Hillary Titley

Filmmaker Paolo Barzman had questions of memory—particularly what to do with or about horrific memories—on his mind for awhile before Matt Cohen’s novel Emotional Arithmetic found its way to him. “There is a big debate,” he says over the phone, “around the world but in Europe a lot, and in France, about what we call […]

A single rack in the inconspicuous part of a local video store holds the last vestiges of a dying era of home entertainment: the VHS tape. After reigning for over two decades as the chosen form of home movie watching and recording, the VHS format is taking its last gasps in some hold-out stores in […]

A scene in Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 fame-and-fortune fable set in the late ’70s/early ’80s porno film industry, features washed-out porno studs attempting to con a coked-up LA fat-cat; their adventure is hampered from the start by a combination of drugs and firearms. Anderson conjures up an impending sense of fiasco by including […]

By Lulu Keating’s own estimation, this is her 22nd turn at the Atlantic Film Festival. “I was making pretty well a film a year and the festival came along just as I was starting to make films,” says the director, “so I kept putting my films in and getting them in there.” Dawson Town Melted […]

When Christopher Spencer-Lowe noticed that Halifax’s experimental and avant garde filmmakers were escaping to bigger opportunities in larger cultural centres in Canada, he did something about it. Everyone leaving “generated the idea to have a celebration of the form in the hope it would generate some new interest in experimental filmmaking,” he says from his […]

At first, it seemed that the geeks were going to inherit the cinemas. But while Grindhouse, with its excessive homage to a cultish genre, did disappointing business in general, the experience proved to be Mecca for those seeking their fill of insider jokes and genre satire. Enter Hot Fuzz and its director Edgar Wright. Hot […]

Exactly how you sell a vague and open-ended film like A Year in the Death of Jack Richards is a question on the mind of filmmaker Benjamin Paquette. How do you get moviegoers to connect with, let alone see in the first place, a film that gives its clues away in fleeting visual flashes and […]

If the thought of Colin Farrell tying his stringy hair back into some goopy ponytail as narcotics cop Sonny Crockett in the new Miami Vice movie gets you down, remember for a second that Don Johnson originated the role in the 1984 TV series and did it sock-less, in white loafers. See if you don’t […]

Guy Pearce’s favourite scene in The Proposition, in which he stars, is when Emily Watson’s Martha realizes the deal her husband has made with the devil in order to, in his words, “civilize” the land. “I cry every time I see it,” he says. “One of the things I think the film is about is […]