Toronto Life: Toronto Movie Index

My Winnipeg (*****)

Posted on July 3, 2008 by Jason McBride

Both departure and summa, My Winnipeg is Maddin’s funniest and most Canadian film to date, a tribute to the hometown that has inspired and irritated him—in more or less equal measure—since he began making movies. A documentary of sorts, but primarily of the reality that is Maddin’s mind, the film has a ludicrous through line: the director (or his surrogate, actor Darcy Fehr, who also played “Guy Maddin” in Cowards Bend the Knee) rides a nighttime train, desperately trying to escape the city and its ghosts—and his mother, “a force as strong as all the trains in Winnipeg.” Continue...

WALL-E (***)

Posted on June 27, 2008 by David Balzer

Pixar is not a studio to compromise on quality, at least as far as visuals are concerned. Their new WALL-E is expertly rendered; the CGI animation is breathtakingly realistic, arguably beyond anything we’ve ever seen from them, or anyone else. And to begin with, WALL-E presents a concept to match. The eponymous robot is a remnant among remnants. Some time in the future he was created to compact garbage; in the far future in which this film is set, humans have long since abandoned earth for a flotilla of corporatized life-support systems in outer space. WALL-E still goes about the task he has been programmed for on earth, however. He wheels between obelisks of trash, forever building, and goes home at night to a lonely bunker, where he watches the same scene from Hello, Dolly! over and over again on a beat-up television. It seems WALL-E, in addition to his industriousness, is an archivist, and an incurable romantic. Continue...

Encounters at the End of the World (****)

Posted on June 27, 2008 by David Balzer

Few directors could get away with making a film like Encounters at the End of the World, and Werner Herzog is one of them. The documentary is a lot like his others: a cinematic logbook, this time about his journey to Antarctica. It rests on Herzog’s cultivated Teutonic persona, expressed in a voice-over narration that makes everything he presents seem both fallacious and fascinating. Continue...

Expelled (*)

Posted on June 27, 2008 by David Balzer

For all Expelled’s asinine tautologies, one must concede a few things to its creator and smothering presence, anti-Darwinist Ben Stein. First, Stein is right to imply that scientists are not philosophers; to look to science for existential solace is, for most, a cold comfort. This is the primary oversight of Stein’s bête noire, Richard Dawkins, who, with his intellectual sanguinity, wants everyone to be capable of abandoning the irrational fear and hope that ties them to religion in favour of science’s perpetually unfolding world of facts. Second, Stein is not completely off in pointing to an ideological lineage connecting Darwin to eugenics and Nazism. The Nazis perverted the evolutionist’s ideas (they did the same to Nietzsche, Wagner and many others), but to completely divorce the two, as reactionary critics of Expelled have done, is inaccurate. It’s like saying Betty Friedan had nothing to do with Madonna. Continue...

Get Smart (*)

Posted on June 20, 2008 by David Balzer

Get Smart the ’60s television show, co-created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, was full of gags and groaners. There was little sophistication in it, but Get Smart the 2008 blockbuster has even less. It rehashes the series’s most popular jokes (the Cone of Silence, for instance) and adds a lot more asinine, prim ones for the sake of its intended Middle American demographic. Continue...

Before the Rains (**1/2)

Posted on June 20, 2008 by David Balzer

Before the Rains’ Henry Moores (Linus Roache) is a British developer in late-colonial India with ambitious plans to construct a road through the mountains. T.K. (Rahul Bose) is his indispensable assistant, and also a prominent member of a local Nayar community, which is just beginning to become swept up in the independence movement. T.K.’s flip-flopping is strained as he discovers an affair between Moores and Sajani, Moores’ maid, who is married to a brutish Hindu traditionalist. Then Moores’ wife arrives with their child, Peter, at the same time as Sajani’s husband begins to accuse her of infidelity, and a clash of wills and cultures follows. Continue...

The Incredible Hulk (***)

Posted on June 13, 2008 by David Balzer

The Incredible Hulk washes away Ang Lee’s eccentric and despised Hulk (2003) and puts in its place a competent franchise. Audiences who enjoy blockbuster superhero films—the predictable yet engrossing plot arcs, the populist tropes of heroism and individualism—will connect with this reworking, which takes no risks yet gets the job done without any major guffaws. And comic book aficionados (who no doubt already know this) will be thrilled by The Incredible Hulk’s teasers, which tie its narrative to that of the recent Iron Man, predicting in-development Marvel Studios projects about Thor, Captain America and, eventually, The Avengers (the writer for which is slated to be Zak Penn, who wrote The Incredible Hulk along with lead Ed Norton). Continue...

The Happening (*)

Posted on June 13, 2008 by David Balzer

M. Night Shyamalan is the critics’ favourite whipping boy because his films represent everything that’s wrong with auteurism. His idol is Hitchcock, yet Hitchcock was an auteur of another era—one who worked with ideas and scripts he did not conceive himself, and hired actors who could contribute their own considerable charisma to his films. Conversely, Shyamalan’s execrable new The Happening falls apart because it is in its director’s fist; nothing escapes his smothering purview. Continue...

Irina Palm (*)

Posted on June 13, 2008 by David Balzer

Maggie, a.k.a. Irina Palm, the heroine of Sam Garbarski’s latest film, is a poor, 50-something widow who gets a job jerking men off at a London sex club in order to pay for her ill grandson’s operation. She is played by legendary singer and hard-liver Marianne Faithfull. Despite this—and against all logical principles of storytelling and moviemaking—Irina Palm is basically dull and humourless. It trusts the authenticity of its conceit, and squanders the talents of its lead, a woman famous for her wryness. Continue...

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (*)

Posted on June 6, 2008 by David Balzer

Now in his 40s, Adam Sandler is in a deep, widely acknowledged creative funk (correspondingly, he’s gotten meatier and logier-looking, as if he’s been on the same diet and weightlifting regime for too long). Last year’s I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry wasn’t as execrable as fearful liberals said it was (the Alexander Payne–Jim Taylor–Barry Fanaro script actually had many bright moments), but Sandler’s performance was distinctly turgid. With You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, Sandler returns to co-writing after a hiatus (his last effort was in 2002’s animated Eight Crazy Nights, and before that 2000’s Little Nicky), and he is in poor shape. Zohan regurgitates the conceits of his ’90s comedies, complementing them with a distastefully simple-minded take on contemporary ethnic politics.

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Mongol (***)

Posted on June 6, 2008 by David Balzer

Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol—nominated for an Oscar as this year’s Best Foreign Language Film—is being marketed in North America as a jolty, gory war epic à la 300 (2007), which isn’t quite accurate. The film is violent, as any recounting of Genghis Khan’s early career must be, but its commitment to stylization owes more to precedent than to contemporary video games (though it does indulge in the obnoxious recent trend of filming fights at high speeds, so that every drop of blood is discernible). Bodrov, who is Russian, seems sympathetic to the graphic inroads made by Soviet cinema: many choppy sequences echo Eisenstein or Bondarchuk; depictions of ancient ritual bring to mind those in Sergei Parajanov’s cult classic Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964). Continue...

My Brother Is an Only Child (***)

Posted on June 6, 2008 by David Balzer

Daniele Luchetti’s My Brother Is an Only Child (Mio Fratello è Figlio Unico) will suffer from inevitable comparisons to Bertolucci, whose high-period films remain the gold standard for art films about Italian revolutionaries. Indeed, Luchetti’s film is so close in theme to Bertolucci that it would seem redundant were it not for a slight tweak in context: instead of the ’40s, My Brother gives us the Republican ’60s, when Mussolini’s legacy was present in the fascist-nationalist MSI party and vehemently rejected by the popular Communist Party. Continue...

Sex and the City (**)

Posted on May 30, 2008 by David Balzer

Sex and the City used to be a good show—a fact that faded further from view during its last few seasons, and of which the movie version seems terrified to remind us too often. This goodness was not rocket science. People liked the show’s four strong female leads, their unblushing attitudes toward sex, and especially the way they talked with each other: an assortment of bons mots, ribald neologisms and frank, sisterly advice. Sex and the City was always a fantasy, but its characters had authenticity. They wanted irrational things; were driven to absurd, humiliating lengths in pursuit of them; and were usually made to face, in the series’s perpetual moral, some form of compromise. Continue...

The Strangers (NO STARS)

Posted on May 30, 2008 by David Balzer

The Strangers’ awfulness is manifold. The thin, shock ’n’ schlock plot is based on true events (as a booming, Cops-like voice tells us at the beginning, reading aloud text that appears onscreen, as if the audience is illiterate) and concerns that oh-so-American of subjects, home invasion. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman are the beautiful couple that arrives at the latter’s parents’ vacation home after an already-rocky night, during which Tyler rejects his proposal of marriage. They walk in at four in the morning; she takes a bath, her face tear-stained; he, brow furrowed, digs into some ice cream. Then there’s a pounding at the door and, well, that’s that. Continue...

Planet B-Boy (***)

Posted on May 30, 2008 by David Balzer

Planet B-Boy is a well-made look at the culture of B-boying, popularly known as breakdancing, across the world. The thesis of director Benson Lee’s (Miss Monday) film is that B-boying is a craft, a way of life—not a retro fad that just happens to have lingered on 30 years after its inception. The focus of the documentary is a recent Battle of the Year, full of enthusiastic international athletes who in many cases have given up a lot, or have overcome some kind of socio-economic adversity in pursuit of their dreams. Continue...

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (****)

Posted on May 28, 2008 by David Balzer

As the fourth instalment of one of the most successful franchises in movie history, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is intrinsically unsatisfactory. It tacks itself on to an internally sound trilogy that began and ended in the ’80s, one that spoke fluently and dynamically to a generation of filmgoers. That said, Crystal Skull has shrewdly anticipated its own awkwardness; it is a consciously strange entity, one as desolate and esoteric in concept as it is entertaining in construct. Continue...

This Beautiful City (***)

Posted on May 23, 2008 by Stéphanie Verge

Local stage director Ed Gass-Donnelly has set his take on urban alienation and desperation in Queen West West, a decision that makes the mercurial neighbourhood a pivotal sixth character in this bleak five-person story. The characters’ worlds collide when Carol (Caroline Cave), a downtrodden architect’s wife, plunges from her condo’s balcony to the alley below, drawing coke-addled prostitute Pretty (Kristin Booth, who also stars in Young People Fucking), her boyfriend, Johnny (Aaron Poole), and cop Peter (Stuart Hughes) to the scene. Fast-forward three months later and Carol has survived, but now she must deal with her crumbling marriage to Harry (Noam Jenkins), who is consumed by the fact that he doesn’t know if she leaped or fell from their home. Continue...

The Edge of Heaven (***)

Posted on May 23, 2008 by David Balzer

The current cinematic trend towards exploring apparent truths of globalization shows no signs of stopping, and The Edge of Heaven, by director Fatih Akin (Head-On), is bound to impress savvy-seeming audiences and critics alike (it already won best screenplay at Cannes). Concerning a family in Germany and one in Turkey, the film uses two deaths to suggest a sequence of socio-political mirroring and counterbalancing between the two countries, and within the nascent European Union as a whole. But The Edge of Heaven’s topicality and clever, labyrinthine plotting (people keep missing each other by a hair’s breadth) isn’t quite enough: it’s too long (and, consequently, seems a tad self-important) and its characters, though wrapped in Akin’s concerted realism, are largely flat—be they shrill, lesbian student radicals; a sensitive, asexual professor; or an aging, jaded whore. Continue...

Savage Grace (***½)

Posted on May 16, 2008 by David Balzer

With Savage Grace, Julianne Moore plays a mid-century housewife for the fourth time in her career (the other three were for Far From Heaven, The Hours and The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio), but she shows no signs of fatigue or boredom. She has embraced the character type in a way old movie stars used to embrace them—as a means by which to plumb the conceptual depths of a persona, and to brand it as her own—thus making her performance endlessly fascinating to watch. Granted, Moore’s Barbara Baekeland is no suffering naïf, which is the most significant change from her previous roles. In Savage Grace, Barbara’s victimization draws her, Medea-like, toward a cool, perverse form of vengeance. Continue...

Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (****)

Posted on May 16, 2008 by David Balzer

Matt Wolf’s new documentary on cult musician Arthur Russell, Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, comes on the heels of a wave of reissues and endorsements by Jens Lekman, Victoria Bergsman, and Joel Gibb of the Hidden Cameras. Thankfully, Wolf is not out to position Russell as seminal or hip, but to use the events of his short life (ended by AIDS, in 1992) as a testament to his subject’s quiet, unflagging dedication to his art. Continue...

Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? (*)

Posted on May 16, 2008 by David Balzer

Those under the impression that vulgarity is the exclusive domain of the right wing need only watch the first few minutes of Morgan Spurlock’s new documentary, Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, during which a computer-generated Osama bops across the screen to the tune of MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.” Much more than Michael Moore, Spurlock is the left’s shock jock. He’ll do anything to get you to notice him and to prove a vague political point (such as stuffing himself with McDonald’s for a month, as he did in Super Size Me)—but once he’s got you looking, all he can think to do is another trick. Continue...

The Stone Angel (**)

Posted on May 14, 2008 by David Balzer

Kari Skogland’s The Stone Angel resembles Sarah Polley’s Away From Her, and not just because it’s a film about dying and death. Both are based on acclaimed Canadian literary works, by Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro, respectively. Both are directed by women. Both use the woeful Can-film vernacular style: bland, conventional editing, lighting and shot composition; intrusive, homely sound design and scoring that is virtually indistinguishable from that of a television drama. And both have a veteran, non-Canadian lead who gives a tremendously moving and hard-won performance, but whose efforts cannot save her film from the mediocrity it courts. Continue...

Son of Rambow (**)

Posted on May 9, 2008 by David Balzer

Son of Rambow is writer-director Garth Jennings’ cartoonish coming-of-age tale set in the 1980s, based loosely on his own forays as a youngster into amateur video filmmaking. His subject is little Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), an odd one for the ’80s as Will is a member of the Plymouth Brethren—a cloistered evangelical sect that rejects the excesses of mainstream secular society and its popular culture. Presumably because of this enforced detachment, Will is a prolific daydreamer and creator; one day, while waiting outside class while other students watch a movie, he encounters troublemaker Lee Carter (Will Poulter). Lee rapidly immerses Will in heresy, among other things introducing him to First Blood, in which Will sees an inspiring, outsized male prototype to replace his recently deceased father. Lee soon recruits Will to help him finish one of his videos—a project that takes Will, and in turn his family, further away from the community in which they have found shelter.

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The Unknown Woman (***½ )

Posted on May 9, 2008 by David Balzer

It doesn’t seem fair to give too much away about The Unknown Woman (La Sconosciuta), the new outing by Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore. Despite its flaws, the film depends so much on mystifying and terrifying its viewers that even the slightest spoiler could eradicate its considerable potency. Continue...

Redbelt (**)

Posted on May 9, 2008 by David Balzer

David Mamet’s Redbelt offers more of the same stilted dialogue and convoluted narrative for which the playwright-director is famous. Again Mamet takes a classic noir conceit—here, the boxing film—and makes it contemporary (Redbelt is about jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts), configuring it both as a parody of Hollywood brass and, consequently, as an allegory for the struggle of the principled individual against the capitalist system. Continue...

My Blueberry Nights (**)

Posted on May 9, 2008 by David Balzer

When critics scoffed at Wong Kar-Wai’s English language debut My Blueberry Nights at Cannes last year, it was as much a pronouncement on the film itself as a troubled look inward. Could it be that the acclaimed director of such contemporary art house classics as Chungking Express, Happy Together and In the Mood for Love had finally revealed himself to Western cinephiles as a vapid stylist whose deliberately loose handling of plot, character and dialogue was sloppy, rather than inspired? Continue...

Standard Operating Procedure (***)

Posted on May 2, 2008 by David Balzer

One of the most interesting things about Standard Operating Procedure is how much it fails as an Errol Morris film. Morris is best at investigating situations, his superior works—the previous The Fog of War, and his breakthrough, The Thin Blue Line—building up tension and suspense like a John Frankenheimer thriller. Morris calls Standard Operating Procedure investigative, but in most respects it is not: there seems little mystery to what happened at Abu Ghraib. Indeed, the dread that comes from contemplating the phenomenon stems in part from its chilling familiarity; anyone who follows U.S. politics or, for that matter, has worked within a government bureaucracy or corporate hierarchy, can (in part) understand how this shameful horror might have transpired. Continue...

21 (*½)

Posted on April 25, 2008 by David Balzer

“The best thing about Vegas,” says Kate Bosworth’s Jill near the beginning of 21, “is that you can become anything you want.” Such tacky jingoism may befit a young MIT whiz making millions at blackjack along with her professor and a crack team of student card-counters, but it can’t fuel a very good film about them. There is, indeed, little demystification of Vegas in 21. Main protagonist Ben (Across the Universe’s Jim Sturgess) has stars in his eyes pretty much from start to finish, and director Robert Luketic actually seems to think the place is glamorous. (Decadent, yes; sexy, maybe; but glamorous? Hell no.) Continue...

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (**)

Posted on April 25, 2008 by David Balzer

It takes Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) approximately 10 minutes to escape from Guantanamo Bay, during which time they meet real terrorists in the cell beside them and fend off advances from a big, fat guard looking for a blowjob (known to Gitmo inmates as a “cockmeat sandwich”). After that, they flee with some Cuban refugees to Florida, and it’s back to the picaresque journey that defined their first film: this time, instead of White Castle, they head toward the Texas wedding of Kumar’s ex, who is marrying a “douche” with political connections that might help to acquit them. Continue...

Then She Found Me (**)

Posted on April 25, 2008 by David Balzer

As a film about a woman on the brink of 40—and as one directed by and starring a woman around that age, Helen Hunt—Then She Found Me can seem, by sheer virtue of its existence, unique, compassionate and smart. This is by no means unfamiliar territory, however. One finds it abundantly in popular contemporary fiction (Then She Found Me is loosely based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, using more clichés than even she would dare to). Its compassion is limited to its whiny subject; its smartness is for the most part hollow and quippy. Continue...

War, Inc. (**)

Posted on April 25, 2008 by David Balzer

One of War, Inc.’s clearly identifiable inspirations is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. This is not shamefully overambitious as much as it is a misstep: do we really need another Strangelove, one of the (forgive the sacrilege) shrillest, most tedious of movie history’s acclaimed political satires? Continue...

London to Brighton (**)

Posted on April 18, 2008 by David Balzer

There is a long tradition of grit in British narrative art, and even the most provocative and moving examples of this—from Dickens to Orwell to such realist filmmakers as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh—have a whiff of upper-middle-class sensationalism about them. London to Brighton has (unlike, say, the recent Red Road) none of Brit grit’s saving graces and most of its faults: it may be involving in parts, but it always feels smarmy and exploitative. It is just not successful enough as a film to justify the kinds of suffering it so insistently shoves in its audiences’ faces. Continue...

Persepolis (****)

Posted on April 11, 2008 by Jason McBride

Marjane Satrapi’s acclaimed graphic novel of the same name was a witty and moving account of her childhood and adolescence in the tumultuous Iran of the ’70s and ’80s. In this animated adaptation, Satrapi (and her co-director, comic book artist Vincent Paronnaud) loses none of the wit and emotion and, with the aid of legendary actresses Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux and Chiara Mastrioanni—who voice Satrapi’s mother, grandmother (the film’s most beguiling character) and the protagonist herself, respectively—further amplifies the drama and pathos. The animation, largely in black and white just like the comic, is deft and compelling, shifting from a Peanuts-like simplicity to a more sophisticated style that recalls the Hernandez brothers’ Love and Rockets. At the centre is Satrapi’s self-portrait of a politicized, freethinking girl whose progressive, loving parents have taught her all she needs to know in order to battle an unjust society.

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Bella (no stars)

Posted on April 11, 2008 by David Balzer

It’s phenomena like Bella that make critics feel disaffected and icky. How could such a film gain such incredible audience adoration? It was one of the top 10 highest-grossing independent films of last year, and won the People’s Choice Award at TIFF, where it was greeted with teary-eyed standing ovations. Still, at the risk of sounding misanthropic, anyone who adores Bella is a dimwit with horrible taste. Continue...

Leatherheads (****)

Posted on April 4, 2008 by David Balzer

George Clooney’s Leatherheads begins with the old Universal Pictures logo (the one with the art deco font swirling around a crystalline globe) and doesn’t quite live up to that promise—well, not stylistically at least. Because it’s in sepia-toned colour (unlike Clooney’s last film, the sumptuously monochrome Good Night, And Good Luck) and employs an omnipresent jazz soundtrack by Randy Newman (’30s comedies never had such things), it presents more as one of those post-1970s, perfectly art-decorated nostalgia trips—à la Woody Allen’s Radio Days and Sweet and Lowdown—rather than the genuine article.

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Kenny (***)

Posted on April 4, 2008 by David Balzer

If only Kenny were a documentary instead of a mockumentary—then it would be a truly astounding film. Even as is, though, this hit Australian comedy about an eponymous Melbourne porta-potty (or porta-loo) installer has its share of authentic, startling moments, owing mostly to its low budget, which forces filmmakers Clayton and Shane Jacobson to go on-location for many of their pivotal scenes. Continue...

Under the Same Moon (**)

Posted on April 4, 2008 by David Balzer

Under the Same Moon (La Misma Luna) is about a pressing, contemporary topic—illegal migrant workers in the U.S.—yet treats it with an old-fashioned sentimentality that would make even Dickens blush. Carlitos (Adrián Alonso) is the film’s Little Nell, an adorable, down-and-out Mexican boy who, after the death of his kind grandmother, goes in search of his mother, Rosario (Kate del Castillo), a maid in L.A. (She’s trying to save up enough money to get him smuggled to her, natch.) Continue...

Run, Fat Boy, Run (***)

Posted on March 28, 2008 by David Balzer

David Schwimmer’s big-screen directorial debut, Run, Fat Boy, Run, unquestionably belongs to Simon Pegg, its co-writer and star. Pegg, best known for his partnerships with Nick Frost in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, has a doltish, deer-in-the-headlights expression that belies a clever, cruel sense of humour. As Run, Fat Boy, Run’s Dennis Doyle, he animates a comedic cliché, the loser-underdog—in this case, a London slacker who leaves his fiancée, Libby (Thandie Newton), at the altar only to challenge her new boyfriend, Whit (Hank Azaria), to a marathon in order to win her back. Doyle doesn’t need an overhaul so much as a confidence boost: he’s got the right opinion about Whit (a showboating corporate shark who works in The Gherkin) and his attempts at training—which he does in vintage rock T-shirts and H&M undies—are brash, Cleesian parodies of the sport. Continue...

The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (***)

Posted on March 28, 2008 by David Balzer

Cao Hamburger’s The Year My Parents Went on Vacation deals with the primary subject (next, perhaps, to adultery) of foreign films that reach English audiences: coming of age. No one with the slightest interest in seeing the film should be surprised, then, by its positioning of a defining moment in a child’s life against a backdrop of political upheaval. Here, Mauro (Michel Joelsas), a young Brazilian soccer fanatic eagerly anticipating a Pelé-led victory at the 1970 World Cup, is dropped off at his grandfather’s apartment building by his parents. They tell him they’re going on vacation, but they are really trying to escape persecution from the country’s mounting military dictatorship.

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Paranoid Park (****)

Posted on March 21, 2008 by David Balzer

Gus Van Sant’s fans, dwindling in number though they may be, like to enthuse about transcendent moments in his cinema—moments that to non-fans come off as plodding, hollow and, if beautiful young men are involved, unnecessarily and uncomfortably lecherous. Paranoid Park, the director’s latest, is patently his—all of his themes and tactics are here in droves, occasionally to the film’s detriment—but it goes a long way toward substantiating his fans’ claims.

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Days of Darkness (**)

Posted on March 21, 2008 by David Balzer

Denys Arcand’s Days of Darkness (L’Âge des ténèbres) is the end of a trilogy that began with The Decline of the American Empire and continued with The Barbarian Invasions. Like those films, it pitches itself as a scathing satire of contemporary Québécois society. Yet this recent outing is mostly about contemporary society in the entire developed world—perhaps about life as it has always been for critical, sensitive people—and is too crude and smug to be terribly scathing. Continue...

Snow Angels (**)

Posted on March 21, 2008 by David Balzer

The paint-by-numbers American realism of David Gordon Green’s (George Washington, All the Real Girls) new ensemble piece, Snow Angels is, at first, endurable. Set in small-town Pennsylvania, the film introduces us to a familiar group of suffering white people: sexually awakened teenager Arthur (Michael Angarano), who is coping with the separation of his parents; Arthur’s old babysitter Annie (Kate Beckinsale), who now has a child of her own; her estranged, possibly psychotic, born-again husband, Glen (Sam Rockwell); and Barb (Amy Sedaris), whose husband, Nate (Nicky Katt), is having an affair with Annie. Dime-store literary devices, which are Green’s stock-in-trade, are everywhere—Arthur’s cold, emotionally unavailable father (Griffin Dunne) studies the sex life of plants; Arthur’s new girlfriend (Olivia Thirlby) wears vintage glasses, carries a vintage camera, and sees things for what they really are—but there is a certain momentum created by the characters’ brief, tetchy interactions. A handful of improvised scenes with Annie’s child Tara (Grace Hudson) are particularly noteworthy. Continue...

Funny Games (**)

Posted on March 14, 2008 by David Balzer

Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, both his original 1997 Austrian film and the new (more or less) shot-for-shot American remake, is like that relentless, twerpy guy in your Intro to Philosophy class: disagree with him all you want, but he’ll just keep finding ways to use your arguments against you. To rail against Funny Games for being cruel, manipulative and juvenile is to play right into its caustic little palm: if you hate it and leave, you’re a hypocrite; if you love it (or hate it and stay anyway) you’re a sadist. Continue...

Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! (***)

Posted on March 14, 2008 by David Balzer

Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! is such an effective, universal tale that it can be, and has been, spun any which way. Its tale of an elephant’s steadfast, verifiable belief in life on a tiny speck of dust (“A person’s a person, no matter how small” is the book’s famous moral) can be harnessed as allegorical propaganda for right or left, libertarianism or communism, god or science. Continue...

Sleepwalking (*)

Posted on March 14, 2008 by David Balzer

The intended grittiness of Sleepwalking is instantly compromised by opening shots of a dark eyelinered, snakeskin-booted Charlize Theron, whose character’s name is Joleen, freaking out at a police station over her boyfriend’s recent arrest for marijuana possession. Then she gets into a car with her brother James (Nick Stahl), pulls out a cigarette, and begins alternating nicotine puffs with blasts from her asthma inhaler. Continue...

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (****)

Posted on March 7, 2008 by David Balzer

There’s something not quite right about Frances McDormand’s Miss Pettigrew. A frowzy clergyman’s daughter who works as a London governess—an unsuccessful venture for her, as she can’t help proselytizing to her employers—she begins the film penniless, and soon falls into the service of Delysia Lafosse (the irrepressible Amy Adams), whose glamour seems bound to change her forever. Continue...

10,000 B.C. (no stars)

Posted on March 7, 2008 by David Balzer

In Roland Emmerich’s version of 10,000 B.C.—the year “when legend began” as his film’s tag line tells us—sabre-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths and flesh-eating birds attack a tribe of English-speaking dreadlocked men with manicured, overdeveloped chests and arms (Ben Harper and Lenny Kravitz’s ancestors, presumably?). Pyramids are erected. Disparate ecosystems (rain forests, savannahs, mountain ranges) are kitty-corner to each other. Love and magic—notably the powers of an old soothsayer with an uncanny resemblance to the Boob Lady from The Simpsons Movie—make the world go around. Continue...

The Other Boleyn Girl (***)

Posted on February 29, 2008 by David Balzer

The Other Boleyn Girl, scripted by Peter Morgan (The Queen, The Last King of Scotland) and based on Philippa Gregory’s 2001 novel, puts melodrama first and history second. This is wise, for its plot points (some of which are daringly outré, right out of a Shakespearean problem play) are, above all, titillating fun, rather than trite lessons on the making of the modern world. And its cast, especially Kristin Scott Thomas as the Boleyn mother, wants very much to share the romp with us. This alone puts the film head and shoulders above, say, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, in which only Cate Blanchett seems aware of the suds through which she is unmistakably wading. Continue...

The Counterfeiters (***)

Posted on February 29, 2008 by David Balzer

Stefan Ruzowitzky’s The Counterfeiters—which won the best foreign language film Oscar last Sunday—aims to be a Holocaust movie with a difference. It doesn’t succeed in doing this, despite its focus on a rapscallion who seems almost immune to suffering. The sky is always grey, for instance, and there is a manipulative gas-or-water communal shower scene. Continue...

Semi-Pro (**)

Posted on February 29, 2008 by David Balzer

Any one of us could write a treatment for a new Will Ferrell movie: set it in the ’70s or early ’80s, give him a daggy haircut and duds, make him a big fish in a small pond who gets his comeuppance but triumphs anyway, throw in Andy Richter and some scantily clad babes (definitely an animal attack), and there you go. Continue...

Be Kind Rewind (****½)

Posted on February 22, 2008 by David Balzer

For director Michel Gondry, cinema begins and ends with its first genius, Belle Époque magician-by-trade Georges Méliès; his other influences (Busby Berkeley, Jacques Demy and, perhaps most of all, Jacques Rivette) can all be traced back to this source. Like Méliès, Gondry has been pegged, wrongly, as an infantilist—someone trapped in cutesy nostalgia—and his new Be Kind Rewind, with its adolescent capering and devotion to all things analog, is sure to suffer similar accusations. But Be Kind Rewind deserves more. It is a treatise on why cinema matters—and on why its modus operandi hasn’t changed a bit since Méliès did A Trip to the Moon in 1902. Continue...

Charlie Bartlett (***)

Posted on February 22, 2008 by David Balzer

The slick, charismatic, eponymous hero of Charlie Bartlett, well-played by Anton Yelchin, is obviously meant as a riff on John Hughes’s preppy icon of ’80s rebellion, Ferris Bueller. Unlike Bueller, however, Bartlett claims the school, rather than the outside world, as his exclusive domain. He shuns the victimology of the high-priced child-psych shrinks his alcoholic mother (Hope Davis) sends him to, and exploits the shrinks’ rubber-wrist prescription writing, selling anti-depressants and stimulants to his messed-up peers in the boys’ bathroom and becoming, as a result, the big man on campus. Continue...

La France (**)

Posted on February 22, 2008 by David Balzer

One of last year’s more obscure critical fixations, La France has, as a concept at least, much to recommend it. Serge Bozon’s story of French soldiers in World War I puts a stubborn, enterprising woman, Camille (Sylvie Testud), at its centre. After receiving a letter from her husband indicating, enigmatically, that she should never contact him again, Camille cuts her hair short and runs away from her small town in North Eastern France to look for him. She stumbles upon a cadre of soldiers, who begrudgingly accept her, putting her in soldier’s garb. As the group’s travels become increasingly desperate, they begin, inexplicably, to pull out instruments and sing beautiful songs, which constitute the only music in the film, and are inspired by post-Revolver pop-psychedelia, not, as one might assume, by period appropriate music hall ditties. Continue...

Vantage Point (*)

Posted on February 22, 2008 by David Balzer

Vantage Point offers election year audiences the sick pleasure of watching a staid U.S. president getting shot again and again and again—though that pleasure wears quickly thin when the president is a rumpled, wooden William Hurt, who, as the film’s trailer even indicates, seems to possess strange powers of resurrection. Continue...

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