Written by Michelle Sinclair PSA: This review is a spoiler-free zone. Despite the nauseating amount of my life that I have spent watching every tangential Marvel film to ensure I would Know All The Things going into Avengers: Infinity War, I didn’t particularly want to see it. Some of that is superhero burnout, but mostly I was turned off by the plethora of articles online speculating that the film would be the darkest installment and gushing over how many major characters could die. Not my favorite things. On top of everything else, the title Infinity War does not sound even remotely […]

Review by Vic Thiessen Among the countless forgotten films lost in the hype surrounding Avengers: Infinity War (which I don’t plan to see) is this wonderful indie comedy-drama from director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, who collaborated on Juno (2007) and Young Adult (2011). Like those two films, Tully has profound things to say about life today and does so with a subtle humor, an unusually intelligent plot, and great acting. Tully stars Charlize Theron as Marlo, who gives birth to her third child, Mia, early in the film. The other two children were already a handful, especially with […]

Two weeks ago, an antifeminist blogger received way too much media attention when he suggested that men shouldn’t see Mad Max: Fury Road because it was feminist propaganda disguised as an action flick (even though he hadn’t actually watched the film). That non-story gained a lot of traction among media outlets, but it really just gave a lot of press to a site that should have just been left to wallow in its own hatred. The question remains, however: is Mad Max: Fury Road really a shift in action film philosophy regarding gender roles? Well, not quite. The women are […]

Traditional power dynamics get the inside-out treatment in Thomas Vinterberg’s Far from the Madding Crowd, a historical film drama based on the 1874 novel by Thomas Hardy. The English author (most famous for Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure) was about a hundred years ahead of his time as a feminist thinker. This sweeping rural opera makes an unforgettable case for giving Tess a break from the high school English class spotlight and letting Bathsheba Everdene, the heroine in Madding Crowd, have the reins for a change. As romance-heavy as all that sounds, this isn’t your usual dances-and-horses […]

Set to become the year’s biggest blockbuster (and one of the highest-grossing films of all time), The Avengers: Age of Ultron has continued the world’s love affair with Marvel superheroes that began with Iron Man. “You want to protect the world, but you don’t want it to change. There’s only one path to peace . . . your extinction.” I watched the film in a full theatre and listened closely to the post-film comments made by the people in my vicinity. I heard not a single negative comment. People were thrilled; some even clapped. When I suggest that the masses are being […]

I gave my two daughters and my niece a pen and a pad as we entered the movie theater to see Monkey Kingdom, Disneynature’s latest documentary. “I need help writing my review,” I said.  The underdog story of Maya drives the film, and she is perhaps the strongest female protagonist in a Disney film in recent memory. When we exited the theater, I received back two whole sentences, the most complete being, “This was a really good movie,” from my 9-year-old niece, who also noticed that there were “a few parts of monkeys fighting.” In retrospect, it was an unfair […]