Jay Stone 136 results
4Score

Movie review: Phantom Thread wears well

Movie Review: Phantom Thread In what might be his final movie, Daniel Day-Lewis fully inhabits another of his difficult characters, this time a fashion designer who demands praise and silence.
3Score

Movie review: Happy End is Haneke at his most elusive

Movie review: Happy End The story of an unhappy French family follows the director's usual pattern of dysfunction and brutal motives, but there's not much to keep us watching
3Score

Movie review: Happy End is Haneke at his most elusive

Movie review: Happy End The story of an unhappy French family follows the director's usual pattern of dysfunction and brutal motives, but there's not much to keep us watching

War, Disasters and Quiet Passions: Jay Stone’s Top Ten Movies of 2017

Movies: Top Ten 2017 Greta Gerwig's coming-of-age gem, Lady Bird, garners big Stone praise amid a cluster of small diamonds about outsiders, loss and the elusive power of hope By Jay Stone Lady Bird: Pretty well the best time I had at the movies this year came from this small, exquisitely observed story that we’ve seen a million times: a young woman comes of age in a small town, fights with her parents and dreams of glory in the big city. But writer/director Greta Gerwig — drawing on her own life — turns this familiar material into a sweet, caustic, and authentic tale of growing up, aided by great performances from Laurie Metcalfe as the exasperated mother and Saoirse Ronan as the complicated young woman. A true gem. The Florida Project: Filmmaker Sean Baker takes a step up from his previous movie (Tangerine, which was shot on an iPhone) but doesn’t sacrifice any of the grit in the story of people living on the edge of the American dream, in every sense: they ...

Jay Stone’s Top 10 movies of 2017

Lady Bird: Pretty well the best time I had at the movies this year came from this small, exquisitely observed story that we’ve seen a million times: a young woman comes of age in a small town, fights with her parents and dreams of glory in the big city. But writer/director Greta Gerwig — drawing on her own life — turns this familiar material into a sweet, caustic, and authentic tale of growing up, aided by great performances from Laurie Metcalfe as the exasperated mother and Saoirse Ronan as the complicated young woman. A true gem.   The Florida Project: Filmmaker Sean Baker takes a step up from his previous movie (Tangerine, which was shot on an iPhone) but doesn’t sacrifice any of the grit in the story of people living on the edge of the American dream, in every sense: they inhabit a welfare motel within sight of Disney World in Orlando, Fla. A cast comprised of mostly first-time actors, lead by the preternaturally talented seven-year-old named Brooklyn Prince ...

The Disaster Artist

Movies: #TIFF17 Jay Stone goes from cornflakes to a promising Canadian movie, stopping along the way to check in with Tommy Wiseau and Margaret Atwood

The Orillia Packet & Times: A Love Story

Newspaper Obituary: The Orillia Packet & Times They're closing the newspaper where I made my start, and where I learned about journalism. I guess I'm still learning. By Jay Stone (Ottawa, ON -- Nov. 27, 2017) I’ve been in love with several newspapers in my life — journalism tends to be a promiscuous passion — but none more deeply than I was in my first affair with the Orillia Packet & Times. It was the place where I started in the business, and now they’re going to close it down, another victim of Google or smart phones or whatever it is that has driven the wayward press to the fringes of our attention. I went there in 1968 from Toronto, where I was a 22-year-old university dropout driving a cab for a living while I plotted how to become a writer. My father, who brooked no such nonsense, sent me a note — I was living in a hippie house on St. Joseph Street, near Bloor and Yonge, with my longhaired hoodlum friends — saying that he had heard there was an ...
4Score

The Florida Project on the edges of Disney

Movie Review: The Florida Project A single mother and her precociously savvy daughter scratch out a living in a $38-a-night motel beside Disney World in this gritty look at American life near the bottom

Parent-Child Day at TIFF17

Movies: #TIFF17 Three movies the the Toronto film festival present different versions of the cinematic parent — Interfering Mother, Distant Father — with varying success By Jay Stone TORONTO — It was parent-and-child day at the Toronto International Film Festival, which is always interesting for those of us who are parents and wonder which of several cinematic categories we might fall into: Distant Father, Interfering Mother, Demanding Taskmaster (or –mistress), Indifferent Hippie or Kooky Eccentric. I think that’s all of them. We began with a terrific little coming-of-age title called Lady Bird, starring Saoirse Ronan — heroine of yesterday’s movie marathon and providing further proof here that she can do no wrong — as a rebellious high school student growing up in terrifyingly unhip Sacramento, Calif. She laughs with her best friend, dumps the friend for some new rich kids, dumps the rich kids for the old friend, meets a couple of boys who are variously ...

TIFF diary: My day in Auditorium 12

Movies: #TIFF17 What's it like to spend the entire day in one cinema, watching whatever comes along? Jay Stone sets out to find out at the Toronto film festival By Jay Stone TORONTO — Today I decided to test the fates by spending the entire day in one movie theatre at the Toronto International Film Festival. Most of the press and industry screenings are held at the Scotiabank cinema on Richmond Street, and I chose Auditorium 12, for reasons that will become more obscure as we go on. The result was a kind of mini-film festival, with all the delights, disappointments — and meals of dry popcorn — that one associates with the glamorous life of the freelance film critic. This is what I saw: On Chesil Beach: The first film of the day in Auditorium 12 — which turns out to be the Imax theatre, so you get a nice big screen — is this adaptation of what is, frankly, a rather thin 2007 novella by the otherwise estimable Ian McEwan. It stars Saoirse Ronan (whose appearance in ...