{"id":52663,"date":"2026-04-18T02:16:04","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T06:16:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=52663"},"modified":"2026-04-18T02:26:27","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T06:26:27","slug":"mile-end-kicks-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/18\/mile-end-kicks-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Mile End Kicks (2025)\u00a0\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A young writer decides to move to Montreal for the music scene and\u00a0write\u00a0a book about the impact of the album Jagged Little Pill.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Written and directed by Chandler Levack,\u00a0Mile End Kicks takes\u00a0a very specific\u00a0time frame\u00a0in\u00a0a very specific\u00a0place\u00a0while injecting an\u00a0outsider\u00a0into\u00a0the local crowd to follow her life.\u00a0The writing here is\u00a0decent;\u00a0the characters are all flawed at best and horrific people at worst.\u00a0As a Montreal club kid of the 1990s and early 2000s,\u00a0the stomping groups were quite different (The Metropolis, The Spectrum, The Loft, Les\u00a0Foufs, Mad Hatter, Thursdays, and a lot of dance clubs), something here feels off\u00a0and benefit of the doubt means letting go of expectations and letting the film tell this viewer that this is how it was in the Mile End a mere 5 years post leaving town.\u00a0The lead character should have connected more as well as a writer watching a writer, but she just did not connect.\u00a0All that being said, the\u00a0writing is decent with a few things being a bit annoying or annoyingly realistic for some folks but not all, and direction working quite well with the script at hand and tone of the film.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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The cast here is interesting both in performances and choice of cast. The fact that their best known (internationally) Montreal actor is in the part of a Toronto website boss is an interesting choice. Jay Baruchel<\/a> is the one most known as a Montreal kid to most audience and he\u00a0does\u00a0good work\u00a0as a douchebag boss, a man who manages in questionable ways and is\u00a0a\u00a0iffy human at best. Baruchel does well here, giving a\u00a0douchey performance that fits\u00a0just right. In the lead, and\u00a0you\u2019ll\u00a0see this an issue here, is an American\u00a0actress\u00a0Barbie Ferreira who does great, the note of her nationality is more about why not use a Canadian\u00a0actress? Ferreira does well here, a solid performance in her second film in US theaters in two weeks (the other being the Faces of Death<\/a> sequel\/reimagining\/homage). Her performance works here, she shows the many layers of her character, makes the most of her screentime, and her work feels natural here. Joining them are a series of international actors, so as this is a Montreal film,\u00a0let\u2019s\u00a0give some props to\u00a0Juliette\u00a0Gari\u00e9py\u00a0(of Red Rooms<\/a>) as Madeleine, who gets not\u00a0nearly enough\u00a0screen time. She gives a true blue Montreal girl<\/a> performance here, giving the kind of life to her character that Montrealers have all met many times, she\u2019s fun but also has some responsibility, she\u2019s has issues, she wants to be loved, all this while being a party\u00a0girl,\u00a0she\u2019s a full character in just a few scenes.\u00a0The guys who play the band members do decent\u00a0here,\u00a0but they come off generic which may be a choice in direction, showing that a lot of these guys are the same from band to band. Bringing one on as \u201cthe worst man in Montreal\u201d is saying something as all\u00a0Montrealers\u00a0have met one of these\u00a0guys. Their personalities do feel like they could be any\u00a0dude\u00a0in any music scene in any city.\u00a0<\/span> Overall, the characters all come off as flawed with few of them being truly likable which makes it more difficult to connect with the film. Yes, humans are flawed, humans are real, but something feels like it’s missing here.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The film is well-shot with cinematography that shows the locations and the mood of it all quite well. The work by Jeremy Cox is\u00a0exactly what the film needed, showing the story clearly, no shaky cam, using the locations and their atmosphere at their best, giving the story life beyond the characters. He uses the location well and makes it feel like Montreal in 2011.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While Mile End Kicks is a well-done film on all aspects, something feels missing and\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0not quite connecting. This is a case of being from the city and having experience with a similar but\u00a0not quite the\u00a0same music scene\u00a0and hoping to be able to connect more with the film and its story and ending up feeling like\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0not from the same version of the city as expected. This is not on the film, but a sign that it will hit\u00a0just right\u00a0for some and not at all for others.\u00a0One thing all can agree on here though is the love for a good Montreal bagel.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A young writer decides to move to Montreal for the music scene and\u00a0write\u00a0a book about the impact of the album Jagged Little Pill.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[219,302,698,874],"class_list":["post-52663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-comedy","tag-drama","tag-music","tag-romance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52663"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52666,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52663\/revisions\/52666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}