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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

What’s new to theatres: April 29-May 1, 2022

Liam Neeson stars in the movie Memory, which is covered among our weekend reviews

Memory

(Martin Campbell)

Memory is the latest from Liam Neeson in Charles Bronson-like reaper-of-vengeance mode, a post-Taken career tract that gave us blissful highs like The Commuter and Cold Pursuit, and lows that I’d rather just forget. Memory belongs with the latter, despite its promise.

The movie is directed by Casino Royale’s Martin Campbell, who knows his way around an action scene, and comes with a nifty log-line borrowed from a Belgian movie called Memory Of A Killer. Neeson is Alex Lewis, a hitman for hire suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s. He’s taking people out and then checking the notes he scribbles on his arm. Casting Guy Pearce as an FBI agent following Lewis’s trail becomes a sly in-joke. You might remember Pearce starred in Memento as a killer with amnesia who tattooed clues on his body. Cute detail, but the movie doesn’t do much with the premise, as if for large chunks it totally forgets that it’s supposed to be about a guy who forgets.

Lewis’s Alzheimer’s barely has any bearing on a movie that just goes through the motions with its plot about a hitman finding high moral ground and turning on his employers. Who needs memory when this story could be told on autopilot? 114 minutes. NOW playing in theatres. N

A scene from Quickening
Courtesy of LevelFILM

Quickening

(Haya Waseem)

Waseem crafts a small and striking coming-of-age film about a young Pakistani-Canadian teenager (fantastic first-time actor Arooj Azeem). This is one of the rare brown-girl coming-of-agers. The ones we’ve seen before have come in more saleable terms: easy-to-like comedies like Bend It Like Beckham and Never Have I Ever that find funny ways to deal with puberty in immigrant homes. Quickening does it differently. It gets more under the skin, latching onto anxieties and emotions you can’t necessarily name, leaning heavily on Christopher Lew’s gorgeous cinematography to just capture the feeling. We’ve seen indie Canadian films do that before. But not for this kind of household. That makes Quickening something special. 88 minutes. Now Playing at Cineplex Yonge-Dundas. NNN

A scene from This House, which is premiering at Hot Docs, hich is one of the best things to do in Toronto in Spring 2022

Hot Docs Film Festival

North America’s largest documentary festival is back in pandemic-friendly hybrid form, hosting both live and online options. Highlights among this year’s selection include Miryam Charles’s gutting exploration of place and memory, This House; Chase Joynt’s Framing Agnes, which uses a playful talk-show format to discuss a young woman who was the subject in the first substantial study on transgender identity in 1958; Ramin Bahrani’s dissection of American gun culture in 2nd Chance; and Shalini Kantayya’s look at what’s really going on with the platform that is holding the youth’s attention in TikTok, Boom. April 28-May 8 at various locations. hotdocs.ca

Streaming guides

Everything on streaming platforms this month:

Netflix

@justsayrad

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