Like many movies chronicling the Millennial experience, “Run This Town” is filled with a kind of quiet despair. Though the film centers on the true story of the spectacular downfall of Toronto mayor Rob Ford, it’s really about recently-graduated young people who find themselves in the midst of this larger-than-life scandal. Each twenty-something protagonist struggles to navigate what have now become standard Millennial clichés: there are few jobs to be found and the ones that are available seem to be a dead-end in terms of career growth; there are impossibly huge student loans that don’t seem as though they will ever possibly be paid back; there is a great fear that young people will never be able to come out of a strange extended adolescence where they are still relying on their parents rather than moving out and starting families of their own; there are jokes about how their generation should maybe just quit the $4 lattes.

User Reviews

Not sure I like the third person talk to camera style. The general vibe and visual style is true to type . I was born in the town this movie was filmed but I lived in another town. And the actual shots I don’t recognise but the visual palate the cinematographer uses is instantly recognisable . It does seem in some ways similar to the movie Fargo but cleary references the “Bain case” Fargo had tension from clear and present danger this movie did not, and some of the performances for me lacked a sense of discovery but I wonder if that is my familiarity with the setting. Stylistically there is some time travelling going on between 1980 and 2020 for me that was ok I liked the closure of the movie narratively