Set at an underfunded theater camp in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains, “Theater Camp,” now playing in cinemas, is a mockumentary about a place where “where every kid picked last in gym finally makes the team.”
Written by, and starring Ben Platt and Molly Gordon, two theater camp kids who made it to Broadway in real life, the film takes place at Camp AdirondACTS, a summer school for theatrical wannabes. When owner Joan Rubinsky (Amy Sedaris) suffers a seizure and falls into a coma during a production of “Bye Bye Birdie,” the future of the camp is thrown into question.
With Joan in the ICU, her dim-witted business vlogger son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) takes over. Faced with running the nearly bankrupt camp, he grapples with closing down his mother’s life project, or selling the land to their neighbor, the infinitely fancier Camp Lakeview.
There may be financial ruin on the horizon, but the show still must go on; there is a season to run and students to teach. With no idea how to do either, Troy turns to eccentric acting teachers Amos (Ben Platt), Rebecca-Diane (Gordon) and production manager Glenn (Noah Galvin) to run things and put together a show-stopping musical to end the camp’s season. “We’re theater people,” says Glenn. “We know how to turn cardboard into gold.”
“Theater Camp” will work best for audiences who have a love of the Three S’s: Sondheim, singing and stagecraft. It’s a celebration of those who bow at the altar of Patti LuPone and spontaneously burst into song.
An update on the Judy and Mickey “let’s put on a show” trope, the movie is a musical underdog story that nails the vibe of the camp, a place for misfits who don’t fit in anywhere else. When it concentrates on the campers and their teachers—Nathan Lee Graham has a memorable cameo as an instructor who says, “You need to know that only three percent of people make it. The rest end up in a mental facility or in a Go-Go box in Hell’s Kitchen.”—it finds a pleasing mix of humor and sweetness.
When it gets deeper into the production of the final show, “Joan, Still,” the movie’s one-joke premise starts to wear thin.
A combination of loving portrayal of the camaraderie of theatre and edgy, awkward humor, “Theater Camp” is a balance of satire and cloying sweetness that applauds theater kid culture, but feels a bit too inside for a wide audience.
On this week’s edition of the Richard Crouse Show we’ll meet Jon Klassen. He is the creator of the #1 New York Times best-selling I Want My Hat Back. He is also the illustrator of The Shapes Trilogy of books which is now is now a television show on Apple TV+ called Shape Island. His new book is The Skull, a folktale about a brave girl who helps a Skull over come his fears as she overcomes her own.
Then, we meet C.C. Humphreys. You know him as an actor. He was Clive Parnell on Coronation Street and appeared on The Adventures of Shirley Holmes and Elysium among many others things.
He has also written twenty-two novels of both historical fiction and fantasy including his latest “Someday I’ll Find You,” a novel about a spy, and a pilot, who fall in love but are wrenched apart during World War II, and must find their way back to each other.
This tale of causes and compromises, heroism and betrayaI is perfect for fan of historical fiction, of books like “The Nightingale” and “Lilac Girls.”
Each week on the nationally syndicated Richard Crouse Show, Canada’s most recognized movie critic brings together some of the most interesting and opinionated people from the movies, television and music to put a fresh spin on news from the world of lifestyle and pop-culture. Tune into this show to hear in-depth interviews with actors and directors, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favourite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Recent guests include Chris Pratt, Elvis Costello, Baz Luhrmann, Martin Freeman, David Cronenberg, Mayim Bialik, The Kids in the Hall and many more!
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When the “Mission: Impossible” franchise began in 1996 the movies were big, prestige spy thrillers, heavy on the intrigue and supported by large action sequences. Then came 2011’s “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” a popcorn flick built around an eye-popping sequence featuring star Tom Cruise scaling the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, with only a pair of suction gloves and courage coming between him and certain death.
That sequence made audience’s eyeballs dance and changed the focus of the franchise. It also turned Cruise into the Evel Knievel of cinematic risk taking.
Since then, the movies have been driven by the death-defying stunts performed by their star, the seemingly fearless Cruise, rather than the convoluted plots of the first batch of films. In the world of “Mission: Impossible” there is no building is too high for Tom to climb, no chasm too wide for him to jump.
The new film, “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One,” files the actual story down to a nub—”I’m going to need a few more details,” says glamourous international thief Grace (Hayley Atwell), as if commenting on the script. “They tend to get in the way,” replies Benji, nodding his head.—while letting it rip with wild action sequences.
The catalyst for the action is artificial intelligence run amok. Called The Entity, it is an all-powerful machine, “who is everywhere and nowhere” and has no center. “We don’t want to kill it,” says Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), the former director of the Impossible Missions Force, “we want to control it.”
The key to controlling it is, well, a key. Split into two halves, the key only works when made whole. Kittridge’s best chance of intercepting the key is the IMF, a secret group of expert spies made up of Ethan Hunt (Cruise), computer technician Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), field agent Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and sometimes member Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson).
The IMF’s mission, should they choose to accept it, is to retrieve one half of the key from glamourous international thief Grace (Hayley Atwell) before she can sell it to black market arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis (Vanessa Kirby). The fear is Mitsopolis will pass the key’s combined halves to terrorist Gabriel (Esai Morales). “None of our lives can matter more than the mission,” says Stickell.
Cue feats of daring-do and wild action.
“Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning” is the ne plus ultra of modern, big-budget studio filmmaking. Director Christopher McQuarrie manages the breathless, super-sized movies with an expert hand, blending old school action movie filmmaking with real stakes.
Whether it is Cruise flying through the air on a motorcycle or navigating through the streets of Rome in a tiny, but speedy European car or hanging on for dear life as a train car disintegrates around him, the green-screenless action scenes seem to be saying, “Take that Marvel.” The organic stunts, no matter how foolhardy they may be, up the stakes, have real danger to them and set “Dead Reckoning” apart from most action flicks. It is escapism at an eye-watering level.
Tempering the action is some humor and an emphasis on the connections between the characters. Loyalty to the cause has always been paramount in these movies, but the bond between the characters has been tempered, probably because we are near the end of the franchise, by a dose of nostalgia and sentimentality.
Still, this is, first and foremost, an action movie, the characters each have an archetype to fill. Rhames and Pegg are the playful foils, Vanessa Kirby is a deliciously vampy femme fatale and Esai Morales is the kind of baddie who makes grand pronouncements like, “I will disappear like smoke in a hurricane.”
Most notable is the latest lead addition, Grace. She is a slippery character whose motives shift and change with the wind, which makes her interesting. Unlike Isla (Rebecca Ferguson), however, who could handle herself in any situation, Grace is more a damsel in distress, although in the arena of self-preservation, she is a master. She is the kind of character that franchises are built around.
“Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One” isn’t all played at 11. It has peaks and valleys, of course, but the valleys are welcome respite from the sensory overload provided by the spectacle and adrenaline. It is a heckuva mission, satisfying, even if we have to wait a year or more, for the story’s conclusion.
Despite the title, “The Miracle Club” isn’t so much about miracles as it is redemption, faith and uplift.
Set in 1967, in Ballygar, Ireland, this is the story of four women. Chrissie (Laura Linney) left the seaside town for Boston under a cloud forty years before and hasn’t been back. When she returns for her mother’s funeral, she must face the demons of the past, and the people she left behind, including her former BFF Eileen (Kathy Bates) and her late mother’s passive-aggressive best friend Lily (Maggie Smith). Bitterness runs deep between the three, each harboring grudges that have bubbled for four decades.
At a church fundraiser, Father Dermot Byrne (Mark O’Halloran) the local priest and center of religious life in the small town, throws a talent show. The prize is a trip to Lourdes in southwest France. One of the most visited places by Catholics from around the world, it is a pilgrimage site where, since 1858, the faithful have flocked to pray for miracles while bathing in the healing waters where a young girl named Bernadette Soubirous is said to have witnessed visions of the Virgin Mary.
Despite their best efforts at the talent show, Eileen, Lily and new mom Dolly (Agnes O’Casey) come in second, winning a hunk of meat instead of the coveted tickets. The first-place winner, feeling sorry for them, offers his tickets to them, and soon they are boarding the bus for Lourdes. Along for the ride is Chrissie, who uses her mother’s ticket for the trip.
On site in the holy town, miracles are in short supply but the situation forces the three generations of women to confront their pasts and prejudices. “You don’t come to Lourdes for a miracle,” says Father Byrne. “You come for the strength to go on when there is no miracle.”
“The Miracle Club” isn’t about divine agency. Nothing miraculous happens, excepting the power of truth and compassion to heal the long-simmering wounds each of these women carry. Their shared trauma (NO SPOILERS HERE) overwhelms their lives, forming who they are as people. The actors imprint each of these characters with the cumulative weight of their lives, willing Eileen, Lily and Chrissie into stubborn life, despite a script that attempts to keep them as stereotypes.
It is these performances that give “The Miracle Club” much of its power to engage with the audience. It is in each of their abilities to imply the inner lives of the characters without necessarily verbalizing them, that shows how deeply they have been devastated by past events. That, and the movie’s evocative sense of time and place, create the backdrop for the more pedestrian story in the foreground.
As extreme sports go, few entail the danger of free-diving. Often immersed hundreds of meters under the water, with no breathing apparatus, divers rely on mental and physical rigor to ensure success. One wrong move, a few seconds extra under the extraordinary pressure of the water, and all can be lost.
A new documentary, “The Deepest Breath,” now playing in theatres before moving to Netflix next week, is an up-close-and-personal look at the sport and the people who risk their lives to practice it.
Director Laura McGann assembles a study of the sport, vividly utilizing underwater photography and interviews with practitioners to provide context, and set the stage for the film’s main story, the story of Irish adventurer Stephen Keenan and Italian freediving champion Alessia Zecchini.
Determined to set a world’s record, Zecchini sets her sights on “the last quiet place on Earth,” the Blue Hole Arch, a claustrophobic 85-foot-long tunnel 184 feet below the Red Sea in Egypt. The treacherous tunnel has claimed at least 100 divers, so to aid in her dive, Keenan will act as her safety diver. His job is to track her underwater movements in case she gets lost or blacks out due to the lack of breath.
No spoilers here, but the dive does not go as planned.
With beautiful and often haunting underwater photography, director McGann gives “The Deepest Breath” a you-are-there feeling. The starkness of the dive footage effectively emphasizes the singularity of the sport; the self-reliance and mental preparation it takes to take the plunge.
The film is slightly less successful in the telling of its story. The first half of the doc is filled with choppy storytelling, archival interviews and digressions on behalf of its cast of characters. It makes for an uneven experience, but the immersive nature of the filmmaking in the ethereal underwater scenes calms any rough waters in the storytelling.
“The Deepest Breath” may not be completely satisfying account of why people risk their lives in this extreme sport, but it is a compelling visual record of those who do.
“Joy Ride,” a new comedy starring Ashley Park and Sherry Cola and now playing in theatres, is a raunchy road trip movie that pushes the boundaries of both its humor and its examination of family and platonic love.
According to Audrey (Park), she and Lolo (Cola) became friends because they were “the only two Asian girls” in their suburban Washington state town. Fast friends from the playground to adulthood, they are a great example of how opposites attract. Audrey is a career-obsessed corporate lawyer, on the fast track to becoming a partner at her firm, while Lolo is an irreverent free spirit, trying to make it as an artist.
When Audrey’s firm sends her on a business trip to China, to close a deal with millionaire Chao (Ronny Chieng), Lolo tags along as translator and troublemaker. “Best friends’ trip,” she shouts. “This is going to be iconic.”
Completing the crew are Lolo’s eccentric cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) and Audrey’s college BFF Kat (“Everything Everywhere All at Once’s” Stephanie Hsu) who is now a television star in Beijing. It’s an uneasy group. Deadeye is off in their own world and Lolo and Kat constantly snipe at one another.
On the ground in Beijing, Audrey and her squad meet with Chao in a crowded nightclub for a night of excessive drinking, eating and playing a slapping game that is as painful as it is ridiculous. “I heard that if you keep up with Chinese businessmen,” says Lolo as a new tray of shots arrives at the table, “they respect you more.”
The night turns serious when Chao says he wants to meet Audrey’s family. “How are we supposed to do business together if we do not know one another’s families?” he asks. Trouble is, Audrey, although born in China, was adopted as a child and raised in America by a white family.
Turns out Lolo, who always thought Audrey should track down her birth mom, has already done some research and discovered the mother lives an hour-and-a-half away. When Chao insists on meeting her, Audrey and company set off on a wild sex, drugs and rock n’ roll (OK, make that K-Pop) fueled trip to reunite mother and daughter.
“Joy Ride” is explicit and emotional. Audrey and her friends engage in a comedy-of-errors—they become reluctant drug mules, run amok in a hotel full of professional basketball players and perform a rowdy remake of Cardi B’s “WAP” with an unexpected reveal—but mixed in with the raunch are sincere messages of identity and belonging that prevent the movie from feeling like a series of outrageous set pieces strung together. The whole thing is bound by the cast’s genuine chemistry, a kind of “Bridemaid’s” bond that allows for the movie’s wild shifts in tone.
It’s is Audrey’s search for identity and self-discovery as an Asian adoptee living in America that lies at the heart of the story. Her coming-of-age in China brings with it an introspection uncommon in hard-R comedies.
“Joy Ride” is a culturally specific story that smashes stereotypes with vagina tattoos and universal messages of self-worth, renewal and the importance of comradery.
A chamber piece set against a backdrop of the literary world, “The Lesson,” now playing in theatres, is a fabulously twisty noir-ish study in betrayal and revenge.
Liam Sommers (Daryl McCormack) is an aspiring author, fresh out of university, who lands a cushy job as a live-in tutor for his idol, the fabulously wealthy J.M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant), the most revered author in the country, who also just happens to be the subject of Liam’s thesis. “I’m sure he’d be flattered,” says Sinclair’s brooding wife, art dealer Hélène (Julie Delpy) to Liam, “but you’re not here for him.”
“Good writers borrow,” says Sinclair, “but great writers steal,” and Sinclair is a great writer.
The reclusive author is recovering from the loss of his older son Felix by suicide two years before, and has brought Liam in to prep his other son, a snot-nosed brat named Bertie (Stephen McMillan), for his Oxford entrance exams. “He has to get in, Liam,” says Hélène.
On arrival, Liam discovers that despite seemingly having it all—think Downton Abbey with fewer servants—the family is lacks one crucial thing, happiness. Kept under the thumb of the egomaniacal Sinclair, who Bertie describes as, “uncaring and cruel,” an air of tension hangs over the house like a shroud.
When Sinclair agrees to read Liam’s work-in-progress novel in exchange for the ambitious, but unpublished, author’s thoughts on his latest book—”The ending, Part III? It feels like a different novel,” says Liam.—it sets off a series of events that unveil the movie’s main themes—inspiration, ethics and vengeance.
The darkly comic “The Lesson” succeeds not because of its pulpy story, which is a bit of down-and-dirty fun, but because of the way the actors inhabit their characters. Grant and Delpy are perfectly cast as a couple who opted for cruelty over love many years ago.
Grant embraces Sinclair’s techy personality and never tries to make him likeable. It’s a bravura performance that drips with superiority, intellect and derision. Sinclair knows his place in the world and is willing to do almost anything to stay there.
Delpy is a slightly more sympathetic character who allows the odd feeling, other than contempt, to bleed through her icy façade. Her misery is evident, she has lost her son and more, but behind there is something more lurking just behind her restrained disguise.
It is McCormack, however, who grounds the flights of fancy with a very real performance fueled by ambition, that prevents “The Lesson” from becoming too arch, too aware of its excesses.
“The Lesson” is a slow burn, a story that unfolds at its own pace with wit, theatrical cruelty and welcome surprises.
“This Place,” a new coming-of-adulthood film now playing in theatres, stars Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs and Priya Guns as two young women who must investigate their pasts to understand their present.
Jacobs (who also co-wrote and co-executive produced) plays Kawenniióhstha, a half-Mohawk, aspiring poet from Montreal who moves to Toronto to go to university and locate, and get to know, the Iranian father who left before she was born. “Can you imagine being okay with being forgotten or unacknowledged?” she asks.
When she leaves her writing notebook, containing all her work, at a laundromat, it leads to a meet cute with Malai (Priya Guns), a Tamil undergraduate student who lives with her older brother Ahrun (Alex Joseph) while figuring out her future.
Sparks immediately fly, and their friendship quickly turns into love, but before their relationship can fully blossom, each must deal with family issues.
As Malai learns that her estranged, alcoholic father (Muraly Srinarayanathas) is dying of cancer, she struggles with how to say goodbye. On the other hand, Kawenniióhstha must learn to say hello to her father Behrooz (Ali Momen). She learns of the complicated past shared by her parents, and her mother’s concern that if the truth about Kawenniióhstha’s father was known,blood quantum laws would deem her not Mohawk enough to live on the reservation.
As the two daughters of refugees grapple with the influence their familial connections have on their lives, it creates a strain in their relationship.
In a scant 87 minutes “This Place” covers a great deal of ground. The love story is the starting place as we get to know Kawenniióhstha and Malai, but the movie also touches on the generational trauma of genocide, parental expectations and otherness.
The love story is heartfelt and has a pleasing intimacy to it, even in its earliest stages but unfortunately, neither character is allowed the time to fully explore the repercussions of the film’s themes on their lives. They are not aided by dialogue that is too often stilted and obvious.
“This Place” has much going for it. The connection between the lead characters feels authentic, and their queerness is accepted and never questioned. But while it falters somewhat in its execution, the movie’s heart, and its messages of love, compassion and understanding, never do.
