Molly Maxwell (Sara St. Onge) is a casually and confidently told coming-of-age tale about the titular 16-year-old’s ill-advised romance with her youngish (but too old for her) English teacher. Director St. Onge found the perfect young star in the charming Lola Tash, who alternates between adorable kid, awkward teen and dangerous seductress with ease. Molly attends a progressive school that encourages unique artistic endeavours, where being quirky seems to be a prerequisite. It’s as if Molly has been cast in a Jason Reitman movie but can’t quite get her Juno on. Amidst all the self-conscious idiosyncrasies, Molly’s amorous relationship with the hunky teacher (Charlie Carrick) seems natural by comparison, and the film savours every awkward beat of their romance. This is provocative territory for such light-hearted fare, but St. Onge handles it with maturity. 90 min.
Rating: NNNN (RS)
Opens Apr 19 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.
The Substance: Albert Hofmann’s LSD (Martin Witz) takes you on a trip through time, from the discovery of LSD in 1943 through the drug’s modern applications to treat anxiety in cancer patients. Accidentally formulated by chemist Albert Hoffman, LSD played several roles before it was dropped by hippies looking for psychedelic euphoria. Hoffman, interviewed right before he turned 100, was hoping it could be used for psychiatric research, but others had different intentions. The CIA thought it might be a truth serum, and the Army saw it as a chemical weapon: why kill the enemy when you can just turn them into Jimi Hendrix fans? Director Witz did his homework, discovering fantastic archival footage, some dark (about LSD in psychiatric clinics) and some hilarious (Army experiments on soldiers who subsequently can’t follow commands). 90 min.
Rating: NNNN (RS)
Opens Apr 19 at Big Picture Cinema. See here for times.
To the Wonder (Terrence Malick) finds Malick turning the ups and downs of a contemporary couple (Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko) into an epic examination of the human condition. The near-absence of dialogue and the stream-of-consciousness structure guarantee it will prove even more divisive than The Tree Of Life. It really is the sort of movie people have accused Malick of making all along: just long takes of people wandering through the tall grass thinking about God in three different languages. But preciousness aside, it’s also a new kind of relationship movie, with Affleck and Kurylenko fully inhabiting their conflicted characters even without words. Rachel McAdams turns in a powerhouse cameo as a radiant young woman who threatens to steal Affleck’s heart, and also there are buffalo. Seriously. Some subtitles. 112 min.
Rating: NNN (NW)
Opens Apr 19 at Varsity. See here for times.
It’s a Disaster (Todd Berger) follows four Los Angeles couples (played by, among others, Julia Stiles, David Cross, America Ferrera and Erinn Hayes) whose Sunday brunch date gets more than a little awkward when news breaks of a dirty bomb attack downtown. With the air filling with unknown toxins, everyone duct-tapes themselves inside the house, only to realize their various issues are trapped inside with them. (Also, it’s a comedy.) A Buñuelian remake of the post-9/11 thriller Right At Your Door could be a great idea, but writer-director Berger can’t deliver on the promise of his premise. It’s one thing to make a movie about small-minded, petty characters, but when the movie is small-minded and petty, too, there’s just nothing to give us a rooting interest. After the halfway point, when the horror literally lands on the doorstep and the characters go on behaving like self-absorbed dicks, you just won’t care if they live or die. 89 min.
Rating: NN (NW)
Opens Apr 19 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.
My Awkward Sexual Adventure (Sean Garrity) stars Jonas Chernick, who also wrote the script, as a Winnipeg accountant whose girlfriend (Sarah Manninen) dumps him just before he’s going to propose. Convinced that his sexual inadequacy is the root of the problem, our hero goes to Toronto, where he meets an exotic dancer (Emily Hampshire) who grudgingly offers to help him improve his bedroom game if he digs her out of a financial hole. The film positions itself as an edgy, sexually honest romantic comedy, but it’s ultimately pretty conventional. The bedroom stuff is no more graphic than an episode of Sex And The City, and Chernick’s thin conception of his character as a dullard who can’t easily articulate what he wants makes him a pretty bland hero. The closing shot is terrific – but it’ll just make you wonder why the entire film couldn’t have been conceived with the same wit and warmth. 103 min.
Rating: NN (NW)
Opens Apr 19 at Colossus, Grande – Yonge, Queensway, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.
Oblivion (Joseph Kosinski) Oblivion (Joseph Kosinski) starts out as a flesh-and-blood spin on WALL*E with Tom Cruise as a maintenance man knocking around a devastated future Earth, and gradually expands to be a knockoff of virtually every sci-fi movie made since 1968, from 2001 to The Matrix to Moon. It’s very pretty to look at Kosinski may not have a brain in his head, but he’s got a great eye, integrating those stolen images smoothly into the visual design of a given scene. The problem is, every time someone opens his or her mouth, the script cripples itself with quasi-meaningful dialogue that’s supposed to be cleverly layered, but really just hangs a lantern on how cleverly layered the dialogue is. Not five minutes in – seriously, not even five minutes in – one of those not-too-clever lines makes specific reference to the movie from which Oblivion’s primary plot is stolen. It’s rare that a movie so resolutely un-clever tells you, straight out, how clever it’s going to be. But then Oblivion doesn’t pull that off, either. 126 min.
Rating: NN (NW)
Opens Apr 19 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Grande – Yonge, Humber Cinemas, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Varsity. See here for times.
Wrong (Quentin Dupieux) finds the director of Rubber once again perversely playing with absurd narratives in a story about a man (Jack Plotnick) whose life collapses when he wakes up one morning to find his beloved dog missing. The search lets Dupieux introduce a series of characters who seem designed for maximum eccentricity – co-workers in a perpetually rainy office, the pet detective who doesn’t think he needs a photo of the pooch and so forth – but there’s literally no point in the random assemblage of scenes. At least Rubber had absurdity driving it Wrong just defies any attempt to connect to the characters or the material. 94 min.
Rating: NN (NW)
Opens Apr 19 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
Bert Stern: Original Mad Man (Shannah Laumeister) is the laziest sort of documentary, unearthing a relatively unknown American artist of marginal interest and trying to dust off his or her secret legacy for a general audience. Director Laumeister inflates the significance of photographer Bert Stern by connecting him to more famous people (Brigitte Bardot, Stanley Kubrick) while limply associating him with something of more contemporary cultural interest. Like the sleazy-cool bigwigs on AMC’s Mad Men, Stern couches his macho misogyny in polished, debonair swagger. Of course, it’s easy to make even an unlikeable guy seem interesting when you ramp up his accomplishments, not so much revealing the drama inherent in Stern’s life as fabricating it. 89 min.
Rating: N (JS)
Opens Apr 19 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
The Metropolitan Opera: Parsifal Encore is a high def broadcast from the Met of Wagner’s final opera, starring Jonas Kaufmann in the title role of the noble knight. 340 min.
Opens Apr 20 at Beach Cinemas, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Grande – Yonge, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Yonge. See here for times.
The Metropolitan Opera: Rigoletto Encore is a high def performance from the Met of Michael Mayer’s new production of the tragic Verdi opera, set in Las Vegas in the 1960s. 211 min.
Opens Apr 24 at Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Yonge, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre. See here for times.
Royal Opera House: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Encore is a high def broadcast of Christopher Wheeldon’s all-ages ballet based on the beloved Lewis Carroll tale. 120 min.
Opens Apr 21 at Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Grande – Yonge, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Yonge. See here for times.
