Baseball is the stuff American dreams are made of; and if you feel the sport has been highly overlooked in recent cinema look no further than Sugar, a very well-received rags to riches sports tale about Miguel Santos, a baseball player from the Dominican who makes it to the minor leagues in America to show off his talent. More than just a sports movie, it reveals the feelings of alienation felt by many Hispanics in the US. Read more »
In Northern Ireland, 1981, IRA member Bobby Sands began a hunger strike to protest the decrepit conditions of Maze Prison where he and other paramilitary prisoners were being held. Steve McQueen’s Hunger chronicles this point of history with a very narrow focus: the prison itself. That Bobby (expertly played by Michael Fassbender) does not appear until the second third of the film allows director McQueen to focus on the conditions of the prison through the eyes of others. This gives a pretext for Bobby’s eventual decision to starve himself. And it is in the details of the conditions where Hunger manages to capture its audience. Read more »

Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinema celebrates it’s 37th year as one of the city’s premiere film festivals. It’s success has been due to great organization, original and modern advertising as well as its policy of allowing all of the latest films, regardless of whether or not they have played at previous festivals around the world. So while the Montreal World Film Festival is more concerned with being the first to premiere films, the FNC places this importance secondary to showing the latest great films. Thus, not only are you more likely to hit a higher quality film, but much of what is shown is known beforehand. This year’s festival is no exception, showing some of the critically acclaimed Cannes hits and others. The festival opens with short film, Next Floor and feature-length film A Sentimental Capitalism (Un capitalisme sentimentale) - both Quebecois premieres. It closes with the Cannes festival winner, The Class (Entre les murs). Read more »