To celebrate TIFF’s ongoing Bangkok Dangerous: The Cinema Of Nicolas Cage series, Alan Jones has resurrected his retrospective of the actor’s work entitled The Nic Cage Project. In this edition, Jones takes a look at Brian De Palma’s Hitchcockian opus Snake Eyes – playing tonight at the Lightbox.
Husband and wife directing team Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (who previously made the shark thriller Open Water) have dusted off one of Hitchcock's oldest tricks for their latest movie, Silent House, and while it certainly stands as an impressive technical achievement, unfortunately it isn’t that impressive of a movie.
This Means War refers not only to the title of director McG’s latest romantic action-comedy, but also to the exact sentiment I felt about forty minutes into the film. Staggeringly unfunny with a masochistic mean streak, only one of the jokes in the film even manages a single actual laugh, making for an extremely long feeling 95 minute sit. Ugly, incoherent, and all around lazy as hell, this is exactly the kind of movie I feel I will be weeping about when it inevitably hits number one at the box office.
Jacob Tierney’s third feature film, Good Neighbours, adds a distinctly Canadian twist on a classic Hitchcock-style thriller, envisioning a cold, claustrophobic world in which no one can be either trusted or in many ways resisted. Set in 1995 during the Quebec referendum, the film spies on three Anglophone residents of an apartment block who try to find friendship merely through proximity and language.
