Michael Bay proves himself as disastrous with “small pictures” as he is with blockbusters in Pain & Gain—the beach bod true crime flick that’s oozing with machismo. Based on the Sun Gym gang Miami murders, P&G finds a pumped up Mark Wahlberg as a dimwitted personal trainer who “believes in fitness.” To get out of […]
Jacob Boon
Posted inArts + Music
The Colony
A sci-fi movie of the week somehow ends up at your local cinema in the embarrassing Canadian horror film, The Colony. In a future where artificial weather has blocked out the sun, blanketing the planet in constant snowfall, a small group of survivors huddle together in an isolated bunker. Once a neighbouring colony goes radio […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Big Wedding
One of the more cognitively dissonant films in theatres, The Big Wedding is an astounding train wreck of a romantic comedy. When their adopted son’s biological mother comes from Columbia for her child’s wedding, divorced parents Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton must pretend to still be married lest they offend the Roman Catholic’s strict […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Disappeared
It’s tempting to call The Disappeared a mixture of The Perfect Storm and survival-horror one-note Open Water. Doing so would give you a sense of how the unflinching film follows six fishermen adrift in the North Atlantic. But it would also be a disservice to the powerful and raw movie director Shandi Mitchell has made […]
Posted inArts + Music
Oblivion
Tom Cruise does his best WALL-E impression, cleaning up a ravaged Earth while dreaming about love, in the sci-fi blockbuster Oblivion. When aliens invaded 50 years ago, humanity went for a scorched earth approach and nuked their own planet. Now, the survivors live off-world, while engineer Jack Harper (Cruise) stays behind repairing drones and helping […]
Posted inArts + Music
Ginger & Rosa
Is there a movie where nuclear bombs aren’t a metaphor for personal crisis? Certainly not Ginger & Rosa, the overreaching little film by Sally Porter. Ginger (Elle Fanning) is a redheaded teenager raised by a sorrowful mom and a peace activist dad in 1962 London. As Ginger and her best friend Rosa protest the growing […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Place Beyond The Pines
Lives keep bouncing off each other, every choice threatening those left standing, in the staggering The Place Beyond The Pines. Ryan Gosling offers yet another brilliant performance, this time playing a shade of his character from Drive—a talented motorcyclist filled with violence who begins robbing banks to provide for the infant son he didn’t know […]
Posted inArts + Music
No
“It looks like a Coca-Cola commercial!” one socialist organizer says of the political ad Gael Garcia Bernal has come up with to topple Chilean dictator Augosto Pinochet. And why not? Coca-Cola sells. Based on a true story, No tells the tale of the 1988 referendum that gave the people of Chile a simple choice; vote […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Deepak Chopra’s radical shift
Why even bother with Earth Day? It’s been decades since the annual day of ecological awareness was conceived, and the condition of the globe has only seemed to worsen. Climate change is still debated as potentially mythical, the oceans border on collapse, fracking causes drinking water to catch on fire and political leaders remain unresponsive […]
Posted inArts + Music
Trance
Danny Boyle’s hypnosis heist caper, Trance, crams an overload of the director’s trademark flourishes into a belaboured screenplay until the entire enterprise falls apart. James McAvoy stars as an auctioneer who suffers from a bout of amnesia after crooks attempt to steal a priceless painting. Which is a problem, as the thieves would like to […]
Posted inArts + Music
Home Run
A substance abuse recovery and Christian-redemption film, Home Run is a yawn of a parable, barely made into a movie. Baseball hotshot Corey Brand is forced to spend his suspension for a DUI coaching a loveable team of misfit kids back in his sleepy hometown. Produced in partnership with both the National Fatherhood Institute and […]
Posted inArts + Music
Scary Movie 5
[IMAGE-1] A franchise continues in Scary Movie 5. The latest approximation of an actual movie that spoofs and goofs whatever’s lying around the house. This time around, Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen, Benny Hill, Paranormal Activity, Evil Dead, Mama, Snoop Dogg, The Cabin in the Woods, Morgan Freeman, Black Swan, Heather Locklear, Rise of the Planet […]