Outside the (multiplex) box

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/05/2020 (1963 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

During the pandemic, people stuck at home are trying new things, ranging from learning guitar to baking ever more exotic breads.

A modest suggestion: Maybe it’s time to expand your taste in film.

We get it. It’s a scary time and it’s a consoling thing to watch familiar movies and sitcoms to give you the comfortably numb feeling of life BC (before COVID).

But let’s also acknowledge it’s an interesting time for movie-watchers. The Hollywood studio machine is more or less on hold, and films that would have otherwise been packing the multiplexes by this time — the latest Bond film No Time to Die, or the Marvel Universe entry Black Widow — are in postponement stasis until the multiplex is deemed safe again.

For fans of any given genre, it doesn’t mean you have to wait. The alternative is to seek out worthwhile films viewable on demand that might otherwise be passed over for seductive studio fare.

With that in mind, Take 5 presents a few suggestions to take your enjoyment of cinema outside the multiplex box.

1. For rom-com fans: James Vs. His Future Self

Former Winnipegger Jonas Chernick had a pretty nifty idea for a science-fiction film. A scientist obsessed with time travel is visited by his more aged iteration, who has come from the future to warn him that his efforts, while ultimately successful, will only ruin his life. It’s a modestly budgeted Canadian film, but director James Lalonde enjoys the benefit of casting Daniel Stern as the older version of Chernick’s socially inept scientist James, just as he is on the cusp of a meaningful relationship with fellow brainiac Courtney (Cleopatra Coleman).

Stern, probably still best known as one of the “Wet Bandits” in the Home Alone movies, is an electric presence and he powers the movie, bringing a delightful unpredictability into one of the more predictable genres. Yet he is movingly tender at times, as when he has a conversation with Courtney and can barely suppress the love he’s longed to express for decades.

Need further incentive? The movie is currently rated 100 per cent at Rotten Tomatoes.

2. For fans of international thrillers: Bacurau

Cinematheque at Home presented this marvellous, genre-jumping whatsit last month, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. Set in the titular Brazilian village a few years hence, it follows the eccentric citizens as they cope with the death of a village elder, only to realize their whole community is about to come under attack by a cadre of rich jerks who have paid for a homicidal spree.

It bounces between social satire and star-crossed romance — public health nurse Teresa (Barbara Colen) is drawn to local outlaw Pacote (Thomas Aquino) — before landing in the realm of the action thriller, with the villagers pitted against bad guys led by the always fascinating Udo Kier. Like the recent tone-deaf action-satire The Hunt, this shares some DNA to the classic story The Most Dangerous Game. But Bacurau is so much more interesting, more textured and infinitely more satisfying.

3. For Mafia-movies fans: The Traitor

Much as we may love Martin Scorsese, you have to appreciate Italian-made films about the Mafia. Case in point: Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor brings an immediacy to the Mob movie, a sense that the Mob is a clear and present danger to those it touches, the innocent and the corrupt.

It’s the true story of mobster-turned-informer Tommaso Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino), once a soldier for the Sicilian Mob. Brutally convinced to testify against his former confederates, he engages with anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi) and ultimately spills on just about everyone, as we come to understand what drove the fatal wedge between him and his fellow mobsters in the first place.

Bellocchio, adapting a true story, uses the facts of the case to gleefully puncture the balloon of Mafiosi dignity. As Buscetta, Favino is a terrific presence, charismatic as past Italian tough guys such as Lino Ventura. Yet he nobly resists the impulse to turn his hoodlum into a hero. In Italian with English subtitles.

4. For science-fiction fans: Color Out of Space

Director Richard Stanley had a promising start — his 1990 indie feature Hardware was a solid science-fiction offering — before things sidetracked horribly when he was fired from the 1996 feature The Island of Dr. Moreau. Color Out of Space, based on the much-filmed story by H.P. Lovecraft, is something of a late-career comeback.

Nicolas Cage — in unhinged mode — plays the patriarch of a family with issues: his wife Theresa (Joely Richardson) is a cancer survivor trying to re-establish her career from home; daughter Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur) is acting out a fascination with the occult; son Benny (Brendan Meyer) is an aspiring pothead; and younger son Jack (Julian Hilliard) is, well, stressed about everything. An alien visitation warps their rural home with nightmarish mutations. For all its grotesque visual effects, Stanley is aiming to make Lovecraft relevant, with a movie about an environmental catastrophe that, while not man-made, is dismayingly recognizable.

5. For horror fans: The Lighthouse

Director Robert Eggers’ followup to his atmospheric horror story The Witch casts Willem Dafoe as a crusty old seaman who shows up for lighthouse duty with the younger Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), a “wickie” in training.

The outpost in New England is picturesquely desolate. But the conflict between the two men turns madly baroque as Winslow comes to believe something is seriously wrong with this place. (Among other things, a malevolent seagull seems to have it in for him.)

The Lighthouse ultimately registers as a surreal prison movie in which the inmates are oppressed, not by an institution but by their own destructive masculine impulses, all let loose in the most phallic of architecture.

Eggers renders it in provocative fashion with a heavily stylized look and sound, including gorgeous black and white cinematography and a squarish aspect ratio that suits the vertical nature of the setting. Pattinson, it turns out, was meant to be photographed in black-and-white.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing