Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel) looks at the commercial fishing industry from the product’s point of view. It’s an immersive, almost assaultive piece of subjective cinema designed to literally plunge us into the deep, experiencing the catch of the day from inside the nets. In collaboration with Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, directors Castaing-Taylor (Sweetgrass) and Paravel (Foreign Parts) strapped HD cameras to to fishermen on a series of voyages. They’ve assembled the footage into a narrative of sorts, recreating a single night’s fishing off the New Bedford coast, where Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick begins. The result is a powerful, unflinching and ultimately thrilling work of 21st-century cinema. See it. 87 min.
Rating: NNNNN (NW)
Opens Mar 15 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
Caesar Must Die (Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani) begins as a documentary, following the inmates of Italy’s Rebibbia prison as they stage a performance of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. But the Taviani brothers are working on multiple levels, encouraging the convicts to play out the drama in the real space of the prison rather than on the stage where they’ll eventually perform. Their rehearsals become a fragmented investigation of the text, and a mirror into their own hearts. There’s a precedent in Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade, though that was an entirely fictional representation of a play being staged by psychiatric inmates in post-revolutionary France. Caesar Must Die is rooted in the present, with Shakespeare’s play used to reflect on Italy’s criminal culture, the text leading prisoners to personal epiphanies as they realize how much they have in common with the characters they’re playing. It’s an incisive sociopolitical inquiry disguised as entertainment, just as the Bard intended. Subtitled. 76 min.
Rating: NNNN (NW)
Opens Mar 15 at Varsity. See here for times.
No (Pablo Larraín) is Chilean director Larraín conclusion to his Pinochet trilogy – begun with 2008’s Tony Manero and continued in 2010’s Post Mortem – and his most audacious film to date, a comedy of manners centred on an advertising whiz (Gael García Bernal) hired to package and market the campaign to defeat the dictator’s 1988 attempt to legitimize his 15-year reign through a public referendum. Shooting in butt-ugly analog video, the better to integrate actual footage from the era, Larraín finds sly humour in the push-pull between dogmatic revolutionaries and Bernal’s more mercenary character, who’s trying to sell a product (freedom! democracy!) rather than scold voters about the issues they’ve long been required to ignore. But the movie also captures the tension of a terrorized society just starting to allow itself to imagine an end to a decade and a half of oppression – and the fear that even the tiniest steps toward that end could all be taken away in an instant. Subtitled. 117 min.
Rating: NNNN (NW)
Opens Mar 15 at Varsity. See here for times.
Reincarnated (Andy Capper) touts former gangster rapper Snoop Dogg’s foray into reggae, trading in the gin and juice for pure Jamaican cess. The born-again Rastafarian travels through Kingston in between recording sessions to visit Bob Marley’s old digs, neighbourhoods and music schools, all while discussing what he wants to achieve with his new album. The smell of a publicity tour is as potent as all the reefer smoke on display. But even if you don’t buy him as a reggae artist, you can’t help but be won over by Snoop’s search for a new identity. The 40-year-old family man laments his rap sheet, which includes being a member of the Crips, a pimp and an player at the centre of hip-hop’s deadliest period. With a legacy forever haunted by Death Row, Snoop is looking to reggae for something positive to leave behind. That’s a worthwhile journey, even if it looks like it’s sponsored by Adidas. 96 min.
Rating: NNNN (RS)
Opens Mar 15 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
Greedy Lying Bastards (Craig Scott Rosebraugh) calls out the corporate actors who make their living muddying the waters on climate change. At the outset, director Rosebraugh explains that the oil industry has a vested interest in keeping any action against climate change in the realm of theory, so it finds shills to go out and cast doubt on the overwhelming scientific evidence that the phenomenon is real. Once he’s established the issue, he shows us the stooges at work, focusing with particular glee on pop-eyed twit Christopher Monckton, a British lord whose sole purpose is to appear on television to tut-tut at his opponents. I’m not sure this material necessarily merits a 90-minute feature, though. There’s a lot of repetition, and a 50-minute TV slot might have forced a more concise argument. But you can’t argue against the righteousness of its mission. 90 min.
Rating: NNN (NW)
Opens Mar 15 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (Don Scardino) is a pleasantly dopey comedy about a has-been stage magician (Steve Carell) at war with a slick street magician (Jim Carrey). Screenwriters Jonathan M. Goldstein and John Francis Daley do the same thing they did with Horrible Bosses, setting a bunch of weird characters loose and seeing how they bounce off one another. The movie sometimes feels too enamoured of its own silliness, but the silliness is essential without it, both Carell’s and Carrey’s characters would just be assholes. This way, at least they’re endearingly goofy assholes. 100 min.
Rating: NNN (NW)
Opens Mar 15 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Carlton Cinema, 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.
Blood Pressure (Sean Garrity) adds psychological thrills to its story of a mid-life crisis and ends up with a major identity problem. Nicole (Stratford’s Michelle Giroux) is a 40-something woman in a wealthy Toronto suburb who’s bored with her job at a pharmacy and alienated from her businessman husband (Judah Katz) and two kids (Jake Epstein and Tatiana Maslany). When mysterious letters start appearing, written by someone who knows her better than anyone else, she’s intrigued and, prodded by her anonymous pen pal, soon begins spying, breaking into homes and learning how to shoot guns. The premise opens up all sorts of rich themes about coercion and female empowerment, but the script swerves around some odd and incongruous plot points to arrive, anti-climactically, at its end, and you can sense Giroux, solid throughout, struggling with her character’s motivation. 94 min.
Rating: NN (GS)
Opens Mar 15 at Royal. See here for times.
The Call (Brad Anderson) is a thriller starring Halle Berry as a 911 operator who must fight her former assailant to help out a new victim. Screened after press time – see review March 15 at nowtoronto.com/movies. 94 min.
Opens Mar 15 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Carlton Cinema, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale. See here for times.
The Metropolitan Opera: Francesca Da Rimini Live is a live high-def broadcast of Zandonai’s rarely performed opera, starring Eva-Maria Westbroek and Marcello Giordani. Subtitled. 237 min.
Opens Mar 16 at Beach Cinemas, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Yonge, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Yonge. See here for times.
The Metropolitan Opera: Maria Stuarda Encore is a high-def broadcast from the Met of Donizetti’s historical opera, starring mezzo Joyce DiDonato in the title role. Subtitled. 200 min.
Opens Mar 18 at Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Yonge, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre. See here for times.
UFC 158: St. Pierre vs. Diaz Live is a live broadcast of a big MMA event from the Bell Centre in Montreal. 210 min.
Opens Mar 16 at Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.