From the category archives:

DVD

Grin and Bear It

A new perspective on the 2012 Genie Award winner for Best Picture, Monsieur Lazhar

by Sarah Fletcher
22.03.2012

An Algerian teacher bandages the emotional wounds of traumatized elementary school students and faces his own demons. Set in Montreal, Monsieur Lazhar is a decent two hours, although the deified teacher bit gets old. Movie-goers apparently have an insatiable appetite for ass-kicking public school educators.

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DVD

Seasonal Affections

Another Year, DVD

by Jim Burke
24.06.2011

In Another Year, Mike Leigh’s latest Oscar-nominated drama, Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent’s long-married couple are called Tom and Gerri. But their marriage has none of the comical antipathy their names might suggest. They live happily

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DVD

Stripped and Scary

Burlesque, DVD

by James Gartler
14.05.2011

Despite what you may have heard, the problem with Burlesque isn’t so much that Christina Aguilera acts in it. Truth is, this was the ideal film project for the vocal powerhouse and provocateur: a sexy musical in the style of her throwback album Back to Basics, co-starring another singer who made the crossover into acting [...]

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DVD

Froggie Feature Fun – Warts And All

The Princess and the Frog

by James Gartler
02.04.2010

The Princess and the Frog is the most significant Disney film of the past decade. Not only does it mark the Mouse House’s return to traditional 2D animation some four years after Home on the Range‘s failure saw them abandoning the medium, it also features a multi-racial cast and African American lead – firsts for [...]

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DVD

Explosive Pain

The Hurt Locker

by Carol Krenz
06.03.2010

Director Kathryn Bigelow is into metaphors big time. The Hurt Locker, her Oscar-worthy film’s title, can mean any number of things – a dangerous physical space, or a wounding of the mind. It might also refer to what Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) keeps in his foot locker – the detonators he’s risked life [...]

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DVD

The Beauty of Godless Angst

Creation

by Sarah Fletcher
10.02.2010

“Supposing nothing mattered. Not love, not trust, not faith, not honour. Only brute survival,” muses Charles Darwin in Creation. Darwin, acted by Paul Bettany, is all too conscious of the existential anxieties provoked by On the Origin of Species. 150 years following its publication, the topic of the film was even controversial enough that its [...]

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DVD

In Search Of Happy Endings

Ally McBeal, Complete Set

by James Gartler
29.12.2009

“To me, the true meaning of Christmas has always been Santa … you’re allowed to believe in something you know doesn’t exist.” Sad, but oh so true. Life is filled with a great many illusions. Thankfully, we’ve arrived at the one time of year when clinging to them isn’t only accepted, but celebrated. It also [...]

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DVD

The Silence Of Discontinuity

Summer Hours

by Carol Krenz
04.12.2009

Funny that Edvard Munch’s The Scream springs to mind under the caress of director Olivier Assayas’ gentle film, Summer Hours (L’heure d’été) – but, it does. Its ghostly alarm provokes a universal lament for the disposable society we have become. With each successive scene, the inaudible noise grows louder, finding no escape through mannerly tears [...]

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DVD

Cynic’s Guide to Italian Politics

Il divo: La straordinaria vita di Giulio Andreotti

by Zornitsa Staneva
19.08.2009

Paolo Sorrentino’s film Il Divo is the opposite of refreshing. In fact, it proves more of a cynicism-inducing boost to preconceptions about political life in general, and its chaotic Italian manifestation in particular. Viewers unfamiliar with the minutiae of 1970s-to-1990s Italian political history may focus on the surreal shape of Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti’s ears. [...]

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DVD

Face Launches Masterpiece

Ce qu’il faut pour vivre

by Leonard Eichel
25.06.2009

It would be hubris indeed to proclaim the iconic status of one particular film but Ce qu’il faut pour vivre (The Necessities of Life) comes awfully close to fulfilling the role as a masterpiece of Canadian cinema. The ingredients for modern drama are there: two cultures colliding, ignorance and bigotry as the starting point for [...]

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