Kurt Halfyard
Toronto, Canada

Scientist by day, cinema aficionado by night. Film festival addict and family man. Kurt has been writing for Twitch since pretty much the inception of the site and can often be found in rep-houses around Toronto taking his kids to films that are rather inappropriate for their age.

TIFF 2012 Review: COME OUT AND PLAY Drops the Ball
A textbook case of a remake failing to improve on a classic original, Come Out And Play not only loses the context of the hidden Narciso Ibáñez Serrador directed gem, which was released on the heels of the Vietnam War... More »
  

TIFF 2012 Feature: WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? Continues to Horrify
[With Come Out and Play, the remake of Who Can Kill a Child?, set to debut at TIFF tonight, we decided to take another look at the original film.] I read a quote from Adam Balz over at NotComing.com that... More »
  

TIFF 2012 Review: GANGS OF WASSEYPUR is the Epic Crime Saga of the Year
Pulling back, deliberately and slowly, from a soap-opera musical on the TV (involving, of all things, character introductions), the 315-minute long Gangs of Wasseypur kicks off with a single shot, Johnnie To-style unbroken assault on the stronghold of Faizal Khan with... More »
  

TIFF 2012 Review: TO THE WONDER Emotes on Our Ephemeral Existence
"Pourqoi pas Toujours?" (Why not always?) is the question on the mind of Terrence Malick in his latest emotive cinematic meditation -- it could have easily been the title. Here he is less concerned with the connections between the personal... More »
  

TIFF 2012 Review: THE BRASS TEAPOT Has Faith in American Middle Class Virtue
The Brass Teapot feels like something that Spielberg would have produced in the mid to late 1980s. It mixes the overall story themes and narrative structure of Gremlins with the goofy morality play of The 'Burbs and the money sense of... More »
  

TIFF 2012 Review: HELLBENDERS Raises a Little, Uh, Hell
"I'm a woman, and you're a Catholic. Everything I do is a sin." -- A taste of the in-your-face comedy on display in J.T. Petty's Hellbenders.Based upon the writer-director's own graphic novel, and pitched somewhere between The Evil Dead and Ghostbusters... More »
  

TIFF 2012 Review: THE IMPOSSIBLE is a Little Bit Soggy
"Just close your eyes and think of something nice" is a refrain repeated several times during J.A. Bayona's Tsunami disaster film that sees Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts (and their three children) attempt to re-unite after a tidal wave destroys... More »
  

TIFF 2012 Review: THE HUNT Searches for Provocation (and Finds it in an Unexpected Place)
There is no arguing the craft on display in Thomas Vinterberg's small-town, big-drama showcase The Hunt. Mads Mikkelsen turns in the performance of his career - and if you look back on his career so far, that is an impressive feat... More »
  

TIFF 2012 Review: 7 BOXES Are All Full of Genre Treats!
It's a hot day in the capital city of Paraguay and the exchange rate for US Dollars is running as high as the mercury in Asunción's bustling marketplace. Narrow rows of stalls glutted with people, consumer goods, and hanging animal... More »
  

TIFF 2012 Review: REBELLE (War Witch) is Bloody and Compassionate
Let us start off by saying that Kim Nyugen's Rebelle, is easily the best Canadian war film ever produced.  I know, you say that there aren't many Canadian war films made outside of National Film Board documentaries and that big... More »
  

TIFF 2012 Review: I DECLARE WAR Goes To Battle with Boys and Bullying
One weekend day a number of the nerdier kids from the local middle school gather their sticks and twine and balloons filled with red dye, and head into the local woods to play capture-the-flag.  Oh, those tweens today with their... More »
  

TIFF 2012 Review: BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO Makes You Lean Forward and Listen
There is a key to unlocking Peter Strickland's dense and puzzling Berberian Sound Studio.  A line of dialogue that comes from the director of the film within the film.  A slip of the tongue.  In movies about sound, or more... More »
  

TIFF 2012 Review: THE BITTER ASH is Pulled Out of Canadian Vault
[In light of its recent screening in the Cinematheque sidebar at TIFF, we pull out this review from our own archives as a part of a series on the cinema of underground/indie filmmaker Larry Kent:  the godfather of Indie Canadian... More »
  

TIFF 2012 Review: AMOUR Serves Up Death and Empathy
Michael Haneke wants to remind us all that we are going to die someday, and that the long days journey into night is probably not going to be pleasant one.  He accomplishes this mightily in the heartbreaking and occasionally shocking,... More »
  

TIFF 2012 Feature: LOOPER Offers Originality and Resonance from Tried and True Time Travel Tropes
Empiricist founding father John Locke proposed a curious scenario with, of all things, his socks. It goes something like this: If you had a hole in your sock and had to patch it over, you'd probably call it the same... More »
  

Review: THE AMBASSADOR, More Than a Great Documentary Stunt
(With Drafthouse Films releasing The Ambassador in New York today and in other selected U.S. cities on Friday, we revisit our review from HotDocs.) Either Mads Brügger has balls the size of grapefruits or there is mondo chicanery going on... More »
  

Movies as a Cassandra Complex: A Conversation with Walter Chaw on Global and Personal Apocalypses of the 1980s with MIRACLE MILE
The thought of reading a 200 page essay-review hybrid, a monograph, on a single film may appear to be a daunting task.  Some time ago, Johnathan Lethem and Softskull Press proved just how delightful and rewarding that can be... More »
  

Paraguay's 7 BOXES contain a Whole Lotta Kinetic Energy
When a street barrow-courier in the most chaotic urban marketplace in capital city of Paraguay gets the gig of watching over seven rather large and mysterious crates, things are sure to get out of hand, and in this trailer for Juan... More »
  

Fantasia 2012 Review: CHAINED
With its sunny daylight ranch exteriors and sparse, sickly yellow interiors, Jennifer Lynch's Chained is not playing subtle at being a domestic dysfunction drama.  But seeing how the film is also firmly exists in the gory serial-killer box, it is... More »
  

Riveting Trailer for Cronenberg's ANTIVIRAL
"Have you started bleeding yet? From your mouth..." Brandon Cronenberg's film Antiviral certainly carries the families DNA. It feels very much in the vein (pun intended) of either his father's Shivers or Rabid. Only here, the plot involves buying... More »
  
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