The new season of HBO’s The Newsroom is up and running, and the second episode, "The Genoa Tip," is principally spent maneuvering us towards the season’s larger ongoing stories. We get some long-overdue progress in the Jim-Maggie-Don love triangle, more of intrepid-as-opposed-to-incompetent reporter Neal Sanpat, and more than one genuinely fun scene featuring Sloan.
Returning once again to the subject of pedophilia, Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt features an incredible leading performance from Mads Mikkelsen and offers the audience no easy answers.
Unlike anything ever attempted on screen before and certainly something that can never be duplicated, Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing gets to the heart, ego, and psyche of Indonesian gangster who massacred for money and now think of themselves as heroes.
There isn’t a single second, moment, shot, performance, or line of dialogue within Nikola Curcin’s idiotic, slipshod, useless, and pointless film, Adriatico My Love that can be see as approximating anything close to an artistic triumph.
This week The Bloor has a pair of winners in the form of the inside-Hollywood documentary Casting By and the straight out of the Shaolin Temple Dragon Girls. Also a few words about a special screening for you wine connoisseurs out there.
Every bit as bad as the bad buzz that precedes it R.I.P.D. might just best the likes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Elektra as the most awful comic book adaptation ever created.
Probably a third place behind The Exorcist and The Changeling in terms of stories that deal in hauntings and possessions (and ahead of even the best films with Amityville in the title), James Wan’s unnerving effort The Conjuring is nothing if not genuine when it comes to wringing tension and scares from the audience.
More or less a carbon copy of the first movie in terms of style, subtlety, tone, and general goodwill, Red 2 stills ekes out a marginally better review than its passable predecessor.
Blackfish is a gut wrenching and powerful look at how sea park mismanagement essentially created a killer through deplorable conditions and general apathy, but what's even more shocking is how the same and formerly majestic Orca is still being used and exploited today after three deaths.
There’s no mistaking Turbo for anything other than a fairy tale fantasy aimed squarely at the young, but there’s something incredibly winsome about it that other films these days miss entirely. It’s genuine and free of any sense of irony.
Only God Forgives is an endlessly pretty, but astoundingly boring and brutal exercise that shows director Nicolas Winding Refn is nothing without a proper story to back him up.
Starting out as a mockumentary blending actual looks at conspiracy theories grafted onto a fictionalized story played out by actors and then giving way to a subtler low budget kind of found footage film, The Conspiracy is an entertaining and clever odd duck.
Have you not been reading this gem called Saga? Where have you been?!
Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie have taken lesser-known young heroes from the Marvel Universe and crafted a refreshing, fun, and compelling title in Young Avengers, with this issue being a perfect introduction to their world.
The year-in-the-life documentary Venus and Serena does a fine job of balancing the laudatory moments with the deeply flawed and sometimes overly confrontational behaviour of the Williams family as a whole.
