Nothing but horror for the holidays in this week's DVD column with looks at the anthology horror V/H/S, the remake Silent Night, the ridiculous concept of having a zombie Osama Bin Laden, and the truly depressing horror faced by some teens in American schools: underfunding.
We talk to the lucky actor to get the high profile role of Thorin Oakenshield in Peter Jackson's kick off to The Hobbit trilogy, British actor Richard Armitage about working with Jackson, being on set in Middle Earth while being a huge Tolkien fan, and Andy Serkis asking the actor to go the extra mile for gritty realism.
Local film site mavericks The Seventh Art are bringing director Whit Stillman to Toronto for two nights at The Royal this week. Here's why you should go.
This week's archival home entertainment column looks back at Michael Cimino's infamous box office flop Heaven's Gate, the strangely forgotten about Steven Spielberg hit Catch Me If You Can, and the classic noir The Postman Always Rings Twice.
The romantic comedy Playing for Keeps has an excellent first 45 minutes mostly because it isn’t trying to be a standard rom-com. What starts off as a curiously winning mixture of a kids sport’s movie and a racy, adult sex farce, however, gives way somewhat suddenly to become something that’s merely okay and not at all surprising.
Not to be confused with the Nicolas Cage campfest of the same name, Deadfall is an overly plotted crime thriller that cares more about piling on story notes than developing actual characters.
It might just be wordless shots of animals if you want to be reductive about it, but Denis Cote's Bestiaire feels transcendent, contemplative, and almost zen like in its opposition to the kinds of nature films audiences have grown accustomed to.
While guitarist Jason Becker serves as a great focus for a documentary, the documentary made about him can only really give the bullet points of his life, works, and current battles with ALS.
With TIFF announcing the line-up for it's 12th annual Canada's Top Ten series in January, we take a look at their choices to represent the best of the Great White North in 2012.
Given all of the anti-drug propaganda we’re forced to swallow on a daily basis, this bitter pill of a film demands to be seen. Even if you’re well versed in the facts and issues that Eugene Jarecki's The House I Live In trots out, the material is collected, organized, and presented in such a way that will tear your guts out and infuriate you all over again.
Dork Shelf sits down with Playing for Keeps leading man Gerard Butler to talk about working with kids, his great cast, his fading accent, and trying to make a film with soccer as a backdrop in the United States.
Looking ahead at the holiday DVD and Blu-ray shopping season, we don't like much of what we see, including Men in Black III, Hope Springs, Ted, The Bourne Legacy, Lawless, and The Odd Life of Timothy Green, but the post-apocalyptic thriller The Day is better than it has any right to be, Laurence Anyways is an exceptional Canadian film, and there's also that Batman movie from that really famous director guy.
Killing Them Softly is a stunning looking and sounding picture with some great performances and directorial panache to spare, but it becomes a bit of slog once the film's bursts of ultraviolence run aground of the constant, unsubtle economic badgering.
What makes director Joe Wright and actress Kiera Knightley's latest collaboration on Tolstoy's Anna Karenina somewhat startling is the fact that it’s an oddball self-conscious, almost Brechtian experience in audience alienation as well (apologies for getting pretentious, but it’s the kind of movie that requires that sort of talk).
For a film about such a creative modern day phenomenon as LARPing, Lloyd the Conqueror takes a lazy approach to what could be a very funny conquest.
