When heroes aren’t heroic in the Hollywood sense of good-fighting- evil, you’re left with a human account of events in which motives are complex and people are characterized by their imperfections. In Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness (a Polish-Canadian-German production), we witness sewer worker Leopold Socha’s effort to hide a group of Jews in the sewers […]
Film + TV
Posted inArts + Music
Roaming on-set report
A couple dozen crew and cast members are nestled into a tiny apartment in Halifax’s north end. Chairs, couches and a computer desk occupy the main area and paintings decorate the walls, with cameras and lights accounting for the rest of the space. Writer-director Michael Ray Fox sits on a chair, prompting the actors with their […]
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Mad about Mad Men
It’s been a very long 17 months since Mad Men graced our living rooms with all its vintage goodness. In that time the hype’s had time to dissipate a little, but for true diehards, Don Draper and this questionable cronies were never too far from our minds. Now, as the hiatus nears its end and […]
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Don’t try Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Director Lasse Hallström’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a collage of a movie, devoid of real characters and crippled by awkward dialogue. Maybe it worked in its book incarnation, but in less than two hours on screen it makes no sense that a scientific fisheries researcher, Dr. Jones (Ewan McGregor), would have a spiritual […]
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The Coast picks the movies
Here are our picks for the best movies in cinemas right now. Click on the movie title for the review. The Hunger Games In Darkness Friends with Kids
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Odds are with The Hunger Games
Gary Ross adapts the first of a trilogy of books by Suzanne Collins, introducing movie audiences to a future world where moneyed elites, having quashed a rebellion by poorer citizens, rub the losers’ noses in it with an annual event that pits the children of the 99 percent against each other in a televised duel […]
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Ann MacKenzie to step down as CEO of Film Nova Scotia
After 14 years, Ann MacKenzie is moving on from the job as CEO of Film Nova Scotia. Her final day will be Friday, March 30. Carolyn Horton, director of finance for Film Nova Scotia, will act as interim CEO. News of MacKenzie’s departure is bound to be greeted with a mixed response. While she can […]
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Halifax films jump out at international film fests
Opening The Canadian Film Festival in Toronto is Cloudburst, Thom Fitzgerald‘s tale of road-tripping ladies heading to Nova Scotia to get married. The film has been winning awards at film festivals locally and internationally—it took the Audience Award at the 2011 Atlantic Film Festival—and continues to show at places like BFI’s Lesbian and Gay Film […]
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Like Crazy
Rarely has the euphoric delirium of new love been rendered as believably as it is in the opening act of Drake Doremus’ Like Crazy, as college-age cuties Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones tumble hard for each other. This giddy first burst, and the chemistry between the actors, sustains a movie that runs into trouble at […]
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A few laughs on 21 Jump Street
A self-referential reboot of the 80s television series (1987-1991) starring Johnny Depp, Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s 21 Jump Street has some good, if juvenile, laughs. Schmidt (Jonah Hill), unpopular in high school, and Jenko (Channing Tatum), popular, switch roles when they return to high school as undercover cops trying to bust a drug ring—and […]
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Suspenseful Silent House
Nothing is quite what it first appears to be with Silent House, which starts off feeling like yet another bump-in-the-night haunted house story before veering off into unexpected territory. Sarah (Elizabeth Olsen) gets trapped in the darkened house that her father (Adam Trese) and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens) are renovating and becomes increasingly terrified by […]
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Jennifer Westfeldt directs Friends with Kids
It’s surprising to hear Jennifer Westfeldt say she hadn’t planned to direct. The three intimate relationship comedies she’s written are exactly the kind of small-scale auteur projects the festival circuit is built upon. In 2001, Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen wrote Kissing Jessica Stein, in which they play straight women who date each other. In 2006, […]
