Operation Avalanche

"Operation Avalanche" is an inventive grab-bag of a film, a movie about making a movie that no one was supposed to know was a movie at all.

Part mockumentary, party black comedy, part action-adventure and part cinematic dare, the movie is a bizarre, engrossing creation that will leave audiences either delighted or baffled, though never bored.

A send-up like this works far better for a few minutes on the small screen (see Documentary! or Drunk History); at feature length it becomes a stylistic exercise, like a kid mugging for the camera through an Instagram filter.

Ingeniously using his low budget to address his ambitions, Johnson has directed, co-written (and starred in) a unique science-fiction film.

A bright idea can only take a movie so far. Mission not accomplished.

This isn't the kind of shaky horror flick you've seen countless times before, or the type of USA versus USSR effort that has been pumped out since the 1960s.

Very amusing, well-made comedy mockumentary, set in the late-1960s, that explains how and why the Apollo 11 Moon landing was faked. Director Matt Johnson squeezes a lot out of a scant-budget.

A frisky, fertile dive into conspiracy theories and the righteous dedication that often gives birth to them, this low-budget Canadian feature is a series of movies within movies: alternately found, forged and finessed.

This Apollo-era would-be suspense-thriller mockumentary is more an exercise in 'look how film-school cool and clever we are' than anything else.

...impresses with its humour, depth and numerous salutes to Kubrick.

There are enough paranoid-thriller sequences set to well-chosen Creedence Clearwater Revival tunes, to suggest the movie that could have been made with a little more seriousness, and money. Not that it matters.