Clowns get serious in the crime drama True Story, starring Jonah Hill as an arrogant reporter undone by a plagiarism scandal and James Franco as the accused murderer who was using his identity while on the lam. Arriving with little fanfare (it premiered at Sundance), make no mistake that this is yet another vanity project […]
Tara Thorne
Posted inArts + Music
Review: Furious 7
It’s always amusing when people—men (boys)—come out swinging before a movie’s even released about how you shouldn’t make fun of it just because it’s the sixth sequel to something dumb, like do you hate fun and driving and The Rock like a monster or what? Had star Paul Walker not died in a high-speed car […]
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Review: Insurgent
The only Hunger Games ripoff that’s managed to stick so far—See you in hell, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones! Didn’t care even a little bit, The Maze Runner!—Insurgent, part two of the awkwardly billed The Divergent Series, finds Tris (Shailene Woodley) and Four (Theo James) in exile with complete dodos Caleb (Ansel Elgort) and […]
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Review: Cast No Shadow
Between the isolation, landscape and accents there’s something distinctive about films made in Newfoundland, a combination that folds too easily and accordingly into the “regional” box Telefilm wants to shove movies from these parts into, while giving off that UK vibe movies from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick don’t. The most successful Newfoundland films lean […]
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Review: The Gunman
“From the director of Taken” should be your first warning about The Gunman’s deal, in case known woman-beater and all-around dour human Sean Penn weren’t enough on his own. He gets a script credit—one assumes his contribution involved his constant, unncessary, Adam Levine-like shirtlessness—in this story about double-crossing secret agents working for a mining company […]
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Happiness is
Lexie Ivy is 30, a small-town business owner, fashionable and eccentric, funny and smart. She’s also the single, overweight one of a trio of sisters, a redheaded sheep sticking way out amongst a family of fantasy blondes. “Flawed yet lovable” is how director and co-writer Deanne Foley describes the protagonist of her second feature, Relative […]
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Review: The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
All your favourites are back in the year’s first tentpole sequel! In the two-hour cross-canon thrill ride The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, you’ve got Iron Man chilling with Shredder at the club, Wonder Woman going #yolo with Catwoman (sexual tension: not invisible) in the country, and Thor putting his hammer to good use rebuilding […]
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Review: Focus
Will Smith gives a big speech about “focus” that feels like they tacked it on after renaming the movie then never mentions it again in Focus, the story of a suspiciously well-off con man and his intern (Margot Robbie, last seen saddled with even worse material in The Wolf of Wall Street, born the same […]
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Christina Martin’s alright, alright, alright
“I’d known for awhile I’d wanted to make a change,” says Christina Martin. “I felt stuck. I guess I was just bored.” With four records of sharp, heartfelt folk behind her, Martin is aiming for a different vibe on It’ll Be Alright—literally, a vibe, a keys-and-licks classic rock groove permeating the 10 tracks produced at […]
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Review: Still Alice
You are unlikely to find a finer-featured, fairer face at the movies than that of Julianne Moore’s, or one with as much empathy and intelligence behind its freckles—so ably, Linneyian warm one moment and fiercely terrifying the next (that was her screaming “You suck my dick!” at a pharmacist in Magnolia). In Still Alice, she […]
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Review: A Most Violent Year
In the somewhat erroneously named A Most Violent Year—it’s actually one month at the end of said year, which is 1981—Oscar Isaac is Abel Morales, who owns a modest but expanding fuel operation in New York City. Married to a gangster’s daughter (2014 MVP Jessica Chastain, all ice blonde and hard Rs), it’s important to […]
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Birdman
Michael Keaton and Edward Norton nearly throw their eyes out with the self-referential winking they’re doing in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), Alejandro González Iñárritu’s thrilling, dazzling, magic-realist take on artistic intention. Ex-Batman Keaton is Riggan Thomas, a former franchise action hero who is trying to regain credibility by adapting (and directing, and […]