Inside Vancouver

Catch some of the best of Canadian cinema FREE!

by Shawn Conner in Uncategorized on June 27, 2017

Jeremy Irons, Genevieve Bujold and Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers. The 1988 David Cronenberg film is screening as part of a week of free movies at Cinematheque.

If by some quirk of fate you haven’t heard, Canada is celebrating its sesquicentennial this year. In acknowledgement of the country’s 150th, the Toronto International Film Festival, The Cinematheque, Library and Archives Canada, and the Cinémathèque québécoise banded together to poll the nation’s movie critics, film historians and industry professionals. They came up with a list of the 150 favourites, ranging from feature films to shorts to animation and documentaries to experimental films.

For the last year, Vancouver’s Cinematheque (1181 Howe St.) has been screening the 150 selections in a program called Canada On Screen. To celebrate Canada Day, Cinematheque presents a full week of FREE screenings of some of the selections from the list. We’ve highlighted some below.

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Catch some of the best of Canadian cinema FREE!

Rohmer retrospective kicks off with six moral tales of sex and desire

by Shawn Conner in Uncategorized on March 17, 2017

A scene from 1967’s La Collectionneuse.

“Boy meets girl. Boy flirts with girl. Boy leaves girl for another girl whom he already loves.”

That’s how the AV Club summarizes the plots of the films that make up Six Moral Tales. Yet while not much happens on the surface, this series of movies from French filmmaker Eric Rohmer are many a cinephile’s dream.

To celebrate Rohmer’s life (1920-2010) and work, Cinematheque is presenting an ongoing retrospective. The retrospective kicks off with Six Moral Tales, all of which focus on sexual temptation and the rationalization of desire. It’s a rare chance to see these classics, made between 1962 and 1972, on the big screen.

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Rohmer retrospective kicks off with six moral tales of sex and desire

Killers, thieves and gumshoes – Cinematheque’s Film Noir series is back!

by Shawn Conner in Uncategorized on July 11, 2016

The iconic image from the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple.

Each year, Vancouver’s premiere arthouse Cinematheque presents a festival of dark shadows, lonely streets, tough guys and tougher dames. This year’s Film Noir festival (Aug. 4-22) includes not only seminal works from the genre’s postwar heyday, but also “neo-noir” selections from the sixties and the eighties, too.

All told, Cinematheque (1131 Howe St) is screening 13 films, nine for the first time. Here are some highlights.

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Killers, thieves and gumshoes – Cinematheque’s Film Noir series is back!

Mind-blowing, adult 1973 Japanese animated feature comes to Cinematheque

by Shawn Conner in Uncategorized on May 19, 2016

Belladonna of Sadness 01

Considered by cinephiles to be one of the great lost masterpieces of Japanese animation, Belladonna of Sadness was never officially released in North America. But a beautifully restored 4k digital restoration is currently making the rounds of the arthouse cinema circuit, with screenings at the Cinematheque (1131 Howe St.) in Vancouver from June 3-8.

Belladonna of Sadness was produced by Osamu Tezuka, the godfather of Japanese anime and manga, but directed by his long-time collaborator Eiichi Yamamoto. The film unfolds as a series of spectacular still watercolour paintings inspired in part by Gustav Klimt. But the 1973 mindblower also reflects the freewheeling spirit of other seventies animated features like Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards and Rene Laloux’s Fantastic Planet. It’s also an adult-oriented flick that is filled with violence and explicit sexuality.

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Mind-blowing, adult 1973 Japanese animated feature comes to Cinematheque