Meryl Streep

The Giver Review

Both slavishly faithful to and thematically distant from Lois Lowry's almost seminal early 90s young adult bestseller, The Giver stands as proof that not every iconic text can work as a coherent film.

CONTEST: See THE GIVER in Select Cities!

Enter for a chance to win a pair of passes to an advance screening of The Giver in Toronto, Ottawa, Halifax, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Victoria, or Vancouver on Wednesday, August 13th at 7:00pm, courtesy of Dork Shelf and eOne Films!

August: Osage County Review

Although it could use a more accomplished director at the helm, August: Osage County is a gleefully misanthropic, exceptionally acted dark family comedy from the same crazy writer who brought you Killer Joe and Bug.

TIFF 2013: August: Osage County Review

August: Osage County Gala Director: John Wells Combing a collection of superstars slumming for awards, a TV director, and single location family dinner setting, August: Osage County sounds like easy awards bait worth dreading. That is unless you recognize the writer: Tracy Letts. He’s the man whose twisted imagination spun Bug and Killer Joe and […]

Hot Docs 2012 Reviews: Part 3

Hot Docs 2012 Preview Day 3 and the hits just keep on coming with looks at China Heavyweight, In the Year of Hip Hop, Brooklyn Castle, The Frog Princes, Finding North, Radioman, Low and Clear, and The Betrayal.

The Nic Cage Project: Adaptation

To celebrate TIFF’s ongoing Bangkok Dangerous: The Cinema Of Nicolas Cage series, Alan Jones has resurrected his retrospective of the actor’s work entitled The Nic Cage Project. In this edition, Jones takes a look at Charlie and Donald Kaufman's brilliantly contrived Adaptation – playing tonight at the Lightbox.

The Iron Lady Review

Sometimes a movie that deserves a spot on a critic’s ten worst films list ends up being excluded because of a technicality. The beetle-headed Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady should almost dead to rights be quite high up on the list of 2011's cinematic atrocities, but thanks to limited Oscar qualifying runs in New York and Los Angeles at the end of the year I felt it wrong to talk about the film in too much depth before its proper wide release. It wasn’t embargoed at all, but I felt it was still too early. That time for charity is over. This movie’s an outright trainwreck with a central performance that isn’t half as good as the work that Meryl Streep has shown in the past.