Movie review: Leave the World Behind captures a very creepy Zeitgeist
Movie review: Leave the World Behind
Sam Esmail serves up a sophisticated psychological thriller that nods to Cold War convention while conjuring the biggest threat of the twenty-first century: A world where money governs morality, friendships are subject to outside influence, and even your neighbour can’t be trusted as an ally.
Juliet, Naked strips romance down to nagging self-doubt
Movie review: Juliet, Naked
Director Jesse Peretz brings alt-rock authenticity to Nick Hornby’s story of a singer-songwriter who fell off the map, only to be rediscovered by the long-suffering partner of an obsessive fan. Ethan Hawke and Chris O’Dowd offer pure performance, but it’s Rose Byrne’s quiet navigation of personal desire that redeems the ego-fest.
Rebecca Miller gets screwball
Interview: Rebecca Miller
She may be the daughter of the man who penned Death of a Salesman, but Rebecca Miller reveals an undeniable talent for thoroughly goofy comedy in her latest film, Maggie's Plan
By Katherine Monk
Rebecca Miller’s intellectual pedigree cannot be argued: daughter of Pulitzer-winner Arthur Miller, graduate of Choate and Yale, and married to the towering dramatic talent named Daniel-Day Lewis. But speaking to Miller over the phone, the legacy of Willy Loman walks out the door and the inner goofball emerges.
It’s a side of Miller that’s on full display in her latest work, Maggie’s Plan, a feature film that charmed audiences at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and opens theatrically this week. A full-on comedy that’s been drawing comparisons to Woody Allen’s witty dissections of the academic elite, Maggie’s Plan stars Greta Gerwig as a modern gal looking to enhance her life in a millennial way.
Maggie wants to have a baby without ...
Horns of a dilemma
Movies: A trumpet player's take on two new brassy biopics
Searching for a proper trumpet movie proves problematic when Hollywood insists on blowing all the false notes in a bid to cook up drama and romantic heroes
by Charles Gordon
Trumpet players hardly every get to have movies made about them — unlike, say, ninjas. As luck would have it, there are two big ones out at the same time, Born to Be Blue, a fictionalized version of Chet Baker’s life, and Miles Ahead, a drama about Miles Davis.
As a trumpet player, woefully amateur but serious about it, I have to say that the real star of Born to Be Blue is not Ethan Hawke, the Hollywood star, who plays Chet, but Kevin Turcotte, the Toronto trumpet player, who plays the music of Chet on the soundtrack. More on that later.
In the jokes that are made about musicians (drummers who slow down, guitarists who play out of tune, unemployable trombonists) the stereotype of the trumpet players is the arrogant show-off. The trumpet ...
Interview: Ethan Hawke and director Andrew Niccol zero in on Good Kill
Reunited for the first time since Gattaca, the actor and the filmmaker are raising questions -- and their fair share of hell -- with a new movie that takes the viewer inside the new theatre of war: climate-controlled trailers parked on U.S. soil
By Katherine Monk
TORONTO – As the Obama Administration faces mounting pressure to disclose the grisly details of drone strikes on civilians across the Middle East this week, a new movie threatens to blow the whole unmanned aerial vehicle program sky high.
It’s called Good Kill, and unlike the handful of documentaries that have already taken the drone strategy to task for its arm’s length summary executions of suspected terrorists, it’s a dramatic film starring solid Hollywood stars Ethan Hawke, January Jones and Canada’s own Bruce Greenwood.
Writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, S1mOne, Lord of War, The Host) says he wasn’t looking for controversy when he started researching the subject and speaking to former drone ...
Movie Review: Seymour – An Introduction
Ethan Hawke steps behind the camera to direct a lovely, purposefully small movie that gently dusts the edges of existential angst as it animates the life of pianist Seymour Bernstein
