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The world is changing for Adam (Patric Hivon), and for us. Increasing temperatures, rising sea levels, weather events becoming more extreme — and there’s very little we can do at this point. We’ve gone past the point where anyone can reasonably deny that human activity has directly effected climate, and that’s cause for great…
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Blue Heron will reach into the soul of anyone who has lost someone. It will pull out emotions long thought forgotten or moved past, and examine them through the small moments of half-remembered connection. Set in both the past and present, Blue Heron tells the story of a girl turned young woman named Sasha as she attempts…
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On paper, this movie should work. Acts of heroism in dire circumstances make for good watching, but Greengrass fails to deliver on the film’s promise of tension and thrills. Meanwhile, there’s a whole crew of first responders actually fighting the fire who we almost never get to see in the movie. The story of…
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Grief is among the most challenging of human emotions. It’s a coupling of despair at loss, the ennui of loneliness, and the fondness of memory. It is a persistence of love, but also an absence that can leave us scrambling to fill the void it has created. Eleanor the Great is a film marketed as a light-hearted…
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We don’t choose our family. Love them, hate them, they are our families, and we are stuck with them. Some of us are blessed with living, supportive ones; others not so much, and the rest fall somewhere in between. Black Rabbit is a story of brothers who fall somewhere in between. Jake (Jude Law) and Vince (Jason Bateman) Friedken grew…
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In Canada, we have an ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. According to research done by Statistics Canada, women of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit descent are six times more likely to be murdered than their non-Indigenous counterparts. They also face assault, both physical and sexual, at disproportionately higher rates, and the perpetrators are…
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Sex work is work. Let’s get that out of the way right off the bat. Society has traditionally looked down on sex work, and in particular sex workers, for various reasons rooted in dubious morality (and religion), but the fact remains that sex work is work, and sex workers are deserving of respect and…
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The filmmaking trio of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (better known as Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker or ZAZ) made their mark on cinema early in their careers. They began with The Kentucky Fried Movie, an anthology film of sketch comedy that did quite well critically and commercially, and then with their sophomore effort, they all but created a genre of film. Airplane!, released…
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On November 6th, 1985, a left-wing guerrilla group called Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19, for short) stormed the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, Colombia. The intent was to hold the Justices of the Supreme Court hostage and force a trial against President Belisario Betancur. What happened instead was one of the deadliest attacks in…
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In Canada, we like to think of ourselves as progressive and inclusive and, relative to other nations today, we most likely are. That hasn’t always been true; our history is littered with heinous events and policies that persecuted the Indigenous peoples of this country. One of the main efforts to erase Indigenous identity and…
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Storytelling has been a part of the human experience since the dawn of time. From cave paintings to campfire stories to novels to film, at our core, we want and need to tell stories, and our memory is key to the process. What we write is informed by our remembered experiences, as is how…
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Spike Lee is best known for racially and politically charged dramas like Do the Right Thing, He Got Game, Da 5 Bloods, and BlacKkKlansman. While these are some of the films that he might be best remembered for, he was not above more studio-friendly fare. In 2006, he also made one of the slickest…
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Heist movies are fun. There are few things as satisfying in cinema as a well-executed plan coming to fruition, and the thieves that execute said plan making their getaway into the sunset. It’s even better if they’re driving a cool car, and get to do a bunch of cool stunts. Eenie Meanie, the directorial…
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The story of DEVO is one of art and protest. For many, it doesn’t feel this way; the band’s one enduring hit seems to be, on its surface, one of their silliest. An uptempo hit with nonsense lyrics encouraging people to solve their issues by “whipping it,” it also satirizes late-’70s and early-’80s American optimism and…
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The old west was a place of wonder and possibility, where one could hop on a horse with little more than the clothes on their back and a few supplies and head out to find their destiny. The new West has lost this. Now a land of established farms and ranches, one might head…