Legend delivers exactly what it promises: a glitzy gangster flick starring Tom Hardy opposite Tom Hardy (doppelgangland!). Director Brian Helgeland lays everything on with a trowel, but subtlety isn’t why we’re here. The flash, the violence, and Tom Hardy’s twin performances make Legend a fun ride. Tom Hardy plays both of the Kray twins, the gangster […]
TIFF15: Jack manages to be a boring serial-killer movie
It should be difficult to make Jack Unterweger’s story dull: Austrian prostitute-murderer turned prison poet, he became a literary cause-celèbre. He achieved early release from prison in 1990, only to kill himself four years later after being convicted of nine subsequent murders. Yet Elisabeth Scharang’s Jack manages to make a clock-watcher out of this dramatic material […]
TIFF15: How Heavy This Hammer explores masculinity in crisis ****
Mary Angela Rowe reviews one of the best films of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival from Canadian director Kazik Radwanski. To discover more great Canadian Cinema, take the Canadian Cinema Challenge and get a copy of our ebook on Canadian film, The 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook here.
Ville-Marie is gorgeously dispassionate ***1/2
Guy Édoin’s Ville-Marie is a visually striking film with a curiously dispassionate core. The film, co-written by Édoin, tells the stories of four individuals whose lives intersect one night at Ville-Marie Hospital in Montreal. A European actress (Monica Belucci) is filming in Montreal to reconnect with her son (Aliocha Schneider), who is trying to finally learn […]
Pericles, Prince and Tiresome at Stratford
Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre (rebranded by the Stratford Festival as The Adventures of Pericles) is less a play and more a series of scenes strung together. It opens with incest and runs through murder, resurrection, and the threat of sexual slavery before a visitation from the goddess Diana. Remarkably, director Scott Wentworth manages to impose unity on this unruly text by highlighting the theme of feminine virtue that runs through the play.