The most bizarre story and astounding characters all happen to be true in the engrossing documentary The Imposter. Telling the story of Frederic Bourdin, a 23-year-old French drifter who in 1994 assumed the identity of a missing American teenager, filmmaker Bart Layton mixes unreliable interviews with misdirecting recreations in an attempt to understand why a […]
Jacob Boon
Posted inArts + Music
Chasing Mavericks
“We are all born from the sea,” Gerard Butler growls as a start to the pretentious myth-making of surfing biopic Chasing Mavericks. The film takes the real life story of surfing prodigy Jay Moriarty, who tamed the grammatically awkward super-wave Mavericks at just 16, and coats it all with so much moralistic spiritualism and family […]
Posted inArts + Music
Silent Hill: Revelation
A nightmarish hell-scape of twisted, groaning fake American accents awaits you in the film that people made and put money into called Silent Hill: Revelation. Answering all those dangling questions from the first Silent Hill (don’t worry, there’s plenty of recap!), this inevitable sequel finds dad Sean Bean and daughter Heather (Australian actress Adelaide Clemens) […]
Posted inArts + Music
Flight
Anyone already afraid of flying won’t be helped by the opening scenes of Flight, when disaster strikes mid-air and a harrowing crash soon follows. That anyone at all survives is attributed to the talents of veteran pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), but the hero worship turns to suspicion as questions about Whitaker’s sobriety begin popping […]
Posted inFood + Drink
Mixed media
Autumn: A season of changing leaves, crisp breezes and fuzzy sweaters. It’s also harvest time, which means a cornucopia of flavours has arrived in time to create some tantalizing seasonal cocktails. You can’t just drink pumpkin spice lattes and apple cider all month, so why not try one of these unique recipes from some of […]
Posted inArts + Music
Alex Cross
Tyler Perry is somehow supposed to stand in for Morgan Freeman in the catastrophic Alex Cross. Previously played by Freeman in Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider, Alex Cross is a Sherlockian detective on the hunt for a sadistic assassin obsessed with experiencing pain. That by-the-numbers case falls aside when the killer, ludicrously […]
Posted inArts + Music
Paranormal Activity 4
Ghosts continue to be a problem in Paranormal Activity 4. The latest film in the annual Halloween series continues the irrelevant story of an invisible demon taking possession of spooky children by slowly opening doors at night. This time the unlucky haunted are a Nevada teenager and her family who have some seriously weird neighbours. […]
Posted inArts + Music
Searching for Sugar Man
No one knew who Sixto Rodriguez was in America, but unknown to him, half a world away he was a legend. Folk musician Rodriguez released only two records in his hometown of Detroit during the early 1970s, neither of which sold very well. After that, he seemed to disappear. But his albums somehow made their […]
Posted inArts + Music
Samsara
A startling assemblage of images from across the globe flicker by in the non-narrative documentary Samsara. Director Ron Fricke and producer Mark Magidson, who made the similar film Baraka, filmed in 25 countries over a period of four years and the end result is a time capsule to humanity’s beauty, power, ugliness and grace. Audiences […]
Posted inArts + Music
Winnie
One of the most complex, noteworthy women of the Twentieth Century gets a biopic unfitting of a made-for-TV movie in the disastrous Winnie. Purporting to examine the life and times of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (Jennifer Hudson), the scattered film instead flits from scene to scene with little purpose. Winnie grows up a tomboy in a small […]
Posted inArts + Music
Here Comes the Boom
Ultimate fighting isn’t the obvious choice to save a school’s arts program, but Here Comes the Boom doesn’t let its head (or fists) get in the way of its heart. A lunkheaded biology teacher at an underfunded elementary, star Kevin James struggles to find a way to raise $50,000 after budget cuts threaten the music […]
Posted inArts + Music
Seven Psychopaths
Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who made his feature film debut with the excellent In Bruges, shifts focus to the sunny, meta-textual hills of Hollywood with the fiendish Seven Psychopaths. A neurotic Colin Farrell plays a screenwriter named Martin, attempting to finish a script for which he only has a title (“Seven Psychopaths”). Figuring it out […]