moviereview

I couldn’t persuade any of my friends to come out to see My Winnipeg at the Tinseltown on a Wednesday night, so I saw by myself, in a theatre occupied by just me and a couple few rows behind me. It’s okay, though — if ever there was a movie meant to wash over you…

My Kid Could Paint That is a documentary about the career of 4-year-old painter Marla Olmstead, who was producing powerful abstract paintings in Binghampton, NY in 2005. The lure of a child painting prodigy was irresistible to the media and the New York art scene, and Marla’s paintings started selling for thousands — and then…

I had big plans to see several of the films in the Pacific Cinemateque series of 1960s Japanese genre films over the long weekend (happy BC Day!), but laziness and a high neighbourhood Walk Score conspired to keep me around Main Street, which I am still enthusiastically exploring. Today, for instance, I walked up to…

Two minor documentaries from two master directors, with two very different approaches. John Landis’ Slasher is very much in the cinéma verite style — in fact, it’s really not much of a step from the classic 1969 film Salesman. Like that doc, this is concerned with the life of a travelling salesman, in this case,…

Val Kilmer has a reputation for being difficult to work with, but it’s clear from this, his very first movie, that he has always been a major talent — I really don’t think many actors could anchor a comedy this zany, and still come across as anything other than a cartoon. Kilmer is basically Elvis…