45 Years a devastating drama
Movie review: 45 Years
Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay play a married couple who uncover a long-buried secret that changes everything they think about their marriage in this devastating British drama
The Revenant is raw tension
Movie review: The Revenant
Leonardo DiCaprio undergoes a horrendous series of trials — including that famous bear attack — in Alejandro G. Inarritu's masterful tale of survival
Movie review: The Joy of capitalism
A woman invents a miracle mop and finds herself knee-deep in screwball dysfunction in David O. Russell's uneven fable about working-class America
Star Wars goes back to the future
Movie review: Star Wars - The Force Awakens
The long-awaited new movie reclaims the universe of Star Wars, makes it fresh again, and still finds room for old favorites like Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher
Theeb: A Middle Eastern Western
Movie review: Theeb
Jordan's official nomination for the best foreign film Oscar is a tightly wound adventure story about a Bedouin boy learning how to be a man on the eve of the First World War
Searching for the legacy of Al Purdy
When film critic Brian D. Johnson retired, he became a filmmaker himself. His first project: a documentary about the difficult, brilliant (and strangely forgotten) Canadian poet
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — “You can argue whether he was our greatest poet, but certainly he was our most Canadian poet. No one wrote about the land the way that he did. If the Group of Seven was a bar band, they might sound like Al Purdy.”
It’s a warm September afternoon and Brian D. Johnson is sitting at an outdoor table at a coffee place he likes near the Toronto International Film Festival. He’s in the sun, hatless, and there is sweat on his forehead. Furthermore, people keep stopping to interrupt us because Johnson is a pretty popular guy in the film festival district, and also because, at this year’s festival, he’s a bit of a celebrity.
He was the film critic for Maclean’s magazine for 28 years. Now, at 66, he has retired (“I’ve had a career. I’m looking for the sweeter ...
Hitchcock and Truffaut offer film 101
Movie Review:
Documentary about a groundbreaking book shows how the legendary film director thought about movies, audiences — and Jimmy Stewart's erection in Vertigo
