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Jay Stone and Katherine Monk movie reviews and profiles. Movies new to streaming / DVD.
Reviews of Canadian movies and filmmaker profiles by Katherine Monk and Jay Stone.

Southside With You takes rom-com in new direction

Film: Sundance Film Festival Movie about Barack and Michelle Obama's first date takes the frame off the official portrait to paint a tender picture of two people falling in love By Katherine Monk PARK CITY, UT — There’s a good chance this year’s Sundance Film Festival will be defined by a larger, and perhaps more honest, discussion about race in America. And if it is, we can look at Richard Tanne’s debut feature Southside With You as a beautiful example of a paradigm shift. It’s not just an accessible romance starring two rising African-American stars in Tika Sumpter and Parker Sawyers, it’s a fictionalized take on the first date between would-be First Lady Michelle Robinson and a young Harvard law student named Barack Obama. We knew the two met at a corporate law firm. We knew she was his advisor. And we knew she wasn’t eager to get involved with a junior, fearing it would erode her professional edge and play into white expectation. The rest became the ...

Redford defends Sundance’s record on diversity

Film: Sundance Film Festival 2016 Sundance Film Festival founder Robert Redford says the whole reason he started programming films in Utah's Wasatch Mountains was to broaden the world of mainstream filmmaking to include other voices. By Katherine Monk PARK CITY, UTAH - It used to be called an “Oscar race.” Now it’s all about race and the Oscars. It’s an issue that’s settled into the tissue of the film industry like a bad infection, threatening to throw the whole system into sepsis, and prompting a wholesale change to the way the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences functions as an organization. Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs announced new initiatives Friday, hoping to stop the growing momentum behind a celebrity boycott, assuring the public the Academy membership would look a lot different by the year 2020, with more representation from non-white males, and more women. Even here at the Sundance Film Festival, where the mountain air and a host of ...
1Score

Dirty Grandpa leaves a stain

Movie review: Dirty Grandpa Robert De Niro and Zac Efron hit the road, and rock bottom, in this grotesquely sexist and vulgar attempt at comedy that uses crack and pedophilia as fodder.

Ten Sundance titles that tweak our critical antenna

Film: The 2016 Sundance Film Festival This year's festival includes a testament to Kristen Stewart's continuing career in art house cinema, Don Cheadle tooting his own horn as Miles Davis and one movie about a wiener dog, and another about a dog named Weiner. By Katherine Monk The festival kicks off in earnest later today with Robert Redford's annual press conference, but before the press corps gets pressed together and becomes a blurb-spouting Borg, I made a list of ten standout titles that may, or may not, get mileage when it's all over: Captain Fantastic: Viggo Mortensen plays a father who’s raised six kids off the grid, and — for reasons as yet unknown — is forced to plug back in the world he left behind. Certain Women: Kelly Reichardt is a true independent who embodies the Sundance ethos, and she returns with Certain Women, an adaptation of Maile Meloy’s short stories that stars Michelle Williams, Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone. Complete ...
3.5Score

Talking ’bout my, my vag-g-g-ina

Home Entertainment: Amy Schumer - Live at the Apollo The world's hottest comic brings a whole new world of oppression to the stage of the legendary Apollo Theatre for her first standup special on HBO  
3.5Score

A direct hit to the head of the NFL

Movie review: Concussion Thanks to a cast that's just as comfortable with comedy as drama, Peter Landesman's forensic examination of the NFL's inaction on head injuries is more than a preachy lesson in institutional denial, it's a gentle testament to the importance of human compassion  
4Score

Metaphysics on a small scale

Movie review: Anomalisa Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson create an existential nightmare that lets the viewer play god while the human comedy looks smaller, and more magical, than ever  
4Score

The Revenant is raw tension

Movie review: The Revenant Leonardo DiCaprio undergoes a horrendous series of trials — including that famous bear attack — in Alejandro G. Inarritu's masterful tale of survival
2Score

The Forest gets lost walking in circles

Movie review: The Forest Natalie Dormer takes a long walk in a forest full of strange fruit in Jason Zada's Japanese take on Little Red Riding Hood  
3Score

Movie review: The Joy of capitalism

A woman invents a miracle mop and finds herself knee-deep in screwball dysfunction in David O. Russell's uneven fable about working-class America