Calvary (John Michael McDonagh) follows Irish priest Father James (Brendan Gleeson), who’s told he’ll be murdered in a week’s time as payback for the Church’s enabling of abusive clerics. The premise makes Calvary sound like a mystery, but that’s not where McDonagh’s interest lies. Instead, he uses the priest’s predicament to explore the social fabric of the village, unpacking the domestic issues and financial struggles of locals played by the likes of Isaach de Bankolé, Aiden Gillen, Dylan Moran and Chris O’Dowd. Slowly, Calvary expands beyond James’s quandary to become an inquiry into the whole village’s crisis of faith – and by extension, Ireland’s. Capitalism is failing, love fades, lives end, the Church is rotten through. What’s the point of any of it? In James’s actions, and in Gleeson’s remarkable performance, we get the glimmers of an answer. Whether it means anything is entirely up to you. 101 min.
Rating: NNNN (NW)
Opens Aug 8 at Varsity. See here for times.
Elena (Petra Costa) is an impressionistic memoir tracing the eerily parallel lives of two sisters. Elena and Petra Costa were born 13 years apart, but you’d think they were twins. Elena became a dancer and actor in her native Brazil, then moved to New York with dreams of a film career. When those dreams failed to materialize, she succumbed to depression and drugs and perished at 20. Petra did everything precisely as Elena did – except die. She’s lived to make this haunting film, a lyrical tapestry of home movies, disembodied voices, interviews and gorgeous images of women drifting in water, face up, a school of Ophelias, their dresses billowing like jellyfish. Water is the key motif in Elena, and the film’s greatest strength is its woozy fluidity. Subtitled. 80 min.
Rating: NNNN (Jose Teodoro)
Opens Aug 8 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
An Honest Liar (Justin Weinstein, Tyler Measom) profiles James Randi, a Toronto-born magician and escape artist who reinvented himself as the world’s premier debunker of psychics and faith healers – most famously by helping Johnny Carson discredit Uri Geller on The Tonight Show in 1973. Randi still maintains a public life at age 85, shuttling from his home in Florida to any number of public appearances. But there are a few things about him you may not know. To that end, directors Weinstein and Measom apply the same relentless scrutiny to their subject that Randi brings to bear on the phonies he exposes. What they find isn’t damning in the least – the man’s decency comes through loud and clear – but it does offer a more complicated consideration of James Randi than you may expect. And that’s a very good thing. 91 min.
Rating: NNNN (NW)
Opens Aug 8 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
Land Ho! (Aaron Katz, Martha Stephens) is a lovely little nothing of a movie about two men in their 60s reconnecting with each other, and themselves, on an awkward tour of Iceland. The stakes are low – will Colin (Paul Eenhoorn) rouse himself from a funk? Will Mitch (Earl Lynn Nelson) reveal the details of his recent retirement? – but that’s why it works. Co-directors Katz and Stephens hang back and observe the interactions of their leads over the course of a few days. It’s gentle and upbeat and life-affirming in a way that some may find a little saccharine I have no such objections. It’s just utterly pleasurable to watch these guys muck around for an hour and a half, learning nothing they don’t absoutely have to. 95 min.
Rating: NNNN (NW)
Opens Aug 8 at Canada Square. See here for times.
Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt) is a low-key, high-stakes thriller about three activists (Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard) who come together to blow up a dam in the Pacific Northwest, and what happens in the aftermath of that operation. After the finely tuned panic of Wendy And Lucy, there’s no question that Reichardt can handle tension, but in Night Moves she layers that tension with social insight, dense character detail and an artful downplaying of the requisite genre elements while still honouring their intentions within the action. It’s like like micro-Michael Mann, and her ensemble (which also includes Alia Shawkat in a small but key role) is uniformly terrific. 113 min.
Rating: NNNN (NW)
Opens Aug 8 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
The Hundred-Foot Journey (Lasse Hallström) gives big fun to foodies. When sectarian violence in Mumbai leads to the destruction of patriarch Om Puri’s restaurant – and the death of his wife – he decides to buy a restaurant in a tiny, perfect Gallic town. Problem is, Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren, with a so-so French accent) runs a Michelin-approved French restaurant across the road and she’s not impressed with the boisterous Bollywood-style competition. Worse, chef Hassan (Manish Dayal) is a singular talent, and one of her employees, Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon), is secretly giving Hassan French cooking tips, making him even more of a threat. In Lasse Hallström’s adaptation of Richard C. Morais’s bestseller, screenwriter Steven Knight drops Hassan’s coming-of-age plot line in London in favour of budding romantic entanglements in France, making the film a lot slighter than the book. There are no surprises but lots of pleasures: Puri and Mirren are obviously having a gas, and it’s literally a feast for the eyes. Prepare to want to eat afterwards. 115 min.
Rating: NNN (SGC)
Opens Aug 8 at Beach Cinemas, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, Rainbow Promenade, SilverCity Yonge, Varsity, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
Into the Storm (Steven Quale) is a found-footage riff on Twister, presented as a documentary about that time a team of weather researchers and a few civilians were thrown together – and wrenched apart, and thrown together again – by a massive superstorm. The bare-bones approach compensates for a lot of the disaster genre’s usual shortcomings, like minimal plotting and superficial characterization putting cameras in the hands of the characters means we can’t help but spend a little more time with them than the formula usually allows. Sarah Wayne Callies and The Hobbit’s Richard Armitage make the right faces of grim determination, Matt Walsh puts a little humanity into the antagonistic role of a pissy authority figure, and Enlisted’s Kyle Davis provides reliable comic relief as an amateur storm chaser who’s modelled his entire scientific approach on a couple of episodes of Jackass. And the CG is very convincing. 89 min.
Rating: NNN (NW)
Opens Aug 13 at 401 & Morningside, Carlton Cinema, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Docks Lakeview Drive-In, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Humber Cinemas, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
About Alex (Jesse Zwick) is a knockoff of The Big Chill that lets its Alex (Jason Ritter) survive his suicide attempt. Conceptually that’s intriguing for maybe three minutes, but writer/director Zwick – son of Ed, whose production company made this – is just doodling in the margins of better material. His characters also throw Jeff Goldblum’s name around and talk about “those 80s movies where everyone gets together,” just so you know he’s seen Kasdan’s movie. But Zwick hasn’t learned a thing from it. About Alex is packed full of young actors I really like – Ritter, Aubrey Plaza, Nate Parker, Max Greenfield, Jane Levy, Maggie Grace and Max Minghella – but it doesn’t give them anything to do beyond snark at one another, eat pasta and look awkward whenever Ritter walks into the room. Ritter and Levy manage to wrench some emotion out of the material, but the effort is obvious. 98 min.
Rating: NN (NW)
Opens Aug 8 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Jonathan Liebesman) is an overblown superhero adventure that tries to get by on bombast and occasionally succeeds. But too often it feels like an orgy of in-your-face 3D and a loud, oppressive score supporting bargain-basement plot and characters and big action set pieces that too often descend into visual incoherence. There’s less comedy than in the 1990 version – it got only a few weak chuckles in the kid-heavy preview audience – and nothing much is gained by casting Megan Fox as a plucky reporter and Will Arnett as her love-struck camera operator. Four turtles and a rat mutate and develop martial arts skills to battle the evil Foot Clan and its plan to dominate New York. 101 min. NN (AD)
Opens Aug 8 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Carlton Cinema, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Docks Lakeview Drive-In, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Humber Cinemas, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
The Anonymous People (Greg Williams) is a documentary about changing public perceptions of people in recovery from addiction. 88 min.
Opens Aug 8 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
Henry IV Part 2 – Royal Shakespeare Company Live is a high def broadcast of the Bard’s history play, from Stratford-upon-Avon. 210 min.
Opens Aug 9 at Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
Let’s Be Cops (Luke Greenfield) stars Jake Johnson and Damon Wayans Jr. as friends who dress up as cops for a costume party but then get caught up in a real case involving gangsters and corrupt detectives. 100 min.
Opens Aug 13 at Carlton Cinema, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
Step Up: All In 3D (Trish Sie) is another sequel in the series of dance battle movies. No press screening – see review Aug 11 at nowtoronto.com/movies. 112 min.
Opens Aug 8 at Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
