Movies

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This article was published 16/03/2017 (3453 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

RECOMMENDED

A UNITED KINGDOM

Grant Park. PG. 110 minutes.

Prince Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo) of Botswana causes an international crisis at his home and in England when he falls in love with a white Londoner (Rosamund Pike) and vows to marry her against the wishes of his own family and the British powerbrokers seeking a foothold in his country. Director Amma Asante sacrifices a bit of melodrama for the chance to make a vital and pertinent point about the underpinnings of institutional racism: disenfranchising black people pays off for anyone cynical enough to exploit hatred to achieve riches and/or political power.

★★★½ (Reviewed by Randall King)

STARTING FRIDAY

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

Grant Park, Kildonan Place, McGillivray, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne. PG. 129 minutes.

This live-action remake of the animated Disney musical stars Emma Watson as Belle and Dan Stevens as the Beast, an aristocrat cursed with a monstrous visage as punishment for past arrogance.

GOON: LAST OF THE ENFORCERS

Kildonan Place, McGillivray, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne. 14A. 101 minutes.

Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott) looks to turn a new page in his life when his wife (Alison Pill) asks him to quit his brutal hockey career for the sake of their baby, a choice that leaves his teammates at the mercy of Doug’s new rival (Wyatt Russell), the son of his team’s owner (Callum Keith Rennie).

THE LAST WORD

Grant Park. 14A. 120 minutes.

Disagreeable businesswoman Harriet Lauler (Shirley MacLaine) enlists young obituary writer Anne (Amanda Seyfried) to write Harriet’s life story in a bid to reshape the way she’ll be remembered once she is gone.

THOSE WHO MAKE REVOLUTION HALFWAY ONLY DIG THEIR OWN GRAVES

Cinematheque. 18A. 183 minutes.

This film from Quebec speculates on the implications of Quebec’s massive student demonstrations of 2012.

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BALLERINA

Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne. G. 90 minutes.

This French-Canadian animated musical adventure centres on a poor orphan girl (voiced by Elle Fanning) who dreams of becoming a ballerina and gets a chance to audition for the celebrated school of the Paris Opera Ballet. The movie’s ballet, translated from actual dancers at the Paris Opera, is quite beautiful. Unfortunately, Ballerina is too clunky and unco-ordinated to be a classic, settling for cute when it could have been charming.

★★★ (Reviewed by Jill Wilson)

BEFORE I FALL

Polo Park, Towne. PG. 100 minutes.

This variation of Groundhog Day follows Sam (Zoey Deutsch) a young woman apparently living a charmed life, especially when she awakens after what should have been a fatal car crash to discover she’ll have another chance to live the day, again and again, until she gets it right. Boasting themes that are both cerebral and philosophical, this young-adult thriller goes far beyond surface level, reminding us how growth, change and breaking with norms can bring us to our truest selves.

★★★½ (Reviewed by Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service)

BITTER HARVEST

McGillivray. 14A. 103 minutes.

Set in 1930s Ukraine, this historic drama examines the fiendish workings of the Holodomor, Stalin’s death-by-starvation program that ultimately killed millions of Ukrainians, as one young artist (Max Irons) battles to save his lover from the purge. A serious historic tragedy is given shmaltzy, soap opera treatment. This is a history lesson that deserves a much better vehicle.

★★ (Reviewed by Jocelyn Noveck, The Associated Press)

A DOG’S PURPOSE

Polo Park. PG. 100 minutes.

Adapted from W. Bruce Cameron’s bestselling novel, this film by Lasse Hallström follows a dog named Bailey through various incarnations, interacting with humans and all the while questioning his purpose in the universe. Hallström, who has directed a couple of dog-themed movies before this one, is a seasoned hand at tear-jerking melodrama (Dear John, Safe Haven) but less assured in the realm of comedy, which is one reason why the film’s frequent moments of canine slapstick tend to fall flat. The movie requires an even ratio of laughter to tears, but it weighs heavier on the melancholy side. But the film’s good intentions count. Without unduly anthropomorphizing its multiple canine heroes, the film succeeds in giving the audience a way to deeply consider canine consciousness.

★★★½ (Reviewed by Randall King)

GET OUT

Polo Park, St. Vital. 14A. 104 minutes.

Key and Peele comedian Jordan Peele segues into an auteur with this horror film in which a young black student (Daniel Kaluuya) accompanies his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) to her affluent parents’ upstate community, inadvertently entering a nightmare as the interracial relationship spawns a sinister reaction. Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, writer-director Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results.

★★★½ (Reviewed by Jake Coyle, The Associated Press)

THE GREAT WALL

Polo Park, Towne. PG. 103 minutes.

Matt Damon plays a European mercenary embroiled in the defence of the Great Wall of China against a horde of monstrous creatures in this fantasy-adventure from director Yimou Zhang. Is it good? Well, no. But at times it possesses the kind of nutty magnificence you might expect from Chinese master Zhang lending his practiced, elegant hand to what is essentially a hyper-inflated B-grade monster-movie.

★★½ (Reviewed by Alison Gillmor)

HIDDEN FIGURES

Grant Park. PG. 127 minutes.

This drama is based on the true story of the female African-American mathematician Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) and her two colleagues, Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), whose groundbreaking calculations helped NASA catch up in America’s space race against the Soviet Union, allowing John Glenn (Glen Powell) to become the first American astronaut to successfully make a complete orbit of the Earth. Unlike many sob-inducing holiday releases, this gets off to a spirited start and rarely lets up, sharing with viewers a little-known chapter of history as inspiring as it is intriguing.

★★★★ (Reviewed by Ann Hornaday, Washington Post)

JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2

Polo Park, Towne. 18A. 122 minutes.

In this sequel to the stylish killfest John Wick, Keanu Reeves’ reluctant assassin must return to his career when a shadowy figure from his past calls in a marker, meaning Wick must carry out an especially difficult execution. The movie has the same lovingly designed mayhem as the first film, but scriptwriter Derek Kolstad offers up enjoyable variations of the assassin movie tropes. The action itself, usually shot in long takes, is impressive enough to take the irony out of the term “fight choreography.”

★★★½ (Reviewed by Randall King)

KONG: SKULL ISLAND

Grant Park, Kildonan Place, McGillivray, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne. PG. 119 minutes.

A team of explorers (including Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, John Goodman and Samuel L. Jackson) explore an uncharted island in the South Pacific that is home to the titular giant ape and a host of other man-eating behemoths. There are a few nods to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, but notwithstanding casting a giant ape as the mysterious, jungle-dwelling Kurtz figure, the movie is an unpretentious, fast-paced festival of the freakish. Yet we’re still left with the niggling feeling this could have been so much more interesting.

★★½ (Reviewed by Randall King)

LA LA LAND

McGillivray. PG. 128 minutes.

This wistful musical directed by Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) stars Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as a jazz pianist and an actress who fall in love while struggling to find success in Los Angeles. It’s a slight, often affecting story that mixes the confusion of contemporary life with nostalgic yearning for a time when the whole boy-meets-girl thing was less complicated. Beautifully shot and elegantly choreographed, the film’s last, perfect moments are a seamless swell of pure emotion.

★★★★ (Reviewed by Alison Gillmor)

THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE

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

In this animated comedy, Batman (voiced by Will Arnett) must get past his lone wolf habits if he hopes to defeat the Joker (Zach Galifianakis), forcing him to lean on sidekick Robin (Michael Cera) and butler Alfred (Ralph Fiennes). In Lego movie terms, this sequel doesn’t have the bite of the first, which somehow managed to be a toy-based neo-Marxist critique of consumer capitalism. As a Batman movie, however, this smart, self-aware, fast and very funny outing is just made to puncture the self-serious, overinflated mythos of the post-Nolan Bat.

★★★★ (Reviewed by Alison Gillmor)

LION

Grant Park. PG. 119 minutes.

A vulnerable boy becomes hopelessly lost when he is trapped on a train that transports him to the other side of India. When he is adopted by an Australian family, he grows up haunted by his previous life and becomes obsessed with tracking his journey via Google Earth. Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) gives a star-quality performance in this drama that embraces the good technology can do.

★★★½ (Reviewed by Randall King)

LOGAN

Grant Park, Kildonan Place, McGillivray, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne. 18A. 137 minutes.

This X-Men entry, set in a future in which the world’s mutants have largely died off, centres on the bleak life of Wolverine, a.k.a. Logan (Hugh Jackman), living with a dementia-addled Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and trying to lay low until a gifted young girl (Dafne Keen, delightfully badass) with Wolverine-like powers falls under his reluctant care. Because this is reportedly Jackman’s farewell to the role, and because the filmmakers have followed the R-rated precedent of last year’s Deadpool, the film makes the most of its licence to crank up the mayhem. Wolverine isn’t merely inflicting flesh wounds, but at the same time, accommodates something no one expected: a richly elegiac superhero movie.

★★★★ (Reviewed by Randall King)

TABLE 19

McGillivray. PG. 87 minutes.

Eloise (Anna Kendrick) is relieved of her maid-of-honour duties after being unceremoniously dumped by the best man via text, but decides to attend her oldest friend’s wedding anyway. She finds herself seated at the random table in the back of the ballroom with a disparate group of strangers, likewise cast off by the head table. The crucial problem with Table 19 is you never fall for the misfits, or fall for them falling for each other. They remain, even after a brisk 87 minutes, those annoying strangers you can’t wait to never see again.

★★ (Reviewed by Lindsey Bahr, The Associated Press)

TONI ERDMANN

Cinematheque. 14A. 162 minutes.

Ines (Sandra Huller) is a high-flying corporate workaholic currently consulting in Bucharest, when her eccentric, semi-estranged father, Winfried (Peter Simonischek), pops in for a surprise visit. Much given to pranks and japes, the rumpled, lumbering Winfried crashes into Ines’s highly controlled corporate life at the most inopportune times. Ostensibly a comedy-drama, that catch-all label doesn’t even begin to cover its idiosyncratic tone, in which the comedy is often killingly awkward and the drama so oddly sweet. In German, Romanian and English, with subtitles.

★★★★ (Reviewed by Alison Gillmor)