I join “CTV News Toronto at Five” with anchor Zuraidah Alman to talk about new movies in theatres including the reimagined “Wuthering Heights,” the time travelling farce “Nirvanna: The Band The Show The Movie,” the nostalgic b-movie “Cold Storrage” and the drama “Sirāt.”
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 13:13)
I join the CTV NewsChanel to talk about the reimagined “Wuthering Heights,” the time travelling farce “Nirvanna: The Band The Show The Movie” and the nostalgic b-movie “Cold Storage.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I sit in with CKTB morning show host Steph Vivier to have a look at movies in theatres including the reimagined “Wuthering Heights,” the time travelling farce “Nirvanna: The Band The Show The Movie,” the nostalgic b-movie “Cold Storrage” and the drama “Sirāt.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “Cold Storage,” a new sci fi comedy starring Joe Keery, and now playing in theatres, an infectious, constantly mutating fungus threatens to end the world unless two storage company nightshift workers and a bioterror expert can combine forces and come to the rescue.
CAST: Georgina Campbell, Joe Keery, Sosie Bacon, Vanessa Redgrave, Lesley Manville, Liam Neeson. Directed by Jonny Campbell.
REVIEW: A throwback to the gross ‘n gory sci-fi and horror popcorn films of 80s and 90s, “Cold Storage” features practical effects, plenty of humor and an exploding eyeball or two.
“Stranger Things” star Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell play Travis and Naomi, nightshift workers at a self-storage company that sits on the site of a decommissioned US military base. Decades before, a deadly, constantly mutating organism, capable of destroying all life on the planet in the grimmest and goriest of ways, was sealed in the facility’s sublevel.
As Travis and Naomi go about their mundane jobs, rising temperatures in the building’s basement allow the rapidly mutating microorganism to grow and escape its underground prison. What began as a sleepy overnight shift soon turns into an outbreak situation that could endanger the entire planet.
With the help of grizzled bioterror expert Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) Travis and Naomi try and save all of humanity. “You two may have started the night as minimum wage guards,” says Quinn, “but you’re a green light team now.”
Adapted from David Koepp’s (the screenwriter of “Jurassic Park,” “The Lost World,” “War of the Worlds” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”) 2019 sci-fi thriller of the same name, “Cold Storage” is a mix of comedy and gory exploding humans.
Practical special effects, done with very little CGI, bring a nice, nostalgic vibe to the film’s action. Exploding deer and fungus infected human effects are over-the-top and have a cool, retro handmade look that brings back memories of the visceral thrills of movies like “Re-Animator” and “Dead Alive.”
The script is laced with humor, but I wouldn’t call this a comedy. It’s more a sci fi horror with a few laughs, many of which some from Keery’s comic timing.
“Cold Storage” is a bit of b-movie fun that doesn’t take itself seriously, so neither should we.
SYNOPSIS: “Queer,” a romantic drama based on the 1985 novella by William S. Burroughs and now playing in theatres, finds American ex-pat Lee, played by Daniel Craig, living in 1950s Mexico City. He’s cut adrift and lonely until a young man named Eugene Allerton, a recently discharged US Navy serviceman, becomes the object of his infatuation.
CAST: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Henrique Zaga, Lesley Manville. Directed by Luca Guadagnino.
REVIEW: A study of loneliness and longing, “Queer” is a melancholic film with a slow burn, introspective story that explores both the main character’s mind and outward desires. More than anything this is a character study, a dive into the deep end of Lee’s (Craig) psyche.
He’s lost, looking for a love that may never come, and even if he can find a companion like Eugene, how can he be sure the feeling is reciprocal? Feelings of sadness, self-doubt and frustration are the character’s fuel, the thing that makes move him through the story, and make him so interesting.
Daniel Craig is terrific, casting off the suave James Bond persona, and once again reminding us of what a great actor he is outside the action-adventure of the 007 world. It’s a touching performance in a very specific movie that touches on universal themes about aging, one’s value to others and longing for love.
Craig is the film’s centerpiece, casting a long, charismatic shadow over the supporting cast, save for Joe, Jason Schwartzman’s welcome comic relief and an almost unrecognizable Lesley Manville as the scruffy Dr. Cotter.
Director Luca Guadagnino stays true to the wandering, rambunctious Beat Generation spirit of Burroughs’s book, sending Lee into the night, or to bed with a stranger or to the jungle to take a psychedelic drug that may help him ascertain how Eugene really feels about him. The connective tissue is Craig in a performance that is as intensely personal as the intimate work by Burroughs that inspired it.
The legendary “Playbill” chose my review of “The Critic” among their top picks for the week.
Have a look HERE!
SYNOPSIS: “The Critic,” a new, melodramatic thriller starring Sir Ian McKellen, Gemma Arterton and Mark Strong, and now playing in theatres, sees a powerful London theater critic lure a struggling actress into a blackmail scheme.
CAST: Ian McKellen, Gemma Arterton, Mark Strong, Lesley Manville, Romola Garai, Ben Barnes, Alfred Enoch. Directed by Anand Tucker.
REVIEW: A tale of blackmail and revenge, set against the (somewhat) polite society of England, circa 1934, “The Critic” is a deceptively dark and grimy drama.
Handsomely mounted, with sumptuous period details, “The Critic” details mostly despicable people who hide their nefarious motivations behind an upper-class veneer.
Topflight performances from McKellen as a powerful theatre critic who’ll do anything to maintain his status, Arterton as a morally compromised actress and Stone as the nepobaby owner of a large newspaper, smooth over some of the rough patches in the movie’s storytelling.
Early on, actress Nina Land (Arterton) confronts the critic, Jimmy Erskine (McKellen), only to have her worst fears about her talent—or lack thereof—confirmed by the sharp-tongued writer. It’s a masterclass from McKellen in controlled cruelty and tells us most everything that we need to know about the unapologetic character. He’s an extravagant wordsmith, one who uses his words not only to entertain his readers, but to also eviscerate his enemies.
It’s a marvelous scene, sleek and caustic, that sets a tone that is, unfortunately, not continued throughout, despite the good performances. McKellen and Company are let down by a script that, time after time, falls for its basest impulses. Every dark turn, and there are many of them, pushes the story deeper into melodrama at the expense of interesting exchanges like the one detailed above.
“The Critic” slides by on the work of McKellen, Arterton, Strong and Lesley Manville, but doesn’t know how to use their performances to the story’s best advantage.
LOGLINE: The Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela) biopic “Back to Black,” now playing in theatres, details the chaotic relationship with husband Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell) that inspired the internationally best-selling album “Back to Black.”
CAST: Marisa Abela, Jack O’Connell, Eddie Marsan, and Lesley Manville. Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and written by Matt Greenhalgh.
REVIEW: With all the depth and curiosity of a Wikipedia page, “Back to Black” attempts to tell the tale of a complicated artist who left a mark, but who left us too soon. Painted in the broadest of strokes, this sad story of sex, drugs and jazz is buoyed somewhat by Marisa Abela, who looks and sounds like the late singer, but instead of becoming a well-rounded character, Winehouse comes across as a walking, talking attitude with an impressive beehive hairdo and an alcohol problem.
An early scene detailing the writing of “What Is It About Men” hints at what is to come. Struck by a bolt of inspiration, she sings, “My destructive side has grown a mile wide.” It’s a shame, then, that “Back to Black” wallows in Winehouse’s self-destruction.
Director Sam Taylor-Johnson, working from a script by Matt Greenhalgh, tiptoes around many of the story’s landmines—the intrusive paparazzi, the exploitation she suffered by those close to her—to focus on the doomed romance with Fielder-Civil. “I need to live my songs,” she says, and her relationship certainly did inspire many of “Back to Black’s” songs, but the focus on her obsessive love, punctuated by the occasional musical performance, shifts the focus from the joy of making music to the story’s tawdry aspects.
Amy Winehouse was a singular artist, a fearless performer who made her own rules, and dug deep to create her art. So, it’s a shame her biopic is such a standard cautionary tale that skims the surface. Recommended instead is “Amy,” director Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary that carefully, and fulsomely, examines the life of a person who, as Tony Bennett says, didn’t live long enough to learn how to live.
I usually avoid movies with titles that rhyme. For every “Be Kind Rewind” or “Chop Shop,” which I liked, there’s a “From Prada to Nada” or “Good Luck Chuck” that remind me that some of the time, a rhyme equals grime.
OK, that was lame, but you get the idea.
Cutesy titles are often the first warning sign of what is to follow. A new film, “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” commits the name game sin, but Academy Award nominee Lesley Manville brings the poetry to the movie.
Set in 1957, Manville plays Ada Harris, an optimistic London house cleaner. “Today’s my lucky day,” she says. A self-described “invisible woman,” she is also a dreamer, a person who hangs on to the belief that her husband Eddie will finally come home from war, and that something better is always around the corner.
Only one of those things is true.
When Eddie is officially declared killed in action, she is devastated, but stoic. “I should have known he would have gotten back to me if he could have,” she said, holding back tears. “Well, footloose and fancy free.”
When she sees a beautiful Dior haute couture gown belonging to one of her aristocratic customers, it is an epiphany. Although the dress costs double what she makes a year, she makes it her goal to visit Paris’s 30 Avenue Montaigne, Christian Dior’s namesake boutique, and treat herself to a dress.
Through a series of unlikely happenstances, Mrs. Harris raises enough money to get to the City of Lights, pay cash for the dress and fulfil her dream, but how will she, as the snobby Dior house manager Claudine Colbert (Isabelle Huppert) asks, “give the dress the life it deserves.”
“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” is the kind of feel good-movie that seems as though it was written by an algorithm. Of course, it’s based on the 1958 novel “Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris” by Paul Gallico, which later a became TV movie of the same name starring Angela Lansbury, Diana Rigg, and Omar Sharif, but it feels as though a bot was asked, “What makes people feel all cuddly- cushy?”
How about some old school British slang, some romance, the Eiffel Tower, glittering dresses, some class warfare and even a tad of existentialism? Nothing like a movie about aspirations with a side of Jean-Paul Sartre.
The philosopher’s name is used as a prop to illustrate the intellectual prowess of the French love interests (Alba Baptista and Lucas Bravo) but Mrs. Harris appears to take Sartre’s ideas to heart.
When Sartre said, “Life begins on the other side of despair,” he may have been talking about Mrs. Harris’s rebirth after she learned Eddie wasn’t coming back to her. Sartre’s observation, “We are our choices,” applies to the title character’s indomitable spirit and her decision to find the beauty in her world, no matter how frivolous. While the movie reduces the existentialist’s theories to pop psychology, the uplift in Manville’s winning performance provides an escape to a more glamorous time (even if it takes place in Paris during a garbage strike).
“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” is predictable and overlong, but Manville brings the heart and soul.
