I Like Movies

Seventeen year old Lawrence works in a video store, dreams of studying film in New York, and is insufferable to everyone around him. In her first feature Chandler Levack refuses to romanticise cinephilia: Lawrence's knowledge of movies is not a personality but a shield, and everything he does to his mother, his one friend and his manager comes from the same place. It is set in the early 2000s and Levack wrote it out of her own adolescence, having worked at a Blockbuster in Burlington. The production tracked down an abandoned Blockbuster in northern Ontario and took its shelving, so the set is literally that store. Isaiah Lehtinen plays him without making him likeable, which is the job. Who it is for: viewers who like films that treat cinephile culture from inside and critically. Who it is not for: anyone who needs a sympathetic lead, since Lawrence is hard going for a long stretch.