Arts

For Christina Maria, her most recent European tour was a little bit like going home.

“My mom has 72 first cousins, many of them in Holland, so a lot of family comes out to my shows and that’s something really special to me,” the Swiss-Canadian explained.

Maria released her second album, Straight Line, this past February.

The tour’s European setting is fitting, given the international production of the album, which she said shaped her sound and the record as a whole.

Halo: Reach
Developed by Bungie
Xbox 360

As Bungie’s last addition to the Halo universe, Halo: Reach has to be the pinnacle of a decade of long, hard work.

Starting with Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001 and culminating with this game, Bungie has done the gaming community a great service.

Get Low
Directed by Aaron Schneider
Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics

Robert Duvall, whose first film role was as Boo Radley in 1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird, returns to his reclusive roots in Get Low. He plays Felix Bush, a hermit who has been living isolated in the woods for the past 40 years, and through town folklore has become a bogeyman figure in the eyes of young and old.

With the Mayfair theatre’s Month of Silence Film Festival set to launch next week, local musicians, actors and composers are preparing to recreate an almost forgotten way of showing films, providing live accompaniment and sound effects to nine classic silent films.

Now in its second year, the festival emerged through the success of silent film screenings at the Mayfair, which began after coming under new management in 2009.

El Salvador is a small country in Central America, still recovering from a 12-year civil war that killed at least 75,000 people. This nation’s story is the one director Jamie Moffett depicts in his documentary Return to El Salvador, the product of a two-month stay in the country and the subject of a recent screening in Ottawa.

“El Salvador is a needle point example of how the United States’ policies affect other sovereign nations,” Moffett said.