Looking back on the first ten years of this century, it’s hard not to consider it one of the most appalling periods in recent memory. Rung in by tragedy and followed by a disgraceful variation on frontier justice (fuelled by pampered frat boy machismo), the decade dragged obnoxiously on with one outrage following another each…

By Steve Gravestock The year 2008 was an odd one for Canadian cinema, characterized by anomalies. The biggest and most anomalous story was Paul Gross’s World War I epic Passchendaele. The film made more than $4.5 million and was the country’s largest domestic hit, outgrossing most commercially successful releases from Québec, something films from English…

By Steve Gravestock One of the most canonized movies in Canadian film history, Francis Mankiewicz’s Les bons débarras (Québec, 1980) was received as a classic almost instantly. It won most of the significant Genies the year it was eligible, defeating Bob Clark’s far more expensive, but vastly inferior Tribute, a much bigger budget Anglo feature…

By Steve Gravestock Much of Québecois cinema plays off or develops its own distinctive mythology. Even in a brazenly calculated commercial work like the province’s biggest 2007 hit, Nitro, riffs off the city-country dichotomy that has characterized Québecois cinema since the ‘60s. (The film follows a former biker/drag racer —now urbanized and therefore domesticated—who returns…