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Movies & TV

Film Friday: The Selfish Giant, The Final Member, Devil’s Knot and more

The Selfish Giant (Clio Barnard) takes its name from Oscar Wilde’s religious parable, but its real ancestry lies in director Barnard’s previous work, 2010’s The Arbor. Like that experimental documentary, her new feature is set on a miserable housing estate in Bradford, in northern England, where impoverished families grind through miserable lives. Thrown out of school for his violent outbursts and disrespectful behaviour, young Arbor (Conner Chapman) pulls his friend Swifty (Shaun Thomas) into scavenging metal for a local junkyard owner (Sean Gilder). Working with a mixture of seasoned character actors and non-professional kids, Barnard creates a sense of a much larger community filtering in and out of Arbor and Swifty’s world. It’s a compelling show-don’t-tell strategy, blending drama and social commentary in manner worthy of Ken Loach at his peak. Go and see this. It’s fantastic. 91 min.

Rating: NNNNN (NW)

Opens Jan 24 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.


The Final Member (Jonah Bekhor, Zach Math) chronicles the quest of Siggi Hjartarson, proprietor of the Iceland Phallological Museum, as he tries to secure the donation of a human penis. Directors Bekhor and Math treat their subject with precisely the right amount of respect, acknowledging Hjartarson’s commitment while still allowing us to enjoy the ridiculous carvings he sells in the gift shop. The parade of eccentrics is fascinating – Tom Mitchell, an affably insane American intent on donating his member before he dies, seems like a lost Will Ferrell improv character – and the story expands in a really interesting fashion. (Oh, grow up.) Some subtitles. 75 min.

Rating: NNNN (NW)

Opens Jan 24 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.


Linsanity (Evan Jackson Leong) is a doc tracking what happened to Jeremy Lin before he rocketed from obscurity to bona fide NBA stardom in a matter of days in 2012. Unfortunately, Lin himself lacks warmth and humour. Game footage from high school to the pros is compelling interviews with the San Fran native and his family and friends much less so. The doc hits its stride when Lin, perilously close to being cut from the New York Knicks, hits his. Anyone with even a peripheral knowledge of basketball knows that going from third-string point guard to scoring 38 points against Kobe Bryant is completely, er, linsane and totally worth reliving one more time. 89 min.

Rating: NNN (Julia LeConte)

Opens Jan 24 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.


Devil’s Knot (Atom Egoyan) dully dramatizes the prosecution of teens Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. for the murders of three young boys – a true story previously chronicled in three Paradise Lost documentaries and West Of Memphis. Egoyan must have seen the project as a chance to revisit the themes of The Sweet Hereafter, another film about a community ravaged by the inexplicable death of its children. But he does absolutely nothing with that opportunity, instead following an outside investigator (Colin Firth) attempting to help defence attorneys build an alternate theory of the crimes. The script shifts clumsily between multiple perspectives – most histrionically that of Reese Witherspoon’s distraught mother – while lazily teasing potential theories of the crime that weren’t fully explored until after the trial. The cast is tonally all over the place and the whole thing is framed, cut and scored like cheap TV. I’ve never seen a movie shot by Paul Sarossy that looked this bad. 114 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Jan 24 at Varsity. See here for times.


Ice Soldiers (Sturla Gunnarsson) is a crappy action quickie about a team of scientists and military contractors chasing three defrosted Soviet murder-men around the Arctic – a lazy combination of themes from The Thing and The Terminator, without even the good manners to include a single soldier made of ice. In fairness, it does feature an engaging supporting turn from Adam Beach as a trapper who aids the hero (Dominic Purcell) in his quest to stop the Aryan killing machines, and director Gunnarsson and cinematographer Stephen Reizes at least tried to deliver a movie that looks like a feature film rather than a cable project. But it’s still terrible. Some subtitles. 95 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Jan 24 at Landmark Cinemas 24 Whitby. See here for times.


Mourning Has Broken (Brett Butler, Jason Butler) stars Robert Nolan as a nameless man who discovers his wife dead and decides to go about his daily routine to put off dealing with his loss. There’s an intriguing premise here – the mundane becomes a burden as the thought of a corpse at home hovers over everything, and routine annoyances like a red light with no oncoming traffic become unbearable. Some fine camera and editing work sets the mood for what could have been an interesting minimalist mood piece, but then the film veers off into antic, broad comedy. Amateur actors play everyday pests, reaching for SNL heights with jokes that professional comedians couldn’t make funny. The film is lovely when it takes itself seriously but obnoxious when it doesn’t. 77 min.

Rating: NN (RS)

Opens Jan 24 at Royal. See here for times.


The Past (Asghar Farhadi) sees the pleasant soapiness that greased A Separation, director Farhadi’s Academy Award winner, reach full froth. Ali Mosaffa plays Ahmad, an Iranian who returns to a Paris suburb to finalize his divorce so his wife (Bérénice Bejo) can marry another man (Tahar Rahim). Ahmad’s desire to fix things ends up fissuring his ex-wife’s family dynamic, exposing lies on top of lies. Mr. Fixit’s nobility is never undermined, his insistence that everyone unburden themselves of their secrets offered as the solution to, and never the cause of, the problems of those around him. Farhadi may be heavy-handedly rooting for the cathartic power of the truth, but his melodrama is so overwrought and shot through with nasty misogyny (all the female characters feel like caricatures of 19th-century Viennese hysterics) that everything about it rings false. 130 min.

Rating: NN (JS)

Opens Jan 24 at Varsity. See here for times.


Whitewash (Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais) stars Thomas Haden Church as Bruce, an alcoholic who mows down a straggler with his mini-plow, ditches the body and hightails it deep into the woods in a violent snowstorm. The mini-plow gets jammed, stranding him in the middle of nowhere, and as time wears on it seems he doesn’t care to be anywhere else. Through flashbacks we learn that Bruce and his victim (Marc Labrèche) have a bit of a history, clues to some of his head-scratching, incriminating decisions. Hoss-Desmarais skilfully teases out these bits of information, stretching out a thin and not entirely convincing story to make it seem more compelling than it really is. He has talent for creating atmosphere and visualizing the main character’s disintegration, but this might have been better as a short film. At feature length, Whitewash feels as tiresome as the weather. 90 min.

Rating: NN (RS)

Opens Jan 24 at Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


I, Frankenstein (Stuart Beattie) always seems to be 30 seconds away from making sense. If it could just slow down for a breath, if something could just not explode in this scene, if the gargoyles and the demons could sheathe their killing swords and let somebody finish a freaking sentence, then maybe a decent movie might emerge. But that’s not the kind of picture I, Frankenstein is. It might have been, at one point, before it was hacked down to 93 minutes of action sequences and anything resembling a plot was muddled into incoherence. All it is now is a showcase for CG cameras swooping through elaborately rendered sets – an ancient cathedral here, a massive underground laboratory there – while Aaron Eckhart punches a series of stuntmen in the foreground. Eckhart can be a charming, charismatic screen presence when given the chance – even when playing a monster – but this movie isn’t interested in letting him loose. In the end, he’s just another stuntman. 93 min.

Rating: N (NW)

Opens Jan 24 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 Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale. See here for times.

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