Mina Shum Gets Her Freaky Friday On
Interview: Mina Shum
The Vancouver filmmaker always wanted to make a movie about how she and her mother are so different, and in her new movie Meditation Park, she reunites with Sandra Oh to make it happen.
By Katherine Monk
VANCOUVER — Mina Shum says she's trying to be “a good Chinese daughter.” After a greeting at the door of the hotel suite, she ushers me to a seat, and checks to make sure the publicist is comfortable. The place is all too generic for a talk about the particular. With its creamy white walls and bleached white linens, the hotel room overlooking Vancouver’s downtown skyline is all postcard pretty, displaying snow-capped mountains and green-patina copper rooftops. Shum says she loves every corner of this coastal town, but her new movie Meditation Park is looking at a different view of the city she calls home.
Set in the Eastside neighbourhood of Sunrise-Hastings, and focused on one family’s love-laden unravelling, Meditation Park stars Asian heavywe...
Hey, Gringo! This One Is For You!
Movie review: Gringo
Nash Edgerton's dark comedy features David Oyelowo as a hapless businessman struggling to stay alive in Mexico after a botched kidnapping, a bad drug deal and festering marital issues leave him deliriously endangered.
Kathleen Hepburn Takes a Metaphorical Skinny Dip
Interview: Kathleen Hepburn
The first-time feature director went back to the family cabin in northern B.C. -- and deep into the wilderness of mother-child dynamics -- in Never Steady, Never Still
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
Bening Becomes Legend in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool
Movie review: Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool
Annette Bening pours pathos into a champagne glass as Gloria Grahame in Paul McGuigan’s moody portrait of the feminine mystique and its martyrdom at the grabby hands of Hollywood
Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool
4/5
Starring: Annette Bening, Jamie Bell, Julie Walters, Vanessa Redgrave, Kenneth Cranham
Directed by: Paul McGuigan
Running time: 1 hr 45 mins
Rating: Restricted
By Katherine Monk
She had a starring role in It’s a Wonderful Life, but Gloria Grahame had anything but. As one of the leading femme fatales of the 20th century, Grahame was a prisoner of her pin-up image, sentenced to the shadows of sexually charged parts in an era that regarded a woman’s libido as a moral liability.
Sexuality was her ticket to the gleaming world of Golden Age Hollywood, but in Paul McGuigan’s emotionally detailed portrait based on Peter Turner’s memoir, we can see how her biggest gift also became her biggest burden, and eventua...
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 ...
The Post Delivers Big Message Sans Emotional Stamp
Movie review: The Post
Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep play second fiddle to a 7,000-page stack of paper and an old Xerox machine in Steven Spielberg's well-intentioned history lesson about lying Presidents
