Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan are a fine duo in the offbeat teenage hitwoman dramedy Violet & Daisy, but the film will be best remembered for one of the sweetest, most touching performances from the late James Gandolfini.
There's only one new release this week at The Bloor - One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das, which really isn't very good - but there are plenty of returning favourites, special events, and special screenings packing the theatre for the rest of the month.
Carrie might be one of the few cases not only of a remake that’s on par with the original, but of one that makes just enough tweaks in style, performance, and theme to warrant its existence.
Here it is! Your guide to this year's eight annual Toronto After Dark Film Festival, bringing Toronto some of the best genre filmmaking from around the world to the Scotabank Theatre this October 17th-25th. Check back daily for new film reviews and updates!
Big Ass Spider! More in step with the loving work of Joe Dante and early Ivan Reitman than the “look at how crappy of a movie we can make” irony of something like Sharknado, Mike Mendez’s aptly named Big Ass Spider! is a welcome surprise. It’s a lovingly cheeseball, genuinely funny man vs. beast creature […]
Bounty Killer It would probably work better as a pilot for a TV series where its characters and world can be fleshed out in greater detail, but Bounty Killer still offers plenty of gory, desolate futuristic fun, silliness, and some astoundingly good low budget action sequences. In a world where all white collar criminals have […]
Although it gets off to a pretty rough start and is a bit overstuffed, Bill Condon’s somewhat fictionalized “inside WikiLeaks” drama The Fifth Estate manages to generate some thrills once it gets the dynamics of the larger than life characters out of the way.
The Canadian black comedy Cottage Country has all the potential elements for success: a beautiful locale, actors who can pull off great comedy, and a story with loads of potential on paper. Unfortunately, it never gels the way it should becoming oddly too sweet for the darkness to play with any real balance.
Recently restored and cut by 20 minutes at late director Chris Marker's request, the 1963 documentary Le Joli Mai helps to solidify Marker's standing as one of the greatest cinematic artists and philosophers to ever pick up a camera.
It might only just be finding a theatrical release now in Canada (after premiering at TIFF in 2012) to capitalize on the relative success of the similarly pitched Don Jon, but as far as looks at sex addiction go writer and director Stuart Blumberg’s Thanks for Sharing is almost infinitely preferable in spite of its own flaws and shortcomings.
There’s no doubt in my mind that 12 Years a Slave will go down in history as a landmark film. Never before, and quite possibly never again, has the issue of African American slavery and the still present pain and anguish been this viscerally and brilliantly realized. Its effect is provocative, much like gazing into an unattended open wound that never quite heals itself, but rather reaches a point of stasis beyond which things couldn’t possibly get any worse no matter how awful a situation may be.
One of the best anthologies in years, Jia Zhang-ke’s A Touch of Sin offers a thrilling, multilayered, and delightfully bitter look at a Chinese economy told from a viewpoint sick of rampant arrogance and greed and openly asks about what an acceptable response to such indifference towards the working class would be.
The indigenous and aboriginal devoted film festival imagineNATIVE kicks off its 14th year in Toronto this coming Wednesday (October 16th through the 20th), and we take a look at several of the high profile features playing in what's shaping up to be a banner year for the festival.
Dork Shelf checks out a selection of the features playing at this year's inaugural music themed film festival Reel Indie, which kicks off this Wednesday at The Royal and runs through Sunday, running the gamut of music from Rockabilly to jazz to emo pop and beyond.
Michael M. Bilandic’s slyly hilarious hipster piss take Hellaware (screening for free at the Revue Cinema in Toronto as part of the Refocus series this Wednesday) comes as the latest film in an interesting year full of films about fucked up visions of the “American Dream," only the more genuine perceived backwoods rubes are the victims of a hipster fraud from the big city.
