Arts 216 results

Reviews of fine art, classical and opera music, and all things cultured

Meet Linnea Dick: Daughter of a Maker of Monsters

Interview: Linnea Dick - Meet Beau Dick: Maker of Monsters A new documentary and a retrospective of Beau Dick's work mark the anniversary of his passing, but for his daughter Linnea, the healing journey her father started is only just beginning. The 26-year-old has already battled addiction and depression, but she’s found a purpose in poetry, helping suicidal youth, and keeping her father’s legacy alive.

Young Warriors Turning Young Adult Fiction Into Reality

Popular Culture: Generation Shift Hits the Fan - #marchforourlives The March for Our Lives is a mission millennials have been training for their whole lives. Just look at the last 20 years of young adult fiction, says movie critic Katherine Monk. Whether it’s Harry Potter fighting the Ministry of Magic or Katniss Everdeen overthrowing President Snow, the next generation grew up with deeply moral role models who courageously confronted power. “If desperate times call for desperate measures, then I am free to act as desperately as I wish.” - Katniss Everdeen in Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games By Katherine Monk They are expecting under half a million, but by the time the last bus empties onto the mall in D.C. Saturday morning, there’s a good chance “The March for Our Lives” to end gun violence will rival the numbers of the Million Man March in 1995, and the 1963 protest led by Martin Luther King Jr. Commentators on the Right will credit hacks from the Democrats for ...
4Score

Movie review: Phantom Thread wears well

Movie Review: Phantom Thread In what might be his final movie, Daniel Day-Lewis fully inhabits another of his difficult characters, this time a fashion designer who demands praise and silence.

Here Comes A Regular: A Photographic Archive of The Railway Club

Ex-Press Salon: The Railway Club Regulars Natasha Moric tended bar at Vancouver's Railway Club for more than 20 years, in the days before selfies and Instagram, but she took her camera to work and captured the regulars -- in their comfort zone without filters By Katherine Monk VANCOUVER, BC — Shakespeare said truth was best found at the bottom of a wine cup, which is why bar life has always attracted the artistic eye. Jan Steen created a tradition with his paintings of rosy-cheeked drunkards in the 1600s, followed centuries later by Van Gogh and the Impressionists. Then photography came along and allowed what French writer Pierre Mac Orlan described as the ability “to capture the fantastic forms of life which require at least a second’s immobility to be perceptible.” In the world of street photography, these glimmering moments of truth come to us a flashes in the darkness: a frozen moment of euphoria on the dancefloor, the desperation of a lurid glance near closing ...
3Score

Movie review: Happy End is Haneke at his most elusive

Movie review: Happy End The story of an unhappy French family follows the director's usual pattern of dysfunction and brutal motives, but there's not much to keep us watching

Jay Stone’s Top 10 movies of 2017

Lady Bird: Pretty well the best time I had at the movies this year came from this small, exquisitely observed story that we’ve seen a million times: a young woman comes of age in a small town, fights with her parents and dreams of glory in the big city. But writer/director Greta Gerwig — drawing on her own life — turns this familiar material into a sweet, caustic, and authentic tale of growing up, aided by great performances from Laurie Metcalfe as the exasperated mother and Saoirse Ronan as the complicated young woman. A true gem.   The Florida Project: Filmmaker Sean Baker takes a step up from his previous movie (Tangerine, which was shot on an iPhone) but doesn’t sacrifice any of the grit in the story of people living on the edge of the American dream, in every sense: they inhabit a welfare motel within sight of Disney World in Orlando, Fla. A cast comprised of mostly first-time actors, lead by the preternaturally talented seven-year-old named Brooklyn ...

My TIFF Diary, or The Disaster Artist

Movies: #TIFF17 Jay Stone goes from cornflakes to a promising Canadian movie, stopping along the way to check in with Tommy Wiseau and Margaret Atwood
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The Florida Project on the edges of Disney

Movie Review: The Florida Project A single mother and her precociously savvy daughter scratch out a living in a $38-a-night motel beside Disney World in this gritty look at American life near the bottom

mother! is a lot of bother!

Darren Aronofsky's new movie is a biblical allegory about the invasion of a rural Eden by the vandals of the world. Or perhaps it's not about anything much at all By Jay Stone   TORONTO — In 2006, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — best known at the time for his disturbing drama Requiem For A Dream — made the absurd cosmic love story The Fountain. It was about a couple chasing one another through the time and space of an irritating cosmos of spiritual set design, and it starred Rachel Weisz, then the director’s romantic partner.   They have since split, and Aronofsky is now dating Jennifer Lawrence, the star of his new movie, mother! After redeeming himself with such films as The Wrestler and Black Swan, he has returned to the murky business of making grand metaphorical showcases for his new love. mother! is another epic of self-regard, this time about nothing less than Creation itself, and the horrors that are visited upon poor Jennifer Lawrence. It has ...

The parents and children of TIFF

Movies: #TIFF17 Three movies the the Toronto film festival present different versions of the cinematic parent — Interfering Mother, Distant Father — with varying success   By Jay Stone TORONTO — It was parent-and-child day at the Toronto International Film Festival, which is always interesting for those of us who are parents and wonder which of several cinematic categories we might fall into: Distant Father, Interfering Mother, Demanding Taskmaster (or –mistress), Indifferent Hippie or Kooky Eccentric. I think that’s all of them. We began with a terrific little coming-of-age title called Lady Bird, starring Saoirse Ronan — heroine of yesterday’s movie marathon and providing further proof here that she can do no wrong — as a rebellious high school student growing up in terrifyingly unhip Sacramento, Calif. She laughs with her best friend, dumps the friend for some new rich kids, dumps the rich kids for the old friend, meets a couple of boys who are variou...