There are a lot of films out this week, and a lot of them played at TIFF. In fact, we caught a few of them at TIFF after their public screenings, so let's take a break from our usual format and give them proper capsule reviews! Blindness (Fernando Mereilles) – It was written by local legend Don McKellar, so we had high hopes for this adaptation of José Saramago's novel, particularly as we've enjoyed......

Well, we're suffering from our "festival cold" two weeks after the festival ended, which is kind of odd. It probably isn't even a festival cold at all, just a lame cold we didn't catch from a visiting celebrity or hot-shot Hollywood producer. Actually, wait, god knows what you could catch from those people, so forget our complaint. We could complain about the generally uninteresting selection of films this week, however. This week's most heavily......

Urgh, with only a week since TIFF ended, who wants to talk about film again now? Paradoxically, we wanted to talk about TIFF again yesterday, but we're fickle like that—perhaps now it's just the realisation that most of our Film Fridays are only going to talk about films that played at this year's TIFF. Instead we'll lead with something from last year's TIFF and probably one of the most welcome releases we can think......

With TIFF ‘08 kicking off next Thursday, most of Toronto’s reviewers are turning their attention towards the 300-plus films that will be taking over the city’s theatres over the following two weeks. Predictably, there’s not much else worth talking about opening this week. The non-festival film generating the most buzz is Traitor, starring Don Cheadle as a former US Special Operations officer who may or may not have begun working on behalf of one......

It was 363 days ago that Torontoist trekked down from North York to the NFB Cinema at John and Richmond for a 9:00-on-a-Monday-morning press screening of Boy A, ahead of its world premiere at TIFF. It was worth the schlep. Surprised to learn from the credits that it was a TV movie produced for Britain's Channel 4, we said of the drama about a young adult being assigned a new identity upon his release......

August is traditionally when studios dump their waste products quietly between the adrenaline-bang of the summer and the prestige-clang of the fall. This weekend has a mix of probably worth your money films premiering, each with a strong oral fixation: you'll get some jaw-detaching, some same-sex lip-locking, and some jaw-droppingly bad voice acting! (Who else loves hyphens?!) Alexander Aja has made some gory films, including his debut, Haute Tension, and the Hills Have Eyes......

StarTropics was probably the very best game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). An ahead-of-its-time adventure following a teenager who tries to solve the mystery around his scientist uncle's disappearance (killing monsters with a yo-yo in the process), it has absolutely nothing to do with Tropic Thunder. Ben Stiller's first directorial effort since Zoolander doesn't come out until Wednesday, so none of the local papers have reviewed it yet, nor have most other critics.......

Now if there’s something you know about our Film Friday columns, it’s usually the place where we spout our opinions on films based on either the trailer or the reviews that we’ve read. But this week we have a dilemma! On which do we base our opinion of Pineapple Express? It’s a dilemma, because if you’ve seen the trailer for Pineapple Express, you must agree that it makes the film look absolutely immense. Featuring......

Dr. Steve Brule. Now, that name either fills you with joy, and probably running straight to YouTube, or it rings absolutely no bells at all. We mention him—John C. Reilly's character from Tim & Eric Awesome Show Good Job!—because he's pretty much the reason we rate Reilly so highly. Initially he was lumped in with the list of "people who have been in Paul Thomas Anderson films that we are ambivalent about," but Dr.......

You know what sucks? Burning significant quantities of helicopter fuel for the purpose of towing around an ad. You know what's cool? Seeing the Batman logo flying across the sky. Life is complicated sometimes. So, yes, The Dark Knight comes out today. Well, actually it came out about fourteen hours ago, with midnight screenings that we assume were packed, as the movie set a new Canadian record for advance ticket sales. It'll almost certainly......

So this week Hellboy II comes out, and advance word has it that Guillermo del Toro has forgotten about creating three-dimensional characters and instead spent all of his time trying to dazzle us with special effects. Of course, you might remember a time in the sixties and seventies when three-dimensional characters were special effects—in which case you should get yourself down to the Fox Theatre to check out the 3D Film Festival. We're kind......

It's the fourth of July weekend, and as a result Canada joins its southern neighbours in having very little new of note in cinemas—it's probably why Hancock, for example, started screening early. Although it's entirely possible that that was just a desperate attempt to avoid poor reviews doing too much damage. They're not quite as bad as we thought they might be, but the praise is very faint, with, for example, The Star's Peter......

Since an enlarged heart is such a dangerous medical condition, how on earth do Pixar get away with causing people's hearts to swell so much with each of their new releases? With Wall*E, the tale of a lonely little robot that falls in love, we're worried our chests will burst right there in the cinema! It just sounds too adorable. Critical response is (as to be expected) positive, though there is a dissenting opinion......

For some reason, this year we're already tired of the summer blockbuster schedule. It's only mid-June and we've already had multiple superhero movies, CGI films, and big-budget comedies. Maybe it's that desperate urge to not get killed by poor word-of-mouth that leads to another "must see!" movie every week until you can't remember the last film you were told was "must see!", but we're exhausted. So, at least this week's big-budget attention-grabbers are The......

Well, we've listed the films that are showing at this week's NXNE festival, but we haven't particularly shown any opinion about which you should go and see. Until now! Our pick, above all, is Agile, Mobile, Hostile: A Year in the Life of Andre Williams, which plays the NFB Cinema at 1:15 p.m. this Saturday. Tim Perlich at NOW complains, "[directors] Matthies and Todd are unable to put [Williams's] sad current state in proper......

We wrote off Kung Fu Panda completely after watching our nine-millionth trailer for it—it was the one where Angelina Jolie's tiger shows Jack Black's panda such disdain that it all but guarantees a clichéed narrative in which she eventually admits grudging and then genuine respect. So what's the deal with the positive reviews? "It’s funny, it’s clever, it’s visually sumptuous—I’d even go so far as to call it the first non-Pixar effort to approach......

Wow! Weird. Apparently we didn't review Mister Lonely, even though we saw it at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. Why didn't we? Who knows. Still, at least we get a chance to talk about it now, as it's getting released this week (well, in the Cumberland, anyway). Mister Lonely is a film…well, to be honest, it's two films. Cut into one, more or less randomly. One is the story of a lonely......

Ah, the perils of mostly basing our weekly film column on what trailers we've seen on TV that week. Did anyone notice that last week we completely failed to mention the release of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian? No? Oh well, that's alright then. So, if you're still unaware, it's been out for a week now. Critics think it's okay, and we quite liked the first one, so there's that. And if you're......

Oh, man! It's a quiet week in film for some reason! It's almost like there's a huge film festival halfway across the world that all of the critics and film companies are distracted by, so they forgot to release anything notable this week. After all, Iron Man can take care of itself, right? (If you haven't seen it, it's definitely the kind of summer blockbuster we're happy to recommend, so go for it.) Well,......

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......