Canadian Film Review: Into the Forest (2016)

* * 1/2
Director: Patricia Rozema
Starring: Ellen Page, Evan Rachel Wood

If all technological infrastructure (which, at this point in time, is basically all infrastructure) were to fall in an instant, how long would you keep holding out hope that it will come back and life will resume as normal? A week? A month? Surely not a year and change. Honestly, even a month sounds like pushing it, no matter how naive you might be. I suppose that was at the heart of my problem with Into the Forest, an intimate portrait of the apocalypse. I can buy that one would cling to the normal and the familiar for comfort for a while, but at a certain point you have to concede, because time has passed and because you've seen first-hand how things were already coming apart after only a few days, that your old way of life is gone, so you should probably stop spending so much time rehearsing for that damn dance audition that's never going to happen and start devoting more time to figuring out your food and shelter situations.

Canadian Film Review: The Forbidden Room (2015)

* * * 1/2
Director: Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson
Starring: Roy Dupuis, Clara Furey

If you're already a Guy Maddin fan, then all I need to say about The Forbidden Room is that it's Guy Maddin's most recent movie and that should be all that you need to know. If you aren't a Guy Maddin fan, The Forbidden Room isn't likely to make you one, as it's perhaps the most "Guy Maddin-y" movie Maddin has ever made. If you simply haven't experienced a Guy Maddin film before, I wouldn't recommend starting with this one, which is probably his least accessible, although it is quite the sensory experience. Maddin has never been a filmmaker hemmed in by convention, but he feels particularly unleashed here, unfolding a series of narratives out of each other and more or less exploding them and blending them all together in the finale. It is a weird (often hilariously so) movie, but if you like your movies weird, this is the one for you.

Canadian Film Review: Room (2015)

* * * 1/2
Director: Lenny Abrahamson
Starring: Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay

"This is the story you get." It may not be pretty, it may not be nice, but sometimes the narrative is given to you by circumstance rather than decided by you according to choice and desire. Room, based on the novel by Emma Donoghue, who also provides the screenplay, is the story of a usurped narrative, of a girl plucked from the story she thought she was living - one of an ordinary girl who would live an ordinary life doing ordinary things - and dropped into a nightmare scenario that is, horrifically, less uncommon in real life than most of us would probably have ever guessed. It's a story of pain and brutality and the enduring effects of trauma, but it's also a story of hope, of endurance, and of love. It's a difficult movie, but also a profoundly moving one.

Canadian Film Review: Cloudburst (2011)

* * *
Director: Thom Fitzgerald
Starring: Olympia Dukakis, Brenda Fricker

Thom Fitzgerald's Cloudburst, based on his stage play of the same name, is a surprisingly daring movie. It's not daring because of its premise, which involves a long-term same-sex couple trying to get married so that they can avoid being separated and which almost seems quaint at this point, but it is kind of daring for the way that it depicts its characters and their relationship and, in particular, their sexuality. Typically the elderly are depicted in pop culture as being not just sexless, but desireless as well, but Cloudburst is pretty unapologetic in portraying its couple as sexual beings. That feels sort of revolutionary, even if the film's more overtly stated political message is slightly blunted by the fact that it relies on a straw man to make its point.

Canadian Film Review: Brand Upon the Brain! (2006)

* * * *
Director: Guy Maddin
Starring: Sullivan Brown, Gretchen Krich

There's something very invigorating about a Guy Maddin film. As a filmmaker, he does things so completely, defiantly his own way, unfettered by what's on trend, unconcerned with what's commercial, that his films are always their own distinct things that cannot be mistaken as coming from anyone else. Brand Upon the Brain! is one of his better known, and more widely seen, gems and it's also one of his best. A psychosexual drama about a man grappling with the unresolved passions of his adolescence, and the secrets of his family's strange dynamics, Brand Upon the Brain! is a surrealist adventure that you have to see to believe... and even then, you might not quite believe it.

Canadian Film Review: Patch Town (2015)

* *
Director: Craig Goodwill
Starring: Rob Ramsay, Zoie Palmer, Julian Richings

Patch Town is a movie for anyone who, as a child, imagined that their toys had a consciousness of their own and feelings that would be hurt if another toy was chosen to be played with instead. Or, perhaps, Patch Town is exactly the kind of movie that sort of person shouldn't watch, because it can only tap into latent feelings of guilt. A fantasy in which the toys of yesterday are revealed to be the slave laborers of today, abandoned by those who supposedly loved them and sucked into a system of tyranny, Patch Town is a mix of dark comedy and light suspense, with a dash of music tossed in. It isn't always successful as a film (particularly as a musical, as the incorporation of songs seems to be something of an afterthought), but it's always interesting and parts of it are rather delightful.

Canadian Film Review: Mommy (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: Xavier Dolan
Starring: Anne Dorval, Suzanne Clement, Antoine Olivier Pilon

Often in film, family dysfunction is presented as "quirkiness," an eccentricity played for laughs and something that is ultimately harmless and, when push comes to shove, makes the family unit stronger. Xavier Dolan's Mommy goes in a different direction, centering on the kind of dysfunction that is painful and exhausting, on a son whose often violent outbursts can't be anticipated let alone controlled, and on a mother who is so overwhelmed and lacking in support that her love for her son may never be enough. Thematically, Mommy is one of Dolan's most mature and sensitive films (I'd say that Laurence Anyways is the only one that truly gives it a run for its money in that regard), though like all the director's films it can be exhilarating and trying in equal measure - sometimes even within the same scene.

Canadian Film Review: Tu Dors Nicole (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: Stephane Lafleur
Starring: Julianne Cote, Marc-Andre Grondin, Catherine St-Laurent

At 22 years old, having just finished college, Nicole is enjoying one last summer before running out of excuses to put off the big transition to adulthood. She's been dreaming away her life and needs to wake up - though it takes her some time, and the convergence of multiple small crises, before she realizes it. Taking a tone that is largely tongue-in-cheek and slightly magic realist, Tu Dors Nicole's writer/director Stephane Lafleur weaves an often delightful, somewhat bizarre, but altogether spellbinding comic drama with an absolutely terrific lead performance at its center.

Canadian Film Review: The Captive (2014)

*
Director: Atom Egoyan
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Rosario Dawson, Scott Speedman, Mireille Enos

The general consensus on Atom Egoyan seems to be that he's been in a sharp decline as an artist for the last decade, or so. I haven't really agreed with that, having found things to like about even Where the Truth Lies and Chloe, two of his least loved films, but The Captive may be the film that makes me change my tune. This abduction thriller is not just a mess, it's borderline unwatchable. Built around characters who are wafer thin, performances that never quite jive with each other, and a story which, were it told in linear fashion rather than in Egoyan's signature scrambled narrative style, would be immediately exposed as a tale that wouldn't even qualify for distinction as a good Lifetime movie, it fails in pretty much every respect. Seriously, this thing is baaaaad.

Canadian Film Review: Tom at the Farm (2013)

* * * 1/2
Director: Xavier Dolan
Starring: Xavier Dolan, Pierre-Yves Cardinal

To watch an Xavier Dolan film is to watch the films that he was watching at the time he made his. This isn't a bad thing, in and of itself (the same thing could, after all, be said of Quentin Tarantino), particularly when a filmmaker has such good taste in the influences worn on his or her sleeve and such a keen ability to put their own twist on it. Dolan's 2013 thriller Tom at the Farm plays like something from Hitchcock - deeply unsettling, built around anticipation of something happening more than the thing itself, sexually preoccupied, and centering on a protagonist who combines both the "cool blonde" and the unwitting man dragged into a plot he couldn't have foreseen - but it is also, unmistakably, a film with its own voice and point of view. It may also very well be Dolan's least self-indulgent film, running at a brisk pace and featuring not an ounce of narrative of stylistic fat.

Canadian Film Review: An Eye for Beauty (2014)

* *
Director: Denys Arcand
Starring: Eric Bruneau, Melanie Mercosky, Melanie Thierry, Marie-Josée Croze

Beautiful people doing ugly things in beautiful locations. An Eye for Beauty, the latest from Canadian master Denys Arcand, will give you a serious case of house envy, but inspires little beyond that. A listless drama about the emotional destruction wrought by an affair, Arcand reunites with actress Marie-Josée Croze for the first time since 2003's The Barbarian Invasions, for which she won Best Actress and he Best Screenplay at Cannes, and then gives her nearly nothing to do, which is a particular shame since she's always the most interesting person on screen whenever she appears. A rare misstep for Arcand, An Eye for Beauty is as emotionally empty as it is gorgeously photographed.

Canadian Film Review: Maps to the Stars (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: David Cronenberg
Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Julianne Moore, John Cusack

For me, Maps to the Stars is a bit of return to form for David Cronenberg, whose last two films - the decent, but kind of bloodless A Dangerous Method, and the ambitious but dull Cosmopolis - didn't really do much for me. A bit messy, tonally inconsistent, full of "unlikeable" characters, and centering on subject matter that can most generously be described as "uncomfortable," Maps is certain to have its detractors, but I enjoyed it for its dark comedy, its scathing view of celebrity, and its terrific performances. That said, after this film and Interstellar it will be some time before I need to see another film which finds it necessary to have its characters repeat one section of one poem over and over and over again.

Canadian Film Review: Blood Pressure (2012)

* * 1/2
Director: Sean Garrity
Starring: Michelle Giroux

A woman receives a letter. It reveals that someone has been watching her, secretly assessing her for a special task. As the letter writer has determined, she's dissatisfied with her life both at home, where she is ignored and unappreciated by her husband and children, and at work, where she finds herself at odds with a mircomanaging superior determined to find fault with everything she does, and ready for a change - even if it means following the increasingly convoluted instructions of an anonymous correspondent. Sean Garrity's Blood Pressure has a premise that could send its story in a few different directions and ends up falling somewhere between thriller and romance, and for much of its running time it spins an intriguing yarn that becomes increasingly engrossing - at least right up until the story hits its final act and goes hard off the rails.

Canadian Film Review: Cinemanovels (2013)

* * *
Director: Terry Miles
Starring: Lauren Lee Smith

Filmmakers put a lot of themselves into their films, and when you watch the entire body of someone's work, certain themes and ideas emerge over and over again as a common through line - but can you really know a person through their films and what they put into them? Terry Miles' Cinemanovels is a film about movies and identity, about a woman whose father is like a giant question mark in her history and who attempts to answer that question by watching all of the movies he wrote and directed. That what she ends up learning is more about herself than her father is, perhaps, inevitable but that makes the route she has to follow to get there no less interesting. Though it made the festivals rounds, including premiering a TIFF, Cinemanovels appears not to have received even a small theatrical release which, while not surprising for a Canadian film, is still unfortunate as it is light and engaging enough that it could have found an audience with a bit of a promotional push.

Canadian Film Review: The Grand Seduction (2014)

* * *
Director: Don McKellar
Starring: Brendan Gleeson, Taylor Kitsch

Films like The Grand Seduction are projects that are engineered to please. They don't take chances, they offer no innovations, but they demonstrate the simple pleasures of the familiar. You know from the beginning just how the film will end, and you know more or less completely how it will get there, so its success or failure hinges on whether it can charm you into thinking that you want to listen to a story that you've already been told. In that respect, Don McKellar's The Grand Seduction is a success even if, in the grand scheme of things, it's a minor work as likely to be remembered after the fact with some affection as it is to fade from memory completely. I'm sure it seems like I'm damning the film with faint praise, but I actually did rather enjoy it. It's a sincere story, told in relaxed fashion, and it knows how to make the most of the innate likeability of its cast and its setting.

Canadian Film Review: Hard Core Logo (1996)

* * * 1/2
Director: Bruce McDonald
Starring: Hugh Dillon, Callum Keith Rennie

It's a sad truth about the Canadian film industry that, unless you're in Toronto or Quebec, it's incredibly difficult for Canadian viewers to get hold of Canadian films. I don't just mean during their theatrical runs (though it is rare, at least where I live, for a Canadian film to play in any of the local theaters), but on video as well (even before all the video stores started shutting down). In that kind of climate, it's a minor miracle when a Canadian film ends up being as widely seen as Bruce McDonald's Hard Core Logo, which has attained status as a Canadian classic (voted in multiple polls as one of the best Canadian films ever made) and a cult following outside of Canada. It's easy to understand why, too. A mockumentary about the ill-fated reunion of the titular punk band, Hard Core Logo is an incredibly entertaining film and Canadian to its core.

Canadian Film Review: Monsieur Lazhar (2011)

* * * 1/2
Director: Philippe Falardeau
Starring: Mohamed Fellag, Sophie Nelisse

Since 2003, when Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions took the prize, Canada has had a pretty decent track record when it comes to the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars. Invasions is the only Canadian winner to date, but four Canadian films have been nominated in the category since then, compared to the mere two that earned nominations between 1971 (the first year Canada submitted to the category) and 2003. One of those nominees was Philippe Falardeau's Monsieur Lazhar, a quiet and exceedingly gentle movie, particularly compared to the Canadian nominees of the year immediately before (Denis Villeneuve's Greek tragedy Incendies) and immediately after (Kim Nguyen's searing child soldier drama Rebelle/War Witch). On the surface, Monsieur Lazhar's tale of a teacher trying to connect with his students sounds like a familiar story (and the sort of typical, non-challenging fare that AMPAS so often goes for in the foreign language category), but while Falardeau keeps things simple, he nevertheless manages to tell a deeply affecting story about the psychic space where grief resides and the many ways that grief finds to express itself.

Canadian Film Review: Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997)

* * 1/2
Director: Guy Maddin
Starring: Pascale Bussieres, Shelly Duvall, Alice Krige

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is arguably the most important film in Guy Maddin's filmography, not because it's good, but because the difficulties Maddin encountered in making it, and his ultimate disappointment in the final product, put him on a track to make the series of acclaimed films that followed. Before Twilight, Maddin was flirting with the possibility of a move to Hollywood and entering a "director for hire" phase. After Twilight, which is the least "Maddin-like" of his films yet still nowhere near a mainstream Hollywood movie, he would retreat from feature films for several years and then emerge, creatively recharged, to make such films as Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, Cowards Bend the Knee, The Saddest Music in the World, Brand Upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg. The disillusionment Maddin felt with the process of making Twilight can be felt throughout the film, which has some typical Maddin touches of weirdness but also possesses an odd feeling of disconnect between what's occurring onscreen and the man behind the camera. Still, while Twilight of the Ice Nymphs may be the least of Maddin's features, it's not a film wholly lacking in value.

Canadian Film Review: Careful (1992)

* * *
Director: Guy Maddin
Starring: Kyle McCulloch, Sarah Neville, Brent Neale, Gosia Zenaida, Paul Cox

Filmmaker Guy Maddin approaches things from outside the box. To get an idea of just how far outside, you need only consider two of his initial casting ideas for a key character in Careful: Martin Scorsese and hockey hall of famer Bobby Hull. Scorsese may not be too out there as a choice given that he has acting credits to his name for small roles/cameos. But Bobby Hull? That's an idea that takes some imagination to come up with. Neither man ended up in the film (Scorsese reportedly had to drop out due to his commitments to Cape Fear), but the idea of either is intriguingly odd. However, as odd as those ideas may be, they could never be quite so odd that they couldn't be made to fit with Careful, Maddin's homage to the German "mountain films" of the 1920s and early 1930s, but with a very Maddin-esque take on a classic form.

Canadian Film Review: Cowards Bend the Knee (2003)

* * * 1/2
Director: Guy Maddin
Starring: Darcy Fehr, Melissa Dionisio, Amy Stewart

Sex. Murder. Hockey. Cowards Bend the Knee, the first entry in Guy Maddin's "Me Trilogy," which includes Brand Upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg, is a delightfully twisted little piece of work which is as darkly funny and enjoyable as it is deeply eccentric. A silent film shot in black and white and on Super-8mm film, what Cowards Bend the Knee lacks in budget (the film was made for about $30k during the pre-production period of Maddin's great The Saddest Music in the World), it makes up for in sheer entertaining weirdness, having been originally conceived of as series of short films that would form part of an art installation. However it came into being, the film is one which makes the most of what it has and uses it to deliver something unlike anything you've ever seen before.