Hotel Mumbai opens ornate doors on an unholy nightmare
Movie review: Hotel Mumbai
The 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai resulted in the deaths of more than 170 people. Yet, until director Anthony Maras decided to dramatize the event in what proves a breathless two hours, the full dimensions of the tragedy never seemed to hit home.
Lion has a big roar
Movie review: Lion
The true story of Saroo Brierley's quest for his ancestral home finds an epic scale through intimate, emotionally compelling scenes and standout performances from a top-notch ensemble
Jay Stone picks his TIFF16 ponies
Movies: #TIFF16
The Toronto International Film Festival offers 400 film titles, two Ryan Gosling movies, a Denis Villeneuve Arrival and if you're lucky, free chips
By Jay Stone
There are many things to look forward to at the Toronto International Film Festival, including that party they have every year to celebrate Canadian cinema where they hand out bags of potato chips and chocolate bars, although this year I hear they’re not having the chocolate bars. But we soldier on. Getting through a film festival requires a certain amount of self-sacrifice.
And oh yes: the films. There are about 400 of them here, and if you play your cards right, you can see a couple of dozen and still have time to pick up enough bags of complimentary potato chips to get you through to lunch, although some chocolate bars would have been a nice addition. You know. For dessert.
Where was I? Right: the films. Here, in no particular order, are some that I’m looking forward to.
Arrival
A sci-fi film ...
The Man Who Knew Infinity goes beyond cliché
Movie review: The Man Who Knew Infinity
A paint-by-numbers picture of genius still finds a lot of soul thanks to the determined presence of Dev Patel and the timeless talents of Jeremy Irons
Chappie reboots best bits of Blade Runner, Robocop
Droidful!
A hacked version of Robocop, Chappie takes place in the not-too-distant future, when violent crime has gone viral and police resources are too stretched to contain the chaos.
By Katherine Monk
Infused with ambient paranoia, apocalyptic imagery and an overall sense of social collapse, Neil Blomkamp’s movies operate in a familiar science-fiction setting, but they feel significantly different from Hollywood spectacle.
Where the likes of Lucas and Spielberg find ways of affirming all-American value systems through hero-centric stories, Blomkamp doesn’t seem at all interested in themes of god and country.
If anything, the South African filmmaker (who makes his home in Vancouver) focuses on the opposite: He ignores the grand rhetoric of the visible and the valued in an effort to hear the slang of the common folk.
In his brilliantly bleak feature debut, District 9, Blomkamp re-invented the alien invasion theme by weaving it into Apartheid metaphor, ...
