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Movies & TV

Film Friday: Frances Ha, Hannah Arendt, Monsters University and more

BB King: The Life of Riley (Jon Brewer) really does tell King’s entire life story, starting with his birth and tracing his long journey to beloved blues icon honoured by musicians and statesmen. At two hours, it risks playing more like a cultural history than a biography. But if you’re a fan, all the backstory – much of it provided by BB himself in decades of interviews – just makes things more interesting. The only downside is that there’s not nearly enough music in it Brewer’s exhaustive profile of the legendary guitarist (born Riley B. King, which explains the movie’s title) takes the Ken Burns approach, painstakingly establishing its subject’s background and the social context in which he became famous, then proceeding to justify and investigate that fame with testimonials from such admirers as Rufus Thomas, Leon Russell, John Mayall and Morgan Freeman, who also narrates. 123 min.

Rating: NNNN (NW)

Opens Jun 21 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.


Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach) is Baumbach’s warmest film to date, a lovely, bittersweet ode to maintaining the romance of friendship while tentatively moving toward adulthood. Co-writer Greta Gerwig plays an aspiring dancer/part-time dance teacher whose Brooklyn roommate/bestie, Sophie (Mickey Sumner, Sting’s daughter), moves to another apartment, leaving Frances with one more thing to figure out in an already cluttered life. But with her infectious grin and grab bag of ironic outbursts, she carries on, moving from place to place until, broke, she literally finds herself where she was years before. With its partial New York City setting and gentle black-and-white palette, it might recall Woody Allen’s Manhattan, but the title character resembles a semi-hipsterish, over-educated Annie Hall – it’s even echoed in the syllables of their names. And it gives mumblecore queen Gerwig a star-making role that she takes, runs (and dances) with and makes completely her own. 86 min.

Rating: NNNN (GS)

Opens Jun 21 at Varsity, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta) is one of those rare films that deals convincingly with ideas. Political theorist Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) was sent by the New Yorker to cover the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, considered an architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution. Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the fact that Eichmann didn’t know how to think and therefore couldn’t make moral choices. She also wrote about the Jewish Councils, suggesting that Jewish leaders, by collaborating with the Germans, made the catastrophe worse. The articles caused a firestorm, which is fascinating to see play out. But the film’s essential interest arises from the contention – which von Trotta disputes – that Arendt was able to write dispassionately only because she’d repressed the pain of her own experience as a Jew during the Holocaust. Credit Sukowa with a superb performance as a woman who lost friends as she influenced people, and Janet McTeer is a delight as her loyal friend, writer Mary McCarthy. Some subtitles. 110 min.

Rating: NNNN (SGC)

Opens Jun 21 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.


Monsters University (Dan Scanlon) throws a conceptual curve ball, dropping John Goodman’s hulking furball Sulley and Billy Crystal’s one-eyed imp Mike Wazowski – introduced as working stiffs in 2001’s Monsters, Inc. – into a snobs-vs-slobs college comedy. Back in the day, it turns out, Sulley and Mike were Scaring School classmates who did not get along. Sulley was a slacker, coasting on natural talent and his family name, while Mike was a bookish overachiever. But when their rivalry gets them kicked out of the program, they must join misfit fraternity Oozma Kappa and defeat the slicker, more successful Greek clubs in the campus-wide Scare Games to convince the crusty Dean Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren!) to give them another chance. Goodman effortlessly convinces as a younger, more impulsive version of Sulley, and Crystal – who’s been insufferable in live-action roles for years – is great as a Mike who hasn’t yet learned to enjoy his job. A climactic venture into the human world demonstrates exactly how far Pixar’s digital artistry has come since the first film. 95 min.

Rating: NNNN (NW)

Opens Jun 21 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, 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 Mississauga, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


Margarita (Dominique Cardona, Laurie Colbert) is a major stride forward for the directors of the not very credible Finn’s Girl. Nanny Margarita (Nicola Correia Damude) gets fired by her financially challenged employers, Ben and Gail (Patrick McKenna and Claire Lautier), to the outrage of their teenaged daughter Mali (Maya Ritter). Turns out Margarita’s indispensable – she fixes things and tutors Mali in math, sending her grades soaring – and soon Ben and Gail discover she’s in the country illegally and regret their decision. There’s some silliness here (okay, they need a housekeeper, but Ben and Gail should know how to use at least one appliance), and a subplot with renovator Carlos (Marco Grazzini), who wants to turn Margarita straight, is unnecessary. But the performances, especially by Damude and Christine Horne as her girlfriend are very good, and there’s lots of gratuitous lesbian sex in the hot tub. I say that in a good way. 90 min.

Rating: NNN (SGC)

Opens Jun 21 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.


Me, the Bees, and Cancer (John Board, Hector Centeno, Jim Donovan) makes the most of its humble $1,000 budget. Board documents his battle with lymphoma and his unorthodox therapy. Rejecting what he sees as traditional medicine’s uninformed and experimental treatments, he decides to go the homeopathic route, maintaining a bee colony in his backyard (I can’t imagine what the neighbours say) and being stung 30 times every other day, a sight that will make you cringe while you admire his courage. Charming and eloquent, Board finds interesting ways to communicate the confusion cancer causes and the inadequacy of established medicine. He also owns up to his own contradictions, like advocating for a healthy lifestyle while refusing to quit smoking. If Board kicked that habit, he could probably afford to make a couple more docs. 78 min.

Rating: NNN (RS)

Opens Jun 21 at Royal. See here for times.


Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington (Sebastian Junger) memorializes Junger’s Restrepo co-director, killed by shrapnel in Libya in April 2011, with a journey through the combat photographer’s life and career, much of it shot by Hetherington himself. It’s a pretty conventional biography: Hetherington narrates his own life through archival interviews, backed up by testimonials from his family and colleagues. Junger inserts himself as an interview subject when the doc covers the filming of Restrepo in Afghanistan and subconsciously tries to turn Hetherington’s death into a life lesson for himself. But the filmmaker’s heart is in the right place – a tribute to his fallen friend that showcases Hetherington’s deeply felt empathy for his subjects and his incredible eye for human drama. Some subtitles. 78 min.

Rating: NNN (NW)

Opens Jun 21 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.


The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola) is the calmest crime story you’ll see this year. Based on the true story of some bored teenagers who broke into the Hollywood Hills homes of celebrities, stealing clothes and jewellery and then posting pics with said booty on Facebook, it’s an observational study of the empty lives of people who seem to have everything. Which makes it exactly like all of Coppola’s previous features, The Virgin Suicides, Lost In Translation, Marie Antoinette and Somewhere, except those films drew you closer to their characters through their empathetic tone and attention to detail. The Bling Ring never quite gets around to doing that. Aside from two interesting moments – a heist played out in one long, slow zoom and a bit of tension around a gun that may or may not be loaded – there’s just nothing to it at all. 90 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Jun 21 at Canada Square, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Mississauga, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, SilverCity Mississauga, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


Ill Manors (Ben Drew) treads the same ground as dozens of other UK productions that popped up in the wake of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting and Guy Ritchie’s swaggering lad movies, telling intersecting stories of various drug thugs, hookers and aspirationally minded teenagers chasing and killing each other around East London. What distinguishes this one is that it’s made by a musician – Drew, who raps as Plan B. He brings some new ideas to the same old stories, introducing each new character with an elaborate hip-hop flashback and a rap about the choices and mistakes that brought each one to this point. But those sequences only happen four or five times, and there’s a lot of generic nonsense in between as central character (Riz Ahmed) spends a frantic night looking for a friend’s missing phone and the next day trying to find a baby’s mother (Natalie Press). At two full hours, it’s exhausting and overloaded Drew’s delivered a double album when he should have started with an EP. 116 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Jun 21 at Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


World War Z 3D (Marc Forster) just had to do one thing, really: turn Max Brooks’s chilling, weirdly credible novel about a global zombie plague into a movie that was half as cinematic as the book. Instead, producer-star Brad Pitt, director Forster and a host of screenwriters have dumped everything from the book but the title and the concept, boiling it down to a two-hour action movie in which Pitt’s heroic UN fixer – who does not appear in the novel – runs away from zombies over and over again. Forster (Monster’s Ball, Quantum of Solace) still can’t handle complex action sequences, and the lowered light levels in the 3D conversion just make everything murky. The final movement is more focused and intense than the rest of the picture, and features Peter Capaldi as a W.H.O. researcher, but it arrives too late to turn things around. Some subtitles. 116 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Jun 20 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, 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, Varsity. See here for times.


The Sheepdogs Have At It (John Barnard) feels like another part of the grinding self-promotional apparatus that is the Sheepdogs. An 85-minute commercial for the band, it captures their reverse engineering as they struggle to complete a record after already becoming a household name. The film desperately tries to authenticate the band, which suggests that at some level they know they should be less worried about living up to the expectations set by being on the cover of Rolling Stone than with living them down. 85 min.

Rating: N (John Semley)

Opens Jun 21 at Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.

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