Widows buries thriller formula and finds female power
#OscarCheck2018
Movie Review - Widows
Steve McQueen's follow-up to 12 Years a Slave is a female-driven heist film based on a beloved British TV series. For most directors, making a genre thriller would put them out of Oscar contention. But the award-winning McQueen isn’t your average director, and in the wake of #MeToo, Widows could still blow things wide open.
Papillon escapes a gritty chrysalis with little flutter
Movie review: Papillon
Charlie Hunnam looks a little like the late Steve McQueen, which makes comparisons to the 1973 Frank Schaffner classic harder to ignore, and Hunnam’s task all the more challenging as he’s forced to escape an island of fortified expectations.
My Cousin Rachel Cinches Blood Ties
Movie Review: My Cousin Rachel
Rachel Weisz performs a dance of several veils as Roger Michell revisits Victorian archetype through a psychologically modern lens
Ghost in the Shell shows off Johansson’s muscle
Movie Review: Ghost in the Shell
The woman who plays Black Widow packs a punch and a few roundhouse kicks as Major, the police robot with a human brain and a big metaphysical question in this detailed homage to the Japanese original
Sense of an Ending eludes closure
Movie Review: The Sense of an Ending
In the film version of the ambiguous Julian Barnes novel, Jim Broadbent shines as an older man whose quiet life is interrupted by a letter that makes him re-evaluate the past
Inferno: To Hell and Back
Movie review: Inferno
Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones get lost in a sea of attractive scenery and classical references in Ron Howard's decryption of Dante's Divine Comedy
An okay film, Unless you read the book
Movie review: Unless
This disappointing film adaptation of Carol Shields' final novel turns a meditation on who we are into a melodramatic puzzle with a conventional solution
On American Pastoral and Canadian Shields
Movies: #TIFF16 American Pastoral press conference
Ewan McGregor's adaptation of Phillip Roth's novel points out the problems in bringing internal narrative to the big screen, but the actor-turned director faced the same challenge as those who braved the work of Carol Shields
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — Here’s something pretty interesting: in the Carol Shields book Unless (now a motion picture at the Toronto International Film Festival), a sensitive teenage girl sees a monk setting himself on fire and is inspired to drop out of society and become a mute beggar in front of Honest Ed’s discount emporium in Toronto. In the Philip Roth novel American Pastoral (also a movie at TIFF), a sensitive teenage girl sees a monk setting himself on fire and is inspired to drop out of society and become a domestic terrorist.
This tells us something about Canada and the United States — or perhaps just something about Carol Shields and Philip Roth, and about the film industry in general. ...