Leviathan is an experimental documentary that experiments more than it documents. Shot aboard a commercial fishing boat in the North Atlantic, the only thing you’ll learn about commercial fishing is that it’s a wet and ugly endeavour. Filmmaker/ Harvard anthropology professor Lucien Castaing-Taylor and co-director Véréna Paravel are contributing to a tradition of ethnographic filmmaking that concerns itself more with observation and ways of seeing than it does with telling a story.
With the Canadian film Blood Pressure director Sean Garrity has crafted a dark fantasy about repressed dreams and suburban malaise with a real eye and ear for how such scenarios would most likely play out in reality.
For the first two thirds of it's running time The Call is a smart and clever B-movie proceedural that benefits from some great performances, but just like how a real life 911 operator very rarely finds out how a call ends after they hang up, you might not want to stick around to see how this thing ends.
The Oscar nominated Chilean historical and political drama No is a riveting, at times darkly funny, and unpredictable piece of work from director Pablo Larrain.
Undeniably fascinating, terrifying and entertaining, the climate change polemic Greedy Lying Bastards still finds itself being occasionally undercut by a level of smugness that would make Michael Moore blush.
While telling the historical background of Snoop Lion (nee Dogg) quite well, Reincarnated ultimately doesn’t answer, or even ask, any of the central questions that come to mind watching it because it’s too focused on chalice puffing and nostalgia.
This week brings out some heavy hitters at the video store including Life of Pi, The Master, Hitchcock, Smashed, Playing for Keeps, This Must be the Place, and A Late Quartet.
Although admirable and stacked with two excellent leads, the cloyingly sentimental and thoroughly underlined dramedy Cloudburst would be more at home on the Hallmark Channel than it would be on the big screen. That is, if Hallmark wasn't so conservative and they would actually take a queer themed, octogenarian love story.
A touching though sometimes lagging story about enduring friendship, Shepard and Dark highlights aspects of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark’s relationship that has now spanned half a century. The impetus for the documentary is the archiving of hundreds of letters that passed back and forth between them over the decades. As much about the individual men as their correspondence, one can’t help but feel this lingering film would have been much more compelling as a documentary short as opposed to feature length.
The nostalgic documentary Greenwich Village: Music that Defined a Generation never offer audiences much more than hero worship, but considering that somehow this documentary hadn’t been made before now, we guess it’s forgivable.
Dead Man Down is a big fat mess of a movie made by people who really should know better.
Oz the Great and Powerful isn’t a particularly great movie overall, but it’s never terribly unwatchable or even all that uninteresting or lacking in entertainment value. It’s the curious case of a film that just has a lot of missteps along the way that add up to an unsatisfactory whole. It's a whishy-washy, sanitized blockbuster that fails to be truly magical.
Imbued with the spirit of Robert Altman in terms of how sprawling slice-of-life epics should be handled and with a healthy dash of Luis Buñuel’s playfulness, Neighbouring Sounds is truly a wonder to behold. It’s what truly great and vital cinema should be: something more than just entertaining and thought provoking that simply washes over the audience without talking down to them or giving them easy answers.
This month's Hot Docs Doc Soup entry The Trouble in the Peace certainly paints a pretty and swift moving picture of gas pipeline corruption in the Peace River section of B.C. and Alberta, but while it doesn't lack heart, it's definitely lacking in substance. Also, strangely enough, it comes with a tie-in video game that might deliver the message better than the film can.
This week on home video we check out The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2, Wreck-It Ralph, The Intouchables, Red Dawn, The Marine 3: Homefront, The Bay, and Girls Against Boys.
