News

Los Angeles-based Premiere Entertainment Group has acquired worldwide sales rights to romance murder mystery “Nightalk,” directed by Canadian filmmaker Donald Shebib. The film, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, stars Ashley Bryant and Al Mukadam.

The steamy thriller follows a female cop (Bryant), who goes undercover on a phone-sex app to solve a murder investigation, as she discovers her own sexuality while losing herself to the erotic fantasies of the suspected killer and risks becoming the killer’s next victim. Ted Hallett, Emily Andrews and Art Hindle round out the key cast.

Shebib and Claude Harz wrote the original screenplay, which was produced by Evdon Productions and Emily Andrews for Filmcoop.

Shebib is considered a key figure in the development of English Canadian cinema, largely due to his most prominent film “Goin’ Down the Road,” which premiered at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in 1971. Other works include the heist crime-drama “Between Friends,...

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As the Toronto Film Festival marks a big post-pandemic return to the physical realm with something almost normal for its 47th edition, the biggest sighs of relief may well come from local Canadian filmmakers and premiere party organizers.

“You cannot launch a festival film digitally. You need to build up hype in person. You need to meet people in person to be able to forge relationships to launch your film,” Markhor Pictures producer Shehrezade Mian, who is launching Antoine Bourges’ Concrete Valley immigrant drama in Toronto as part of the Wavelengths sidebar, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Mian insists fellow filmmakers who screened their films at scaled-down Toronto festivals in 2020 and 2021 had their launch plans undermined by play on digital platforms. “The buzz this year is so much more hyped and so much more intense,” she added.

Director Kelly Fyffe-Marshall, who is bringing her...

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The Toronto Film Festival has announced new titles for its TIFF Docs and Contemporary World Cinema sections.

The TIFF Docs section will open with the previously announced Sacha Jenkins’ Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues, and there’s a North American premiere for Laura Poitras’ opioid epidemic doc All the Beauty and the Bloodshed from Participant.

The festival will also feature newly-added world bows for Cine-Guerrilas: Scenes from the Labudovic Reels, by director Mila Rurajlic; Documentary Now!, by Alex Buono, Rhys Thomas and Micah Gardner; Sam Soko and Lauren DeFilippo’s Free Money, about a Kenyan village being given a universal basic income by an American organization; The Grab, from Blackfish director Gabriela Cowperthwaite; and Stephanie Johnes’ Maya and the Wave.

Other documentary first looks headed to Toronto include Mark Fletcher’s Patrick and the Whale; Sinead O’Shea’s Pray for our Sinners; Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot,...

The Canadian film industry produces numerous blockbuster features, as well as popular TV series, in an entertainment business mostly financed by Us Hollywood studios:

Some notable 'Hollywood North' movies produced over the years include "2012", "X-Men: The Last Stand", "Man of Steel", "Star Trek Beyond", "Tron: Legacy", "Titanic", and "I, Robot", all filmed in Vancouver, with "Kick-Ass" and "Suicide Squad" shot in Toronto.

But truly 'Canadian' movies, produced and directed by Canadian film-makers, are not as well known around the world as their Us counterparts. Is it because the Canadian government investing tax dollars into properties, insist their films be representational 'art', while Hollywood films only care about profit ?

Chances are, you will never see a slot machine based on "Jesus of Montreal", or "Goin' Down The Road"...

...while Hollywood's "Terminator" and "Jurassic Park" movies have popped @ the 'Royal Vegas Online Casino' as slot games. 

The Royal Vegas, just like Hollywood,...

The Canadian film industry produces numerous blockbuster features, as well as popular TV series, in an entertainment business mostly financed by Us Hollywood studios:

Some notable 'Hollywood North' movies produced over the years include "2012", "X-Men: The Last Stand", "Man of Steel", "Star Trek Beyond", "Tron: Legacy", "Titanic", and "I, Robot", all filmed in Vancouver, with "Kick-Ass" and "Suicide Squad" shot in Toronto.

But truly 'Canadian' movies, produced and directed by Canadian film-makers, are not as well known around the world as their Us counterparts. Is it because the Canadian government investing tax dollars into properties, insist their films be representational 'art', while Hollywood films only care about profit ?

Chances are, you will never see a slot machine based on "Jesus of Montreal", or "Goin' Down The Road"...

...while Hollywood's "Terminator" and "Jurassic Park" movies have popped @ the 'Royal Vegas Online Casino' as slot games. 

The Royal Vegas, just like Hollywood,...

Last year the The Globe & Mail released an article entitled "What is Wrong with the Canadian Film Industry?" that outlined the problems facing our country’s cinema: low box-office numbers, a crisis of English-Canadian identity, an inability to compete with Hollywood entertainments etc., etc. Focused entirely on the industry, the piece fails to mention the resurgence that had been taking root for quite some time. 2015 was an important year for Canadian cinema, but while Room, Hyena Road and Wet Bum ate up the article’s word count, three of the year’s great Canadian films by emerging directors went unnoticed: Isiah Medina’s 88:88, Kurt Walker’s Hit 2 Pass, and Kazik Radwanski’s How Heavy This Hammer. Equating cinema with ‘content,’ a product to be bought and sold, the article is as much a reflection of the problems with Canadian cinema as an exposition of it. But this insidious...

Goin’ Down the Road

Written by William Fruet and Donald Shebib

Directed by Donald Shebib

Canada, 1970

Donald Shebib’s landmark 1970 drama Goin’ Down the Road was a watershed moment in Canadian national cinema, in part because it proved that there could be one. The very notion of a Canadian national cinema was relatively new when the film was released. Though the National Film Board (Nfb) was establish in the late 1930s, it was only in the 1950s that its focus shifted from war-effort propaganda to a very specific form of national soul-searching, wondering aloud who we were and what our place in the world was. The collective attempt at pinpointing Canada’s national identity would reach a fever pitch with the Centennial just around the corner, but ended up yielding precious few concrete answers (though it wasn’t for lack of trying, as Nfb-produced works like Helicopter Canada, commissioned specifically for Canada’s 100th birthday,...

Lesleh Donaldson with Cinema Retro columnist Todd Garbarini.

By Todd Garbarini

Richard Ciupka’s unfairly maligned 1983 horror film Curtains was screened recently as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Scary Movies 7 exhibition that also included screenings of Lucky McKee’s new film All Cheerleaders Die, Michele Soavi’s highly regarded Cemetery Man (1994), Eli Roth’s new film The Green Inferno, John D. Hancock’s ultra creepy Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), the New York premiere of Clive Barker’s 1990 film Nightbreed - the Cabal Cut, and Peter Carter’s brilliant Rituals (1977), better known as The Creeper, which stars Hal Holbrook and Lawrence Dane in a film that is clearly influenced by John Boorman’s Deliverance (1971) but easily stands on its own as a strong piece of independent filmmaking.

Appearing in person at the Curtains screening was actress Lesleh Donaldson who played Christie Burns, the ice skater in the film.

As Sneak Peek first reported December 2008, Union Pictures will now start production September 27 on "Down The Road Again", a feature sequel to Toronto director Don Shebib's 1970 Canadian classic "Goin' Down The Road".

The new film, written/directed by Shebib, will see the return of original cast members Doug McGrath, Jayne Eastwood and Cayle Chernin. Also starring are Kathleen Robertson, Anthony Lemke and Tedde Moore.

"...Set forty years after the original, 'Down The Road Again' begins as 'Pete McGraw' retires from his days as a Vancouver postal employee. With the news of the demise of his life-long buddy 'Joey', Pete finds himself the custodian of a series of letters, an envelope full of money and a plea from his late pal to head back east with his ashes with details of a special delivery along the way..."

"Down The Road Again" is produced by Robin Cass for executive producers Sandra Cunningham and Anna Stratton,...

In honor of Canada Day, we are republishing this post -- Ranylt's first on the site -- from Canada Day 2007.

July 1 is Canada Day, so while my compatriots are busy painting themselves red and perfecting their Maenadic howls in time for tonight's fireworks, I've been tasked with offering up a list of ten nifty Canadian films that are mostly off the radar outside of this country (and I throw my arms around you in delight if you're a foreigner who's actually seen any of these--French kisses for anyone who appreciates them, to boot).

Many readers seem familiar with Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter and Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire. And David Cronenberg's body of work needs no introduction thanks to The Fly, Naked Lunch, Scanners, Crash (the other Crash!) and Videodrome. As unnatural as it is to omit Egoyan, Arcand and Cronenberg from a Canadian film overview,...