When I was a kid Young Sherlock Holmes was one of my favourite movies (it still is). The young detective cut his teeth not on finding the family jewels, but on cults and devil worshippers. I have a feeling the screenwriters of the new Sherlock Holmes may have been as well. Which is not a […]
What makes a film (or any work of art for that matter) memorable for years after it first appears? What are the films that we go back to again and again? The ones with the amazing special effects? The big stars? Or the ones with the great stories that still resonate? James Cameron makes blockbuster […]
I was asked to pick just one top film of the past decade. Such a task is impossible. Even choosing just ten was a monumental task, and lord knows I am probably forgetting some movie (when you see as many as I do that happens a lot). So below is my list, in chronological order, […]
You may have heard of James Cameron’s new film, a little movie called Avatar . Cameron and others have hyped the film to no end, claiming that it will change cinema as we know it (and for $250 million, it had better!). Avatar features all the hallmarks we’ve come to expect from James Cameron: great […]
To slightly skew Marshall MacLuhan’s famous saying “the medium is the message”, I think it’s also fair to say that art should be designed for the medium for which it was intended. For example, a film like Where the Wild Things Are is meant to be seen on a big screen, where it is arguable […]
It seems that I slept through all those timely Halloween horror film recommendations last month. However, this double feature is just is applicable now as it was then, which is why I’m making these my Yanksgiving (what us Canadians call American Thanksgiving, or at least should start) family viewing picks. Because nothing says ‘Thank You’ […]
I met Breathless director Yang Ik-June over dim sum in Montreal when his film played at the Fantasia Film Festival. He seemed such a nice, quiet, unassuming young man. Who knew that behind the modest exterior lay a writer-director-actor who pulls no punches, literally and figuratively, with his first feature length film. I heard praise […]
This past Thursday night I was treated to a very special surprise: last minute tickets to an evening with Stephen King . I estimate that no one has written a larger portion of my lifetime’s reading than this man. And as an added bonus, he was interviewed by my favourite Canadian filmmaker, David Cronenberg . […]
To see Shelagh’s first batch of reviews from the 2009 Sitges Film Festival, including Splice , Amer , Cargo and TiMER be sure to click here . Probably the best night I had at Sitges was not at a film, but at a party (like all good festivals, the parties are great). This one was […]
Every day, new people are born into this world. There’s a good chance most of these people have parents, and there’s an even better chance that their parents watched at least one Star Wars trilogy while growing up. These new parents are faced with all kinds of important decisions during their children’s formative years, none […]
Last February when on holiday in Spain, I was fortunate enough to meet Mike Hostench, co-director of Sitges Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantà stic de Catalunya , the largest fantastic film festival of Europe and one of the largest and most important in the world. His enthusiasm convinced me to attend the festival last month. Believe […]
The folks over at How It Should Have Ended are best known for their hilarious animated alternate endings to popular films. They have finally tackled the cinematic abomination that was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen , showing the many different ways the film probably should have ended. [youtube width=”560″ height=”344″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEdZ-yjxHLI[/youtube] The HISHE team clearly has […]
Welcome to the first installment of what is sure to become the biggest thing on the ‘net since it stopped making those NIN-inspired up dial up noises. This will be an ongoing series of articles in which I recommend a film from the decade that gave me the love of the medium. The nineties were […]
Any new project by veteran filmmaker Sally Potter deserves attention. Any new film project which markets itself to mobile phones and the internet almost exclusively also demands attention. Put these two things together and you have Potter’s newest and most (at least technically) daring work to date. Rage is her new film set in the […]
Seeing as I’ve been in their presence for several years now, it’s still a surprise to me when I meet people who are not familiar with the phenomenon that is the hipster. Existing mainly within major metropolitan areas, they’re usually artsy, skinny jean wearing, indie-rock listening, vintage hunting, irony loving youths who, like so many […]
