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Movies & TV

Film Friday: Upstream Color, Trance, The Place Beyond The Pines and more

Upstream Color (Shane Carruth) is an even more complex tale of identity and destiny than writer/director/star Carruth’s Primer. It’s an impressionistic, emotionally fraught study of two people (Carruth and Amy Seimetz) drawn to one another by a series of circumstances beyond their comprehension. Though the characters are lost and afraid, the movie is assured and confident. Carruth makes the complex, multi-layered story flow easily, using fluid editing to make us see the connections between apparently unrelated characters and keeping dialogue to a minimum. One of the best movies I’ve seen this year. 96 min.

Rating: NNNNN (NW)

Opens Apr 12 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.


Renoir (Gilles Bourdos) has a quiet, cumulative power that creeps up on you. In 1915 in the French Riviera, a fiery new model inspires both the arthritic, wheelchair-bound painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet) and his 21-year-old son Jean, who’s injured from the war and hasn’t found his calling yet. (He’ll eventually become an acclaimed filmmaker.) Rather than go all soapy, director Bourdos chooses to examine big themes like the nature of art. Alexandre Desplat’s shimmering score and Mark Ping Bing Lee’s cinematography evoke the setting with gorgeous dabs of colour and sound, and the performances are subtle and effective. Subtitled. 107 min.

Rating: NNNN (GS)

Opens Apr 12 at Varsity. See here for times.


42 (Brian Helgeland) elevates Jackie Robinson’s racial-barrier-breaking debut baseball season to the level of myth. It would be easy to write off 42 as a cheesy sports soap opera, especially since Chadwick Boseman plays Robinson as almost impossibly earnest, and a gruff-voiced Harrison Ford, as Dodgers boss Branch Rickey, barks about the significance of the story every few scenes. Yet Robinson is almost mythic in his cultural significance, and writer/director Helgeland treats the material honorably rather than manipulatively. If you can stomach a little corn with your ballpark frank, it’s a charmingly old-fashioned and touching sports weepy. Sure, Helgeland’s script occasionally skips over and streamlines history, to the inevitable chagrin of baseball purists, but these flaws never overwhelm the warmhearted charm. It should fall into the Field Of Dreams category of romantic baseball movies that make even the most hardened jocks tear up. 128 min.

Rating: NNN (Phil Brown)

Opens Apr 12 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Yonge, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Varsity, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami) would be a minor but lovely little character study if not for its jarring, atonal final shot. It’s Kiarostami’s first feature after the magnificent Certified Copy, and though he’s moved the story from Tuscany to Tokyo, the principle is the same. Once again, the lives of strangers (Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno) intersect, and people assume new personalities on a whim just to see what will happen. There’s also a lot of driving around in cars, but Kiarostami’s been doing that for decades. It’s all very elliptical and unfocused, but for a good long while that’s part of its charm Kiarostami is an expert at the gradual reveal, letting his characters just exist in the frame and steeping us in their relationships and histories. But then there’s the climax, which sends those characters speeding toward a collision that sours everything that’s gone before. Honestly, if it had ended just five seconds sooner, I’d have been fine. Subtitled. 109 min.

Rating: NNN (NW)

Opens Apr 12 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.


Men at Lunch (Seán Ó Cualáin) offers a fascinating multiple-angle look at the iconic photograph Lunch Atop A Skyscraper, in which ironworkers casually perch on a beam 800 feet above Manhattan. The men, working on what we now call 30 Rock, and the daredevil photographer remain anonymous, though that doesn’t prevent people from all over the world claiming them as ancestors. Ó Cualáin digs for clues pointing to the men’s identity, but his search is complicated by the fact that many New Yorkers identify with the immigrant workers who risked their lives to establish themselves in their new home. As the director talks to locals about the death-defying photo, the film’s focus shifts from the building of skyscrapers to the construction of the Big Apple’s identity. 70 min.

Rating: NNN (RS)

Opens Apr 12 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.


Trance (Danny Boyle) finds the recently respectable Boyle reaching back to the messier storytelling of Shallow Grave and Trainspotting for a stylish, twisty caper picture in which an art dealer (James McAvoy), having successfully helped steal an invaluable Goya painting, must submit to a hypnotist (Rosario Dawson) after a head injury leaves him unable to remember where he hid the prize. For all the plot’s convolutions, it’s pretty simple to follow as the unpacking of our hero’s psyche reveals origami-like levels of complexity – and suggests that we might not be rooting for the right characters. But as its plot gains momentum, Trance sacrifices emotional clarity, fracturing its initial focus on McAvoy’s protagonist into an elaborate triangle between him, Dawson’s confident therapist and Vincent Cassel’s grim thief that tangles the movie’s themes of identity and deception rather than enhancing them. As a result, the final movement doesn’t pay off quite the way it wants to. 101 min.

Rating: NNN (NW)

Opens Apr 12 at Eglinton Town Centre, Interchange 30, Queensway, SilverCity Mississauga, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


Paris-Manhattan (Sophie Lellouche) wants to do with Woody Allen what Allen did with Humphrey Bogart in Play It Again, Sam, but it just doesn’t work. Allen-obsessed Alice (Alice Taglioni), who works at the pharmacy she inherited from her father – and presses Woody Allen DVDs into her customers’ hands – is unlucky in love. She doesn’t notice locksmith Victor (Patrick Bruel), the great guy she could get if she only paid attention. She bemoans her romantic fate to a wall poster of Allen, who talks back to her in clips from his movies, exchanges that are strangely bland. When you have Allen’s own lines to work with, what can go wrong? Though some family secrets emerge late in the narrative, neither they nor Alice’s conflict with her sister (Marine Delterme) are real grabbers. The actors are charming enough and the movie looks terrific, but I can’t be the only one who’s tired of seeing a knockout woman with a great job portrayed as a loser. 77 min.

Rating: NN (SGC)

Opens Apr 12 at Varsity. See here for times.


The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianfrance) uses a triptych structure to tell one long, sprawling story set in and around Schenectady, NY, where a stunt motorcyclist (Ryan Gosling, who starred in Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine) looks up an old girlfriend (Eva Mendes), learns he’s fathered her child and tries to support them by robbing banks. When he crosses paths with a local cop (Bradley Cooper), Cianfrance’s focus shifts to that character’s struggles to do right in a crooked world, and yet another story involves a pair of high-school students (Dane DeHaan, Emory Cohen) dealing with their own deeply rooted issues. There’s a moral of sorts, and a few thoughts on the cyclical nature of violence, but Cianfrance takes his sweet time getting to them. Gosling’s still magnetic as hell, though when he’s on screen, even covered from head to toe in biker gear, you can’t look at anyone else. 140 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Apr 12 at Canada Square, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Yorkdale, Varsity, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


Revolution (Rob Stewart) documents the Sharkwater director’s efforts to get people to wake up and stop poisoning the earth. It’s a compelling thesis: what good will it do to save sharks if we’re destroying the whole planet? But as was the case with Sharkwater, a worthy message is muddled by a lack of editorial control. Revolution is a disorganized, jumbled piece of work. Stewart zips around the globe dropping in on various protest movements and looking concerned, then flips back to lovely HD seascapes as he recharges his activist batteries. The marine world may be part of what he’s trying to save, but the footage doesn’t belong in this picture it cripples the momentum and keeps Revolution from digging into the movements Stewart visits. The cumulative effect is like watching someone flip through Polaroids of his adventure tourism. Some subtitles. 86 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Apr 12 at Coliseum Mississauga, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Yonge, Queensway, SilverCity Yonge, Varsity, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


Exhibition: Manet — Portraying Life takes you behind the scenes of the Royal Academy of Arts’s eagerly awaited exhibition of the French painter’s portraits, featuring host Tim Marlow and expert guests. 100 min.

Opens Apr 11 at Coliseum Mississauga, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


Scary Movie 5 (Malcolm D. Lee) is yet another sequel in the series spoofing the popular horror movies. No press screening – see review April 15 at nowtoronto.com/movies. 85 min.

Opens Apr 12 at 401 & Morningside, Carlton Cinema, 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.


Stevie Nicks: In Your Dreams (Dave Stewart, Stevie Nicks)

Opens Apr 12 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.

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