Quentin Tarantino, the only contemporary director of a blaxploitation film, a samurai movie and a Nazi revenge fantasy, baptizes his audiences in blood, rebirthing them through vengeance. But what’s most fascinating about Tarantino’s latest three films – Inglorious Bastards, Django…
TIFF Announces 2015’s Top 10 Canadian Films
Underfed, neglected, and trapped: Canadian films are like inmates in a prison where the guards, institution and funding agency, don’t care about their well-being. Overshadowed by our southern neighbors, and unprotected by box-office levies or content regulations, there is rarely…
Images And Identities: Top 5 Uses Of Mirrors In 2015
Mirrors and their reflections are a complex signifier in cinema, a visual tool used to dramatize framing, while, also, a symbol of vanity, image, and identity. Influenced by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, there is a tradition in film theory that…
Movie Review: ‘The Revenant’
After directing Birdman, last year’s Best Picture winner, Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu returns with a survival tale set against the backdrop of American colonialism as settlers try to claim the land and civilize the “savages” that inhabit it. Leonardo DiCaprio, who does not…
Movie Review: ‘A Royal Night Out’
A period piece about Princess Elizabeth and her younger sister Margaret is one of the wildest, most bizarre and confounding films of the year – an equal mix of Disney princess fare, screwball comedies, old musicals, and also Superbad (without…
Terrence Malick’s Knight Of Cups Has A New Trailer
From the expanse of the Badlands, to the naturally lit wheat fields on an industrialized farm, Terrence Malick has made some of the most visually arresting, soul-stirring, and thematically profound films ever made. In recent years, Malick has shifted his…
Movie Review: ‘Victor Frankenstein’
Do you prefer your Franken-shteened or shtined? I’m more a “shteener” than a “shtiner,” but Paul McGuigan’s confused Victor Frankenstein is neither Mel Brooks parody nor classic gothic horror. The film shifts between tones without satisfying either connotation of these…
