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Revenge of the ’80s
Photo Illustration by Bradley Reinhardt Oliver Stone’s new movie, Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, will bring Gordon Gekko back to the big screen after more than two decades. This surely means that...
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A blockbuster with brains
Ellen Page sits nestled in the middle of a large couch in a Beverly Hills hotel room, her small frame almost lost among the pillows. She looks artfully casual in a blue linen shirt, scarf, jeans and...
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The end of channel surfing, thanks to Netflix
Paul Sakuma/AP For Canadians, the idea of watching television or movies over the Internet has not yet caught on in a big way. And that’s partly because there has so far been relatively little on the...
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Horrifically good movies
ILLUSTRATION BY BRADLEY REINHARDT In True Grit, the Coen brothers’ new remake of the classic 1969 John Wayne western, the heroine—a hard-headed 14-year-old girl on a mission to avenge her father’s...
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Dolly Parton’s Prairie love child
Mongrel Media Anyone looking for proof that Canadian cinema is a mongrel beast need look no further than The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom. The director of this eccentric first feature, Tara Johns,...
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Tire gets lead roll as serial killer
Mongrel Media Jean-Luc Godard famously said, “All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.” Now that we’ve seen Rubber, a film by a younger French provocateur, perhaps that should be amended to: “All...
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The Internet is a 99 cent store
The answer is 99 cents. The questions are many: What’s your debut novel worth? What are you willing to pay for a video game? How much does the best song ever cost? Also: how do you compete with free?...
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3D R.I.P.
The first (and last) thing that needs to be said about 3D movies themselves is that they aren’t. Three-dimensional, that is. A layer of schmutz floating around a few feet in front of your nose while a...
View ArticleHow porn parodies avoid copyright restrictions
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 marked an intriguing confluence of events. No, it’s not some sort of Mayan end-of-the-world situation, but it is the day on which Wikipedia, Google and a number of other big...
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Toronto and Vancouver: Hollywood can’t quite disguise them
Kerry Hayes/Vow Productions; Shutterstock; Photo Illustration By Levi Nicholson In a scene from The Vow, Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum park by the Chicago waterfront, strip down to their underwear,...
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Cheese, art and TV
A lot of ink was spilled (if bandwidth counts as ink) over Ryan McGee’s post “Did The Sopranos Do More Harm Than Good?”, where he raises the question of whether heavily-serialized, “novelistic” TV has...
View Article‘Brave’s’ lesbian princess?
Entertainment Weekly’s Adam Markovitz is under fire for suggesting that the arrow-wielding, suitor-denying princess in Disney-Pixar’s latest animated feature, Brave, might be gay. Because princess...
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With fast cuts and gimmicks, Tony Scott helped redefine action films
Director Tony Scott at the premiere of "Unstoppable," in October 2010. (MARK RALSTON/ AFP PHOTO) Tony Scott, the director, committed suicide after learning that he had inoperable cancer. Update: The...
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A dim view of movie texting
In an age of constant communication, the movie theatre is one of few places where using your cellphone, with its bright glowing screen, is still a social faux pas. A new app for Android phones,...
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Steven Soderbergh—Hollywood’s most successful misfit
Barry Wetcher/eOne Films Steven Soderbergh swears he’s getting out of the business. After he completes his Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra—which features a scene of Michael Douglas as Liberace...
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Escaping with Greeks vs. Google geeks: This week at the movies
Owen Wilson (left) and Vince Vaughn in 'The Internship' / courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Movies can be a form of tourism, and this week offers a choice of touring the Google campus for a game of...
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Buttering up the politics of popcorn flicks
MPC/Paramount Pictures The best summer-movie moment for a political columnist came during World War Z. Brad Pitt’s resourceful United Nations analyst, stymied in South Korea as he searches for a cure...
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Divergent: is it the next dystopian hit?
Shailene Woodley and Theo James star in DivergentCourtesy of eOne Films / Photo Credit: Jaap Buitendijk One of the best ways these days to make money is to write teen dystopian fiction—ideally a...
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Was Winnipeg right about Phantom of the Paradise all along?
20th Century Fox/Everett Collection It’s tricky to predict the patterns shaping a movie’s cult success. A few hardened horror fans import a Japanese flick about a haunted video tape and, next thing you...
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Marvel Studios Announces the Future of Movies and the World
Marvel Studios, best known for making your kids know who Iron Man is and turning a raccoon and a tree into movie stars, called a special “secret” press conference today, which turned out to be an...
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In debt to Dumb and Dumber
Universal Pictures Of all the films of 1994, the one whose 20th anniversary is being celebrated with the most fanfare this year may not be Forrest Gump, or The Lion King, but a comedy about two idiots...
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I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley
Paramount/Everett Collection When critics list the most influential films in history, Gone with the Wind soars, Battleship Potemkin rides high, and Airplane! flies under the radar. But, as the densely...
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Why the movie world now belongs to Disney
Jasin Boland/Warner Bros. Entertainment This will be a year of expensive fantasy movies, comic book franchises, and adaptations of proven properties. So pretty much like every year. But watch out for...
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‘Spy': Can this deliciously funny film overcome its marketing?
Melissa McCarthy faces off against a knife-wielding adversary (Nargis Fakhri). Larry Horricks/EPKTV I remember the scene when I realized that Spy was going to be a deliciously funny film. Susan Cooper...
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‘A Royal Night Out': An old-fashioned comedy of errors
01836-Girls Night Out (Nick Wall/eOne) When the trailer for the latest film about the Windsor clan hit the Internet last February, it looked like another royal movie horror show. There have been plenty...
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Star Wars and the silent majority
Star Wars: The Force Awakens.. Han Solo (Harrison Ford)..Ph: Film Frame..?Lucasfilm 2015 So rumour has it there’s this movie coming out this week… about a war? Or possibly more than one? Anyway, the...
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Fantastic Beasts review: the good, the bad and the beastly
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. (Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc/Ratpac-Dune Entertainment LLC) The film adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is...
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What if Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War flops?
(Photo illustration by Lauren Cattermole and Hesmat Saberi) Even by the standards of the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which gun-toting racoons mingle with mystical surgeon-wizards and...
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Netflix in April: A list of what to watch
(Photo: Netflix Canada) Happy official start of spring, y’all! We thought this day would never come but it’s here, and along with chocolate mini eggs at Shoppers and the first signs of green popping up...
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Sex scenes go granular in the age of #MeToo
What Salvatore Antonio remembers from filming his first intimate scene was breaking out in cold sweats. “It was a nightmare in terms of humiliation,” says the Toronto actor of filming a...
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James Bond’s fantasy-driven history with Jamaica
This story was originally published in print in February 2020. During a trip to Jamaica when I was 11, my father took me to lunch one day with my aunts and uncles. As often happens when two or more...
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Netflix Canada in November 2021: What’s new this month
Here are four things that I’m going to be watching on Netflix this month (click or tap on the title to take you to the description below). You can also look out for the emojis. The Harder They Fall Red...
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Eight blockbuster movie sequels coming out in 2022
(Illustration by Dominic Bugatto) Big blockbuster productions have been endangered by the rise of streaming and the pandemic, so Hollywood isn’t taking chances on anything new. From Disney hits to...
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How one Newfoundlander revived Blockbuster in his basement
Corey Lynch has built a blue-and-yellow time machine in his St. John’s basement. It’s a portal to his own past, and maybe yours, too. Welcome to Megahit Video—the alternative universe where it’s Friday...
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Netflix Canada in January 2022: What’s new this month
Here are four things that I’m going to be watching on Netflix this month (click or tap on the title to take you to the description below). You can also look out for the emojis. Rebelde Archive 81...
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Heather O’Neill on Sarah Polley
I grew up in Montreal in the ’80s, without cable TV. My dad and I did everything we could to occasionally pick up the PBS channel from Vermont. This involved a small Brechtian production. We put piles...
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‘Framing Agnes’ re-enacts the real lives of trans people in the 1950s
The film Framing Agnes, a Sundance award winner that screened at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival this month, features a cast of trans actors who take real case files from a 1958 UCLA sociology study and...
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Simu Liu shares his acting origin story
Whether hitting the red carpet for the premiere of Brad Pitt’s Bullet Train, licking a frozen maggot to life on Running Wild With Bear Grylls, or teasing fans with hints about Shang-Chi’s future in the...
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Canadian YouTuber Madison Tevlin is starring opposite Woody Harrelson. Here’s...
Madison Tevlin stars in the new film ‘Champions’ (Photo courtesy Tevlin) You may remember Madison Tevlin as the 13-year-old from Toronto who went viral with her heartfelt rendition of John Legend’s...
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Q&A: BlackBerry’s Jay Baruchel loves movies, weed and his now-obsolete phone
(Photography by Erin Leydon) Jay Baruchel is everywhere: in slashers, sex farces and sports movies; opposite mythical lizards in Disney’s How to Train Your Dragon franchise; and he’s worked with...
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