Here’s a list of Canadian dramas more flavourful than a bag of ketchup chips. Coming up I have the story of a mystical child on a remote island off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, a journey to justice for Christopher Plummer, the tale of a young women who went from wilderness of Alberta to the wild runways of the fashion world and a young Indigenous woman guided by spirits to exact revenge against a vicious Government Agent. First stop on our dramatic journey, Nova Scotia.
I sit in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with host Bill Carroll to talk about the new movies coming to theatres including Ben Affleck in “The Accountant 2,” David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds,” the documentary “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” and the family fantasy “The Legend of Ochi.”
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to roll a joint! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds,” the documentary “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” and the family fantasy “The Legend of Ochi.”
I join the Bell Media Radio Network national night time show “Shane Hewitt and the Night Shift” for “Booze & Reviews!” This week I review the documentary “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” and talk about a new Stevie Nicks album and Cameron Crowe’s new book about old interviews!
Listen as Shane and I talk about Stevie Nick’s new album inspired by Prince HERE!
Then, on Booze & Reviews listen as I talk about THC inspired cocktails HERE!
On the Saturday April 26, 2025 edition of The Richard Crouse Show we’ll meet JUNO Award-winning Indigenous artist Crystal Shawanda. Born and raised on Manitoulin Island in Northern Ontario, Crystal began her career in country music, signing with RCA Nashville. After parting ways with the label, she launched New Sun Records and shifted her focus to the blues. Her highly anticipated new album “Sing Pretty Blues,” blends blues and Southern country soul with Stax, Chess and Motown influences, is available now via her very own label, New Sun Records on all streaming platforms.
Then we’ll meet actor, comedian, writer and producer Susan Serrao, who started acting at the age of 35 after raising 4 boys. The Calgary based performer always encouraged her kids to go after whatever they wanted in life. Then one day her kids encouraged her to do the same thing, so she finally went after her dream to be an actor.
Since then, she’s kept busy, appearing on shows like ”Fargo” and “Homeland,” appearing on stages across Western Canada and elsewhere. She has a YouTube channel called Susan Serrao Sketch ‘N Stuff which is home to her sketch series “got milf?,” her podcast “Completely Off Topic, With Susan Serrao.”
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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SYNOPSIS: In the “The Accountant 2,” a new Ben Affleck action comedy now playing in theatres, money laundering forensic accountant Christian Wolff (Affleck), his bruiser brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal) and Treasury Agent Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) must use Christian’s special set of skills to stay alive as they track down a group of human traffickers. “Most brains seek a pattern that’s familiar,” Christian says. “My brain doesn’t work that way.”
CAST: Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, J. K. Simmons, Daniella Pineda. Directed by Gavin O’Connor.
REVIEW: Appropriately released during tax season, this buddy film of two brothers, a neurodivergent accountant and a hitman, is equal parts light and playful and dangerous and dark. With a line dancing scene and a human trafficking ring run out of a pizza company, it’s complicated and messy, but thoroughly entertaining.
The key to finding the film’s entertainment value is patience. Following a standard action thriller set up involving a retired FBI financial crimes agent (J.K. Simmons), a mysterious killer (Daniella Pineda) and determined FBI agent Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), the movie finally gets to the heart of the matter, the dynamic between brothers Christian (Ben Affleck) and Braxton Wolff (Jon Bernthal).
The movie still goes a bit heavy on exposition, but Affleck and Bernthal are an appealing combo who dance on the thin line between danger and whimsy. Both are stone cold killers, but each brings a different flavor to the story.
Affleck plays Christian as part 007, part John Nash. A deadly mix of mathematician and tactician, stereotypically, he speaks in clipped sentences and is matter of fact in the extreme, but in his relationship with Braxton there’s a sense of history and nuance in a movie that doesn’t favor nuance.
Bernthal is volatile and vulnerable, physical and funny, but his real strength is as a foil for Affleck. His action movie bona fides give some extra oomph to the climatic shoot out, but it is the brotherly bond, and their love-hate relationship, that gives the movie a beating heart.
“The Accountant 2’s” unnecessarily complicated plot and serviceable action exist essentially to put Christian and Braxton on screen together, which is fine when the result is as entertaining as this movie.
SYNOPSIS: A look back at the 50-year career of Cheech & Chong, the duo Lou Adler called “the first rock ‘n’ roll comedians,” “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” takes us from their beginnings in Vancouver to, as they say in the movie, “two guys with a bag of Goodwill clothes and one roadie living the rock and roll life.”
CAST: Tommy Chong, Cheech Marin, Lou Adler, Geraldo Rivera. Directed by David Bushell.
REVIEW: “So, is this a documentary or a movie?” Chong asks at one point. It’s a good question. The film uses elements of traditional documentary filmmaking, but director David Bushell isn’t afraid to use staged scenes to move the story along.
The hybrid style provides an in-depth look at the origins of the duo’s stoner comedy, their time at the top, and the creative frictions that caused an acrimonious split in the 1980s.
It’s a detailed time capsule, that leaves no stone unturned, no roach un-toked. The approach is supported by archival material, animation, fresh interviews and some connective new material of Cheech & Chong riffing while driving through the desert.
Casual fans—ie, those who don’t know who the prissy Sister Mary Elephant is—may get bogged down but for the duo’s hardcores the timeline provides interesting insight into how the pair’s various skill sets dovetailed into the hippie stoner style that made them famous.
Chong’s stagecraft and Cheech’s social awareness combined to create a male double act for their time, like a countercultural Abbott and Costello, or anti-authority Laurel and Hardy.
Along the way are insights into how they created their most famous sketches, like the improvised “Dave’s Not Here,” how a wild ride with Jack Nicholson inspired “Basketball Jones” and how George Harrison ended up playing guitar on that record. They’re fun stories but the compelling info comes later when Bushell delves into their financial and creative partnership.
After signing a bad deal with producer Lou Adler—”We got a pair of lime green shoes out of it,” Cheech says of the $100 box office of their film” Up In Smoke.”—the “Freaks of Frivolity” took control of the career even as they began to drift apart. “The essential part of what was funny never changed,” says Cheech. “What changed was who got to decide what was funny.”
What emerges in this segment is a, shall I say, sober contemplation on how their evolving roles within their partnership broke them up. The hurt from that time reverberates through their contemporary interactions. Bushell captures the easy chemistry between the two, in the old and new footage, but when the tensions arise, the pain is palpable.
“Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” ends with their career divorce, giving short shrift to the decades of sporadic reunions, trouble with the law (Chong spent 9 months in federal prison for trafficking in illegal drug paraphernalia) and, most importantly, placing them into cultural context. As counter cultural icons, they deserve more than a quick montage over the final credits—including Chong’s stint on “Dancing with the Stars”—to define their effect on comedy. Nonetheless, it’s an enjoyable walk down memory lane with two fun tour guides.
SYNOPSIS: In “The Shrouds,” a new film from David Cronenberg, and now playing in theatres, a grieving businessman is drawn into a world of jealousy and conspiracy when he markets a new, high-tech kind of interment designed to console those left behind.
CAST: Diane Kruger, Vincent Cassel, Guy Pearce, and Sandrine Holt. Written and directed by David Cronenberg.
REVIEW: Technology has invaded every aspect of our lives, and now, in the new David Cronenberg film “The Shrouds,” it invades death as well.
Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, a wealthy businessman still reeling from the death of his wife Becca. “When they lowered my wife into the coffin,” Karsh says, “I had an intense urge to get in the box with her.” In response he invents GraveTech, essentially a service that allows grieving loved ones see inside the graves of their dearly departed family members as they decompose in their shrouds.
Located next to a theme restaurant called The Shrouds, the cemetery features the latest in boneyard tech. Controlled by an app, the graves come complete with a monitor on the headstone. “It’s basically kind of a camera in her grave,” says Karsh. “It comforts me.”
As Karsh makes plans to expand his business to Iceland and Budapest, a group of activists desecrate nine of the high-tech graves, including Becca’s final resting spot. That attack becomes the catalyst for the film’s action, sending Karsh into a murky world of conspiracy, jealousy, hallucination and obsession.
“The Shrouds” may be the very definition of a movie that is not for everyone. “How dark are you willing to go?” Karsh asks at one point, and the answer is pitch black. A study in grief without a whiff of sentimentality, this is an uneasy, and occasionally queasy, representation of the pain of loss.
Cronenberg, who lost his wife Carolyn to cancer after 38 years of marriage, says he was inspired to write “The Shrouds” by his own experiences with grief. And while the movie bears his trademarked fusion of psychological and physical elements, of technology and flesh, and his clinical approach to the material, the movie still pulsates with vulnerability. The setting is surreal, but the story’s underlying motivation is personal, motivated by the thorny act of grieving.
“The Shrouds” is Cronenberg’s most personal film and is as complicated, and occasionally confounding, as the act of grief itself.
SYNOPSIS: The new family fantasy film “The Legend of Ochi,” starring Willem Dafoe and an adorable puppet, tells the story of a young girl who learns that everything she’s been taught is a lie. “I am strong, and I am cool,” she writes in a note to her father, “and I don’t believe what you say.”
CAST: Helena Zengel, Willem Dafoe, Finn Wolfhard and Emily Watson. Directed by Isaiah Saxon.
REVIEW: “The Legend of Ochi” feels like an arthouse “How to Train Your Dragon” or a 1980s Amblin movie without the lens flares but with a Dr. Doolittle twist.
Set in the mountains of Carpathia, the story of Yuri (Helena Zengel), teenage daughter of her village’s head Ochi hunter Maxim (Willem Dafoe), unfolds as she discovers these woodland creatures aren’t the terrible beasts of her people’s folktales.
These creatures, who like a Gremlin and Baby Yoda had a child, are under constant threat from Maxim who believes they pillage the village, kill livestock and, years ago, kidnapped his wife. When Yuri learns the truth, that her father’s stories are more myth than truth, she goes all “E.T. the Extraterrestrial” and attempts to reunite one of the big-eyed creature with its mother.
Shot on location in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains—where apparently, they had trouble keeping bears from eating the sets at night—“The Legend of Ochi” has the look of a medieval fantasy. Although set in modern (ish) day there is a magical feel to the film’s scenery. The Frank Frazetta-esque backdrop is enhanced by a dramatic, mostly orchestral score by David Longstreth that does as much as the locations to set the stage for Yuri’s adventure.
Against this are a striking human cast. As Maxim, Willem DaFoe takes an over-the-top character who says things like, “I saw the devil dancing in the goblin’s eyes,” and still manages to make him human and not simply a flowery caricature of a mountain man on a mission.
Emily Watson, as Maxim’s ex with a wooden hand, is true grit personified, living life on the side of a mountain, alone, save for her research into the Ochi and their connection with nature.
As Yuri, Helena Zengel hands in a retrained performance, fueled by her concern for the Ochi. If Spielberg still made movies like this, she would be expecting a call.
The themes of connection, resilience and eco-responsibility wouldn’t mean much if we didn’t care about the Ochi, but the animatronic creatures are not only adorable but also bring real emotional appeal. Hand operated puppets, they have an organic, artisanal vibe that sets them apart from so many of their CGI counterparts. They are, at once, a nostalgic throwback to the days of rubber ETs and a charming new presence that gives the movie an emotional core.
“The Legend of Ochi” has much to recommend it but suffers from pacing issues and a predictable ending. Still, as new, stand-alone kid’s fantasy goes, it delivers a magical story that feels definitely and delightfully handmade.
Here’s a list of Canadian dramas more flavourful than a bag of ketchup chips. Coming up I have the story of a mystical child on a remote island off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, a journey to justice for Christopher Plummer, the tale of a young women who went from wilderness of Alberta to the wild runways of the fashion world and a young Indigenous woman guided by spirits to exact revenge against a vicious Government Agent. First stop on our dramatic journey, Nova Scotia.
