By Ryan Pike
The past 10 years of cinema has seen a great deal of progress and peculiarities. In the 2000s, for better or worse, a glut of films have been released. Some of them were flat-out awful.Unfortunately, because of the sheer number of films released during the decade, a lot of bad films saw the light of… Continue reading Decade in Review: Film
Four decades and twenty-one films in, the Bond series really only had two options: continue along the path of ever-more-desperate celebrity cameos, CGI effects and over the top villainy, or, you know, make something interesting. Wisely, the franchise opted for the latter. With Casino Royale, screenwriter Paul Haggis kept what was working (Judi Dench’s wonderfully… Continue reading Film Review: Bond is Back
It’s easy to assume a movie titled Bobby would reveal something of Robert F. Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic candidate for president. Instead, director Emilio Estevez uses Kennedy to focus on a collection of staff and patrons who were at the Ambassador Hotel on the night Kennedy was shot, leaving the man himself a mystery. The… Continue reading A movie about the other Kennedy… who died
By Kyle Francis
There are hundreds of movies pimped to Utah’s Sundance Film Festival every year, filmmakers hoping against galactic-level odds their film will be one of the few optioned to a large production house when it’s all over. Most movies don’t make it out of the festival circuit and, frankly, most don’t deserve to. Every now and… Continue reading Film Review: Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows
By Kyle Francis
Everyone thinks they’re righteous. No one, not corrupt policemen, rapists, nor killers want to believe they’re anything but the hero of their own fiction. This facet of human nature is what John Hillcoat and Nick Cave acknowledge–to huge success–in their Aussie-western epic The Proposition. Following the intertwining stories of the lawman, Morris Stanley (Ray Winstone)… Continue reading An Australian Gunslinger Triumph
There are aspects of Canadian culture we ruefully admit to–hockey, parkas, iced brewskies, and yet we still bemoan the idea that Canada has no culture, that we’re just Americans who know how to dress in layers. Douglas Coupland has spent a good deal of his life running from his nationality, but with the release of… Continue reading Mapleleaves, Hockey and Movies
Lucky Number Slevin, a crime thriller directed by Paul McGuigan and starring Josh Hartnett, Bruce Willis, Lucy Liu, Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley, has everything a good crime movie could want, except, well, character development and a plot. Slevin (Hartnett) is a man who has had quite the run of bad luck. He not only… Continue reading Film Preview: Slevin isn’t lucky enough
There’s an old adage at the Gauntlet saying: “no one really knows what to do with a music DVD.” Entertainment writers and editors alike have wondered whether it’s proper to review the music, the performance, the quality of the footage or how amiable the subjects are. To this day it has remained a mystery. At… Continue reading Film Review: A purely golden Neil Young film
By Kate Foote
In 2002, Michael Moore’s Academy Award winning documentary Bowling for Columbine became an icon of pop-culture. For arguably the first time, a documentary managed to transcend the yawn-factor traditionally associated with such films. The public has since come to embrace the art of documentary filmmaking, a fortunate transformation considering many under appreciated gems deserving accolades.… Continue reading Film Interview: Movies matter too, you know
By Kate Foote
It hasn’t been long since British films consisted predominantly of either Monty Python films or period dramas about repressed characters. Everything changed in 1998, however, when Guy Ritchie’s Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels created fresh appreciation for the darkly comedic British gangster genre. Following in this format is Canadian director Mike Scullion’s Gobshite. While… Continue reading Film Review: A little too much shite, not enough gob