Niki Caro’s The Zookeeper’s Wife, now available on the Netflix streaming network, is a film that will most likely please the current Polish government, which presents Poland as a model of resistance and a beacon of righteousness during the German occupation from 1939 to 1945. Based on real-life events, it’s the inspirational story of a Polish […]
One of the most memorable images in Loveless, an evocative Russian film by Andrey Zvyagintsev opening in Canada on February 23, summarizes its relentlessly bleak mood. In the opening frame, the camera lingers pensively on a big tree whose branches have been shorn of their leaves by lashing autumn winds and rain. It’s a stark […]
Stacey Tenenbaum’s unusual documentary, Shiners, examines an archaic trade that seems destined for oblivion. Her subjects are shoe shiners who polish and buff shoes and boots for a living. As she suggests, they’re a dwindling breed. Her film, a paean to working-class men and women, will be screened at the Royal Cinema in Toronto on February […]
Interracial dating, an increasingly common phenomenon in Western societies, is the subject of Michael Showalter’s romantic comedy, The Big Sick. It’s about the on-again, off-again relationship between a Pakistani American standup comedian and an Anglo postgraduate student. Kumail Nanjiani, playing himself, meets Emily Gardner (Zoe Kazan) in a comedy nightclub one night. In a clever […]
There are only a handful of movies I would bother watching again, and Das Boot (The Boat), a German-language war film released in 1981, qualifies as one. I caught it on the Netflix streaming network the other night, and it was as thrilling, gripping and spine-tingling as I remembered it 37 years ago. Wolfgang Petersen’s […]
Maysaloun Hamoud’s debut feature film, In Between, examines the Arab minority in Israel through the eyes of three young Israeli Arab women living in the world’s first all-Jewish city, Tel Aviv. It opens in Vancouver on February 9, in Toronto on February 16 and in Ottawa on April 6. Laila (Mouna Hawa), Salma (Sana Jammelieh) […]
The ordinary and the extraordinary converge seamlessly in Guillermo Del Toro’s artful fantasy, The Shape of Water. The British actress Sally Hawkins stars as a mute night cleaner who falls in love with a mythical amphibian thing who was dragged out of the muck of the Amazon rainforest. Hawkins’ character, Eliza Esposito, works in a top-secret […]
The complexities of a non-traditional romantic relationship are laid bare in Sebastian Lelio’s sensitive Spanish-language drama, A Fantastic Woman, which opens in Canada on February 9. Chilean actor Daniela Vega plays Marina Vidal, a trans-woman who’s been thrown into grief and mourning following the sudden death of her boyfriend, Orlando Onetto (Francisco Reyes). Orlando, 57, […]
Three weathered billboards line a lonely stretch of road near an unremarkable town in middle America. They’re grist for Martin McDonagh’s mill in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a meditative, gloomy and utterly unconventional film about the nature of grief, vengeance and violence. Having driven past these signs countless times, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), a […]
Greta Gerwig’s quirky coming-of-age drama, Lady Bird, showcases the manifold talents of Saoirse Rowan, an Irish American actress who turned in an impressive performance in her last movie, Brooklyn, in which she played a winsome Irish immigrant adjusting to a new milieu in the United States. In Lady Bird — which is set in Sacramento, California, […]