The Night Before leaves blurry impression
Superbad with seasonal wrapping
Seth Rogen, Anthony Mackie and Joseph Gordon-Levitt rip a page from Charles Dickens and Timothy Leary in a well-intended holiday comedy that would have been Scrooged if not for Michael Shannon's performance as angelic weed dealer
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 offers less magic
Katniss still kicks ass as dramatic scope broadens
You can almost feel director Francis Lawrence stiffening up as he approaches the finish line, eager to break the tape without falling down in the last mile. The goofiness and the spontaneity are gone, replaced by an official sense of duty, as Jennifer Lawrence loads her bow and fires an arrow into the abyss of adulthood in Hunger Games finale.
Movie review: Remember a moving drama
Atom Egoyan's new movie Remember — about an aging Holocaust survivor plotting revenge — is a moving and surprising feat of storytelling, and featuring a great performance
Emory Cohen finds his inner Tony
The young co-star of Brooklyn says he was inspired by his colourful New York City uncles in creating the role of the gentle plumber who courts Saoirse Ronan
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — Emory Cohen is explaining how he creates characters in his movies. Stealing has a lot to do with it. For instance, for his role in the melancholy love story Brooklyn — in which he plays Tony, a 1950s Italian plumber in love with a lonely Irish immigrant named Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) — Cohen was inspired by Marlon Brando’s working-class character in the drama On The Waterfront, as well as the naturalistic performances in the Italian neo-realist classic The Bicycle Thief. “That’s what I do,” Cohen says. “I basically steal ideas from different performances and try to take on little bits and do it in an Emory Cohen kind of way and see what happens.” What happened in Brooklyn, which is based on a novel by Colm Toibin, is a bit of throwback magic. Tony is an unusual kind of movie ...
Spotlight’s tarnished details make it shine
The real story behind a Pulitzer-winning series
Director Tom McCarthy creates cinematic tension by setting two institutions on a collision course as the Catholic Church and The Boston Globe wrestle arrogance and ego while professing human compassion
Spotlight's tarnished details make it shine
The real story behind a Pulitzer-winning series
Director Tom McCarthy creates cinematic tension by setting two institutions on a collision course as the Catholic Church and The Boston Globe wrestle arrogance and ego while professing human compassion
Dog by Dog points a paw at AKC
New doc exposes dogs as cash crop
The American Kennel Club, big agri-business and -- surprise! -- the Amish emerge as chief enemies of the humble and lovable canine in a new documentary aimed at changing how the consumer purchases a pet.
By Katherine Monk
VANCOUVER – It’s enough to make you burn your VHS tape of Witness and boycott the Westminster Dog show, because according to a new documentary film, the Amish of Pennsylvania and the American Kennel Club resist efforts to curb puppy mills. “It’s about money. Dogs are a cash crop” says Christopher Grimes, the director behind Dog by Dog, a feature documentary airing on PBS later this year. “Papering dogs is a big part of the American Kennel Club’s budget… and for the Amish, they will do what is most profitable, and right now, they can get $3000 for one puppy. They have no other commodity that they are raising that can command the same price.” On the surface, there’s nothing inherently ...
You can vote on climate films
Young filmmakers from around the world enter festival of short movies about the environment shot on mobile devices
By Jay Stone
There’s a film from France in which a man in horror mask chops down a tree — but it’s really a young girl. There’s an Indian movie that illustrates the coming crisis by showing the hands of a person paying more and more money for smaller and smaller bottles of water, until, a few decades from now, there’s none left. There’s a British film about a man who becomes so irritated by the “mad prophet” of climate change that he kills him, only to discover that he has in fact killed the very air he breathes. They’re all part of the Mobile Film Festival, a competition that challenged young filmmakers from around the world to make one-minute movies about climate change on their mobile devices. The organizers received 765 movies from 70 countries, and winnowed them down to 75 finalists. It’s an official event of COP21, the Paris conference ...
