The most bizarre story and astounding characters all happen to be true in the engrossing documentary The Imposter. Telling the story of Frederic Bourdin, a 23-year-old French drifter who in 1994 assumed the identity of a missing American teenager, filmmaker Bart Layton mixes unreliable interviews with misdirecting recreations in an attempt to understand why a […]
Film + TV
Posted inArts + Music
Chasing Mavericks
“We are all born from the sea,” Gerard Butler growls as a start to the pretentious myth-making of surfing biopic Chasing Mavericks. The film takes the real life story of surfing prodigy Jay Moriarty, who tamed the grammatically awkward super-wave Mavericks at just 16, and coats it all with so much moralistic spiritualism and family […]
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Silent Hill: Revelation
A nightmarish hell-scape of twisted, groaning fake American accents awaits you in the film that people made and put money into called Silent Hill: Revelation. Answering all those dangling questions from the first Silent Hill (don’t worry, there’s plenty of recap!), this inevitable sequel finds dad Sean Bean and daughter Heather (Australian actress Adelaide Clemens) […]
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Arc story
“Our projectionist came up with the name,” says Siloën Daley, founder and director of Carbon Arc. “A carbon arc is a kind of projector that used carbon rods instead of lamps. They were really cheap and would take 20 minutes to burn out, so you’d have to buy a whole lot of them. It was […]
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Alex Cross
Tyler Perry is somehow supposed to stand in for Morgan Freeman in the catastrophic Alex Cross. Previously played by Freeman in Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider, Alex Cross is a Sherlockian detective on the hunt for a sadistic assassin obsessed with experiencing pain. That by-the-numbers case falls aside when the killer, ludicrously […]
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Searching for Sugar Man
No one knew who Sixto Rodriguez was in America, but unknown to him, half a world away he was a legend. Folk musician Rodriguez released only two records in his hometown of Detroit during the early 1970s, neither of which sold very well. After that, he seemed to disappear. But his albums somehow made their […]
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Stories We Tell
We begin with Margaret Atwood, Bon Iver, home movies from the 1970s and we’re totally in: Sarah Polley’s very personal documentary about her mother, her family and a secret kept between them. “You know all about it, you know it’s a delusion,” narrates the man who raised her. “It’s all done with mirrors, mate, they […]
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Samsara
A startling assemblage of images from across the globe flicker by in the non-narrative documentary Samsara. Director Ron Fricke and producer Mark Magidson, who made the similar film Baraka, filmed in 25 countries over a period of four years and the end result is a time capsule to humanity’s beauty, power, ugliness and grace. Audiences […]
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Paranormal Activity 4
Ghosts continue to be a problem in Paranormal Activity 4. The latest film in the annual Halloween series continues the irrelevant story of an invisible demon taking possession of spooky children by slowly opening doors at night. This time the unlucky haunted are a Nevada teenager and her family who have some seriously weird neighbours. […]
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Here Comes the Boom
Ultimate fighting isn’t the obvious choice to save a school’s arts program, but Here Comes the Boom doesn’t let its head (or fists) get in the way of its heart. A lunkheaded biology teacher at an underfunded elementary, star Kevin James struggles to find a way to raise $50,000 after budget cuts threaten the music […]
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Seven Psychopaths
Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who made his feature film debut with the excellent In Bruges, shifts focus to the sunny, meta-textual hills of Hollywood with the fiendish Seven Psychopaths. A neurotic Colin Farrell plays a screenwriter named Martin, attempting to finish a script for which he only has a title (“Seven Psychopaths”). Figuring it out […]
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Barfi!
You might know “barfi” as an Indian dessert, but in Anurag Basu’s romantic comedy, Barfi!, it’s the name of one of the movie’s central characters (played by Ranbir Kapoor), a man with a speech-impediment who can’t pronounce his real name, Murphy. Instead of picking a directorial style, Basu includes Charlie Chaplin-style slapstick, choppy cuts and […]
