Melora Koepke

In the Great Hall of LAX’s new Tom Bradley International Terminal, time dances – literally – on a giant clocktower. Every hour on the hour, the Time Tower, a four-sided, 22-metre screen plays Dance Time, a Busby Berkeley-esque dance number in which the legs of smiling showgirls create a fleshy kaleidoscope inside the clock’s whirring gears. […]

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 […]

TORONTO—IF YOU THINK you know what water is, you don’t. Watermark, Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky’s documentary shot in 5K ultra high-def video, brings us on a trip to the hyperreal extremes of what water can be at its most powerful, plentiful—or absent. Burtynsky and Baichwal shot 200 hours of footage in far-flung locations around the world, places […]

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 […]

When you walk into Moment Factory, let the door slam behind you – the banging noise makes the giant circular projected LED clock in the entry way jump back two hours.If you keep your eye on it, though, it soon snaps back to the present. The purpose of this, apparently, is to show us that […]

“Audiences want truth as opposed to reality” – Wim Wenders on life, work and the meaning of both. Wim Wenders’ Pina is as simple, artful and perfect as a dance movie can be – and watching it with 3D glasses on the big screen, it’s tempting to think that this is exactly why Stereoscopic 3D was invented. Wenders […]

There are two kinds of audiences who adored The Hangover, and they will love the sequel just as much. First, there are those for whom the whole idea of waking up in a state of sweaty- eye-balled shame like the one depicted in the first movie is inconceivable—so for them, it’s pure schadenfreude. And then there’s […]

Montreal filmmaker Denis Villeneuve brings the Polytechnique massacre to the screen Twenty years ago this December, as they finished up their last week of classes before the Christmas break, fourteen young women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique were killed by twenty-five-year-old Marc Lépine, who entered the school with a semi-automatic machine gun sheathed in a garbage […]

Nighthawk in the light of day: Tom Waits gets Real Gone on latest album and leaves the piano at home “Hi, I’m calling from Tom Waits’ office,” says the pleasant publicist voice on the other end of the line. “I’ll put Tom through now. Are you ready?” Tom Waits has an office? It strikes me […]

A comprehensive online guide to Montreal written for National Geographic Traveller’s Places of a Lifetime franchise: “Je me souviens” (I remember) is Quebec’s provincial motto, and history is present everywhere in Montreal, a city teeming with architecture and culture from the past three centuries. Canada’s second largest, third oldest, and most cosmopolitan city is also a […]