Die Hard turns 25 years old with its fifth installment, and Bruce Willis is still at the centre of the action as John McClane. This time, he’s in Russia helping his estranged CIA agent son, Jack (Jai Courtney), keep nuclear weapons away from some bad guys. A Good Day to Die Hard doesn’t even attempt […]
Film + TV
Posted inArts + Music
Amour
Michael Haneke’s (The White Ribbon, Caché) latest film tackles aging and love—the harsh fate that can befall anyone after eight or so decades on this planet, and bearing witness to this happening to your spouse. We encounter Anne and Georges (Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant) at the beginning of Anne’s decline. While Haneke suggests they’ve […]
Posted inArts + Music
Safe Haven
If it’s Valentine’s Day that must mean it’s time for yet another adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel. This year’s entry, Safe Haven, provides all the gooshy, fast food romance you’d expect but adds a dash of domestic violence just to shake things up. Technically movie stars, Julianne Hough and Josh Duhamel play a pair […]
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Beautiful Creatures
Twilight, but with witches. Such is the carefully crafted premise of Beautiful Creatures, the latest young adult paranormal romance. Teenager Lena comes from a long line of “casters,” and on her sixteenth birthday her powers will be claimed by either good or evil. Which poses a problem for the cute town heartthrob she’s in love […]
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A reliable narrator
The first time Winnepeg Film Group curator Scott Birdwise saw the late Winston Washington Moxam’s films it was with enthusiasm. “I was instantly struck by how they unapologetically tackle tricky questions about race, class, and gender in Canada,” says Birdwise. “From documentary works…to short fiction and features, including the historical drama Billy, [these] are truly […]
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Miami Connection
In 1987, director Richard Park teamed up with Tae Kwon Do grandmaster (and fledgling screenwriter-producer) Y.K. Kim to create Miami Connection, a martial arts action film about a multiracial rock group doing battle with a coke-dealing alliance of bikers and ninjas. The film opened in a measly eight theatres before being laughed off the screen, […]
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Identity Thief
If you’ve seen the preview for Identity Thief, you’ve seen enough. Seth Gordon’s (Horrible Bosses) latest comedy is a flop about a con artist (Melissa McCarthy), whose latest victim is a middle-class family man (Jason Bateman). The plot and subplots are over-the-top and don’t carry themselves far—Bateman schlepping it out to Florida from Colorado in […]
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Side Effects
Sleepwalking is to be expected when Rooney Mara starts taking a new anti-depressant in Side Effects, but could those side effects also include…murder? Mara plays the psychologically rattled ingenue whose therapist (Jude Law) puts her on daring new drug. A prescription that may or may not be what causes her to kill adoring ex-con husband […]
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Bullet to the Head
Sylvester Stallone’s grizzled hit man really didn’t need a day like this, you know? Playing resigned contract killer Jimmy Bobo with a crunchy sorta detachment, Stallone headlines the hard-boiled gangster flick Bullet to the Head. When Bobo is screwed over and his partner killed, the longtime thug must team up with a visiting detective (Sung […]
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Stand Up Guys
After serving a 28-year stint, Al Pacino’s low-level criminal gets paroled and picked up by now equally elderly best friend Christopher Walken. Together with old getaway driver Alan Arkin, the three spend an evening on the town visiting brothels, flirting with waitresses and snorting crushed up prescription pills. It’s a sad, pathetic party in the […]
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Warm Bodies
A promising premise is frustratingly under-utilized in Warm Bodies, a zombie romantic comedy without any brains. In a post-zombie apocalypse world, survivors struggle to find food and medicine while avoiding packs of roaming corpses. But after kidnapping a young woman he’s attracted to (because he’s stolen the memories of her boyfriend by eating his brains), […]
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Hyde Park on Hudson
The steamy escapades of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (America’s sexiest president) come to light in the dumb little historical comedy, Hyde Park on Hudson. Kind of doing a reverse Daniel Day Lewis in Lincoln, Bill Murray barely stars as the cigarette-smoking prez who entertains the visiting King and Queen of Canada at his country estate while […]
