Movies – Winnipeg Free Press

Jordan Strauss / Invision Files
Catherine O’Hara was beloved by seemingly everyone.

Catherine O’Hara flipped tropes, brought humanity to every role

Jen Zoratti 5 minute read 2:02 AM CST

Like many kids growing up in the ’90s, I first encountered Catherine O’Hara as Kevin’s mom in Home Alone.

Back then, she was just that: Kevin’s (Macaulay Culkin) mom. But watching the 1990 holiday classic as an adult, as I do every single Christmas with a lovely cheese pizza just for me, you realize the brilliance she brought to the character of Kate McCallister.

Only O’Hara could elevate one line into a movie-trailer tentpole catchphrase — “Kevin!” — by delivering it in a wide-eyed, two-syllable shriek.

Her comedic genius is everywhere, from her interactions on the phone with the Chicago police — “Yeah, hi, look…” — to her banter with real-life friend John Candy, as the Polka King of the Midwest.

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French film has no clue about what kind of mystery it is

Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Preview

French film has no clue about what kind of mystery it is

Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Friday, Jan. 30, 2026

There are a “lot of loose ends,” worries one amateur sleuth midway through this elegant, intelligent but ultimately unsatisfying French film.

That’s a frustrating problem with A Private Life (in French with English subtitles). Filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski (Other People’s Children) throws out intriguing ideas and sly cinematic riffs, but the narrative lines keep flying off in all directions.

By its anticlimactic conclusion, this would-be psychological thriller is held together only by the astonishing centrifugal force of star Jodie Foster.

Foster plays Lilian Steiner, an American expatriate living in Paris and working as a psychoanalyst. (Foster speaks very good French, though her character falls back on English whenever she needs to swear.)

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Friday, Jan. 30, 2026

Netflix
Jodie Foster’s French is a highlight of A Private Life.

Touching story buried in creepy Canadian film

Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Preview

Touching story buried in creepy Canadian film

Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Friday, Jan. 23, 2026

Flawed but still fascinating, this Canadian horror flick — which made its North American debut at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival — is also, at times, an oddly sweet and sincere love story.

That’s an unusual genre mashup, but it could be because Honey Bunch’s creators are Ontario-based Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli (Violation), a scripting and directing team who are also partners in life.

Set in the 1970s — a decade that’s resonating right now at the movie theatre — Honey Bunch centres on husband and wife Homer and Diana, played by Ben Petrie and Grace Glowicki (also a real-life couple, who have worked together previously on The Heirloom).

After a catastrophic car crash, Diana is left with chronic pain and a brain injury that has led to short-term memory loss.

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Friday, Jan. 23, 2026

Elevation pictures
Diana (Grace Glowicki) faces numerous challenges following a car accident.

‘Based on true story’ drama Dead Man’s Wire lacks crucial information

Alison Gillmor 5 minute read Preview

‘Based on true story’ drama Dead Man’s Wire lacks crucial information

Alison Gillmor 5 minute read Friday, Jan. 16, 2026

Loosely based on a real-life hostage taking in Indianapolis in 1977, this period crime drama from veteran director Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Milk) and screenwriter Austin Kolodney (making his feature-film debut) is packed with scruffy retro style and some cool callbacks.

The 1970s were a decade of paranoia, cynicism and division. (Maybe that’s why they’re resonating in pop culture right now.) Dead Man’s Wire channels some of the antihero energy of Dog Day Afternoon. It riffs on the mad-as-hell rants of Network. It gives us a turtlenecked, leather-jacketed cop like Serpico.

The hair is long, the cars are the size of barges and the colour palette suggests old Polaroid photos.

There’s dark humour and some sly, intriguing performances, but there’s also something missing. Dead Man’s Wire throws out heady ideas — looking at the era’s deepening distrust of institutions, the rise of vulture capitalism and the shifting role of media — but never really follows them up.

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Friday, Jan. 16, 2026

Row K
Dacre Montgomery (front) is taken hostage by Bill Skarsgård in Gus Van Sant’s latest feature, based on a real 1977 incident.

Hey ho, let’s go watch punks, cops and spies

Denise Duguay 4 minute read Preview

Hey ho, let’s go watch punks, cops and spies

Denise Duguay 4 minute read Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026

Punk rock, kooky spies, crooked cops, a hilarious old man and a contract killer with a big, big problem: that should be enough to tide viewers over for a couple of weeks!

● Riot Women (series premières Wednesday on BritBox)

Happy Valley writer-director Sally Wainwright has a new series, which is reason enough to celebrate. That this one is about the forming of a punk band by a handful of menopausal women makes it even more appealing to those revelling in CBC’s brilliant menopause comedy Small Achievable Goals. Sisters are doing it! The performances are bound to also be good, from the likes of Joanna Scanlan (Slow Horses), Tamsin Greig (Friday Night Dinner), Lorraine Ashbourne (Sherwood), Taj Atwal (Line of Duty) and Rosalie Craig (Moonflower Murders). Hey ho, let’s go!

● Ponies (series premières Thursday on StackTV and Showcase)

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Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026

Helen Williams / BritBox
From left: Joanna Scanlan, Tamsin Greig, Rosalie Craig and Amelia Bullmore start a punk band in the British series Riot Women.

Hear her roar

Randall King 3 minute read Preview

Hear her roar

Randall King 3 minute read Friday, Jan. 9, 2026

As a film location, Winnipeg has subbed for everywhere from turn-of-the-century New York City (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) to rural Kansas (Capote).

Winnipeg rarely plays itself, and even more rarely is employed in a fish-out-of-water comedy. (The only one that comes to mind is the locally produced 1989 comedy Mob Story, in which John Vernon played a New York mobster hiding out in wintry Winnipeg, wisely reasoning that no one in their right mind would seek him out there.)

Chinese-Canadian director Johnny Ma rises to that challenge with The Mother and the Bear, which kicks off with 26-year-old Sumi (Leere Park) suffering a typical accident on Winnipeg’s icy streets, slipping and knocking herself out cold after a mysterious encounter with a growling creature lurking in an Exchange District alley.

Even in that one scene, Sumi’s mother Sara (Kim Ho-jung) has made her presence known all the way from Seoul, Korea, leaving Sumi a series of ever-more-urgent messages to connect.

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Friday, Jan. 9, 2026

elevation pictures
Sara (Kim Ho-jung) hits the dating apps to find a match for her single daughter.

Chinese love letter to cinema a film to be experienced

Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Preview

Chinese love letter to cinema a film to be experienced

Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Friday, Jan. 9, 2026

In this visionary experiment from Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan (Long Day’s Journey Into Night), dream and film, history and memory come together in a beautiful, shifting kaleidoscope of images.

Resurrection can be unwieldy and opaque — and its biggest thematic ambitions might remain unrealized — but as it explores the ways cinema can transcend space and time, Bi’s super-meta movie is a stylistic and technical tour de force.

Resurrection (in Chinese with English subtitles) starts with a printed statement that humanity now exists in a world where people can achieve eternal life by choosing not to dream. There are dissidents, though, who refuse this option, the text goes on.

Entering the realms of imagination, these so-called “Deliriants” ecstatically burn through their lives, even if this means chaos, pain and death. They are pursued through their dreams by a force of order named the “Big Other.”

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Friday, Jan. 9, 2026

Huace Pictures
Shu Qi delivers an almost wordless performance as an agent of the Big Other.

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Director roars about making film during Winnipeg winter

Randall King 5 minute read Preview

Director roars about making film during Winnipeg winter

Randall King 5 minute read Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026

TORONTO — To fans of Guy Maddin’s 2007 film My Winnipeg, the opening tune heard in Johnny Ma’s comedy-drama The Mother and the Bear – the ’50s-era promotional anthem Wonderful Winnipeg – will ring familiar. (“It’s no Eden that you would see, but it’s home sweet home to me.”)

This is deliberate. Ma, who was born in Shanghai and moved to Canada at the age of 10, intended the song’s inclusion as an oblique tribute to Maddin and his work.

Indeed, if it weren’t for Maddin and other local filmmakers, it is doubtful Ma would have set his story in Winnipeg in the first place.

Ma premièred The Mother and the Bear during the 2024 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival — the same festival that featured Rumours, the international satire co-directed by local boys Maddin, Galen Johnson and Evan Johnson (the brothers also have a production credit on Ma’s film), as well as Universal Language, Matthew Rankin’s celebrated comedy that, like The Mother and the Bear, offers an often surreal portrait of Winnipeg that still somehow feels familiar.

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Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026

Supplied
Johnny Ma (left) directs Kim Ho-jung during the making of The Mother and the Bear.

Laughing — and screening — all the way to 2026

Denise Duguay 4 minute read Preview

Laughing — and screening — all the way to 2026

Denise Duguay 4 minute read Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2025

There is abundant comedy available to ease into the formal new year and abundant new and returning television in the month to follow to keep your various screens crackling. Press Play now.

● Ricky Gervais: Mortality (comedy special premières Tuesday, Dec. 30, on Netflix)

The British comic Ricky Gervais offers more of his usual bitter, bitter candy, but that might be just the palate cleanser required after too much holiday sugar. It’s one of a veritable avalanche of new comedy specials, some available now (Kumail Nanjiani’s adorably bewildered Night Thoughts on Disney+; Robby Hoffman’s ferociously indignant debut special, Wake Up, on Netflix; Tom Segura’s gleefully disgusting Teacher, also on Netflix); and coming up (SNL’s Marcello Hernández’s American Boy, recorded in front of a hometown Miami crowd, on Netflix on Wednesday, Jan. 7).

● Best Medicine (series gets a “special advance” première on Sunday, Jan. 4, on Fox and on Wednesday, Jan. 7, on CTV)

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Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2025

Netflix
Jon Bernthal and Tessa Thompson star in the new thriller His & Hers.

From blockbusters to intimate dramas, cinematic gems lit up the screen in 2025

Alison Gillmor 5 minute read Preview

From blockbusters to intimate dramas, cinematic gems lit up the screen in 2025

Alison Gillmor 5 minute read Friday, Dec. 26, 2025

With the movie business facing so-so box office, corporate consolidation, shifting viewing habits and the encroachment of AI, 2025 often felt odd, exhausting and polarizing.

In an uneven year of big disappointments and unexpected pleasures, here are some of the films that snuck up on me.

MUSIC MOVIES (BUT NOT MUSICALS):

Sorry, Wicked: For Good. The movie music that really grabbed me this year was from Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a Depression-era vampire movie propelled by blistering blues, haunting gospel numbers and some undead Irish step-dancing.

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Friday, Dec. 26, 2025

Warner Bros. Pictures
Sinners, starring Michael B. Jordan (centre), is propelled by a blues and gospel soundtrack.

Table tennis dramedy Marty Supreme serves gold

Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Preview

Table tennis dramedy Marty Supreme serves gold

Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2025

Kinetic, frenetic, incredibly anxiety-provoking, this cynical sideways take on the underdog sports story delivers the kind of out-and-out chaos that actually requires a lot of cinematic precision.

Filmmaker Josh Safdie’s sardonic comic-drama, Marty Supreme, is both completely assured and slightly insane, and it’s held together by a tricky, nervy, live-wire performance by Timothée Chalamet.

Safdie has previously partnered with brother Benny on such films as Good Time and Uncut Gems, with the pair specializing in everyone-shouting-at-once havoc. Here Josh is solo director, while sharing a screenwriting credit with frequent collaborator Ronald Bronstein.

Marty Supreme takes us back to the 1950s and New York’s Lower East Side, where Marty Mauser (Chalamet) is working at his uncle’s shoe store just long enough to make the fare to England for an international table tennis tournament.

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Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2025

A24 / TNS
Timothée Chalamet delivers a nervy, livewire performance in Marty Supreme.

Chilling thriller fuel for nightmares

Randall King 3 minute read Preview

Chilling thriller fuel for nightmares

Randall King 3 minute read Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025

David Gregory’s fascinating documentary Theatre of Horrors is not to be confused with the grand old 1973 genre chestnut Theatre of Blood, which saw Vincent Price as a deranged Shakespearean actor out to avenge himself on a London critics’ circle, employing gruesome acts of murder inspired by the Bard himself.

But then again, the two films have a common thread, suggesting that contemporary horror cinema owes a debt to live theatre.

This is specifically true of the Grand Guignol, a hideaway little playhouse in the sketchy Pigalle neighbourhood of Paris that operated for about 65 years, commencing in 1897, treating theatregoers to sex- and violence-filled spectacles that literally employed buckets of blood. The activities on its narrow little stage would fuel screen nightmares for generations to come.

Considering very little footage exists of the theatre and its productions, director Gregory makes the most out of a barrage of animators who manage to reinvent the grotesquerie that was on display.

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Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025

Supplied
The Grand Guignol Theatre in Paris

Director Rob Reiner’s oeuvre more than mere movies

Jen Zoratti 4 minute read Preview

Director Rob Reiner’s oeuvre more than mere movies

Jen Zoratti 4 minute read Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025

Rob Reiner made the kind of movies that became people’s favourite movies.

For all of high school, his 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap was mine. As a kid who grew up loving rock music and wanted nothing more than to be a music journalist, his comedy about an aging English heavy metal band — played by Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, all in top form — going out on an American tour with a documentary crew in tow, checked a lot of boxes for me.

This Is Spinal Tap came out a year before I was born, so I discovered it via my dad, who caught it on TV while channel surfing and summoned me with a “You gotta see this, it’s a classic” even though it was late and I had school the next day.

But education comes in many forms, and This Is Spinal Tap is a masterclass in comedy.

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Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025

Lisa Rose / MG
From left: Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest in This Is Spinal Tap

Yellow Christmas

Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Preview

Yellow Christmas

Alison Gillmor 4 minute read Friday, Dec. 19, 2025

Just in time for the holidays, the little yellow fellow is back for a fourth big-screen outing.

The new family-friendly SpongeBob comedy-adventure never matches the surreal genius of the television series’ early seasons, but it’s still a showcase for the sweet, sublime silliness of its underwater protagonists, SpongeBob SquarePants (voiced by the unsinkable Tom Kenny) and his best pal, Patrick Star (Bill Fagerbakke).

We open with SpongeBob realizing he is now 36 clams high, which officially makes him “a big guy.”

He relates the good news to his boss, Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown), who tells him he’ll have to stop being a “bubble-blowing baby boy” and start being a “rough and tumble” man. By way of example, Mr. Krabs recalls his own swashbuckling youth when he tangled with the fierce Flying Dutchman (Star Wars’ Mark Hamill, who’s gone on to do a lot of voice work).

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Friday, Dec. 19, 2025

Escapist viewing for a stressful time of year

Denise Duguay 4 minute read Preview

Escapist viewing for a stressful time of year

Denise Duguay 4 minute read Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025

In the middle of the best-of-the year roundup season, here is a list of simple escapist viewing, (mostly) minus deep thinking. Consider these five suggestions as either (both?) reward or procrastinatory enabler for all the hard work of preparing for and enduring whatever holiday season you celebrate.

● My Next Guest Needs No Introduction (new Season 6 episodes première starting today, Tuesday, Dec. 16, on Netflix)

Anyone missing the former network talk-show titan gets a stocking full of new one-on-ones. Debuting earlier this month, David Letterman’s interview with Adam Sandler is only slightly in support of the latter’s new film, Jay Kelly, with George Clooney (also on Netflix, after a theatrical run). Mostly, it is a charming look at the sometimes fratboy scat-mouthed comic and serious actor, here rendered cowed fanboy, alternating between trying to amuse his hero and marvelling, like any fan would, at being in the same space as the bearded curmudgeon. Next up are three new episodes in which Letterman banters and gets occasionally serious with Michael B. Jordan (Sinners), Jason Bateman (Black Rabbit) and the influencer philanthropist MrBeast.

● Save Me/Save Me Too (series premières Thursday, Dec. 18, on BritBox)

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Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025

Kimberley French / Netflix
Helen Mirren (left) and Kate Winslet star in the tearjerker Goodbye June.

Santa slasher quick, dirty, but also top-notch

Randall King 4 minute read Preview

Santa slasher quick, dirty, but also top-notch

Randall King 4 minute read Friday, Dec. 12, 2025

A few decades back, the movie Silent Night, Deadly Night was a creature that stirred controversy all through December of 1984.

While somewhat nastier and sleazier than the usual ’80s slasher, its downfall — that is, being removed from theatres before it had even begun its wide release — was contained within its Christmas trimmings. The idea of a psycho Santa was too much for Reagan-era audiences in the U.S., even though an axe-wielding psycho Santa was highlighted some 12 years earlier in the 1972 holiday release Tales from the Crypt. But despite its abbreviated run, it would achieve cult status, spawning two sequels and two reboots.

The new iteration of Silent Night, shot in Manitoba earlier this year, redeems the source material with a fresh take that, uncomfortably, compels the audience to be more sympathetic to its designated psycho.

Billy Chapman (Rohan Campbell of Halloween Ends and The Hardy Boys) is an itinerant young man who arrives by bus into a small Midwestern town with apparently evil intent. Dream flashbacks tell the story of his early childhood trauma: As a little boy, he witnessed the brutal slaying of his parents by a shotgun-brandishing Santa.

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Friday, Dec. 12, 2025

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