Ed Gass-Donnelly hides a message up his sleeve
#VIFF16: Interview with Ed Gass-Donnelly
The Toronto-based director takes a pry bar to the basement door of family secrets in Lavender, a psychological thriller starring Abbie Cornish, Dermot Mulroney and Justin Long
By Katherine Monk
VANCOUVER – The man who made The Last Exorcism Part II is marked. Ed Gass-Donnelly rolls up his right sleeve in the firelight, and reveals two words written in deep indigo capital letters: “Find Beauty.”
“I’m not doing this to pay the bills,” says the Toronto-born director of Lavender, a psychological thriller unspooling at the Vancouver International Film Festival this week as part of the Altered States program.
“I have to remind myself of that… after making [The Last Exorcism Part II] I think I found new perspective,” he says, sitting back in a leather couch at the Sutton Place lounge.
“I appreciated the experience of coming out on 3000 screens. It was like ‘WOW!’ – 3000 screens at once is what you ...
Cozy, crazy: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Movie review: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Tim Burton returns to his haunted wheelhouse with a melancholy kid's tale about gifted outsiders searching for a sense of family and belonging as the world blows apart
Anthropoid ignores war movie expectations
Movie review: Anthropoid
Sean Ellis's Second World War thriller about the real-life assassination attempt on Nazi henchman Reinhard Heydrich adopts a slightly random, and disarmingly intimate approach to both heroism and history
Star Trek Beyond falls Below the Bar
Movie review: Star Trek Beyond
Justin Lin revs the Enterprise's perpetually over-heated engines but Star Trek Beyond orbits a familiar universe without reflection
Honest emotion makes Gleason a must-see
Movie review: Gleason
Sports movies demand a whole lot of heart, but this documentary about a former NFL'er diagnosed with ALS captures the whole body of the human experience
Just the end of the world another soap on steroids
Movie review: Juste la fin du monde
The latest effort from Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan plays to the auteur's favourite themes: moms, gay sons and simmering family dramas that will not be denied - or else!
A bad case of Storkholm Syndrome
Movie review: Storks
Andy Samberg headlines an all-star cast but this cartoon outing from the man who wrote Zoolander 2 holds the viewer captive to a bird-brained premise
The Lovers & The Despot a bizarre thriller
Movie review: The Lovers & the Despot
Documentary tells how a South Korean movie star and a director were kidnapped by North Korea's autocratic leader to help kick start his nation's film industry
Lawren Harris resurrected on screen
#VIFF16: Peter Raymont and Nancy Lang on Lawren Harris
The Group of Seven founder rides a wave of rediscovery with the bow of a revealing and personal Harris documentary from Peter Raymont and Nancy Lang that gives the viewer a portal into the painter's time
Feeding the mind with a good book and a head of cabbage
Recipe: Red Split Lentils with Cabbage
Cabbage may not get the same respect as other 'it-legumes' such as kale and continental chard, but the humble head is a superfood, too, and cooked up with split red lentils, it's an easy way to stew goodness
By Louise Crosby
One thing I’ve come to appreciate since retiring from the workforce two years ago is the Ottawa Public Library, or the OPL. What a resource. What I most love is the option to reserve, to get in line for a particular publication. It may seem dispiriting to be number 143 in the line-up, but things move quickly and before you know it, the book is yours for three whole weeks. Free! It does happen that books become available all at once, in a big wave, and there’s no way you can read them all in the allotted time, but life is like that and you just get back in line again.
What books am I reading? I just started The Edge of the Empire: A Journey to Britannia, in which the author, Bronwen Riley, takes us on a trip from ...