Nov 1, 2012

FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead • There’s a school of thought that says authors should never be allowed to adapt their own books for the big screen. They are just too close to the source material to make the necessary cuts and re-mixing to make a book come alive on the big screen. In Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children (opening November 2), Salman...

Oct 1, 2012

FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead • New York is not a place that springs to mind when you think about bird watching. All that concrete and human bustle. But smack in the middle of Manhattan you’ll find one of the most famous urban parks in the world and as Birders: the Central Park Effectreveals, it’s a magnet for hundreds of different species of...

Sep 1, 2012

FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead In Bitter Seeds, Micha X. Peled reveals an appalling statistic: a farmer in India commits suicide every half-hour. The documentary, showing at the Vancouver International Film Festival (September 27-October 12), puts a human face on this ongoing tragedy with its intimate portrait of a poor farming community in India’s...

Aug 1, 2012

FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead • It’s easy to forget that many Chinese teenagers know nothing about the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989; just ask any young Chinese immigrant to Vancouver. Given China’s huge and fast-growing economic and military power, there’s ongoing pressure for it to open up, but as documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry...

Jul 1, 2012

FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead   Love, sex, fidelity and relationships – this is the stuff of Toronto-set Take This Waltz, a bittersweet, sensuous romance from actress-director Sarah Polley. The story is a dance of desire and will, as sweet, 28-year-old copyrighter Margot (versatile performance by Michelle Williams) is torn between her love for...

Jun 1, 2012

FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead   From Where Do We Go Now? Left to right: Roukoz (Ali Haidar) and Nassim (Kevin Abboud). Photo by Rudy Bou Chebel ©, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. Two foreign language comedies out this month give Hollywood a run for its money with feel-good crowd-pleasers. First to Paris. The Intouchables is a buddy...

May 1, 2012

FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead • The annual documentary festival DOXA is on this month. The Vancouver fest is hosting 72 screenings across five different venues from May 4 to 13. DOXA opens with the NFB Digital Studio’s interactive documentary Bear 71, which makes extensive use of surveillance footage of an electronically tagged grizzly in...

Apr 1, 2012

FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead • Given that recent polls suggest that around 40 percent of Americans believe that God created human beings in their present form 10,000 years ago, some people might consider Journey of the Universe quite a radical documentary. This story of the universe, which has screened on PBS, starts around 14 billion years ago...

Mar 1, 2012

FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead   • On March 17, it will be six months since the beginning of Occupy Wall Street and the subsequent cascade of grassroots occupations that followed across the Western world. Two local filmmakers who have been documenting the Occupy movement – from the Arab Spring, through Zuccotti Park to the Vancouver Art...

Feb 8, 2012

FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead • There have been many movies about the Holocaust. So much so there is a fear that filmmakers’ constant re-framing and re-imagining of it undermines and clouds the awful history they seek to convey. However, for Polish director Agnieszka Holland, there is still a sense the “main mystery” surrounding...