American Mary (Jen Soska, Sylvia Soska) is the story of a good doctor who goes bad. Promising young surgical student Mary Mason (Katharine Isabelle) discovers she can make the money she desperately needs by performing illicit body modifications – think split tongue. The work sickens her at first, but after she uses her skills to exact a gruesome revenge, she develops a taste for her practice and a fetishy wardrobe. Isabelle’s Mary is initially very likeable, then terrifying as she grows increasingly icy, then savage. Dark humour and ample gore provide the thrills, but it’s the vivid verbal descriptions that chill to the bone. 103 min.
Rating: NNNN (AD)
Opens May 31 at Coliseum Mississauga, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, SilverCity Fairview, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
Charles Bradley: Soul of America (Poull Brien) places the soul singer in the pantheon of great American second acts. Bradley spent decades working as a James Brown impersonator, finally recording his own material at the age of 62 for Daptone Records at the urging of label mate Sharon Jones. His subsequent rise within the world of American soul – opening for Jones on tour and slowly coming into his own as a performer after decades spent being someone else onstage – makes for an incredible story, especially once Brien fills us in on the man’s grim personal history. 75 min.
Rating: NNNN (NW)
Opens May 31 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
The Ghosts In Our Machine follows photographer Jo-Anne McArthur, whose mission is to document the invisible war on animals, bearing powerful witness to the appalling conditions to which humans consign our fellow creatures. Marshall tags along as McArthur covertly snaps photos at a fur farm and a theme park where entertainers literally surf on dolphins, just two of the film’s disturbing settings. These scenes are contrasted with beautifully shot sequences at animal sanctuaries where rescued animals – and McArthur herself – recover from their traumatic experiences. Ghosts In The Machine isn’t as gruesome as it could have been. Obviously determined not to go the exploitation route, the director makes her point with shots of a five-tiered truck carrying hundreds of pigs to the abattoir, a glimpse of McArthur’s photo of skinned rabbits and a distressing – but mercifully short – sequence of cows going to slaughter. A superb example of committed filmmaking. 93 min.
Rating: NNNN (SGC)
Opens May 31 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.
Lore (Cate Shortland) is a stirring, evocative drama set just after the collapse of the Nazi regime. Eldest sister Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) has to guide her siblings through Germany to survive. The problem is that they’re the children of an arrested SS officer who innocently subscribe to the Fuhrer’s ideology. Cate Shortland’s daring sophomore feature (after 2004’s Somersault) is also a sensual coming-of-age tale. Lore’s sexual awakening comes to the fore in spite of her grim circumstances – or maybe because of them. With an eye for images that are both lush and foreboding, Shortland dives confidently into a moral minefield and has no instinct to defuse the situation. She finds a game collaborator in Rosendahl, whose brave performance as a young Nazi without bearings is heartbreaking and haunting. 108 min.
Rating: NNNN (RS)
Opens May 31 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
Sightseers (Ben Wheatley) is a pitch-black farce about a couple of misfits (Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, who also scripted) whose caravan holiday goes very, very badly for almost everyone they meet. It’s Badlands in the Midlands, with Wheatley contrasting the everyday trials of a boring vacation – mismatched traveling companions, judgmental strangers, obnoxious bridal parties – with the more immediate and considerably more graphic retribution visited upon the offenders. Lowe and Oram, who built the screenplay from characters they created for the stage years ago, deserve a great deal of credit themselves for creating such fascinating people … and giving them so many awful things to do. 88 min.
Rating: NNNN (NW)
Opens May 31 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
Blancanieves (Pablo Berger) is yet another exquisitely shot black-and-white silent film that trades primarily in nostalgia and not much else. Pablo Berger’s retelling of Snow White recreates 1920s Spain – not the historic version, but that of a cultural memory populated by flamenco dancers and matadors. Berger composes remarkably sweeping visuals within the constraints of the 1:85 frame aspect ratio. However, the film is so impressed with its technical recreation of the past that it fails to communicate anything significant with its craft. What’s the point of revisiting another time if you have nothing to say about it? Like The Artist, Blancanieves is delightfully novel, but it also feels trapped by its gimmicky innovation. 104 min.
Rating: NNN (RS)
Opens May 31 at Varsity. See here for times.
Hava Nagila (The Movie) (Roberta Grossman) tracks the journey of the titular song from 19th-century Chassidic melody to North American bar mitzvah staple to international cliché. It’s been covered by everybody from Chubby Checker to Celia Cruz. Even Elvis had a crack at it, and it was a huge hit for mainstream artists like Harry Belafonte and Connie Francis, among director Grossman’s interview subjects. The song, especially during the 50s and 60s, became identified with Jewish culture – home movies of bar mitzvah blowouts in the American suburbs figure prominently – much to the embarrassment of Jewish klezmer artists, who have made it their mission to bury it. Grossman deftly pursues the premise that the Hebrew ode to joy (Hava Nagila translates as Come, Let Us Rejoice) has a way of starting the party no matter what your religion or ethnicity. But I’m not sure the appeal of this entertaining film goes beyond a Jewish audience. 75 min.
Rating: NNN (SGC)
Opens May 31 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
The English Teacher (Craig Zisk) is what happens when someone sees an Alexander Payne movie and thinks, “Hey, I should do something like that.” The problem is, director Zisk is no Alexander Payne. Julianne Moore plays Linda Sinclair, an upstate New York high school teacher who’s allowed herself to prematurely ossify into isolated singlehood. She’s jolted out of her rut when she meets former student Jason (Michael Angarano) and decides the school should stage his brilliant play – much to the confusion of Jason’s disapproving father (Greg Kinnear). I’ll watch Moore in just about anything, but Zisk’s floppy direction gives her nothing on which to hang a character. And the writers’ use of intermittent third-person narration (by Fiona Shaw) feels like a literary flourish neither they nor Zisk fully understand. 93 min.
Rating: NN (NW)
Opens May 31 at Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
Erased (Philipp Stölzl) is an uninspired knockoff of the Bourne and Taken movies – Europe-based thrillers with morally ambiguous American heroes running through the murky underworld of espionage because This Time It’s Personal. Aaron Eckhart gets the Damon/Neeson role, an American expatriate on contract in Antwerp, consulting on some security thingie. One morning he comes to work to find the office completely vacated, the company non-existent and his co-workers vanished. And then people start trying to kill him, sending our hero and his teenage daughter (Liana Liberato) underground in Belgium. Eckhart’s a decent choice for the role of an unassuming fellow hiding a particular set of skills, but director Stölzl doesn’t let him do much more than look concerned, focused or furious. This has a way of undercutting any chance Eckhart has at fleshing out his character. Some subtitles. 104 min.
Rating: NN (NW)
Opens May 31 at Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
The Lesser Blessed (Anita Doron) feels like the sort of movie no one much cared about as long as it ticked off a lot of boxes on some Telefilm bureaucrat’s list. A coming-of-age drama set in a remote town in the Northwest Territories, it follows a sensitive First Nations teenager (Joel Evans) with a buried secret who’s infatuated with a pretty classmate (Chloe Rose) and befriended by a volatile newcomer (Kiowa Gordon). Doron seems more interested in creating striking images than in working with her actors. Tamara Podemski and Benjamin Bratt are great as a long-term off-and-on couple, but the teen cast is utterly at sea. Evans’s performance is a feature-length pout, while Gordon turns out to be Canada’s answer to Zac Efron in range as well as looks. 86 min.
Rating: NN (NW)
Opens May 31 at Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
Old Stock (James Genn) is inspired by Garden State, meaning it ain’t aiming high. The Canadian film is stuffed with as many quirks as Zach Braff’s debut, and it rings just as hollow. Noah Reid’s 20-something Stock Burton hides from life in a retirement home, occupying himself with the residents and their pastimes: golf, playing cards and meds. He even plays the accordion, that clichéd signifier of a young man’s peculiarity. There’s a tragic circumstance that broadly informs Stock’s curious behaviour, and he’s forced to deal with it, though not in any way that’s sincere. The screenplay is far too pedestrian to handle intense emotions or a meaningful character arc. This is the kind of script where characters spell out the film’s themes for the audience, just in case we’re not getting it, uttering unprovoked mantras like “Growing old is mandatory growing up is optional” or “Pencils have erasers mistakes don’t.” That’s almost as insulting as assuming we liked Garden State. 85 min.
Rating: NN (RS)
Opens May 31 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.
Pieta (Kim Ki-duk) is an empty provocation – a ceaseless catalogue of transgressive ideas and images designed to shock and appall, following a Mob thug, Gang-do (Lee Jeong-jin), whose uncomplicated life of torturing people who owe his bosses money is shaken up by the arrival of a woman (Jo Min-soo) claiming to be his long-lost mother. Naturally, he has sex with her. And that’s not even the first of Kim’s attempts to send the audience screaming from the theatre. Pieta is a constant stream of posturing offense. There’s no art or intelligence behind any of it, which is doubly disappointing because Kim has actual talent. (The simplicity of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … And Spring is really lovely.) Here, he’s working at the level of a child who’s just learned that dirty words make the grown-ups pay attention, and won’t stop shouting them. Subtitled. 104 min.
Rating: N (NW)
Opens May 31 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
After Earth (M. Night Shyamalan) Jaden Smith and dad Will Smith try to survive on a Planet Earth abandoned by humans 1,000 years earlier in this hot-buzz pic. See review May 31 at nowtoronto.com. 100 min.
Opens May 31 at 401 & Morningside, Carlton Cinema, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Docks Lakeview Drive-In, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Grande – Yonge, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
Now You See Me (Louis Leterrier) is a heist film, with Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg and Mark Ruffalo, about chasing illusionists who rob banks during their gigs and the cops who chase them. 115 min.
Opens May 31 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Carlton Cinema, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Docks Lakeview Drive-In, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Grande – Yonge, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale. See here for times.
A Wedding Invitation (Oh Ki-hwan) offers another of Oh’s implausible-bordering-on-silly premises, as high school sweethearts part – she’s got a big secret – with a promise that they’ll reconnect if they’re both single in five years. 101 min.
Opens May 31 at Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
