Arts & Culture

“Our lives have become very long,” says a man named Karma. He’s Tibetan, a dweller on the high plains some 15,000 feet above sea level, and he, with two of his cousins, has gone blind. Four percent of the Tibetan population over age 40 has cataracts due to high levels of ultraviolet radiation that prematurely […]

Seeing a genuinely Canadian film was one of the real pleasures of the Atlantic Film Festival. The CBC keeps telling us we want to see our own stories told, but there is precious little evidence of that at the multiplex. Aside from the booming homegrown film industry in Quebec, Canadians just don’t seem to be […]

“My ego is too huge to not do something that has some impact on our culture,” said Jodie Foster in a 1997 interview, in which she also said, “I keep being in the same movie over and over again. Nobody realizes it but me.” Eight years later, one notion has fed the other to profoundly […]

The festival is finished. For a little while, Halifax felt like a city unconditionally in love with the movies, whether a potential blockbuster starring Jennifer Lopez or an obscure international co-production no one on these shores is liable to ever see again. The Park Lane cinemas were clogged with line-ups as cinema-goers waited for the […]

Peter Gabriel hadn’t released a proper album of new material since Us in 1992. He’d staged the international Secret World tour, then for years, silence, broken only by a largely instrumental project in conjunction with the opening of the Millennium Dome in London. When he released Up in 2002 and launched the Growing Up tour, […]