Red Sparrow Flutters, Flaps, Finally Flies
Movie Review: Red Sparrow
Jennifer Lawrence has trouble with a Slavic accent, but she nails the emotional conflict and physicality of a ballet dancer turned sex spy in Francis Lawrence's Cold War thriller that feels like a return to the good old bad days
Mother! Rips TIFF Audiences Apart with Creative Labour Pains
Movies: TIFF17
Darren Aronofsky's latest is a dark swan dive to the depths of the artistic process that could be read as brilliant biblical allegory or a self-absorbed bid at vindicating failure
By Katherine Monk
TORONTO (September 10, 2017) - Oh, mother! The creative process can be a real bitch. Just ask Darren Aronofsky. The director of the Oscar-winning Black Swan returned to the Toronto International Film Festival with his latest film, mother! And already, it’s dividing audience opinion.
A laborious metaphor about the act of making art, the film stars Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem as a handsome couple renovating an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. He’s a successful writer struggling with a blank page. She is the young muse, fixing and mending broken walls, looking to restore the house to its former glory after a fire burned it to the ground.
The only thing left is a diamond-like stone with a mysterious glow that he carefully places on a ...
X-Men: Apocalypse, Now and Then
Movie review: X-Men: Apocalypse
Director Bryan Singer brings the comic book franchise to the brink as he sends us back to the 1980s, when the powerful mutants were forced to pick sides
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
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 offers less magic
Katniss still kicks ass as dramatic scope broadens
You can almost feel director Francis Lawrence stiffening up as he approaches the finish line, eager to break the tape without falling down in the last mile. The goofiness and the spontaneity are gone, replaced by an official sense of duty, as Jennifer Lawrence loads her bow and fires an arrow into the abyss of adulthood in Hunger Games finale.