I really enjoy me a loose ensemble drama-comedy—they mostly come in teen-type films like Empire Records, Can’t Hardly Wait or American Pie, just a lot of promising actors pairing off in interesting combos with low stakes. I enjoy that. Ten Year follows a decent group of 28-year-olds hitting their 10-year high school reunion. It’s a […]
Tara Thorne
Posted inArts + Music
A life-changer
Imagine making a movie that got some wrongfully convicted people out of prison, but not in enough time to fix the movie? That’s what happened to Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, whose Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory was finished on August 15. Four days later, the three men they’ve been following for nearly twenty years who’d […]
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Greta Gerwig + Jennifer Westfeldt FTW
Whit Stillman hasn’t made a movie since 1998—The Last Days of Disco with Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny—which I was able to see at Empire Bedford, that’s how long ago. He’s back now with Damsels in Distress, a quirky, mannered comedy about a quartet of girls (led by Greta Gerwig, The Future of American Acting […]
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Binoche!
I’ve always appreciated Todd Solondz—I wouldn’t call myself a fan, exactly, because even I don’t hate people that much—but for a guy who riles up such rage, what he’s doing is always interesting, nothing more so than Palindromes, in which eight different actors, including a dude and Jennifer Jason Leigh, played the lead character. Dark […]
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That time I thought it was Ryan Gosling but it was Brian Austin Green
Always nice to start your festival with a clusterfuck—Alexander Payne’s much-anticipated George Clooney-starring Oscar bait The Descendants came at a very early-seeming 9am, until it didn’t start until 10am, meaning over 500 people, many with entitlement issues, were furiously Tweeting their outrage and, in the case of the British man next to me, calling his […]
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Young blood
The whole family tells a version of the same story. She was either six or seven, her Dad thinks; they sent her to her room “for something” her mother doesn’t remember; from outside her door they listened to her sing a song about being sad that she doesn’t know the precise lyrics to. But the […]
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Osheaga Days 2+3
My singular reason for attending day two was Bright Eyes. Who I have somehow missed live in my love affair with Saddle Creek and Barsuk bands. After saying whatup to my girl Kinley Dowling of Hey Rosetta, who were busking for War Child after an early mainstage slot, I waded into the crowd for Conor […]
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Osheaga Day 1
Montreal’s Osheaga festival rivals any Bonnaroo or Coachella lineup, but since it comes after those, it has yet to gain their traction on a wider scale, which is crazy to me, since it takes all of four minutes on the train to get from the festival site to downtown. Anyway, I arrived with what turned […]
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Arcade Fire burning
Arcade Fire is a band like any other band. Except: Arcade Fire make a fine living, because they self-record and own their studios and their masters and two of their three records have been insanely successful by indie-rock standards. Your band and all the people in it are broke. Arcade Fire know Bruce Springsteen and […]
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The Other Woman
After two years on the shelf, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits was renamed The Other Woman and fobbed into theatres (elsewhere) to capitalize on Natalie Portman’s Oscar win. Though more emotionally complex than Portman’s other spring releases, Your Highness and Thor, The Other Woman has no more reason to exist than either of those. A […]
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Inside Cambridge
I was studying the wrong discipline —I should’ve been studying architecture, not theology,” says John Devlin, standing before eight framed collages in Eyelevel Gallery, where he’s part of the group show Outside Inside. In 1979, he moved to England to study theology at Cambridge University— after completing a bachelor of environmental design studies at Dalhousie, […]
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Fran Leibowitz: Public Speaking
Fran Leibowitz is one of those New Yorkers who got there at the right time, met the right people and stayed in the right circles. Last year she sat down for an interview with Martin Scorsese— pure stuntcasting, anybody could’ve directed this thing, especially with Ellen Kuras shooting it—and the result is Public Speaking. Intercut […]
