Melora Koepke

TORONTO – Besides being one of the leading lights in China’s so-called Fifth Generation of filmmakers, Zhang Yimou is also, for moviegoers of a certain vintage, one of his country’s best-loved historical storytellers. His period films often contemplate pivotal moments in China’s past, told from conflicting points of view, offering ways of remembering a past […]

Like all good movies about the evils of Hollywood, Maps is an inside job. The A-list cast, which includes Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, and Robert Pattinson, participates with an ill-disguised glee. You get the sense that their performances come from their experience in the industry, a fleeting intuition that Cusack confirmed. “Every awful thing that happens to […]

I landed by private chopper on the helipad at the West Coast Fishing Club’s Clubhouse less than an hour ago, and I’m already suited up in a bright red survival suit aboard a 25-foot Boston Whaler Predator, where three rods bend expectantly into the navy blue water. Each one is fitted with a purpose-built single-action […]

MONTREAL – Though we live in an age where information is constant and ubiquitous, how much do we really know about our own neighbours? The artists and philosophers at SenseLab, a “laboratory for thought in motion” at Concordia University, think that finding common ground is more important than information exchange. Through Three Mile Meal, its […]

This is one from the vaults; my first glossy feature and first National Magazine Award win. Being in Vancouver again makes me think about how much has changed since this was published-  and how nothing has. “Beyond the search for the corpus delicti—beyond headlines about the “pig farm killer,” the accused Robert Pickton, and the […]

MONTREAL – The giant windowed storefront of Boucherie Lawrence is situated on a stretch of the upper Main where high-end designer shops are lined up next to sparse art galleries and mid-century modern furniture stores. The row of window-facing counter stools in its well-designed, airy interior, with meat-specific wall art and a wide pine “merch […]

When Zelda Abramson contacted me on a housing-swap website for academics on sabbatical to inquire about subletting my apartment, I gave her a list of its ups and downs. On the pro side, it’s a typical century-old triplex on Waverly St., which means original fixtures, Mile End cachet and a great quartier. On the con […]

By the time I’m at the foot of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, I haven’t slept in five days and I’m running on bocadillos and adrenalin. The circadian rhythms of touring like a musician are new to me; when you’re travelling on this kind of schedule, your experience of time and space becomes intensified, amplified, […]

TORONTO—WHEN IT COMES to movies about sex, The Sessions comes closer than most to approximating the actual experience. It’s emotionally as well as physically explicit about what happens when coitus happens. So it’s sexy, yes, but be forewarned: you might also feel other, more complicated things. The Sessions (opening Friday [November 2]) is neither a disease-of-the-month movie nor an […]

Running my hands over the smooth and
 nubbly turrets of green nopales, the cactus pads that Chuck Hughes is trying to de-needle on camera like an habitué, I follow along as he picks up the items on his grocery list: yerba santa, an aromatic that tastes like nutmeg and mint, and huitlacoche, bulbous black mushrooms that cling […]