Jay Stone 92 results

Jay Stone has been a fixture in Canadian media for decades, and one of the most beloved movie critics in the country. He worked at the Ottawa Citizen and Postmedia News service until he retired.

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Movie review: The Jesus Rolls is a sad spin-off

In this remake of a French movie, John Turturro revisits his Big Lebowski character, but can't find any of the originality or charm    

Jay Stone’s Top 10 movies of 2019

(Along with one honourable mention and one movie that every one else loved conspicuous by its absence) By Jay Stone   Here are my favourite movies of 2019, in alphabetical order:   Honeyland: An amazing documentary, filmed in Macedonia, about a female beekeeper who lives with her ailing mother in rocky isolation, and harvests honey in a way compatible with her deep understanding of the life of bees. This hard-scrabble harmony is disrupted by a family of raucous nomads who move next door. The result is a galvanizing drama about society, greed, culture and, well, bees.   Gloria Bell: Sebastián Lelio’s remake of his own 2013 Spanish-language movie Gloria stars Julianne Moore as a divorcee who assuages her loneliness at dance clubs, and John Turturro as the constricted man who falls for her. The final scene, with the magnificent Moore dancing to the titular disco hit, is one of the great cinematic shouts of joy of the year.   Jojo Rabbit: New ...
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Movie review: Uncut Gems is a boisterous jewel

Adam Sandler stars as a hyperkinetic gambler in this New York City drama about gambling that perfectly captures the anxiety of the city  
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Movie review: MARGARET ATWOOD A Word after a Word after a Word is Power

This documentary examines how a Canadian literary icon went from being a much-heralded writer to becoming the prophet of dystopia in a post-Trump world

Movie review: Honeyland is a parable of capitalism

Documentary about a beekeeper in Macedonia takes an intimate look at what happens when neighbours move in and see the profits that can be made

Tiff 2019 finds its controversy in Jojo Rabbit

A young boy in Nazi Germany turns for moral guidance to a fantasy figure of Adolf Hitler in this satire that has sharply divided critics By Jay Stone   TORONTO — Film festivals need movies that people can argue about, and the Toronto film festival has been blessed with a good one: Jojo Rabbit, a comedy set in Nazi Germany. Some people, including half of the representatives of Ex-Press.com, argue that it’s juvenile, and in bad taste, and — worst of all — not funny. Others, including the other half of Ex-Press.com staff, think it’s bold, original and filled with laughs.   And we’re not the only ones. The aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes gives it a favourable rating in the 70s, but the opinions are wildly divergent, from raves (“a triumph. A film of sophisticated brilliance and humour:” Jason Gorber, HighDef Digest) to pans (“conventional, lazy and incredibly irresponsible filmmaking:” Jordan Ruimy, World of Reel.)   Personally, I ...

The movies of TIFF 2019, but not all of them

You don't always get to see a whole movie at a film festival, but sometimes what you do see is enough, Jay Stone discovers By Jay Stone   TORONTO — Another thing that happens at film festivals is that you don’t see a whole movie because maybe you had to leave to get to another theatre for an even more important film, or because it’s late and you have to get some sleep or you’ll pass out, or because it’s late and you do pass out right there in the cinema and the nice lady next to you has to poke you in the ribs because it turns out you were snoring. You can actually follow a movie this way — often you hear enough dialogue that you dream it — unless it’s a foreign film, in which case you jerk yourself awake and you’re not sure where you are and it takes a few seconds for your eyes to focus enough to read the subtitles.   This is part of the reason that professional film criticism is a young person’s game, or at least an awake person’s ...

All the mothers of TIFF 2019

There are many problems for mothers in this year's Toronto film festival movies, but Jay Stone finds that his real-life mother is still going strong By Jay Stone   TORONTO — The other night I played hooky from the Toronto film festival to have dinner with my mother, who lives in north Toronto. She’s 97, but she’s in terrific shape. She works out every day at the gym, and, as she tells it, the people at the retirement home are less amazed by the fact that she can still get down to stretch on the Pilates ball than they are by the fact that she can get back up.   This gives me a tremendous genetic advantage in life: Robert Benchley once wrote that one of the keys to a long life is to keep one’s parents alive, at gunpoint if necessary. It also gives me a huge edge over a lot of people in movies at the festival, many of which feature plots revolving around mothers who have just died, although they continue to haunt their offspring with varying dramatic ...

Beautiful day in the Oscarhood: Academy Award hopes of TIFF

The Toronto film festival features several movies that could be in the discussion for this year's top movie awards, Jay Stone writes By Jay Stone   TORONTO — The Toronto film festival is known as a launching pad for Oscar movies. Here are a few of the early contenders.   A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The re-evaluation of Fred Rogers — from figure of fun in a thousand parodies of his children’s program to American hero in a famous Esquire magazine article to secular sainthood in the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? — continues in this movie that’s actually based on that Esquire article. Tom Junod, an investigative journalist, was assigned in 1998 to do a short profile of Rogers (Tom Hanks) and emerged with a 10,000-word cover story that painted him as an unexpected wise man, a life coach whose simple wisdom could heal fractures of the heart. It was as if Being There had come to life as a puppet show for children.   In this ...

TIFF 2019: When the theme is the theme

Movies: #TIFF19 Jay Stone discovers that you can go from dance to geriatric sex at the Toronto film festival, with barely time for a refreshing doughnut By Jay Stone TORONTO — One of the secrets of formerly professional film criticism (I can now reveal) is to find a common theme around which you can elucidate your theories of the creative imagination. The good news is, if a common theme doesn’t occur to you, you can always make one up because who cares really? So it was the other day that I saw a 3-D movie about dance and a black-and-white drama about geriatric sex, then attended a lunch party that was so jammed with loud freeloaders that I could barely get to the dessert table for a second doughnut. What do these things have in common?, I asked my daughter, who got me into the party because she knows a guy who knows a guy. “Three things you don’t like,” she ventured, which is a pretty good guess. But it’s a daughter guess. I actually liked the party, especially ...