The best moments of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe come early. But even once they’ve passed, this adaptation of CS Lewis’s children’s classic has a surprisingly humble charm. When Lucy (Georgie Henley), the youngest of four children evacuated from home during a WWII air raid, discovers a land inside […]
Arts & Culture
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A handmade tale
Darryl Besch’s Cool cars and motorcycles were part of Darryl Besch’s childhood, but they weren’t the wee Hot Wheels you raced across the kitchen floor. “My Dad does custom bike and car paint and one of his things is flames, so I grew up around ,” Besch offers, adding he takes inspiration from comics and […]
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Aeon Flux
The visual excitement of Peter Chung’s MTV series Aeon Flux is lost in transition from animation to live action. Weird pop art becomes routine. There’s a sincere effort to recreate a cartoon look. Director Karyn Kusama (returning five years after her festival hit Girlfight) imbues horizontal line structures through the designs of Earth’s last city […]
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Forum moment
Last December, OneLight Theatre hosted a day-long discussion about the state of Canadian theatre in The Crib, its intimate space on Gottingen Street. The response was so overwhelming that this year’s forum has expanded into the Dalhousie Arts Centre for an entire weekend of disussion, philosophies and performances. Beginning on December 10, the event will […]
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Back to the auteur
Bruce McDonald is Canadian cinema’s enfant terrible. The Kingston, Ontario-born director emerged from the outlaw auteur movement created when Telefilm came into being in the mid-’80s , along with Patricia Rozema and Atom Egoyan. They shared the new face of Canadian cinema; movies for us, about us and made by creative people here who needn’t […]
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Nightfall
AT 6:00 P.M. , Harvey Jones, the editor of the Daily Echo, stood in the shadow of a row of stone buildings at the end of the Pickford & Black Wharf. He was waiting for the same tug that had dropped Hayes off at the Imo earlier that morning. Pickford & Black were the agents […]
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Nightfall
AT 9:00 P.M. , LIEUTENANT Colonel Frederick McKelvey Bell, assistant director of medical services (ADMS) for the Canadian military, dictated a confident telegram to St. John telling them that he would not need any more doctors. As the ADMS, the military hospitals—Camp Hill, Cogswell, and the destroyed Pier 2—were his priority, but they were filled […]
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The eyes have it
2046 (sony)Wong Kar Wai’s long-awaited follow-up to In the Mood For Love finally arrives on DVD in December. Partly a sequel to the doomed love affair of the earlier film, and partly a science-fiction mood piece, Kar Wai makes images as important as narrative. CK Angel: Season 5 (fox)Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s shadow haunted this […]
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Holiday! Celebrate!
This is traditionally the time when, slavering over the prestige and box office returns that the Academy Awards season anoints upon its chosen, Hollywood studios drop the biggest and best of the year’s movies. Odds are, if there’s going to be a challenging mainstream film that will attract both the attention of the critics and […]
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Reviews
The Ice Harvest The combined talent of director Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day) and performers John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton is a lot to recommend and it got this sour pill made. Firmly ensconced in the Coen brothers’ world of Midwestern noir, sans the quirky characters, The Ice Harvest takes place on Christmas Eve in […]
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Hello Bombgurl
“I’m a poster girl for inappropriate art,” says Melissa Ryan. The petite 31-year-old Halifax artist is sitting in her north end apartment/studio, with her brown wavy hair in pigtails, surrounded by the odds and bobs of different projects she’s working on. Here are small canvases with splashy pop-art paintings piled up on a shelf above […]
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Lucky of the draw
Born in 2003 out of the depths of the imaginations of former NSCAD students, the critically acclaimed Lucky Comics keeps on truckin’. Fronted by Chris Lockerbie, Peter Diamond and Jesse Jacobs, with contributions from Owen Diamond, Eggnog, Dan Gallant and Rob Jabbaz, the collective has released a mighty triumvirate of issues over the past two […]
