Every city has a cinema where movies go to die. In San Francisco, Landmark’s Opera Plaza Cinemas takes that honour: with five tiny screens and sound so tinny your iPod earbuds would probably be an improvement, the cinema plays hosts to movies that have worn out their welcome at Landmark’s bigger screens or that were […]
Essays
Review: We Are The Best! is a winning and funny film about gutsy, punk-loving teenage girls
We Are The Best!, the uproariously funny and buoyant new film from Swedish auteur Lukas Moodysson, follows a trio of teenage girls who form a punk rock band.
Review of The Grand Seduction: The scheme may be grand but the comedy isn’t
Despite boasting a cast of the who’s who in English Canadian cinema — from Gordon Pinsent to Mark Critch to Taylor Kitsch — Don McKellar’s English adaptation of the lovely 2003 Québécois film La Grande Séduction is rather lacklustre. Considering most Canadians have no qualms about reading subtitles, it’s a bit of a mystery why this […]
Reviews: The Rover and El Ardor — On the fringes of society, you have to kill to survive
Two wonderfully atmospheric films screening Out of Competition at Cannes this year, The Rover from Australia and El Ardor from Argentina, take a look at the savagery that happens on the fringes of society.
Cannes Review: Argentina’s Wild Tales is inventive, funny, but uneven
After this review of Wild Tales, read our coverage of the Cannes film festival. Argentinian Director Damian Szifron’s Wild Tales, an uneven series of short, darkly comedic films, slyly woos you in with a perfect, taut beginning: an uproariously funny tale of a strange coincidental encounter. A model gets on a plane and finds herself sitting […]
Cannes Review: The Captive is captivatingly tense but shallow
The best thing about The Captive, Atom Egoyan’s entry in this year’s Official Competition at Cannes, is the way it doles out information slowly. Egoyan frames each shot so precisely so that we’re always aware of what we’re not seeing, creating suspense as things are revealed. We open on an icy, tall man, Mika (Kevin […]