By Anne Brodie Let’s open with a fact-based story of celebrity woe that’s screaming from the headlines again. Woody Allen was one of the world’s leading filmmakers and writers, he made a movie a year or so for decades, usually starring his real-life partners including Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow. On August 18, 1992, Allen held an out-of-character news… View Post
Apple TV’s wildly updated series based on the life of poet Emily Dickinson is an astonishing mash-up of ultra-modern and 19th-century life in Amherst, Massachusetts. The young poet Emily, played by Hailee Steinfeld, is unfettered in her attitudes about men, women, sex and gender roles. She throws off tradition to follow her many passions, to write poetry and be at… View Post
Comedians and Second City vets Alan Shane Lewis and Ann Pornel are off to a sweet start as hosts of CBC and CBC Gem’s fourth season of The Great Canadian Baking Show. They have a certain je ne sais quoi and that’s because they’re besties from years together on the comedy scene. The chemistry’s there. Just as it must be to bake successfully. What She Said’ … View Post
Rosamund Pike bilks the elderly in her role as a Professional Legal Guardian in J Blakeson’s I Care a Lot. Her latest victim, a healthy and functioning woman living alone, played by Dianne Wiest, is helpless as Pike’s abuser systematically strips her of all she owns. The film shows how the serial legal thief traps her victims, all within the… View Post
By Anne Brodie Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah an intense fact-based chapter in the life of the Black Panther is important. Party Chairman Fred Hampton was less famous than, say, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton or Malcolm X during the burgeoning civil rights movement of the 60s. But that in part is because… View Post