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Movies & TV

Serious summertime viewing

Another week, another new summer program gets underway at TIFF Cinematheque this time, it’s Personal Views: A Tribute To Robin Wood, which honours the recent passing of the esteemed film critic and theorist with screenings of the movies he championed.

From Ophüls to Hitchcock to Haneke, the programming choices create an efficient tour through the unheralded masterworks of various masters. The films being screened may not be anyone’s first choice to represent a given filmmaker, but that’s the point they’re just as valid – as accomplished, and as personal – as the usual selection. Click on the titles for showtimes and tickets.

Tonight (Friday) kicks off with Howard Hawks’s marvellous Rio Bravo, which delivers the pulp thrills of the Western genre with a master craftsman’s confidence and skill. (It’s accompanied by a 1929 Laurel & Hardy short directed by another populist auteur, Leo McCarey.)

Other films in the series include Arthur Penn’s The Chase, screening tomorrow (Saturday) Max Ophüls’s Letter From An Unknown Woman on Wednesday Michael Haneke’s Code Inconnu on Thursday and Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie on June 28.

Anne Wheeler’s Loyalties, William McGillivray’s Life Classes, Satyajit Ray’s Days And Nights In The Forest and Kenzo Mizoguchi’s Sansho The Baliff will all run early next month – along with George A. Romero’s Day Of The Dead, originally scheduled to run next weekend but moved to July 8 to avoid running afoul of any G20 unpleasantness.

If you’re in a more verité kind of mood, the M.U.C.K. Film Festival takes over the Royal on Sunday with screenings of three documentaries that qualify as “Movies of UnCommon Knowledge” – Rethink Afghanistan at 3 pm, the Oscar-nominated (and very good) Burma VJ: Reporting From A Closed Country at 5 pm, and No Past To Speak Of at 7:30 pm.

And along similar lines, the Toronto Underground Cinema recovers from its NXNE screenings with the 2010 People’s Summit Doc Film Series, a selection of political and social documentaries including Pray The Devil Back To Hell, Return To El Salvador, H2Oil and Under Rich Earth. You can find the complete schedule as a PDF at the theatre’s website.

But the real highlight of the series is Josh Fox’s terrific eco-horror doc Gasland, which was one of my favourite films at Hot Docs last month. If you missed it there, see it now. You know, before it’s too late.[rssbreak]

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