Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund) is a bone-dry dissection of bourgeois happiness: you may have a great job and a loving family, but it can all be lost in a moment’s foolishness. When a picture-perfect Swedish family – Johannes Kuhnke and Ebba as the parents and real-life siblings Clara and Vincent Wettergren as the children – takes a skiing vacation in the French Alps, the dad panics in a moment of potential crisis, destroying his standing as benevolent patriarch and sending him into a spiral of self-justification. The deeper he digs, the funnier Force Majeure gets, and the more perceptive and uncomfortable it becomes. It goes on a little longer than it needs to, but that’s really my only complaint. Some subtitles. 118 min.
Rating: NNNN (NW)
Opens Oct 31 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy) is a twitchy Los Angeles thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a creepy loner who worms his way into a career as a freelance videographer, chasing car crashes and murders and selling his footage to a TV news director (Rene Russo) who’s just as ethically flexible as he is. Writer-director Gilroy’s script is less interested in social commentary than in crafting a slippery character study, and Gyllenhaal is perfectly suited to that – face gaunt, eyes blazing with demented self-confidence and showing no humanity whatsoever, he’s like a man grown out of synthetic meat in a lab. His performance will keep you watching even as Nightcrawler backs itself into a narrative corner. 117 min.
Rating: NNNN (NW)
Opens Oct 31 at Beach Cinemas, Carlton Cinema, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Cineplex VIP Cinemas Don Mills, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Woodbine, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
ABCs of Death 2 (various directors) follows the same formula as its predecessors, assembling 26 horror shorts – each taking its subject from a letter of the alphabet – from 26 different filmmaking teams. And as with the original, the result is a very mixed bag, since some directors are far more capable of telling a story (or delivering a scare) than others. Standouts include Rodney (Room 237) Ascher’s questionnaire creeper, Julian (The Mighty Boosh) Barratt’s found-footage goof, Vanishing Waves collaborators Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper’s unsettling alien-invasion tale and Inside and Livid directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s intensely creepy babysitting sketch. But the ones that don’t work really don’t work, and you’ll be very aware of the running time after three duds in a row. Some subtitles. 122 min.
Rating: NNN (NW)
Opens Oct 31 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.
Horns (Alexandre Aja) stars Daniel Radcliffe as a small-town DJ cracking under the strain of being a suspect in the murder of his girlfriend (Juno Temple). After drunkenly desecrating her memorial site, he wakes up the next morning with horns sprouting from his head and a curious ability to make people reveal their most awful secrets. Radcliffe’s a good choice for the lead – you never suspect for a moment that he could actually kill anyone – and director Aja (High Tension, the recent Hills Have Eyes remake) clearly loves the grungy, magic-realist heart of Joe Hill’s novel. But the pacing’s lumpy, with much of the midsection spent watching the tormented hero interrogating one person after another about the night of the murder, and the tone doesn’t quite slide from absurd dark comedy to proper suspense. When it works, it works really well, but after a while Horns just wears you down. 120 min.
Rating: NNN (NW)
Opens Oct 31 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.
Young Ones (Jake Paltrow) positions itself as a nifty fusion of western tropes and dystopian sci-fi, with Michael Shannon, Nicholas Hoult, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Elle Fanning playing homesteaders surviving in a drought-devastated California not too far in the future. (The conflict is over water rather than cattle or oil, but the emotions are basically the same.) As he did with his first feature, The Good Night, writer-director Paltrow has paired a top-notch cast with a novel idea, but he struggles with individual scenes and can’t quite figure out how to land the ending. (His vision of the future is also frustratingly limited.) The sun-blasted South African locations provide impressively alien terrain, and the actors keep you engaged – Shannon is so good that I wanted the whole movie to be about his character – but something’s always just a little off. And the longer Young Ones goes on, the clearer that becomes. 100 min.
Rating: NNN (NW)
Opens Oct 31 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.
Before I Go to Sleep (Rowan Joffe) stars a quivering Nicole Kidman as an amnesiac who wakes up every morning next to a husband (Colin Firth) she can’t remember because of an accident (or attempted murrrderrr?) that’s also robbed her of the ability to sustain new memories beyond a day. Perhaps the filmmakers were hoping we forgot Christopher Nolan’s Memento, from which they borrow freely to diminished effect. Christine must solve a whodunit while in an exceptionally vulnerable spot where she can’t trust the people who claim to be her husband, doctor and best friend. Director Joffe’s tight framing never allows us to know more than Christine, but despite the effective tension and confusion, with every reveal and explanation the film becomes more hammy and ridiculous. A lean B-movie thriller is buried somewhere within this preposterous story, one that could have left us rattled in the darkwithout all the faux explanations.. 92 min.
Rating: NN (RS)
Opens Oct 31 at Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg) takes Bruce Wagner’s satirical Hollywood novel and turns it into… well, whatever it is now, it’s not satire. It’s a flat, psychologically trite tale of absent parents and ruined children, with Julianne Moore as a neurotic actor trying to land a part originally played by her famous, and famously dead, mother (Sarah Gadon, glimpsed in clips and hallucinations). Mia Wasikowska plays a troubled young woman who arrives in Los Angeles on a collision course with an even more troubled child star (Evan Bird) whose parents (John Cusack, Olivia Williams) have at least one terrible secret of their own. Also, Robert Pattinson drives a limo. There are some interesting ideas knocking around, and the theme of parents’ mistakes literally haunting their children is a perfect metaphor for Cronenberg. But there’s no centre to the script, which simply wanders back and forth between the characters with no real point or logic. Nothing has any impact, and the biggest revelations are sort of left hanging. 112 min.
Rating: NN (NW)
Opens Oct 31 at Colossus, Queensway, SilverCity Yonge, TIFF Bell Lightbox, Varsity. See here for times.
