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Film

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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Film

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 […]

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Film

Lady Bird

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

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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Film

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 […]

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Film

Call Me By Your Name

Amid the sun-drenched sylvan splendor of a summer in northern Italy, two young men form a special bond. Their friendship unfolds in 1983 against the bucolic backdrop of a sunny garden, a Roman-style pool whose cool waters reflect the blissful rays of a southern European sun, an aquamarine sea and a starry sky. All this takes […]

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Film

The Final Year

During Barack Obama’s last year as president of the United States, Greg Barker and his camera crew followed him and his most trusted associates around the country and abroad. Barker’s fly-on-the-wall documentary, The Final Year, which opens in Canada on January 19, peeks inside the Obama White House as he and his chief operatives attend […]

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Film

In The Fade

Fatih Akin’s taut thriller, In the Fade, the winner of this year’s Golden Globes award for best foreign movie, is a combustible melange of two popular cinematic forms, police procedural and court room drama. Scheduled to open in Canada on January 19, it’s set against the backdrop of a terrorist incident in the German city […]

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Film

Aida’s Secrets

Alon and Shaul Schwarz’s intriguing documentary, Aida’s Secrets, plumbs the depths of a family’s convoluted history, but leaves a viewer asking more questions than it answers. The film, set in Israel, Germany and Canada, opens in Toronto on January 12 at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. It revolves around a mother and her two […]

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Film

Happy End

The Laurents are a wealthy French family living off the fat of the land in the port of Calais. As they sit around a table in their palatial home enjoying a fine meal prepared by their eager-to-please Moroccan cook, one might think they epitomize bourgeois contentment. Think again, Austrian director Michael Haneke suggests in his newest […]