Reviews
The Middle East is an unlikely setting for romance in the quirky fishing comedy Salmon Fishing in the Yemen directed by Lasse Hallström. Strong performances from the all-star cast help the film overcome its moments of weakness, resulting in an often funny but convoluted romantic comedy. Dr. Alfred “Fred” Jones (Ewan McGregor) is a cocky fisheries scientist approached by representative Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt) to start up a salmon fishing project in the middle of the Yemen. Her client, a Yemeni sheikh, is quite fond of fly-fishing and wishes to bring his favourite pastime to his home country. At first...
Unfolding like your average sitcom, Jennifer Westfeldt’s Friends with Kids is a formulaic and predictable attempt to capture the complicated relationship changes that come when your social circle starts having kids.
Late thirty-something pals Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott) enter into a pact to share in raising a child with no romantic entanglements in an attempt to avoid the pitfalls their formerly fun but now married-with-kids endure. Essentially treating their kid like a time-share property......
Director Volker Heise brought together over 80 different directors and camera crews to record for a full 24 hours in Berlin on Friday, September 5, 2008. Over 700 hours of footage was then edited to form one 24-hour-long film, entitled 24 Hours Berlin, which chronicles a day in the life of the iconic city. The Goethe Institut will be bringing two separate 3-hour segments of the film to TIFF Bell Lightbox on March 12, 2012 and March 14, 2012....
John Carter, the new 3D epic from Disney, is the story of John Carter (played by the ironically-named Taylor Kitsch), a bitter former military captain who finds himself transported to Mars, or "Barsoom" as the natives call it. All John Carter wants to do is mine a cave of gold on Earth, but when he meets the captivating Princess Dejah Thoris of Helium (Lynn Collins) and the four-armed giant warrior creature Tars Tarkas......
Battle Royale (2000) was part of my introduction to the cinema of Japan. A brutal and bloody tale of a high school class forced to fight against each other until only one person remains, it’s a film that handles subject matter we wouldn’t normally see in North American movies, and now is your chance to catch it on the big screen. On March 2, the director’s cut of Battle Royale will be screening at The Projection Booth as part of Fangoria’s Fright Nights....
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia… a large group consisting of police, public officials, military and civilian workers were led through a dark, Turkish desert by a man accused of murder. They were in search of the buried body of his victim – only he couldn’t remember exactly where he placed it. So they trek blindly through the desolate land, stopping at the slightest recognition of a landmark only to discover it’s similar to a place marker that can be found further up the road. The search continues to be fruitless and tensions rise as the night grows longer. But...
Fatal Pictures, a Toronto-based film production company founded by Zach Green and Richard Powell, unleash their most disturbing film to date with Familiar. Robert Nolan stars as John Dodd, a husband and father who can’t stand his family. He dreams of the moment when he can escape, but begins to think that his increasingly disturbing thoughts aren’t really his own. Fright Nights at the Projection Booth will host the world premiere of this short film on March 2, along with their screening of Battle Royale....
In Rampart, Woody Harrelson stars as a corrupt officer Dave Brown in the LAPD that lays out his own form of rough-justice, or at least he thinks he does. Dave thinks of himself of mix of John Wayne and Dirty Harry, but the reality of his personality and his world is really something else in this new film by director Oren Moverman premiering at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. ...
There are two things you hear when people talk about Act Of Valor. The first is that it is Call Of Duty: the movie. The second is that it is a 2-hour propaganda film. Unfortunately, this film doesn’t succeed at being either. Directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh employed actual service men in the movie and used live ammunition and explosives to promote what we expected to be the most realistic dramatization of what the men and woman in the armed forces really do. The problem with this isn’t the anticipated poor acting; it was the surprisingly dull action sequences....
Doppelgänger Paul has an undeniably intriguing premise: Karl (Tygh Runyan), a strange and lonely man, becomes convinced that Paul (Brad Dryborough), another strange and lonely man, is his exact replica. This is, of course, clearly not true, since the characters are played by two actors that hardly resemble each other and behave quite differently. But the film’s point is well-made: Karl and Paul are basically united in a particular kind of loneliness in their worlds, and the absurdist premise ends up delivering a pretty touching friendship comedy in which the two guys help each other out with some warmth and...
Writer/director Rohan Fernando explores loss, love, and finding your place in the world with Snow. When Parvati’s (Kalista Zackhariyas) family is killed in the 2004 South Asian tsunami, she must move to Halifax to live with relatives. She struggles to become accustomed to her new life in Canada while dealing with such a tragic and traumatic experience, but she eventually finds friends in unlikely places along the way....
