“Dancing Arabs is an unfortunate title,” says Chris Knight in The National Post, in contrast to the film’s director, Eran Riklis, who as we noted yesterday thinks it’s great. Knight goes on to say “no one does any literal fancy footwork here, in a film that originally went by the slightly spoiler-ish name of A Borrowed Identity.” It’s gone by (borrowed?) a couple of other names too . . .
At Cannes, Vancouver’s Kathleen Jayme is presenting her work Paradise Island at the Short Film Corner, The Vancouver Sun’s Matthew Robinson reports. It’s “on the long-term effects of tourism in tropical countries.” Also at Cannes, Andrew Cividino “was stunned to find an audience for his tiny film Sleeping Giant was already there, patiently waiting in a long line that stretched around the building”, says The Winnipeg Free Press.
Canadian thriller Big Muddy, now playing, is ” a kind of Canuck Gothic, if you will”, says Chris Alexander at MetroNews.ca. It stars Nadia Litz as “Martha, a troubled single mother caught in a web of crime and desperation.”
Ben’s at Home and not going anywhere ever again, in a “quirky, made-in-Canada romantic comedy”, Brad Wheeler writes in The Globe and Mail. The newly single Ben decides never to leave his house, but that doesn’t mean life doesn’t go on for him.
They were known as “The Singing Sweethearts” and rumoured actually to hate each other, but it seems the truth was more complicated. Patrice Messina’s newly finished screenplay Sweethearts — written in defiance of her struggle with cancer — tackles the untold story of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. (And if you’re wondering what the Canadian connection is, Eddy plays a Mountie in one of their movies.)