STREAMING
Extinction
Michael Peña and Lizzy Caplan tend to be the best things about any movie they’re in, so putting them together seems like a can’t-miss idea. Better still: it sounds like a sci-fi spin on Take Shelter, with Peña in the Michael Shannon role of an ordinary man suffering from terrifying visions of an apocalypse that looks a lot like an extraterrestrial invasion and Caplan as his Jessica Chastain. July 27 on Netflix
The Filmmakers
The second season of CBC’s summer film show – now hosted by Johanna Schneller and Amanda Parris – focuses exclusively on Canadian women, interviewing a different director each week, followed by a panel conversation and a screening of her film. First up: Mina Shum, whose Meditation Park makes its broadcast debut less than a year after its TIFF premiere. And coming up: Patricia Rozema and Into The Forest (August 4), Ann Marie Fleming and Window Horses (August 11), Sadaf Foroughi and Ava (September 1) and Rebecca Addelman and Paper Year (September 8). Saturdays, 8:30 pm and streaming on cbc.ca/watch.
Picnic At Hanging Rock
Peter Weir’s 1975 film version of Joan Lindsay’s gothic novel Picnic At Hanging Rock is still iconic, but this six-part TV series veers into camp territory – with mixed results. The story kicks off when three students and a governess at an high-end Australian boarding school vanish without a trace on Valentine’s Day in 1900. Natalie Dormer (Game Of Thrones) is great as the deliciously wicked headmaster but, unlike Weir’s film, this adaptation leaves less to the imagination. July 27 on CraveTV
THEATRICAL
Angels Wear White
A young woman (Wen Qi) witnesses a sexual assault and finds herself caught in a cover-up in a seaside resort town in Vivian Qu’s drama, which turned heads at TIFF last year. Rad Simonpillai says it’s a powerful study of contemporary Chinese social and sexual mores, and the exploitation of women that’s baked into them.
Belle de Jour
Luis Buñuel’s 1967 drama – starring Catherine Deneuve as a bored, bourgeois housewife who takes a side gig as a sex worker at a brothel specializing in fetishistic fantasies – returns to the TIFF Bell Lightbox in a new 4K restoration. Best seen with a crowd that has no idea what’s coming.
Blindspotting
Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs and his best friend Rafael Casal co-wrote their own starring vehicle about two pals in Oakland, directed with an anything-goes attitude by Carlos López Estrada. (It’s also sort of a musical.) Rad Simonpillai finds it entertaining and frustrating in roughly equal measure.
Generation Wealth
Lauren Greenfield, director of The Queen Of Versailles, continues her career-long exploration of status and materialism in America with this new documentary – and uses herself as a subject for the first time.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout
Tom Cruise tries to kill himself all over Europe (and also in India!) in the sixth installment of his long-running action franchise, accompanied by most of the actors you’ve enjoyed in previous chapters. (Hi, Simon Pegg!) Norm Wilner isn’t quite as enthusiastic about it as everyone else, though he really admires the set pieces.
Our House
Toronto-based Anthony Scott Burns’s supernatural thriller – starring Thomas Mann as a young genius who accidentally invents a way to bring the spirits of the dead into our plane of existence – arrives in theatres fresh from its Fantasia premiere. It’s a remake of the 2010 chiller Ghost From The Machine Rad Simonpillai wonders if they should have bothered.
Shock And Awe
Rob Reiner follows LBJ with another political picture, and one more suited to the current political moment: a drama about the reporters who tried to fact-check George W. Bush’s justifications for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. LBJ’s Woody Harrelson stars alongside James Marsden, with Tommy Lee Jones and Reiner himself as their colleagues.
Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
The meta, manic animated series gets its own big-screen incarnation, promising to break the fourth wall at least as often as Deadpool. But, you know, without the swears! (Or the violence, or the humping, or the fridging.) Also, Nicolas Cage and Kristen Bell are in there somewhere. And probably Batman. Batman’s everywhere.
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