Maleficent (Robert Stromberg) stars Angelina Jolie as a happy sprite with extraordinary powers who defends her gorgeous land from venal humans. When she’s betrayed by the neighbouring prince (Sharlto Copley) – who later takes the throne – Maleficent lays a curse on the king’s daughter (Elle Fanning): she’ll fall into a deep sleep after pricking her finger, and can be woken only by a true love’s kiss. The story, originally about evil visiting an innocent kingdom, turns into a meditation on revenge and regret. Iconic star Jolie’s pointy-eared Maleficent, all sneers and hisses as she hatches her plan, is not a character children will be drawn to. Never mind. This movie is spectacular to look at – 3D’s not wasted here, and you can tell that first-time director Stromberg has 94 visual effects credits, including Life Of Pi. It also puts a glorious twist on the kiss that’s supposed to wake Princess Aurora. Breakneck pacing, too. Big fun, but definitely for grown-ups. 97 min.
Rating: NNNN (SGC)
Opens May 30 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 Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Varsity, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh) tells the story of director Panh’s family’s ordeal under the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. With no archival footage available, Panh – who was 13 when the Khmer Rouge seized power in the spring of 1975 – films clay figurines in dioramas to give form to his own lost history. It’s a technique that reframes an unimaginable event as something intimate and delicate. Panh uses cinema as a catalyst for memory, recreating stylized images in an attempt to convey a profound truth. The Missing Picture is a genuinely striking work of personal journalism, its artistry making it possible to consider the convulsions of Cambodia – and Panh’s own life – without folding up into fetal balls in our seats. It’s awfully powerful stuff. Subtitled. 90 min.
Rating: NNNN (NW)
Opens May 30 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
Tom at the Farm (Xavier Dolan) feels like a horror movie zapped into our universe from some other, more compassionate dimension. Tom (Dolan) heads into the beige-bleached Quebec countryside to attend the funeral of his lover, Guy, meeting up with his bereaved family. While Guy’s widowed mother (Lise Roy) seems oblivious to her son’s sexuality, her other son, Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), is acutely aware, coercing Tom to maintain the fiction that Guy was arrow-straight. Mingling melodrama, rural horror and absurdist plotting (Tom’s inability to escape evokes Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel as much as John Carpenter’s In The Mouth Of Madness), Dolan takes turns satisfying and stymying the conventions of the genre. The film also offers an unforgettable monster in the prowling, deeply repressed, borderline incestuous Francis: a Frankenstein of sloppily stitched-together sexual energies. Subtitled. 103 min.
Rating: NNNN (John Semley)
Opens May 30 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
We Are the Best! (Lukas Moodysson) is an adaptation of a graphic novel by the director’s wife, Coco Moodysson. Swedish preteens Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin) are ready to launch their punk music careers. All they need to do is learn how to play their instruments and convert schoolmate Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne), a nerdy classical guitar player, from Christian to punk. Of course, no one at school appreciates their efforts, and neither does Hedvig’s mom, especially after the girls give their long-tressed friend a very short haircut. The films is as much about preteen mentality – that paradoxical tendency to be hilariously overconfident and hopelessly insecure at the same time – as it is about creative aspirations. Director Moodysson has an unerring eye and ear for the early 80s – the adults, including some hippie parents, are as well rendered as the kids. It helps that he’s working with three charismatic young actors. Sly, fun and irresistible. Subtitled. 102 min.
Rating: NNNN (SGC)
Opens May 30 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
Filth (Jon S. Baird) stars James McAvoy, who shines (or perhaps rots) as an exceptionally bad lieutenant who can’t be bothered to solve a murder because he’s having too much fun. With glazed, wild eyes and a sinister grin, McAvoy holds little back, daring us not to look away from his coked-out, depraved and deranged Scottish detective. He’s the magnetic centre in this latest adaptation of an Irvine Welsh novel, which arrives almost two decades after Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting. If this film feels dated, it’s because director Baird stays reverent to Boyle’s style, with all the visual flourishes and accelerated editing that seem mandatory when translating Welsh’s prose. The sick hijinks – including racism, homophobia and statutory rape – are periodically hysterical, if not morally nauseating, but also numbing, like the movie is beating on a dick that’s already cum five times. 98 min.
Rating: NNN (RS)
Opens May 30 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.
The Grand Seduction (Don McKellar) is an English-language remake of Jean-François Pouliot’s 2003 comedy Seducing Dr. Lewis, with the action transposed from rural Quebec to a depressed Newfoundland harbour community. The plot is otherwise the same, with the locals (including Brendon Gleeson and Gordon Pinsent) scheming to trick a big-city doctor (Taylor Kitsch) into moving there in order to secure a factory that’ll stave off town’s financial ruin. Directing a script by Michael Dowse and Seducing screenwriter Ken Scott, McKellar crafts a gentle, pleasant farce that takes its time setting up stakes and defining the characters, giving the cast (which also includes actual Maritimers Liane Balaban, Mary Walsh and Cathy Jones) room to play. It’s a movie less interested in belly laughs than in generating a constant hum of contentment, and it works perfectly well for the material. 115 min.
Rating: NNN (NW)
Opens May 30 at Beach Cinemas, Canada Square, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, Varsity, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
Hotel Congress (Nadia Litz, Michael Kandinsky) takes place entirely within the confines of a Tuscon hotel, where a woman (co-director Litz, who also wrote the screenplay) and a man (Philip Riccio) spend their time talking around a profound truth. Produced as part of Ingrid Veninger’s $1K challenge, the film is lean to the point of emaciation, but Litz and co-director Kandinsky turn their limitations into assets, expanding the movie’s world through sound design and austere, precise compositions. Litz’s dialogue uses evasion and allusion to explore who these two people are – and, more importantly, who they might be to each other – while creating a deep sense of melancholy through their isolation. Though not for everybody, it’s a work of considerable intelligence and great promise. 72 min.
Rating: NNN (NW)
Opens May 30 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
Web Junkie (Hilla Medalia, Shosh Shlam) follows patients in the Daxing boot camp for internet addicts, who can often be good for a laugh. The treatment facility near Beijing looks like a military-run juvenile detention centre. The locked-up teens often break down in tears because they can’t get their hands on a keyboard to play World Of Warcraft. The documentary takes their gaming addiction very seriously, and you stifle your laughter when you see how very sad the situation has become. The film is astute enough to consider social conditions: the boys grew up as only children whose relationship with stern parents makes the web a drug to remedy loneliness. It falters when an underdeveloped rehab success story is ushered in at the end as a quick fix to numb the pain. Subtitled. 76 min.
Rating: NNN (RS)
Opens May 30 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
Cyber-Seniors (Saffron Cassaday) chronicles the efforts of some patient youngsters to teach internet skills to their elders, but there’s little to justify this as a feature-length release instead of a PSA. It never expands beyond comfortable boundaries of class or race for a film made in Toronto, the absence of colour is startling. Touching as it is to see seniors connect with loved ones via Skype or social media, the impact of the digital-age generation gap is surely greater on seniors living with limited resources or other challenges. The internet project is laudable, and the elderly subjects are genuinely inspiring, but individual profiles are cursory. Director Cassaday largely settles for cute-oldster YouTube material and easy sentiment. 74 min.
Rating: NN (José Teodoro)
Opens May 30 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.
Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy is a high-def broadcast of the successful recent touring production of Uhry’s play about an elderly Southern Jewish woman and her African-American chauffeur, starring Angela Lansbury and James Earl Jones. 90 min.
Opens Jun 4 at Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Scarborough, Courtney Park 16, Queensway, SilverCity Yonge, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
Cabin Fever 3: Patient Zero (Kaare Andrews) is a horror franchise prequel about a flesh-eating virus that spreads throughout a cruise ship in the Caribbean after it crashes into an abandoned scientific research boat. 91 min.
Opens May 29 at Coliseum Mississauga, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, SilverCity Fairview, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
Led Zeppelin “Celebration” Day Encore (Nick Carruthers) is a rebroadcast of the 2007 concert by the legendary band (their first headlining gig in 27 years) from London’s O2 arena to honour their friend and Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun. 125 min.
Opens Jun 2 at Colossus, Queensway, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
A Million Ways to Die in the West (Seth MacFarlane) is a comic western starring director MacFarlane, Charlize Theron and Liam Neeson. Screened after press time – see review May 30 at nowtoronto.com/movies. 116 min.
Opens May 30 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, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
WWE Payback is a live match featuring Daniel Bryan, John Cena, Randy Orton, The Shield and others. (This match was formally called Over The Limit.) 180 min.
Opens Jun 1 at Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
