It might just be a greatest hits compilation for Cirque du Soleil and a demo reel for James Cameron's beloved 3D cameras, but this big screen outing for the Montreal based acrobatic workers looks better in 3D than The Hobbit did, and despite an almost complete lack of story, it's still quite a bit of fun.
Influenced more by film directors like Hitchcock, Lynch, and Todd Haynes, photographer Gregory Crewdson makes large scale stills from scratch often for budgets equal to that of independent film productions. Documentarian Ben Shapiro traces the artist's work and influences in this well made profile piece.
The award for the most physically uncomfortable film to watch in 2012 goes quite easily to The Guilt Trip. This 95 minutes of mother-nagging offers about 10 minutes of passable cringe comedy and 85 minutes of painfully unfunny gags that will make you want to crawl up into a fetal ball and pray for it all to end.
We talk to one of the stars of James Cameron and Andrew Adamson's 3D extravaganza Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away, actress and acrobat Erica Linz about the hard preparation that goes into the numerous acrobatic numbers (shot with Cameron’s go-to Pace camera system), her brief time spent in Montreal before touring, and her own personal and exciting charity work.
Monsters, Inc. solidified the Pixar formula and proved that clever, emotionally rich, and technically stunning work could be produced by the CGI dream team at will. Now that the film is (get ready to feel old) 11-years old and sliding back out into theaters in 3D, it’s clear just how special of a family flick it was. The movie remains just as funny and warm as ever, with a rather ingenious central concept strong enough to make the upcoming sequel something to look forward to.
In this "holiday" themed edition of Defending the Indefensible, we look at the first two films in the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise, neither of which is particularly excellent (and in the case of the sequel not even remotely okay), but both of which have interesting points worth talking about.
With films coming to home video two days this week (Tuesday and Friday) here's part one of our look at the latest releases including Beasts of the Southern Wild, Killer Joe, Total Recall, Premium Rush, and Arbitrage.
The Toronto Film Critics Association has named the winners in their annual survey of film critics within the city and Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master came out a huge winner. Here's this year's results including a couple of surprise winners and the nominees for the Rogers Best Canadian Feature award to be determined on January 8th.
Dork Shelf talks to the one and only Quentin Tarantino about his latest film Django Unchained, the bridge between Inglorious Basterds and Django, what makes an effective spaghetti western, his rumoured casting choices, shooting on a real Southern plantation, moving his production due to a lack of snow, and the potential for a revival of westerns as a genre following his film.
As the 1970s came to a close, many of the best filmmakers of the past century nearly had their careers ruined as studios asserted more control over them during the emergence of blockbuster cinema. Here we take a look at some of those special cases: Scorsese's New York New York, Friedkin's Sorcerer, Spielberg's 1941, Cimino's Heaven's Gate, Altman's Popeye, and Coppola's One from the Heart.
Despite Bill Murray doing an okay job as FDR, Hyde Park on Hudson should have spent less time on actively trying to get Oscars by any means necessary (and goofy, tactfully shot handjobs) and instead should have aimed for a film with some actual substance.
While Meet the Fokkens tells the story of two fascinating 69-year old identical twin prostitutes in Amsterdam, the film is ultimately too slight and far too anecdotal to make much of an impact.
Nothing but titles from the house that Mickey Mouse built in this week's archival DVD column, as our film editor explains why he has a hard time talking about Cinderella (as well as looks at The Muppet Christmas Carol and The Great Mouse Detective), while Phil Brown and Dave Voight look at a couple of Pixar gems on Blu-ray: Finding Nemo and Up
While dividing Tolkien's most childish and thinnest material into three films seems like a strange decision, Peter Jackson makes it mostly work with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which still manages to be a lot of fun. That new high-frame rate 3D? Not so much.
Time to gear up for the end of the world, and thankfully the TIFF Bell Lightbox has all your post-Apocalyptic film-going/research needs covered.
