Walk into almost any conversation about Canadian genre filmmaking long enough and the Western comes up. Not the dusty Hollywood cliché of tumbleweeds and saloon doors, but something closer to home: the frontier myth that
Continue ReadingCategory: The Bottom Line
Canadian Cinema and the Art of Building Suspense
Suspense is one of cinema’s most effective storytelling tools. A scene can hold an audience’s attention without an elaborate action sequence, a dramatic soundtrack or even much dialogue. Sometimes, all it takes is a character
Continue ReadingFrom Toronto to Vegas: The Ultimate Guide to Canadian Heist Cinema
If you ask the average film nerd to list their favorite heist or gambling flicks, you’ll usually hear the standard roster of classics. You get Scorsese’s neon-drenched Vegas, Soderbergh’s slick ensemble in Ocean’s Eleven, or
Continue ReadingUnrequited Love and the Writer’s Voice: What Young Werther (2024) Inherits from Goethe
This article argues that the film inherits something other than plot. What travels from Goethe to the screen is a way of speaking: the confiding, restless, self – examining voice of a person who turns
Continue ReadingThe One-Minute Canadian Animation With a Technique That Outlived the Film
A film barely one minute long can still leave a mark on cinema history. Evelyn Lambart’s O Canada, made at the National Film Board of Canada in 1952, did exactly that. The stereoscopic animation used
Continue ReadingThe Toronto Homes That Keep Showing Up on Screen
Watch enough film and television and you develop a strange second sense about Toronto. A brick semi with a deep front porch appears in a series set in Boston. A centre-hall home with a wide
Continue Reading


