Skate Kitchen slices, dices dude culture
Movie Review: Skate Kitchen
Crystal Moselle’s follow-up to The Wolfpack returns the viewer to the margins of New York City, this time in fictional form as we hook up with some real-life skateboarders who kick-flip chick stereotype.
Tim Wardle’s life changed at the hands of Three Identical Strangers
People: Interview with documentary director Tim Wardle
When he first heard the story of triplets separated at birth and placed in different families, British director Tim Wardle knew it should be a movie. He didn’t know others had tried, and hit a wall of orchestrated silence. His new documentary takes us inside a secret ‘Twin Study’ and the shocking experience of three unwitting subjects.
The Protest Movie: Medium Cool Gets Medium Hot
On Film: Activist documentary, embedded journalism at DOXA 2018
An explosion of activist filmmaking means a variety of issues are getting their closeup on the big screen. But are these new forms of non-fiction “protest movies” changing our minds, or changing our understanding of truth? The answer seems to be both.
Small Wins, Big Tanks: Top Ten Movies of 2017
Movies: Top Ten Films of 2017
Film critic Katherine Monk looks back on a year without frontrunners or favourites, making 2017’s top choices a truly personal matter with I, Tonya, Icarus and Wonder Woman landing on the podium, and plenty of other worthy contenders in the race.
By Katherine Monk
It seems the President and Harvey Weinstein eclipsed the klieg lights of the entertainment world: There is no artistic standout, nor crowd-pleasing frontrunner in the race for this year’s movie laurels as the recent Golden Globe ceremony proved.
The five major awards were handed out to four films. No Moonlight. No Lala Land. Not even a Hidden Figures. The year 2017 will be remembered for the last-minute resuscitation at the box-office thanks to Star Wars’s enduring shock paddles, pulling a loser year into so-so territory in the home stretch with more than half a billion in receipts for The Last Jedi.
Nonetheless, revenues were down 2.7 per cent ($11 billion US) over 2016’s ...
NFB offers early gifts
Brief: Canadian Film
The National Film Board of Canada wants you to unwrap your present of Canadian presence, offering 20 award-winning movies on-line for free, starting today
By Katherine Monk
(December 7, 2017) -- Naughty? Nice? No matter. The National Film Board is giving everyone a gift by posting 20 award-winning movies on-line — for free. Starting today, Canadian film fans can take in an assortment of documentaries and animated films, including Sarah Polley’s The Stories We Tell, a timeless portrait of her own family and its secrets, as well as Mina Shum’s Ninth Floor, a documentary about racial tensions at Concordia and the scars that linger decades later.
Perhaps best suited to the Christmas season is Payback, Jennifer Baichwal’s big screen take on Margaret Atwood’s Massey Lecture outlining the unspoken balance sheet that exists between humans.
“We all have these scales of acknowledged or unacknowledged balances in our heads. Some are family things. ...
Bjarke Ingels talks BIG in new documentary
Movie review: Big Time
The man behind the architectural powerhouse, BIG, gets a medium close-up in Kaspar Astrup Schröder's globe-trotting portrait that takes us to the heights of Manhattan's skyline to the depths of a Danish maritime museum
Finding the Real Mensch in Menashe
Movies: Interview with Joshua Z. Weinstein
A documentary filmmaker explores the closed world of New York's Hasidic community in his first narrative feature shot entirely in Yiddish with amateur actors and a leading man who'd never set foot in a cinema
By Katherine Monk
There are approximately 330,000 Hasidic and Ultra-Orthodox Jews living in New York City, yet, the community remains largely closed and somewhat mysterious to outsiders. Filmmaker Joshua Z. Weinstein wanted to know more, so he focused his documentary skills on the world at his doorstep in the boroughs and neighbourhoods of his native New York City.
The result is Menashe, a narrative feature shot entirely in Yiddish with an amateur cast of community members — some of whom had never set foot in a theatre until the film’s debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Weinstein says the experience was rich and memorable, but it’s not something he’ll do again — if only because as a director, he’d like ...
Trish Dolman directs the national selfie: Canada in a Day
Interview: Trish Dolman
Vancouver filmmaker Trish Dolman captures Canadian soul in crowd-sourced documentary portrait airing tonight on CTV
By Katherine Monk
(July 1, 2017) VANCOUVER — There is something extraordinarily moving about Canada in a Day, even though one might say it’s thoroughly ordinary.
A visual scrapbook pulled together from over 16,000 video submissions from average Canucks who pointed the camera at their own lives on September 10, 2016, this selfie collage isn’t a film made by the rich and famous. It wasn’t scripted, and contains no professional actors. Yet, there is drama. There’s a palpable sense of theme. And despite the diversity of the players and their unique messages, one even feels a sense of unity. A shared heartbeat echoing empathy and human understanding. It’s lurking in every frame, because it’s part of who we are as a people.
It’s also because of Trish Dolman, the Vancouver-based producer and director who took on the challe...
