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National Observer
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- National Observer
MOVIES: A big showdown for the US long weekend: Tom Cruise in action vs Disney's live action Lilo & Stitch
It seems that we've got another case of two big films going head to head. It's Memorial Day weekend in the US and both Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning starring Tom Cruise and Lilo & Stitch, Disney's latest live-action remake of an animated film, are both predicted to be smash hits. The only question is, which one will be at the top. The other will be right behind. And here's a fun fact: Angela Bassett is an actor in one; her husband Courtney B. Vance is in the other. We've got other choices too, including a Jane Austen-inspired rom com and a gay rights/anti-Communist dissertation with a small Canadian connection. And watch out for a film I didn't have a chance to preview: Ocean with David Attenborough. It promises to be stocked with his usual wisdom about the natural world and revel in spectacular cinematography. And take note that Incandescence, the film about forest wildfires that I reviewed a month and a half ago, is about to start on the National Film Board ( website. It'll be free and with wildfire season starting up again, essential. In theaters, we have these: Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning: 3 stars Lilo & Stitch: 3 Jane Austen Wrecked My Life: 4 Bad Shabbos: 2 ½ MISSION IMPOSSIBLE THE FINAL RECKONING: This film finishes the story that started in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning two years ago and is predicted to be a much bigger hit. But it's not the story that you come to it for; it's the action, the driving narrative and Tom Cruise again doing his own stunts. I don't know if he really did the main sequence, dangling from a plane in midair after jumping from another. Then climbing up to overpower the pilot. It's thrilling and pretty-well sums up what summer movies are all about. Don't explain, just energize. The story has Cruise as Ethan Hunt continue searching for the people behind a malevolent use of Artificial Intelligence. It's a program called The Entity. It can invade any computer system on earth and considering how much of our world is now run with computers poses an extreme threat. Nuclear missiles will launch in three days unless Ethan can stop the Entity. He has half of a key (he got hold of it last film) and now needs something called the Podkova, a gadget apparently sitting in a Russian submarine that sank, also last film. He assembles his crew (Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, holdovers, and Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementiff, newcomers) and with the U.S. president (Angela Bassett) urging him on, gets to work. The details don't make sense and take almost three hours to play out but for gung ho action and intense moralizing this is more than worthwhile. (In many theaters) 3 out of 5 LILO & STITCH: Disney is at it again. They've made this live action version of the animated film which came out 23 years ago and has been very popular with children. This new one will probably be also, with kids about 8 or 10 years old. They'll love the recurring scenes of havoc and probably the family connections it espouses. Adults may find it glossy and pleasant but bland and repetitive, a milder counterpart of better films like ET, lower in emotional impact and certainly not bringing on tears. Instead it plays like a run-of-the-mill family drama like Disney used to make regularly. Lilo (played winningly by newcomer Maia Kealoha) is a young girl living in Hawaii. She's been raised by her older sister (Sydney Elizabeth Agudong) after their parents died sometime in the past. Lilo is a bit of a troublemaker at school (in self-defense) which brings both a teacher and two children's services people calling. Sis assures her she's not bad. 'You just do bad things sometimes,' she says. All that changes dramatically because out on a planet somewhere in space a rogue genetic experiment has produced a 'monstrosity.' The queen orders it disposed of. It looks like a small animal with a soulful face and ends up on Earth where an animal rescue group saves it and Lilo finds and adopts it. She thinks it's a dog. Cue the havoc it causes at her home, at various locations and even on a surfboard. All that is fun but very silly, as are the forces closing in. One is the CIA (really? Operating internally in the USA?). Courtney B. Vance is the agent investigating. Also in pursuit are a couple of agents sent from the planet that Stitch came from. They disguise themselves as humans (Zach Galifianakis and Billy Magnussen) but prove to be bumblers. Children may enjoy that. What may affect them more is the family separation threat looming over Lilo thanks to the child social workers. The film follows the original closely, with only a few changes. And live action isn't 100%. Characters on and from the alien planet are still animated; earthlings are live. Any reason, I guess, to re-visit old favorites. (In theaters) 2 ½ out if 5 JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE: Here's a better-than-usual romantic comedy powered by a literary and classic English ambience. The word 'wrecked' don't fit though. The main character is a reader of Austen's novels and quite longing for some of the life in there, but she's not, as far as I can see, damaged by her. Influenced, sure. Agathe, played by Camille Rutherford, is single, hasn't had sex in years, writes but hasn't finished a novel yet, seems to be suffering a writer's block, and works in a bookstore alongside Felix (Pablo Pauly). She is attracted to him but makes no effort to show it. Felix says to her 'You don't live. You hide.' He helps, though. He reads the start of her in-progress novel, declares it good and recommends her to an English writers retreat. She's accepted, sheepishly goes and meets Oliver (Charlie Anson) who is a great, great, great, great nephew of Jane Austen's. He's a professor of English literature and considers Austen 'overated' which prompts Agathe to declare him 'unbearable and arrogant.' If you've seen any rom com before you know that feeling won't last. Gradually she warms to him and a love triangle, with him versus Felix, takes shape. Much like in an Austen novel. There are other smaller parallels envisioned by writer/director Laura Piani who herself, like Agathe, worked in a Paris bookstore. She steers the film's main theme to fight self-doubt and do what you dream of. A surprise cameo late in the film by the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman sums that up. Satisfying. (Theaters in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver) 4 out of 5 BAD SHABBOS: The Jewish Sabbath is supposed to be a day of rest and family gatherings but is noisily disrupted in this comedy. Too bad it's not as funny as the writers, Daniel Robbins, who is also the director, and Zack Weiner, seem to think it is. It feels like one of those SNL skits that starts with a good idea but comes up short in the writing. It's not all that clever and the story reminds me of several films done before. At heart this is a standard meeting-of-cultures film. David, who is Jewish and played by Jon Bass, is engaged to marry Meg, a Christian, and brings her home to his family for dinner on the Sabbath evening. Her parents are to arrive later. So there are many opportunities to have slightly awkward misunderstandings over Jewish traditions. Meg (Meghan Leathers) says she has always wanted to find out more about Judaism and thinks the Torah is a prequel to the Bible. (One of the better jokes in here). Kyra Sedgwick and David Paymer play the Jewish parents; she written stereotypically and he easygoing. Another son is the problem. Adam (Theo Taplitz) dreams of joining the JDF (the Isreali army) but sets off a huge problem with a prank that causes the death of another of the evening's guests. How to hide the body before the potential in-laws arrive? Do you call the police? 911? Good complications but lackluster debate and an unsatisfying solution follow. And the laughs are pretty mild in this would-be dark comedy, although the rapper Method Man contributes some good ones as a doorman who helps. The film has been popular at many festivals including Tribeca, in New York. (In theaters: Toronto, North York and Vancouver, soon Victoria). 2 ½ out of 5
Montreal Gazette
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Montreal Gazette
Actor Jay Baruchel only too happy to provide all of the voices for Bread Will Walk
Movies And TV By Jay Baruchel didn't need any arm-twisting to agree to lend his voice to the brand-new National Film Board animated short Bread Will Walk. In fact, he was so into this extraordinary 11-minute film that he agreed to do all 10 voices in the short film! 'Number one, it's just gorgeous and wholly unique,' said the former Montrealer in a recent phone interview from his home in Toronto, explaining why he agreed to jump on board the film created by Montreal director Alex Boya. 'I can't explain its look or tone to anybody, which is a rare thing,' said Baruchel, who has appeared in the films Goon, Knocked Up, BlackBerry and Million Dollar Baby. 'It's like nothing meets nothing. I don't know how I would possibly describe what Bread Will Walk is and in 2025 that's a rare special thing to be treasured. There is not one piece of phoney inside of Alex Boya. There isn't a phoney bone in his body. He's as authentic an artist as I've ever worked with and I felt it watching it. When I saw this f---ed up Grimm's Fairy Tale, it reminded me of the scariest stories my mother would read to me as a kid. Then on top of that I really liked what he had to say about the food industrial complex and the inherent predatory nature of free-market capitalism.' Bread Will Walk is kind of a reverse zombie-apocalypse movie. The zombies are peaceful beings made of bread and it's the hungry living who're trying to eat the zombies! It's not The Walking Dead. It's The Walking Bread! Like in any zombie flick worth its salt, the setting is a world on the verge of collapse with a little social critique thrown in for good measure. It's about hunger, nasty food multinationals and a media world gone mad. The basic story is simple: An older sister is on the run with her younger brother who is indeed made of bread. Bread Will Walk is set to have its world premiere on Thursday in the Directors Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival. 'It started off with a dream,' said Boya, on the phone from Cannes. 'I had a dream many many years ago about a man who was faceless, who had a jet turbine on his head instead of a face. In that world you also had a scene where someone pulled my hand, I was trying to get away from this industrial wasteland, and someone held on to my arm and then my whole arm was ripped off. But it wasn't an arm. It was a baguette and there were crumbs everywhere.' It took Boya four years to make the film using paper and 2D animation mixed with digital collages. It's built around 4,000 ink-on-paper hand drawings. Baruchel does 10 different voices in the film, using styles of voice that range from a guy who sounds like an older Louisiana man to someone who sounds like a BBC announcer. He also sings the jazz standard All of Me. 'It appealed to my hubris,' said Baruchel. 'He said: 'Do you want to do the work of 10 people?' And I'm like: 'Yeah! Absolutely I can'.' Doing voice work is old hat for Baruchel. One of his highest-profile roles on the big screen was voicing the character Hiccup Haddock in the How to Train Your Dragon movies, but even that was far from his first experience doing voices in animation. 'I have spent years at a microphone figuring out a way to make my voice suit an animated story,' said Baruchel. 'When I started my career, when I was 12 or 13, I worked at Astral Tech a lot on Ste-Catherine St. near Fort (St.). I would dub French TV shows into English, live action and animated. That was like boot camp for voice recording. So that put me in a good place to do How to Train Your Dragon, which turned into three movies and eight-plus years of a TV series. It is now a place in the world that I am as at home in as anywhere else. 'I'm plus à l'aise in doing a voice because nobody's looking at me and it's devoid of vanity. I'm not worried about my complexion or my hairline or my posture or any of these things. All I'm doing, in a pretty pure way, is just creating with no ego, no sense of personal aesthetics. When you take away a camera, you take away a microscope and any superficiality, which is a necessary evil of being a person who gets makeup put on their face and stands in front of a camera and lights. So it becomes this really pure almost childlike channeling of your imagination.'
CTV News
20-05-2025
- Politics
- CTV News
CRTC hears debate on including a ‘cultural element' in new definition of CanCon
A person navigates to the on-line social-media pages of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) in Ottawa on Monday, May 17, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick OTTAWA — The CRTC is considering whether it should include a 'cultural element' in its new definition of Canadian content. A consumers' group says having a test that attempts to define who or what is culturally Canadian would be 'highly problematic.' The Public Interest Advocacy Centre says the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission should stick to its current approach, which looks at whether Canadians are employed in key creative positions. The broadcast regulator has heard from others during its two-week hearing who are in favour of including culture in the modernized definition of CanCon. The National Film Board has argued that now is the time to include cultural elements in the definition of Canadian content. It says the lack of a cultural element in the definition could result in harmful long-term consequences and risks erasing 'what makes us who we are.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 20, 2024. Anja Karadeglija, The Canadian Press
CBC
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Films with Manitoba connections at Hot Docs range from surreal animation to history of 2SLGBTQ+ rights
Social Sharing With its launch in Toronto last week, the documentary film festival Hot Docs celebrated its 32nd year in earnest after coming perilously close to dissolution last year due to money woes and key staff resignations. If one can say it has rebounded in 2025, no small credit goes to Manitoba filmmakers and Manitoba subjects. Like the Toronto International Film Festival last September, Hot Docs has a rich abundance of Manitoba content (if not actual Manitoba productions) that, at minimum, affirms the province's plurality of talent. The festival began with a resounding bang with the April 24 evening opening premiere of Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance at the Hot Docs Cinema, the first of 113 docs on the program. The press/industry screening and the first public screening were held back-to-back. The National Film Board production was directed by current Winnipegger Noam Gonick and produced by former Winnipegger Justine Pimlott. Despite being laid off from the NFB last year, Pimlott has been having an impressive run of films, including her project Any Other Way, a portrait of trans soul singer Jackie Shane that just this week won a Peabody Award in the documentary category and also won the $50,000 Rogers Documentary Prize from the Toronto Film Critics Association. A comprehensive history of the fight for 2SLGBTQ+ rights over the past 60 years, Parade combines a history of activism and queer themes, both of which are near and dear to the hearts of Pimlott and Gonick, both children of activists. The opening night screenings went over enthusiastically, especially since many of the activists interviewed in the film showed up for the screenings, filling the stage of the cinema with living witnesses to the events depicted. Gonick, for one, was happy to share the stage. "When it's just one person out there to represent all those voices, that's just not the way it should be," Gonick said in an interview after the screening. "So it was just perfect that we had, like, a photo call of 35 people. "Svend Robinson [Canada's first MP to come out as gay ] flew in all the way from Cypress just to be there that night." Pimlott, who premiered Any Other Way at Hot Docs last year, called the festival "this incredible platform to get word out." "At the public screening, we got a standing ovation, and most of the activists were there. So the Q&A was really taken up with these moments of these incredible people all being together in the same room, and God knows when they were last together," she said. "The audience got a chance to be in communion with these incredible elder activists," Pimlott said. "So that was really remarkable." Animated doc 9 years in the making Endless Cookie — perhaps the most eccentric documentary since Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg — is an animated feature centred on the lives of half-brothers and storytelling collaborators Seth and Peter Scriver. Seth, who is white, lives in Toronto, while Peter, who is white and Cree, lives in Shamattawa First Nation in northern Manitoba. Their relationship and their larger family lives are expressed in chaotic animation. This is the closest any filmmaker has come to capturing the psychedelia of Heavy Traffic -era Ralph Bakshi, courtesy of animator Seth, who co-directed the 2013 animated road movie Asphalt Watches. More than nine years in the making, the film went through changes, including the fact that little children seen in the beginning of the film transmogrified into adults by the end, including the title character Cookie (who, of course, is drawn as a literal cookie). "Cookie is not a little tiny Cookie anymore," Seth said at a Q&A following the screening last Sunday. The nature of the film revealed itself during attempts to record typically clean animation dialogue, he said. "Originally, when we started, it was going to be straight up good recording, with no interruption," said Seth. "But Pete lives in a four-bedroom house with nine kids and 16 dogs, so it's insane to try to record anything. "So eventually, we gave into the insanity and let it go." Will the film have a premiere in Shamattawa? "We have to figure that out. But that's the plan," Seth said. "There's tons of people that are bugging us to see it, but only the family has seen it. But it's going to happen." Another doc with Winnipeg roots, The Nest focuses on a Victorian mansion in the city's Armstrong's Point neighbourhood, a storied house on West Gate that was the childhood home of the film's Winnipeg-born co-director Julietta Singh. She joined forces with co-director Chase Joynt in a lush and often startling investigation of the house's history, which includes being the residence of Métis firebrand Annie Bannatyne, housing a school for deaf people, and serving as home to a Japanese family after wartime internment, in addition to the story of Singh's mother, who raised her mixed-race children there and spent decades restoring the house to its Victorian-era glory while running it as a bed and breakfast. "I left the house as a teenager — actually moved out when I was 15, and I left Winnipeg itself in my early 20s to go to school," said Singh, who now teaches post-colonial literature, along with gender and sexuality studies, at the University of Richmond in Virginia. "Before the film, my experience of the house was a hard one. It was the repository of difficult family memories of filial violence, but also it was a very white and racist neighborhood when we were growing up there," Singh said. "When we moved in, in 1980, we were told very explicitly, 'We don't want your kind around here,'" she said. "So my coming back and forth from Winnipeg has been to visit my mother and to visit that house over many decades, and my experience of the house really shifted through the making of the film." Quiet, rich life on Mennonite farm At 90 years old, Agatha Bock is the unlikely star of Agatha's Almanac, directed by her niece Amalie Atkins. Over its 86-minute running time, we witness Agatha tending to her ancestral Mennonite farm in rural Manitoba, lingering over details both beautiful (buckets of ruby-red strawberries) and subtly hilarious (Agatha likes to put masking tape on objects for easy identification, such as "Very good bucket — 2003"). But viewed as a whole, the film is a testament to living a quiet, rich life. Prior to a screening in Toronto, Agatha recalled the genesis of the film. "She started by taking a few pictures and then eventually decided she would make a film out of it," Bock said. "And so she just kept coming and coming." Atkins, who lives in Saskatoon, said she showed Agatha a rough cut last year, and the subject of the film maintained her honesty in her critique. "I went for her 90th birthday, and I showed her the first hour," Atkins said. "And she said, 'You've got to cut this down!'" There wasn't time then to watch the second hour. "But that was enough feedback," said Atkins, laughing. "So then I went back into the film and kept arranging and cutting and trimming." 'To make a movie about me was very scary' The 10-minute documentary Becoming Ruby is one of six shorts commissioned by Hot Docs to celebrate ordinary Canadians doing extraordinary things. That certainly describes Alex Nguyen, Manitoba's first drag artist-in-residence at Winnipeg's Rainbow Resource Centre in the persona of Ruby Chopstix. Winnipeg director Quan Luong, who, like Nguyen, is of Vietnamese heritage, says it was fun to shoot Ruby in performance, but he was just as compelled by the film's quieter behind-the-scenes moments. "The relationship between Alex and their mom was so beautiful to capture," said Luong. Nguyen said it was a challenge to reveal the person behind Ruby's elaborate makeup. "To make a movie about me was very scary, but very rewarding," Nguyen said, adding it was "very healing to talk about myself for once." "I was imagining my younger self watching it," Nguyen said. "Really, this is a very impactful thing that I wish I had growing up."
CBC
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
3 Canadian films to watch on National Canadian Film Day
Founded in 2014, National Canadian Film Day (or CanFilmDay) encourages audiences to "stand up for Canada by sitting down to watch a great Canadian film." This year, CanFilmDay will present almost 2,000 free screenings across every province and territory, as well as more than 43 countries around the world. The movement has seen a surge of support in recent months thanks in large part to the current moment of national pride, with registrations running 60 per cent higher than last year. Today on Commotion, Toronto Metropolitan University's Storyteller in Residence Jesse Wente, film critic Sarah-Tai Black and screenwriter Nathalie Younglai join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to celebrate CanFilmDay, and to discuss the state of Canadian filmmaking in 2025. We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player. WATCH | Today's episode on YouTube: Elamin: Jesse, we were talking before we went live, and you were like, "There used to be a time when I saw 10,000 movies a year." Maybe you see slightly fewer than that now, but seeing as this is National Canadian Film Day, can you give me a home-grown movie that has come out in the last year or so, that you think people should spend some time with? Jesse: Well, sure, but just to quickly correct the misinformation that just occurred, it was 1,500. Elamin: That's a lot, man. That's three a day. Anyway, yes. Continue. Jesse: Yeah, so I was a film critic and programming a couple different film festivals at that time, and that's how you accumulate that. The film I most want to highlight is a fantastic documentary. Canadian cinema is very much rooted in the documentary tradition. That's where our national cinema actually comes from, from the founding of the National Film Board and the early days of the CBC…. And so I want to highlight Wilfred Buck. This is a fantastic documentary, sort of a biography of this Cree elder who's very well known in all Indigenous communities as being "the star guy," because he has a deep understanding and knowledge of Cree astronomy and understanding of the stars in a very different way than we understand now. This film melds science and humanity. It takes you through time. It takes you through literal space, Elamin. I think it's just a fantastic film, and the type of film that … gives a window for a lot of the world, and for Canada, it gives a great opportunity to reflect on the knowledge systems that have existed here for thousands of years and that yet remain somewhat of an untapped resource for the Canada of today. WATCH | Official trailer for Wilfred Buck: Elamin: You're such a great salesman of a movie, Jesse, that I'm like, "I'm gonna abandon the rest of the show and go find this movie."... Sarah-Tai, over to you, pal. What do you want to recommend? Sarah-Tai: Something I watched very recently and enjoyed is Sook-Yin Lee's Paying For It, which is an adaptation of cartoonist Chester Brown's graphic novel of the same name. The novel follows his decision to start frequenting sex workers after the break-up of his real-life relationship with Sook-Yin. And Sook-Yin is re-imagined in the film as this character, Sunny. It's this very nostalgic, zeitgeist-y look at late '90s, early 2000s Toronto's arts and culture. You get to see that transition of MuchMusic, which is called MaxMusic in the film, from this kind of zany DIY platform for punky kids into this more mainstream space. It's really funny. It's really cool. I laughed out loud, which is very difficult to do for me for a narrative film. But I think it's really fresh, and I think Sook-Yin and co-writer Joanne Sarazen add a really amazing feminist perspective to Chester's story as well. WATCH | Official trailer for Paying For It: Elamin: Natalie, over to you pal. What do you want to recommend? Natalie: I'd love to highlight Lucky Strikes, which is a film by Darcy Waite. It's this hilarious Indigenous comedy starring Victoria Gwendolyne, Gabriel Daniels and Meegwun Fairbrother. It's about this washed-up Indigenous bowler trying to preserve his father's legacy by buying his late father's bowling alley. But first, [he and his best friend] have to win this national bowling competition. I think these really fun and quirky stories about Indigenous communities are really important for audiences who are Indigenous, but also non-Indigenous too alike.
