The opening scene of The Grizzlies is heartwrenching: The transition from hearing the crack of a shotgun reverberate off the wide-open, snow-covered land on-screen to a young white man excitedly remarking at the lack of trees is jarring. Every single shot in Miranda de Pencier’s feature film debut is equally as powerful. It’s based on […]
Film + TV
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Film review: Birds of Passage
Friday, April 12, 7pm Carbon Arc Cinema, 1747 Summer Street $8.75 carbonarc.ca Ciro Guerra’s Academy Award-nominated Embrace of the Serpent (2015) was gorgeously photographed in black and white, spanning 40 years in the Amazon, whose main character was a shaman and lone survivor of his tribe. That is to say: Ambitious. For Birds of Passage, […]
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Street Cents is back, sort of!
Jonathan Torrens announced via YouTube yesterday that he’s back with a 2019 version the beloved CBC show Street Cents, a new webseries appropriately titled Your Two Cents. Street Cents was produced out of Halifax from 1989 to 2006 and its roster of hosts included Entertainment Tonight‘s Kim D’Eon, Cavendish‘s Andrew Bush and actor Demore Barnes. My […]
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Telling Holly’s Bartlett’s story, again
What Happened to Holly Bartlett Premieres Thursday, March 28, 10pm on AMI-TV Holly Bartlett’s death was declared an accident shortly after she passed away in March 2010. And again, after an independent review of the case in 2014. But the story doesn’t end there. Bartlett, who was 31 years old, had been blind since she […]
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Film review: Neither Wolf Nor Dog
Neither Wolf Nor Dog comes to Halifax this weekend on a wave of grassroots success—crowdfunded to start, nearly 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, starring a 95-year-old Lakota elder who lived through D-Day, worked with Marilyn Monroe, was Errol Flynn’s stunt double and was born and died at 97, in 2016, on the Cheyenne River Sioux […]
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Film review: Gloria Bell
An absolutely effervescent Julianne Moore lights up Gloria Bell, Sebastien Leilo’s remake of his own 2013 Spanish film Gloria. Leilo’s last film Disobedience had Rachels McAdams and Weisz literally spitting in each other’s mouths, a highlight to be sure, but in an otherwise sullen and drab drama. He does a complete turnaround here, setting the film […]
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Film review: The Hummingbird Project
It’d be interesting to figure out exactly how the diminutive and unimposing Jesse Eisenberg has crafted a career out of playing total pricks: All the way back to 2005’s The Squid and the Whale, his Walt felt confident enough to claim ownership of Who song as his own, to say nothing of Mark Zuckerberg and […]
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The musical Chairs
An Audience of Chairs Opens Friday, March 22 Cineplex Park Lane, 5657 Spring Garden Road I n Joan Clark’s 2006 novel An Audience of Chairs, a bipolar Cape Bretoner named Moranna reflects on her life without her children, taken by her husband in the wake of her breakdown, and the loss of her gifts as an […]
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Thug’s life
The premise of the local short Thug comes from real life: Three aspirational actors—Simon Mutuyimana, Emmanuel John and Joshua Schlagenweit—shoot a film in the streets of Halifax. So, too, does the film’s critical story point, when a scene of violence is mistaken for truth. “They’re in a Starbucks parking lot and the cops pulled up […]
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maggie jayne’s fashion on film
The Clever Hand screening Friday, March 15, 8pm Atlantic Filmmakers’ Co-Operative 5663 Cornwallis Street It all started a little over a year ago, when Maggie MacCormick—the designer behind the colourful, clean-lined fashion label maggie jayne—and a bunch of her pals gathered on the beach for a music video shoot. “It was just so fun to […]
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The Marvelous Ms. Danvers
In the utterly pointless argument of Marvel versus DC, it nonetheless remains worth noting that the dour, self-serious DC got its lady superhero movie out first. It’s also worth nothing that Wonder Woman is better than Captain Marvel, but still not as good as you remember: Like every superpowered outing—led by man, woman or Groot—it’s […]
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Welcome to Diggstown
Diggstown Wednesdays at 9pm on CBC TV Streaming on CBC Gem M arcie Diggs is grieving. Her favourite aunt—the one who taught her how to surf, showed her how to find salvation in the sea—has taken her own life and Marcie is flailing emotionally and—in certain eyes—professionally, ditching lucrative corporate law for legal aid in […]