As we may have mentioned before, here at Torontoist we’re terrified of zombies—terrified! But yet we still love zombie films enough to not run out of the theatre screaming (usually). However, we’re not sure we could deal with the the Rolling Stones in IMAX, as seen in Martin Scorsese's concert film Shine a Light, released this week. A giant Mick Jagger looming over us, ready to eat our brains for sustenance! Horrifying! (We’ve been......

If there’s something that all critics know, it’s that it’s great fun to rip apart something that’s incredibly bad. Especially if you know the person who made it deserves it. So as a result there’s a regular bounty of great criticism thrown at Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C. The guy has foisted some of the worst, laziest, most idiotic films on the public ever (his take on Godzilla should have had him tried in the......

Every day this week, Torontoist is exploring the future of repertory cinema in Toronto. We spoke to the theatre managers of four major rep cinemas to hear if rep cinema is dying, what it's like to exist in a YouTube society, and what original programming has them most excited. Today, we look at the model used by Cinematheque Ontario. Cinematheque Ontario, the screening program run by the Toronto International Film Festival Group, is not a......

We managed to see Cloverfield a few weeks ago, and with the release of Diary of the Dead (above) this week, we have to say it's rather timely to discuss our opinion of it. As tired as this quote is, there's really no better way to describe Cloverfield than to take from Macbeth's famous soliloquy: "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." It's particularly relevant because Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead are similar......

Hello, and welcome to another installment of everyone’s favourite film column in which the writer makes up their opinions on the weeks films largely based on what trailers they’ve seen on TV. This week we didn’t watch much (busy watching our IT Crowd Series 2 and Metalocalypse DVDs) so the only one which managed to break our consciousness was the three seconds or so we caught of a trailer for In Bruges, a Belgium-set......

It’s wild outside, huh? So wild that it allows us to segue into talking about Strange Wilderness first, for some reason. It surprises us that the last Happy Madison film that we saw was (the quite sweet, really) 50 First Dates. Strange Wilderness is only of interest to us because it has quite possibly the worst trailer we’ve ever seen on TV. It’s absolutely meaningless. It explains nothing about the (surely) threadbare plot of......

So, who else remembers that Rambo III was about Rambo going to Afghanistan to help the Taliban, huh? We do (and apparently the Sun’s Jim Slotek does too). It’s rather a shame that Sylvester Stallone hasn’t seen fit to continue from that point and deal with the consequences of the conflict, instead jumping straight to Burma/Myanmar for, as far as the reviews tell us, an absolute ton of incredibly graphic (and meaningless) violence. Eye’s......

Films! Films films films films. Sometimes it’s hard to get this column started, so we just sit in front of a blank word document and type the word "films" until it doesn’t make any sense to us any more. But by then, we’ve got started typing, at least, and so we continue. Cloverfield! Also, we just type the names of the films that are out that week with exclamation marks! In an attempt to......

We’re going to take a break from our usual Torontoist style in this post because the passing of John Harkness, the film critic for Now magazine since its inception in 1981, is something that has particular importance for me. As the writer of Torontoist's weekly “Film Friday” column, which, as you know, very often quotes the reviews from local critics, I have probably quoted John Harkness more than anyone. There’s a funny story in this,......

The Toronto International Film Festival Group announced their top ten Canadian features for 2007 last night, along with (for the first time) their top ten list of Canadian short films. The top ten Canadian features were: L’âge Des Ténèbres (Denys Arcand), Amal (Richie Mehta), Continental, Un Film Sans Fusil (Stéphane Lafleur), Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg), Fugitive Pieces (Jeremy Podeswa) , My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin), A Promise To The Dead: The Exile Journey Of Ariel......

Last week, we were told off a bit in the comments for being "down" on everything. We thought we’d do our best to be really positive this week, and then we realised how lame it is to force it, you know? The great news is we don’t actually have to force it, as this week sees the release of King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters—one of the most entertaining films we’ve seen in......

Blade Runner is no longer showing at the Regent, which in many ways is lucky, as otherwise it was going to turn into a weekly, Rocky Horror Picture Show-style event for us—well, without all of that tedious audience interaction, which now we think about it, would make it not very like the Rocky Horror Picture Show at all. If you’re still hungry for more vintage Harrison Ford, though, they are showing Raiders of the......

We don’t think we’ve ever lead with the same film two weeks in a row, but there’s a first time for everything. Did you get a chance to see Blade Runner: The Final Cut this week? We did. It was amazing. We really can’t think of a film we’d rather lead with (and there’s some good stuff this week). If you didn’t get a chance to see it, consider yourself massively lucky, because it’s still......

Oh man! What a pickle. This week we have the release of one of our favourite films in ages, This is England, and one of our favourite films of all time, Blade Runner, in its super-special, Ridley Scott-approved final cut. So, what do we lead with? It’s an impossible situation! If Torontoist was some kind of a 1960s robot, we’d be wobbling back and forth, smoke spouting out of our metal brain holes, yelling,......

During TIFF we said, "if you’re as big a fan of Joy Division as Torontoist is, you’ll quickly come to terms with the fact that Control is simply one man’s interpretation of Deborah Curtis’s book Touching from a Distance, and your overall feelings will (probably) lie on how you feel about that interpretation," and we stand by that even now—despite the gorgeous cinematography, which remains the film’s strongest point, we still like 24 Hour......

The After Dark Film Festival! Happening all week! The only film festival where Uwe bloody Boll could have his film accepted! We talked about it here! Check it out! Another crowded week for festivals, though, and sometimes we have to wonder how even Toronto can support this many in a week. We’ve got the ImagiNATIVE Film Festival and Toronto Latin Film Festivals finishing up, the Student Shorts Film Festival and the Estonian Documentary Film......

This week Torontoist decided to work out for itself exactly when The Simpsons was good. Because it’s just been so long, so depressingly long, since we’ve seen a episode that didn’t make us want to open a vein. Seriously. Using the powers of science (well, Wikipedia) we’ve decided it was good between seasons three and ten, peaking in (roughly) season seven. So there, done and dusted. Turns out we’re actually quite forgiving here compared to......

Have you entered our Hot Rod competition yet, readers? It's still running. You probably should enter, as it’s the most exciting film you could see this week, in our humble opinion. We really like Andy Samberg, you see. It’s so rarely worth struggling through an episode of Saturday Night Live just to see him (he’s so often wasted) but Hot Rod could be good! It really could! Well, alright, maybe you have a stranger......

Michael Moore’s much anticipated Sicko hits, and having seen it, we can say it’s not particularly essential for Canadian viewers to watch, unless you want to feel smug about our lovely health care system, or slightly surprised that it only takes an hour or so in London (Ontario) to be seen in an emergency room. Yes, the film is chock-a-block with anecdotal evidence, and it’s probably to the film’s fault that, as usual, Moore......

We’ve been looking for a way to talk about King Kong again for a while now. It’s unlikely you’ll remember, but Torontoist’s first Film Friday column was actually published in the week Peter Jackson’s remake hit cinema screens, yet that’s not (specifically) the reason we’ve been in the mood to mention it again. It just happens to be that a few weeks ago, with an evening to kill, we picked up Peter Jackson’s King......

Cinematheque Ontario begins its Pedro Almódovar programme, Almódovar Meets Hollywood’s Golden Age, tomorrow and they’ve been kind enough to give us two pairs of tickets to the opening night, a double feature of Nicholas Ray’s 1954 bizzaro-western Johnny Guitar and Almódovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which pays homage to Johnny Guitar. The screenings begin at 6:30 p.m. at Jackman Hall, the AGO, 317 Dundas West, so if you can make......

Recently, Torontoist has probably been playing too many videogames. Not that that’s a problem, per se, but when you’ve become such an adrenaline junkie that you’re absent-mindedly tapping a non-existent "A" button to get past this bothersomely long “cut-scene” you’ve been watching only to remember that you’re actually watching The Omen, you have to admit that you’ve probably got a problem, and should probably cool off with some of Pedro Costa's longest films, showing at......

Cinematheque Ontario’s summer season begins tonight, and we’ve got one pair of tickets to give away to their opening night screening, the celebrated silent film classic Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans, argued to be one of the greatest films ever made by countless critics. It’s tonight at Jackman Hall at 6:30 p.m., so if you can make it and you’re randomly selected from the people who email us at contests@torontoist.com, we’ll notify you by......

So, although we’ve only just spent a whole post gushing about Sprockets, we can’t really forget about the other excellent stuff that’s going on this week. The Images Film Festival closes this weekend, and we’ve been told Live Images 4: Quasar, tonight at the Music Gallery (197 John) at 9:30 p.m. is the hot ticket, as it features “an army of modified 16mm projectors and a quadraphonic sound system to envelop the audience in a......

Going to see all three films in Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher Trilogy, one after another in one night, is one of this Torontoist’s most treasured cinema memories, and although we did it at 2005’s Toronto International Film Festival, anyone who missed that chance can now do it at the Brunswick Theatre (296 Brunswick Avenue) tonight and tomorrow night starting 7 p.m. It’s $10 for one film or $15 for the lot, so obviously you......

Torontoist officially can’t wait for the first home renovation programme to have its interior designer kick open a door to an empty room and scream "This…Is…SPARTAN!" referencing this week’s biggest release, 300. On the topic of 300, we link you to the best review ever featured on the otherwise not-particularly-good Ain’t It Cool News. Neill Cumpston enthuses, "If you watch this movie and go into a Taco Bell, and say to the cashier, 'I......

This week our attention is almost completely owned by Cinematheque Ontario’s offerings, even with the thought of Christina Ricci chained to a radiator in Black Snake Moan grasping at us. Not only are Cinematheque Ontario hosting the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, they’re also showing From the Tsars to the Stars, a series of Russian sci-fi. How awesome is that? (There’s more to Russian sci-fi than just Solaris, doubters.) Maybe they’ll do a season......

Without a doubt, this week we’d be letting cheapskate cinephiles down by failing to mention the CNISSU’s Free Friday Film of the week, which isn’t just one but three, starting at 6:30 p.m. tonight at Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex) with the remarkably hard-to-see The Monster Squad, followed by Toronto classic The Brood, and finished off with the excellent blaxploitation nonsense The Human Tornado, starring, of course, Dolemite (Rudy Ray Moore). Check out the trailer,......

Ghost Rider’s head is a flaming skull. Can’t get much cooler than that, eh? And yet, from trailers you’d barely know that Ghost Rider is a cinematic version of a Marvel comic book (with, as per usual, a ridiculously complex history) that stars a biker whose head is flaming skull. Having seen the film, we have to argue that the film itself almost doesn’t want you to remember Ghost Rider's awesome fiery visage, concentrating almost......

After what feels like a surprisingly long gap of film festivals in the city, they’re back, with The Prisoner Justice Film Festival now running and Ozflix starting tonight with screenings of Ten Canoes and 2:37; We pretty much hated 2:37, though (but we’ve heard good things about Ten Canoes). Full details can be found at their respective websites. If you’re looking for a romantic trip to the cinema this week, what with it being Valentine’s......