Movies

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This article was published 15/10/2015 (3674 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

recommended

THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

Cinematheque. 14A. 119 minutes.

Largely shot in the past four years at gallery events in Montreal and Paris, this film by Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson is a mosaic of reproduced “lost films” constructed as one beautiful/bizarre narrative. The Winnipeg auteur’s latest psycho-fantasia is as avant-garde as all get-out, but also enchantingly watchable, packed with strapping woodsmen, mad doctors, femmes fatales, angry volcanoes, doomed submarines and all manner of “boggling puzzlements.” The 59-year-old Maddin, along with co-director Johnson and writing collaborator Robert Kotyk, mix high art — and high anxiety — with unabashedly low comedy. To Sunday. 4 stars (Reviewed by Alison Gillmor)

 

STARTING FRIDAY

BEEBA BOYS

Grant Park, Polo Park. 14A. 103 minutes.

Dipping her toes in the crime thriller, Can-film fixture Deepa Mehta wrote and directed this Indo-Canadian answer to Scarface focusing on Jeet Johar (Randeep Hooda), a Sikh gangster in Vancouver backed by a crew of brutal but stylish hoodlum underlings.

 

BRIDGE OF SPIES

Grant Park, McGillivray, McGillivray VIP, Polo Park, St. Vital. PG. 142 minutes.

Director Steve Spielberg reunites with Tom Hanks for this story of how a humble American lawyer (Hanks) finds himself plunged in Cold War intrigue when he is drafted to negotiate the release of an American pilot accused of spying on Russia.

 

CRIMSON PEAK

Grant Park, Kildonan Place, McGillivray, Polo Park Imax, St. Vital, Towne. 14A. 119 minutes.

Guillermo Del Toro goes full-on gothic with this lushly romantic ghost story starring Mia Wasikowska as a writer who falls for a mysterious aristocrat (Tom Hiddleston) in the haunted north England mansion he shares with his sister (Jessica Chastain).

 

FREEHELD

Grant Park. PG. 104 minutes.

Julianne Moore plays a terminally ill police detective who takes on the New Jersey political establishment fighting for the right for her partner (Ellen Page) to be the recipient of her work pension. Based on a true story.

 

GOOSEBUMPS

Kildonan Place, McGillivray, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne. PG. 104 minutes.

This kid-friendly chiller stars Jack Black as Goosebumps author R.L. Stine, who finds himself faced with chaos when the accumulated scary creations of his fiction escape into the real world.

 

GRANDMA

Cinematheque. 14A. 79 minutes.

She first gave movie stardom a shot decades ago with a couple of best-left-forgotten features, but at 76, Lily Tomlin is starting to make sense as a leading lady, especially here in this close-to-the-bone role of Elle, a lesbian poet mourning the recent death of her partner and forced into a family reckoning when her teenage granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) shows up at her door announcing she’s pregnant.

 

NOW PLAYING

EVEREST

Polo Park. PG. 122 minutes.

Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Josh Brolin, this is the epic true story of how a climbing expedition up Mount Everest went wrong when a devastating storm swept the mountain. The movie is an orgy of suffering, a powerfully affecting experience that you feel with your gut more than with your emotions, playing out like a foregone conclusion as things move from bad to worse with the steady, dirge-like drumbeat of a funeral march. 3 stars (Reviewed by Michael O’Sullivan)

 

HE NAMED ME MALALA

Grant Park. PG. 88 minutes.

Director Davis Guggenheim profiles the heroic Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, who survived a cowardly Taliban attack to emerge as a widely recognized advocate of girls’ education and the youngest Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. Moviegoers hankering for a female superhero needn’t wait for Wonder Woman. A big-screen heroine of astounding power swoops into theatres, caped in a hijab, a backpack full of books slung over her shoulder and a crooked smile — the reminder of her fearlessness. 4 stars 1/2 (Reviewed by Rebecca Keegan)

 

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2

Kildonan Place, McGillivray, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne. G. 90 minutes.

This sequel to the 2012 animated feature sees Dracula (again voiced by Adam Sandler) coming to terms with a grandson who may turn out to be just a regular mortal, while enduring grief from his own dad (voiced by Mel Brooks). It’s as rare as vampires on a beach to have a movie sequel be better than the original, but vampires might start looking for some sunglasses because the spookiest thing about Hotel Transylvania 2 is how much funnier, more colourful and original it is the second time around. 4 stars (Reviewed by Rick Bentley)

 

HYENA ROAD

Grant Park, McGillivray, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne. 14A. 120 minutes.

After Passchendaele, actor-director-writer Paul Gross returns to the field of war with a more lucid and accomplished drama set in modern Afghanistan, where an intelligence officer (Gross) befriends an army sniper (Rossif Sutherland) while attempting to enlist a legendary mujahedeen warrior known as “The Ghost” (Neamat Arghandabi) to the Canadian cause. Amazingly, lots of it was shot here in Manitoba. 3 stars (Reviewed by Randall King)

 

THE INTERN

Grant Park, McGillivray, McGillivray VIP, Polo Park, St. Vital. PG. 122 minutes.

Robert De Niro, as a senior looking for a post-retirement purpose, is drafted to “intern” for a fashion-website maven Jules (Anne Hathaway) who is in need of some worldly acumen. Instead of romantic fantasy, director Nancy Meyers (It’s Complicated) creates a father-figure fantasy, presenting De Niro as an all-wise patriarch who not only asserts Jules’s right to run her own business, he will dress down anyone who stands in her way. Too bad the film is so grossly patronizing to its older characters and outrageously condescending to its younger ones. 2 stars (Reviewed by Randall King)

 

THE MARTIAN

Grant Park, Kildonan Place, McGillivray, McGillivray VIP, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne. PG. 142 minutes.

Director Ridley Scott’s survival adventure casts Matt Damon as Mark Watney, an abandoned astronaut struggling to survive alone on Mars. With Scott at the helm and Damon leading the cast, The Martian is accessible and beautiful, cinematically and intellectually. Even though it’s a big Hollywood production, Watney’s survival really does seem in question, and audiences will want to join the international crowds onscreen in cheering for his rescue. 4 1/2 (Reviewed by Sandy Cohen)

 

MAZE RUNNER: THE SCORCH TRIALS

Kildonan Place, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne. PG. 132 minutes.

Having escaped the maze of the first film, the young “Gladers” face new post-apocalyptic challenges on the path to learning the truth about their dystopian society. As the protagonists flee yet again, the movie moves through so many colourful crises that it feels like a series of trailers for the next chapter of The Hunger Games, Divergent, Night of the Living Dead and Mad Max. It’s exhausting and fails to emotionally engage, but the film is not without its pleasures. It’s not a bad movie, it’s like several pretty good ones. 2 1/2 (Reviewed by Michael O’Sullivan)

 

PAN

Kildonan Place, McGillivray, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne. PG. 112 minutes.

This Peter Pan prequel explains the origin of the eternally boyish Neverland denizen and how he came to prominence battling for the future of Neverland’s fairy kingdom with an unlikely ally named James Hook (Garrett Hedlund) against the pirate Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman). Crossing pirate ships with the London Blitz, mixing Neverland with the music of Nirvana, it’s dark, bizarre and tonally incoherent. But before you accuse Hollywood of wrecking another beloved children’s classic, it’s important to note that the source material is also dark, bizarre and tonally incoherent — and then some. 2 1/2 (Reviewed by Alison Gillmor)

 

SICARIO

Grant Park, McGillivray, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne. 14A. 122 minutes.

Emily Blunt is an idealistic FBI agent swept into an anti-drug-cartel task force led by an enigmatic Josh Brolin, and an even more mysterious Benicio del Toro, in this grim and gripping thriller from Québécois director Denis Villeneuve. Though the story plays out through meticulously crafted, unbearably tense action set-pieces, this brutal film never exults in brutality, becoming instead an emotionally haunting, intellectually searching journey into the murky moral borderland of the war on drugs. 4 1/2 (Reviewed by Alison Gillmor)

 

THE VISIT

Polo Park. 14A. 94 minutes.

A couple of kids are sent for a visit to grandma and grandpa’s house, only to realize there is something dangerously wrong with the old couple. With the clever, cheeky and only slightly scary horror film, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan, evidently attempting to get his Sixth Sense mojo back, is partying like it’s 2000 all over again. 4 stars (Reviewed by Cary Darling)

 

THE WALK

Grant Park, Polo Park, Towne. PG. 123 minutes.

Robert Zemeckis’s biopic tells the story of Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and his plot to walk a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974, an event covered in the celebrated doc Man on Wire. Ultimately, the film’s balance is all weighted towards its third act. In that, Zemeckis and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski have made a truly extraordinary and breathtaking 40 minutes of cinema, preceded by a mostly forgettable, cloyingly whimsical hour and change. 3 stars (Reviewed by Lindsey Bahr)