This week on DVD and Blu-Ray, takes on Mel Gibson in Get the Gringo, Lockout, Friends With Kids, Being FlynnA Bag of Hammers, and the fourth season of TV's Sanctuary, while Phil Brown sinks into American Reunion, Silent House, and Bobcat Golthwait's God Bless America.
When Batman meets another Batman from a parallel Earth, their team-up gets... emotional. Weirdly emotional.
In our archival home entertainment column for this week, we look at forms of grand theatre and the theatre of the somewhat absurd, as Phil Brown looks at Ken Russell's Altered States and takes a look at some classic Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare with Twelfth Night and the 80s cheeseball classic No Holds Barred.
Arriving in Toronto a few years after becoming New Zealand’s highest grossing film production of all time, Boy is a pleasant little surprise that finds just the right balance between stylized quirk and heartfelt emotion.
Programmers for two Toronto based film festivals and series, Chris MaGee from the Shinsedai Japanese Cinema Festival (at the Revue through Sunday) and James McNally, curator of the short film series Shorts That Are Not Pants (Friday night at the Revue) talk about their co-existence in the city's landscape of cinema culture and attempt to put to rest the question asking if there's simply too much going on in the city.
Actor Martin Donovan's directorial debut Collaborator is a subtle, desperately dry dark comedy with thriller elements, a surprising amount of insight, and entertainment borne out of trapping two unique characters in a room together and watching them talk.
This week, the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto starts off their Summer in France series, and we look at four classic films showing throughout the dog days: Belle du Jour, Elevator to the Gallows, Breathless, and Le quai des brumes.
We caught up with famed character actor turned first time feature director Martin Donovan about his filmmaking debut Collaborator, how his life and previous work led to this point, and why comedy never works unless you play it straight.
Pitched somewhere between a southern gothic, a fairly tale, and a hard luck life childhood, Beasts of the Southern Wild is an undeniably striking feature directorial debut from Benh Zeitlin. It’s a low budget, independent movie with the scope of an epic, nimbly weaving between acutely observed realism and wide-eyed child’s fantasy. Unfortunately, that combination of seemingly contradictory elements is both the film’s strength and shortcoming.
Although still nothing more than just another concert film collaboration between icons Neil Young and Jonathan Demme, it still works largely on the strengths of the talents involved.
In a busy week for little seen movies coming to DVD and Blu-ray, we take a look at Nicolas Cage in Seeking Justice, Willem Dafoe in The Hunter, director Morgan Spurlock's look at the San Diego Comic-Con, the offbeat comedy Jesus Henry Christ, Jon Voight in Beyond, and the aptly titled dark comedy Some Guy Who Kills People.
In this week's archival DVD column we look at some great re-releases including the 40th anniversary of Deliverance, a pair of Criterions featuring Spalding Gray from director Steven Soderbergh, Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, and some of the best no holds barred matches from the WWE.
While not one of the more disposable films in the Woody Allen cannon, the filmmaker's latest To Rome With Love only manages to be a mildly amusing mishmash of four separate, mediocre, half-baked stories instead of just one really good one.
From the opening seconds following the Universal logo to the tooth gratingly awful cover of The Beatles “Here Comes the Sun” that plays over the film’s all too late THE END title card, there isn’t a more ungainly, unfocused, idiotic, and overall unpleasant film thus far this year than Oliver Stone’s Savages.
In the documentary Unfinished Spaces directors Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray look at Cuba's unfinished and grand looking National Art Schools in a poignant way to depict the grey areas where politics, art, and commerce meet.
