Curzon’s eclectic season of recent Canadian cinema ranges from Atom Egoyan’s latest to one of the finest films of 2020…
When the major national cinemas are rounded up,
Canada rarely gets much of a look-in: sometimes blurred with
American cinema, sometimes with French, too rarely appreciated on its own. If younger auteurs such as Xavier Dolan – whose work was spotlit in this column earlier this year – are taking it to a brasher place, Canadian cinema retains a reputation for being, certainly relative to its noisy southern neighbour, rather Canadian: quiet, thoughtful, progressive in subtle, unassuming ways. That’s reflected in a season of new Canadian cinema on Curzon Home Cinema: the six-film Canada Now selection spans multiple generations and subcultures of Canuck film-making, forming a national snapshot more interestingly diverse than what tends to filter through to
British cinemas.
The selections are being staggered on the Curzon platform through the rest of July, but the best of them – indeed, one of the best films of the year, full stop – is available to stream now. Kazik Radwanski’s punchy, exhilarating Anne at 13,000 Feet is, essentially, a psychological thriller for Generation Anxious, finding tension in the unpredictable rhythms of a young woman’s fragile mental health, without exploiting it for drama. It boasts a singularly astonishing performance by Deragh Campbell as Anne, a 27-year-old daycare worker in
Toronto, whose persistent anxiety disorder disrupts her professional life, her dating attempts and even her relationships with loving
Friends and family – though it seems to desert her when she goes skydiving for a friend’s hen party.