The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn) plays its intriguing premise for maximum impact. Directors Oppenheimer and Cynn offered former Indonesian death squad leader Anwar Congo and his associates the chance to re-enact their crimes onscreen, filtered through the tropes of musicals or thrillers or any other genre they might choose. The results are mesmerizing – and not just because of Congo’s self-aggrandizing and utter lack of remorse. The cameras bring out the worst in all concerned, who think nothing of singing and dancing about mass murder. It’s no wonder Errol Morris and Werner Herzog got behind this movie when it premiered at TIFF last year. It lands right in the centre of their lifelong obsessions, while feeling utterly original and unique. It burns itself into you. Subtitled. 115 min.
Rating: NNNNN (NW)
Opens Jul 19 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
Blackfish (Gabriela Cowperthwaite) opens like a boilerplate Hollywood thriller. Calls placed to 911 from SeaWorld in Orlando playing over the film’s opening credits set the scene of the crime: “A whale has eaten one of the trainers.” On February 24, 2010, SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau was drowned by Tilikum, a 550-kilo bull orca. Blackfish offers a psychological profile of Tilikum and, in turn, of the humans who want to keep animals in captivity. The film moves carefully from cinematic tropes (those establishing 911 calls) to an investigation of the labour economy of whale-hunting and capture, the spectacle of training them for slack-jawed tourists and SeaWorld’s move into globalization by selling whales to poorly equipped parks across the globe. 83 min.
Rating: NNNN (JS)
Opens Jul 19 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
Casting By (Tom Donahue) is an activist documentary designed to lobby the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to consider an Oscar category for casting directors – the only opening-title category not currently eligible for an Academy Award. Donahue’s doc makes a pretty good case over a sprightly hour and a half. He focuses on Marion Dougherty, who more or less invented the idea that casting could be a specific skill during stints on Kraft Television Theater, Naked City and Route 66, where she filled bit parts with new faces drawn from New York acting schools – you know, nobodies like Robert Duvall, Dustin Hoffman, Jean Stapleton and Jimmys Dean and Caan. Donahue interviewed Dougherty extensively before her death in 2011, and she’s a great subject – as is pretty much everyone else who appears here, which feels like two-thirds of Hollywood (including Dougherty’s old pals Al Pacino, Clint Eastwood and Jon Voight). It’s an insider project, but that’s the point. 90 min.
Rating: NNNN (NW)
Opens Jul 19 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
Dragon Girls (Inigo Westmeier) tracks three female students at the Tagou Martial Arts School, where 30,000 Chinese youths learn discipline and respect for self through the art of kung fu. Some of them do, anyway. One of Westmeier’s subjects has been sent to the school, a kind of boot camp, as punishment. She eventually drops out and launches a nail salon. Another was born in the factory where her parents work, was then sent to her family’s home village when she was a year and half old to be reared by her grandmother, only to be shipped off to Tagou because her grandmother needed a rest. The third, the most talented, is close to being best in her division. Not good enough, though – Dad won’t visit unless she comes in first. All three are emblematic of the new China. Dragon Girls copped the best international feature documentary award at Hod Docs this year. Doubtless the jury was awed by the visuals. Nothing like seeing 30,000 kids perform martial arts in unison. The opening sequence is a knockout. Subtitles. 90 min.
Rating: NNNN (SGC)
Opens Jul 19 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg) shoots straight for the gut with a wrenching performance by Mads Mikkelsen. He plays a kindergarten teacher falsely accused of child abuse like a wounded doe squirming. You want to put a bullet in him just to end his suffering (and your own). Writer/director Vinterberg dives into the sensitive topic he touched on his Dogme 95 debut, The Celebration. Here he takes a more simplistic, straightforward approach to a fraught subject, allowing characters and audience to decide rather swiftly who not to believe. Yet there’s nothing simplistic about the performances. Mikkelsen and a terrific ensemble navigate complex emotions and moral quandaries in a terrain where a satisfying resolution is as hard to come by as a child who never tells a lie. 111 min.
Rating: NNNN (RS)
Opens Jul 19 at Varsity. See here for times.
Red 2 (Dean Parisot) sticks to the same formula that made the 2010 original a foolishly entertaining sleeper hit. Bruce Willis, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren return as spies who just can’t stay retired. This time around, Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones contribute to the hijinks, joining Mirren to make Red 2 the rare action comedy to showcase four Oscar winners. The plot, which revolves around the construction of an undetectable weapon of mass destruction, doesn’t even try to make sense. Like the whimsical action scenes, the entire movie is careless about logic and even suspense, coasting instead on the giddy pleasures of watching its aging stars. Once again, it’s Mirren who delivers the best gags. With her delicious twist on James Bond, she sports elegant ballgowns and furs while dual-fisting handguns and incinerating corpses. She just can’t resist classing the joint up before blowing it apart. 116 min.
Rating: NNN (RS)
Opens Jul 19 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Docks Lakeview Drive-In, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Humber Cinemas, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Varsity. See here for times.
The Conjuring (James Wan) is a 70s-style tale of demonic infestation, with married demonologists Ed and Louise Warren trying to save a Rhode Island family from an evil spirit that came with their nice new home. Wan has fun mimicking the textures and aesthetics of movies of the period – the natural lighting, constant camera zooms, a fondness for wide shots. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are nicely understated as the Warrens (who’d famously check out that house in Amityville a few years later), and Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor are perfectly cast as unlucky homeowners struggling with a problem that can’t be solved through budgeting and compromise. But Wan is basically just remaking his own Insidious with a few modest tweaks and a polyester wardrobe, and, just like that movie, The Conjuring gets progressively less scary as it goes along. I am also required by pedantry to point out that there is no actual conjuring at any point in the story. 112 min.
Rating: NN (NW)
Opens Jul 19 at 401 & Morningside, Carlton Cinema, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Docks Lakeview Drive-In, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Woodbine, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale. See here for times.
Only God Forgives (Nicolas Winding Refn) reunites Winding Refn with Ryan Gosling, the soulful killing machine of his last feature, Drive, to ask the question “What if Michael Mann had made Kickboxer 2 as a Kubrickian morality tale?” Turns out that is not a question that needed to be asked. Gosling plays a Bangkok fight-school owner locked in a war of retribution with a local cop (Vithaya Pansringarm) over a murdered prostitute. Families get involved. Loyalties are tested. Blood is spilled, vividly and in volume. And that’s pretty much it, all set to a thumping synth score and a dense, almost tactile colour palette of rich reds and deep blacks. But, dear god, is it slow, and dear god is it pointless. Only God Forgives is too well made to be dismissed out of hand. Gosling is giving a real performance, and Winding Refn crafts every shot with a rich, simmering beauty. I was never bored exactly. But I was never engaged either. Some subtitles. 90 min.
Rating: NN (NW)
Opens Jul 19 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
R.I.P.D. (Robert Schwentke) stars Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges as two dead cops, now ghosts, conscripted by the the Rest In Peace Department of the title to battle the baddies. 96 min.
Opens Jul 19 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Carlton Cinema, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Queensway, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
Springsteen & I (Baillie Walsh) is a documentary about rock ‘n’ roll icon Bruce Springsteen. 123 min.
Opens Jul 22 at Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Queensway, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
