This week The Bloor has a pair of winners in the form of the inside-Hollywood documentary Casting By and the straight out of the Shaolin Temple Dragon Girls. Also a few words about a special screening for you wine connoisseurs out there.
Every bit as bad as the bad buzz that precedes it R.I.P.D. might just best the likes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Elektra as the most awful comic book adaptation ever created.
Probably a third place behind The Exorcist and The Changeling in terms of stories that deal in hauntings and possessions (and ahead of even the best films with Amityville in the title), James Wan’s unnerving effort The Conjuring is nothing if not genuine when it comes to wringing tension and scares from the audience.
More or less a carbon copy of the first movie in terms of style, subtlety, tone, and general goodwill, Red 2 stills ekes out a marginally better review than its passable predecessor.
Blackfish is a gut wrenching and powerful look at how sea park mismanagement essentially created a killer through deplorable conditions and general apathy, but what's even more shocking is how the same and formerly majestic Orca is still being used and exploited today after three deaths.
There’s no mistaking Turbo for anything other than a fairy tale fantasy aimed squarely at the young, but there’s something incredibly winsome about it that other films these days miss entirely. It’s genuine and free of any sense of irony.
Only God Forgives is an endlessly pretty, but astoundingly boring and brutal exercise that shows director Nicolas Winding Refn is nothing without a proper story to back him up.
Starting out as a mockumentary blending actual looks at conspiracy theories grafted onto a fictionalized story played out by actors and then giving way to a subtler low budget kind of found footage film, The Conspiracy is an entertaining and clever odd duck.
With TOGA! The Reinvention of the American Comedy, the TIFF Bell Lightbox looks back on the history of the gross out, bro-down comedy with looks at three of our own personal favourites.
We talk to writer-director Christopher MacBride and actor Aaron Poole about crafting the paranoid Canadian made thriller The Conspiracy about blending real conspiracy theories within the frameworks of both an old school thriller and a found footage film, how the internet’s wealth of information shaped the film, how conspiracy theories are like religions, playing characters searching for the truth, a general mistrust of people in suits, and [REDACTED].
The year-in-the-life documentary Venus and Serena does a fine job of balancing the laudatory moments with the deeply flawed and sometimes overly confrontational behaviour of the Williams family as a whole.
This Blu-Ray round-up for early July takes a look at the new releases of the rebooting of Evil Dead, the award winning documentary The Gatekeepers, the bizarre Southern fried sleaze of The Paperboy, and a different take on the already much talked about Spring Breakers.
Another of the year's worst, Fondi '91 is an incompetent and reprehensible coming of age story that can't decide if it wants to be a half assed romantic comedy or an icky, sleazy, and serious parable about date rape.
While good points are being raised about the benefits and misunderstanding of nuclear power, there still isn't enough balance to the documentary Pandora's Promise to make that convincing of an argument.
Artful, but deeply hollow, the art film autobiography I Send You This Place tries to understand mental illness, but cares about nothing more than its own pretty images.
