The Canadian-produced documentary Last Train Home idly, even blandly opens with titles superimposed on a massive crush of people informing us that, during the new year festivities, 130 million Chinese workers travel from their jobs in the big cities to their homes in the country – a once-per-year journey that is the largest migration of […]

As a general rule for life, I’ve found that if a movie stars Patricia Clarkson (especially since the turn of the millennium), it is almost certainly worth seeing. Not, maybe, a masterpiece; not even, necessarily, particularly good. But Clarkson herself is invariably worth watching, and she’s of that rarefied company of actors who seems to […]

Basically, Splice is one of the most confounding horror movies I’ve seen in quite a long time. Parts of it work magnificently well, parts of it work magnificently well while being incredibly hateful, and parts of it are just plain stupid. There are going to be a lot of people who see it, and hate […]

For the second time this year (Shutter Island was the first), we come across a film with a twist ending that’s so terrifically obvious that you almost can’t help but assume the filmmakers meant for us to figure it out beforehand; and at the same time, it’s rather difficult to actually discuss how the film […]

The work of Candian filmmaker Guy Maddin falls squarely into love-it or hate-it territory, although “hate-it” might be too strong; “find it humourlessly indulgent” is probably better. Anyway, I love it, and I’m not going to try to mount a defense of the director, because I think so much of what makes his films work […]