An account of the 1968 strike by female workers at a Ford plant that led to Britain’s passage of equal pay legislation, Made In Dagenham rarely strays from the “inspirational story” playbook. It’s got a plucky heroine (Sally Hawkins) spearheading an unimpeachably just cause—in this case, wages based on work rather than gender—against some irredeemably […]
Matt Semansky
Posted inArts + Music
How Do You Know is so-so
James L. Brooks has a knack for crafting lines of dialogue that are simultaneously funny and touching, the kind that make you wish you could distill your own thoughts so economically. Reese Witherspoon plays a softball star who, reeling after getting cut from the US Olympic team, takes up with Owen Wilson’s dimwitted major leaguer. […]
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Town without TV
In the digital world, the usual laws of time—or, at least, deadlines for comedy series—don’t apply. While most television shows advertise the exact date and time of their debut episode weeks in advance, the same cannot be said for Moderation Town, a locally shot web series that launches tonight at showcase.ca. Or maybe tomorrow. Well, […]
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Faith, Fraud & Minimum Wage is at the crossroads
Josh MacDonald’s play Halo takes a bumpy road to the screen in this micro-budget local feature. Casey (Martha MacIsaac) is a sarcastic teenaged doughnut shop employee who manipulates a coffee spill into a likeness of Christ, an image that the true believers in her small Nova Scotia town come to worship. Casey’s flabbergasted by their […]
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A TKO for The Fighter
David O. Russell’s boxing-and-family drama transcends the usual uplifting sports movie conventions while also deploying them to great effectiveness. The Fighter is the story of real-life pugilist Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), who’s weighed down by a crackhead brother (Christian Bale) and a meddling manager-mother (Melissa Leo). Once they’re out of his way and a local […]
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The Tourist : all beauty, no brains
When in full-out glam mode, Angelina Jolie tends to overwhelm her male co-stars with her sheer Angelina-ness. The Tourist sets Jolie, her taut face and inflated lips giving her the appearance of an absurdly beautiful Team Americaa puppet, opposite Johnny Depp, her superior as an actor and her equal in charisma. But this great match […]
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Gotta have Faith
It’s been a busy year for Halifax screenwriter and playwright Josh MacDonald, with two of his projects, The Corridor and Faith, Fraud and Minimum Wage, screening at the Atlantic Film Festival in September. As he nursed the movies through the long, challenging years of the development process, MacDonald dreamed of the day the finished products […]
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Sex sells Love and Other Drugs
There are lots of different movies swimming around inside the latest cinematic offering from director Edward Zwick (Glory, thirtysomething). Love and Other Drugs is part disease drama, part commentary on the greed of Big Pharma, part Apatowian dick-joke comedy and part sex-charged romance. This last element is the only one that really works, but it’s […]
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Faster isn’t always better
Dwayne Johnson may have finally dropped his old wrestling nickname, but the slab of muscle formerly known as The Rock still performs like he’s in the squared circle. He’s all glowering eyes and bulging biceps as a man who finishes a 10-year prison bid and instantly sets about gunning down the scuzzbuckets who killed his […]
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Fair Game gets political
Fair Game doesn’t require much more than the plain facts to be an effective political drama. The real-life story played out a few years ago, after Bush administration officials outed undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame in retaliation for an op-ed written by her husband denouncing the government’s bogus Iraq WMD evidence. Plamegate and its aftermath […]
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The plot darkens for Harry Potter
The heroes of Hogwarts are all grown up in the penultimate installment of the wizard series. A good thing, too, since Dumbledore’s dead, Voldemort’s on a terror spree and Harry, Ron and Hermione are on the run in the countryside. This is the first of the Potter movies not to use the school year as […]
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Disney unravels Tangled
Though it doesn’t belong in Disney’s canon of classics, this animated update of the Rapunzel fairytale does offer better-than-average family entertainment. Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) has been locked up in a tower for 18 years by a vain old woman who uses the girl’s long blonde mane for its magical anti-aging properties. When cocky thief Flynn […]