Katherine Monk 399 results

Katherine Monk is a former movie critic with The Vancouver Sun and Postmedia News, as well as co-founder of The Ex-Press. She still watches a lot of movies. She can be heard talking about them on CBC Radio, and you can read what she thinks about them here, exclusively in The Ex-Press.

Robert Carlyle boards new train as director

People: Robert Carlyle Robert Carlyle gets back to his Glaswegian roots and takes a bit off the top as a barber with Barbicide on his mind, and a mother who loves a good game of bingo as much as a grisly murder in The Legend of Barney Thomson. By Katherine Monk VANCOUVER, BC – Everyone’s been asking him about Trainspotting 2, but Robert Carlyle has more on his plate than a plan to reprise the role of Begbie in an as-yet-to-be scripted sequel to Danny Boyle’s breakout film about heroin addicts. For the past few years, he’s been living in Vancouver playing Mr. Gold in the successful Disney TV series Once Upon a Time, and before that, he was Dr. Nicholas Rush in the B.C.-shot SGU: Stargate Universe. He says he loves Canada’s west coast. But after making his directorial debut with the Glasgow-shot black comedy Barney Thomson, released in theatres this week, Carlyle says he’s looking at a tough decision somewhere down the road. He may want to hang around town. Even ...

Peanuts, Macbeth, a big whale and an evil car hit home entertainment

Entertainment: @home releases for March 8 Embrace the joy of Snoopy or explore the many faces of man-made evil as Michael Fassbender cuts to the bone in Macbeth, James McAvoy breathes life into Frankenstein and James Brolin tries to stop a killer car   By Katherine Monk We love you, Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie (4/5) The hand-drawn essence of Charles Schulz’s iconic comic strip comes through with flying colors in this gentle transition to digital from Ice Age director Steve Martino. Martino and the animators realized they didn’t need to reinvent the characters for a modern audience by making Charlie Brown look like a human kid, or turn Snoopy into a drooling lump of pixelated fur. They went for the feel of the source material: ever roving between pre-teen daydream, birthday party bliss and existential angst – with an emphasis on the latter, because it’s that quiet ache of looming adulthood that makes Peanuts the pop culture monolith it is. Charlie ...
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London Has Fallen and it can’t get up

Movie review: London Has Fallen Gerard Butler returns as the bulletproof bodyguard who slays terrorists, butchers an American accent and saves the free world before breakfast
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Movie review: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Movie review: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot WTF: What the Tina Fey? It's a feature-length Liz Lemon playing a war correspondent in Afghanistan
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Loved The Danish Girl, Hated Lili

Movie review: The Danish Girl How Alicia Vikander's performance as a wife who loses her husband to another woman proves there's more to being a female than donning silk frocks and fancy shoes

The Ex-Press Oscar Predictions 2016

Movies: Oscars 2016 Our expert guide -- and some good guesses -- about who will win the little man with the gold complexion come curtain time By Katherine Monk Chris Rock is in a hard place. Hosting this year’s Oscars isn’t a task for amateurs who get by on dimples, he’ll need to do an entirely different song and dance and address, and hopefully undress, the diversity issue that continues to ripple through every corner of the industry, putting legendary stars in embarrassing situations. Poor Meryl Streep. You know she’s going to get some zinger about about how “we all come from Africa.” And poor Sylvester Stallone, having to represent Creed as the white guy, and poor Bryan Cranston and Michael Fassbender who handed in spectacular performances as two different brands of genius in Trumbo and Steve Jobs but will not take home the big prize. It was a year of great performances in so-so movies, or at least movies that never fully connected with audiences in the ...
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Movie review: Where to Invade Next

Movie review: Where to Invade Next Michael Moore plays chatty tour guide as he treks through Europe to discover healthy school lunches, free college tuition and - gasp! - women in power!
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Triple 9 shoots in the dark

Movie review: Triple 9 Australian director John Hillcoat gets lost in the shadows of a dirty cop drama that has too many characters and not enough Woody or Winslet
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Gods of Egypt in need of burial

Movie review: Gods of Egypt Director Alex Proyas brings a shallow and distracted superhero style to a story about ancient Egyptian gods in a sibling power struggle -30-

Luke Kirby takes another waltz with romance

People: Luke Kirby He played a problematic brand of Prince Charming in Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz and now Canadian-born Luke Kirby is walking a tightrope of sanity as a bipolar Romeo in Paul Dalio's Touched With Fire   By Katherine Monk He played a pedicab-driving Romeo opposite Michelle Williams in Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, and now he plays a bipolar brand of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Paul Dalio’s Touched With Fire, but if you think Luke Kirby has a thing for playing the problematic prince charming, it’s just optics. The Guelph-raised Kirby is also a regular on the Sundance Channel crime drama Rectify, did several seasons of the Astronaut Wives Club and recently appeared in The Good Wife. And for those who weren’t paying attention to Canadian cinema at the turn of the present century, Kirby starred as the gay son of traditional Italian parents in Emile Gaudrealt’s Mambo Italiano. “Right now, I’d like to work on my tan if I could find the ...