Capsule reviews

Stone of Destiny

Dir. Charles Martin Smith (Canada/U.K.)

* * * (out of 5)

Here’s a movie to warm the cockles of Sean Connery’s tartan-clad heart. Connery and other Scottish nationalists are likely to cheer this rousing, real-life tale of four plucky Glasgow students who stole Scotland’s legendary Stone of Scone from London’s Westminster Abbey in 1950. The rest of us will recognize it as a slight but enjoyable comedy/drama that reduces the thorny issue of home rule to a daring – and semi-farcical – caper.

Charlie Cox (the likable hero ofStardust) is Ian Hamilton, a passionate young Scottish patriot frustrated by his country’s futile struggle for independence. In a symbolic act of defiance, he decides to take back the Scone stone, the traditional coronation seat of Scottish kings, but held by England since 1296. Stephen McCole and Ciaron Kelly co-star as two engineering students who help Ian pull off the job. Kate Mara plays the brave lass who provides romantic interest and a getaway car.

You know this Scottish-Canadian co-pro is going to be a simple crowd-pleaser going in – after all, the writer-director is Charles Martin Smith (Never Cry Wolf, Air Bud ) and the supporting cast includesThe Full Monty ’s Robert Carlyle and Brenda Fricker ofMy Left Foot. Still, Smith handles this kind of feel-good material with understated expertise and draws appealing performances from his young stars. McCole, who resembles a younger, beefier Russell Crowe, is the standout as a brawny, beer-loving lad who turns out to be brainier and more sensitive than he lets on. He and Kelly, as his meek, pasty-faced pal, make a great Laurel and Hardy team in their bumbling efforts to purloin the 152 kilogram stone. (MM)

Me and Orson Welles

Dir. Richard Linklater (U.S.)

* * 1/2

There's one reason to see Me and Orson Welles, and it ain't Zac Efron. The High School Musical star does a fine job as the "Me" of the title, a 17-year-old aspiring actor who lands a role in Welles' legendary 1937 production of Julius Caesar. But it's Christian McKay's unerring impersonation of the great man himself that makes the film worth watching at all. Based on a novel by Robert Kaplow, this glossy, amiable but unaffecting little picture follows wide-eyed Richard Samuels (Efron) as he stumbles into Welles' magical world, finds first love and struggles mightily to grow up.

Richard's journey is largely beside the point. Like Nathan Zuckerman in many of Philip Roth's recent novels, he's merely a conduit to explore a larger-than-life personality. It's Welles that Linklater (and everyone in the movie) is really interested in, and why not: the man was mercurial, protean, capable of blazing brilliance and also blistering betrayal. Welles was only 22 at the time of his production of Julius Caesar, though he looked and acted much older. McKay has the man-boy down to a T, from the baby face to the sardonic, seductive baritone. It's unfortunate that the film that surrounds him is not nearly as powerful. (JM)

Miracle at St. Anna

Dir. Spike Lee (U.S.)

* *

Spike Lee famously blasted Clint Eastwood for failing to include depictions of African-American servicemen in his two recent war films. With his latest picture, Lee sets out to correct the record himself. Working from a novel by James McBride, Lee tells the story of four Buffalo Soldiers (members of the all-black 92^nd division) caught behind enemy lines in Tuscany during the Second World War. There, they contend with Nazis, deceitful partisans, a beautiful Italian villager and a strange young boy who witnessed the slaughter of his entire family.

The premise is compelling and the battle scenes thrilling, reminiscent in their horror (and deafening loudness) of Saving Private Ryan. But Lee undermines this with a gangly narrative — the framing story set in the 1980s is entirely unnecessary, not to mention implausible. The film also features relentless caricatures (from the racist white captain to the gentle giant played by Omar Benson Miller) and some mawkish missteps (a love triangle is gratuitous and irrelevant). As admirable as Lee’s intentions, the resulting film feels like a disservice to the men he’s commemorating. (JM)

Genova

Dir. Michael Winterbottom (U.K.)

* * 1/2

Rarely has so much beauty been put in the service of such an inconsequential film. The ever-prolific Winterbottom is back in quiet, intimate 9 Songs mode with this tale of a university prof (Colin Firth) struggling to deal with the abrupt death of his wife (Hope Davis) and the ensuing grief of his daughters. His answer is to pack the family up and move from Chicago to picturesque Genova, Italy, in the hopes that a change of scenery will revive their spirits.

It does and it doesn’t. Plucky Mary (the wonderful Perla Haney-Jardine) remains haunted by her mother, dangerously so, while sullen sexpot Kelly (The O.C.’s Willa Holland) dulls her pain by jumping into the arms of the local male population. Dad is generally confused, even with a comely colleague (Catherine Keener) acting as tour guide and life coach.

With its Italian setting, a sense of pervasive dread and the whiff of the supernatural, this handsome film recalls Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973). But unlike Roeg’s film, Genova moves inexorably towards … niente. Winterbottom’s restraint is admirable, but it ultimately only makes the film feel unfinished. (JM)

I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime)

Dir. Philippe Claudel (France)

* * * 1/2

I’ve Loved You So Long begins with an arresting close-up of a pale, haggard face. That worn out visage belongs to Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas), who is returning home after a 15-year prison stint to live with her estranged sister Léa (Elsa Zylberstein). Though neither wants to discuss the past, it’s clear the subject will arise as Juliette attempts to rebuild her fractured sibling relationship, as well as her life.

Novelist-turned-director Philippe Claudel handles this potentially maudlin setup with great restraint; in both look and tone, this is an impressive, beautiful debut. I’ve Loved You So Long features many messy, wounded characters who try to exorcise their demons through lots of smart chatter. (At a dinner party, Léa’s academic colleagues discuss the films of Eric Rohmer, an obvious influence for Claudel.) Genuine warmth pervades the film, and Claudel is careful to give all of his characters — from a sad-sack parole officer to a lecherous old man at the local pool — their due.

But I’ve Loved You So Long is Juliette’s story, and Scott Thomas is astonishing as the complicated heroine who marches to her own drummer. She’s able to suggest volumes with an arched eyebrow or a crooked smile, and by the time she delivers the film’s perfect last line, viewers will catch themselves wondering what comes next for Juliette, and rooting for her, warts and all. (LF)

JCVD

Dir. Mabrouk El Mechri (France/Luxembourg/ Belgium)

* * * 1/2

The rumours are true: the Muscles from Brussels can act. And he can be very funny – intentionally so. In this whip-smart send-up of his own stardom, Jean-Claude Van Damme plays himself, or at least a sad, washed-up version of himself. In JCVD, JCVD is 47 years old, plagued by debt and drugs, in the midst of a messy divorce and unable to find work. (One role is taken away from him and given to Steven Seagal because the latter has cut off his ponytail.) Nonetheless, Van Damme is still a beloved star in his native Belgium and, when he returns to ostensibly visit his parents, he’s greeted with open arms.

But the visit home doesn’t go well, as the action star becomes caught up in a Dog Day Afternoon-style bank heist where his much-vaunted karate skills prove worthless. The ordeal, in fact, unmasks Van Damme completely. In a startling, even moving monologue, he reveals himself to be a man like any other: frail, insecure and desperate to please. Whether this repudiation of his entire life and work is real or not, it feels entirely redemptive. (JM)

The Good, the Bad, the Weird

Dir. Kim Jee-woon (South Korea)

* *

For the past several years, South Korea has produced some of the world's most exciting cinema – Save the Green Planet (2003), Old Boy (2003) and The Host (2006) are just the most mainstream examples. The Good, the Bad, the Weird thus arrives on waves of goodwill (it premiered at Cannes to largely decent notices) and its reputation as the country's most expensive film to date. But for all of its manic energy and (supposedly) sidesplitting splatter, this mash-up of Asian action and old-school spaghetti western is strangely enervating.

The time: the 1930s. The place: Japanese-controlled Manchuria. Three fortune seekers – a bounty hunter, a sadistic killer and a goofy thief played by The Host's Kang Ho-song – are all vying for a mysterious treasure map. Battles between the characters rage aboard steam locomotives, in opium parlours and in a tawdry thieves' den called the Ghost Market. Unfortunately, the choreography is often clichéd, the effects unremarkable and the fight sequences overly familiar even as they strain toward ever-greater spectacle. The overstuffed plot – which is dense with muddled allusions to Korea's struggle for independence – doesn't help. (JM)

Fifty Dead Men Walking

Dir. Kari Skogland (U.K./Canada)

* * *

Fifty Dead Men Walking almost didn’t make it to TIFF. Martin McGartland, who sold IRA secrets to the British in the ’80s and is still in hiding, wasn’t happy with the film, but a last-minute financial settlement and a few final tweaks saved the screen from blackness. Good thing: though under-edited, director Kari Skogland vigorously captures ’80s Belfast in all its violence and bitterness. The theme of occupation is obviously a relevant one for today’s audiences.

The wildly talented young actor Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) owns McGartland’s transition from clueless street hustler to traitor/saviour. Skogland never entirely buys the spy as hero — as likable as he is — but moral complexity is the film’s strength. Boggy in the action sequences, the picture soars when it focuses on McGartland’s emotional ruin as he watches his girlfriend and baby slip away. When the mess escalates, the only relationship he has left is with a British agent (Ben Kingsley), a paternal figure for another fatherless son. (KO)

Sugar

Dir. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (U.S.)

* * * *

With their sophomore outing, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck prove that their Oscar-nominated Half Nelson was no fluke. If anything, this tender, surprising, heartbreaking film is even better. The titular Sugar (real name, Miguel Santo) is a 20-year-old Dominican baseball pitcher who dreams of one day playing in Yankee Stadium. His entire impoverished village has the same dream, and the pressure mounts to unbearable levels as his knuckleball takes him to an arduous local training camp, then to the Iowa minor leagues and beyond. Boden and Fleck constantly, effectively evade cliché (even the obligatory training montage scene, featuring TV on the Radio of all things, feels fresh), and newcomer Algenis Perez Soto, who's in virtually every scene, is a wonder. (JM)

Che

Dir. Steven Soderbergh (U.S.)

* * 1/2

Given that Che runs 4.5 hours, by all rights, this review should be about 50,000 words long. But what would there be to say? Plenty, if Steven Soderbergh’s biopic itself had something to say about its iconic subject, Ernesto (Che) Guevara. But length may be the only truly revolutionary thing about this disappointing, inadequate film.

Che (Benicio Del Toro) needs no introduction and Soderbergh doesn’t give one. The film begins with the courageous, selfless Argentine revolutionary and doctor in Mexico City, on the eve of the Castro-led Cuban Revolution. This first chapter, covering 1955 to 1964, describes the slow, bloody struggle for Cuban hearts and minds and Che’s celebrity turn in New York in 1964. In part two, which ranges from 1966 to Che’s death in 1967, Guevara slips into Bolivia, where he tries to incite another revolt. This time, he’s faced with more suspicious campesinos, a more lethal opposing army and nefarious American interests.

Part two is more effective – failure is always more dramatic than success, and Che’s Bolivia sojourn is more compelling for its unfamiliarity to most viewers. Ultimately, Soderbergh’s project suffers from an inability to penetrate the Che legend. Soderbergh restricts himself to relentlessly cataloguing the grim grime of guerilla warfare. Not only is Soderbergh overawed by the richness of his subject’s life but the script is riven with clichéd revolutionary rhetoric. (See Hunger for a far superior example.) The charismatic Del Toro disappears completely into the role, but the film gives him little opportunity to show what kind of man becomes a myth. (JM)

The Hurt Locker

Dir. Kathryn Bigelow (U.S.)

* * *

Kathryn Bigelow kicks off The Hurt Locker, her ballsy addition to the recent spate of Iraq films, with an expertly staged action sequence that will leave viewers gnawing their fingernails to the quick. She sustains this tension for the better part of two hours.

The Hurt Locker’s screenwriter, war journalist Mark Boal, goes deep inside Bravo Company, an elite bomb disposal unit nearing the end of its rotation in Baghdad. The unit’s core members include cautious intelligence worker Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), the empathic Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) and a new addition, Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner). Initially, good ol’ boy James seems bound to get everyone killed with his cocky, reckless behaviour. But Renner humanizes this cowboy, who displays a sixth sense for ferreting out bombs. At one point, he even talks a unit member through a panic attack. James may be crazy, but he’s loyal and brave, too.

Bigelow is a master at filming violence, and she’s aided by Barry Ackroyd (United 93), whose immediate, verité cinematography draws viewers into an uneasy identification with the Bravo Company’s adrenaline-fuelled men. But the film fumbles during chaotic scenes leading up to the unit’s final mission, and the quieter, less convincing moments of emotional horror that follow. The Hurt Locker still ends with a wallop, but by then, wrung-out viewers might be feeling a little like casualties themselves. (LF)

Goodbye Solo

Dir. Ramin Bahrani (U.S.)

* * * 1/2

It’s remarkable how the films of Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani have been able to fuse both halves of his heritage. Watching his pictures, which include last year’s splendid Chop Shop, I’m reminded, often in the course of the same scene, of films by Martin Scorsese, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Gus Van Sant and Abbas Kiarostami. Kiarostami’s acclaimed Taste of Cherry is the most obvious touchstone for Goodbye Solo, but Bahrani’s film is much warmer and more accessible.

Solo (newcomer Souleymane Sy Savane) is a Sengalese immigrant who drives a taxi in Winston-Salem, N.C. (where Bahrani grew up) and dreams of becoming a flight attendant. Without preamble, we’re in his cab as he ferries a grouchy, elderly passenger named William (TV vet Red West). We quickly learn that in a week’s time, William wants to pay Solo $1,000 to drive him to the northern mountains where he will kill himself. But Solo’s a big personality, a sunny chatterbox who, for no reason other than simple humanity, makes it his duty to stop the old man. It’s a quixotic mission, and Solo’s charm offensive (as an actor, Savane is nothing if not charming) becomes increasingly desperate. Goodbye Solo’s willful mystification can be unsatisfying, but it’s a largely surprising, well-wrought film. (JM)

Before Tomorrow

Dir. Marie-Helene Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu (Canada)

* * *

"Why must we die?" sing Kate and Anna McGarrigle on the soundtrack to the third film from Igloolik Isuma Productions (Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner). Before Tomorrow never offers an answer – what film could? – but it does chronicle, in precise, ethnographic detail, how a particular people prepared for and coped with suffering and death.

Set in 1894, just as the Inuit first encountered non-natives, the film follows aging Ninioq (the remarkable Madeline Ivalu) and her young grandson as they struggle to survive after smallpox has suddenly wiped out the rest of their family. The film was made communally (by Arnait Video, a collective in Igloolik, Nunavut, that's committed to telling Inuit women's stories), and it's preoccupied with the painful, swift disappearance of community, of family and, indeed, of entire cultures. Patient, tender and heartbreaking. (JM)

Summer Hours (L’Heure d’été)

Dir. Olivier Assayas (France)

* * * *

There aren’t many films in which inanimate works of art play almost as large a role as the living characters. In this quietly elegiac drama by French writer-director Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Clean), some Art Nouveau furniture, a couple of Corot paintings and a pair of Bracquemond vases become eloquent symbols of a family undergoing upheavals.

These and other artworks belong to the elderly widow, Hélène (Edith Scob), who inherited them – as well as a lovely home in the French countryside – from her adored uncle, a famous painter. When Hélène dies, it’s up to her three adult children to decide the fate of the house and its valuable contents. What follows is the timeless tug of war between the sentimental and the practical. Hélène’s oldest son, Frédéric (Charles Berling), a Paris economist, wants to keep the treasures in the family; his sister, New York-based designer Adrienne (a blond Juliette Binoche), and their kid brother, Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), a manufacturer living in China, argue in favour of selling them.

Summer Hours is the second film commissioned by Paris’s Musée d’Orsay to mark its 20th anniversary. (The first, released earlier this year, was Flight of the Red Balloon.) Assayas uses the occasion to consider the point at which a personal heritage becomes impersonal history, enclosed in a museum’s display case, and to gently mourn the way we let our links with the past slip away. The film itself suggests Assayas’s own French cinematic heritage — its intimate naturalism evokes the works of Rohmer and Renoir. The acting is subtle and superb, particularly Berling’s performance as a beleaguered family man seeking stability in nostalgia.  (In French, with English subtitles.) (MM)

Wendy and Lucy

Dir. Kelly Reichardt (U.S.)

* * * *

American indie director Kelly Reichardt has perfected a particular kind of film, one that American indie directors rarely make any more: low-key, meditative, devoted to small moments and big questions. Her last picture, Old Joy (2006), featured two estranged pals trying to figure out their lives and their friendship while on a camping trip. Reichardt’s latest has a plot of even greater modesty, despite the A-list presence of Michelle Williams, who plays the titular Wendy. Broke and possibly troubled, Wendy is on her way to Alaska from Indiana, looking for work. In Oregon, her Honda Accord conks out and then, while Wendy is shoplifting dog food, her beloved mutt (and seemingly only friend), Lucy, goes missing.

Little else happens – and dialogue is scant – but Reichardt builds great suspense with every quiet, finely detailed scene. Wendy is helped and hindered on her quest by a variety of compelling strangers; the introduction of each signals both threat and possibility. A brilliant portrait of the anguish, frustration and panic of American poverty, one that a largely silent Williams embodies with enormous subtlety and sensitivity. (JM)

Real Time

Dir. Randall Cole (U.S.)

Being trapped in a Lincoln Town Car for 75 minutes with Randy Quaid and up-and-comer Jay Baruchel might sound like one of the circles of hell, but the situation actually makes for a surprisingly effective movie. Baruchel (Tropic Thunder) plays Andy, a skittish sad sack up to his bloodshot eyeballs in gambling debt, while Quaid is the tough-love-dispensing, Aussie-accented assassin sent to dispatch him. Real Time has the slightly schematic, high-concept feel of a short film – everything transpires in, yes, real time – but the writing is sharp and the leads compelling. A perfectly pitched soundtrack (with songs by Lighthouse, The Tragically Hip and Air Supply) gooses the comedic moments. (JM)

Le Silence de Lorna (The Silence of Lorna)

Dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Belgium)

* * 1/2

Belgium's Dardenne Brothers (L'enfant) have long been a kind of art-house brand, known for small-scale, grimly naturalistic fables about working-class characters oppressed by unjust systems. Their latest picture works the same vein, but is broader and plot-driven.

The titular Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is an Albanian immigrant who has married a Belgian man in order to secure citizenship. Unfortunately, the fellow is also a heroin addict. This scheme is part of a larger global conspiracy – the Dardennes' Europe runs on lies and greed – and events inexorably, agonizingly, turn tragic. The performances are predictably devastating and the sentiments heartfelt, but there's a sense of exhaustion in the Dardennes' formula — what in earlier films felt like impotent rage is beginning to feel like indifference. (JM)

Management

Dir. Stephen Belber (U.S.)

* * 1/2

Steve Zahn is nice guy Mike, stuck at the gateway to adulthood, working in his parents’ Arizona motel and occasionally making passes at more fetching guests. One of them, a buttoned-up art dealer named Sue (Jennifer Aniston), takes him up on an offer in the laundry room. Mike mistakes sex for something that matters and shows up on her doorstep in Baltimore a few days later, thus commencing a lengthy, meandering love story about hopes and dreams and quirky small-town misfits – wait, was this workshopped at Sundance, perchance? The offbeat American indie has become a genre unto itself – Little Miss Sunshine at the pinnacle – and Management is no better or worse than the median.

Woody Harrelson goes bald and big as Sue’s ex-punk sometime beau, a yogurt mogul who trains attack dogs and misses the Clash’s Joe Strummer. (Harrelson’s eye-bugging, slightly scary take might deserve his own, much weirder film.) Aniston tries so hard to fight against her trademark vivaciousness that she seems shuttered and blank. Then again, she’s chosen to play another remote, numbed character, as in The Good Girl and Friends with Money, so maybe she’s a genius. It’s nice to see Zahn given some room to stretch, and Mike’s gradual awakening is just charming enough to earn mild smiling approval. Plus, great use of New Pornographers tracks. (KO)

Gomorrah

Dir. Matteo Garrone (Italy)

* * * *

"We don’t know who’s with us and who’s against us," one weary Mafioso says to another in Gomorrah. "Who do we make pay?" This confused sentiment defines Matteo Garrone’s brilliant, bloody chronicle of the Camorra, Italy’s most notorious Mafia organization. Set in the sullen suburbs of Naples, the film follows a handful of kaleidoscopic, interwoven narratives, including that of a pair of inept, teenaged wannabe mobsters and a corrupt businessman tasked with illegally dumping toxic waste. These stories all depict how organized crime has infected every level of Italian society. Despite one character’s constant, absurd impersonation of Scarface’s Tony Montana, Garrone’s criminals are more glum than glamorous, resigned to a life of crime largely because they know no other. If Ken Loach ever directed an episode of The Sopranos, it might look something like this. (JM)

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Dir. Kevin Smith (U.S.)

*

Kevin Smith (Chasing Amy) tries to grab a piece of the Judd Apatow comedic pie by stocking his latest gabfest with members of the Apatow army, notably Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks as the titular would-be pornographers. What Smith fails to include, however, is any of the latter filmmaker’s signature sweetness and smarts. Zack and Miri are life-long, platonic best friends who, down on their luck one Thanksgiving, decide to solve their monetary woes by making an X-rated flick. As bluntly literal and unimaginative as its title, Zack and Miri is tawdry, tasteless, baldly sentimental and, worse, rarely funny. Apple shill Justin Long appears briefly as a gay porn star, but even his enjoyable presence wears thin before long. A film that makes Knocked Up look like Ingmar Bergman. (JM)

Skin

Dir. Anthony Fabian (U.K./South Africa)

* * 1/2

Based on a riveting true story, Skin spans three decades in the life of Sandra Laing (Sophia Okonedo), a girl with dark skin and black, kinky hair born to white Afrikaner parents (Sam Neill and Alice Krige) in apartheid-era South Africa. Though Sandra is raised white, her boarding-school teachers and peers waste no time in pronouncing her "coloured," and it kickstarts her struggle to piece together an identity that transcends race.

Director Anthony Fabian takes pains to faithfully render Sandra’s inner journey, shooting Skin’s early scenes in crisp, bleached tones, then shifting to vibrant colours as Sandra begins to explore life as a black woman. Skin plays like two movies – half biopic, half melodrama – and this fits, since feeling split in two is what Skin is all about. Yet, one wishes Fabian had taken more risks: The requisite sepia-toned shots, crimson sunsets and "never give up" speech all feel a bit too tasteful — even Sandra’s make-out sessions with her black lover look chaste. The timid approach undercuts the sting of the otherwise gripping material.

In the end, it’s up to the fearless Alice Krige and Sophia Okonedo to give the film its bite. In their mother-daughter scenes, the two actresses create a portrait of a fierce, indestructible bond – one that suggests their true identity is something mysterious, hidden deep beneath the skin. (LF)

The Duchess

Dir. Saul Dibb (U.K.)

* * *

What’s that? Keira Knightley in a corset? Yeah, call me when she’s not wearing a corset; that’ll get my attention. But The Duchess is a costume drama with a sharp enough edge that it rescues the young actress from a career that has become more about fashion magazines and cosmetics contracts than acting. It’s fitting then, that Knightley plays an 18^th-century Paris Hilton figure, although Hilton probably wouldn’t use her style icon status to promote the Whig party. Based on a true story, Knightley plays the spitfire Duchess of Devonshire, married young and optimistic to the laconic, all-powerful Duke (Ralph Fiennes). He is indifferent to her charms, wanting only a male heir, and in her loneliness, the Duchess wakes to something called "freedom." Ideas of America and the French Revolution buzz in the background of this winningly understated film; more circumstance than pomp.

The couples’ various infidelities result in a marital arrangement that would be considered forward-thinking today: The Duchess’s best frenemy, Lady Foster (Hayley Atwell) is also the Duke’s lover, and they all live together in a sprawling castle. The Duchess’ true soulmate is Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper), future PM of England, an affair that sizzles less than her lust for a life outside the prescribed parameters of highest-society wife. Knightley does well with a phenomenal part, but Fiennes steals the show as a nuanced kind of evil. He delivers TIFF’s best line when one of his wife’s Marge Simpson wigs catches fire at a party: "Please put out Her Grace’s hair." (KO)

La Fille de Monaco (The Girl from Monaco)

Dir. Anne Fontaine (France)

* * * 1/2

The old Blue Angel scenario gets transplanted to the sparkling Mediterranean in Anne Fontaine’s witty romantic comedy/drama The Girl from Monaco. Fabrice Luchini stars as Bertrand Beauvois, a distinguished criminal lawyer from Paris who has arrived in the posh principality of Monaco to defend Edith Lassalle (Stéphane Audran), a middle-aged woman accused of murder. Fearing reprisals from the family of the victim, Lassalle’s son has assigned Bertrand a bodyguard, the stoic Christophe (Roschdy Zem). Christophe makes every effort to protect Bertrand, but he’s powerless to keep the 40-ish lawyer from falling unexpectedly for a pretty young thing – Audrey (Louise Bourgoin), a ditzy but delicious TV weather girl.

Bourgoin (a real-life meteorologist on France's Canal +) is effervescent as a kind of Gallic Paris Hilton, who drives a scooter, parties hard and worships Diana, the late Princess of Wales. She leads the besotted Bertrand into a world of sex, drugs and reality TV that threatens to impair his performance at the trial. Meantime, Christophe’s own past relationship with Audrey flares up, while the unfolding Lassalle case – a crime of passion – starts to foreshadow Bertrand’s own situation.

Fontaine, a writer-director with a penchant for sexual intrigues (Nathalie..., Dry Cleaning ), gives her film a dark twist in the second half, but still manages to sustain a light tone. That’s in part thanks to her funny, sympathetic characters. Luchini is charmingly absurd as poor Bertrand and the broodingly handsome Zem is hilarious as Christophe, who attacks his job with such fervour that you’d think he was guarding Nicolas Sarkozy. (In French, with English subtitles.) (MM)

Hunger

Dir. Steve McQueen (U.K.)

* * * * *

Step aside, Julian Schnabel. British artist Steve McQueen won Cannes’ Camera D’or for this, his first feature, and it was entirely deserved. The film possesses an undeniable beauty and relentless invention. Ostensibly a biopic about legendary IRA member Bobby Sands, who went on a 66-day hunger strike in the early ’80s, Hunger is really more about the inhuman treatment of prisoners at Ireland’s notorious Maze prison – and, metaphorically, about the treatment of political prisoners in general. In its politics and aesthetic, McQueen is indebted to fellow British filmmakers Ken Loach and the late, great Alan Clarke (Scum, Elephant), but the younger director has an artistry and sophistication all his own. There’s a gripping physicality to this largely dialogue-free film, a concentration on prison walls covered in prisoners’ excrement, the maggots that lurk in their food and the bruises and lacerations that disfigure their concentration camp-thin bodies. Even knowing how Sands’s real-life saga ends cannot rob Hunger of its astonishing, heartbreaking power. (JM)

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

Dir. Peter Sollett (U.S.)

* * 1/2

Good news: These teens aren’t Gossip Girl privileged or Dawson’s Creek precocious. Bad: they become their own kind of hipster cliché for generation iPod. Nick (Michael Cera) is a heartbroken teen bassist who crosses paths with Norah (Kat Dennings), a sardonic beauty who’s his "musical soul mate." Over the course of one night, they hit every cool-kid hotspot in New York searching for a secret concert by their favourite band. The gossamer plot exists only to sustain some me-so-witty repartee (the Juno curse), a generic alt-rock soundtrack and a multitude of vomit jokes. Still, several moments of genuine connection between two unaffected, unique actors hint at the gentle romance this could have been. But the American Graffiti structure is rote, and the barriers keeping the young lovers apart are yawningly familiar – jerky ex-boyfriend, meet slutty ex-girlfriend. In his stunning debut, Raising Victor Vargas (2002), director Peter Sollett showed he has a rare respect for the inner lives of teens; maybe next time, he can turn down the noise and get back the grace. (KO)

Flame & Citron

Dir. Ole Christian Madsen (Denmark/Germany)

* * *

Bloody and overlong, director Ole Christian Madsen’s ambitious Second World War thriller trains its sights on the Holger Dankse resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Denmark. "Flame" is the nom de guerre of Bent (Thure Lindhardt), a young, red-haired assassin who targets Danish Nazi sympathizers. His partner is Jorgen (Mads Mikkelsen), a.k.a. "Citron," who drives their getaway car. We meet the two in 1944, when they and a small band of colleagues are waging a minor guerrilla war against the Occupation in Copenhagen. Then orders come to step up their efforts and start killing German Nazis; at the same time, Flame falls for a mysterious woman named Ketty Selmer (Stine Stengade, resembling one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s heroines), who claims to run messages for the Resistance, but may be a suspected informer within their ranks.

The ensuing plot has enough counter-spies and doublecrosses to furnish a John le Carré novel, but is based on real people and actual events. Madsen and his co-screenwriter, Lars K. Andersen, set out to show the ambiguities and ugliness within the Resistance movement, whose fighters would later be held up as brave heroes. It’s another worthy attempt, à la Downfall, to examine the complexities of a war long regarded as purely a battle of good against evil. Yet at a running time of 130 minutes, it gets mired in its own convolutions.

The most effective of the titular characters is Mikkelsen’s Jorgen, who has a wife and child and, unlike ex-soldier Bent, is at first incapable of killing. Mikkelsen makes him sweaty and ill-shaven, with a weak stomach and raw nerves. Anger finally drives Jorgen to make a successful hit and after that, he becomes a killing machine. That macho transformation – the sort of thing other movies ask us to cheer for – is played here for what it really is: dehumanizing and terrible. (In Danish and German, with English subtitles.) (MM)

Rachel Getting Married

Dir. Jonathan Demme (U.S.)

* * 1/2

Even more harrowing than last year's dysfunction fest Margot at the Wedding, Demme's latest features Anne Hathaway as a snarky, damaged ex-model released from rehab just in time for her sister's nuptials in Connecticut. A consummate narcissist, Kym (Hathaway) does everything she can to disrupt the wedding, itself a kind of impossibly multicultural, über-liberal extravaganza. The performances are largely compelling (in particular, the underused, rubber-faced Bill Irwin as the bewildered patriarch), though Hathaway's never quite convincing, and the script (by Jenny Lumet, daughter of Sydney) is too deliberate to be the Cassavetes-like psychodrama it aspires to be. But Demme wisely jams the film with musicians – everyone from Robyn Hitchcock to Fab 5 Freddy to TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe (playing Rachel's fiancé) – so that even when the familial strife grows too shrill, the soundtrack continues to soothe. (JM)

Religulous

Dir. Larry Charles (U.S.)

* * * *

On the heels of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great, comedian-commentator Bill Maher offers his own savagely funny critique of religious faith. As the title of this documentary suggests, Maher is out to relentlessly needle the absurdities of organized religion, focusing mainly on the Big Three: Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

Travelling from the heartland of evangelical Christianity in the southern U.S. to the Vatican and Jerusalem, Maher meets and questions believers. Although he talks to the occasional mainstream mullah or priest, most of his subjects dwell on the spiritual fringes: the founder of the notorious Creation Museum in Kentucky; an ex-Jews for Jesus member; an Islamic extremist rapper; a Puerto Rican who claims to be a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. With Borat director Larry Charles at the helm, there are plenty of ambush-style interviews, in which the clueless interviewees make fools of themselves – or the filmmakers do it for them. (The one who arguably comes off the worst is Arkansas senator and Christian fundamentalist Mark Pryor.) The influence of Michael Moore is heavy throughout, especially in the comic juxtapositions of old film footage – for example, the sophomoric Charles gets many laughs by doctoring snippets from vintage religious epics like John Huston’s The Bible.

Like Moore, Maher turns his inquiry into a personal quest. The host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher is half-Jewish and was raised Catholic, but then lost his faith. Beneath his wicked sarcasm, Maher seems to be making a sincere effort to understand why people still believe the things he has long rejected as irrational. Nonetheless, Maher has a thesis to present – that religion is at the root of humankind’s self-destructive impulse. Whether or not you agree with him, you’ll likely find this film’s cacophony of religious zanies and buffoons both hilarious and deeply depressing. (MM)

Appaloosa

Dir. Ed Harris (U.S.)

* *

Ed Harris directs Ed Harris and his first suggestion to Ed Harris is: "You should work with Viggo Mortensen again, as  you did in History of Violence." Mortensen – ever effortless – agreed to play Lefty to Harris’s Sancho in Appaloosa, and the two are silent-but-deadly friends who move from place to place as vigilante cowboys for hire. Their latest gig is to bring law back to a New Mexico town that has fallen into the clutches of an unscrupulous rancher (Jeremy Irons, confusingly scrawny and British). Harris becomes sheriff, and Mortensen his deputy, powers they use to clear out the mess with much gunplay. But their peripatetic ways look threatened by a parasol-wielding damsel (Renee Zellweger) who wants a house and a husband. Trouble is that the platonic romance between the two men is far more interesting than the one between Zellweger and … anyone. The arid location is gorgeous, but the staging is often awkward, and the final effect is something strangely un-cool and far too fussy for the genre. (KO)

Ghost Town

Dir. David Koepp (U.S.)

* *

It's unfortunate that for his first leading role stateside, Ricky Gervais chose a vehicle that flies in the face of his comedic innovation in The Office and Extras. (Perhaps it isn't surprising given his movie choices to date; after all, he had a bit part in Christopher Guest's worst movie, For Your Consideration.) In Ghost Town, Gervais plays misanthropic dentist Bertram Pincus, who, after a bungled colonoscopy, can suddenly see dead people. One of these dead people is a sleazy Manhattan lawyer (Greg Kinnear) desperate to break up the impending second marriage of his widowed wife, Gwen (Téa Leoni).

Ghosts, as it turns out, are just people with unresolved earthly issues. Grouchy and self-interested Pincus, however, has no interest in helping anyone – that is, until Gwen warms his cold heart. An inconsistent script by director David Koepp and John Kamps has Gervais in classic David Brent mode one moment and in a kind of sour, not-terribly-amusing mode the next. The plot, on the other hand, moves in predictable, cloying rom-com ways — not even Saturday Night Live's always-delightful Kristin Wiig (as Pincus' surgeon) can save it. (JM)

Three Monkeys

Dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey/France/Italy)

* * *

In his two previous films (Distant and Climates), Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan masterfully illustrated the way that minor irritants like a roommate’s dirty dishes or a husband’s patronizing tone can take root and fester until they detonate with a force that is louder than bombs. His latest effort, Three Monkeys, begins with a volatile premise: a seedy politician commits a crime, then pays his driver to take the fall. As the driver serves his sentence, his wife and son pass their time in ways that will have consequences for the entire family.

Ceylan was named best director at Cannes for this feast of moody, static images. His HD camera caresses every pore and crease on his actors’ faces, and marvels at glowering clouds in the Istanbul sky. In one typically spare scene, a betrayal is shown with little more than a shot of an eye at a keyhole, a murky shape moving behind mottled glass and the sound of a muffled cough. Three Monkeys begins to feel joyless and stifling, however, with the introduction of a fifth character midway through; suddenly, the busy plot threatens to overtake the film’s quiet study of simmering emotions. Still, to complain about the story in such a sumptuous film feels — to quote one of the characters — like quibbling over small change. (LF)

Examined Life

Dir. Astra Taylor (U.S.)

* * *

Astra Taylor is fast becoming the Errol Morris of the egghead set. Zizek! (2005), her documentary about notorious Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, dazzled TIFF audiences. Zizek turns up in Examined Life, too — carrying on a monologue about ecology while foraging in a garbage dump — but he is joined by other contemporary thinkers. In 10-minute bursts, Taylor interviews academics from Cornell West to Peter Singer to Judith Butler, all of whom discuss existential and ontological questions specific to their respective research. Taylor keeps things lively by keeping each thinker on their toes. West ruminates from the backseat of the director’s car, while Michael Hardt rows a boat in Central Park; all of the philosophers muse while meandering through urban settings. The bite-sized structure of the film necessarily gives it a certain superficiality – the issues raised don't go much beyond an undergrad seminar. But it's pleasing nonetheless to see such heady chatter on the big screen at all. A better format might be a regular TV show: So You Think You Can Think? (JM)

Passchendaele

Dir. Paul Gross (Canada)

* *

You have to admire actor-director Paul Gross for managing to make an all-Canadian First World War epic on a budget ($21 million) that’s the equivalent of the salary for a single major Hollywood star. If Passchendaele doesn’t rival Saving Private Ryan, it still succeeds in recreating the arduous offensive of the title – a defining event for Canadians – with impressive realism. Gross and cinematographer Greg Middleton (Fugitive Pieces) put us smack dab in the middle of the rain-swamped battlefield, capturing the insanity of trench warfare with bone-chilling intimacy.

The big problem is Gross’s script, in which the melodrama and war-movie clichés are laid on as thick as the mud. The film builds to its climactic battle with a romantic tale set on the home front in Calgary involving a heroic sergeant (played by Gross), a beautiful nurse (Caroline Dhavernas) and her headstrong younger brother (Joe Dinicol). As fate draws all three to the hell of Flanders, Belgium, noble self-sacrifice and hokey coincidence become the order of the day.

Dhavernas is appealing as the bright-eyed nurse, but Dinicol’s nervous kid is whiny and unsympathetic. Fans of the ruggedly handsome Gross will find plenty of opportunities to swoon; the director part of Gross indulges the star side shamelessly. When he starts dealing in Christ imagery, you’ll be rubbing your eyes in disbelief. There is, however, one terrific performance: Shaw Festival vet Jim Mezon in a rare screen role as the sergeant’s nemesis, a slippery British major. Mezon plays the part with relish and a gleam in his eye. It’s as though he was aware of the movie’s silliness, but was determined to have a great time with it anyway. (MM)

Waltz with Bashir

Dir. Ari Folman (Israel/Germany/France)

* * * *

"It was like an LSD trip," says one of the Israeli army veterans, recalling the massacre at Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Waltz with Bashir. To convey the hallucinogenic horrors of war and genocide, filmmaker Ari Folman artfully turned to animation, giving us a powerful, at times hauntingly lyrical evocation of the 1982 Lebanon war.

Folman served with the Israeli army during that conflict and his film is a kind of Proustian search for lost time as he attempts to dredge up his suppressed memories of his experiences. Speaking with former comrades, a psychotherapist and legendary Israeli reporter Ron Ben-Yishai, Folman reconstructs his involvement in the events that led to the Sabra and Shatila tragedy – the mass-murder of Palestinian refugees by Israeli-backed Christian Phalangists in revenge for the assassination of Lebanese president Bashir Gemayel. Using the mud-and-khaki palette of illustrator David Polonskey, Folman paints a familiar picture of naïve young men — frightened, cocky, half-playing at war — as remote politicians (including then-Israeli defence minister Ariel Sharon) turn a blind eye to the atrocities happening on the ground.

Screened this year at Cannes, Folman's animated documentary has drawn inevitable comparisons to 2007's Persepolis, but it's closer in style and subject matter to the graphic journalism of war-zone artist Joe Sacco. But the film's most provocative gambit is not to depict real-life tragedy in cartoon form, but to probe the Israeli psyche and its attempts to grapple with outrages like Sabra and Shatila, which eerily echo the Holocaust. (In Hebrew, with English subtitles.) (MM)

Edison and Leo

Dir. Neil Burns (Canada)

* * 1/2

George Toles has long been Guy Maddin’s chief collaborator, co-writing with the Winnipeg filmmaker just about every feature he’s made since 1990’s Archangel. For Edison and Leo, his stop-motion animated feature, Toles has teamed up with co-writer Daegan Fryklind (jPod) and debut director Neil Burns (responsible for the animation in 2003’s Rhinoceros Eyes). The results aren’t exactly pretty. The titular Edison is George T. Edison – a womanizing, amoral genius loosely based on Thomas Edison – and Leo is his son ("his greatest invention"), whose accidental electrocution as a boy transforms him into an untouchable, forlorn young man.

Tolesian touches abound: sibling and Oedipal rivalries, scientific hubris, a tribe of Amazonian natives and sexual violence. While the writing is generally sharp, the animation itself is lurid and grotesque – think rancid Rankin/Bass. Backgrounds seem hastily designed, unpleasant mouths are filled with unpleasant teeth and characters that should be adorable are creepy. Definitely not a film for children — and only for the most perverse-minded of adults. (JM)

(Reviewers: Lee Ferguson, Jason McBride, Martin Morrow and Katrina Onstad.)