In former Academy Award nominee Lucy Walker's latest documentary, The Crash Reel, the sport of snowboarding gets its finest film: a thoughtful and often heartbreaking look at one athlete struggling to come back to his greatest love after a near life ending accident, but one devoid of standard sports movie cliches in favour of true human emotions and bigger questions about its subjects.
Buried within The Wagner Files is a somewhat decent documentary and talking heads look at how famed German composer Richard Wagner wasn't such a nice person, but it's brought down tremendously by frequently atrocious dramatic recreations of theoretical historic events that are laughably realized and awkwardly integrated.
Culture critic and psychoanalyst rock star Slavoj Zizek follows up his look at cinema with The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, a more disappointing and unnecessarily long winded look at how all ideologies are bad no matter who they come from. It can be summed up in a single sentence, but despite some good case studies, it's really for die hard Zizek fans only.
Eric Smith's new book The Geek's Guide to Dating is a tongue-in-cheek book that has exactly what the “Player One” who has everything in his life but a leading lady needs.
With the return of TIFF's retrospective of the works of Studio Ghibli returning to the Lightbox starting this Thursday (and running to January 3rd), lets look back at our Beginner's Guide to the works of possibly the best animation studio operating today.
The TIFF Packaged Goods series once again returns to the Lightbox this Wednesday at 7:00pm for their annual year end round-up of the best in commercials and music videos, and this year’s final programme is definitely heavier on the latter than the former.
This week on video store shelves we look at new releases Fast and Furious 6, Man of Steel, We're the Millers, Touchy Feely Frances Ha, Force of Execution, Jayne Mansfield's Car, Clear History, and Despicable Me 2, as well as classics Nashville, City Lights, and Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.
Jason Osder's documentary Let the Fire Burn looks at a tragic 1985 incident in Philadelphia that caught everyday citizens in the crossfire of an increasingly agitated inner city political organization and a local government that wanted to stop the group by any means necessary.
A trio of new films hit The Bloor this week: Jingle Bell Rock is a well made bit of holiday nostalgia. The Italian Character can never quite find an even handed way of showcasing one of the world's best orchestras. And InRealLife is a well made, but oddly fear mongering look at how teenagers approach the internet.
Out of the Furnace aims for a character driven drama, but despite having an excellent cast of actors giving all they can to the project, there’s not much that can be done to give the movie any kind of pulse or momentum. It’s dull and plodding when the material suggests something with much higher emotional stakes. It’s the perfect example of a film that’s too subdued for its own good.
Spinning Plates is a well done, crowd pleasing documentary that looks at how three very different restaurants play into the notion that food is an art form that's just as valid as writing, painting, or movies.
The abysmal CBGB is about as appropriate and fitting of a tribute to the sadly lost NYC Bowery dive and punk rock Mecca as playing a Jock Jams album over pallbearers carrying a casket to a hearse.
Instead of an in-depth look into the life of one of the world's greatest scientists, Hawking plays more like a low level, unambitious biography of a sports star: a parade of nothing more than statistics and snapshots.
The sexually charged lesbian drama Concussion comes with a solid premise (one cribbed almost directly from Bunuel’s Belle de Jour), but little sense of focus or any interesting tension.
A sprawling look at songwriting superstar Jerome Felder, A.K.A. Doc Pomus, looks at one man's unlikely life crafting some of the biggest rock, R&B, and blues tracks of the 1950s and 60s.
