This week in home entertainment, we look back on the new Blu-Ray for The Little Mermaid and how the film pretty much saved Walt Disney Animation, as well as the Blu-Ray release of The Heat, and DVDs for Michael Winterbottom's The Look of Love, Alex Gibney's documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, and something called Detention of the Dead, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Thanks to some great performances and Claire Denis’ always exceptional ability to mine suspense out of the purposefully vague, Bastards saves itself from needless convolution and a story that’s pretty much on the level of a late 90s American boilerplate thriller.
Every year, several romantic comedies are released that dig the grave for the genre even deeper, and this year, Canadian cinema has made its own vile contribution with The Right Kind of Wrong.
Underwhelming, Lynn Shelton's Touchy Feely feels like a stock American indie that never lives up to the talents of the director or the cast. It's not awful, but it never reaches it's full potential.
There’s almost nothing that I can say about Carlo Carlei’s big screen staging of Romeo and Juliet. It would be redundant to say there’s nothing here that you haven’t already seen before, and yet it’s worse than that. This is EXACTLY what you have seen before. It’s a drab, lifeless Shakespearean melodrama perked up ever so slightly by a few decent performances that does absolutely nothing whatsoever to warrant its existence.
This week at The Bloor, a look back at the hardest moments in Muhammad Ali's career in The Trials of Muhammad Ali and a pair of married designers responsible for a wide range of products get their due in Design is One: Lella & Massimo Vignelli
Paul Greengrass’ based on a true story piracy drama Captain Phillips plays out like a riveting series of procedures and planning that gives way to negotiation and bargaining and then finally to pleading and panic. It's incredibly nuanced and emotional, anchored by one of Tom Hanks' best performances.
Returning to the Bloor for it's first big screen appearance in Toronto since 2010, NY Export: Opus Jazz is a dazzling dance film you probably wouldn't believe was made by one of the co-directors of Catfish and the last two Paranormal Activity films and the cinematographer of Martha Marcy May Marlene working together. It's a real hidden gem and a true big screen dance experience.
This special Cineplex look at the works of Johannes Vermeer from a recent exhibition at the National Gallery in London should give curious, expert, or neophyte art aficionados a reasonably in-depth look into one of the world’s still most mysterious and elusive painters.
It's been a while, but we're back with looks at new Blu-Rays for Iron Man 3, Psycho II, Psycho III John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, Seconds, The Croods, Pain and Gain, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing.
The tepid potboiler Runner Runner is so dull and hopelessly cliched the only reaction one can really give it is a raised eyebrow and a facial expression that says "Really? That's it?"
A surprisingly poignant documentary, La Camioneta takes a sprawling, multiple arc look at the life of a decommissioned US school bus being reborn as public transportation in a violent section of Guatemala City.
Attempting to be both a female empowerment drama and food porn at the same time, the French import Haute Cuisine fails staggeringly on both counts thanks to a messy, arbitrary narrative told with absolutely no imagination, likeable (or even believable) characters, and a grating insistence to be as crowd pleasing as possible.
The sleepy Alabama hamlet of Muscle Shoals has produced more hit records than any other sleepy town in the world. This entertaining (if slightly overlong) documentary looks at how this town along the Tennessee became a hotbed of R&B and Southern Rock culture.
This week at The Bloor, a heartwrenching look at the select group of people capable of performing controversial late term abortions in After Tiller and Toronto's favourite curmudgeon Alan Zweig gives viewers 15 Reasons to Live.
