A night of flirting and drinking leads up to House of Darkness’ initial scene, featuring a coy couple exchanging smiles as Hap (Justin Long) anticipates more canoodling with Mina (Kate Bosworth) at her place. She invites him in and, immediately, he can’t believe her house which resembles a castle-style mansion. For some reason, he shrugs off the peculiar detail that it’s lit by several candlesticks and that Mina is dressed for a long-ago period, but…
While far from perfect, director Harry Wootliff’s (Only You) drama True Things is an excellent showcase for actor Ruth Wilson, as well as a challenging portrait of a woman caught between societal expectations and her own desire.
Representing Canada in the competition to be selected for the Best International Feature Film category is Jason Loftus’ semi-animated doc Eternal Spring, and I’m honoured to have such a strong movie in our corner. But while we wait for confirmation that the movie made the cut, audiences can check out this Hot Docs award-winning masterpiece during its current, exclusive theatrical run – I urge you to seek it out and see it on the biggest…
Clerks III features writer/director Kevin Smith “returning to the well” to follow up with everyone’s favourite perturbed convenience store employees, Dante and Randal.
Triangle of Sadness pitches itself as a sophisticated comedy with “biting” satire about elitist attitudes during class wars. However, the jabs made by writer/director Ruben Östlund are nothing more than the filmmaker taking hackneyed swings at low-hanging fruit for a really, really long time.
Brett Morgen is a brilliant documentarian as seen in The Kid Stays in the Picture, Jane, and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck – the last flick mentioned being, what I believe, is one of the best movies ever made about a musician. His latest endeavour Moonage Daydream, a documentary about enigmatic artist David Bowie, is cut from the same cloth as Montage of Heck with the movie resembling a mixture of mediums but, this time,…
Set in the theatre district of London’s West End in 1953, a production of Agatha Christie’s whodunit The Mousetrap seems to be cursed after the body of flagrant director Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody) turns up dead after the show. The jaded Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and rookie investigator Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) are assigned to the case, and it seems as if everyone’s a suspect: the actors, the crew, the waiting staff and, to Stalker’s…
Environmental lawyer Aurora (Noëlle Schönwald) has sought out refuge in Canada after her husband is mysteriously killed. She flees across the border from Columbia and then, after some additional information is explained about Aurora’s backstory, the film fast-forwards to the refugee’s contemporary lifestyle in Toronto. Despite finding new roots and separating herself from the past, recent sightings of her late husband around the city have Aurora second-guessing her identity.
Anthony Michael Hall (also serving as a producer) stars as an embittered school administrator in writer/director Nicholas Celozzi’s The Class, an update of the 1985 classic The Breakfast Club (in which Hall played the nerdy Brian Johnson). Sadly, The Class never manages to grow beyond the shadow of its famous predecessor.
