NFB offers early gifts
Brief: Canadian Film
The National Film Board of Canada wants you to unwrap your present of Canadian presence, offering 20 award-winning movies on-line for free, starting today
By Katherine Monk
(December 7, 2017) -- Naughty? Nice? No matter. The National Film Board is giving everyone a gift by posting 20 award-winning movies on-line — for free. Starting today, Canadian film fans can take in an assortment of documentaries and animated films, including Sarah Polley’s The Stories We Tell, a timeless portrait of her own family and its secrets, as well as Mina Shum’s Ninth Floor, a documentary about racial tensions at Concordia and the scars that linger decades later.
Perhaps best suited to the Christmas season is Payback, Jennifer Baichwal’s big screen take on Margaret Atwood’s Massey Lecture outlining the unspoken balance sheet that exists between humans.
“We all have these scales of acknowledged or unacknowledged balances in our heads. Some are family things. ...
Gleason scores, Anthropoid kills, Bad Moms just bad
Home Entertainment: November 1, 2016
Justin Lin puts Star Trek franchise into hyperdrive but fails to engage mental engines but there's plenty of other stars to check out on home platforms this week
By Katherine Monk
Star Trek Beyond (Directed by: Justin Lin, Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg) 2.5/5:
I wanted to love Star Trek Beyond as much as I enjoyed the other two reboots from mastermind J.J. Abrams, and yet, despite my ample enthusiasm for a franchise that puts friendship and humanity first, this third film starring Chris Pine as James T. Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Mr. Spock failed to make it out of the transporter room in one piece. There are many reasons why Beyond falls from a high orbit, but the most noticeable is the name on the director’s chair. Abrams was busy helming that other sci-fi juggernaut, leaving the Fast and the Furious’s Justin Lin to assemble the pieces and play the cosmic strings. Lin is good at car crashes and man ...
Star Trek Beyond falls Below the Bar
Movie review: Star Trek Beyond
Justin Lin revs the Enterprise's perpetually over-heated engines but Star Trek Beyond orbits a familiar universe without reflection
Wintour is Coming… to home entertainment
What's Streaming: August
The nights are getting shorter, but there's more to sink your eyeballs into when the sun goes down as Tom Hanks, the Met Gala, a High-Rise horror and The Lobster hit home
By Katherine Monk
The First Monday in May (3/5)
Who doesn’t want to go behind the scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? I know I do, even if I’m just getting access to the costume gallery – that small square of space accessible by freight elevator and remote staircases in the bowels of the storied institution on Fifth Ave. Ever since its inception in 1946, the costume institute (now named after Vogue editor and chief fundraiser Anna Wintour) hosts the museum’s annual fundraising ball, which makes or breaks the annual operating budget on the first Monday in May. With so much riding on the Met Gala, you can feel the stress in curator Andrew Bolton’s fashionable fibers from the moment the movie opens. And it ramps up from there as we watch him prepare for the opening of ...
Slicing Life: A Tale of Two Cities
Blu-ray blast from the past: A Tale of Two Cities
Reflections on the Revolution in France - from the man who brought you Shanghai Surprise: Jim Goddard's adaptation of the Dickens classic still holds its edge, even in a 1980 Hallmark production starring Chris Sarandon and Peter Cushing
Peanuts, Macbeth, a big whale and an evil car hit home entertainment
Entertainment: @home releases for March 8
Embrace the joy of Snoopy or explore the many faces of man-made evil as Michael Fassbender cuts to the bone in Macbeth, James McAvoy breathes life into Frankenstein and James Brolin tries to stop a killer car
By Katherine Monk
We love you, Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie (4/5)
The hand-drawn essence of Charles Schulz’s iconic comic strip comes through with flying colors in this gentle transition to digital from Ice Age director Steve Martino. Martino and the animators realized they didn’t need to reinvent the characters for a modern audience by making Charlie Brown look like a human kid, or turn Snoopy into a drooling lump of pixelated fur.
They went for the feel of the source material: ever roving between pre-teen daydream, birthday party bliss and existential angst – with an emphasis on the latter, because it’s that quiet ache of looming adulthood that makes Peanuts the pop culture monolith it is.
Charlie ...
News: The National Film Board and Vimeo launch new service
News: Streaming Services
New platform showcasing short films from the Oscar-winning studio is available now
By The Ex-Press
It’s the first rule of drug dealers and encyclopedia salesmen: The first one is always free. And now, the National Film Board will be adopting a similar strategy hoping to get you addicted to short films.
Partnering with Vimeo, the on-line streaming service, the NFB has created NFB Shorts on Demand. The subscription-based, on-demand platform (SVOD) was unveiled in a press release late Wednesday — declaring it available immediately.
One newly added film will always be available for free, but after that, there’s a $4.99 subscription fee for monthly unlimited streaming, a $1.99 single streaming fee, or a $3.99 charge for download-to-own.
The new outlet is designed to showcase the latest work coming out of the acclaimed studio, unlike the current film board website, which allows access to a great deal of the deep and decorated short film ...
Summer tentpoles hit home entertainment
What's new on DVD, Blu-ray and streaming services
With Avengers, Tomorrowland and San Andreas hitting the small screen in October, now everyone can get a sniff of the dogs of summer
By Katherine Monk
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
4/5 Stars
Directed by: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon.
Starring: Thomas Mann, Olivia Cooke, RJ Cyler.
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon emerged as the breakout director of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival thanks to this touching and cinematically vibrant exploration of high school life that pushes the dramatic needle into the red zone. Unlike other teen traumas that pivot on locker room taunts, mean girls and backstabbing bad apples, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl takes all that generic teen angst and throws it against the brick wall of mortality. Greg (Thomas Mann) is an ordinary high school senior looking to make it to graduation without getting noticed, but when his mother (Connie Britton) asks him to befriend Rachel (Olivia Cooke) after ...
