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Movies & TV

TIFF Next Wave

TIFF NEXT WAVE at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West) from tonight (Thursday, May 10) to Saturday (May 12). tiff.net/­nextwave. Rating: NNNN


The rebranding of Sprockets as the TIFF Kids International Film Festival means the programmers had to find somewhere else to put their more grown-up offerings.

In past years, strong but potentially challenging entries like My Suicide, Bitter Sweetheart, Jitters and Through A Glass, Darkly arrived plastered with mature-content warnings and age restrictions. There’s no room for them in the current incarnation of the festival, so TIFF has spun off that portion into “a new festival for young movie lovers” called TIFF Next Wave.

Whatever. Names aren’t important. What is important is that the content of the spinoff live up to the standard set by Sprockets in previous years – and it does.

A highlight: Fat Kid Rules The World, the directorial debut of actor Matthew Lillard, whose intriguing CV includes geeking out in Scream, acting opposite an imaginary dog in Scooby-Doo and cuckolding George Clooney in The Descendants. Adapted from KL Going’s young adult novel, it’s the empathetic and heartfelt story of a miserable high-schooler (Jacob Wysocki) unwillingly befriended by a bipolar classmate (Matt O’Leary).

Lillard and his actors bore into the material. Wysocki and O’Leary are entirely convincing as symbiotic misfits, and Billy Campbell works wonders with the role of a rigid father, investing a potential cliché with depth and complexity. And though the material skews dark – this is, after all, a picture that opens with Wysocki’s character imagining his own very messy suicide – the movie never loses its sense of playful humour.

Another title worth a look is 17 Girls, a French drama spun out of the media frenzy a few years back over a clique of Massachusetts high school students alleged to have formed a pregnancy pact.

That turned out not to be the case, but directors Muriel and Delphine Coulin have made a drama in which it is, with an unexpectedly pregnant French teen (Louise Grinberg, one of the most memorable students in Laurent Cantet’s The Class) exhorting her classmates to get knocked up so they can raise their children together. And if you think that’s a rather short-sighted prospect, well, you and the film are on the same page.

normw@nowtoronto.com

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