24 CITY *****
Dir. Jia Zhang-ke w/ Zhao Tao, Joan Chen. 112 min. Visions.
It’s been China’s year in just about every conceivable manner. Leave it to the country’s most celebrated young filmmaker to create a uniquely insightful and evocative portrait of Chinese society as it undergoes yet another seismic change. Integrating interviews with actual workers and fictional monologues by actors (including Joan Chen and Jia regular Zhao Tao) with haunting views of the industrial landscape, the film charts the transition of a military aviation factory into a “living community” named 24 City. In so doing, Jia reveals the impact of China’s industrial and cultural reforms on the people most likely to be tossed around by the turbulence.
ADORATION **
Dir. Atom Egoyan w/ Scott Speedman, Arsinee Khanjian. 100 min. Special.
Often beguiling but frustratingly opaque, Egoyan’s latest marks a return to the more intimate style that should be his sweet spot. Through the story of a teen’s provocative claim that he was part of a bombing that never happened, Adoration tackles heady but underdeveloped themes about terrorism, religion, memory and identity. Once it scales down into a more conventionally Egoyan-esque tale of emotionally repressed characters excavating old family traumas, it engages more strongly. Yet the mystifying behaviour of nearly everyone on screen is enough to make The Adjuster play like social realism -- not for nothing are characters continually asking each other, “Why?” Devoid of the pervy allure of Exotica or the emotional force of The Sweet Hereafter, it too often feels like a few good ideas in search of a movie.
ASHES OF TIME REDUX ****
Dir Wong Kar Wai w/ Brigitte Lin, Leslie Cheung. 93 min. Special Presentations.
Only Wong Kar Wai could’ve turned what his financers must’ve hoped would be a wuxia action flick into a Borges-ian rumination on love, memory and mortality. And though Ashes of Time was an expensive flop back in 1994, it’s one of the Hong Kong auteur’s most gorgeous and alluring works, especially in this newly revamped form. The slight but judicious re-editing, much-enhanced colour palette and revised musical score make this a remarkably sumptuous viewing experience even if some of the impact is diffused by the fugue-like narrative structure.
BETTER THINGS ***
Dir Duane Hopkins w/ Liam McIlfatrick, Che Corr. 93 min. Discovery.
This haunting, visually austere if somewhat overwrought debut feature by British upstart Duane Hopkins traces the impact of a young junkie’s overdose death in a rural community that is filled with similarly lost souls. An unremittingly bleak portrait of alienation and societal decay, Better Things has no shortage of misery or agony, but nor is it without moments of grace and power. Hopkins’ flair for painterly compositions also points to greater things in his future.
BIRDSONG ****
Dir Albert Serra w/ Lluis Carbo, Lluis Serrat Batlle. 96 min. Visions.
In what instantly ranks as one of cinema’s most unusual takes on the nativity story, this second feature by Catalan director Albert Serra re-imagines the journey of the three kings to visit Jesus. Rendered in lengthy shots that are sometimes so dimly lit that they look more black than black-and-white, these travels involve a lot of walking, climbing and napping, plus some often comical banter, an angelic encounter or two and a fine debut performance by Cinema Scope publisher Mark Peranson. Minimalist it may be, Birdsong nevertheless possesses a spirit of lightness and a bounty of surprises that will delight the (very) patient viewer.
BLIND LOVES *****
Dir Juraj Lehotsky. 77 min. Real to Reel.
Ingenious, touching and delightfully odd, this Slovakian documentary delves deeply into the private lives of its four sightless subjects. Among them are a music teacher who enjoys a Jules Verne-like adventure, a teenage girl who yearns for a beau and — most movingly — a pregnant woman who wonders about the relationship she will have with her sighted offspring. Startling for its intimacy (it’s like an Ulrich Seidl doc minus the misanthropy), Blind Loves also benefits greatly from its streak of playfulness.
BLINDNESS ***
Dir Fernando Mereilles w/ Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo. 118 min. Special Presentations.
Many critics at Cannes were less than kind to director Fernando Mereilles’ adaptation of Jose Saramago’s dark allegory about societal disintegration in the wake of an epidemic of sightlessness. Yet Blindness deserves rather more humane treatment than it’s received. The script by Don McKellar (who also stars) preserves most of the necessary grace notes while bringing a lighter touch to the novel’s heavier-handed moments. The visual aesthetic is unusually daring, with convincing use of locations in Guelph and Sao Paulo. Julianne Moore is also on typically strong form as the one character who is able to witness her world’s descent into squalour and brutality. An air of tentativeness hampers the whole endeavour but the story still has great force.
CHE: PART 1 ***
Dir Steven Soderbergh w/ Benicio Del Toro, Demian Bichir. 135 min. Special Presentations.
Wildly ambitious and not a little demanding, the first half of Steven Soderbergh’s Latin American epic contains a barrage of details great and small about Guevara’s most triumphant years. Crosscutting between Che’s celebrity-minting 1964 trip to New York to speak before the United Nations and the grueling, bloody Cuban campaign that originally brought the Argentine radical such renown, the movie successfully eschews the clichés of the biopic and the war movie yet can’t quite develop a satisfying replacement for that vocabulary. As a result, it only comes fully alive during the final sequence, a riveting recreation of the decisive battle for Santa Clara.
CHE: PART 2 ****
Dir. Steven Soderbergh w/ Benicio Del Toro, Franka Potente. 135 min. Special Presentations.
Though its subject is Guevara’s doomed efforts to create a Bolivian franchise for his Cuban Revolution, Che’s second half is Soderbergh’s true triumph. The influence of Peter Watkins — a great model for political filmmakers, though perhaps not the wisest for those who just spent $65 million on a piece of Marxist agit-prop and now have to find a U.S. distributor — is also easier to see in Part 2’s dialectically inclined mojito of arguments, strategy sessions, sloganeering and brutal battle scenes. And while Del Toro’s incarnation of Che remains a model of intelligence, honour and decency throughout, his desperate final acts leave us to wonder contemplate the mountain of corpses in his wake.
GOMORRAH ****
Dir. Matteo Garrone w/ Toni Servillo, Gianfelica Imparato. 135 min. Special Presentations.
Based on a bestseller about the crime syndicate that dominates Naples’ economy — unsurprisingly, the author went into hiding lest he catch a bullet himself — Matteo Garrone’s Cannes prize-winner bears less resemblance to the average mob drama than to The Wire. This too is a stern, unflinching study of what happens when crime and corruption have ceased to be aberrant elements in a culture and instead comprise its social fabric. Appropriately enough, the plot strand about a tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo) who learns a hard lesson in global economics proves to be the most affecting of the many storylines within Garrone’s ambitious but powerful film.
THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE WEIRD ***
Dir. Kim Jee-woon w/ Song Kang-ho, Jung Woo-sung. 120 min. Gala presentations.
A frequently exhilarating if often maddening mash-up of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, George Miller’s apocalyptic road movies and a frantic brand of comedy that’s quintessentially Korean, Kim Jee-woon’s fifth feature is certainly wilder than the usual TIFF gala. In Japanese-controlled Korea in the 1930s, bandits, soldiers and scoundrels of all stripes knock heads and exchange fire during the hunt for a treasure map. The movie’s box-office success at home bodes well for its chances of a Host-like breakthrough over here, though its baffling plot makes it hard to muddle through the spaces between the increasingly outlandish setpieces.
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY **
Dir. Mike Leigh w/ Sally Hawkins, Alexis Zegerman. 118 min. Masters.
Whether you find Sally Hawkins’ chatterbox protagonist enchanting or grating will likely determine how well you take to Mike Leigh’s new film. But the problem with Happy-Go-Lucky is not so much the presence of Poppy, a relentlessly cheery London schoolteacher who likes a bit of a larf, as Leigh’s failure to build much of a movie around her. Instead, he makes some pretty bloody obvious points about individual psychology and social dynamics via Poppy’s encounters with her boozy pals, a tense, bigoted driving instructor (Eddie Marsden), various middle-class prats and, most cringingly, a tramp who talks even more than she does. All that makes for an uncharacteristically slack piece of work from a director who knows better.
HUNGER *****
Dir Steve McQueen w/ Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham. 100 min. Discovery.
A harrowing yet enthralling docudrama about the events surrounding the IRA hunger strike led by Bobby Sands, this feature debut by UK video artist Steve McQueen was the very deserving winner of the Camera d’Or for best first film at Cannes. The stark, steely and shit-strewn visual aesthetic reflects both McQueen’s video art background and his evident affection for the similarly brutal dramas of Alan Clarke. A bigger surprise is McQueen’s prowess with actors, especially in the extraordinary centerpiece in which Sands (the superb Michael Fassbender) carefully articulates his justification for destroying himself.
I WANT TO SEE ***
Dir Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige w/ Catherine Deneuve, Rabih Mroue. 75 min. Visions.
Several freshly bombed areas in and near Beirut had an unusual visitor not long after tensions between Israel and Lebanon boiled over last year. This Lebanese not-quite-documentary situates Catherine Deneuve amid the rubble as she accompanies fellow actor Rabih Mroue into areas most stars would not dare to tread. (To be fair, Deneuve has long been involved with UNESCO and other aid organizations.) Though not enough transpires to really justify I Want to See’s feature length or its aspirations to Kiarostami-like profundity, it’s still bracing to see this epitome of movie glamour respond with so much empathy.
LION’S DEN ***
Dir Pablo Trapero w/ Martina Gusman, Elli Medeiros. 113 min. Contemporary World Cinema.
From the Argentinian director of El Bonaerense and Rolling Family comes a women-in-prison flick that only occasionally resembles Caged Heat. The lioness in Lion’s Den is Julia (Martina Gusman), a young pregnant woman imprisoned for the murder of her boyfriend. After she gives birth, Julia is allowed her to raise her son in a ward for mothers but conflict becomes inevitable when she’s compelled to surrender him. Energized by Gusman’s ferocious performance and marred only by a few mawkish moments, Pablo Trapero’s fifth feature exhibits the same strength and tenacity as its heroine.
LORNA’S SILENCE ***
Dir Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne w/ Arta Dobroshi, Jeremie Renier. 105 min. Masters.
It feels miserly to gripe about a Dardennes movie that may be less than perfect but is still more courageous and better crafted than the vast majority of the planet’s cinematic output. It’s also welcome to see the brotherly Belgian duo take a step outside the comfort zone of their Palme d’Or-winning, shaky-cam-friendly social-realist aesthetic. Yet this almost-thriller about a young Albanian woman (Arta Dobroshi) with grave misgivings about the immigration scam in which she’s involved is periodically stymied by some uncharacteristic inconsistencies in the story and the desperate people on display.
OF TIME AND THE CITY *****
Dir Terence Davies. 72 min. Masters.
Much missed since 2000’s House of Mirth, British director Terence Davies is at the top of his craft with this tribute to his dirty ol’ (home)town of Liverpool, a work largely inspired by Listen to Britain, Humphrey Jennings’ immortal ode to Englishness. Caustic, rueful and profound in equal measure, Davies’ narration is a marvel of erudition, especially when he’s venting his spleen in the direction of the Queen (or Betty, as he calls her). His alternately withering and affectionate observations are accompanied by an effective montage of archival footage and newly shot images, as well as some perfectly chosen musical selections. Is it any surprise Davies hates the Beatles?
SERBIS ***
Dir Brillante Mendoza w/ Gina Pareno, Jaclyn Jose. 90 min. Vanguard.
Set in a decrepit and memorably chaotic Manilla porn theatre, the latest by Brillante Mendoza is a frantic family melodrama that mixes sleaze and social realism to mostly arresting effect. Though a more erratic work than the Filipino director’s ’07 TIFF entry Slingshot, it bristles with the same restless energy. And while the exploding-ass-boil shot may go several steps beyond the threshold of genteel viewers, Serbis’ climactic scene proves the worth of an old showbiz adage: if you’re ever worried that you’re losing the audience, throw in a runaway goat.
SNOW ****
Dir Aida Begic w/ Zana Marjanovic, Jasna Beri. 99 min. Discovery.
The grand prize winner of the International Critics Week at Cannes, Aida Begic’s debut feature is set in 1997 in a small Bosnian village that the war has almost completely robbed of its men. The surviving women must decide whether to keep their homes or sell them off to developers. Humanely wrought and sensitively rendered by Begic and her excellent cast, Snow is a work of rare modesty and poignance.
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK ****
Dir Charlie Kaufman w/ Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton. 124 min. Special Presentations.
Rueful, daring and bleakly funny, Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut poses far greater challenges than how to pronounce the title (say it like Schenectady). Like, for instance, trying to keep track of the passage of time in this story of a frustrated playwright (played by an especially shambling Philip Seymour Hoffman) who uses a massive grant to literally turn his life into a theatrical production. Or, for that matter, keeping a handle on who’s playing who as characters in the playwright’s life are integrated into his meisterwerk, and vice versa.
THREE MONKEYS ***
Dir Nuri Bilge Ceylan w/ Ahmet Rifat Sungar, Hatice Aslan. 109 min. Masters.
The Turkish maker of Uzak and Climates goes for the full Antonioni with this angst-soaked yet beautifully mounted drama, which netted him a best director prize at Cannes. After a driver takes the fall for a hit-and-run accident by his politician boss, his wife and son contend with their own personal crises. A throwback to the weightiest end of ’60s arthouse cinema, the high modernist mode is often intoxicating but can also be a lot to bear, especially given the near-total absence of the mordant wit that leavened Ceylan’s past films.
TOKYO SONATA ****
Dir Kiyoshi Kurosawa w/ Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyoko Koizumi. 85 min. Masters.
Though a delicate domestic drama is not what one normally expects from the maker of such existentialist J-horror faves as Pulse, Charisma and Cure, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest turns out to be as provocative and unnerving as his best work. Kyoko Koizumi gives a quietly heartbreaking performance as a middle-class wife and mother who’s unable to keep her family from disintegrating. While the film’s final-act shift from gentle naturalism to something more avidly surreal may perplex newcomers to Kurosawa’s films, it yields some of his most exciting and moving moments to date.
TONY MANERO ****
Dir Pablo Lerrain w/ Alfredo Castro, Amparo Noguera. 92 min. Discovery.
How’s this for a must-see premise? A violent, sociopathic dirtbag in Pinochet’s Chile pursues his obsession with Saturday Night Fever to dangerous extremes. Director Pablo Lerrain makes good on the potential of this concept with an unnerving and often very darkly funny second feature that’s further distinguished by the stark period detail and Alfredo Castro’s gonzo performance as the would-be Travolta who does some unspeakable things in (and to) a pair of white suits.
UN CONTE DE NOEL ****
Dir Arnaud Desplechin w/ Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric. 150 min. Special.
The French director’s follow-up to his masterful Kings and Queen can be a right mess at times but this Christmas story’s sheer abundance of wit, warmth and wisdom makes is very engaging. The cast’s evident enthusiasm is also infectious, with Deneuve and Amalric proving to be very worthy adversaries as a mother and son who have a peculiarly hostile relationship. Even though the relations among the rest of the clan’s members are not quite so testy as they gather for the holidays, there’s still plenty of hectic business and unexpected digressions, some of which turn out to be blind alleys. But amid the chaos lie many magical moments, largely conjured up by Chiara Mastroianni as a woman who discovers she might’ve picked the wrong mate.
WALTZ WITH BASHIR ****
Dir Ari Folman. 87 min. Special Presentations.
An Israeli variation on the memoir-toon template of Persepolis with more than a few echoes of Waking Life, Ari Folman was a favourite at Cannes that’s sure to pick up momentum as it comes into circulation. Waltz With Bashir charts the filmmaker’s quest to learn about his involvement in a wartime massacre that his memory has preserved only in ambiguous fragments. Though the decision to use animation may initially seem counterproductive (especially in the most harrowing scenes), the largely rotoscoped visuals accentuate the sense of slippage as Folman offers different versions of what may have happened, and from many different perspectives. The question of culpability is a thorny one and the film’s final moments are both devastating and divisive.
WENDY AND LUCY ****
Dir Kelly Reichardt w/ Michelle Williams, Will Patton. 80 min. Contemporary World Cinema.
The team behind Old Joy crafts another small-scale, Pacific Northwestern wonder that’s remarkable for its emotional intimacy. It’s also a strong showcase for the talents of Michelle Williams. She plays Wendy, a transient young woman who loses what little control over her life after things go wrong with her car and her only compadre (the second half of the titular couple is played by director Kelly Reichardt’s own dog). This vulnerable figure’s sudden shift to the very periphery of American society is as wrenching as it is astutely rendered.