No matter how bad your Monday is, it can’t be as bad as this travesty that I ventured into with the Sci-Fi Chronicles book as I continue to take a look at the cinematic interpretations of the work of HG Wells. A director, who worked on developing the film for four years was replaced…
Tag: documentary
Hot Docs – The Messenger – Su Rynard
The Messenger is a beautiful, thought-provoking film which takes a look at the rapidly-depleting global population of songbirds, and what that likely means not only to the planet, but to our survival as a species, as well. Director Su Rynard deftly takes us all over the world, speaking with various birders and ornithologists about bird…
Hot Docs 2015: Deep Web – Alex Winter
Planetary may have been the most important film at the festival in terms of our species and its relation with our tender planet, but Alex Winter’s documentary, Deep Web, brings to the screen the topical, and argumentative subject of internet privacy. The digital frontier is turning into the latest battleground, a wild west shootout,…
Hot Docs 2015: Journey with Prabhat – Samarth Dixit & Jessica Sadana
Film preservation, and cinematic history are a huge part of Western culture, as we restore, and catalogue our seemingly endless collection of films, so I was rather interested to see how things played out in other countries. Prabhat Studios was a big and well-recognized Indian studio when talkies came along. After that, though it fell…
Hot Docs 2015: Welcome to Leith – Michael Beach Nichols & Chrisopher K. Walker
It will be interesting if this review doesn’t become a tirade, as I’ve never understood racism, and think that those who go around spouting it, are all manner of moronic. So, I settled in to be as objective and open-minded as I could, which proved to be not very. The first time Craig Cobb, and…
Hot Docs 2015: Attacking the Devil – Harold Evans and the Last Nazi War Crime – Jacqui Morris & David Morris
Yesterday, I discovered a new hero. His name is Harold Evans. I love films about newspapers, and when they introduce me to people I should have heard of and haven’t and when they are wrapped up in amazing stories that deals with objective journalism , working to get the truth out, and working for justice…
Hot Docs 2015: (T)error – David Felix Sutcliffe and Lyric R. Cabral
Screening tonight at the Lightbox at 9:45pm is this thriller of a documentary, that pulls the curtain back from the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts within the continental United States and the revelation that it isn’t all as above-board and by the book as the public would like to believe. Saeed, alias Shariff, an ex-con has been working…
Hot Docs – A Woman Like Me – Alex Sichel, Elizabeth Giamatti
When Alex Sichel is diagnosed with terminal cancer, she immediately envisions another woman – a different version of herself – who undergoes the same journey, but in the spirit of living through it, rather than dying from it. Ever the filmmaker, Alex embarks on a mission to tell her own story, through both voices –…
The Last Man On The Moon (2014) – Mark Craig
The Bloor Cinema/Hot Doc’s 2014 – 2015 Doc Soup is coming to an end, and I couldn’t imagine a better picture to close out this year’s run than this amazing documentary. Back in the early 70s, somewhere between my introductions to Star Wars and Star Trek, my young brain processed the fact that at…
Canadian Screen Awards 2015: Gala 1
Last night’s event, hosted by the very funny Darrin Rose, who was quite happy to take hilarious shots at any and everyone, and made sure things moved along smoothly as awards were delivered for News, Sports, Documentary, Lifestyle, Reality and Digital Media. Put another way, it was an evening of pretty damned good voices,…
The Mind Reels 