February is back, and so is Cineplex’s Great Digital Film Festival, mixing and matching decades of recent blockbusters – and the occasional cult favourite – at theatres across Canada from tonight (Friday, February 5) to Thursday (February 11). In the GTA, the festival is screening at the Scotiabank Theatre, the Cineplex Cinemas Scarborough and the SilverCity Newmarket.
As is becoming tradition, the program is peppered with nerd-bait double bills: on Saturday (February 6), a 7:30 pm screening of George Miller’s second Mad Max movie The Road Warrior is followed by Miller’s most recent entry in the series, the Oscar-nominated Fury Road at 9:30 pm.
Sunday (February 7) features matinees of Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal at 12:50 pm and Labyrinth at 2:50 pm the evening program pairs Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan at 7:30 pm with its 21st century cousin Star Trek Into Darkness at 9:50 pm. On Wednesday (February 10), it’s a John Carpenter night with Big Trouble In Little China at 7:50 pm and The Thing at 9:55 pm Thursday (February 11), it’s a pair of Quentin Tarantino scripts: True Romance at 7:35 pm, and From Dusk Till Dawn at 9:55 pm.
Also screening in the festival: Ghostbusters, Inception, Serenity, Looper, Dirty Harry, Beverly Hills Cop and Runaway Train. Each film screens at least twice during the festival click here for showtimes. Tickets are $6.99 per screening, with discounts for multi-event purchases.
Looking for something less bombastic? TIFF has you covered on Sunday with conflicting screenings of Albert and David Maysles’s Grey Gardens at 1 pm and Allan Moyle’s New Waterford Girl at 1:30 pm.
Grey Gardens, the Maysles’s remarkable portrait of two women living in utter codependency on a disintegrating homestead, is screening as a benefit for TIFF’s Reel Comfort hospital outreach program – and as a tie-in to the Toronto premiere of the Acting Stage Company’s production of the Grey Gardens musical, which opens at the Berkeley Street Theatre February 19. (Tickets for the screening are $13, available right here.)
As for New Waterford Girl, the East Coast coming-of-age drama that introduced Liane Balaban and Tara Spencer-Nairn to the big screen, that one’s free – it’s the latest screening in TIFF’s Canadian Open Vault series, tied to the launch of Darrell Varga’s new book Shooting From The East: Filmmaking On The Canadian Atlantic. Varga will be signing copies at the Lightbox before and after the screening, and Spencer-Nairn will be present to introduce the film.
Both movies are great, albeit in very different ways. If you’ve never seen New Waterford Girl, this is likely to be your only shot to see it in a decent presentation for a good long time the DVD is an old release, and I’m not aware of any plans for a high-def remaster. And I’m sure you can make a donation to the Reel Comfort program while you’re in the building.
