Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen) is dark, delves into class issues and has a powerful performance by Cate Blanchett as Jasmine, the emotionally unhinged wife of a corporate sleazebag (Alec Baldwin) who’s fleeced everyone he knows and been thrown into the slammer, where he’s committed suicide. Penniless and on the brink of a second breakdown, Jasmine heads to San Francisco from her former home base in New York to move in with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), a grocery bagger living in in the Mission district with her two children from an earlier marriage. Flashbacks tell Jasmine’s story and contrast her formerly extravagant lifestyle with Ginger’s. Baldwin is terrific as the slimeball husband, and Andrew Dice Clay is surprisingly soulful as Ginger’s ex. But it’s Blanchett who’ll blow your mind. Hers is a devastating portrait of a woman losing her grip, able to flip instantly from supremely composed to twitchy to completely bonkers. Expect Oscar to come calling. 98 min.
Rating: NNNN (SGC)
Opens Aug 2 at Varsity. See here for times.
A People Uncounted (Aaron Yeger) is a comprehensive and emotionally charged doc that sheds light on Roma history and the horrific abuses suffered by an often-ignored population during the Holocaust. Interviews with academics and survivors paint a vivid and traumatic narrative of the Roma (“Gypsies”), who gained acclaim through jazz (thank you, Django Reinhardt) and were romanticized in the popular opera Carmen, but for centuries were branded travelling beggars, thieves and whores, European history’s most expendable lot. Some sections make wobbly attempts to connect the past to current affairs, their underlying point – history might repeat itself – stretched thin. The film fares much better when it focuses on deconstructing stereotypes about Roma culture, details of the Holocaust and devastating accounts of survivors, whose recollections will make you sick to your stomach. Some subtitles. 99 min.
Rating: NNNN (RS)
Opens Aug 2 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
2 Guns (Baltasar Kormákur) pairs Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg as Texas gunmen who accidentally steal $43.125 million dollars of the wrong people’s money and must shoot a whole lot of bad guys to get themselves out of trouble. Kormákur, who directed Wahlberg’s similarly sturdy vehicle Contraband, isn’t out to make a meathead movie: he doesn’t spin the camera around the actors unless it’s spatially necessary, and he allows scenes to unfold at a pace that lets us get a feel for the people involved. And he’s great with actors, encouraging Washington to rediscover the mojo he misplaced years ago and letting Wahlberg goof around in the Eddie Murphy/Chris Tucker role of the cocky motormouth. It’s a surprisingly good fit for him, especially after his almost-charming work as a murderous dullard in Pain & Gain. You can’t help but enjoy the ride. Some subtitles. 109 min.
Rating: NNNN (NW)
Opens Aug 2 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Carlton Cinema, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Docks Lakeview Drive-In, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale. See here for times.
The Attack (Ziad Doueiri) is almost a crowd-pleasing portrait of a suicide bomber. Amin (Ali Suliman) is a respected Arab-Israeli surgeon whose comfortable life in Tel Aviv is shattered when his beloved wife (Reymond Amsalem) attacks a café strapped with a bomb, killing 17 people. Looking for answers, Amin heads to Palestine to find out exactly how his wife became radicalized. The Attack feels a bit stuffily like an old novel of ideas, in which most of the characters function as types espousing their respective ideologies with narrow literalness. The exception is Amin, whose emotional life becomes believably upturned as he snoops around his wife’s secret life. Suliman’s terrific hangdog performance gives the film weight as something more than a broad political allegory. Subtitled. 99 min.
Rating: NNN (JS)
Opens Aug 2 at Varsity. See here for times.
Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland) takes place almost entirely within the confines of the eponymous Italian recording facility, where a repressed British engineer (Toby Jones) has arrived to mix a bloody giallo called The Equestrian Vortex. Writer/director Strickland sets the story in the mid-70s, right around the time Dario Argento was finishing up Suspiria, chanelling that film’s suffocating, oppressive sensibility with lots of heavy breathing and shrieking (as looped by actors in sound booths) and flesh-squelching (as recreated by foley artists stabbing watermelons and smashing fruit). As our twitchy hero begins to come apart under the stress of the job, the movie replicates his crumbling state of mind by coming unstuck in chronology and language – sort of. Berberian Sound Studio evaporates like a bad dream as soon as the lights come up, but the experience is still worth having. 92 min.
Rating: NNN (NW)
Opens Aug 2 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
Terms and Conditions May Apply (Cullen Hoback) will make you think twice the next time you click “I Agree” on a user agreement for your computer or mobile device. Writer/director Hoback and his many talking heads – lawyers, marketers, analysts and a couple of celebrities like writer Margaret Atwood and musician Moby – show that you’re signing away a lot of freedoms with that innocent little click. We’re not just talking about the reams of consumer information gleaned from your browser history. In a post-9/11 society, Big Brother is a reality, monitoring your texts, emails, Facebook posts and – thanks to your car’s fancy GPS system – whether you’re speeding. Unfortunately, the film is information-heavy and lacks much momentum. A gonzo attempt by the filmmaker to capture Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in a private moment comes late in the film, but there’s no way to scroll down to the end to see it sooner. 79 min.
Rating: NNN (GS)
Opens Aug 2 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
The Canyons (Paul Schrader) is a dull, plodding look at the lives of a handful of 20-somethings in West Hollywood who spend their time screwing each other – and screwing each other over – while juggling various indulgences and wearing as little as possible. One of those people is played by Lindsay Lohan, which is the only reason anyone is talking about this movie at all. Yes, she looks like hell yes, she takes her clothes off. At no point will you care about her character’s relationship with either a dead-eyed movie producer (porn star James Deen) or her old boyfriend (Nolan Funk), a struggling actor. That’s because screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis hasn’t bothered to give any of them a personality beyond “Hollywood type,” and Schrader hasn’t encouraged the actors to flesh them out. Unlike Ellis’s key L.A. work Less Than Zero, the ennui here is entirely accidental. 100 min.
Rating: N (NW)
Opens Aug 2 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
Andre Rieu Live in Maastricht 2013 is a high def screening of a concert by the King of the Waltz from his home town of Maastricht, in The Netherlands. 177 min.
Opens Aug 7 at Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Queensway, SilverCity Yonge, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (Thor Freudenthal) brings back the title character (Logan Lerman, fresh off The Perks Of Being A Wallflower) for more adventures in this adaptation of the young adult fantasy series. Screened after press time – see review in next week’s issue. 107 min.
Opens Aug 7 at 401 & Morningside, Carlton Cinema, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Queensway, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Yonge, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
We’re the Millers (Rawson Marshall Thurber) stars Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, Emma Roberts and Will Poulter as acquaintances who pretend to be a wholesome family in order to bring a shipment of pot from Mexico to the U.S. without incurring suspicion. Screened after press time – see review in next week’s issue. 110 min.
Opens Aug 7 at 401 & Morningside, Carlton Cinema, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Humber Cinemas, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
