Dork Shelf talks with heavy metal icon Slash to talk about his first foray into feature film production, Nothing Left to Fear, the differences between film and music business, why his life has always been following a learning curve, balancing life on the road as a musician with being a producer, how filmmaking plays into his more impulsive desires as an artist, scoring a film he helped produce, and the real life legend of Stull, Kansas.
Not familiar with the work of masterful French filmmaker Claire Denis? With a retrospective of her work about to kick off at the TIFF Bell Lightbox this Thursday and a new film opening this Friday, here are five great places to start and become acquainted with one of the most boundary pushing and thoughtful filmmakers working today in our new series we like to call Fast Five
It's been a while, but we're back with looks at new Blu-Rays for Iron Man 3, Psycho II, Psycho III John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, Seconds, The Croods, Pain and Gain, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing.
The tepid potboiler Runner Runner is so dull and hopelessly cliched the only reaction one can really give it is a raised eyebrow and a facial expression that says "Really? That's it?"
A surprisingly poignant documentary, La Camioneta takes a sprawling, multiple arc look at the life of a decommissioned US school bus being reborn as public transportation in a violent section of Guatemala City.
Attempting to be both a female empowerment drama and food porn at the same time, the French import Haute Cuisine fails staggeringly on both counts thanks to a messy, arbitrary narrative told with absolutely no imagination, likeable (or even believable) characters, and a grating insistence to be as crowd pleasing as possible.
The sleepy Alabama hamlet of Muscle Shoals has produced more hit records than any other sleepy town in the world. This entertaining (if slightly overlong) documentary looks at how this town along the Tennessee became a hotbed of R&B and Southern Rock culture.
This week at The Bloor, a heartwrenching look at the select group of people capable of performing controversial late term abortions in After Tiller and Toronto's favourite curmudgeon Alan Zweig gives viewers 15 Reasons to Live.
It only took seven years since it's debut at TIFF to get released in North America, but the teen slasher All the Boys Love Mandy Lane has aged quite well.
Comedies don’t get much darker, thought provoking, and ultimately harrowing than Toronto director Matt Johnson’s The Dirties.
As a depiction of the events on the day of American President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22nd 1963 – as well as the three days in the immediate wake of the killing – Parkland doesn’t cover any historical or narrative ground that hasn’t been touched on before, nor does it go out of its way to create melodrama.
It’s so rare to come across a film that’s genuinely important. Wadjda is one such film. In fact, it’s a film that manages to be important simply by existing at all. Haifaa al-Mansour’s film about a young girl who desperately wants to buy a bicycle is the first ever to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia. What’s more, it’s a film addressing womanhood in Saudi society, directed by a woman.
This Thursday and Friday, the TIFF Bell Lightbox offers free screenings of shorts and features from filmmaker and artist Kevin Jerome Everson, someone incredibly adept at looking at the beauty and hardship in being a part of the modern working class.
Best viewed on the largest screen humanly possible to capture the scope and grandeur of every frame, Gravity is exactly the kind of blockbuster filmmaking mainstream audiences deserve but never get. It could very well over time gain the same kind of cultish notoriety as King Kong or Jaws in terms of delivering the goods to the viewer and giving audiences just enough to chew on to analyze it afterwards and view it again and again.
Lazy, unfunny, and unfocused even by 1980s made-for-TV movie standards, Girl Most Likely is the rare example of a near perfect disaster.
