[1] Set in the early 2000s, the film stars Isaiah Lehtinen as Lawrence, a socially inept 17-year-old cinephile who gets a job at a video store, where he forms a complicated friendship with his older female manager.
Its cast also includes Romina D'Ugo, Krista Bridges, Percy Hynes White, Dan Beirne, Andy McQueen, Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll, and Alex Ateah.
Levack has described the film as being based in part on her own teenage job in a video store, although she has stated that she chose to write the central character as male out of a desire to push back against the popular notion that women filmmakers can only tell female-oriented stories.
[2] The project was first announced as receiving funding from Telefilm Canada's Talent to Watch program for emerging filmmakers in 2019, under the working title Rejects Night.
[9] Rachel Ho of That Shelf praised Lehtinen's performance in the lead role, and wrote, "While based loosely on her own life, Levack's gender swap proves to be a fascinating element of the film.
"[10] For Cult MTL, Alex Rose wrote that "Though obviously borrowing from retail-work staples of the video store era like Clerks, Empire Records or High Fidelity, Levack brings an incredible attention to detail to every frame of I Like Movies.
Packed with MuchMusic-adjacent turn-of-the-century pop-punk (and a score by Murray A. Lightburn of the Dears), a truly Canadian sense of scale (much of Lawrence’s obsession with NYU also stems from his desire to avoid becoming a Canadian filmmaker — in his American-auteur-addled brain, nothing could be worse) and discussions of Jimmy Fallon’s unsatisfying run on Weekend Update, it should prove a potent antidote to Gen Z’s growing obsession with early 2000s aesthetics while also sending most people my age into a tizzy of anti-nostalgia.