movie reviews Playing this week Cinema, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande - Steeles, Grande - Yonge, Queensway, Rainbow Promenade, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24
How to find a listing
Movie listings are comprehensive and organized alphabetically. Listings include name of film, director’s name in brackets, a review, running time and a rating. Reviews are by Norman Wilner (NW), Susan G. Cole (SGC), Glenn Sumi (GS), Andrew Dowler (AD) and Radheyan Simonpillai (RS) unless otherwise specified.
Alvin And The Chipmunks: ChipwreCked (Mike Mitchell) places the Chip-
munks on a desert island, where they’re accompanied by former SNL player Jenny Slate and series villain David Cross. Preschoolers might enjoy the slapstick in this castaway comedy, but others will find this high-pitched squeakquel unbearable. 87 min. n (Phil Brown) 401 & Morningside, Coliseum Mississauga, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande Steeles, Kennedy Commons 20, Queensway, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Yorkdale
The rating system is as follows: NNNNN Top 10 of the year NNNN Honourable mention NNN Entertaining NN Mediocre N Bomb
Ñ= Critics’ pick (highly recommended)
ñThe ArTisT
Movie theatres are listed at the end and can be cross-referenced to our film times on page 65.
ñThe AdvenTures of TinTin
(Steven Spielberg) brings Belgian cartoonist Hergé’s boy journalist to the big screen. It’s the first “performance capture” movie that doesn’t look like it’s populated by wall-eyed zombies. And it’s thrilling. Spielberg crafts a series of amazingly ambitious action sequences, one of which is as complex as the great truck chase in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. 108 min. nnnn (NW) 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Carlton
(Michel Hazanavicius) is a stylistic experiment pulled off with panache. A 1920s silent film star (Jean Dujardin) and fan and aspiring star (Bérénice Bejo) meet cute, and soon her career is taking off (she’s dubbed the “it girl” of talkies) as his falls into decline. Filming in gorgeous black-and-white, director Hazanavicius lovingly embraces all the tropes of silent cinema (iris shots, titles), sharpening the familiar narrative with a slight edge that should satisfy contemporary tastes. 100 min. nnnn (GS) Beach Cinemas, Colossus, Grande - Yonge, Kennedy Commons 20, Kingsway Theatre, SilverCity Mississauga, Varsity, Yonge & Dundas 24
Celebrating Black History Month TD, CFC and Clement Virgo Present
AN EVENING WITH
Pam Grier THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2 Cineplex Odeon Varsity and VIP Cinemas 7PM In Conversation with Pam Grier TICKETS $20.00* www.totix.ca or at the door *plus applicable surcharges
cfccreates.com/bhm
CLEMENT VIRGO PRODUCTIONS
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january 26 - february 1 2012 NOW
BACk To The seA (Thom Lu) comes up dry on thrills, laughs, appealing characters, visual splendour or anything else that might appeal to the small fry who are its intended audience or the adults accompanying them. Things start lively with Kevin the flying fish, who wants to go to Barbados, but he’s soon caught by fishermen and put in the seafood tank of a Chinese restaurant. The movie descends into protracted, repetitive dialogue scenes between Kevin, who wants to escape, the other fish, and the restaurant owner and his perpetually downcast son, who doesn’t want to go into the family business. Kevin’s situation is hopeless until he and the son unite to foil a thief. The characters are visually simple and the fish lack range of movement. Backgrounds are well-drawn and coloured but have little texture or detail. 96 min. n (AD) Opens Jan 27 at Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Kennedy Commons 20, Queensway, Yonge & Dundas 24.
ñBeAuTy And The BeAsT 3d
(Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise) is a 3-D rerelease of the classic 1991 animated film about the resourceful Belle (voiced by Paige O’Hara) and the cursed Beast (Robby Benson) who’s holding her captive in his enchanted castle. The film remains one of Disney’s glories, and one of the best movie musicals ever. All elements of the story are introduced in the soaring opening number, and the French-flavoured Be Our Guest is one of the catchiest tunes written by the brilliant team of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. Even 20 years after the fact, it’s still rare to find a female movie hero who’d rather read a book and experience adventure than hook up with the buff town hunk. The 3-D adds depth to the forest and castle scenes: wolves leap out at you, snowflakes and dust fall believably in the foreground, and that ballroom scene (you know the one) becomes even more dizzyingly romantic. As a bonus, it’s preceded by a short and very funny 3-D sequel to Disney’s Tangled. nnnnn (GS) 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Coliseum Mississauga, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Empire Theatres at Empress Walk, Grande - Steeles, Kennedy Commons 20, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale
ñCAfé de flore
(Jean-Marc Vallée) finds writer/director Vallée (C.R.A.Z.Y., The Young Victoria) playing out a complex, time-jumping narrative involving a present-day Montreal father (Kevin Parent) in the throes of a mid-life crisis and the mother (Vanessa Paradis) of a Down syndrome child in 1969 Paris. Some people are going to hate it; I found it bracing, daring and entirely invigorating. Stay for the closing credits. Subtitled. 120 min. nnnnn (NW) Canada Square, Carlton Cinema
ñCArnAge
(Roman Polanski) turns Yasmina Reza’s play God Of Carnage into a vividly cinematic endurance test, as two sets of parents (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly, and Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) face off in a Brooklyn apartment over a fight between their sons. Not necessarily something you’d call a holiday delight, but a damn fine little picture. 79 min. nnnn (NW) Canada Square, Carlton Cinema, Cumberland 4, Empire Theatres at Empress Walk, Kennedy Commons 20, TIFF Bell Lightbox
ChemiCAl BroThers: don’T Think is the screening of a live multimedia show by the British electronic duo, taped at Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival in 2011. 105 min. Jan 26, 7:45 pm, at Scotiabank Theatre.
ConTrABAnd (Baltasar Kormákur) stars Mark Wahlberg as an ex-smuggler risking everything to run one last job, and yeah, that’s a movie he’s made before. It’s a movie everyone has made before, come to think of it – including director Kormákur, who co-wrote and starred in the 2008 Icelandic thriller Reykjavik-Rotterdam and now finds himself in the curious position of directing its remake. Wahlberg’s got pretty good at the stone-faced hero thing, and his simmering presence suits the film’s tone nicely. The ever-mounting complications start to feel a little ridiculous about an hour
Ñ
in, but Kormákur keeps the action moving so swiftly, you won’t really mind. The admirably modest scale makes for an interesting change of pace after the IMAX-sized spectacle of the Mission: Impossible and Sherlock Holmes sequels. 109 min. nnn (NW) 401 & Morningside, Carlton Cinema, Coliseum Scarborough, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande - Steeles, Grande Yonge, Interchange 30, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale
ñCoriolAnus
(Ralph Fiennes) is a modern updating of Shakespeare’s tragedy about a Roman general and war hero (Fiennes) whose refusal to play politics leads to his exile and an eventual alliance with his mortal enemy (Gerard Butler). It’s a muscular, vivid directorial debut for its star, who’s assembled a terrific cast – Vanessa Redgrave as his formidable mother, Jessica Chastain as his loyal wife, and Brian Cox as a wily but ultimately noble politician – and given them their head. (The focus rightly remains on his character, a ferocious warrior undone by his own integrity.) Barry Aykroyd, who shot The Hurt Locker and Green Zone, convincingly creates an alternate Rome out of British and Serbian locations, and John Logan streamlines the play into a series of harsh confrontations, handing most of the formal exposition to media pundits. Sure, Baz Luhrmann did it 15 years ago in Romeo + Juliet, but a good device is a good device. 123 min. nnnn (NW) Grande - Yonge, Kennedy Commons 20, Varsity
A dAngerous meThod (David Cronen-
berg) finds the master filmmaker adapting Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure, exploring the friendship and eventual schism between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mor tensen), which gave birth to modern psychoanalysis. Cronenberg’s clinical approach to Hampton’s too on-the-nose dialogue makes for a very static drama; it’s as if the filmmaker is much more comfortable dealing with eroticism as subtext than text. Fassbender and Mortensen are never less than watchable as the cautious Jung and the more flamboyant Freud, but Keira Knightley seems mannered and artificial as Jung’s patient, disciple and lover, Sabina Spielrein, whose tragic story is relegated to the background by Hampton’s focus on the conflict between the two analysts. 93 min. nn (NW) Canada Square, Coliseum Scarborough, Eglinton Town Centre, Empire Theatres at Empress Walk, Interchange 30, Kennedy Commons 20, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre, Varsity
The dArkesT hour (Chris Gorak) feels like a third-rate Stephen King movie of the week. A handful of hot young tourists in Moscow witness an invasion by invisible aliens who instantly eat up every bit of electrical energy (hence the title) and reduce living things to atoms. The CG effects, dialogue and acting are laughable, and there’s no variety in the deaths-by-pulverization. Some subtitles. 89 min. n (GS) Coliseum Scarborough, Yonge & Dundas 24
The desCendAnTs (Alexander Payne) stars George Clooney as a Hawaiian lawyer trying to cope with his wife’s impending death from a brain injury, figure out how to relate to his two young daughters (Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller) and digest the revelation that she was cheating on him before her accident. It’s sort of a comedy. Clooney’s textured performance pulls uneasy laughs out of the misery, and the kids are terrific at the complicated emotional turns. 115 min. nnnn (NW) Beach Cinemas, Canada Square, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Cumberland 4, Grande Steeles, Kennedy Commons 20, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Mississauga, Varsity
ñ
The devil inside (William Brent Bell) elicits boos. A young woman tries to uncover the truth about the triple murder her mother committed while being exorcised. She’s helped by a couple of young priests and a documentary filmmaker who overdoes the shakycam. 87 min. n (AD) 401 & Morningside, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Empire Theatres at Empress Walk, Grande - Steeles, Queensway, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24 The divide (Xavier Gens) piles a group of
relative strangers into a claustrophobic underground shelter following an unexplained nuclear attack, where tempers flair, blood is shed and some resort to sexual and psychological abuse. Though Gens slightly reins in the stylistic and violent excess of his previous movies, he still displays a lack of subtlety. Most of the high-strung cast ranges from bland to mediocre, but 80s genre movie fans will enjoy the sadly MIA Michael Biehn chewing cigars and scenery in this enjoyably nihilistic apocalypse romp. 123 min. nnn (Phil Brown) Scotiabank Theatre
exTremely loud & inCrediBly Close
(Stephen Daldry) takes some of the edge off Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel about a socially challenged boy trying to solve a mystery left behind by the father who died in the collapse of the World Trade Center, but the core story is compelling, Thomas Horn is an appealing hero and director Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Reader) is surprisingly restrained and less patronizing than usual. 129 min. nnn (NW) 401 & Morningside, Carlton Cinema, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande - Steeles, Grande - Yonge, Kennedy Commons 20, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Yonge, Yonge & Dundas 24
The fronT line (Hun Jang) is a well-made, energetic horrors-of-war entry that takes its combat style from Saving Private Ryan and its characters from every movie about stress-disordered grunts since Platoon. The guys of Alligator company don’t know it, but they’re about to take part in the final battle of the Korean war, yet another assault on a hill they’ve already taken and lost
= Critics’ Pick nnnnn = Top ten of the year nnnn = Honourable mention nnn = Entertaining nn = Mediocre n = Bomb