
Greg Quill
Movies reviews only
Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Coriolanus (2011) |
The play's inherent difficulties notwithstanding, Coriolanus, the movie, is a perfectly sound achievement. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Jan 08, 2013
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Hysteria (2011) |
Ostensibly a story about sexual liberation, Hysteria needs a thrill worthy of its intended good vibrations. - Toronto Star
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| Posted May 24, 2012
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Off World (2010) |
Off World is marred by compromises in quality that probably come down to economic constraints, and lock first-time director Mateo Guez into decisions that give his film the odour of desperation. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Mar 15, 2012
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Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011) |
The withering political pungency, the commentary on terrorism and the searing critique of nationalism and patriotism that made the book a best-seller in the U.K. are replaced by a comforting surface sheen and a lot of unconvincing nonsense... - Toronto Star
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| Posted Mar 08, 2012
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Let the Bullets Fly (2010) |
A ribald mess of a farce whose finer qualities will likely be lost on non-Chinese-speaking audiences and others not familiar with 1920s warlord lore. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Mar 01, 2012
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The Flowers of War (2011) |
The director's grip on the drama is often weakened by his penchant for creating spectacles. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Feb 23, 2012
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The Salesman (2011) |
A masterful observation of ordinary people squeezing what they need to get by out of unforgiving circumstances. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Feb 02, 2012
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Pina (2011) |
We are among these dancers in their pain and joy and longing. We hear them breathe, feel the heat of their skin, smell their sweat, sense the pounding of their hearts, the ache in their thighs and feet. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Dec 22, 2011
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Surviving Progress (2011) |
Crucial, captivating and profoundly disturbing... - Toronto Star
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| Posted Dec 02, 2011
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Kevin Hart: Laugh at My Pain (2011) |
Hart is the comic equivalent of a journeyman musician with a lot of clever licks and one good trick. Once you've seen it, you have little appetite for more. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Nov 18, 2011
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Down the Road Again (2011) |
It's a worthy companion piece to its raw and jagged partner, maybe a bit old-fashioned, maybe a bit too sweet, but imbued with wisdom, heart and good intentions. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Oct 20, 2011
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Revenge of the Electric Car (2011) |
Too many important questions are never addressed, or even asked, presumably to protect corporate secrets. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Oct 13, 2011
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Margaret (2011) |
What it does have going for it is a pre-True Blood Anna Paquin, who burns up the screen with a bravura performance in a complex and discomfiting role. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Oct 06, 2011
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1911 (2011) |
1911 serves too many masters for its own good. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Oct 06, 2011
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French Immersion (2011) |
An embarrassment from beginning to end, a silly, laugh-deprived farce designed to poke fun at an issue - the two solitudes and their language rights - that has as much currency as the length of Farley Mowat's beard. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Oct 06, 2011
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The Last Circus (2010) |
Basque director Álex de la Iglesia's exotic, surreal, hilarious, bloody and utterly explosive grand opus. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Oct 01, 2011
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Gainsbourg (2010) |
While Sfar doesn't dare tinker with the facts or sully the mystique, he gains enormous traction via the imaginative and subversive manner he has devised to tell a story that, in many ways, is hard to believe. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Sep 15, 2011
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Friends With Benefits (2011) |
It's one of those rare made-in-Hollywood couplings that transcends the ordinary stuff of movies, like plot and sense and credibility. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Aug 02, 2011
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Familiar Grounds (2011) |
[Its] glacial pace, bloodless performances and minimalist architecture will likely assure it a place in the archives of Forgotten Canadian Cinema. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Jul 29, 2011
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A Better Life (2011) |
Personalizes the illegal immigrant experience and digs much deeper into what has become a national disgrace. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Jul 15, 2011
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The Tree (2010) |
It's a small film, almost a parable in its simplicity and predictability, but it gains extra strength from its hybrid industrial origins. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Jul 08, 2011
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Monte Carlo (2011) |
The movie sputs out like fizzled fireworks in the Monte Carlo night. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Jul 03, 2011
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The Names of Love (2010) |
Well worth the effort spent trying to read the white subtitles too often superimposed over a white background. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Jul 03, 2011
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The Invisible Eye (2010) |
If this film is remembered at all, it will be for Zylberberg's exceptional character study. - Toronto Star
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| Posted May 26, 2011
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Something Borrowed (2011) |
The big moral issues, the deception and lies? Blown off, like so much sand on the deck. After all, if you're a rich, young, white American, what's a bit of hanky-panky among friends? - Toronto Star
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| Posted May 06, 2011
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American: The Bill Hicks Story (2010) |
The movie's appeal extends to the manner of its construction; it's an almost hypnotic kind of hybrid animation in which hundreds of photographs of Hicks in various poses and at various stages in his life are grafted onto two-dimensional backgrounds. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Apr 14, 2011
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Beeswax (2009) |
Ultimately a dull story about dull thirtysomethings whose dull issues are conveyed in a prying, cinema verit style, implying drama and meaning in the mundane details of their dull lives. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Apr 07, 2011
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The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman (2010) |
If it's diminished by the director's feverish urge to over-achieve, this movie is clearly the kind of irreverent, multi-platform, cross-genre, otherworldly stuff Hollywood wants from China: fast, furious, big, bold and brassy. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Mar 17, 2011
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The Mechanic (2011) |
Standard Statham stuff. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Jan 27, 2011
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Winnebago Man (2009) |
Perhaps the most disturbing issue raised in Ben Steinbauer's fascinating and often hilarious Winnebago Man has to do with the Internet's awesome ability to reduce complex and apparently dangerous behaviour to the level of banal spectacle. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Dec 10, 2010
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The Concert (2009) |
Benefits from clever editing and a credible cinematic representation of the ineffable power of music to ignite the human spirit. Sadly, the magic is way too long in the making. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Oct 08, 2010
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You Again (2010) |
A laugh-free script that's underscored by a nasty mean streak... - Toronto Star
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| Posted Sep 24, 2010
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Mother and Child (2009) |
That Garcia manages to spin three rich and complex yarns without ever losing hold of the main thread -- the deep and mysterious connections between mothers and daughters -- is evidence of a keen eye and an exceptionally curious mind. - Toronto Star
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| Posted May 07, 2010
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The Burning Plain (2008) |
If Arriaga had allowed us to spend more time with the key characters in this extended tragedy, or had spent some time punching up the plot, The Burning Plain might have had a chance. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Oct 16, 2009
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Unmistaken Child (2008) |
The film is fascinating on every level -- as a portrait of a willing servant in a complex, powerful and inscrutable religious system and a feast of spectacular sights and unusual mundane events in a corner of the world rarely exposed to prying eyes. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Oct 02, 2009
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It Might Get Loud (2008) |
Davis Guggenheim's contrived documentary is a largely unrewarding essay on the mystique of the ubiquitous electric guitar... - Toronto Star
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| Posted Sep 25, 2009
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The Boys Are Back (2009) |
Shot in the glorious golds and greens of South Australia's autumn, it's a convincing tale of spiritual and emotional rehabilitation, perhaps not as important as it wants to be, but not exactly a waste of time, either. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Sep 25, 2009
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Fame (2009) |
That fame seems assured to those who merely crave it -- without sacrifice, or spiritual and physical effort -- emerges as the underlying message in this sanitized and unrewarding production. Simon Cowell has much to answer for. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Sep 25, 2009
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Whiteout (2009) |
By eliminating so many suspects before the obligatory drawing-room denouement and final deadly confrontation, it's a given that the audience will feel cheated when the real bad guy turns out to be the only possible contender. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Sep 11, 2009
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Enlighten Up! (2008) |
Director Kate Churchill ends up with a non-story in her feature Enlighten Up! when her subject fails to experience the changes she had been expecting. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Aug 28, 2009
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The Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story (2009) |
The story of the men who wrote them in the golden age of Walt Disney Studios' movie musicals, brothers Robert and Richard Sherman, is one of the most fascinating chronicles of creative partnership never told. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Aug 21, 2009
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Post Grad (2009) |
Post Grad deserves a failing grade. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Aug 21, 2009
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Idiots and Angels (2008) |
Even without a word of dialogue, Plympton's dark fable about the almost unnatural redemption of a lost soul content in its damnation is easily understood, and neatly told. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Aug 14, 2009
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Ponyo (2008) |
It's a wonderful place that Miyazaki creates, an alternatively sweet and savage world that defies physics and common sense, as imaginative and impossible in its own way as Jules Verne's sci-fi fantasies or Maurice Sendak's animal kingdom. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Aug 14, 2009
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Fifty Dead Men Walking (2008) |
The movie, shot it Ireland, has a gritty, documentary feel and a sharp, dramatic pulse that never really falters. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Jul 31, 2009
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Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae (2009) |
A rich and rewarding music documentary endowed with a wonderful sense of the significance of its subject, with revealing tales. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Jul 27, 2009
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Soul Power (2008) |
A dazzling chronicle of the African American music expo that was meant to accompany the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle heavyweight title bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Congo). - Toronto Star
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| Posted Jul 24, 2009
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The Beaches of Agnès (2008) |
Intensely personal and universally adaptable, The Beaches of Agnès is at once Varda's gift to posterity, and to a world that that undervalues the small and seemingly insignificant events through which we drift unconsciously, but which leave a mark. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Jul 24, 2009
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Orphan (2009) |
The best thing about Orphan, is the way it plays with the genre's overused staples and its sophisticated audience's expectations. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Jul 24, 2009
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The Stoning of Soraya M. (2008) |
Despite some wonderful performances, the plot plods inexorably and with sickening predictability towards the inevitable conclusion, but nothing can prepare us for the actual event, which Nowrasteh films in real time and in shocking detail. - Toronto Star
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| Posted Jul 17, 2009
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