We take a look at the second annual Toronto Black Film Festival - kicking off Tuesday and running through this Sunday evening - bringing some of the best in Black Cinema to the city, including reviews of several of this year's entries.
From Above From Above tells the tale of William Ward (Danny Glover) as he recalls the love story of his life with Venus (Tantoo Cardinal). Told in flashback from his wife’s deathbed, Ward relives the events of their shared life together. Venus is from the Lightning Clan, a mystical Native American family living in Arkansas, […]
The Retrieval This serious 1860s set bounty hunter drama is the antithesis of Tarantino’s Django Unchained, but in the best possible ways. A purposefully metered and purposely direful journey, it has a lot more in common with John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road than its synopsis might suggest (albeit with a larger cast). […]
Cristo Rey In the ghettos of Leticia Tonos Paniagua’s titular city on the southern coast of the Dominican Republic, tensions between the country’s local population and the thousands of largely illegal Haitian immigrants and refugees living there is at an all time high. It’s against this backdrop that this 2013 TIFF selection decides to set […]
The Suspect Two social scientists (Mekhi Phifer and Sterling K. Brown) pose as bank robbers in a small all-white Southern town to understand the racial dynamics of small-town law enforcement. However, their experiment takes an unplanned, deadly turn as a local sheriff (William Sadler) has his own questions to ask, as one of the two […]
Haiti Untold A well meaning and well intentioned documentary doesn’t always make for the greatest movie, as evidenced by Dan Shannon and Isabelle Depelteau’s surprisingly predominantly white-centric look at the rebuilding effort in Haiti following the devastating 2010 earthquake. Getting in on the ground with the organizations and volunteers who are funding and actively working […]
The Forgotten Kingdom This year’s opening night film takes the standard “wayward son returning home after a tragedy” narrative and crafts a complex and emotionally enriched narrative not only about the estrangement between fathers and sons, but also between cultures, economies, and between the nations of South Africa and Lesotho. Atang (Zenzo Ngqobe), a young […]
Blue Caprice Boasting an exceptional leading performance from Isaiah Washington, Alexandre Moore’s Blue Caprice takes a real life story that has already be used for trashy “true crime” novelizations and movies of the week, and crafts a slow-burning, suspenseful, and uneasy character piece from the material. It does justice to a tragedy while simultaneously never […]
We FINALLY start digging ourselves out of the backlog of DVDs and Blu-Rays we received over the past month with the first of two special home entertainment columns this week. Today we look at the hilarious Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, the intense Captain Phillips, the Adam Scott comedy A.C.O.D., Kuosawa's classic Throne of Blood on Criterion, and Dylan McDermott trapped in a Freezer.
While certainly a bit overstuffed with several barely intersecting storylines, the ensemble Canadian indie comedy Sex After Kids has great performances, an ear for truthful humor, and certainly a little something for everybody.
Everything about The Lego Movie is awesome. An astoundingly smart, gut busting comedy with an anti-corporate message tied into the greatest virtues of one of the most beloved brands on Earth, Phil Lord and Chris Miller's exceptional film for people of all ages deserves to be talked about in the same breath as Monsters Inc. and Fantastic Mr. Fox when talking about the best animated comedies of the new millennium.
This week at The Bloor, entertaining looks at some hard headed intellectual icons that are often talked about in hushed reverential tones: atheist pundits Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins in The Unbelievers and the the late, controversial American writer and wit Gore Vidal in Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia.
In the first entry of our new weekly series looking at films celebrating anniversaries this week that might otherwise go unnoticed, our film editor explains a bit about the series and takes a look at 2004's US hockey drama Miracle just in time for this year's Winter Olympics.
While it has some enjoyable moments, a complete lack of character development and an unsure storyline make George Clooney's latest directorial effort, the all star World War II period piece The Monuments Men, a bit of a ponderous disappointment.
We talk to teen filmmaker and last year's winner of the RBC/TIFF Next Wave 24 Hour Film Challenge winner Nate Wilson prior him meeting this year's competitors on Saturday's kick off about what kind of advice he would give to any teens interested in taking on the challenge this year, what the experience and the shoot was like last year, and how the competition makes him feel about his work today.
