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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Movies Opening This Week

Rating: NNNNN


AGAINST THE ROPES (Charles Dutton) stars Meg Ryan in a fictionalized account of female boxing promoter Jackie Kallen’s life. See review online at www.nowtoronto.com. 111 min. Opens Feb 20 at Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Paramount, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Newmarket, SilverCity North York, SilverCity Richmond Hill, SilverCity Yorkdale, Winston Churchill.

CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE DRAMA QUEEN (Sara Sugarman) stars Lindsay Lohan (Freaky Friday, The Parent Trap) as a popular high school student who’s not so popular once she moves to the suburbs. See review online at www.nowtoronto.com. 90 min. Opens Feb 20 at Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Courtney Park 16, Interchange 30, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Newmarket, SilverCity Richmond Hill, SilverCity Yorkdale, Silvercity Yonge.

EUROTRIP (Jeff Schaffer) has a high school graduate go to Germany with three friends to meet his dishy pen pal. See review online at www.nowtoronto.com. 90 min. Opens Feb 20 at Beach Cinemas, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Paramount, Rainbow Fairview, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Newmarket, SilverCity Richmond Hill, SilverCity Yorkdale, Silvercity Yonge.

MY ARCHITECT: A SON’S JOURNEY (Nathaniel Kahn) arrives with an Oscar nomination and the DGA prize for documentary and was named top doc at the Chicago Film Festival. It’s an O Father, Where Art Thou? in which the director goes in search of the dad who died when he was 12. Papa was a rolling stone – three children by three women – and the world-famous architect Louis Kahn, who designed the Salk Institute in La Jolla and the capital complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Opening with tributes from Philip Johnson, IM Pei and Frank Gehry, it’s an intriguing portrait of an irascible genius. But the work overwhelms the personal portrait – the way Nathaniel Kahn shoots his father’s creations shows the real reason we’re interested in Louis Kahn. It’s not his problematic family life, which may or may not be the director’s reason for making the film. 116 min. NNNN (JH)

Opens Feb 20 at Bayview, Cumberland.

OSAMA (Siddiq Barmak) is a good movie in spite of the opportunities it affords for war-on-terror flag-waving south of the border. It follows a young girl in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan whose grandmother and widowed mother, unable to leave their house without a male protector, dress her up as a boy and send her out to work, where she risks capture and death. Barmak makes the most of this inherently dramatic premise, using it as the vehicle for a tour of life in purdah, revealed through a Tarkovskian haze of surreal beauty and muted menace. Funded by the Iranian Ministry of Culture and the Makhmalbaf Film House as part of an effort to resuscitate Afghani culture. It’s a promising start. 90 min. NNNN (Wendy Banks)

Opens Feb 20 at Canada Square.

THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (Mel Gibson) will probably have a hard time being seen as a work of art. Before its opening, Gibson’s life of Jesus has become controversial for its treatment of the role of the Jews in Jesus’ death. See review online at www.nowtoronto.com. 127 min. Opens Feb 25 at Beach Cinemas, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Courtney Park 16, Cumberland, Interchange 30, Paramount, Rainbow Fairview, Rainbow Market Square, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Newmarket, SilverCity Richmond Hill, SilverCity Yorkdale, Silvercity Yonge.

TOUCHING THE VOID (Kevin Macdonald)

– See review, page 71. 106 min. NNNN (JH)

Opens Feb 20 at Cumberland.

WELCOME TO MOOSEPORT (Donald Petrie) offers the odd experience of a film that plays like a comedy but isn’t actually funny. The fun is in watching a ferociously professional cast playing as if they were getting laughs. Gene Hackman stars as a retiring president approached to run for mayor of a small Maine town. He begins pursuing the girlfriend (Maura Tierney) of the opposing candidate, the local plumber (Ray Romano). Romano, a one-note comic actor who apparently has no dark side, is way out of his depth against his co-stars and a supporting cast of veteran scene stealers like Christine Baranski, Marcia Gay Harden and Rip Torn. Why would any woman choose him over Hackman, even if Hackman’s got almost 30 years on him? 105 min. NNN (JH)

Opens Feb 20 at Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Kennedy Commons, Paramount, Rainbow Fairview, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Newmarket, SilverCity Richmond Hill, Silvercity Yonge.

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