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Movies & TV

Film Friday: Hell Baby, Drinking Buddies, Adore and more

Hell Baby (Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon) is a goofy romp about an expectant couple who move into a crappy old New Orleans house and almost immediately find themselves in a paranormal vortex that seems focused on their unborn child. Rob Corddry and Leslie Bibb are the would-be parents who buy a crumbling manse as a fixer-upper only to discover its history is a little more clouded than they’d been told. (The locals call it the Maison Du Sang.) And no sooner have they moved in than Bibb starts acting all Rosemary Woodhouse, much to the consternation of her loving husband. It’s as much of a joke machine as A Haunted House or Scary Movie V, but here the jokes are actually funny. 98 min.

Rating: NNNN (NW)

Opens Sep 6 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.


Drinking Buddies (Joe Swanberg) stars Olivia Wilde and Jake Johnson as co-workers at a Chicago brewery who are uncommonly close, to the point where it may concern their significant others (Ron Livingston, Anna Kendrick). The bid for mainstream attention means mumblecore director Swanberg has to tone down his usual fondness for graphic sexuality and blunt language Drinking Buddies feels like a much safer work than his Nights And Weekends and Autoerotic. But it’s not an uninteresting one, and Wilde is particularly strong as a woman too busy ordering the next round to figure out why she keeps making the wrong choices. 90 min.

Rating: NNN (NW)

Opens Sep 6 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.


Riddick (David Twohy) is the kind of low-stakes, hyper-violent trifle that a Hollywood built on PG-13 compromise can’t really stomach. Vin Diesel’s convict-cum-galactic-overlord is double-crossed and marooned on an abandoned planet populated by deadly reptilian predators. In order to escape, he triggers a beacon alerting two duelling gangs of mercenary bounty hunters. The plan is to pick off enough of them so he can hijack one of their ships and blast back to his home planet. For all its hard-nosed silliness, and even its flip misogyny (Katee Sackhoff appears as a self-possessed mercenary only so she can later be bedded by Diesel’s burly superman), Riddick is solid B-movie filmmaking. If you’re susceptible to this kind of thing, there’s plenty of fun to be had. 119 min.

Rating: NNN (JS)

Opens Sep 6 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, 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 Mississauga, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


Adore (Anne Fontaine) stars Robin Wright and Naomi Watts as Roz and Lil, best friends who get sexually involved with each other’s adult sons. Sound creepy? It is. Set in a sleepy seaside town in Australia, it’s also very beautiful. I finally gave up on figuring out who to root for and just kept wishing I could have one of their beachside homes. The dialogue is surprisingly pedestrian, given that it’s by Christopher Hampton. But though it’s based on a short story by Doris Lessing, the narrative fails even more miserably. It depends on the characters inhabiting a hermetically sealed environment. They carry on their unconventional affairs for a full three years. Lil’s husband has died, and Roz’s is teaching in Sydney, but doesn’t anybody else notice? Where is their community? Don’t the boys have any friends? I’m with Roz’s husband (Ben Mendelsohn), who wonders why Roz and Lil aren’t sleeping with each other. 111 min.

Rating: NN (SGC)

Opens Sep 6 at Varsity. See here for times.


Flu (Kim Sung-su) is a Korean disaster movie that starts out strong but falters about halfway through, once director Kim loses interest in the progress of an avian superflu raging through the Seoul suburb of Bundang and narrows the focus to a handful of one-dimensional characters running around inside a quarantine zone while politicians yell at each other about responsibility in one of those big shiny war rooms. There are a couple of chilling images, but this is a movie that’s much more interested in manufacturing cheesy emotional beats and increasingly unlikely connections between its heroes in order to pander to the lowest common denominator. It starts out as Contagion but winds up as Outbreak. Subtitled. 122 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Sep 6 at Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


Last Night Of The Proms Live – BBC Proms 2013 is a live broadcast from London’s Royal Albert Hall of the musical celebration, featuring Nigel Kennedy, Joyce DiDonato and conductor Marin Alsop. 190 min.

Opens Sep 7 at Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Queensway, SilverCity Yonge, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


National Theatre Live: The Audience Encore is a high-def broadcast of Peter Morgan’s play chronicling Queen Elizabeth II’s (Helen Mirren) private meetings with Britain’s prime ministers over six decades. 180 min.

Opens Sep 9 at Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Scarborough, Queensway, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.

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