Horror to Hummingbirds, Greta, Gloria and Canadian Screen Awards  I haven’t much to say about the Canadian Screen Awards to be announced this Sunday night on CBC (see the list of nominations: https://www.academy.ca/nominees/ ), not having seen any of the five “best picture” nominees (none of which has yet played theatrically in Canada’s capital), and precious few of the films nominated for anything.    There is a best actor nomination for Brandon Oakes in Don McKellar’s Through Black Spruce now arriving in select theatres.   An adaptation of the acclaimed Joseph Boyden novel, it’s about the search by a young Cree woman from Northern Ontario for her twin sister who has disappeared in Toronto. I was able to see it at last year’s Toronto film festival. Definitely worth a look. At New York’s Tribeca film festival a year ago I caught Robert Budreau’s Stockholm , nominated for “best adapted screenplay”. It stars the reliably excellent Ethan Hawke. Several of the documen...

Women and Girls on Screen    Captain Marvel (U.S./Australia https://www.marvel.com/movies/captain-marvel ) Written and directed by the duo of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, this female-led superhero blockbuster is approaching a billion-dollar worldwide box-office, on track to surpass last year’s Wonder Woman , so it must be doing something right.   Credit Brie Larson in the title role as “Vers”, being trained as an extra-terrestrial “Kree” warrior, up against shape-shifting “Skrulls”, and in thrall to a Dr. Wendy Lawson (Annette Bening).   After crashing back to a retro 1990s planet C-53 (aka Earth), and discovering her origins as fighter pilot Carol “Avenger” Danvers, our superheroine learns the truth about the Kree and its “supreme intelligence”.   The Skrulls sure are ugly but maybe not the bad-guy invaders.   If not totally marvelous, there’s more than enough diverting action-hero effects and story twists to keep one engaged.   B   Woman...

Best of March Movies I missed going to summery Austin, Texas this March for the South By Southwest Festival. But I did get a preview screener for an outstanding documentary feature The River and the Wall which played to standing ovations and was awarded the fest’s Louis Black “Lone Star” award. An intrepid crew navigates the full 1,200-mile length of the Texas-Mexico border along the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf coast using bicycles, on horseback, and by canoe.   The rugged environmentally sensitive locations are awe-inspiring and the film includes bipartisan commentary (from both Democratic presidential aspirant Beto O’Rourke and Republican Congressman Will Hurd) showing how senseless is Donald Trump’s blowhard “build the wall” approach to border security. See and read more at: http://theriverandthewall.com/ .             Below I briefly review the Netflix South American action-thriller Triple Frontier .   A...

Oscar Hangover? I was less dismayed than some at Green Book taking best picture. Notwithstanding the controversies, the movie is quite good, and Mahershala Ali deserved his second Oscar for his role as the African-American pianist Don Shirley. Still Roma was in a class above, a masterwork by every measure.   In 91 years the big Oscar has never gone to a non-English language film and here was a golden chance to end that. (Compare Roma’s 96% rating on metacritic.com to the reverse numbers of 69% for Green Book; the critical consensus is clear.) Was it the fact that Netflix produced Roma ? A black-and-white movie with no big-name stars?   (Netflix also produced and is streaming the winning documentary short Period. End of Sentence .  Then again theatrical distribution is not an issue for shorts.) Bohemian Rhapsody was another Oscar-favoured film dogged by controversy and hated by some critics with a passion.   But there were also the Spike Lee and...

The Envelope Please … Those Oscars That time of the year again, and you can find out all about the 91 st Academy Awards this Sunday here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/91st_Academy_Awards . Also a few other links: https://www.rogerebert.com/chazs-blog/my-joys-and-sorrows-of-the-2019-oscar-nominations Gold Derby predictions tracker: https://www.goldderby.com/c/film/oscars/ https://variety.com/2019/film/awards/advantages-and-challenges-for-the-2019-best-picture-nominees-1203120868/ https://www.macleans.ca/culture/movies/will-roma-make-history-or-will-bradley-coopers-snub-turn-a-star-is-born-into-the-underdog/ I won’t go through all the categories.   However I am glad to see that the Academy backed down on a ridiculous earlier decision to relegate best cinematography and best editing to commercial breaks. No host should mean less inane patter, and there’s other fluff that could be cut to reduce the length of the ceremony. Best Picture I fully expect Alfonso ...

Beyond Hollywood: Border, Capernaum Hollywood’s biggest party, the Oscars, is coming up and will no doubt indulge in some of the usual self-congratulation.   So it’s good to look beyond the tinsel of an American-dominated industry, especially in a year when a “foreign-language” feature— Roma —has a decent shot to win best picture.   Border (Sweden/Denmark) Iranian-born director Ali Abbasi’s bizarre Scandinavian tale was tops in the Un Certain Regard sidebar of the 2018 Cannes film festival and Sweden’s entry to the Oscar foreign-language category.     It did manage one Oscar nomination—for makeup and hair styling—as well it should. Based on a short story, the central character is Tina (Eva Melander in a raw, fearless performance) who works as a Swedish custom agent at a seaside port of entry.   To say that this is not a movie with beautiful people is an understatement. Tina has forbidding, Neanderthal-like features and quite literally a nose for sniff...

Powerhouse Female Roles: Destroyer , Vox Lux This year’s last week of January has been a change from the past dozen or so when I would be binging on exciting new movies at the Sundance film festival, my favorite festival experience. I miss that special atmosphere but am keeping tabs on the offerings generating the most buzz and worth watching out for during the year. In the meantime let me recommend a couple of recent releases featuring powerhouse female performances that command attention even if overlooked for Oscar nominations in a competitive year. Destroyer (U.S. https://www.destroyer.movie/ ) Nicole Kidman won her best actress Oscar back in 2003 for her transformative role as Virginia Woolf in The Hours . In director Karyn Kusama’s bleak crime drama, Kidman’s psycho-physical transformation is if anything greater and considerably less glamorous, akin to that of Charlize Theron as a serial killer in Monster .   Kidman plays Erin Bell, an alcoholic, hard-bitten Los...

Another Awesome Documentary and Those Oscar Nominations They Shall Not Grow Old (New Zealand/UK https://www.theyshallnotgrowold.film/ )   New Zealand director Peter Jackson is best known for the fictional Lord of the Rings trilogy.   But it’s his longtime interest in military history that has led to this amazing work, released during the centenary of the armistice that ended the First World War and dedicated to a grandfather who served in the British army from 1910-1919.   On January 21 I braved extreme windchills to see it on the big screen, a one-day only showing at Cineplex theatres in Canada.             The painstaking production drew from some 100 hours of archival footage originally shot during the war itself, and 600 hours of audio recordings by WWI veterans made in the 1960s and 1970s. These voices of firsthand experience provide all the narration.   Given the variable quality of extant archiva...

RBG, Laurel and Hardy On the Basis of Sex (U.S. http://www.focusfeatures.com/on-the-basis-of-sex ) One of the finer documentaries of 2018 is RBG which covers the trail-blazing career of liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who turns 86 on March 15).   A multiple award winner, including being named best documentary by the National Board of Review, it’s a contender for an Oscar nomination to be announced January 22.             Director Mimi Leder’s narrative takes a rather jaunty inspirational melodrama approach to its subject, focusing on the period from 1956, when Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) was among a handful of women admitted to the Harvard Law School, to the 1970s when she, representing a male client, won a groundbreaking case before a federal appeals court that hinged on overturning gender discrimination in tax legislation. From the outset, and in that seminal case, Bader Ginsberg, then a...