Another week with many new movie choices for you, from the new journalism of The Fifth Estate, to a check-up of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, a visit to a hit-making studio in Alabama and even a classic Italian oldie.
Here’s the list:
The Fifth Estate: 3 stars
Wadjda: 4
Muscle Shoals: 4
Camille Claudel: 3
L’Avventura: 4
Escape Plan: 2 ½
Cottage Country: 2
Carrie: not previewed
THE FIFTH ESTATE: You’ll learn a lot from this movie about WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange and his work to release information businesses and governments try to hide. He exposed a Swiss bank, election fraud in Kenya, Scientology’s secrets and more. Then his coup: American outrages in Afghanistan and diplomatic blunders in e-mails. But you still won’t feel you’ve got the whole story. The film skips a lot, is too busy in some areas and wobbles between points of view just as you’d expect some definite conclusions.
Naturally, much of the film’s action is at the computer and between two men: Assange, played brilliantly by Benedict Cumberbatch, with just the right single-minded insistence of the driven activist, and his Berlin associate Daniel Berg, who later went on his own and wrote one of the two books this film is based on. Daniel Brühl, who is also in theatres as Nikki Lauda in Rush, plays him as a nice guy, content to overlook Assange’s self-centered, self-important airs in favor of the new journalism he’s trumpeting. There’s a hectic pace as we’re given the basics and the self-promotion, watch newspapers co-operate and US government officials (Laura Linney, Stanley Tucci) squirm and Julian and Daniel head to a falling-out. That’s where we finally get into a few ethical issues. No sign of Assange’s sex charges or what he’s thinking sitting there in Ecuador’s London embassy. Or of his biggest source, Bradley Manning, sitting in prison for the next 35 years. Like I said, fascinating stuff but incomplete. (5th Avenue, International Village and many suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
WADJDA: It’s charm and humor that drives this look at the status of women in Saudi Arabia and the situation is far more mixed than we might imagine. The very fact that this film exists gives you some indication of that. It’s the first ever made entirely in that country, where cinemas don’t exist by the way, and the first directed by a woman. Haifaa Al Mansour is hardly shut out of that work; she’s done a great deal in TV and print where she’s explored women’s issues. But she had to direct some scenes by walkie talkie so as not to be seen mixing with and giving orders to men. Those kind of contradictions shape this simple tale of a young girl who wants a bicycle.
She’s endearing and headstrong, as played by Waad Mohammed, and willing to defy conventions. She wears Chuck Taylor sneakers and secretly listens to “evil songs,” as her mother calls them, on the radio. When she’s too loud in the schoolyard she’s told she should not be heard by men outside because “A woman’s voice is her nakedness.” She tries money-making schemes but they’re too slow, so she joins an Islamic club just so she can get into a Koran competition and win the money she needs. It’s a standard story arc, takes an ironic turn and still finds optimism in a very-conservative society. (International Village) 4 out of 5
MUSCLE SHOALS: One of my all-time favorite record albums is Tell Mama by Etta James. This lively documentary takes us to the small Alabama town where it was created, tells us how it came about and why some of the biggest names in rock and R and B went there to record.
Etta was recorded by Rick Hall. He, his Fame studio, and his utter perfectionism are at the centre of the story. He tells how he grew up poor (“dirt floors”) and was driven to make something of himself. Recording hits by Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett and others did it for him. Then his best rhythm players, dubbed The Swampers, left and started their own studio. The town now had two and they turned out classics like Brown Sugar, Kodachrome, I’ll Take You There, even Jimmy Cliff’s reggae hit, Sitting Here in Limbo. Stars like Bono, Alicia Keys and Mick Jagger try to define the “Muscle Shoals Sound” while the film offers lots of music and trivia. Why there’s a concert piano in Free Bird, why Atlantic Records pulled Aretha out, how Duane Allman got to playing slide guitar, and more. Not clear is what relations between the two studios were like or that Rick Hall later turned to country music where he produced many more hits. Still, A real treat for music fans. (VanCity Theatre) 4 out of 5
CAMILLE CLAUDEL, 1915: Juliette Binoche is mesmerizing in this grim, unsettling film from France. She plays the same character (sculptor, student and mistress of Rodin) that won Isabelle Adjani an Oscar nomination back in 1990. But it’s now several years later. Her family has her confined to an insane asylum and she is annoyed, sometimes disgusted, by the other inmates. She feels better than them, calls them “creatures” and can’t understand why she’s among them.
The color scheme is almost all grey, with a few dull greens and a rare flash of blue sky outside. That’s her world and slowly the film reveals her paranoia. She’s convinced Rodin is trying to have her poisoned and his associates have robbed her. Doctors won’t tell her why she’s there, she says, and her family has abandoned her. One grain of hope--her brother Paul is coming to visit--sustains her. The film switches to him on his way. He prays at length, tells a priest about his conversion to Christian “obedience” and finally arrives to meet Camille. It’s a deeply emotional scene, as is much of the film which delves into delusions of grandeur, heartless but well-meaning systems and tiny signs of compassion. Bruno Dumont, the director, boosted the realism by casting real mental patients for a few of the small roles. I wish he had told us more about Paul, an author, world-traveller and diplomat. (VanCity Theatre) 3 out of 5
L’AVVENTURA: No, it’s not new, it’s 53 years old. The print is new though, and restored and the film deserves to be here because of its key place in cinema history. It’s often cited as one of the best films ever made. It made Monica Vitti a star and Michelangelo Antonioni a world-famous director. And it’s credited with changing the language of movies. Story no longer needed to be primary; character, mood, context could carry a film. That can and has been abused. Not here though.
The slim story has a group of idle rich take a boat cruise to a rocky island where one, a moody about-to- be-married woman, disappears. Neither the others or the police can find her and only her fiance Sandro (played by Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) keep searching. While they do, he comes on to her and she strives to resist—for a while. As he puts it, “It’s better to look at things the way they are.” A study in ennui, empty lives and drifting motivations. Some find it slow but watching it again just this week I found there’s always something going on in the story, to the characters or in the masterful visual compositions, to keep you engaged. (The Cinematheque) 4 out of 5
Playing in tandem with another art house classic: Nostalghia, which the Russian director Andrei Tarkovky made in Italy’s Tuscany region in 1983. Check the website theCinematheque.ca for more.
ESCAPE PLAN: Another film with the old guys. (In a couple of weeks four others will be off carousing in Las Vegas.) Here it’s Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, both in good form, doing their 1980s action thing. Sly grunts as usual. Arnie has more of the fun. He even has a long rant in German and watch his eyes go all squinty when he’s handed a machine gun. It all happens in a prison. Yes this film is stocked full with improbabilities and it requires a big reveal at the end to explain what’s really going on.
This we do know: Sly plays a man who tests prison security. He gets put in and breaks out. He’s done that 14 times. (Only in the movies). The CIA hires him to test their new “redaction site” which replaced those infamous “black” sites. Once inside, he teams up with Arnie and briefly a Muslim inmate to plan another escape. It’s not that straightforward though; the story gets tortured with complications and needs a rescue in a long, quite preposterous action sequence. Fans gets what they came for. (International Village and many suburban theatres) 2 ½ out of 5
COTTAGE COUNTRY: Horror-comedy fans will be hoping for another Tucker & Dale vs Evil as they sit through the mediocre beginnings of this one. Tyler Labine stars again and the film does improve as it goes on but don’t expect a blood-fest. Expect dry humor and ironic tension as two people try to cover up their crimes.
Labine and Malin Ackerman prove to be bumbling conspirators, which sets up most of the fun. He’s about to propose marriage in Ontario’s cottage country when his annoying brother barges in with a Euro-trash girlfriend. A request to leave, an argument and an axe-accident later, they have a body to dismember and dump in the lake and a woman to kill and bury. Thinks get worse. The brother’s friends show up to party, including a Torah divinity student who asks inconvenient questions. Tyler, playing fearful, and Malin, ever more assertive, are very funny. The movie overall is only so so, done in by unwelcome choices like hallucinations of the dead brother as a zombie. (Only at the Guildford in Surrey) 2 out of 5
Also now playing …
CARRIE: No previews for this one. That’s usually a bad sign. The studio wants a few bucks from the audience before they get wise. Well, we’ll see how director Kimberly Peirce and her star Chloë Grace Moretz do with the role that Sissy Spacek turned into a horror classic 27 years ago. Carrie who has telekinetic powers, is kept as an outsider by her fanatically religious mom (Julianne Moore) but gets both a drenching of blood and revenge at the high school prom. It’s one of the movies’ most iconic scenes, for teens anyway. From a Stephen King novel which also wielded a sequel, a TV movie and a Broadway musical. (Scotiabank and many suburban theatres)
NOTE: All images are movie stills provided by the studios or producers. They are the exclusive property of their copyright owners.