FILMFEST.CA

If all Ginger Baker ever did musically was to beat the drums behind Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton during the heady two year sprint that was Cream, then Ginger Baker’s role as rock-god may well have been solidified. If all this documentary had was that same Ginger Baker beating the shit out of the director [...]

Everyone lies. It’s a simple statement, but few take it to heart. Now, of course, I’m not lying, I’m telling you my story, my response to this film. But I may be lying to myself, and then to you, convincing myself I loved this film more than I really did just to stand out from [...]

This review also appears on TWITCHfilm.com The arrival of any Attenborough narrated, epic BBC Natural History unit documentary is cause for celebration. The small elements are like Pavlovian cues for any fan of these films, leaving us drooling over the sans-serif font (Helvetica Narrow? Century Schoolbook Gothic?), the massive panorama shots, the endless pullback zooms, [...]

Of all the silly, arbitrary, greeting-cardy, ridiculous holidays (I’m looking at you, Simchas Torah!), the one I can get behind unreservedly is “Record Store Day”. I think that the celebration of your local record establishment, complete with exclusive and often beautifully esoteric releases, is a fine thing worth of celebration. As we march inevitably into [...]

If you look at the past credits of nature film director Greg MacGillivray, you’ll see oodles of super pretty documentaries, often with epic shots filmed from ‘copters buzzing a particular landscape. Of late, he’s crafted a number of those IMAX films that get shown to school kids at your local science center. One of the [...]

Unless you’ve been living under one of the rocks that they photograph so beautifully, you’ll know that the BBC’s nature photography unit has been at the forefront of capturing some of the most stunning images of our planet and its inhabitants for decades now. Usually narrated by the stalwart, infectiously curious David Attenborough, series such [...]

“It sounds like it’s the worst movie when you pitch it. I usually, say ‘It’s about a family that buys a zoo!’, and just when their eyes begin to glaze over, I say, ‘well, it’s a Cameron Crowe movie!’” – Matt Damon There are films, the recent release of Chinatown is brought immediate to mind, [...]

The back story goes something like this – in 2008, Jason Segel finds commercial success with a quirky comedy he wrote and starred in called Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The surprise hit offers the opportunity for Segel (who has now joined up with FSM’s director Nicholas Stoller) to a pitch meeting at the “House the Mouse [...]

The Film Growing up on a slew of Bond flicks, and reading the Bourne books at a relatively young age, my introduction to the world of the British spy trope was one of car chases, kinetic action and exotic locales. The tone presented in this film, clearly derived from the  John le Carré’s source, seems [...]

Excerpt from the full essay found at TWITCHFILM.com GOON adroitly plays on many of our nationalistic and cultural predilections to craft a pretty fun little film.  On one level it’s just a silly hockey movie, speaking to those craving scenes of brutality on ice. But on another, deeper level, it serves as a kind of [...]

It should come as no surprise that even for the most stalwart of cinephiles there are always enormous holes in their film education. Sure, I may have seen both CRANK films, the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA film and a large portion of the works of Baz Lurhman, but before this latest round of Lightbox’s cinemateque retrospective, I’d [...]

This January, a month traditionally reserved as a dumping ground for movies that neither fit in the mold for Awards season, nor are mainstream enough to be considered Summer blockbuster fare, have seen a few surprises show up. CHRONICLE joins the likes of WOMAN IN BLACK and THE GREY as a slightly offbeat, literate genre [...]

What’s most frustrating about THE INKEEPERS is that it’s far less clever than the film tries desperately to be. With Ti West’s script (and direction, and editing, and production) we get a passable genre piece with illusions of grandeur. Mixing the matter-of-fact dialogue of PULP FICTION with a spookified hotel channeling every film that came [...]

Let me state at the outset that RED TAILS will be seen as both a commercial and critical failure. It’s hard to see, despite the mass marketing blitz, how this film about the famed Tuskeegee airmen, the first black fighting air squadron in the US military, will manage even in this slow season to reap [...]

There are few political figures as polarizing at Margaret Thatcher, leader of great Britain through a tumultuous decade that followed a sharp, shocking decline in the UKs economic and social fortunes. Any film that tackles her story is bound to be met with a great deal of skepticism, fearing either hatchet piece or hagiography. Gratefully, [...]

Taking what first appears to be a left turn from his usual comfort zone (dry comedy usually doesn’t come first to mind),  Roman Polanski brings us CARNAGE. It’s a dark, droll work, one based on a play originally written in French, playing (in translated form) for hundreds of performances on Broadway. I’m the first to [...]

Following up on their recent success with the Lars Von Trier retrospective, TIFF Lightbox provides a similar overview of the career of another provocative and controversial filmmaker, Roman Polanski. Like Von Trier, it’s often difficult for many to separate the art from the life of the man, and few have lived a more colourful and [...]

Once upon a time, way before there were the interwebs as we know them to be, there were a series of clipshows that’d play local arthouses. I remember sitting through 90 minutes of weird Japanese hottub-farting commercials, or clips of Scandavians learning English through the filthy lyrics of hardcore music on the radio. These were [...]

Way back in 2008, I described director Steve McQueen’s HUNGER, starring Michael Fassbender, as “a study in meditation and ambivalence”. With this, his second film and second collaboration with the fantastically talented actor, McQueen turns his lens to a far more prosaic topic – loveless fucking. Not since Cronenberg’s 1996 film CRASH, also a film [...]

Back in the spring of 1996 I had the opportunity to attend the Cannes Film Festival. The whole week was a whirlwind, my first real fest experience that involved a lack of sleep, running from screening to screening and seeing some of the best (and worst!) films that I’d ever experienced. ’96 was the year [...]

by Heidi Zarse (@PWNNY) One of us! One of us! One of us! Congrats on making the list of less than 200 lucky people! I bet you have a lot of questions! I’ve been collecting advice from past bnatters to share with first-timers who have no clue about the awesome that they are soon to [...]

There’s a scene early on in INNI where the members of Sigur Rós sit down to an interview at NPR. Asked if their music started out as something more conventional before it became experimental, the four of them stare at the off screen host, dumfounded. Describing their music is a fool’s errand, one even the [...]

With THE LAST WALTZ, Martin Scorsese assembled some of the finest cinematographers in history and captured the epic last concert of The Band. He interspersed concert footage with behind-the-scenes interviews, crafting one of the finest documentations of that period of music. With SHINE A LIGHT, he brought 70mm IMAX production to a contemporary Rolling Stones [...]

It all seemed so promising – a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Chinese revolution that overthrew centuries of dynastic rule, coupled with the 100th film credited to international superstar Jackie Chan, and granted a budget that could see such a story being brought to the screen with sufficient pomp and scope. Why, then, [...]

I was asked on the twitter today about what Criterion Blu-Ray a friend should buy. This got me thinking as to what are my favourite discs in the collection, which disc on DVD-only are must haves (or deserving of upgrade), and which discs that they formally had licensed in their Laserdisc days deserve to be [...]

THE INTERRUPTERS is a poignant, engaging look at a group of Chicagoans looking to curb the violence plaguing their city. Tracing a year in the life of this group, the film details with stark clarity the lives of a community beset by ongoing cycles of retribution. We follow a group of “Interrupters”, former gang members [...]

By almost any measure, this film should be terrible. Nothing much happens for an hour, then a bunch of guys get in a truck to make a delivery. Finally (spoiler), things go badly. And yet, almost despite itself, THE WAGES OF FEAR is one of the most tense, most accomplished thrillers ever put to film. [...]

Growing up with THE MUPPET SHOW, the musical and comic stylings of Paul Williams were inescapable. I assume I saw him on the plethora of game shows and LOVE BOAT appearances he made, but it was this little mans turn with Kermit and friends, and his subsequent scoring of the first MUPPET MOVIE that ingrained [...]

All the ingredients are there – a fascinating tale of a boy-King crowned in the midst of the last World War, forced to flee his country and live in exile, only to triumphantly return after the collapse of the Soviet Union to claim a democratically elected leadership position decades after he first held office. Unfortunately, [...]

In this extremely well made documentary, Alex Gibney (here last year with the under-appreciated CLIENT 9) sets his sights on one of the more misunderstood characters of Canada’s game – the hockey enforcer. The film starts with a startling shot of a pair of ravaged hands, the kunckles obliterated, fingers skewed at odd angles. The [...]