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 […]
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The Big Sick
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 […]
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A Classic War Film
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 […]
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In Between — An Israeli Arab Movie
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) […]
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The Shape of Water
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 […]
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A Fantastic Woman
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, […]
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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
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, […]
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Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool
Gloria Grahame is a figure from the past, an almost forgotten Hollywood star who won the Academy Award for best supporting actress in 1953 for her fleeting seven-minute appearance in The Bad and the Beautiful. A femme fatale, she made her film debut in Blonde Fever in 1944 and went on to appear in such […]
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Darkest Hour
Britain was in the throes of a crisis in May 1940. The prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had stepped aside, Parliament having lost confidence in his leadership. Germany was on the ascendancy, having annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, recaptured Memmel, occupied Poland and invaded Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Holland and France. At that fraught moment, when the fate […]