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Movies & TV

Film Friday: John Carter, Silent House, Friends With Kids and more

Friends With Kids (Jennifer Westfeldt) is an entirely okay comedy about two long-time pals (writer/director Westfeldt and Parks And Recreation’s invaluable Adam Scott) who impulsively decide to have a baby together without any romantic entanglement, only to find their friendship getting complicated anyway. It’s the same mechanism that drove No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits, only without condoms. Westfeldt’s script is stronger in the first half than the second. She’s far better at establishing characters and situations than she is wrapping them up, and she still has that weird obsession with writing scenes where people tell her she’s beautiful. But the actors are appealing and talented enough to make it work. Scott, particularly, is terrific, his ironic detachment slowly sliding away into self-knowledge as his character slowly comes into focus. And Jon Hamm makes a sardonic supporting role into a complex human being, just like he did in Bridesmaids. 107 min.

Rating: NNN (NW)

Opens Mar 9 at Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Yonge, Interchange 30, Kennedy Commons 20, Queensway, SilverCity Mississauga, Varsity, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


John Carter (Andrew Stanton) tries a little too hard to turn Edgar Rice Burroughs’s simple adventure story about a Civil War veteran (Taylor Kitsch) transported to Mars into the next massive SF epic. When it’s just the simple story of a broken man reinventing himself as a hero – and falling in love with a Martian princess (Lynn Collins) – it’s entertaining, but whenever it lurches into grandiose space-opera mode it feels rushed and overstuffed, with characters barking exposition at one another while moving to the next crisis. The pacing’s problematic, and WALL*E director Stanton’s transition from animation to live-action isn’t quite as elegant as Brad Bird’s was with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. He wants to give his supporting characters moments to pop, but those moments just wind up contributing to the chaos of the second half. But then he pulls off a genuine moment between Kitsch and Collins, or a snarky look from Willem Dafoe’s motion-captured Tars Tarkus, and you end up rooting for the movie all over again. Some subtitles. 132 min.

Rating: NNN (NW)

Opens Mar 9 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Empire Theatres at Empress Walk, Grande – Steeles, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Lasse Hallström) is a light comedy about a stuffy salmon expert (Ewan McGregor) and a troubled administrator (Emily Blunt) drawn to one another while working to stock the river of a wealthy Yemeni sheik (Amr Waked) with Atlantic salmon. No, seriously. Appealing performances by McGregor and Blunt – the former channelling Guinness and Sellers circa 1956, the latter just being her lovely, flinty self – can’t quite overcome the artificiality of Simon Beaufoy’s script, which solves each new plot complication mere moments after said complication is introduced sure, there’s broad-strokes storytelling, but this is just silly. In the end, whimsy and geopolitical metaphor collide and wobble away dazed. 112 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Mar 9 at Varsity. See here for times.


Silent House (Chris Kentis, Laura Lau) stars Martha Marcy May Marlene’s amazing Elizabeth Olsen as a young woman terrorized by someone or something in a boarded-up old house. She spends most of the movie nearly incoherent with panic, and she does it in what appears to be a single sustained take. Remaking Gustavo Hernandez’s intriguing but deeply flawed 2010 Uruguayan thriller La Casa Muda, Kentis and Lau (Open Water) have addressed several of that film’s problems, bolstering its internal logic and opening up the material while preserving its suffocating, claustrophobic structure. But by staying true to that structure, they doom themselves to repeating the mistakes that bring down the original movie – specifically, the series of reveals in the last third that deflate the tension and eventually garble the plot beyond coherence. 86 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Mar 9 at 401 & Morningside, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Yonge, Kennedy Commons 20, Queensway, Rainbow Woodbine, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Yonge. See here for times.


I Am Bruce Lee (Pete McCormack) is a documentary about iconic action star Lee, featuring rare archival footage and interviews with people like Kobe Bryant, Mickey Rourke and others. 90 min.

Opens Mar 8 at Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview. See here for times.


Le Corsaire: Bolshoi Ballet Live is a live broadcast of the romantic ballet by the legendary Russian company. 315 min.

Opens Mar 11 at Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Grande – Yonge, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Yonge. See here for times.


A Thousand Words (Brian Robbins) stars Eddie Murphy as a fast-talker who’s limited to speaking only a thousand words. Screened after press time – see review March 9 at nowtoronto.com/movies. 91 min.

Opens Mar 9 at 401 & Morningside, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Empire Theatres at Empress Walk, Queensway, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a broadcast of Stratford’s splashy 2011 production of the classic comedy directed by Des McAnuff and starring Brian Dennehy, Andrea Runge and Stephen Ouimette. 171 min.

Opens Mar 10 at Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Grande – Yonge, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, Varsity. See here for times.

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