[ad_1]
Including the Lamb, No Time to Die, Rescue, and the events before, after and during a high school basketball game
Lamb
(Valdimar Jóhannsson)
You won’t be surprised to learn that Lamb is the latest high genre image from US distributor A24, who has built a reputation on the bespoke weirdness of projects like Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar and A Ghost Story and The Green Knight by David Lowery, among others. . Lamb is a Scandinavian import that fits right on this hand-carved craft shelf, a folk tale in modern costume about childless farmers (Noomi Rapace, -Hilmir Snær Guðnason) welcoming an unlikely newborn baby and l ‘raise like theirs. The nature of this newborn is hidden from us for a good 40 minutes, as Jóhansson – who co-wrote the screenplay with Björk Sjón’s frequent collaborator – slowly and cautiously draws us into his story, Rapace and Guðnason selling the effect. long before we see it. this. Lamb is a tightrope walker between the sublime and the absurd, achieved with a mixture of puppets, CG and tone. And while the whole thing ultimately looks like a short stretched over a feature film, the accomplishment is impressive. 106 minutes Subtitled. Now playing in theaters. NNN (Norman Wilner)
No time to die
(Cary Joji Fukunaga)
The 25th official James Bond film is Daniel Craig’s fifth and final outing in the role. I love Craig’s Bond – the actor captures the brutality and cruelty so central to Ian Fleming’s character design – but his films don’t know what to do with him. James Bond has become an ambitious figure, trapped in the same superhero narrative as any Marvel or DC character: he can’t really change or grow, because that would stop everything. And across five films, the odd insistence that what this dead-eyed assassin really wants is to be part of a family – whether it’s the working family he built at MI-6, or other elements hanging all over the place – pushed against Craig’s performance in an interesting and frustrating way, as if the actor, rather than the character, were rejecting the premise. Additionally, the plot details of this film are both too familiar and incomprehensible: No Time To Die wants to be a high Bond film, but that sort of stance shows some contempt for the company; maybe, just maybe, focus on making a Bond movie that moves, that rocks, that doesn’t keep all of its bolder choices for the last five minutes, and it’ll rise. 163 minutes Some subtitles. Now playing in theaters. NN (NO)
The rescue
(Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin)
Free Solo directors Vasarhelyi and Chin follow this Oscar-winning documentary with this look at the 2018 Tham Luang rescue, in which a handful of British cave divers came to Thailand to retrieve a trapped football team and coach. a system of flooded caves. Given the access to the divers and the hours and hours of footage filmed during the effort, Vasarhelyi and Chin compress a three-week operation into two crisp hours, reflecting both the terrifying scale of the challenge and the sheer scale of the challenge. ingenuity required to achieve it. all the work. (If you’re claustrophobic, you probably stopped reading this review as soon as you figured out what the movie was about, but if you’re still around, yeah, it’s intense.) I could have done without the use liberal reenactments; Towards the end, when The Rescue shows us a diver struggling to keep his young protege alive while talking about their utter loneliness, recreating that moment for a camera that couldn’t have been present seems almost obnoxious – but it’s a minor blow against an otherwise brilliantly orchestrated film. 114 minutes Some subtitles. Playing at the Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema. NNNN (NO)
Events that take place before, during, and after a high school basketball game
(Ted Stenson)
There isn’t much going on in Events Transpiring Before…, really. There’s a basketball game, obviously, but the movie doesn’t really care about whether the Middleview Ducks are going to win this one; the game is just a toss for all the weirdos in the building. There are many. Some of them are adults, like the referee (Jay Morberg) who is distracted by the fact that he brought a small dog to the game, or the assistant trainer (Andrew Phung), who is full of ingenious games and strategies that it cannot articulate in a coherent way. And some of them are kids, like the theater troupe who are considering crashing the game with a protest against their canceled production of King Lear, but continue to be distracted by the nature of the protest. (Should there be signs? Should there be nudity? Isn’t the gym a bit cold?) The basketball team has its fair share of eccentrics, and all their stories end up bouncing on top of each other. It’s kind of a sweet chaos, and writer / director Stenson films it all in long, contemplative takes, like if we stare at these characters long enough, they might suddenly start to make sense. They don’t, but the extended shots become their own racing gag, setting us up to hunt for the next silliness bursting into the frame. 75 minutes. Now available on VOD platforms. NNNN (NO)
Available on VOD
Bayou blue
Justin Chon, Alicia Vikander, Mark O’Brien; directed by Justin Chon
Read the review of NOW here
Apple tv, Cineplex, Google Play
Decisive moments
Burt Reynolds, Sienna Guillory, Eric Peterson; directed by Stephen Wallis
Apple tv, Cineplex, Google Play
Events that take place before, during, and after a high school basketball game
Andrew Phung, Catherine Gell, Paul Cowling; directed by Tim Stenson
Apple tv, google play
The night house
Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Vondie Curtis Hall; directed by David Bruckner
Read the review of NOW here
Apple tv, Cineplex, google play
Old
Gael Garcia-Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell; directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Read the NOW review
Apple tv, Cineplex, google play
Pharma Bro
Documentary directed by Brent Hodge
Apple tv, Google Play
The protected
Maggie Q, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Keaton; directed by Martin Campbell
Apple tv, Cineplex, google play
Summer time
Austin Antoine, Bryce Banks, Mila Cuda; directed by Carlos López Estrada
Apple tv, Google Play
V / H / S / 94
Anthology film directed by Jennifer Reeder, Chloe Okuno, Simon Barrett, Timo Tjahjanto and Ryan Prows
Thrill Canada
The year of the eternal storm
Anthology film directed by Anthony Chen, David Lowery, Jafar Panahi, Laura Poitras, Dominga Sotomayor, Malik Vitthal and Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Apple tv, Google Play
Streaming guides
Everything coming to streaming platforms this month:
Netflix
Very wanting to
CBC Gem
Disney +
Film festival
Toronto Independent Horror Festival
October is packed with horror festivals, and this one – which takes place in the Eyesore Cinema (1176 Bloor West) – presents an international selection of feature films and shorts, including a program of Women In Horror shorts (Saturday , 6:30 p.m.) and the closing feature Were-Wool (Saturday, 9 p.m.), by Ontario filmmaker Lucas Birnie. And yes, that one is exactly what you think it is.
Until Saturday (October 9) at Eyesore Cinema (1176 Bloor West). Tickets available through Film Freeway. toindiehorrorfest.com
Disc of the week
It’s October, so of course we’re going to be highlighting this brilliant act of creature resurrection – though it’s nowhere near as complete as it should be. This set brings together four of Universal’s greatest monster movies – Tod Browning’s Dracula, Frankenstein and James Whale’s The Invisible Man and George Waggner’s The Wolf Man – and delivers them in ultra-high-definition masters that are almost pristine in all their glory. in black and white.
Ninety years after their arrival, Dracula and Frankenstein are still wonderful experiences; It’s still astonishing that Frankenstein – with his adventurous camera work and arching performances – arrived barely four years after the Age of Sound began. (Browning’s Dracula looks a lot older, although that probably has more to do with his scenic origins and more deliberate pacing; the Spanish-language version, shot on the same sets with a different cast and crew, has a more alive – and it’s also included here in 4K.) The Wolf Man and The Invisible Man are perhaps less iconic, but still very entertaining, thanks to Lon Chaney Jr’s misery as poor Laurence Talbot and the joy which Claude Rains’ transparent maniac frolics around the soundstages in Whale’s other historic monster movie, which is sort of even more fun when you can just glimpse the mechanics of the invisibility effects.
Universal’s box set includes 4K and Blu-ray discs for every feature, with all of the extras produced for previous editions carried across both formats – audio commentaries, documentaries, retrospectives, even Philip Glass’s alternate score for Browning’s Dracula. commissioned by Universal and recorded by the Kronos Quartet in 1998.
It’s a bit annoying that Universal’s love for four-packs means it will probably be another year before the equally essential quartet of The Mummy, The Bride Of Frankenstein, The Creature From The Black Lagoon and The Phantom Of The Opera doesn’t arrive in UHD, but if there’s one thing these monsters are good at, it’s waiting in the dark. They will eventually slip away.
Norman Wilner
[ad_2]
Comments are closed.