The wide river of Gordon Pinsent’s dreams
Movie Review: The River of My Dreams
Documentary about the Canadian actor captures much of his impish charm, but it leaves many questions unanswered about what really makes him tick
Bringing up Babies: Top Ten movies of 2016
Movies: Top Ten 2016
Some say Donald Trump won the Presidency playing to childish insecurity and name-calling, but the annual box-office derby also proved a public appetite for adolescent entertainments. Film Critic Katherine Monk breaks down the top-ten money earners, and offers her own take on the year's best.
By Katherine Monk (Published Jan. 2, 2017) The political arena wasn’t the only place where childhood behaviours prevailed in 2016. Movie theatres also played to our apparent desire for less-sophisticated, over-simplified entertainments. It was the year the Mouse House roared: The Walt Disney Company was responsible for five of the year’s top ten earners worldwide, for a record haul of $4.829 billion - just a little under half the cumulative worldwide gross of $11.3 billion. Disney raced to the pinnacle of a relatively static box-office heap with titles that included the top-earning Captain America: Civil War ($1.153B), Finding Dory ($1.027B), Zootopia ($1.023B), The ...
Cohen, Prince, Bowie and now… Comparelli
Tribute: R.I.P. Peter Comparelli
A fellow scribe remembers the good old days when journalists spoke truth to power, a per diem could get you drunk and a guy named Peter Comparelli backstopped the labour beat
By Rod Mickleburgh
It has been a terrible year. Bowie and Prince taken far too early. Leonard Cohen leaving us to mourn and light candles against the dark. Long-time friends battling serious health issues. Fake news, the decline of newspapers and the mainstream media, more necessary than ever to hold governments and politicians to account. An antiquated electoral system, an FBI “announcement coup” against Hillary Clinton and Russian hackers delivering a sniveling, bullying, thin-skinned, shallow-thinking prima-donna with the attention span of a child to the White House, while the most adult of U.S. presidents takes his dignified leave. Terrorism in Europe. Aleppo. And now, to cap off this annus horribilis came news of the passing of Peter Comparelli, as lovely a person as ...
Canadian women bound for Palm Springs
Movies: Palm Springs International Film Festival
The partnership between Palm Springs and Telefilm continues to push the Canadian film cause in influential U.S. circles, with female directors taking centre stage
By The Ex-Press
(December 22, 2016) — A delegation of strong Canadian women will be heading to Palm Springs in the new year, showcasing work that touches on everything from Kenyan marathon runners to resource extraction and First Nations issues in the North. Anjali Nayar’s Gun Runners, Nettie Wild’s Koneline, Anne Émond’s Nelly and Chloé Robichaud’s Pays were selected to screen at this year’s Palm Springs International Film Festival, joining Zacharias Kunuk’s Maliglutit, Xavier Dolan’s Juste la fin du monde and Juan Andrés Arango’s X Quinientos as part of this year’s seven-film Canadian delegation, one of the strongest in recent years. “With a diverse mix of Canadian features—including works from emerging talent and an Indigenous pioneer, ...
Christmas found in Stollen recipe
Recipe: Snidal’s Christmas Stollen
Most store-bought gifts will end up as landfill, so why not fill the tummies of loved-ones with delicious homemade goodies such as German Stollen instead?
By Louise Crosby
(December 14, 2016) - Since my family stopped exchanging gifts at Christmas, food has taken on more importance. This is that one time of the year when you can rationalize buying those fancy Spanish sardines in olive oil, some of that aged-to-perfection, sliced-paper-thin jamón ibérico, that sublime, creamy raw goat cheese from France. Expensive yes, but hey, it’s Christmas. Of course, it’s also a time for baking. This year I’m making Mexican Wedding Cakes, Chocolate Hazelnut Crinkle Cookies, Coconut Stars, and Pecan Sandies. (Notice that all those cookies contain nuts!) I’m also making this stollen, a recipe that comes from Leslie Snidal, my friend in Nova Scotia who makes it every Christmas, as her mother did. It is baked earlier in December, wrapped up well ...
John Madden hits home with Miss Sloan
Interview: John Madden on Miss Sloane
The director of Shakespeare in Love says casting Jessica Chastain as a shrewd, morally ambiguous D.C. lobbyist was the best way to expose the ugliness of modern politics
By Katherine Monk
WHISTLER, BC – John Madden doesn’t want to get bogged down by the F-word: Feminism has so much ancillary luggage, too many awkward hard edges to cram into the narrative anchovy tin called a feature film. Yet, Miss Sloane, the latest film from the Academy Award-nominated director of Shakespeare in Love points a laser beam at the modern female experience. A D.C.-set (Toronto-shot) thriller starring Jessica Chastain as the title character, Miss Sloane offers a close-up view of the lobbyist’s reality. Watching from a slightly distanced perspective, the viewer picks up the trail of professional lobbyist Elizabeth Sloane just as she embarks on a career move that will change her life forever. Madden was reluctant to give away too many details about his ...
Remembering a massacre: A tough pill to swallow
The Sick Days: Part 18
Covering the events of December 6 at L'École Polytechnique was a formative experience, and one a seasoned reporter now thinks she got all wrong.
By Shelley Page
(Published Dec. 2, 2015) The moment my editor told me to get to the airport, my stomach fell as though I was on the down slope of a rollercoaster. I stood in the middle of the newsroom, as a few deskers and reporters stared at me expectantly, wondering if I could possibly decline. I think reporters often dread the unknown of a story and the difficulties that lay ahead to nail it down, but I feared I just wasn’t up to the task. I’d been feeling tired, lupus tired, for days and I was walking like an elderly woman whose joints lacked lubricant. But the killing in Montreal had begun around 5 p.m., and within 20 minutes, 27 people were shot or stabbed. All the dead were young women; fourteen of them. How could I not go? In the Beaches areas apartment I shared with my absentee boyfriend, who ...
Tatiana Maslany, Tom Cullen fire up first-timer
Interview: Joey Klein on The Other Half
In a world full of malaise, misanthropy and unmitigated sorrow, first-time filmmaker Joey Klein says he wants to hold up a funhouse mirror to ambient pain
By Katherine Monk
(November 30, 2016) Joey Klein is what you’d call a ‘late bloomer.’ When he was a kid growing up in Montreal, he assumed he’d become a doctor like his father. He ended up in McGill management school instead, and hated it. So he headed to New York City at the age of 25 to study acting, a career he pursued with success, landing roles in American Gangster and 12 Monkeys -- to name a few. Yet, he craved a bigger challenge still. He had a hankering to address the ambient angst of modern experience – without exploiting Hollywood trope – so he started writing. And now, just a year shy of his 40th birthday, he's making his directorial debut with the theatrical release of The Other Half. “Originally, it was a story about grief… and about grief over time. ...
Between the lines: Delicate tragedy of Manchester by the Sea
Interview: Kenneth Lonergan on Manchester by the Sea
Kenneth Lonergan makes a triumphant return to movies with a story about a solitary man who must go back home to face his family and the events that changed his life
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — There’s a scene in the penetrating and devastating drama Manchester by the Sea where Casey Affleck, playing a loner with a crippling secret in his past, stands in front of a burning building. It’s defining tragedy in the film: the Affleck character, named Lee, has just been to the grocery store to buy some 2 a.m. snacks and beer, and he has returned to find his life going up in flames. It’s the kind of moment that would call — in a lesser film — for a lot of outsized emotions. But Manchester by the Sea is too quiet and controlled for that: it’s written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, a master of understated sadness, and has in Affleck a leading man whose own work (he’s the younger, less famous brother of Ben) reflects a though...