One of the best anthologies in years, Jia Zhang-ke’s A Touch of Sin offers a thrilling, multilayered, and delightfully bitter look at a Chinese economy told from a viewpoint sick of rampant arrogance and greed and openly asks about what an acceptable response to such indifference towards the working class would be.
The indigenous and aboriginal devoted film festival imagineNATIVE kicks off its 14th year in Toronto this coming Wednesday (October 16th through the 20th), and we take a look at several of the high profile features playing in what's shaping up to be a banner year for the festival.
Dork Shelf talks to Toronto After Dark Film Festival Programming Director and Founder Adam Lopez about his genre festival's eighth year, the move from rep houses to Cineplex, why accessibility and the opinions of his fans mean so much to him, theme nights, and why they decided upon We Are What We Are for the opening night film.
Dork Shelf checks out a selection of the features playing at this year's inaugural music themed film festival Reel Indie, which kicks off this Wednesday at The Royal and runs through Sunday, running the gamut of music from Rockabilly to jazz to emo pop and beyond.
Michael M. Bilandic’s slyly hilarious hipster piss take Hellaware (screening for free at the Revue Cinema in Toronto as part of the Refocus series this Wednesday) comes as the latest film in an interesting year full of films about fucked up visions of the “American Dream," only the more genuine perceived backwoods rubes are the victims of a hipster fraud from the big city.
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.
Eschewing the straight-laced (and sadly often boring) grindhouse aesthetic of its predecessor, Machete Kills dives headlong into off-the-wall comedy like it probably should have done in the first place. It’s still way too long and the energy considerably flags towards the conclusion, but at least the laughs are fairly consistent throughout and there’s hardly anything that can be called a lull in the action and gags.
