It’s common to hear bad movies referred to as car accidents. Because I Said So is an airship disaster. There’s not a scene in it that isn’t awful. Diane Keaton is Daphne, the single mother of three adult daughters who approaches delirium when her youngest, Milly (Mandy Moore), can’t find a steady boyfriend. And so […]
Arts & Culture
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A love apart
Consider Canadian filmmaker Vic Sarin’s latest film, Partition, to be a labour of love. Sarin, who was born in Kashmir, sets his film against the tumultuous backdrop of the 1947 division of India and Pakistan. The film focuses on a classic Romeo and Juliet story of forbidden love between a Sikh man, Gian, and a […]
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Depraved in Utah
Two of my biggest pet peeves are a sense of entitlement and casual rudeness, so it really doesn’t make much sense that I make a habit of spending part of January at the Sundance Film Festival. Yet here I am, back in Park City, Utah, for the fourth time in the last five years. The […]
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Maze craze
“I think monster movies are fantastic parables about the human condition,” Pan’s Labyrinth writer and director Guillermo del Toro explains. It’s the subject matter with which he’s built his name. “This is the kind of movie I want to do all my life. I’d love to be pigeonholed. People say, ‘Oh, this is just a […]
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The Hitcher
For anyone sick of Oscar season (when last year’s movies finally hit smaller cities hoping to garner widespread attention pre-awards ceremony), the competing first-wave January releases can be a relief. They’re the movies Hollywood doesn’t have a lot of faith in, or money behind—teen-skewed genre films that can risk idiosyncrasy because they’re neither expected to […]
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Dream weaver
On January 15 the Golden Globes shone a spotlight on the very-likely contenders for this year’s Academy Awards. But the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the small group of mostly European journalists who vote on the Globes—yes, it’s weird—is a very different organization from the Academy: A collection of actors, producers and other industry grande fromage. […]
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Oscars results
You watched the awards show, now see how Coast voting compares with the Academy.
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Stomp the Yard
The popularity of the youth dance film Stomp the Yard (the top film in North America) is a feat many reviewers and editors would rather ignore. Although it was screened for the regular critic markets, following the film’s first weekend Rotten Tomatoes counted only half as many reviews written for Stomp the Yard compared with […]
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Do make say think
Children of Men is a movie about hope. About what might happen if we don’t have any, and what humanity might do to find it again. It posits a world 20 years hence, where women have ceased to reproduce, a place where industry runs free of environmental restraint, where fascist western governments detain foreigners in […]
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The Curse of the Golden Flower
The Curse of the Golden Flower has at its centre a familiar idea: Beneath the face of esteemed social roles lies deceit and torment. Director Zhang Yimou illustrates this premise on a breathtaking canvas. Like many great filmmakers, Yimou (continuing with the period Hong Kong epics of his Hero and House of Flying Daggers) begins […]
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Dreamgirls
Seeing through “buzz” (the promotional hype that constitutes most movie-writing) is a necessary aim of criticism. But lapdogs don’t want good movies. They want Dreamgirls. Bill Condon’s adaptation of the Broadway musical, based loosely on the career of The Supremes, distorts the legacy and major cultural impact of black music. It looks and plays like […]
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The next act?
The Canadian film industry is holding its collective breath this week as representatives of the Canadian actors’ union and movie producers return to the bargaining table for a last shot at creating a new labour agreement and averting an industry-wide strike that could take place at midnight on Monday, January 8. On Wednesday, January 3, […]