Consider first half of the title My Week With Marilyn when setting your expectations for the film. Far from an insightful biopic about an iconic star, it’s the (apparently true) story of a young man’s masturbatory fantasy come to life. That fantasy belongs to Colin (Eddie Redmayne), whose job as an assistant to acting legend […]
Matt Semansky
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Multiple joys of Martha Marcy May Marlene
Here be proof that the Olsen family gene pool contains both acting talent and the capacity to produce normal-sized humans. Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister of Mary Kate and Ashley, is a revelation as a young woman who escapes a creepy cult headed by a soft-spoken sexual predator (John Hawkes), only to find herself haunted by […]
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In Time a waste
Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, The Truman Show) brings another clever idea to the screen with a future-world where people’s bodies stop aging at 25 and time literally is money, but doesn’t execute well enough to make the most of it. Justin Timberlake plays a poor worker who’s given an extra century by a suicidal old dude […]
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Bollywood superhero movie Ra. One exhausts
Anubhav Sinha’s Ra. One links a video game-inspired storyline and liberal dollops of CGI to Bollywood storytelling staples such as high melodrama, raucous musical numbers and an ass-numbingly long running time. Game designer Shekhar (Shah Rukh Khan) impresses his son (Aman Verma) by creating an invincible virtual villain, but things get messy when the bad […]
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Afghan Luke dramatic, comic and thoughtful
Hometown hero Mike Clattenburg bursts out of the Trailer Park in a major way with this film about the tragedy, comedy and madness of war. Based on the work of freelance reporter Patrick Graham, who also co-wrote the script, Afghan Luke follows a battlefield journalist (Nick Stahl) who returns to Afghanistan in search of more […]
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Monsieur Lazhar is the best of the fest
The nonsensical embargo that my colleague Carsten Knox wrote about a few days back prevents me from effusing the way I’d like to about Monsieur Lazhar, which I was lucky enough to be able to see last night. From Canadian director Philippe Falardeau, it’s the story of an Algerian refugee claimant who takes over as […]
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Shandi Mitchell and The Disappeared.
“Damn that writer,” says Shandi Mitchell, laughing, days before she begins her maiden voyage as a feature film director. The Disappeared is a psychological drama about six fishers adrift in the North Atlantic after their boat goes down, a story that, Mitchell hopes, won’t end up as an allegory for the production itself. This is […]
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Charlie Zone is visceral, gritty and grimy
Having visited the set of Michael Melski’s dark drama Charlie Zone in April, I was eager to catch up with the completed film, which Melski pulled together just in time for the festival. In conversations with the director, he described the movie as a portrayal of the dark side of Halifax—the drug dens, the violence, […]
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Ingrid Veninger brings i am a good person/i am a bad person
When I read blurbs describing a movie as the product of “experimental filmmaking,” it tends to put me on high alert. I’m either going to see some out-of-left-field brilliance or, more often than not, some pretentious twaddle. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive, either—many times they appear in the same movie. As such, I went to […]
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Rejoice and Shout
A couple of years ago on a road trip through the American South, my fellow travelers and I had the good fortune to stumble onto the church where soul legend Al Green serves as a minister. Watching and listening to Green sing his praises to a higher power with his inimitable voice beat the hell […]
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Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy revisited with cast and director
Chatting with filmmakers after you’ve seen (and reviewed) their movies is always a curious experience, in that your perspective is always changed in at least some small way. If you read the print edition of this week’s Coast, you know how I felt about Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy, the Rob Heydon adaptation of the Trainspotting author’s […]
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Blood In The Mobile shows our complicity
With local director Michael Melski and busting balls to finish Charlie Zone, Melski’s drama-thriller set in Halifax’s seedier neighbourhoods, a planned Thursday morning screening of the film was scrapped. Disappointing, for sure. The good news is that Melski, whom I ran into Thursday afternoon, did finish Charlie Zone that morning and the movie was ready […]