Film + TV

Often when you tack a number onto the end of an animated movie title, you can almost guarantee no good is going to come from it. But, Oscar-nominated Quebec writer-director Dean DeBlois (Lilo & Stitch) managed to avoid the usual pratfall by gasp trying something new instead of recycling the same ol’ plot (likely helped […]

Darcy Tirrel always wanted to be called “doctor.” “But you have such a pretty face,” her mother would say. “Why muck about getting your hands dirty?” In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire burned miles of the city, but it would be nearly destroyed by something much worse, 140 years later. Dr. Tirrel watched Chicago go […]

Mia Wasikowska walks four camels across Australia, obviously. Based on Robyn Davidson’s true 1977 story, this festival delight also stars Adam Driver as a field photographer for National Geographic who stands in for most of Robyn’s human interaction. Wasikowska continues to build on a varied, interesting resume in diverse films including The Kids Are Alright, […]

The 2012 reboot of the non-beloved 1980s cop series (people only remember because Johnny Depp was on it) was one of the year’s biggest and best surprises, the laziest of ideas well-cast, well-written and well-executed. They actually tried. In addition to establishing Clone High’s evil geniuses Phil Lord and Christopher Miller as comic powerhouses (you […]

The Fault in Our Stars, based on the wildly successful novel that is so adept at existing it had a perfectly timed placement in the new season of Orange is the New Black last weekend, is a maddening melodrama in the Sad Teen Death Movie genre. Hazel (Shailene Woodley) has terminal cancer. Gus (Ansel Elgort) […]

Pick a superhero or a villain and his motivation for becoming either can most often be drawn back to a dead parent(s). Avenging, revenging, honouring, all that crap—it’s about something being cruelly taken from you, wondering why and coming to terms with it your own way. In Maleficent, the origin story of Sleeping Beauty’s evil […]

Here is a list of terrible things about this movie: 1. Woody Allen plays a pimp. 2. Sofia Vergara. 3. Sharon Stone, still beautiful, needing to a. hire a gigolo while b. wondering aloud if she’ll get AIDS. 4. A visual palette of cigarette-stain yellow. 5. A subplot about Hasidic Jews that is supposed to […]

Most directors since Ghost World have just pointed their cameras at Scarlett Johansson and let her butt do the rest—especially, disappointingly, Sofia Coppola; especially, unsurprisingly, Woody Allen—an apex you’d think was reached with Black Widow’s catsuit, but has Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) got a challenge for you. In a script so wordless it makes Gravity […]

Nobody worries about the space-time continuum in X-Men: Days of Future Past, in which Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) goes back to the ’70s to stop Raven (Jennifer Lawrence, playing one awful note) from killing a scientist (Peter Dinklage), thus creating super-robots who roll up in coffins to kill everyone now. Kitty (Ellen Page) does some reiki […]

Tim Riggins Goes A-Doctorin’, B’ys, in this folksy adaptation of the decade-old French film by Jean-François Pouliot. Directed by Don McKellar (confusing), this Seduction stars Taylor Kitsch as a Toronto doctor (the hotshot is implied) who is tricked into spending a month in the depressed Newfoundland town of Tickle Head. If he agrees to stay, […]