Bryan Singer’s Bohemian Rhapsody immortalizes the late, lamented pop singer Freddie Mercury. This exuberant biopic rises to sublime heights at times thanks to Rami Malek’s star turn as Mercury. Malek portrays the iconic British musician as self-confident yet vulnerable, flamboyant yet lonely, heterosexual yet gay, secular yet attached to his Zoroastrian faith. It is apparent […]
Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s two-term vice-president, emerges as the power behind the throne in Adam McKay’s sardonic film, Vice, which takes a dim view not only of Cheney but of Bush and many of the major figures in his administration. Superbly portrayed by Christian Bale, a British actor who imitates his monotone mid-western accent with […]
Pawel Pawilkowski’s stark black-and-white Polish film, Cold War, charts the course of a tempestuous romance between two people temperamentally at odds — Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), a serious-minded musician who strives for artistic freedom, and Zula (Joanna Kulig), a flighty dancer and singer who’s content with the status quo. The lovers are loosely modelled after Pawilkowski’s late […]
A lavish period piece set in early 18th century Britain, The Favourite brims with intrigue, personality clashes, power struggles and secret sexual liaisons. At the center of it all are Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), the last Stuart monarch; Sarah, the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), her childhood friend and closest advisor, and Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), […]
A low-key but vibrant film about quiet desperation and survival, Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? is never less than absorbing. The chief protagonist, New York-based author Lee Israel, finds herself in dire straits in the early 1990s. Israel’s last book about cosmetics mogul Estee Lauder has bombed and, cruelly enough, publishers are shunning her. Unable to earn […]
Bjorn Runge’s film, The Wife, is a complex, compelling and nuanced portrait of Joe and Joan Castleman, an elderly couple whose marriage is sorely tested by an unexpected telephone call in the dead of night and a glittering awards ceremony thousands of kilometres away from their home. It’s 1992 and Joe (Jonathan Pryce), an acclaimed […]
Morris (Moe) Berg has acquired a reputation as the most educated and brainiest player in the history of American major league baseball. Born in New York City in 1902, he studied modern languages at Princeton University and law at Columbia University. Despite his bent for academia, he devoted himself to baseball. For 15 years, he […]
We live in an era of rising racism, antisemitism and tacit acceptance of racial and ethnic hatred by right-wing populist politicians. Case in point: A year and a half ago, at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, neo-Nazi louts chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” In a profoundly disappointing response, U.S. President Donald Trump […]
Twenty five years have elapsed since I watched Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, his riveting and powerful 195-minute film set during the Holocaust in Poland. Having left an indelible impression on me the first time around, I was eager to see it again at a Spielberg retrospective at the Toronto International Film Festival. In the re-release […]
Alfonso Cuaron’s stark and absorbing black-and-white neo-realistic Mexican movie, Roma, unfolds as languidly as a steamy night in the tropics. Semi-autobiographical and filmed in quasi-documentary style, it’s set in the upscale but slightly scruffy Roma district of Mexico City in the early 1970s and focuses on the tribulations of a middle-class family and one of its […]