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paper year movie review

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Paper Year Reviews

paper year movie review

Jogia and Hewson are entirely believable in capturing and portraying deep affection and adoration for one another, which makes it all the more affecting when their relationship breaks down.

Full Review | Oct 10, 2018

paper year movie review

A subplot that finds Dan obsessing over Hailey's conveniently-left-out diary fizzles, as does the larger question of Franny's crush on Noah.

Full Review | Jun 27, 2018

Their problems are numbingly generic, while the couple's SoCal setting and career aspirations add nothing of special significance to this tale of wandering eyes and untested convictions.

Full Review | Jun 25, 2018

paper year movie review

Though more breezily poignant than deeply insightful, Paper Year has a savvy commercial snap in its portrayal of love coming undone.

Full Review | Jun 22, 2018

paper year movie review

Slight but intriguing...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 22, 2018

Hewson and Jogia are both very good at finding the small moments that make Franny and Dan individuals rather than templates, and Hamish Linklater and Grace Glowicki pop as Franny's boss and best friend, respectively.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 21, 2018

Addelman has crafted a story of gentle drama that smacks of authenticity, chronicling - as the title suggests - the couple's bumpy first year of marriage while casting two appealing young actors in the lead roles.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 21, 2018

What happens beyond the happily ever after? Paper Year begins where most rom-coms end

Rebecca addelman draws from her own personal experience as a comedy writer and early divorcee in her 2018 film.

paper year movie review

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Your typical rom-com usually finishes with a marriage and a standard happily-ever-after ending. But filmmaker Rebecca Addelman turned that formula on its head for her "anti-rom-com"  Paper Year .

The movie begins with its two central characters, Franny (Eve Hewson) and Dan (Avan Jogia), impulsively deciding to get married. But their passionate relationship begins to go awry when Franny starts a new job as a writer for a ridiculous reality show — and she soon begins to take a romantic interest in her coworker.

Watch a clip from Rebecca Addelman's interview on The Filmmakers :

paper year movie review

This film takes an honest look at young romance

For her first feature film, Addelman drew from personal experiences she had as a young comedy writer for series such as New Girl and Love . Just like Franny, she was married — and divorced — at a young age while she navigated the challenges of being the only woman in the writer's room.

  • THE FILMMAKERS 'We are all our own superheroes': Window Horses celebrates multiculturalism and the power of poetry

In her interview with The Filmmakers  co-host Johanna Schneller, Addelman describes how Paper Year can be interpreted as a letter to her younger self — and shares some advice for women going through the same struggles as Franny.

"Just because a really significant [relationship] ends doesn't make it less meaningful," says Addelman. "It's just part of your path."

Paper Year takes an refreshingly honest look about sexuality, fantasy and romance from a young woman's point of view. Franny experiences the exhilaration, heartbreak and disappointment during her romantic encounters throughout the film.

"I felt it was important to show sex the way I remembered it in my 20s," explains Addelman. "Sometimes it was fantastic...and there were a lot of experiences that weren't like that."

Watch the whole film and check out the full interview and panel discussion about Paper Year this week on The Filmmakers .

The Filmmakers airs Saturdays at 8:30pm ET/CT/MT, 9:30pm AT, 10PM NT and 11pm PT on CBC TV and cbc.ca/watch .​

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Paper Year is a clever concept as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go quite far enough

Chris Knight: Given that everything moves faster these days, Paper Year could have been titled The Six-Month Itch

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Paper Year, named after the traditional gift for first-year wedding anniversaries, opens where most films fade to black, on a happily ever after. Franny and Dan (Eve Hewson, Avan Jogia) are running merrily from the registry office to the strains of the 1957 hit “Young Love.”

Why did this young couple tie the knot? It’s never quite made clear in Canadian writer/director Rebecca Addelman’s debut feature. It’s instructive to note that we’re halfway through the film before Dan asks his bride: “What do you want?” And the best she can come up with is: “I don’t want to fight.” Not exactly the stuff that vows are made of.

Paper Year is a clever concept as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go quite far enough Back to video

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Aside from their impossibly cute names, Franny and Dan don’t have much going for them. He’s an actor who hasn’t worked in two years, and lands a gig (if you can call it that) house- and dog-sitting for Hailey, a more famous performer who’s shooting a film overseas.

Franny gets a job as a writer on a game show. But the toxic culture there includes a skeevy boss (Brooks Gray) who starts pawing her on day one, only to fall into a funk when he notices her ring. And head writer Noah (Hamish Linklater) flirts first and only mentions in passing that he’s also married. (Addelman spent several years as a writer and story editor for TV’s New Girl , and I’d love to know if these characters are based on anyone in particular.)

Given that everything moves faster these days, Paper Year could have been titled The Six-Month Itch . Or, if the title hadn’t already been taken, I Give It a Year. The audience is put in the unenviable position of watching the characters and pondering not whether they’ve made a mistake, but how big and to what end.

It’s a clever concept as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go quite far enough. Addelman handles the pacing nicely, and the two leads manage to portray their characters as self-centred and a bit clueless without quite stepping over the line into total-jerkdom, which is quite an achievement. But a subplot that finds Dan obsessing over Hailey’s conveniently-left-out diary fizzles, as does the larger question of Franny’s crush on Noah.

In the end, I couldn’t get that final scene from The Graduate out of my head; the one that finds Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross racing from the church, not yet married, but thrilled to be together – that is, until the camera holds on them long enough for their smiles to fade and doubt to creep into their faces. Paper Year takes a similarly jaundiced view of youthful romance.

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Deborah Krieger writes about art and culture.

  • bust magazine
  • Movie Review

MOVIE REVIEW: "Paper Year" Shows A Married Couple's Troubled First Year

paper year movie review

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paper year movie review

Review: Paper Year is more rom than com, but that’s no con

This article was published more than 6 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.

paper year movie review

Eve Hewson plays Franny and Avan Jogia plays Dan in Paper Year. Pacific Northwest Pictures

  • Written and directed by:  Rebecca Addelman
  • Starring:  Eve Hewson and Avan Jogia
  • Classification:  18A
  • 100 minutes

Since the Hollywood studios have largely abandoned the field, it is falling to Netflix, Amazon and small indie films to define contemporary romance. The traditional rom-com was propelled by comic situations, mistaken identities and prolonged confusions that kept lovers apart until the third act. However, in recent titles such as The F-Word , Sleeping with Other People or Obvious Child , it is the tortured characters’ skepticism and ineptitude that appear as the main roadblocks. These days, the hard-won, last-minute ending of The Big Sick may be about as happily-ever-after as you are going to get.

Now, Canadian director Rebecca Addelman turns the whole proposition on its head, in her slight but intriguing anti-romance Paper Year . Supported by Telefilm Canada and the CBC but set entirely in L.A., the film begins as Franny (Eve Hewson) and Dan (Avan Jogia) spill out of a municipal wedding chamber, congratulate the next couples in line and rush into the street bursting with their declarations and their kisses. They are quickly brought up short by Franny’s parents, in a darkly amusing scene where the bride’s mother (Andie MacDowell) tries valiantly to engage with this ill-considered decision to marry young and poor, while the wordless father slouches in the background.

The excruciating realism, the well-observed social undercurrents and the tentative black comedy are typical of Addelman’s provocative if occasionally wavering style as Franny and Dan proceed to screw up their first year of married life. Within months of the excited nuptials, both are dreaming of other people: An aspiring screenwriter, she has a crush on the head writer on the game show where she’s got her first job in television; a would-be actor who mainly dog walks and house sits, he creates a fantasy life surrounding the young actress whose glamorous home the newlyweds are occupying for six months.

Although it gives more space to Franny’s escapades, the plot is inventively orchestrated to tease out both sides of the story, and Addelman’s wry observations on the idiocy that young women endure from senior male colleagues is acutely topical. Hewson’s smart and sassy Franny is certainly no pushover; yet, the actress makes her ill-advised passion for the manipulative Noah completely convincing – even as Hamish Linklater delights in creating an obnoxious character with warning signs posted all over him, the very picture of middle-aged insecurity and self-indulgence.

Jogia’s Dan is more gentle and more lost than Franny – Dan is the one making lists of potential babies’ names – and together the actors carefully peel back layers of their dynamic to reveal how this husband and wife are mismatched. But it is Hewson’s scenes with Linklater’s Noah that are truly painful to watch – although also the most potentially funny; they may leave you hooting with laughter or peering at the screen through your fingers, depending on your appetite for watching a sympathetic character make colossally embarrassing mistakes.

Laughter always helps an audience cope with its discomfort, but Addelman, who could take a firmer hand with her own material, doesn’t offer much guidance as to how funny these scenes should be. She plays Noah’s scheming very quietly and then opts for a downbeat ending to her film. In a piece bracingly free of sentiment, viewers may be left puzzling over how much com they were supposed to find in this rom.

Paper Year opens Friday in Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa

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Review: Paper Year

paper year movie review

A story of young love on the rocks, the Canadian produced/American set romantic drama Paper Year comes from a place of brutal, emotional honesty, but not from an assured filmmaking perspective. Writer-director (and Toronto and Ottawa native) Rebecca Addelman’s debut feature clearly understands the pitfalls of falling in love too fast and too young, but never quite figures out how to make its pointed, but obvious dramatic sentiments into anything significant or satisfying.

Franny (Eve Hewson) and Dan (Avan Jogia) are 22-year old California lovebirds who just tied the knot. They don’t have a lot of money, or many job prospects – he’s a struggling actor, she’s trying to land writing gigs – but they have a lot of sexual chemistry and a great rapport. Some people in their lives are happy for them, some are skeptical (particularly Franny’s parents), but they decide to move in together and make a go of it. While still trying to figure out the next steps in their relationship, Dan lands a house-sitting gig for an established actress, and Franny gets more gainful employment as a writer on a television game show. A slight, unspoken rift develops between the couple when Dan grows needier and Franny starts crushing on her show’s considerably older and married head writer (Hamish Linklater).

Addelman, who has been working as a television writer on the west coast and was inspired by the crumbling of her own marriage, gets Paper Year off to an interesting enough start. Throwing the viewers headlong into Franny and Dan’s relationship right after their City Hall civil ceremony, Addelman eschews lengthy scenes and sequences where huge amounts of backstory are dumped to give the viewer context. There are some scenes that provide necessary info, but Addelman seems far more interested in the brief, subtler moments where the cracks in the relationship begin to develop; the kinds that people remember in hindsight as clues that a relationship was doomed to fail.

Those early, perceptive moments and Addelman’s quicker-than-average pacing get Paper Year off to a promising start, and occasional bursts of welcome humour help, but quickly it’s apparent that the audience knows as much about these characters than they know about themselves, which is to say that no one knows very much at all. Although Franny and Dan talk like many people in their early twenties these days, they’re also lacking in any kind of self-awareness. They interact more like teenagers who engaged in a shotgun wedding than young adults, which might be the point, but it’s all implied rather than examined. Suddenly, that lack of backstory and context off the top makes one question why these two would ever be together. They’re all over each other in a sexual sense, but without that context the film quickly backslides into predictability and a curious lack of empathy.

It’s very easy to empathize with Franny, and Hewson excels at showcasing the character’s self-doubt and inner conflict. It’s almost impossible to side with Dan, however, and I’m not quite sure if it’s the fault of Addelman or Jogia. He’s needy to the point of annoyance, so aloof that one could categorize it as a disability, and his insecurity is so high that one wonders who could have fallen in love with him in the first place.

paper year movie review

Again, a lack of context comes back to haunt the audience’s perceptions of the characters. It’s not that Paper Year needs to side with both parties to be effective, but that it has to show how they were brought together in the first place if it wants the audience to have an emotional response to the end of their relationship. The gulf between these people is so far apart from the outset that the audience falls into the gap between them. It builds to revelations that aren’t particularly shocking, twists that seem more like foregone conclusions, and a final sequence that feels both emotionally honest, but logically false. I do believe that this couple would dissolve in this manner, and I believe in the factors that led to their demise, but it’s hard to buy into the actual ending.

Addelman’s cause isn’t helped any by wildly inconsistent cinematography that ranges from standard to sometimes jarringly ugly and an assembly that can lead to awkward transitions between scenes. These are common jitters among first time filmmakers, but they could have been overcome with a bit more depth of character. The viewer can see why things are falling apart early on, but they’re never able to figure out what exactly is taking so long for it to end. Paper Year is a film where people can likely see pieces of themselves reflected in what’s happening, but also one that’s bound to breed nonconstructive frustration.

Paper Year opens at Cineplex Yonge and Dundas in Toronto, The Park in Vancouver, and South Keys in Ottawa on Friday, June 22, 2018.

Check out the trailer for Paper Year :

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Andrew Parker

Andrew Parker

Andrew Parker fell in love with film growing up across the street from a movie theatre. He began writing professionally about film at the age of fourteen, and has been following his passions ever since. His writing has been showcased at various online outlets, as well as in The Globe and Mail, BeatRoute, and NOW Magazine. If he's not watching something or reading something, he's probably sleeping.

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Paper Year Stream and Watch Online

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Fancy watching ' Paper Year ' on your TV or mobile device at home? Discovering a streaming service to buy, rent, download, or watch the Rebecca Addelman-directed movie via subscription can be a challenge, so we here at Moviefone want to help you out. Read on for a listing of streaming and cable services - including rental, purchase, and subscription options - along with the availability of 'Paper Year' on each platform when they are available. Now, before we get into the nitty-gritty of how you can watch 'Paper Year' right now, here are some finer points about the First Generation Films drama flick. Released , 'Paper Year' stars Eve Hewson , Avan Jogia , Andie MacDowell , Hamish Linklater The movie has a runtime of about 1 hr 29 min, and received a user score of 60 (out of 100) on TMDb, which assembled reviews from 15 experienced users. Curious to know what the movie's about? Here's the plot: "Young newlyweds encounter a series of challenges during the first year of their marriage." 'Paper Year' is currently available to rent, purchase, or stream via subscription on VUDU Free, The Roku Channel, YouTube, Apple iTunes, Plex Channel, Amazon Video, Pluto TV, Vudu, Crackle, Google Play Movies, and Plex .

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User review rating: 1

I dislike the idea of taking marriage vows so lightly!

There is so many flaws in this movie. Cheating your husband and getting hooked by the a colleague and leaving the husband under the pretext of "I want more in life" to getting married to the colleague.

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Franny and Noah experience all the thrills of new romance and have a rushed courtroom wedding due to their low funds. When Franny connects with a guy at her new job, she spends her first year of marriage in a tough spot.

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Paper Year (2018)

  • Eve Hewson as Franny Nightingale
  • Avan Jogia as Dan
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A newly married couple (Hewson & Jogia), barely employed with $175 between them. They are madly in love and ready to conquer the world but as they move into the first year of marriage, they encounter obstacles that reveal cracks in their relationship forcing them to question whether they made a fully formed decision.

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Ron Howard's "The Paper" gets a lot of things right about working on a newspaper, and one of them is how it screws up your personal life. You get cocooned in a tight little crowd of hyperactive competitors, and eventually your view of normality begins to blur. The phrase "I'm on deadline!" becomes an excuse for behavior that would otherwise lack any justification.

Michael Keaton is just about perfectly cast in the movie as an assistant managing editor who cannot, under any circumstances, let a big story wait until tomorrow. Not even if his pregnant wife has been waiting for hours in a restaurant with his parents. Not even if it's costing thousands of dollars an hour to delay a press run. Not even if he's not exactly sure the big story actually exists in a form that is printable. He gets a strange light in his eyes and switches into hyperdrive, and only the other people who work with him can truly understand how he feels.

The movie takes place during about 24 hours in the life of a New York daily called the Sun, but clearly modeled on the Post. It's a scrappy tabloid that has teetered for years on the brink of bankruptcy, and its headlines scream sensationally in the biggest type (or "wood") the page will hold. But the Keaton character, whose name is Hackett, can truthfully say that it has never knowingly printed anything that was untrue. Until tonight, maybe.

A big story is breaking. Two men have been shot dead in a parked car. Two young black kids have been seen fleeing the scene of the crime. We know (because the movie tells us) that the kids are innocent. But there's political pressure to find the killers, and when the kids are arrested, every paper in town goes with the story, big. It's just that one of Hackett's reporters has overheard information indicating that the police themselves think the kids didn't do it.

A big story - if anyone in authority will go on record.

Meanwhile, the minutes are ticking away toward the deadline, and Hackett's superior, a managing editor named Alicia Clark ( Glenn Close ) wants to go with the story they have on hand, and then fix it tomorrow. To delay will cost thousands of dollars in pressroom overtime and drivers' wages. But going with the easy story sounds all wrong to Hackett, and also to his star columnist McDougal ( Randy Quaid ), and they go on a desperate odyssey through the night to try to get the quote they need. While meanwhile, of course, the wife and the in-laws get stood up.

All of which makes "The Paper" sound like a film noir set in a newspaper office. It is, in a way. But it's very perceptive about the relationships among its characters - how they talk, how they compete, what their values are. And Howard has cast the movie with splendid veteran actors, who are able to convey all the little quirks and idiosyncrasies of real people.

Robert Duvall , for example, plays the paper's editor with such depth that he turns an essentially supporting role into the man's life story - a story of broken marriages, estranged children, nightly drinking and hidden desperation, all contained in a package of unbending journalistic integrity. I don't know if the Duvall character is based on an actual man in New York, but I have known three or four Chicago editors who could have inspired this guy, right down to his patience with strangers in a bar.

Because this is a story and not a documentary, Howard and his writers, David and Stephen Koepp, turn up the heat a little. In real life, editors may scream at one another, but they hardly ever get into fist fights in the press room. Nut cases may come looking for columnists they hate, but they rarely cause much harm. Cops may tell the truth to reporters, but not often with such exquisite dramatic timing. The movie is just a little bigger than life - although I for one admired the scene that justified a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shout, "Stop the presses!" The Glenn Close character is one of the movie's more interesting. She is a professional newspaperwoman who is also, it would appear, wealthy and fashionable - and embittered, because the guys on the staff have frozen her out. She's also the heavy, until the somewhat too neat ending. But I liked the speech in which she tells a couple of the men on the staff how she feels, and why.

Sometimes sexual harassment is almost impossible to define: For example, what do you call it when the guys go out for a beer and never, ever, invite this woman along? Michael Keaton is a fast-talking actor, who may be the best in the business at showing you how fast he can think. He projects smartness, he sees all the angles, he sizes up a situation and acts on it while another actor might still be straightening his tie. He is wonderful here at projecting a quality of angry impatience: He knows he's right, he knows he's late, he knows what he has to do, and he'll explain everything later.

Watching "The Paper" got me in touch all over again with how good it feels to work at the top of your form, on a story you believe in, on deadline. Here on the movie beat everything is pretty neatly scheduled and we don't cover a lot of crimes ("Ace Ventura" excepted). But I used to write real news on deadline, and those were some of the happiest days of my life. This movie knows how that feels.

Last week the new owner of The Sun-Times, Conrad Black, was quoted as criticizing journalists: They get too involved in the story, they all want to be stars, they're cynical, they're disillusioned, and a lot of them drink too much. Everybody seemed scandalized that he would say such things. I think the problem was that he couched them as criticisms. A lot of the people I've worked with would use them as boasts. "The Paper" knows all about that, too.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The Paper (1994)

Rated R Strong Language

112 minutes

Michael Keaton as Henry Hackett

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Quietly transcendent 'close your eyes' may be among the best films you see all year.

Justin Chang

José Coronado as Julio Arenas in Close Your Eyes.

José Coronado plays film star Julio Arenas in Close Your Eyes. Film Movement hide caption

The Spanish director Víctor Erice is one of our most revered, yet least prolific, European filmmakers. Over the past 50 years or so, he’s directed just four features, starting with his masterful debut, The Spirit of the Beehive .

That movie was a haunting family drama set in 1940, during the early days of the Franco dictatorship. It was also a passionate ode to cinema from a filmmaker who’s always loved the movies, even when the movies haven’t loved him back.

Erice had a rough time with his 1983 film El Sur , a beautiful yet truncated work that was released in its unfinished form. In the years since, Erice has directed a number of projects, including the 1992 documentary The Quince Tree Sun and several shorts.

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But he has struggled to get another fiction feature off the ground — until now. The arrival of Erice’s new movie, Close Your Eyes , would be welcome news even if it weren’t one of the best things I’ve seen this year. Manolo Solo plays a long-retired director named Miguel, who quit the biz in 1990, after one of his films shut down production. The circumstances were mysterious: His star, a handsome actor named Julio Arenas, vanished without explanation and was presumed dead. Now, it’s 2012, and a Madrid-based TV journalist is investigating Julio’s disappearance.

After he’s interviewed, Miguel stays in Madrid and makes inquiries of his own. While Close Your Eyes unfolds at a leisurely pace over nearly three hours, it has the pull of a well-crafted detective story. Miguel reaches out to old friends and colleagues, like his longtime editor, Max, a hardcore cinephile who still has the never-screened footage from that halted production.

Miguel also gets back in touch with Julio’s daughter, who knew little about her father even before he went missing. She’s played, exquisitely, by Ana Torrent, who was just a young girl when she starred in The Spirit of the Beehive decades ago. It’s a glorious full-circle moment.

Miguel’s investigation doesn’t yield any immediate answers, and he returns, wistfully, to his home on the Spanish coast. It’s here that the action briefly pauses and settles into a simply magical interlude. One night, while hanging out under the stars, Miguel picks up a guitar and performs a duet with his friend Toni. You’ll recognize the song if you’ve seen Howard Hawks’ 1959 western, Rio Bravo , which is one of my own favorite movies.

Maybe it’s one of Erice’s, too. Like Rio Bravo , Close Your Eyes turns out to be a story about community, about friendships forged under unlikely circumstances. Miguel’s mission to solve the mystery of Julio’s disappearance becomes a group effort, as old and new friends come together to help him.

You don’t have to know Erice’s work to get swept up in Close Your Eyes . But those who do know his work will find the new film an almost unbearably moving experience. Erice is, in many ways, telling his own story: Miguel could be his stand-in, just as Miguel’s unfinished film feels like a meta-commentary on some of Erice’s own abandoned projects. Miguel and his old editor, Max, reminisce about earlier, better times for the film industry and grouse about the changes wrought by digital technology.

But despite his characters’ pessimism, Erice continues to show a hard-won faith in the movies. He knows that they can move us in ways that no other art form can. At one point, Erice ushers all his characters into a dilapidated old movie theatre, which is where Close Your Eyes becomes not just an engaging film, but a quietly transcendent one. I don’t want to say too much about what happens, but it’s worth discovering for yourself, in a movie theatre of your own.

One of the Year's Best Horror Movies Finally Hits Streaming Next Month

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An acclaimed Canadian slasher movie is heading to Shudder. The streaming service has revealed that In a Violent Nature will finally be arriving on its platform next month.

In a Violent Nature , written and directed by Chris Nash, will debut on the platform as a Shudder Original Film on Sept. 13, 2024. Starring Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, and Lauren-Marie Taylor, the well-received slasher movie follows a mute killer named Johnny who is accidentally resurrected from his grave in the Ontario wilderness by a group of teenagers, whom he then begins stalking and murdering. In a unique take on the genre, the movie is largely observed from the killer's perspective.

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After premiering at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, In a Violent Nature was released in more than 1400 theaters by IFC Films on May 31, marking the studio's widest theatrical release to date. The movie grossed $2.1 million in its opening weekend at the domestic box office, enough for the second-best opening for IFC Films after another 2024 horror movie, Late Night with the Devil , starring David Dastmalchian. The 94-minute movie finished its theatrical run with roughly $4.5 million in box office receipts.

In a Violent Nature also received largely positive reviews from critics, with a 78 percent Rotten Tomatoes score. Horror author Stephen King also gave his seal of approval on the slasher, writing on X that In a Violent Nature "will do the job" for those looking for a slasher movie. "It's leisurely, almost languorous, but when the blood flows, it flows in buckets. The killer in his mask looks like the world's most terrifying Minion," King added.

In a Violent Nature Is Getting a Sequel

At San Diego Comic-Con 2024, IFC Films and Shudder jointly announced In A Violent Nature 2 . " In a Violent Nature was originally conceived as a meta-sequel within a fictional slasher series, so we were always imagining mayhem beyond the scope of the original film," producer Peter Kuplowsky shared in a statement. "That we now have the opportunity to continue following Johnny on his restless walk has us feeling incredibly grateful to our incredible partners at IFC Films / Shudder who believed in Chris [Nash's] vision from day one. We are thrilled to return for a new chapter and are excited to deploy Johnny as a conduit to further experiments in the genre."

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In a Violent Nature Creative Team Already Has Ideas for Future Sequels

If In a Violent Nature 2 is as successful as the first one, there's a good chance that IFC Films and Shudder will reunite for a third movie. While plot details remain under wraps for the forthcoming sequel, special effects lead Steven Kostanski shared in June 2024 where he would like to see Johnny go next. "I wouldn’t mind seeing him end up in suburbia at some point. Just the feeling of walking around with this character in a back alley — somewhere while people are just living their lives — is pretty spooky. I would entertain that," he said. "And then by part four, maybe he goes to space . We’ll see," he added, likely referring to how the Friday the 13th franchise took Jason to space in 2001's Jason X .

In a Violent Nature begins streaming on Shudder on Sept. 13.

Source: Shudder

In a Violent Nature Sundance Film Festival 2024 Image

In a Violent Nature

The horror movie tracks a ravenous zombie creature as it makes its way through a secluded forest.

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‘Mountains’ Review: This Haitian Immigrant Drama Is One of the Year’s Best Debut Features

Christian blauvelt.

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paper year movie review

“ Mountains ” gives us Xavier ( Atibon Nazaire ) and Esperance (Sheila Anozier), two Haitian immigrants in mid-life who are deeply embedded in the fabric of their Miami community. They’ve built a meaningful life — but need to work ever harder to maintain it. Esperance already works two jobs (one at a school, another making her own custom clothes) and Xavier is literally employed in a line of work that represents the massive changes happening around them. He’s a demolition-crew worker, spending his days knocking down homes that he himself might have aspired to live in someday. But this is a city where change — the kind that can leave people behind when they barely realize it’s already hit them — is a defining feature. The treasure you aspire to at one time can become a rubble pile before long. How do you fight for your piece of the future? Related Stories Giovanni Ribisi Turns to Cinematography for ‘Strange Darling’ — and Creates a Modern Horror Masterpiece Jon Hamm and Jennifer Aniston Want Their Rom-Com: ‘God Bless Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney’

paper year movie review

Junior’s an aspiring stand-up comedian and assimilated into American homogeny in a way that Xavier and Esperance maybe aren’t interested in. Much of his set, when we see him performing at a comedy club, is about what it’s like to have immigrant parents, and how they’re different from American-born mothers and fathers. One bit is particularly funny about how, when playing soccer, he’d always see the American parents being endlessly encouraging while his dad would point out every flaw in his performance. But you can see how that would happen: When you’re on the endless treadmill toward “making it” you don’t really have time for fridge-magnet feel-goodery. And so Xavier continues critiquing his son’s life into his 20s: How can Junior be happy having dropped out of college and barely making his ends meet? Junior’s feeling of oppression in this household means he even avoids speaking Haitian Creole, the primary language of the film, any longer.

paper year movie review

Nazaire’s work is a performance of true dimension, and it’s key to fulfilling the aim of “Mountains”: Sorelle may think about gentrification every day, but this is in no way “Gentrification, the Movie.” It’s too tapped into, too appreciative, of life in Miami’s Little Haiti. Sorelle lets her shots linger, getting moments with her DP Javier Labrador Deulofeu’s camera that feel like they’ve wandered into the frame naturally, not shoehorned into it. There’s a lot of downtime here, moments when “nothing” happens — except for that most crucial thing of all: Inhabiting the feeling of a space and time. “Mountains” deploys very few manipulative tricks of editing or scoring to emphasize its emotional takeaways. It drops you in and lets you navigate a bit for yourself. Sorelle finds joy in a Ra-Ra street party, in the serving of food at a little girl’s first-communion gathering in a backyard, in the bright Caribbean colors of this shining city. All of this allows dimension that ensures this is not a “problem picture” like a white director surely would have made. Xavier, Esperance, and Junior are always people in this film, not walking personifications of issues, not vessels for conveying “a point.”

‘Mountains’ is being released by Music Box Films in New York City and Miami on August 23, with a national rollout to follow beginning August 30.

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film  reviews  and critical thoughts?  Subscribe here  to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best reviews, streaming picks, and offers some new musings, all only available to subscribers.

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  1. Review: Paper Year

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  2. Review: Paper Year

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  3. 'Paper Year' Debuts Official Trailer

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  4. Paper Year (2017) by Rebecca Addelman

    paper year movie review

  5. Paper Year

    paper year movie review

  6. Paper Year (2017) by Rebecca Addelman

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COMMENTS

  1. Paper Year

    Jun 25, 2018 Full Review Liam Lacey Original Cin Though more breezily poignant than deeply insightful, Paper Year has a savvy commercial snap in its portrayal of love coming undone. Jun 22, 2018 ...

  2. Paper Year

    Though more breezily poignant than deeply insightful, Paper Year has a savvy commercial snap in its portrayal of love coming undone. Full Review | Jun 22, 2018.

  3. Paper Year (2018)

    Dan Delaney (Avan Jogia) and Franny Winters (Eve Hewson) get a quickie city hall marriage. He's a struggling actor trying to break into Hollywood. He gets to housesit and dog-sit for hot starlet Hailey Turner. Franny gets a job writing for reality TV game show Duck, Duck, Goose. She finds herself falling for the head writer, Noah Bearinger ...

  4. Paper Year

    Paper Year is a 2018 Canadian romantic drama film written and directed by Rebecca Addelman and starring Eve Hewson, Avan Jogia, Hamish Linklater and Andie MacDowell. ... The film has a 71% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on seven reviews with an average rating of 7.7/10.

  5. What happens beyond the happily ever after? Paper Year begins where

    Watch the whole film and check out the full interview and panel discussion about Paper Year this week on The Filmmakers. The Filmmakers airs Saturdays at 8:30pm ET/CT/MT, 9:30pm AT, 10PM NT and ...

  6. Paper Year is a clever concept as far as it goes, but it doesn't go

    Article content. Paper Year, named after the traditional gift for first-year wedding anniversaries, opens where most films fade to black, on a happily ever after. Franny and Dan (Eve Hewson, Avan ...

  7. MOVIE REVIEW: "Paper Year" Shows A Married Couple's Troubled First Year

    Apparently millennials are killing the divorce industry, along with the diamond industry, fabric softener industry, and Denny's. So when Paper Year opens with the charismatically beautiful Dan and Franny (Avan Jogia and Eve Hewson) rushing through the halls of the drab bureaucratic government building where they've just had a quickie wedding, you want to shake your head and coo, "aww, I hope ...

  8. Review: Paper Year is more rom than com, but that's no con

    Paper Year. Written and directed by: Rebecca Addelman. Starring: Eve Hewson and Avan Jogia. Classification: 18A. 100 minutes. Rating: Since the Hollywood studios have largely abandoned the field ...

  9. Review: Paper Year

    A review of Paper Year, starring Eve Hewson and Avan Jogia, opening in select theatres in Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa on Friday, June 22, 2018. ... Andrew Parker fell in love with film growing up across the street from a movie theatre. He began writing professionally about film at the age of fourteen, and has been following his passions ever ...

  10. Paper Year (2018)

    Young newlyweds encounter a series of challenges during the first year of their marriage. ... Paper Year (2018) 04/19/2018 (CA) Drama, Romance 1h 29m User Score. What's your Vibe? Login to use TMDB's new rating system. ... Excellent Movie.

  11. Paper Year

    Get the latest movie times, trailers and celebrity interviews. ... 8 votes and 2 Reviews | Write a Review . Watch Trailer In theatres: June 22, 2018 - Ottawa ... Paper Year Trailer; Featured Cast ...

  12. Paper Year (2018)

    NOW ON DIGITALFranny (Eve Hewson) and Dan (Avan Jogia) are fresh-faced, 22-year old newlyweds playing house and juggling new jobs in Los Angeles. When Franny...

  13. Paper Year Stream and Watch Online

    Released , 'Paper Year' stars Eve Hewson, Avan Jogia, Andie MacDowell, Hamish Linklater The movie has a runtime of about 1 hr 29 min, and received a user score of 60 (out of 100) on TMDb, which ...

  14. Paper Year reviews

    Paper Year movie reviews and ratings - Tribute.ca rating of 3.00 out of 5 Stars.

  15. Paper Year

    Paper Year. 2018. 1 hr 29 mins. Drama. NR. Watchlist. Franny and Noah experience all the thrills of new romance and have a rushed courtroom wedding due to their low funds. When Franny connects ...

  16. PAPER YEAR Official Trailer (2018) Andie MacDowell, Teen Drama HD

    PAPER YEAR Official Trailer (2018) Andie MacDowell, Teen Drama HD© 2018 - The Orchard MoviesComedy, Kids, Family and Animated Film, Blockbuster, Action Cine...

  17. Paper Year (2018) Cast, Crew, Synopsis and Information

    Paper Year (2018) Cast, Crew, Synopsis and Information. ... Movie. Movie News Movie List TV. TV News TV List Music Paper Year (2018) Cast, Crew, Synopsis and Information. Home -

  18. Paper Year (FULL MOVIE)

    Franny (Eve Hewson) and Dan (Avan Jogia) are fresh-faced, 22-year old newlyweds playing house and juggling new jobs in Los Angeles. When Franny falls for a c...

  19. Paper Year

    Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight

  20. The Paperboy movie review & film summary (2012)

    Set in 1969, "The Paperboy" stars Matthew McConaughey as Ward Jansen, a reporter for the Miami Times, who is visiting his hometown of Lately, Fla., because he believes a man on Death Row has been wrongly convicted for the murder of a sheriff. That man is Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack), a human snake with a vicious streak, who we suspect should be executed on general principle.

  21. The Paper movie review & film summary (1994)

    Roger Ebert March 18, 1994. Tweet. Now streaming on: Powered by JustWatch. Ron Howard's "The Paper" gets a lot of things right about working on a newspaper, and one of them is how it screws up your personal life. You get cocooned in a tight little crowd of hyperactive competitors, and eventually your view of normality begins to blur.

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  23. The Paper (film)

    The Paper is a 1994 American comedy-drama film directed by Ron Howard and starring Michael Keaton, Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Randy Quaid and Robert Duvall.It received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song for "Make Up Your Mind", which was written and performed by Randy Newman.. The film depicts a hectic 24 hours in a newspaper editor's professional and personal life.

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  25. One of the Year's Best Horror Movies Finally Hits Streaming Next ...

    An acclaimed Canadian slasher movie is heading to Shudder. The streaming service has revealed that In a Violent Nature will finally be arriving on its platform next month.. In a Violent Nature, written and directed by Chris Nash, will debut on the platform as a Shudder Original Film on Sept. 13, 2024. Starring Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, and Lauren-Marie Taylor, the well-received slasher ...

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