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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Arik Rotstein’s moody Israeli film, Antenna, is ostensibly about a minor dispute concerning a cellular antenna. In actuality, it’s about family dynamics. The movie — scheduled to be screened by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation’s Chai Tea series on Sunday, December 10 at 12:30 p.m. and 4 p.m. at the Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, 5095 […]
Passions erupt and flow like red-hot lava in Woody Allen’s 48th film, Wonder Wheel, which opens in Canadian theatres on December 8. Set in the 1950s amid the honky-tonk atmosphere of New York City’s Coney Island amusement park, this dark, high-strung drama delves into the lives of four people who touch each other’s hearts profoundly. […]
What would Christmas be like without iconic Christmas songs such as White Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Sleigh Ride or Chessnuts Roasting on an Open Fire? Larry Weinstein asks this intriguing question in his film, Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas, whose world premiere takes place on the Documentary Channel on December 3 at 8 p.m. CBC TV […]