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 […]
Film + TV
Posted inArts + Music
Film tax credits across Canada
Before the budget dropped, Nova Scotia and Manitoba had the best film tax credit incentives—highest amount of money that could be given back to productions for local spending—in Canada. Now that Nova Scotia has backed out of the race, it’s “Hooray for Winniwood!” And given PEI’s efforts, even an Anne of Green Gables reboot would […]
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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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Paradise Sisters lost
Thirteen years after it formed and promised to bring independent cinema back to Halifax, Paradise Sisters Film Society is finally, officially giving up the ghost. But not before it passes on its torch (not to mention $20,000 and a long members list) to Halifax’s current hope for honest-to-goodness rep cinema: Carbon Arc Cinema Co-op. While […]
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#NSFilmJobs in limbo
“The Liberal government must already regret its cryptic messaging,” says filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald, referring to a potential cut to the Nova Scotia Film Industry Tax Credit that has many people in a huff. “A petition in protest of it got 10,000 signatures in one day. They’ve instantly turned Trailer Park Boys fans against them. No […]
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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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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 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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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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Black Halifax’s unseen histories
After a fruitful weeklong residency at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic during African Heritage Month last year, where El Jones, Jacob Sampson, Valerie Mason-John and Afua Cooper interpreted the stories of historical black pioneers, the group realized that their project was destined for more. First approached by John Hennigar-Shuh, president of the Canadian Maritime […]
