Randall King
Winnipeg Free Press
Canada
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Past articles by Randall:
Strong performances buoy drama’s heavy subject matter
Director Darren Aronofsky has demonstrated a penchant for grandiose metaphysical statements in past films, such as The Fountain, Black Swan and Mother!, but he is back down to earth in his new film, The Whale. → Read More
Cold comfort, creative fire on Winnipeg winter set
When the movie production team for the Universal Studios release Violent Night showed up in Winnipeg around this time last winter, it brought 42-year-old Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola to the project, and it must be said, rarely has a director been so seemingly perfect for this kind of movie. → Read More
Rainbow Stage scores with classic Canadian tale
It was some kind of ghastly benchmark in Canadian culture when, in 2010, someone made a movie titled Score: A Hockey Musical, a silly effort with a dead-end ambition: to make a film for that tiny Venn diagram demographic that loves both hockey and movie musicals. → Read More
Jewish love story painted in bittersweet strokes
At one point in Daniel Jamieson’s play The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, artist Marc Chagall (Daniel Greenberg) is seen rebelling against the stodgy artists in his native Russian community of Vitebsk, saying that if he wants to paint green cows, he will paint green cows. (Chagall indeed took the green cow as his personal emblem. → Read More
Dolce Vita-inspired production of Much Ado in the St. Norbert ruins keeps actors and audience hopping
Federico Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita is the stylistic touchstone for director Ann Hodges’ robust interpretation of the Shakespeare comedy Much Ado About Nothing, produced live (at last!) in the Trappist Monastery Provincial Heritage Park in St. Norbert. → Read More
Crimes takes the Future to a weird new place
Bless his twisted heart, David Cronenberg is back… with his “Future.” Apart from the title, his new film has little to do with the notorious Canadian director’s 1970 film of the same name, aside from being set in a world beset by a plague of mutation. → Read More
Top Gun: Maverick: the Tom Cruise-starring followup to the Tom Cruise-starring 36-year-old blockbuster
Top Gun: Maverick absolutely lives up to its predecessor, Tony Scott’s streamlined blockbuster/machine from 1986. That film purveyed the very ’80s notion of war as a sleek spectator event, with keening jet engines, a glamorous hero and not a little homoerotic subtext, notwithstanding Kelly McGillis’s gratuitous love interest. → Read More
Kids in the Hall back to push the envelope
It has been nearly 27 years since the five-man Canadian comedy troupe Kids in the Hall challenged comedy norms with their landmark sketch comedy series, which ran on CBC and HBO from 1989 to 1995. → Read More
Hilary Swank shooting inspirational drama in Winnipeg
Two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank will be coming to Winnipeg to shoot the drama Ordinary Angels from late March to early May. Set in Kentucky in 1994, the film is based on a true story. → Read More
Topical, timely comedy addresses uncomfortable questions of race, privilege and class
After originally announcing it in 2020, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre was to have unveiled the comedy Calpurnia on its mainstage exactly this time last year, before the pandemic laid waste to the theatre’s best-laid plans. The play surely would have been appreciated in 2021, given its examination of topical racial issues, albeit set in the cushy environs of Toronto’s Forest Hill. → Read More
Actress foiled by famously frigid Winnipeg intersection
On last Wednesday’s broadcast of The Late Late Show with James Corden, actress Edi Patterson (a writer and star on the cable series The Righteous Gemstones) told a startling story of travelling to frigid Winnipeg to shoot a movie. → Read More
Animated film follows girl’s quest to reunite with her mother
Veterans of the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival may remember an early iteration of the play Places We Go from the 2017 edition of that much-missed fest. Co-writer Hazel Venzon performed the half-hour show largely in silhouette, backlit by the projected illustrations of her artist husband — and co-writer — David Oro. → Read More
Festival sheds light on evolution of Black horror films
In the documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, now playing on the genre specialty streaming service Shudder, director Xavier Burgin makes the provocative case that the horror genre, for good and ill, reflected the Black experience like no other in the past century. In the words of writer-educator Tananarive Due, an executive producer of the film, “Black history is Black horror. → Read More
Series deftly balances melodrama with meaty issues
Shot last year in and around Winnipeg, the CBC TV series The Porter is, first and foremost, breathtaking in its scope and ambition. The largest Black-led production in the history of Canadian broadcasting, this is a panoramic portrait of Black Canadian life in the 1920s, centred on a pair of railway porters intent on improving the circumstances of themselves and their families. → Read More
Full steam ahead
The story told in the eight episodes of the new CBC series The Porter is one of overcoming adversity to triumph against impossible odds. As it happens, that is also the story of the making of the series itself, which was shot in and around Winnipeg over about 75 days from early June to mid-September of last year. → Read More
Chinese director embraces Winnipeg’s winter weather
Even after they wrapped the Manitoba component of production on Feb. 4, the producers and the director of the Chinese-American co-production Unspoken were unaware that Winnipeg can lay claim to a little piece of Chinese cinema history. → Read More
The only psycho in silly Winnipeg-filmed thriller is the screenwriter
While it was being cobbled together in Winnipeg in the chilly winter of 2017, the movie now known as Night Hunter was shot under the working title Nomis. Night Hunter feels a little more like a generic serial killer thriller. → Read More
Bard’s wife crafts sandbox world that demands leaning in
“I long for the sea,” announces Anne Hathaway at the start of this 92-minute, one-hander drama by Winnipeg-born, Alberta-based playwright Vern Thiessen. Considering some of the circumstances of her life to be revealed, it will prove to be a shocking statement. → Read More
Winnipeg writer’s narrative leads him to Netflix
It’s not that Burke Scurfield was necessarily destined for a life in the entertainment industry. But he allows being put in a headlock at the age of four by professional wrestler Bret “The Hitman” Hart may have had something to do with starting him on a path that would ultimately lead him to a writing gig on Netflix’s first in-house adult animated series, Inside Job. → Read More
Daniel Craig's overlong final outing as suave secret agent doesn't reach an all-time high
The world of James Bond is stirred, shaken and positively blown up in this fifth and final chapter of what you might call 007: The Daniel Craig Years. Craig, as most people know, will not be returning to the role of the suave superspy. → Read More