Kurt Vile and the Violators are psych-tinged country-fried rock personified. The very type that washes over you like a soothing, albeit heavy, wave. At Toronto’s Danforth Music Hall, band leader, singer-songwriter Kurt Vile, lurched amid assorted guitar pedals, his long…
Although the music of 1990’s alternative rock icons The Smashing Pumpkins may be dour, the atmosphere inside Scotiabank Arena was anything but. Celebrating the 27th anniversary of their seminal 1995 double-album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Billy Corgan and…
Eighty-two-year-old Tom Jones has impeccable taste in choosing songs. Inside a packed house at Toronto’s Massey Hall – his booming voice still distinctly his – he played an array of covers including ones by Leonard Cohen, Prince, and Jerry Lee…
One of the details that The Fabelmens gets just right is how family and home shapes one’s journey from adolescence and beyond. The movie is about the Fabelmans, computer engineer Burt and former concert pianist Mitzi (Paul Dano and Michelle…
Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke walked the red carpet at Roy Thomson Hall for the TIFF premiere of their film Raymond & Ray, in which they play long-estranged half-brothers who reunite to bury their father. By all accounts, director Rodrigo…
Typically, the two basic approaches to obesity in cinema are to regard it as tragic or comic. In director Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, he has somehow avoided both. And unfortunately, therein lays its fatal flaw. Here’s a movie with the…
Legendary director Steven Spielberg along with his cast, including Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, and Paul Dano, walked the red carpet ahead of the The Fabelmans world premiere during TIFF 2022. The coming-of-age picture tells the story of a young man…
One of the most interesting aspects about Holy Spider is the film’s atypical construction, which amplifies suspense even while simultaneously revealing everything one would want to know. It’s a thriller based on inspired true events in the early 2000s –…
Who was David Bowie? Glam rock star? Prophetic philosopher? World traveller? Painter? A south London lad who never looked back? Director Brett Morgen’s captivating new documentary, named Moonage Daydream, aims its sights on those questions with a multi-faceted deep-dive on…
Is there a modern band more synonymous with the state of California than the Red Hot Chili Peppers? Now a few months into their massive Unlimited Love stadium tour of Europe and North America, the funk rock legends pulled into Toronto’s…