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HALIFAX MOVIES JUL 4, 2008

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Wall-E
The first line of A.O. Scott’s review of Wall-E for the NY Times; The first 40 minutes or so of “Wall-E” — in which barely any dialogue is spoken, and almost no human figures appear on screen — is a cinematic poem of such wit and beauty that its darker implic... Read More.

The Panopticon.
The doc Eastern State Penitentiary is about the famed prison in Philadelphia. A little slow, but very interesting and accurate. Especially good viewing for those of us who have read Discipline & Punish by my buddy Foucault. Read More.

WALL-E: Robot Movie Becomes Robotic
Some critics have gone gonzo over the new Disney/Pixar animated flick WALL-E. That only proves that if you throw in a few references to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001, film snobs eyes tend to glaze over. The reality is that WALL-E does indeed ha... Read More.

The Marmer Files, Vol. II
Because it annoys my critics, and pleases my fans, I shall now follow a serious UFO post with another installment of the Marmer Files. Read More.

Young People F**king
Last night I went to the Oxford with a friend to check out the much-buzzed-about indie flick, Young People Fucking. For a movie with such an NC17 title, it was actually pretty light on the fucking. Read More.

The Happening: A Brisk and Economical Chiller
Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan’s latest flick is an environmental thriller that would make a brilliant B-Movie if we still had those kinds of categories. Instead, The Happening is getting a pummelling from critics fed up with the Indian-American’s ... Read More.

Thanks for nothing, Samantha Jones
Why is it that some people still think that fighting stereotypes with stereotypes is okay? Read More.

The Strangers: It's nothing terribly original but surprisingly effective
Texas cinematographer Bryan Bertino has knocked one out the park with The Strangers, his first directoral effort. Tense, creepy and minimal, it’s the definitive contemporary scary couple attacked by weirdos in a remote cheepie house. Keeping the cast small,... Read More.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
I make it no secret that I'm a huge fan of Indiana Jones. From the time Raiders of the Lost Ark came out through the awful mess of The Temple of Doom and the redemption that was The Last Crusade, I loved every crooked grin and cheesy moment. Read More.

Rabbits! Spoiler Warning (or, Stick To The Small Screen)
And in the end, The Sex and the City movie was like a knockoff handbag; cute, cheap and painfully unsatisfying. Read More.

Lars and the Inflato-Chick
I have to thank the Bad Tempered Zombie for putting me onto the flick Lars and the Real Girl. Had it not been for her review and encouragement, I probably would have given this flick a miss. I mean, come on. A movie about a guy who falls for an inflato chic... Read More.

Not Jones-ing for another fix.
Over the weekend, I was forcibly dragged taken out to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I was never a huge fan of the original Indy flicks, but since it's one of the boyfriend's favourite series and he is abandoning me going to spend the ... Read More.

Paul Kimball - Communist??
A certain wacko in the Czech Republic has been braying lately about how I'm a communist because my company is called Redstar Films. Of course, this charge is patently ridiculous... Read More.

Indiana Jones: Marvelous Filmmaking and Massively Entertaining
The long-awaited fourth Indiana Jones flick has arrived, and it offers further proof of the franchise’s enduring potency. Indiana Jones And the Kingdom Of the Crystal Skull is edge- of- your- seat filmmaking from Hollywood’s leading producer and directing t... Read More.

The Special Collector's Limited Anniversary Edition
You know one thing I really dislike…re-releases of DVDs. I know why companies do this; I mean really, they already have a digital copy of the movie, why not press it again with fancy packaging, and sell it again to the stupid ass public? Like do people actuall... Read More.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian has more battles, less magic
The second installment in the big screen adaptation of C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series is actually a little bit better than the lead-off movie, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Prince Caspian is darker and grander, and director Adam Adamson has a surer grip o... Read More.

Five Guv'ner Movie Classics
OK, I know what you’re all thinking. You’re thinking the words “Guv’ner” and “classics” can never coexist harmoniously in one sentence. But you’d be wrong because you see I have the most discerning taste in just about everything, especially when it comes to m... Read More.

Iron Man Flies High
The first of 2008’s big budget summer blockbusters, Iron Man is shockingly good. Powered by a tight, economical script - by two of the team who wrote the riveting sci-fi flick Children Of Men - that cleverly doubles back on itself, delivering a doppleganger... Read More.

Snow Angels: Breaking up is hard to do
David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels is a powerful and haunting drama about contemporary families falling apart. Filmed in Halifax a few years ago, it represents a shift for the young indie filmmaker from his previous three films, all shot in his native America... Read More.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall: a sprightly sex comedy that sings
The Judd Apatow movie machine just keeps rolling on. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a sprightly sex comedy that is - surprise, surprise - both funny and tender. The Hollywood Megaproducer (40 Year Old Virgin, Drillbit Taylor) seems to release a new film these da... Read More.

Smart People: A cinematic misfire
Fans of Halifax actress Ellen Page who are expecting the sparkle of Juno in her follow-up film Smart People will probably be disappointed. In a rather typecast role as a cranky Republican Youth high schooler - and the daughter of an even crankier and suprem... Read More.

The Bank Job: A fine piece of Olde World cinema
Kiwi director Roger Donaldson's heist flick The Bank Job is a slick and entertaining robbery film that revisits a notorious Baker Street bank safety deposit break-in from 1971. Building in concentric circles of intrigue and suspense, the movie follows a bun... Read More.

Stop Loss: A Powerful, Haunting Film
Kimberley Peirce’s long-awaited follow-up to Boys Don’t Cry, Stop Loss, is getting the same short shrift that almost all Iraq war fictional flicks have received from the antsy American movie going public. That means that like Home Of the Brave, Redacted, In... Read More.

In Bruges: A collision of irony, violence and wit
The opening night film of this year's Sundance Festival, In Bruges is the feature debut by London-based Irish playwright Martin McDonagh (The Pillowman, The Lonesome West). Utilizing his trademark collision of irony, violence and wit, McDonagh - who won an ... Read More.

Juno: Page Is Great; Juno Is Just Good
The long-awaited arrival of Halifax actress Ellen Page's starmaker-film Juno can’t help but be a bit of a letdown. Page is brilliant in the film. Without her, neither Jason Reitman’s paint-by-numbers direction nor Diablo Cody’s pre-fab indie movie script wo... Read More.

Atonement: Another Book To Screen Mismash
There are any number of reasons why the big-screen cinematic adaptation of the popular post-modernist novel by Ian McEwan, Atonement, doesn’t really work. One could be that old saw that great literature rarely makes good movies. The many post-modern effects... Read More.

RFM's Best Films Of 2007
Year-end Best Of lists are always a bit suspect. They tend to shortchange the first part of the year due to chronological distance; acclaimed films that haven’t opened yet further mess up attempts to keep the catalogue in some kind of decent order. That sai... Read More.

I Am Legend: Good But Not Quite Great
Director Francis Lawrence almost gets the third screen version of Richard Matheson’s enduring sci-fi story I Am Legend to home base. After all, the film sports a fine performance from Will Smith in an eerily deserted New York City for the first two-thirds o... Read More.

Golden Compass: Not So Golden
American Pie producer and director of About A Boy, Chris Weitz, has made a mess of British author Philip Pullman’s new fantasy movie franchise The Golden Compass, adapted from Pullman’s novel Northern Lights, part of his popular His Dark Materials series. T... Read More.

Control: One Man’s Isolation
Control, beautifully and skillfully shot in stark black and white by well-known music director Anton Corbijn in his first full-length, is a film about the band Joy Division. Fans of the group will consider Control the definitive Joy Division story ever put to ... Read More.

Before The Devil Knows You're Dead: Veteran director Sidney Lumet at the top of his game
Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is a low-key but potent triumph for longtime director Sidney Lumet. It’s a late-in-career revival for a man who’s already committed a clutch of classics to the American Cinema Cannon, including masterworks like 12 Angry Men, ... Read More.

No Country For Old Men: Larded with black humour
The Coen Brothers have returned to the glories of their greatest films, Fargo, and Miller’s Crossing, with their latest work, a screen adaptation of novelist Cormac McCarthy’s book, No Country For Old Men. Dark, taciturn and yet larded with black humour, No... Read More.

Beowulf - Pride, Lust, and 3D
Much ado has been made in regards to Beowulf, the adventure-fantasy that was shot to be seen in 3D IMAX. While 3D is something that adds to the movie going experience, the visual gimmickry can just as easily take away from the storyline. In the case of directo... Read More.

The Mist - A study in mist-ifying circumstances
Whatever form it takes, be it zombies, a super virus, or a massive meteor, the apocalyptic disaster movie hinges on one question that almost all of us who have seen one of these flicks have asked ourselves: what would you do in the same situation? Now, I’d... Read More.

August Rush: A hyperventilating musical with eye-candy aplenty
August Rush is one of those films that seems so unbelievable you can’t imagine how it actually got made. A rhapsodic melodrama with a plot that could only fit into a lumbering 19th century opera, it takes the term ‘musical’ into a hyperventilating place that m... Read More.

Lars And The Real Girl: Ryan Gosling in a sentimental stew
London, Ontario-born actor Ryan Gosling has squandered all that momentum and good will he generated from last year’s low-budget hit Half Nelson with his latest film, Lars And The Real Girl. With a premise that starts out in John Waters’ territory - a morose... Read More.

Norman Mailer, Author, Director 1923-2007
The various tributes and obituaries of the great American writer and gadfly Norman Mailer have failed, for the most part, to mention two aspects of his extraordinary contribution to the world of discourse and culture. Along with his more obvious literary wo... Read More.

The Tracey Fragments: A Triumph For Ellen Page
Advance praise and Festival Prizes hardly prepare viewers for the breathtaking quicksilver brilliance of Toronto director Bruce McDonald’s latest film, The Tracey Fragments. Powered by a remarkably precise central performance by Halifax’s Ellen Page in the ... Read More.

Martian Child: Lost in Space
John Cusack is a wonderful actor. His charm can often lift a mediocre film into a higher zone altogether. Alas, even his abundant gifts falter faced with Martian Child, a drippy, sentimental and manipulative modern-day adoption story set on the West Coast. ... Read More.

American Gangster: Something Fresh On The Take
It’s hard not to believe we’ve seen it all in today’s climate of film re-makes, re-vamps, and general redundancy. But every so often, comes a film that takes an existing genre and turns it on its head. In the case of Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, it tr... Read More.

Poor Boy's Game: A Knockout
Poor Boy’s Game is finally getting its nation-wide commercial release after performing spectacularly on this fall’s Film Festival circuit. The best film ever made about Halifax, and certainly one of the top Canadian films of this or any year, Poor Boy’s Gam... Read More.

Dan In Real Life: Date movie of the year?
The family gathering is a favourite subject in film. Every household has its dysfunctions, its secrets, its share of awkward moments that make for great drama and comedy. It’s no surprise that Dan in Real Life uses this setting to tackle its subject matter. Wh... Read More.

Saw IV: A twisted, illogical sense of life
$32 million. That's how much Saw IV took in at the U.S. box office this past weekend. The fourth in this strangely popular horror series earned top honours from movie goers, which means it's a great flick, right? If you're into the unnecessarily grotesque, unc... Read More.

Work on TV movie, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, starts next month
The film version of the best-selling book by Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, will be shot in Halifax as a television movie starting November 18th. To be directed by Mick Jackson - who helmed the widely seen MOW of the hit inspirational memoir Tu... Read More.

The Assassination of Jesse James: Long and Slow, but Engrossing
I sincerely hope Warner Brothers isn’t willing to let The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford fizzle out on the exhibition scene across North America in the run up before Christmas. The epic-length flick - 160 minutes long - debuted well ... Read More.

Film Fest Attendance Up 18 %
The Atlantic Film Festival broke its own box office record in 2007 with an 18% increase in attendance, according to spokesperson Pam Todd. The annual celebration of cinema - of which this humble correspondent is a senior programmer - brought a total of 33,5... Read More.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age - Spectacle fit for a Queen
Like its 1998 predecessor, Elizabeth: The Golden Age is the kind of movie that wins statues during awards season. The sequel to the simply titled Elizabeth, starring the dynamic and captivating Cate Blanchett in the title role as the first named Elizabeth to t... Read More.

Chris Marker's Two Masterpieces
Chris Marker’s two most important films have been collected together on DVD by Criterion. The 28-minute still-picture drama La Jetee from 1962 - the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys - and the feature-length 1982 documentary meditation on memory, ... Read More.

The Heartbreak Kid: Stiller Loses His Mojo
There's a telling scene in the brilliant second season of the BBC comedy Extras starring Office creator Ricky Gervais, who recently won an Emmy for his current role. It centers on Ben Stiller playing himself as a director of a gritty drama about an Eastern Eur... Read More.

AFCOOP Exhumes Arthur Lipsett For Rare Treat
The Atlantic Filmmaker’s Co-Op is offering a rare treat for East Coast experimental film buffs. The entry-level training organization is presenting the works of Montreal ‘found footage’ artist Arthur Lipsett over three nights this week, curated by former Halif... Read More.

Austen Book Club: A Guilty Pleasure
The Jane Austen Book Club is a glib bonbon of a movie, a glossy chick-flick that seems more like a niche marking exercise than a real film. It’s fun and diverting for the most part, but ultimately light as a feather. Taking six characters who read six Jane ... Read More.

Jarmusch Films At Dal Art Gallery
Jim Jarmusch shock of premature white hair only ads to his mystique as one of America’s most unique and consistent cinema artists. Mainstream movie fans may have just caught up with the laconic New Yorker with his breakthrough Bill Murray vehicle Broken Flo... Read More.

Vincent Price Back From The Grave
Vincent Price has finally received the box DVD treatment from MGM home video. On four double-sided discs you get some of the iconic actor’s most important onscreen work: seven features and three new documentaries. The legendary actor - who arose from studio... Read More.

Teshigahara's Incredible Triple Header
The Criterion Collection has knocked another one out of the park with their new collection Three Films of Hiroshi Teshigahara. Best known as the Japanese director of the enduring and still intriguing 1964 international art-house hit Woman Of the Dunes, this... Read More.

Shake Hands With the Devil: Gripping Cinema
Shake Hands With the Devil is a courageous and radically unconventional film that reveals much about its producer, the Academy Award-winning producer Michael Donovan, as much as it does tell the autobiographical narrative of General Romeo Dallaire and his doom... Read More.

Eastern Promises: Stunning Setpieces But No Knockout
David Cronenberg’s new film Eastern Promises is strong, but it’s no knockout. Following in the footsteps of a genuine masterpiece in A History Of Violence, the Toronto-based director again uses Viggo Mortensen as his central figure. This time, however, the ... Read More.

Chas Thorne, Roy Dupuis among 07 Film Festival Winners
The 2007 Winners at the Atlantic Film Festival have been announced. There are two juries at the Fest, one that considers local (Atlantic) work and another that looks at Canadian films from outside the region. The Canadian Winners include Ellen Page and B... Read More.

Local Shoots Pick Up
Local writer and director Anne Verrall will shoot a low-budget feature this fall in Halifax entitled Nonsense Revolution. The movie will be produced by Halifax - based filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald through his production company Emotion Pictures. And the Trailer ... Read More.

The Censor Board Board Must Go
The Censor Board popped up in the news again last week after NDP MLA Howard Epstein sent back a list of appointees to the committee that oversees the board because he found them ‘not diverse enough’ - seven of the 14-member board are older than 60, and many ar... Read More.

Rodney Announces Larger Film Tax Credit
At the launch of the 2007 Atlantic Film Festival on Thursday night Nova Scotia Premier Rodney MacDonald announced exactly what many film industry reps in the audience wanted to hear: an increase in the NS Film Tax Credit. And what a rise! From 35 per cent t... Read More.

Friday Night Lights Are Bright
Friday Night Lights was the most acclaimed TV series of last year’s season. Recently released on DVD in the last week of August - nearly 16 hours worth - you can catch up with the critics to by checking out the entire season in one shiny three-disc package. ... Read More.

3:10 To Yuma: A Solid Remake Of A Classic
James Mangold’s remake of the classic western 3:10 To Yuma has become the surprise hit prestige picture of the late summer. And no wonder. With a terrific cast and a superb script based on the original Elmore Leonard story, it’s a film that broadens and deepen... Read More.

Common: The state of here and now
One of the most powerful - but neatly restrained - indie flicks I’ve seen for the 2007 AFF is Kansas director Jeremy Fiest’s Common. A road movie that deconstructs the friendships of three twentysomething men on the cusp of adult careers, Common is a playfully... Read More.

Scouts Are Cancelled: An examination of the soul of Nova Scotia
One of the cinematic marvels I watched in the programming run up to AFF ‘07 is ex-Haligonian director John D. Scott’s feature-length literary biography enigmatically titled Scouts Are Cancelled. It’s a 72-minute portrait of the former Toronto performance po... Read More.

Over The GW: Rehab revealed
Amidst the hidden gems of this year’s Atlantic Film Festival is the gripping New York City rehab drama Over The GW. Written and directed by Nick Gaglia and based on a true story, it’s a powerful disturbing story set amidst the unregulated and rather dodgy sect... Read More.

Hairspray: Song and dance a second time around
The movie version of the hit musical Hairspray is a puzzling cinematic experience. Based on John Water’s 1988 trash classic of the same name but drained of its corrosive nature and brilliant garbage can aesthetic, the new flick is a relentlessly happy, song-an... Read More.

Superbad: Supergood
Superbad is the best youth comedy about guys since Dazed And Confused. Relentlessly funny, surprisingly sweet, and powered by a ribald teen longing that is deliciously politically incorrect, it delivers on the comedic promise suggested by this summer’s earlier... Read More.

Becoming Jane: ‘Girl Power’ circa 1800
Becoming Jane represents Hollywood scraping the bottom of the barrel. Since there are no Jane Austen novels left to film - a few have been already done several times, witness Pride And Prejudice - producers have scampered over the great writer’s scanty biograp... Read More.

The Vaults Open To More Film Noir
The Fourth Volume of Film Noir: Classic Collection DVD set (just released at the end of July, 2007) richens and deepens the Warners Brothers-driven stream of American Studio productions from the 1940s to the late ‘50s. This batch includes 10 films on five d... Read More.

Singer, Songwriter, and Producer, Lee Hazlewood Dies at 78
The Iconic American producer, songwriter and performer Lee Hazlewood died on Sunday, August 4th at his home in Henderson, Nevada, from cancer. First coming to prominence as a rockabilly writer and producer in 1956 with the hit The Fool, Hazlewood moved on ... Read More.

Reflections On Michaelangelo Antonioni
The passing of the great Italian Film Director Michaelangelo Antonioni comes as less of a shock than that of Ingmar Bergman's death yesterday. Bergman was 89 and had made a film just two years ago; Antonioni suffered a stroke more than a decade ago and could b... Read More.

Ingmar Bergman Dies At 89
One of the greatest of all modern cinema directors, Ingmar Bergman, has passed away at the age of 89 at his home on the island of Faro off the coast of Sweden. Bergman rose to international prominence in the 1950s with a string of black-and-white ensemble d... Read More.

Sunshine: Pretty Hot
Danny Boyle’s space opera Sunshine has finally arrived in town, trailing a raft of rotten reviews and uninspired media interest. It might be that Joe Critic is tired of Boyle’s genre-hopping career. Sure, he wowed’em with youth cult classics like Trainspott... Read More.

Talk To Me: Top of My List
Kasi Lemmons’ third feature, Talk To Me, is clearly her most immediate and accessible film. A fast-paced bio-pic of the Washington DJ and Television personality Petey Greene, it resembles the great recent cinematic portrait of Ray Charles in its sweeping appro... Read More.

Introducing The Dwights: A Delight Despite the Title
The unfortunately-titled Australian film, Introducing The Dwights, is one of the hidden gems of this rather flat cinematic summer. A contemporary domestic dramady built around the British actress Brenda Blethyn - a favourite of the ultra-realist director Mi... Read More.

'Just Buried' selected for Toronto Film Fest
Halifax writer and director Chas Thorne's first directed feature, Just Buried, has been invited to this year's Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The film, shot under the title Pushing Up Daisies but forced to change its moniker when an ABC TV series ... Read More.

Erroll Williams, African Canadian Bermudian Director Dies
Canada's East Coast Film Scene has lost one its brightest lights. Documentarian Erroll Williams died of cancer on Saturday, July 14th. He was 56. Parcelling his time between Bermuda, Toronto, Nova Scotia and Fredericton in the last decade or so, Erroll ... Read More.

Book Vs Film: Gods And Monsters
Christopher Bram’s 1996 novel Father Of Frankenstein became Bill Condon’s Academy Award-winning feature film Gods And Monsters. With a paperback version of the novel - renamed to match the movie - now hitting the remainder bins, fans of filmic adaptations have... Read More.

Peter Greenaway To Speak at Atlantic Film Festival
Maverick British filmmaker Peter Greenaway has been announced as the Academy Luncheon speaker at this year’s Atlantic Film Festival Strategic Partner conference scheduled for Sunday, September 16th. Greenaway - along with the late Derek Jarman - represents ... Read More.

Transformers Is Terrific
Transformers is one of those films that you really can’t knock. Adapted from the old Saturday Morning TV series - in association with Hasbro for the obligatory toy tie in - it’s long, indulgent and a bit uneven, but also funny, fast-paced and full of some o... Read More.

Evening: Claire Danes Is Stunning
Evening is like The Hours without Virginia Woolf. Producer / screenwriter Michael Cunningham - who scored such a success with that novel-turned-screenplay a few years ago - has returned to the same territory of juggled timelines and lush romanticism for this n... Read More.

A Mighty Heart: Mighty Good
Maverick British director Michael Winterbottom may have just moved into the big leagues with his latest effort, A Mighty Heart. Formerly known for a series of highly original (24 Hour Party People, The Claim) and controversial (Nine Songs, Tristam Shandy) art-... Read More.

Fantastic Four: The World is in Peril
In the old Marvel Comics pantheon, the Fantastic Four were one of that company’s premium brands. It was the closest the innovative graphic art entertainment company came to pure Science Fiction; only Doctor Strange went further in its examination of philosophi... Read More.

Hostel Part II: Now I'm Afraid of the Rich
Much in the same way that the original Texas chainsaw massacre made me afraid of rednecks, Hostel 2 makes me fear the rich. In this sequel, director Eli Roth continues to flesh out (pun intended) a new sub genre of the horror film, dubbed "torture porn." Th... Read More.

Father Of African Filmmaking Dies
Senegalese writer/director Ousmane Sembene has died. His family announced his passing on Sunday. He had been sick since December. Sembene was universally recognized as the founder of sub-Saharan African Cinema. His film Black Girl (1965) is generally consid... Read More.

Hollywood director Daniel Petrie's, The Neptune Factor, On DVD
The first of three Nova Scotia-shot films by legendary Hollywood director Daniel Petrie, Sr. has finally resurfaced on DVD. The undersea adventure The Neptune Factor is now available through 20th Century Fox. And while it’s by no measure Petrie’s best film,... Read More.

Movie Production Slows
2007 is not turning out to be a banner year in Nova Scotia’s film production scene. There are a number of factors at work here. The industry is naturally cyclical, and 2006 was very busy - three local features, a major mini-series, three TV movie service pr... Read More.

Bluenose Flicks At Spanish Hemp Fest
Two Nova Scotia films have made it into the first World Marijuana Film Festival in Ibiza, Spain. The feature comedy by Afterdark Productions, A Bug And A Bag Of Weed, and director Connie Littlefield’s recent made-for- Global TV documentary ‘The Damage Done: Th... Read More.

Knocked Up: I'm Not Knocked Out
Judd Apatow’s contemporary reconciliation comedy Knocked Up has the Hollywood hype machine in overdrive. Even hard-bitten, big-city critics are foaming at the mouth over this two-hour and ten-minute cinematic trifle. it’s truly shocking to see once-sensible... Read More.

Severence: Smart Alec Slasher
The British slasher film Severence follows in the smart-alec footsteps of UK hits such as Shaun Of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. It’s a smart, self-conscious popcorn movie that knowingly states its conventions while adding elements of pointed contemporary social crit... Read More.

David Goodis Resurfaces in Soft Cover
David Goodis is one of the most intriguing of all serie noire writers. Best known for providing the source material for a string of fascinating movies - Truffaut’s early 1960s French New Wave masterpiece Shoot the Piano Player, the 1948 Bogart/Bacall vehicle ... Read More.

Waitress: A Marvelous and Melancholy Masterpiece
If Jim Jarmusch remade Like Water For Chocolate in Atlanta, it might look and sound a bit like the late Adrienne Shelley’s marvelous third feature Waitress. Shelly - once one of indie film icon Hal Hartley’s stock acting company - was tragically murdered la... Read More.

Shrek 3: This Vehicle Has Run Out Of Gas
Shrek might just be one feature cartoon franchise that has finally run out of gas. The latest installment, Shrek The Third, is a shrill and shallow exercise in pop culture re-and-deconstruction that takes the iconoclastic tale of the friendly ogre to a place t... Read More.

Away From Her: A Solid Snooze
I must be the only person in the world who thought that Sarah Polley’s feature film writing and directing debut, Away From Her, was a solid snooze. Sure, it’s got two wonderful actors at its core in Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie. And yes, it’s adapted f... Read More.

28 Weeks Later: Apocalypse-du-jour
28 Weeks Later is the inspired sequel to the hit British zombie flick of a few years back, 28 Days Later. While not quite as sharply drawn or gripping as that first film, the new movie does have some substantial charms. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo conc... Read More.

Spiderman 3: Cinema snobs might sneer, but Spidey swings high
While the majority of serious film critics seem to have turned thumbs down on Sam Raimi’s third and latest installment in the Spider Man movie franchise, audiences and populist reviewers have lost none of their enthusiasm for the comic-book flick which constit... Read More.

Disturbia's Arresting Teenage Snoops
Disturbia has been topping the box-office charts for the last two weekends in the big lead-up to the spring blockbusters; Spider Man 3 opens this Friday, sure to end the film’s stratospheric ascendancy. Cleverly marketed as Rear Window for teens, the film’s... Read More.

Thieves Like Us A Classic
One of Robert Altman’s lost 1970s classics has finally resurfaced on DVD. Thieves Like Us, the Kansas-born filmmaker’s depression-era set love story starring Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall, is now out on a low-budget, no-frills home video version from 2... Read More.

Bava Box A Horror Gem
Anchor Bay has done horror film fans a big favour by collecting up five cleaned up versions of the Italian master filmmaker and special effects wizard Mario Bava’s most important films. Dating from the early and mid-1960s, these are some of the most influen... Read More.

Hot Fuzz: A Comic Masterpiece
For most North Americans, Hot Fuzz is just the follow up film to the quirky British zombie comedy Shaun Of the Dead. Little do many audiences suspect - on this side of the pond, at least - that the dreadfully titled Hot Fuzz is an English comic powerhouse, an ... Read More.

The Lives Of Others: Good, But Over-rated
By now, the German film The Lives Of Others has piled up enough awards and accolades to make it one of the most acclaimed international movies of the last few years. And while it’s a solid entry in the long-simmering creative renewal of the German film scen... Read More.

CBC TV to Show Thirty Takes
CBC Television on the East Coast will use the schedule interruptions provided by the NHL Hockey Playoffs to broadcast the hour-long omnibus documentary Thirty Takes: Thirty Years of Independent Filmmaking in Atlantic Canada. Directed by Chuck Lapp and Walte... Read More.

Pathfinder Passes the Comic-to-Screen Test
Pathfinder is the latest entry in the graphic novel to big screen sweepstakes. Like the Spartans vs Persians epic 300, Pathfinder takes off from a basic historical scenario to follow a relentless action-oriented path. The result is surprisingly effective... Read More.

Re-Animator Re-Animated
Renowned horror film director Stuart Gordon has received the deluxe DVD reissue treatment from Anchor Bay for his 1985 camp gore-fest Re-Animator. Gordon is known to Maritimers for shooting a film with Irish actor Stephen Rea in Saint John, New Brunswick, enti... Read More.

Grindhouse: Glorious Cinema Trash
Grindhouse, the long-awaited double-bill collaboration from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, is just about what you’d think it would be: a tribute to and evocation of early-’70s inner-city and drive-in cinema trash. it’s two separate films (Rodriguez’ P... Read More.

Samuel Fuller's 'A Third Face'
There are only a handful of truly great memoirs in the cinema. Chaplin’s My Autobiography is one, going from the Dickensian misery of London’s Poor Houses to the status of an international icon. Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Lantern is another, full of vivid reme... Read More.

The Reaping: Cliches
What Hillary Swank and Stephen Rea are doing in a blustery, Devil-By-Numbers clunker like The Reaping is something only their agents might be able to explain. Stephen Hopkins’ Louisiana-set contemporary supernatural thriller treads some of the same apocalyp... Read More.

Amazing Grace: one of the best historical films of this or any year
Michael Apted’s genuinely moving and informative movie treatise on the struggle to end Britain’s slave trade - titled Amazing Grace after the hymn - is one of the best historical films of this or any year. Centered around the charismatic performance of Ioan... Read More.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley
British director Ken Loach’s latest, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, is one of his most anticipated films. A big winner at last year’s Cannes Awards, the chronicle of two crucial years in the Irish War of Independence and its immediate aftermath in the early ... Read More.

A Treat At The Edge Of Your Seat
Robert Stewart’s environmentally-minded debut feature film Sharkwater has been getting the big push from distributors Alliance Atlantis lately and no wonder. A virtually unclassifiable non-fiction film that starts out as a natural history documentary and th... Read More.

This Fido Really Is A Dog
Andrew Currie’s horror satire Fido is one dead dog of a movie. Filmed in British Columbia with a couple of Americans and one British star, it’s a Canadian film that tries a little too hard to be funny and original. The trouble is, it’s neither. I don’t thin... Read More.

Perfume: An Audacious Epic Indeed
Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer has one of those trailers almost deliberately designed to turn potential audiences off. Emphasizing a rather silly premise - a young Frenchman who has supernatural abilities to sniff fragrances and essence - the preview als... Read More.

HFX Filmmakers Win Trailer Contest
Jason Eisenor and John Davies, of Halifax, won the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino contest to make the best 'Grindhouse' trailer. The decision was made Sunday afternoon in Austin, Texas. Their prize package includes an AVID editing softwear package, alo... Read More.

300: Comic book mythic history on screen
300 has collected an astonishingly snarky set of reviews considering that it is a cinematic adaptation of a graphic novel retelling the heroic events of the Battle of Thermopylae in the 6th century BC. Think comic book. Think classic battle at the outset of... Read More.

Jason Eisner's Off To Austin
Local Filmmaker Jason Eisner and his crew are off to Austin, Texas, for a contest sponsored by legendary low-budget film pioneer Robert Rodriguez. Rodriguez - the director of Spy Kids, El Mariachi and Once Upon A Time In Mexico - along with Quentin Tarantin... Read More.

The Man Who Inspired The Matrix Dies
The post-structuralist theorist whose ideas inspired the sci-fi blockbuster The Matrix has died. Jean Baudrillard passed away on March 6th, 2007. He was born in the Cathedral town of Reims on July 29, 1929. Baudrillard's theories proceeded directly from... Read More.

A Terrifying Zodiac
Zodiac is one of those once-in-a-lifetime films that creates real horror out of the ashes and ruins of everyday life. As scary as Stanley Kubrick’s 1979 masterpiece The Shining, David Fincher’s portrait of three men obssessed by San Francisco’s Zodiac seria... Read More.

Factory Girl Factory Fresh
Factory Girl is one of those films which carries quite a bit of baggage before it even opens. Directed by ‘Mayor of Sunset Strip’ documentarian George Hickenlooper, it’s a portrait of the relationship between New York ‘It’ girl Edie Sedgwick and her artist/pat... Read More.

Black Snake Moan A Southern Gothic Stew
Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan is a picture-perfect example of a problematic second film. The follow-up to the acclaimed - and now, in retrospect, probably over-rated - Hustle And Flow is even more strident and determined than its predecessor, which was no sl... Read More.

Music And Lyrics Gets Off on the Wrong Note
Writer/Director Marc Lawrence’s valentine romance barely made any impact on the heart-weary holiday’s box-office figures. Perhaps that’s because the film - a limp cocktail of musical satire and gooey romance - promises far more than it delivers. Sure, you d... Read More.

Ron Foley Macdonald Picks His Oscar Winners
The Oscars are being overwhelmed by Anna Nicole and Britney. Ironic, of course, that a ceremony contrived to build celebrity is being swamped by celebrities no longer required to do anything more than simply be famous. Still, there’s a curious quietness ... Read More.

US Studios Nix Deal; CTF Foes Knuckle Under
The two disputes plaguing the Canadian Motion Picture sector took strange turns this week. The ACTRA strike--which was about to be solved by a deal between producers and screen actors--was KO'd by American Studios, who objected to the new media provisions.... Read More.

Black actor raised in Nova Scotia became a star in New York
African-American actor Godfrey Cambridge - whose film Cotton Comes To Harlem plays at the Dalhousie Art Gallery Tuesday, February 20 at 5:00pm - grew up in Sydney, Nova Scotia, before heading to New York City to follow a career in acting and stand-up comedy. ... Read More.

NS Flick Sparks Berlin Bidding War
The Nova Scotia-shot feature film Poor Boys Game has apparently sparked an international bidding war in Berlin. The film--distributed by Seville Pictures in Canada--has generated so much excitement at a screening at the Berlin Film Festival that internatio... Read More.

Deal In ACTRA Strike
A tentative deal has been struck between the Canadian Motion Picture Actors Union (ACTRA) and Canadian producers. While a few glitches have yet to be worked out and union members must vote on the deal, a resolution to the dispute - ongoing since January 8th in... Read More.

ACTRA Talks Break Off
According to a report in Saturday's Toronto Globe and Mail, talks between Canadian motion picture producers and the country's film actor's union have broken off. The lead negotiator for the producers has left the country for a commitment at the Berlin Film Fes... Read More.

ThinkFilm Sale Strands Canuck Flicks
The sale of the Canadian/American film distributor ThinkFilm has left up to 15 Canuck feature films in limbo. Sold late last fall, a US company bought out and eliminated the company's Canadian operations. Films that qualified for tax credits and Canadian Te... Read More.

Fights Over CTF Ramp Up
Quebecor chief Pierre Karl Pelardeau has intensified the rifts tearing apart the Canadian Television Fund (CTF) by launching a defamation lawsuit against Radio Canada vice president Sylvain Lafrance for allegedly stating that Pelardeau was ‘acting like a hooli... Read More.

Last Sin Eater Is Pretty Tasty
The Last Sin Eater is an example of the fascinating proliferation of faith-based filmmaking that has been flourishing in the wake of Mel Gibson’s box office monster The Passion Of The Christ. Earnest and low-budget, this would be an indie sleeper if it did... Read More.

Oh! What A Lovely War
Oh! What A Lovely War has finally arrived on DVD. One of the most unique films about war ever made - adapted from a vastly unconventional stage show conceived by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in Britain during the ‘Angry Young Man’ days - the epic movie b... Read More.

Unpleasant people being very bad to each other
Richard Eyre’s Notes On A Scandal has corralled enough great reviews to make the film a must-see in the busy pre-Oscar season. And while the Judi Dench vehicle is indeed a compelling watch, Notes On A Scandal shares a fatal flaw with screenwriter Patrick Marbe... Read More.

Birth Of Soul Cinema
In the late 1960s the Hollywood Studios - in a belated attempt to deal with the social disruptions of the times - hired three African-American directors to helm black-themed feature productions. This was a first for Hollywood. Previously films aimed at Afr... Read More.

Peter O'Toole's Twilight Masterpiece
Venus is startling, edgy and ultimately very moving film about a very rare subject: age and desire. It may also be the swansong of a very great actor, Peter O’ Toole, who delivers a performance portraying an unusual screen emotion, elegant lechery. It’s marvel... Read More.

TV Fund 'Dead'
The Ottawa Sun contains a tersely worded announcement today (Friday, February 2nd) that the Canadian Television Fund (CTF) is ‘dead’. Quoting Shaw cable executive Ken Stein, the report comes after a Tuesday meeting with Federal Heritage Minister Bev Oda tha... Read More.

Because I Said So
Because I Said So is one of those pieces of cinematic flotsam that oozes out into the exhibition world between the cracks in all the frenzy leading up to the Oscars. A virtually unwatchable meddling mommy flick that ends up a kind of post-feminist King Lear cr... Read More.

Because I Said So
Because I Said So is one of those pieces of cinematic flotsam that oozes out into the exhibition world between the cracks in all the frenzy leading up to the Oscars. A virtually unwatchable meddling mommy flick that ends up a kind of post-feminist King Lear cr... Read More.

Book vs Film: Book Wins
Filmmaker Todd Field’s follow-up to his acclaimed literary adaptation In The Bedroom is an even more ambitious adult drama. This time he’s tackled American satirical novelist Tom Perotta’s 2001 suburban angst 'n-adultery book, Little Children. Perotta is best ... Read More.

NJ In NS?
Norman Jewison Plans Nova Scotia Shoot... Tucked away in a wire article promoting a new DVD version of the classic musical Fiddler On the Roof, famous Canadian film director Norman Jewison announced he’s planning a semi-sequel to his raucous 1966 Cold War com... Read More.

Poor Boy's Game To Berlin
The Nova Scotia film Poor Boy's Game has been invited to the prestigious Berlin Film Festival, one of the most important cinematic celebrations in the world. Starring American icon Danny Glover, Poor Boys Game was shot in Spryfield and Halifax in the spring... Read More.

Pan's Labyrinth
Guillermo Del Toro’s feature fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth is well on its way to becoming the one of the most over-hyped films of 2007. Given a small-scale release at the end 0f 2006 in order to qualify for a Foreign Film Oscar nomination, the movie has now opened w... Read More.

Eastwood's movie 'Letter from Iowa Jima' the lesser of his two war flicks
Clint Eastwood’s companion film to Flags Of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima, has piled up more awards, critical acclaim and box office returns than its narrative mate. It’s a bizarre situation, because while Letters From Iwo Jima is indeed a fine piece o... Read More.

Centre For Art Tapes screens scholarship program films
I know, I know… I’m the art person. I’m supposed to write about stuff that happens in galleries, stuff that gets applied to canvas, stuff that people like to dismiss with an “I coulda done that” sneer. But one thing I haven’t been doing enough of is writ... Read More.

Outlander Wraps
One of the biggest motion picture projects in recent Nova Scotia history has wrapped. Outlander - the Vikings meet Alien flick starring John Hurt and Jim Caviezel - completed some green-screen interior studio work at William F. White studio in early to mid-Jan... Read More.

The Last King Of Scotland
Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland has been piling up some amazing critical notices, and no wonder. It’s an edge-of-your-seat character study of Idi Amin, the ruthless Ugandan dictator seen through the partly fictionalized eyes of his young Scottish p... Read More.

Goth-lite, prep-school junior warlock flick not so bad
By any measure, a film like The Covenant should be terrible. Thrown away on the youth market in first release last September during all that Film Festival Frenzy, and one of the sorry flicks to come out on DVD January 2nd (along with the tragically over-hyped ... Read More.

It's a Dog
Nick Cassavetes Alpha Dog is yet another installment in what has been an exceptionally uneven directing career. Cassavetes is the son of the great American Indie filmmaker John Cassavetes and his imposing actress wife, Gena Rowlands. Cassevetes - Nick that ... Read More.

Adultery and redemption in a stunning landscape
Filmed twice before, The Painted Veil’s late British colonial story of adultery and redemption keeps threatening to fall into fusty Masterpiece Theatre territory. Surprisingly, the film avoids the typical pitfalls of contemporary costume dramas to deliver a... Read More.

When the Levees Broke: Spike Lee's Documentary Masterpiece
Spike Lee’s monumental 4-hour HBO documentary When the Levees Broke comes to DVD with an exra 105 minute disc of out-takes, making for nearly six hours of heart-breaking non-fiction footage on the Hurricane Katrina disaster. It’s an extraordinary, essential... Read More.

The Fountainhead an essential ingredient of Signature Collection
There are already a couple of Gary Cooper DVD collections out, but there’s no question that Warner Home Video’s Signature set is the most significant. Not only does it include his 1941 Howard Hawks-directed 1941 box-office hit Sergeant York - for which he w... Read More.

Accelerated action makes Children of Men harrowing cinema
There have been previews running for Alfonso Cuaron’s Children Of Men since the late summer, but nothing will prepare you for the film’s overwhelming impact. A tightly-wound sci-fi chase story with a relentlessly dour outlook, Children Of Men ditches charac... Read More.

Of the best in movies it was Spike Lee's year
2006 held its best movies for the last few months of the year, piling up an astonishing list of strong entries from October onward. So many, in fact, that some top titles such as Pan’s Labyrinth and Little Children will necessarily spill over into 2007 as ... Read More.

Motown And Broadway Collide; Casualties Reported
When Broadway and Motown collide, it’s not hard to expect a overblown film such as Dreamgirls coming as collatoral damage. Sort of the story of Berry Gordy’s Motown Records - but compressed and rewritten by gay white men - Dreamgirls misses out on the campi... Read More.

The History Boys survives intact in transition to the screen
The hit Alan Bennett theatre piece The History Boys made a quick transition to screen by utilizing the same actors from the London and New York productions. The result may be uneven as cinema, but it more than adequately catches Bennett’s complex, quicksilver ... Read More.

New year could be bleak if film and video crowd can't reach agreement
A dispute between Canada’s fim and television actor’s union and producers is now heading for the brink. ACTRA’s membership has voted for a strike mandate, at perhaps the least advantageous time in the production schedule for hard-pressed thespians. Winter i... Read More.

MacGillivray's Classic Resurfaces
It’s not that much of a leap to say that William D. MacGillivray’s 1987 feature film Lifeclasses is one of the most important Canadian Films ever made. The Newfoundland-born, Nova Scotia-based writer/director has made other films - in 2005 he premiered two ... Read More.

Sword and Sorcery a Stinker
The junior Lord Of the Rings fantasy film Eragon not only seems like a dumbed-down sword-and-sorcery flick, it really is The Hobbit rewritten by a 15-year-old. Adapted from Christopher Paolini’s best-selling book - he was reportedly only 15 years old when h... Read More.

Four Oscar Winners Out of Five
That the Frank Capra Collection should come out so close to the Christmas season when his 1946 classic It’s A Wonderful Life will be playing on millions of small screens across North American adds some irony to these frenzied festive holidays. It’s A Wonder... Read More.

Mel Gibson's Splatterfest Is Must-See Cinema
Co-written, co-produced and directed by Mel Gibson, Apocalypto is one astonishing movie. Astonishing because, for one, it’s in a Mayan dialect with English subtitles; for two, it’s exceptionally violent and very, very gory; and three - surprise, surprise -... Read More.

How Does One Write A Screenplay?
Everyone loves movies. Well, at least most people do anyway. One thing I do feel is overlooked at times, is the brilliance of a good screenplay. Look at all the great movies of the past century; The Godfather, Platoon, Chinatown, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nes... Read More.

This Nova Scotia Story is One of the All Time Great Musicals
Question: What Nova Scotia story has been filmed four times, piling up a total of six Oscars? The answer is Anna and the King Of Siam, the story of Haligonian (and NSCAD - Art College founder) Anna Leonowens’ journey to Thailand in 1862 to tutor the Siamese... Read More.

Bobby is a mixed bag of flat and vivid images
Emilio Estevez spent years trying to turn his script about the day Robert Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in 1968 into a feature film. Now that Bobby is finally onscreen, it seems simultaneously promising and unsatisfying. Estevez, s... Read More.

Indie film shot in Nova Scotia to debut at Sundance
The American independent feature film Snow Angels, shot last winter in Nova Scotia, will have its international debut at the prestigious Sundance Festival in January. Directed by Indie icon David Gordon Green - who is barely 30 but already has a Criterion e... Read More.

Miles Davis Bios Headed For the Big Screen
Following the bizarre Hollywood rule of two movies on the same subject at the same time - whether they be about asteroids threatening the earth, Truman Capote or the legendary runner Steve Prefontaine - there are two Miles Davis bio-pics in the works. The i... Read More.

Surfer Chick Flick Short Wraps
The National Screen Institute Short Film Project ‘Eastern Shore’ has just wrapped its shoot at Laurencetown Beach north of Halifax. The atmospheric drama - about a female surfer faced with life-changing choice when her boyfriend decides to move to the city ... Read More.

Daniel Craig Ups The Ante in Casino Royale
Daniel Craig does indeed make an exciting new James Bond, and Casino Royale is in fact a surprising re-invigoration of the once-flagging cinematic franchise. By taking the story back to its beginning - Casino Royale was the very first James Bond book by Ian... Read More.

France Honours Acadian Filmmaker
Acadian Filmmaker Phil Comeau is the first Nova Scotian ever to be inducted into France’s prestigious Order Of Arts and Letters. The most prominent of Nova Scotian Acadian directors, Comeau has a long and impressive filmography that dates back to the late ... Read More.

Robert Altman left an indelible record of American Theatre in the 80s
Tributes to remarkable American filmmaker Robert Altman have been rushing in from all quarters since his death from liver cancer was announced Tuesday, November 21th. And while many of Altman’s greatest films are getting their full due - Nashville, M.A.S.H.... Read More.

Humphrey Bogart In Halifax! Twice!
The new Humphrey Bogart DVD set from Warners puts the legendary tough-guy film anti-hero in Nova Scotia. Not once but two times. Well, okay, it was only a back lot in Burbank dressed up as Halifax. (Did you think that that Warner Brothers actually shot Casa... Read More.

NS TV Movie Stars Silverstone
The Nova Scotia-shot Hallmark Film Candles On Bay Street will be broadcast on the CBS Network, Sunday, November 26th at 10 pm Atlantic Time. Filmed in Mahone Bay and Halifax in the summer and fall of 2006, Candles On Bay Street is adapted from Maine Writer ... Read More.

Euro-pudding. Global Goulash. It's Babel.
Babel is one those films that seems more a movie that’s good for you than a good movie. Sure, it’s got three separate storylines that straddle the globe. Sure it’s got an impressive international cast who are ace at playing up the mis-communication theme of... Read More.

American distributor picks up Trailer Park Boys - The Movie
Myriad Films, a relatively new, mid-sized company with an impressive list of films, will distribute Mike Clattenburg's Trailer Park Boys - The Movie across the United States sometime next year. The company was and is responsible for art, cult, and exploita... Read More.

Very Funny, But At What Price?
Sasha Baron Cohen’s hit comedy Borat is indeed one of the funniest films to come down the pike in a while. But it is based in a comedy of cruelty, an inhumanity that becomes uglier and uglier the more you think about it. With reports mushrooming that Cohen ... Read More.

Five Key Films with Marlon Brando at his Best
Five Marlon Brando flicks have recently emerged in a single Warners Home Video package of 6 DVDs. They include three of his classics, Mutiny On the Bounty, Julius Caesar, and The Teahouse Of the August Moon, along with the wonderfully bizarre Reflections In A ... Read More.

Sofia Coppola's Moronic New Movie
Sofia Coppola’s Maria Antoinette is one of those films that is so bad you wonder how her earlier efforts turned out so well. The answer could simply be luck. Being the daughter of a legendary filmmaker, Francis Ford Coppola, Sofia’s first flick was a straig... Read More.

The actual magic is performed in The Prestige
Christopher Nolan’s latest feature The Prestige suffers from only one thing. It came out at almost the same time as a very similar - if inferior - turn-of-the-last-century costume drama about magicians (the other film is Neil Burger’s The Illusionist starr... Read More.

Mirren dazzles as docu-drama Queen
Busy British film director Stephen Frears is enjoying one of his biggest hits with the contemporary docu-drama The Queen. Powered by a dazzling performance by Prime Suspect star Helen Mirren, The Queen is a reconstruction of the three months just before, d... Read More.

Clint Eastwood's Instant WWII Classic
Clint Eastwood’s long-awaited Iwo Jima film, Flags Of Our Fathers, hasn’t exactly set the box-office on fire in its first weekend of release. Perhaps the North American public is tired of war, what with images the conflicts from Iraq and Afganistan on the t... Read More.

De Palma's intelligent, stylish and exceptional noir masterpiece
Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia has collected an astonishing amount of bad press since it opened in mid-September. Critics have carped about poor performances, an incoherent script, and a glacial pacing; audiences haven’t exactly been beating down the barric... Read More.

An intelligent and probing Hollywood whodunnit
Except for a deliberately ambivalent ending, Allen Coulter’s LA whodunnit Hollywoodland is just about as intelligent and probing a film can get when it comes to examining the process of fame and stardom. Like L.A. Confidential, Hollywoodland is set in the l... Read More.

One of toughest films ever to come out of Hollywood
Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic film noir Double Indemnity has finally come to DVD. Just released by Universal Home Video as a special 2-disc set, the film can boast of America’s most hard-boiled Pulp Fiction authors on board: original story writer James M. Ca... Read More.

Football Flick Flies High
Cinematographer Ericson Core has emerged with a palpable hit on his hands with Invincible, the true-to-life story of unlikely NFL player Vince Papale and his revival of the moribund Philadephia Eagles during the mid-to-late ‘70s rustbelt recession. While th... Read More.

OutKast's almost musical almost succeeds
Vanity project? Indulgent mess? Musical movie masterpiece? Idlewild is a bit of everything, proving that while the r’n’b/rap duo OutKast have mastered the audio CD format, they have a way to go to conquer the cinema. Still, Andre ‘Andre 3000’ Benjamin and A... Read More.

State Of the Union
Frank Capra’s last truly great film was the oddly overshadowed political morality tale State Of the Union. Released in 1948 and sporting his most impressive cast ever (Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, Van Johnson, Angela Lansbury, Adolf Menjou, Tor John... Read More.

Massive Viking-Alien Shoot For Nova Scotia
Some details have emerged concerning what has been known up to now as ‘The Viking’ shoot in Nova Scotia this summer and fall. The film’s title is Outlander and apparently it's a massive $30 million (Cdn) Sci-Fi costume drama set between 500 and 700 AD. R... Read More.

Little Miss Sunshine shines
Unlike flicks such as Happy, Texas and The Spitfire Grill, the contemporary American ensemble comedy Little Miss Sunshine mostly lives up to its Sundance-generated hype. Terse, tense, and illuminating when it comes to addressing the lopsided aspirations and... Read More.

Five Cool Film Noir Flicks Plus a Documentary
Warner’s third Film Noir Box DVD set might just be its best yet. Five classic titles with a sixth disc made up of a punchy new documentary on Film Noir plus some vintage shorts to fill out the package. This is el primo cinematic stuff. With major directors ... Read More.

An Illusion of a film
Ridley Scott protege Neil Burger’s sophomore feature, The Illusionist - after his curious Blair Witch-like 2002 debut Interview With The Assassin - is a muddled costume drama that strains the very basics of credulity. Setting his story in turn of the centur... Read More.

Halifax filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald nominated for Directors Guild Award
Halifax Filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald has been nominated for a 2006 Directors Guild Award for Best Direction of a Feature Film for his work on “3 Needles – The Director’s Cut”. “3 Needles” tells stories of people changed by the global AIDS pandemic in Africa, ... Read More.

Oliver Stone's Remarkable Return
Oliver Stone’s latest film, World Trade Centre, is a stunning return to form for the maverick American director. After getting bashed for his clumsy - but still surprisingly watchable - historical epic Alexander, Stone is back to remind audiences that, yes... Read More.

Brick: A vision of hard-boiled adolescence
Winner of an 'originality' award at last year's Sundance Festival, Brick is one of those once-in-a-lifetime indie features that miraculously mixes familiar genres -- teen dramas and the hard-boiled whodunnit -- to come up with a shocking blast of the freshest ... Read More.

Nova Scotia's connection to The Man Who Came To Dinner
Buried in Warner Brothers’ Bette Davis Video Collection Box #2 (just released in Canada) is the classic 1942 comedy The Man Who Came To Dinner. A rare, humorous ensemble piece for the legendary Oscar-Winning actress, the film version of The Man Who Came To ... Read More.

Starlets, Selleck and more hot rumours
Those tell-tale plastic yellow location indicators posted on power and telephone polls along Bell Road in Halifax reveal one of the worst-kept secrets on the Nova Scotia motion production scene. Adorned with an elegant drawing of two candles rather than wor... Read More.

Audacious Aussie Western From Nick Cave
The grim-and-grimy Aussie Outback Western flick The Proposition has finally hit town, barely a month before its scheduled DVD release. Don’t let that stop you from seeing this audiacious little art-film on the glorious big screen where it truly belongs. Wri... Read More.

Shyamalan's Suspenseful Comeback
M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady In The Water is a strange, intoxicating film that does not seem to be connecting so well with critics or audiences. That’s a shame, because it’s one of his best films, certainly up there with The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. W... Read More.

Toronto Film Festival to screen two Nova Scotia films
Two Nova Scotia films will be shown at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Writer/directors Camilia Frieberg and Anne Verrall have had their works selected by what is considered North America’s single most important general audience film fe... Read More.

Richard Linklater's Cool Return To Animation
American Indie Icon Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise, Dazed And Confused) has returned to the animated realm he so effectively mined in the marvelous film Waking Life from 2001. This time out the maverick filmmaker has used the same slow-and-jittery rotosc... Read More.

Dan Petrie's Television Masterpiece Restored
Glace Bay-born film director Daniel Petrie ranks as one of the most successful cinema artists ever to emerge from Canada. Yet with so few of his works available on DVD, he’s one of those names that causes many movie fans to ask just what films did this guy dir... Read More.

Altman Directs Last Night Of Live Radio
Robert Altman’s long-awaited cinematic version of Garrison Keillor’s live-radio show the Prairie Home Companion is a curious entry in the great filmmaker’s extraordinary canon. Powered by the thinnest of narratives, it’s a slight, but immensely enjoyable fi... Read More.

Third X-Men Unlucky
X3 has been packing them in for over a week now, the first truly successful North American blockbuster of the summer movie season. The Da Vinci Code scored overseas more so than here in the New World. The man who directed the first two installments in the f... Read More.

So much potential... such a terrible movie
After reading a review here on Infomonkey urging readers to ignore the negative press and go see Art School Confidential, I became horrified at the prospect of people being duped into actually going to see this monstrosity. Do not be fooled. Sure from a dis... Read More.

Trannie Flick Transcends The Flat Look
Duncan Tucker's first foray into directing has yielded one of the all-time great gender-bending flicks. Transamerica tells the tale of a man who is in the last stages of becoming a woman (played with frumpy panache by Felicity Huffman). She/He must make a... Read More.

New Film Czar Declines Job
After a month of meet-and-greets the new feature film czar at Telefilm Canada has declined to take the job. Producer Michael Jenkinson, after signing a contract with Telefilm Head Wayne Clarkson, has returned to work in Hollywood where his best-known projec... Read More.

Zwigoff's Bitter Black Comedy A Blast
Already resisting a raft of rotten -- and competely undeserving -- reviews, Art School Confidential is proving third time lucky for maverick American Indie filmmaker Terry Zwigoff. Having charmed us with his groundbreaking documentary on the curmudgeonly ca... Read More.

Tennessee’s Waltz
May 2nd saw the late American playwright Tennessee Williams get the deluxe treatment. Warner Brothers Home Video released a six-film box of the great Southern dramatist’s most important work, loaded with some surprising and quite substantial extras. With...