Film + TV

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic gets the splashy 3D adaptation no one was particularly asking for in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. To recount the plot every high schooler knows; Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) moves to West Egg, New York and befriends the mysterious Jay Gatsby. The young millionaire throws opulent parties, but longs for […]

Everyone involved in Tyler Perry Presents: Peeples, a lacklustre meet-the-parents romantic comedy, deserves some sort of medal for keeping out anything even resembling Perry’s trademark cinematic poison. Regular guy Wade (ever loveable Craig Robinson) crashes his girlfriend’s family reunion in the Hamptons to ask for her hand in marriage, only to find that his lady […]

King of the summer blockbusters, Terrence Malick returns with a vengeance in the broody slab of melancholia, To the Wonder. Olga Kurylenko is a French ex-pat brought to small town America with her precocious daughter by stoic boyfriend Ben Affleck. Under the shadow of her poetic narration, the two struggle to stay together as Affleck […]

Tony Stark squares off against his greatest foe to date—panic attacks—in the inevitable Iron Man 3. After saving the planet from cyborg zombie aliens in The Avengers, Stark (the getting-a-little-old-for-this Robert Downey Jr.) retreats to his workshop to tinker with his fantastical toys. When a paralyzing attack by hipster terrorist kingpin The Mandarin (Sir Ben […]

A somewhat true story is hacked up and spit out as superficial feel-good ’60s melodrama in the disappointing Australian movie, The Sapphires. Three Aboriginal sisters (and their light-skinned cousin) with some golden pipes get the chance of a lifetime when a washed up producer (Chris O’Dowd) helps them tour USO shows during the Vietnam War. […]

Jason Buxton’s locally-made, festival darling finally comes to theatres in the earnest depiction of youth justice, Blackbird. Teenager Sean Randall is your typical outsider goth. When his friendship with local “puck bunny” Deanna (Alexia Fast) angers her jock boyfriend, Sean becomes the target of some vicious bullying. Pushed to his breaking point, he crafts an […]

Michael Bay proves himself as disastrous with “small pictures” as he is with blockbusters in Pain & Gain—the beach bod true crime flick that’s oozing with machismo. Based on the Sun Gym gang Miami murders, P&G finds a pumped up Mark Wahlberg as a dimwitted personal trainer who “believes in fitness.” To get out of […]

A sci-fi movie of the week somehow ends up at your local cinema in the embarrassing Canadian horror film, The Colony. In a future where artificial weather has blocked out the sun, blanketing the planet in constant snowfall, a small group of survivors huddle together in an isolated bunker. Once a neighbouring colony goes radio […]

One of the more cognitively dissonant films in theatres, The Big Wedding is an astounding train wreck of a romantic comedy. When their adopted son’s biological mother comes from Columbia for her child’s wedding, divorced parents Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton must pretend to still be married lest they offend the Roman Catholic’s strict […]