Jorge Ignacio Castillo

One of the (many) things the “Defund the CBC” mob misses in its idiotic crusade is that, if it’s successful, it would deprive us of the luxury of having Malcolm McDowell reciting Pickering poems in a Canadian sitcom.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the level of difficulty it took to turn The Sweet Hereafter into a critical and commercial success. The story’s stock-in-trade is pain — most of the characters are grieving parents — and the audience’s closest thing to a proxy is an opportunistic lawyer looking to weaponize the parents’ sorrow.
In less competent hands, such a narrative would be taxing if not unbearable.

Actors who’ve played famous roles can have a difficult time branching out. For Daniel Radcliffe, that challenge had the added difficulty of growing up on screen as the iconic Harry Potter. What’s a former boy wizard to do?
Genre movies, of course.
After a perfectly competent foray into romcoms (The F Word), Radcliffe has let his freak flag fly.

If our worldwide pandemic hasn’t turned you off dystopic movies, you could do a lot worse than The Platform.
A Spanish sci-fi/horror/social commentary hybrid, The Platform won last year’s TIFF Midnight Madness section. It wasn’t even close: the film is effective at every level and even provides a few laughs amid the carnage.

Atom Egoyan is never shy about talking about his creative process. One of Canada’s foremost filmmakers has a cerebral approach to moviemaking that has only become more acute with time.
Egoyan’s transition from maverick (The Sweet Hereafter, Exotica) to elder statesman (Remember) happened in front of our eyes.

You may have crossed paths with Kacey Rohl in Arrow, Wayward Pines or The Magicians. But most likely you remember her from her pivotal role in Hannibal as Lecter’s protegee, Abigail Hobbs.
Rohl’s ability to go back and forth between the light and the dark has served her well in her career.

When you kickoff your acting career working for Ingmar Bergman, there’s nowhere to go but down. Lena Olin managed to break through and forge a path of her own, one that included working for Sidney Lumet, Philip Kaufman and Roman Polanski (yeah, I know. So does she).

Seventeen years ago the Canadian documentary The Corporation proved a once-controversial thesis: if corporations were people, they would be psychopaths. Now that they’ve rebranded themselves as good citizens — environmentally mindful, woke even — the team behind the award-winning doc decided it was time for another look.

One of the absurdities of film journalism is having to agree to do an interview over the phone with someone who’s walking distance away. In this particular case, the prospect of talking to a proper filmmaker supersedes discomfort and oh-so-many interruptions, although one can’t help but thinking how much more information you could get in person.

Since Elevation Pictures’ birth in 2013, it’s become a major player in Canadian film production. You probably recognize the logo from dozens of movie intros: travelling through space, a group of stars link up like a constellation to form the company name as the high notes of a synthesizer shape into a slight melody.

The first thing you notice when you meet Ewen Bremner is how radically different he is from the high-strung, manic characters he often plays — most notably Daniel “Spud” Murphy from the Trainspotting movies.
His latest film, Creation Stories, is a biopic of sorts. It follows the rise and (partial) fall of Alan McGee, cofounder of the Creation Records label.

Is there anything else to know about the 90’s most written-about figure? Thousands of articles, hundreds of books and a plenty of terrible Hallmark movies have had Diana, Princess of Wales, as their subject, even though she wasn’t all that interesting to start with [writer takes cover].
Or was she? The feminist movements of the last few years have reframed the narratives surrounding iconic figures.

A Canadian film starring two in-demand local figures is a rarity. The fact both leads are actresses in their thirties makes the project unusual. Make the source material and most of the cast and crew local, and you have a straight-up unicorn.
Meet All My Puny Sorrows, based on Miriam Toews semi-autobiographical 2014 Giller Prize finalist.

In times when studios, networks and streamers are desperate for content, pre-existing IPs are gold. This has led to some unfortunate reboots (nobody needed another Saved by the Bell?), but once in a while they find something good.
Cut to May 2022. The sixth season of The Kids in the Hall arrives on Prime Video 27 years after the last one.

With eight movies and an Oscar on his resume (2018’s Best Foreign Film, A Fantastic Woman), Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio oozes confidence. His new film, The Wonder, provocatively opens on an almost-bare stage. A disembodied voice tells us we’re about to watch a work of fiction.