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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.

Three movies that helped me understand terrorism

Brazil, The Green Prince and Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam If movies are empathy machines, can they help us understand the incomprehensible reality of intentional violence against the innocent masses? Veteran film critic Katherine Monk says maybe, and offers a list of titles that helped her gain a better understanding of the big picture. By Katherine Monk A drunk man reels backward in a burka as the random thump of a bass drum ricochets through the basement walls, sweating from the heat of writhing humanity. “This one is called Sharia Law in the USA!,” screams the shirtless, bearded man on the mike. “I am an Islamist! I am the Anti-Christ!!” It’s a scene from the 2009 Omar Majeed documentary Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, a film that didn’t make much of an impression the first time I watched it, but something pulled me back to the movie about young, thoroughly westernized Muslim men who found a sense of tribal belonging in a form of vocal and violent ...
3Score

The Secret in Their Eyes lacks vision

Julia Roberts removes makeup in U.S. remake The Oscar-winning film from Argentina gets an American reboot with the help of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nicole Kidman and the star of Pretty Woman, but director Billy Ray fails to craft the chaos in a meaningful way
2.5Score

The Night Before leaves blurry impression

Superbad with seasonal wrapping Seth Rogen, Anthony Mackie and Joseph Gordon-Levitt rip a page from Charles Dickens and Timothy Leary in a well-intended holiday comedy that would have been Scrooged if not for Michael Shannon's performance as angelic weed dealer
4Score

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 offers less magic

Katniss still kicks ass as dramatic scope broadens You can almost feel director Francis Lawrence stiffening up as he approaches the finish line, eager to break the tape without falling down in the last mile. The goofiness and the spontaneity are gone, replaced by an official sense of duty, as Jennifer Lawrence loads her bow and fires an arrow into the abyss of adulthood in Hunger Games finale.  
4Score

Movie review: Brooklyn is bittersweet nostalgia

Saoirse Ronan gives a remarkable performance as a young Irish girl who grows up when she goes to New York City in the 1950s to start a new life
4Score

Movie review: Remember a moving drama

Atom Egoyan's new movie Remember — about an aging Holocaust survivor plotting revenge — is a moving and surprising feat of storytelling, and featuring a great performance

Emory Cohen finds his inner Tony

The young co-star of Brooklyn says he was inspired by his colourful New York City uncles in creating the role of the gentle plumber who courts Saoirse Ronan By Jay Stone TORONTO — Emory Cohen is explaining how he creates characters in his movies. Stealing has a lot to do with it. For instance, for his role in the melancholy love story Brooklyn — in which he plays Tony, a 1950s Italian plumber in love with a lonely Irish immigrant named Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) — Cohen was inspired by Marlon Brando’s working-class character in the drama On The Waterfront, as well as the naturalistic performances in the Italian neo-realist classic The Bicycle Thief. “That’s what I do,” Cohen says. “I basically steal ideas from different performances and try to take on little bits and do it in an Emory Cohen kind of way and see what happens.” What happened in Brooklyn, which is based on a novel by Colm Toibin, is a bit of throwback magic. Tony is an unusual kind of movie ...
4Score

Spotlight’s tarnished details make it shine

The real story behind a Pulitzer-winning series Director Tom McCarthy creates cinematic tension by setting two institutions on a collision course as the Catholic Church and The Boston Globe wrestle arrogance and ego while professing human compassion    

You can vote on climate films

Young filmmakers from around the world enter festival of short movies about the environment shot on mobile devices By Jay Stone There’s a film from France in which a man in horror mask chops down a tree — but it’s really a young girl. There’s an Indian movie that illustrates the coming crisis by showing the hands of a person paying more and more money for smaller and smaller bottles of water, until, a few decades from now, there’s none left. There’s a British film about a man who becomes so irritated by the “mad prophet” of climate change that he kills him, only to discover that he has in fact killed the very air he breathes. They’re all part of the Mobile Film Festival, a competition that challenged young filmmakers from around the world to make one-minute movies about climate change on their mobile devices. The organizers received 765 movies from 70 countries, and winnowed them down to 75 finalists. It’s an official event of COP21, the Paris conference ...
2.5Score

Movie review: The 33 trapped in a cave-in

The story of the 2010 Chilean mine disaster is told with many familiar beats and with an international cast that doesn't always fit together