Written and directed by director Matthew Rankin, the comedy presents a Persian-language-inflected Canada, getting at timely ...

‘I always like to say that Iranian cinema emerges out of a thousand years of poetry, and Canadian cinema emerges out of fifty years of discount furniture commercials,’ Matthew Rankin said at a recent ...

But so, too, begins the dolorous new comedy “Universal Language,” which the Canadian screenwriter and director Matthew Rankin has fashioned as a kind of elaborately deadpan homage to the ...

Learning Farsi in advance to accommodate his singular vision of a film set in “a mysterious and surreal interzone somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg,” Matthew Rankin did such an alluring ...

In the cockeyed Canada of Matthew Rankin’s nutty comedy “Universal Language,” Winnipeg is colourful and bustling while Montreal is dreary and almost comatose. Peter Howell is a Toronto-based ...

All known human languages display a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the second most frequent, three times as frequent as the third, and so on.

Koo surmises that this sort of "managed divergence" might be preferable in some ways to universal adoption of IFRS. Because the two frameworks are seen as roughly equivalent in terms of quality ...

So it's refreshing to see Winnipeg will get the Canadian theatrical premiere of Universal Language, which is already on the Oscar short list for best international feature film. Credit director ...

Before seeing Universal Language, I'd heard people compare writer/director Matthew Rankin's latest absurdist comedy (which he penned with Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati) to the works of Joel ...

Pop culture isn’t just internet fodder anymore – it’s become a universal language that decodes how people communicate, connect and consume. Two years ago, the hour-long pop culture summit ...

Welcome to the Winnipeg of Universal Language, which feels like the bastard love child between Guy Maddin and Abbas Kiarostami – and just might be one of the best films, Canadian or otherwise ...

Parshall: But linguists are talking about pain because the words that we use to express it might actually tell us something about our shared biology and the evolution of kind of language in general.