Carsten Knox

This is traditionally the time when, slavering over the prestige and box office returns that the Academy Awards season anoints upon its chosen, Hollywood studios drop the biggest and best of the year’s movies. Odds are, if there’s going to be a challenging mainstream film that will attract both the attention of the critics and […]

The Ice Harvest The combined talent of director Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day) and performers John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton is a lot to recommend and it got this sour pill made. Firmly ensconced in the Coen brothers’ world of Midwestern noir, sans the quirky characters, The Ice Harvest takes place on Christmas Eve in […]

Water Water is the third of Deepa Mehta’s elemental trilogy, following Fire from 1996 and Earth from ’98. Each film takes place further back in Indian history, exploring the places where tradition and culture crack under human desire. Water is set in the 1930s against the turmoil of India circa Gandhi, and the social changes […]

Somewhere deep in the low-rise sameness of the Burnside Industrial Park is a building no different from any anonymous business space. Except this one is filled with lights, cables, monitors, flimsy wooden-walled rooms and a group of children having the time of their lives. This is the interior set for Summerhood, a summer camp movie […]

It was on the second day of shooting the thriller The River King that the camera operator and an assistant went through the ice. The crew, set up near Meander River, had been assured the intense winter cold of 2004 had made the river safe to stand on. The director, Nick Willing, an Englishman, had […]

“Our lives have become very long,” says a man named Karma. He’s Tibetan, a dweller on the high plains some 15,000 feet above sea level, and he, with two of his cousins, has gone blind. Four percent of the Tibetan population over age 40 has cataracts due to high levels of ultraviolet radiation that prematurely […]

The festival is finished. For a little while, Halifax felt like a city unconditionally in love with the movies, whether a potential blockbuster starring Jennifer Lopez or an obscure international co-production no one on these shores is liable to ever see again. The Park Lane cinemas were clogged with line-ups as cinema-goers waited for the […]

Peter Gabriel hadn’t released a proper album of new material since Us in 1992. He’d staged the international Secret World tour, then for years, silence, broken only by a largely instrumental project in conjunction with the opening of the Millennium Dome in London. When he released Up in 2002 and launched the Growing Up tour, […]

Film is a naturally collaborative medium, and much of the best in music is as well. To bring filmmaking bigwigs and music honchos together is such a natural marriage, it’s sort of surprising no one thought of it before. This year’s Atlantic Film Festival dates, September 15 to 24, overlap with the Nova Scotia Music […]

If ever she once was, Lia Rinaldo is no longer bothered by a new film festival in Montreal. “It became quite clear that we were pursuing different things,” says Rinaldo, the Atlantic Film Festival’s director, of the new event that overlaps with AFF’s 25th anniversary. “So, we haven’t kept in regular contact, as one would […]