Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You Directed by Rachel Grady & Heidi Ewing USA, 2016 Legend is a term that gets thrown around a lot in Hollywood. Any actor/actress with a charming smile, a great head of hair, who can survive in Hollywood’s shark infested waters long enough, will eventually get slapped with the term …
Where is Rocky II? works both as an engaging documentary and a unique cinematic hybrid.
What makes How to Build a Time Machine such a great documentary is that isn’t just interested in watching Niosi and Mallett chase after their eccentric goals. Cheel really keys in on the nature of fixation.
Does edgy humor uplift the downtrodden, or use their misery as a crutch for easy jokes? The Last Laugh may not offer any definitive answers but it does provide enough well thought out arguments, sharp insights, to spark conversations.
Hot Docs 2016 features over 200 films from Canada and around the world, here is a preview of must-see movies and events.
Overflowing with obscenities and zany comedic performances, Full Strike is the perfect film for fans of filthy, over the top humor.
Patchwork is an examination of life death in the modern age, mixed with violence, gore, and a cheeky tone sure to delight fans of classic 80’s scream-fests.
Perhaps no other film making the rounds at Toronto After Dark is receiving as much buzz as Love & Peace
Der Nachtmahr Directed by Akiz Written by Achim Bornhak Germany, 2015 German nu-techno artist Akiz opens his debut film with a meek disclaimer to ‘play this film loud’, a rare moment of quiet trepidation before all sorts of sonic and symbiotic hell breaks loose. Tina (Carolyn Genzkow) and her teenage friends are veterans of the …
The August bank holiday weekend in London is always cause for celebration for horror fans as the FrightFest horror and genre film festival rolls into the city’s Leicester Square for four days of blood-spattered cinematic mayhem. This year saw the arrival of horror icon and star of Re-Animator and You’re Next, Barbara Crampton, as the …
Before 1979, Iran had a history of iconic female singers. Qamar al-Molouk Vaziri was in 1924 the first woman to sing in front of a male audience and still “retain her good reputation”. It was a time when “women wore burkas and men were on opium”, sighs one of the protagonists of the documentary from the Iranian Ayat Najafi. Singers such as Delkash and Googoosh, as well as Sayeh Sodeyfi, performing in the film, were widely listened to, but have since then been made illegal. After the revolution, female solo-singing in public was banned on the grounds of “exceeding a certain vocal range” and “sexually arousing men in the audience”, and thereby breaking the rule of decency and of not deviating from their normal condition.
João Bénard da Costa (1935-2009) was the director of the Portuguese Film Museum in Lisbon for 18 years, and he is responsible for what it is today. He was also a writer, poet, critic and actor. The biographical documentary about his life and work made by his fellow countryman Manuel Mozos is one of those films that defies film criticism in its conventional form. If film criticism is deficient in general for trying to speak about a medium that entails several tracks—image, dialogue, music and so on—by using a single-track medium, i.e., words, then the conventional form of film criticism can be deficient, as it is in this specific case. The history of da Costa’s life work is what it is, however poetically presented it may be—it is literally a collection of the things he loved, presented for others to love (or not): the texts he has written, parts of movies he preferred seeing, poems, paintings, photographs and so on. The director takes on the role of a curator in the collection of da Costa’s artistic and intellectual legacy, allowing us to make out the silhouette of the man himself only through the rich collection of his life work.
What is love? Love is a pain, love is death, love is a bitch. But friendship, that’s even worse. Friendship is nebulous; it’ll steal your affections, spread rumors about you, scrawl dirty lies on your locker. Life-affirming and, ultimately, life-ending, friendship is like coffee laced with slow-acting poison. At least that’s how it works in Melanie Laurent’s gorgeous Respire, an unsettling usurpation of your usual coming-of-age story, and one of the most confident sophomore films of recent memory.
The first character of the cinema was the mass: In La sortie des usines Lumière, credited as the first ever film, a crowd of factory workers leave a factory. While on repeated viewings you could begin to pick out the quirks and personalities of certain subjects, the real character was the group, the mass, the …
In 1983, the final Monty Python film, The Meaning Of Life, was released with a rather ambitious title and intent to discover, well, the meaning of life. Thirty years later, and Terry Gilliam returns to these enterprising realms with his new film The Zero Theorem, a codex volcanic in enthusiasm yet insipid at its core. Terry does good press: he barks an intriguing sound bite, citing that his latest ode to chaos is an “impossible look at nothing,” which is certain to prick the interest of existentialists everywhere.
Poor Llewyn Davis is not at a good point in his life. In February of 1961, he is a struggling, bearded bohemian shivering through a frosty Greenwich Village, a folk musician seeking the next gig just to keep the wolf from the door. With few possessions other than the fraying clothes on his back and his trusty guitar, he relies on the charity of others to keep a temporary roof over his head, oscillating from staying with two wedded musical companions in the tight-knit folk scene, Jean (Carey Mulligan, deliciously spiteful) and Jim Berkey (Justin Timberlake, polished) and the middle-class Gorfiens , the wealthy, perky parents of Llewyn’s musical partner, revealed to have committed suicide a few months earlier. Davis is a man scorned, sneering at others and certain of his superior musical skills. He’s not the most likable sort, as his futile attempts to escape the confines of his self-imposed cage make for a colourfully arranged period crooner.
Textbook Videos Presents 11th YoungCuts Film Festival The YoungCuts Film Festival is pleased to announce 2012’s Top 100 short films by the world’s best young filmmakers. Lead sponsor TextbookVideos.com will present the films in Montreal’s De Seve Theatre at Concordia University on Friday October 12th and Saturday, October 13th. ***** On Friday, October 12th, the …
With this weekend’s Total Recall cashing in on a trend we could conceivably never see the end of (at least in this lifetime), the question I’m posing refers to what we have to look forward to, but not from bombastic, shallow-minded “anti-auteurs;” we look instead to the distinguished festival elite. Putting aside the innumerable trademarks …
It is that time of year again. Mid-to-late July means two things if one is a film fan either living or visiting the city of Montréal. The blockbuster season is in full swing, although that can be applied to just about any city in the universe, and the Fantasia film festival is mere days away. …
“Six adds new life to the traditional ‘kidnap and torture’ genre that we’ve previously seen in such films as Hostel or Martyrs.” The Human Centipede: First Sequence Directed by Tom Six Every once in a while a film comes along that pushes the boundaries of blood and torture unlike anyone has ever seen. When …
“Outrageous, and hysterical, All About Evil is as much an ode to no-budget indie horror as it is a celebration of independent movie theatres; surely, a veteran horror fan can ask for nothing more.” All About Evil Dir. Joshua Grannell (2010, USA, 98 mins.) Freaks everywhere, rejoice. Director Joshua Grannell, better known as cult film …
Out of the Cineplex in Toronto This past weekend, Toronto added yet another film festival to its crowded scene. Each weekend for the rest of August, Open Roof Films will screen films atop the Amsterdam Brewery. Each screening will be something of a party; filmgoers can expect a band, a Q&A, and an after party. …
The Jury and Audience Award-winners of the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference and Festival were announced at the Festival’s closing Awards Ceremony hosted by comedian Eugene Mirman in Austin, Texas. Feature Films receiving Jury Awards were selected from the Narrative Feature and Documentary Feature categories. Films in these categories, as well as the Spotlight …