We talk once again with Mitchell Kezin, director of the Christmas music documentary Jingle Bell Rocks, but this time he shares with us a playlist of 12 indispensable alternative holiday tracks no collection should be without.
Out of the Furnace aims for a character driven drama, but despite having an excellent cast of actors giving all they can to the project, there’s not much that can be done to give the movie any kind of pulse or momentum. It’s dull and plodding when the material suggests something with much higher emotional stakes. It’s the perfect example of a film that’s too subdued for its own good.
Spinning Plates is a well done, crowd pleasing documentary that looks at how three very different restaurants play into the notion that food is an art form that's just as valid as writing, painting, or movies.
We talk to Vancouver filmmaker and record collector Mitchell Kezin about his labour of love, Jingle Bell Rocks (opening this Friday at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema) about the rich variety, history, and nostalgia that surrounds alternative Christmas music.
We talk to Alicia Fletcher, film archivist and programmer for the Silent Sundays series of silent films at The Revue, who this Sunday will screen comedies from silent film heavyweights Buster Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle, and Charlie Chaplin. We talk about her work as an archivist, the importance of music in silent films today and during initial release, and a bit about the diverging careers and films of Arbuckle and Keaton.
The abysmal CBGB is about as appropriate and fitting of a tribute to the sadly lost NYC Bowery dive and punk rock Mecca as playing a Jock Jams album over pallbearers carrying a casket to a hearse.
Instead of an in-depth look into the life of one of the world's greatest scientists, Hawking plays more like a low level, unambitious biography of a sports star: a parade of nothing more than statistics and snapshots.
The sexually charged lesbian drama Concussion comes with a solid premise (one cribbed almost directly from Bunuel’s Belle de Jour), but little sense of focus or any interesting tension.
A sprawling look at songwriting superstar Jerome Felder, A.K.A. Doc Pomus, looks at one man's unlikely life crafting some of the biggest rock, R&B, and blues tracks of the 1950s and 60s.
In honour of the upcoming release of the Coen Brothers' most recent film Inside Llewyn Davis opening in December, the Lightbox has programmed a selection of films from the duo, but how do these chosen films fit in with their latest work and how the brothers are constantly redefining genres?
This week at The Bloor, one of the most harrowing and unflinching documentaries of the year, Narco Cultura, takes a look at the lesser seen sides of the Mexican drug trade, while the much lighter, but still great Tokyo Waka: A City Poem examines how one city deals with a large number of pesky crows with equal parts admiration and annoyance.
Alex Gibney’s firsthand look into the rise and fall of cyclist Lance Armstrong, The Armstrong Lie, becomes even more increasingly interesting as a result of how flawed the film is overall. It’s not that Gibney’s points about the tarnished seven time Tour de France champion and cancer survivor’s deceptions and lies about doping allegations aren’t perceptive or valid, but with a bloated and unwarranted running time north of two hours it’s not only about its subject’s inability to come clean. In many ways it’s an almost overly emotional document of Gibney’s own inability to let go of his own film.
We take a look at several of the films playing this year's 7th annual Brazil Film Fest, kicking off tonight in Toronto at the TIFF Bell Lightbox and running through Sunday.
We talk to Kiva Reardon, one of the founder and head editor for cléo, a journal of film and feminism, and talk about the formation of the journal, varying definitions of feminism, why she's always pleasantly surprised with the wealth and range of films they are able to look at, and what film writing inspires her the most as a writer and an editor.
Dork Shelf runs down some of this year's offerings at the all Canadian horror movie festival Blood in the Snow, running from November 29th to December 1st at the Carlton Cinemas in Toronto.
