Ever since her incredible performance in I’ve Heard The Mermaids Singing 35 years ago, Sheila McCarthy has been one of Canada’s most hardworking and reliable actors in theater, television, and film on both sides of the border. In her latest project, she joins a “murderers’ row” lineup of actresses like Judith Ivey, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Frances McDormand, and Rooney Mara in Sarah Polley’s powerful new film Women Talking. On this episode, she talks about how the production was both daunting and exhilarating, why it felt like the “acting olympics,” what having this “extraordinarily ordinary” powerhouse director at the helm […]

Kudos to Vice for commandeering a handful of Criterion extras and uploading them to their YouTube channel, Conversations Inside the Criterion Collection. Their most recent addition, from the Frances Ha boxset, is a conversation between Sarah Polley and Greta Gerwig on the process of creating both the titular character and her written foundations. Polley approaches the interview as both a filmmaker and (former) actor, posing astute observations on the registry of Gerwig’s interior monologues, as well as the nuts and bolts behind the film’s climactic dance sequence. The other videos in the series — Wexler on Medium Cool, Polanski on Rosemary’s Baby and Scorsese on Rossellini — […]

The Cinema Eye Honors is always one of the most enjoyable and lively awards shows of the year, and arguably the most intimate; at no other awards show is there such a sense of an entire community coming together. This year, the short film that prefaced the awards — which was compromised of pictures of all the nominees — ended with the words, “We are Cinema Eye. We are on each other’s team.” And that sense of unity and people pulling together was underlined in the opening words of AJ Schnack, who called on the filmmakers present to stand together […]

Stories We Tell is being distributed by Roadside Attractions and opens theatrically on Friday, May 10, 2013. It world premiered at the 2012 Venice Film Festival before next appearing at the Telluride Film Festival. Its New York premiere was at New Directors/New Films 2013. NOTE: This review was first published at Hammer to Nail on September 7, 2012, in conjunction with its Canadian premiere at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. One of the cinema’s greatest feats of magic is its ability to create contemplative space in the mind of the viewer; the experience of people sitting in a dark […]

Over the course of two narrative features, and now a documentary, Sarah Polley has made a habit of taking on unexpected subjects, all the while managing to produce a remarkably consistent body of work. Polley’s films explore the vagaries of relationships and intimacy, and in particular, the challenges of marriage. Filled with tonal shifts and narrative reveals, Polley’s naturalism is always accompanied by flights of fancy and spontaneous moments of romance that may twist against the viewer’s sympathies. Her 2006 debut, Away from Her, stars two aging icons of cinema, Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent and the ever-radiant Julie Christie, as […]

If brave new fiction dominated the first week of New Directors/New Films, a cluster of divergent docs owns the second. Some of the docmakers aim for the intimate and personal (Stories We Tell, Anton’s Right Here); others, the extroverted and novel (Our Nixon, People’s Park). For the most part, grasp equals reach. The directors merge form and content in ways appropriate for both subject and audience. The one standout feature fits nicely with the docs. The Interval is a study in doc-like realism, and Italian director Leonardo Di Costanzo is a veteran of documentaries. The film has a light poetic feel as well — […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 18, 9:00pm — Salt Lake City Library Theatre, Salt Lake City] To make Stories We Tell, I think I sacrificed any semblance of an equilibrium for five years. It was terrifying to make a film about the people closest to me. The potential consequences of damaged or severed relationships hung over me and haunted me, the weighing of truth versus fiction in my family’s lives and how the exposure of that balance would surely effect us all, was at times almost too much to bear. Spending hours on end in an editing room reliving some of […]

Are you surprised that this year, some of the most anticipated films at the Toronto International Film Festival actually are by (gulp) Canadian filmmakers? Largely known to many for their solicitousness, their skills in the rink, and their charming way of saying the letter “o,” the Canadians often inspire jealousy in their film-loving neighbors to the south because of the wide-ranging institutional support that they provide for national filmmakers. The National Film Board of Canada, for instance, both produces films and distributes them to the far reaches of the country… and has been doing so for over 7o years, when […]

Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 24, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Scott Macaulay interviewed Away From Her director Sarah Polley for the Spring ’07 issue. Away From Her is nominated for Best Lead Actress (Julie Christie) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Sarah Polley). Whether it is as the paralyzed survivor in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter or the zombie apocalypse heroine in Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead, Sarah Polley brings something fascinating yet almost indescribable to all of her roles. […]