By Anne Brodie Elvis, Baz Lurhman’s 2-hour and 39-minute hallucination fable comes at you like shot from a pellet gun, blasting from one nerve point to the next in rapid, head-spinning succession, bouncing from style to style, plot point to end-it-all motifs to tight closeups of Austin Butler’s sensuous Elvis-like lips to pensive Elvis to runaway hips Elvis to mama’s… View Post
Inuit filmmaker Nyla Innuksuk’s genre-busting Slash/Back is probably the sweetest film of its kind, a sci-fi variation on Little Women, set in remote Pangnirtung, Nunavut, or Pang. Preteens Maika (Tasiana Shirley), Jesse (Alexis Vincent-Wolfe), Leena (Chelsea Pruksy), and Uki (Nalajoss Ellsworth) are passing the time crushing on boys, gossiping, hunting, and fishing in Pangnirtung, unaware that in a few hours,… View Post
Twenty-six-year-old movie-making wunderkind Cooper Raiff’s second coming-of-age film Cha Cha Real Smooth is on AppleTV+, a heart-tugging portrait of a young man becoming an adult. Raiff is Andrew; he has a degree but lives at his mother’s and works at Meat Sticks. By chance, he becomes a “party starter” thanks to his antics at a Bar Mitzvah and meets an… View Post
The FX Orginal series The Bear on Hulu takes place in the bustling, hot kitchen of the Original Beef of Chicagoland. It’s a family-owned diner inherited by fine dining international award-winning chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) on the death of his brother. He gives up his glossy career to come home, make sandwiches and face the wrath of his cousin… View Post
By Anne Brodie Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a witty and provocative portrait of an uptight former school teacher Nancy played with vulnerability by Emma Thompson who has never had an orgasm, experienced oral sex, or much pleasure at all in her 31-year marriage. She’s a bundle of anxieties but following her husband’s death, takes a brave step,… View Post
There’s a bittersweet story at the centre of the new comedy series The Lake between Jordan Gavaris and Madison Shamoun. Gavaris is Justin, a gay man who in high school had fathered a daughter he gave up for adoption. Shamoun plays Billie who bonds with her biological father immediately. They’ve come to the family cottage in North Bay for a… View Post