Who Let the Dogs Out Fri, Sep 13, 9:30pm Cineplex Park Lane, 5657 Spring Garden Road $13.50-$15, finfestival.ca For the amount of time it’s been living in our heads rent-free, each and every one of us should have made a documentary about “Who Let the Dogs Out” by now. And yet, it took one obsessive […]
Film + TV
Posted inArts + Music
Heather Young’s film slays not with a bang but a Murmur
FIN AIFF Opening Night Gala: Murmur Thu Sep 12, 7pm Rebecca Cohn Auditorium 6101 University Avenue $50 The opposite of a silver-set Hollywood dream, Heather Young’s films have both feet firmly planted in reality. She wants to make movies about “a real person, that feels like someone I could meet in my real life—that both […]
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There’s Something In the Water runs deep
There’s Something In the Water Sat, Sep 14, 9:30pm Cineplex Park Lane, 5657 Spring Garden Road $18.50, finfestival.ca Nearly a year after publishing a book on environmental racism, the story has taken on a new life. There’s Something In the Water by Dalhousie professor Ingrid Waldron is now a 70-minute documentary co-produced by Ellen Page, […]
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Former Haligonian announced as competitor on the first-ever UK edition of RuPaul’s Drag Race
RuPaul continues to build a guided, tea-spilling empire like no other, with the mother of modern drag launching a new edition of the beloved reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race in the UK later this year. The first series promises the same format as the US edition we know and love—and features a former Haligonian in […]
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Interrogating masculinity in The Art of Self-Defense
Riley Stearns began writing The Art of Self-Defense in 2015, when the internet had accelerated and highlighted terrible behaviour acted out by men along traditional gender lines: Violence and action over words and feelings, now very commonly known as toxic masculinity. “I was questioning who I was as a man, and what society was telling me […]
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Film review: Late Night
Nisha Ganatra’s Late Night ignited a bidding war at this year’s Sundance Film Festival—and as in nearly every Sundance bidding-war story, save Once and Garden State, it has ended with disappointing box office returns. But what other reaction could you possibly expect to a movie this sharp, feminist, self-aware and fresh? Booksmart was a financial […]
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Visiting A Colony
“There are a lot of coming-of-age films, a lot of teen films, but my goal was to have an honest image of teenagerhood,” says the writer-director Geneviève Dulude-De Celles. “I really wanted to give them that space and take them seriously.” Dulude-De Celles’ second feature A Colony (Une Colonie) arrives at the Halifax Independent Filmmakers’ […]
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Film review: The Biggest Little Farm
In The Biggest Little Farm, we meet a host of characters: Todd the rescue dog, Emma the pig and Greasy the rooster as well as cows, snails, gophers, coyotes, bees, ducks, a cat, and on and on. These 200 acres in California—dusty, dead, dry soil when Molly Chester and her husband John, who directed and […]
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Film review: The Hustle
F or a film like The Hustle, dropped in the wake of Avengers before the summer’s riptide comes roaring in, you’d be right to approach with tempered expectations. But the film—a grifters’ caper starring Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson, a remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Hollywood, please stop it with this)—immediately subverts those with its […]
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Film review: Ordinary Days
The Canadian festival entry Ordinary Days—it screened here at FIN—gets a theatrical release this week at Park Lane. Its concept—the same story told from three perspectives, each segment handled by a different director—could’ve played as pointless schtick, but here it’s deployed deftly enough to keep you guessing until nearly the final shot, which doesn’t seem […]
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A peek inside Tin Can
Seth Smith works quietly, switching his glance between an an oblong tunnel and the set as it is captured on a camera monitor. The director is surrounded by actors in metallic suits and crew members confirming scene numbers, but he looks as if he’s in his own world. As the take is called with a […]
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Visionaries on videos at Emerging Lens
Emerging Lens Cultural Film Festival April 24-28 various locations theemerginglens.com With the 9th annual Emerging Lens Film Festival kicking off yesterday, Halifax is lit with the talent and flair of homegrown BIPOC filmmakers. One of the festival’s freshest offerings on the itinerary is an entire segment dedicated to music videos created by up-and-coming artists on […]