It's an interesting week for film, with direct competition between two kinds of films—one that wants to make you feel like a kid again by bludgeoning you with special effects and nostalgic licence, and another that wants to make you feel like a kid again by simply recalling, well, what it was to be a kid. We refer to the big-screen adaptation of the lets-be-honest-it-was-pretty-terrible-but-now-amusing-in-a-kitsch-way Speed Racer (phew) and the release, finally, of the......

Yes, we're being very obvious by leading with Iron Man this week, considering that it's everywhere anyway as this year's first big "summer" blockbuster. However, and we have a feeling we might have mentioned this before, we're sold on any film that recognizes that a trademark way to make your hero look as awesome as possible is to have him walk towards the camera with his back to an explosion—like they don't even care!......

Harold & Kumar are back! Oh glorious day—how on earth could we not lead with the return of this generation's most important stoners? Their original quest for White Castle burgers (which we've never tried, and still wonder about) was maybe a little patchy but (for some reason) completely rewatchable in the way the best quick-fire comedies are, and the results for Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay seem to promise a similar experience,......

Even with all the Hot Docs talk there's a good chance that you just don't like documentaries, preferring instead to stick to fiction. (Which is interesting, really. We were just reading a piece that was, er, reviewing the last season of Doctor Who, which discussed how long it took people to warm to the idea of "made-up stories.") So you'd probably be better served by some of the other films on offer this week......

Read our Sprockets preview? Don’t have kids—or don’t care? Well, there’s… Not a great deal we can genuinely recommend instead, but there is some stuff. Obviously, the Images Festival continues, ending this Sunday night with the closing night gala Trading the Future at 7 p.m. Cinematheque Ontario is also running The Latest Wave: New Romanian Cinema, a retrospective of the latest hot films to come out of Romania to thundering critical acclaim and absolutely......

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......

Well, there have been a lot of films made about the ongoing conflict in Iraq and its effect on soldiers, and here’s another one! Stop-Loss is probably the glossiest, most-Hollywood looking attempt so far (no mean feat, considering Paul Haggis has had a shot already) and it remains to be seen if anyone in America really wants to be reminded that its sending its army off to fight a war that the majority of......

Couple of things going on with the films released this week. With Shutter, most interesting is that it’s based on a Thai horror film, but has been, in its Western remake, transplanted to Tokyo. Reasons? Well, either “all of Asia is basically the same thing, right?” or “people always think of scary pale girls with long black hair as being Japanese, anyway.” Okay, that’s not really that interesting (who cares about Asian horror films......

Is anyone else disappointed that the dystopian future promised in 1980s films isn’t here? If there’s one thing we’ve learned here at Torontoist, is that en masse, humans are terrible at predicting our future. It’s always so much more mundane than we expect it to be. The perfect example being The Running Man. Instead of audiences being unsatisfied unless they’re watching the most ridiculously violent reality TV shows possible, here people are absolutely satisfied......

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......

Hello! Although you probably didn’t notice, this Torontoist writer was away for a week, and as a result we failed to do something very important. Specifically, to congratulate Norm Wilner on becoming NOW’s senior film critic. We're not doing this just because we know Wilner keeps an eye on Torontoist to see if he gets a mention, but because we like his work so much that we can’t think of anyone better to step......

The coolest movie opening this week is Be Kind Rewind, which is a treasure trove of Things White People Like, as it stars Jack Black and his black friend played by Mos Def, and is directed by Michel Gondry, and has lots of irony, seeing as how it is about a couple of people who erase all the videotapes in their video store and then make their own mocking versions of the movies they......

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......

Though there are only three new films on release this week, it would be unfair to bemoan the shortage when one film, Persepolis, is of a high enough quality that it might as well be the only film released. During TIFF 2007 Christopher Bird handed it a 5/5 and called it "a masterwork in every way that matters." Much like in our praise of There Will Be Blood, we do have to hesitate with......

Hello readers! If you were lucky enough to win tickets to the screening of There Will Be Blood last night you will have already made your mind up about the film (well, we hope), but we’re going to subject you to our opinion of it anyway. Quite good, wasn’t it? Contrary to a lot of things we’ve heard, it did seem to be identifiably a Paul Thomas Anderson film (strong performances, non-traditional story arc,......

Really not much on in terms of Christmas films this week. The Bloor is showing National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (which is about as far away from a Christmas classic as we can imagine without being a film about aliens from another galaxy that have never heard of Christmas) and White Christmas. We’re still happy to recommend Enchanted (we just saw it, and it was absolutely lovely), but for those of you who want 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,......

Feeling “Christmassy” yet? We aren’t either (we've just assumed you weren’t, apologies if you are, or something), and there isn’t that much on at the cinema yet to start ramping up the festive joy. It’s a Wonderful Life is showing at the Fox starting tomorrow and Bad Santa is going to be on at the Revue this Wednesday. To be completely honest, if you’re going to check out anything at those cinemas, we recommend......

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......

It’s funny that we mentioned The Rocky Horror Picture Show in our introduction last week, because it’s showing tonight at 11:30 p.m. at the Bloor. It’s been a while, in our memory, since the last time it showed, which would imply that the fans in Toronto aren't as rabid as elsewhere, but we’d still recommend that you don't head along unless you’re very familiar with the film. Who knows what could happen. Speaking of......

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,......

If there’s one thing Torontoist likes to do, it’s moan about stuff, but on the face of it, that Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days receiving a theatrical release here is something that should be received without complaint. After all, journalists have praised the film, including Norm Wilner at Metro, who calls the film "marvellous filmmaking." But really, it just gives us a chance to moan about the lack of......

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......