Liam Lacey

If the Miranda musical touches are getting familiar, they’re still a lot fresher than the script here, yet another story of a pet animal on a mission and its special bond with a lonely child.

The trouble is not that the movie is exploitative but that it’s out of its depth. This tone-jumping jigsaw of a narrative (written by McCarthy and Marchus Hinchey along French screenwriters Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré) amounts to several movies in one.

There’s no doubt that spotlighting Close’s reputation in our recent cultural history is worthwhile. But the documentary is unjust in ignoring such seminal figures as acting coach and academic Violin Spolin, who developed and wrote the bible on the subject (Improvisation for the Theatre).

Romanticization and exploitation often converge. Stripped of its warm memories, this could be an MBA study on turning local youth trends into global lifestyle commodities, inevitably leaving casualties along the way.

A poetic drama about the lives of three Maori girls from the 1950s to the 1980s, Cousins is a heart-breaker, tempered with hope.

None of this is helped by Platt’s performance, with a petulant eye-roll to every impediment, as if he were the fussbudget Felix of The Odd Couple and Cindy his disaster-prone Oscar.

In sum, we have a silly Hollywood-style action movie with a Robin Hood theme, serving the ideology of an elitist authoritarian regime. In other words, a real misfit.

Taken in micro-doses, Peter Rabbit 2 has clever moments and a relentless eagerness to please. But the movie trips over itself when it attempts to satirize what it practices.

The emotional tone here is sympathetic and elegiac, and since both men have a way with words, often absorbing. Though there is little here that won’t be known by fans of the writers, the format of the interviews is striking.

When the movie abandons the memoir’s story of grief and joy it becomes less interesting.

For better and worse, the script has a clear depiction of contemporary good and evil and an efficient movie-of-the-week purposefulness, to the point where you half expect to see a helpline number before the closing credits.

Returning director Patrick Hughes and screenwriters Tom O’Connor, Phillip Murphy, and Brandon Murphy count too much on star charisma and action set-ups to carry the narrative. The result is that the smirks are mild and scattered while the bloodshed, gun fights, and explosions are relentless.

A dark movie, but also a funny one.

All this is big, busy fun and while one might wish for some a bit more grit in the charm offensive, the catchwords here are feel-good and broad appeal.

Equal Standard means well, doesn’t stereotype black or white characters unduly, and offers hope instead of rage. The trouble is the movie is just poorly executed.

One can see clear linkages between Undine to the nightmare weirdness of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, though it’s as if this similar story were drained of its passionate momentum and rendered abstract.

Though it comes with good credentials, four hours feels like a lot of screen real estate for a what is essentially an elevated soap opera. For the home-streaming viewer though, The Real Thing meets the essential requirements for binge-watching: it’s undemanding to follow but sustains enough of a mystery to keep us hooked.

Both a heist film and a revenge story, Ritchie’s Wrath of Man is the cinema equivalent of a hollow-point bullet. It’s not weighty, but it causes a lot of destruction.

Drunk Bus has some pros and cons. At its best, it evokes the freewheeling style and emotional pangs of Greg Mottola’s 2009 film, Adventureland.

There’s more than an echo here of The Client, the 1993 John Grisham adaptation which saw Susan Sarandon playing a maternal role to Brad Refro’s 11-year-old Mafia witness. But the surrogate mother-child bond barely develops here, as Hannah and Connor leap from one near-death experience to the next in this relatively brisk 100-minute film.

At 74 minutes, the film has little time for deep character mining and ends up feeling more like a collection of uneven scenes and engaging dialogue riffs rather than a fully realized drama.

Bolivia’s 2019 Oscar submission for best international picture, adapted by writer-director Rodrigo Bellott, the film floats freely through different chronologies, creating a level of intellectual play that prevents the drama from sliding into earnest messaging.

Possibly, Eat Wheaties! will age well, but at this point, there’s more cringe than comedy here. The character of Sid isn’t just endearingly awkward or amusingly fatuous, like Steve Carell’s Michael Scott in The Office. He’s just thickly insensitive.

3 ½ Minutes, 10 Bullets, as well as being a compelling real-life courtroom drama, offers some clarity about race and injustice in the pre-Trump era.

Beyond the premise though, Held is pretty much stale ginger ale, not fresh, no fizz, thinly acted and tepidly paced. While it’s passably interesting, watching co-directors Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing (The Gallows) explore the antiseptic house as if watching a a real estate video, the accompanying thin drama drifts into episodic genre violence and doubtful logic.

Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić succeeds where many filmmakers fail in conveying the dimensions of a mass atrocity in a film that matches clear-eyed personal experience to history in a lightly fictionalized story.

Sugar Daddy impresses as an idiosyncratic film with a forceful visual style and sound design, attached to a familiar story about the ways of bad men and a young woman getting lost in the fast life.

Fill the cupboards and refrigerator with junk food, lock the doors, roll yourself a couple of fat ones and settle in for a couple of hours of stupor/reverie. Warning: Resist any temptation to roll the movie back to figure out what just happened; it won’t help.

In summoning the artist and his eighties’ art-scene milieu, the film also serves as memorial to the generation of creative voices silenced by the AIDS virus.

As effective as Enforcement is on a visceral level, it comes up short in any deeper reflection on the social crisis of its premise.

Like a rash of contemporary films — The Trial of the Chicago 7, Judas and the Black Messiah and Da Five Bloods — F.T.A. reminds us how much the anti-war and civil rights battles of the past are currently resonant, even when we have our history slightly wrong.

You couldn’t call Coming 2 America a good movie or even a so-bad-its-good, but just puffed-up mediocre concoction with a few pockets of delight.

The best way to appreciate The Affair is to sidestep its pot-boiler pretentious and think of as an exceptionally elegant episode of House Hunters International.

The problems with The United States vs Billie Holiday aren’t about Day’s creditable performance, but pretty much everything that happens around it. That includes Pulitzer-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ time-hopping, confusing script and Daniels’ direction, which is both feverishly pulpy and stilted and laden.

While the gangster genre over the past 50 years has been the specialty of Italian-American auteurs (Coppola, Scorsese, DePalma and The Sopranos’ David Chase), Mafia Inc., directed by Quebec director Daniel Grou (a.k.a. Podz), stands up surprisingly well.

I Blame Society barely scrapes by as midnight movie camp; it’s much better as a form of wryly witty performance art/film criticism.

A farce that fizzles, a satire that sags, and a dead-end for its gifted cast, Breaking News In Yuba County at least starts well.

Featuring terrific performances from Get Out alumnus, Daniel Kaluuya as the young revolutionary Hampton, and LaKeith Stanfield as FBI informant, William O’Neal, the film is a revelation from King, a director, who until now, was known for his television work and the 2013 comedy, Newlyweeds.

The film suffers from the over-interpreting mental “glitch,” eagerly connecting coincidence, mental illness, drug experiences, religious awe, computer gaming, and science fiction movies in an over-arching pattern.

The parts of The Little Things that are good aren’t original, and the parts that are original aren’t good.

At under 90 minutes, Make Up doesn’t include much action but the skin-crawling effect of the film reverberates until after the credits roll. The entire technical package — the menacing visuals, the rumbling soundscape, the brief disorienting sequences of flashbacks and dreams — are anchored in naturalistic, understated performances.

There’s nothing new in noting that crime and dirty politics are fast tracks to success. (“Is it the same in your country?” Balram asks the viewer). What’s more interesting here is how The White Tiger explores the paradoxes of the master-servant dynamic. Singer-actor Gourav is marvelous in capturing the duality.

The whole package — written by Sarah Henderson and directed by her husband Curtis Vowell — has a casual, episodic vibe, mixing sardonic banter and broad physical comedy.

The result is a film that is presented as a kind of a fable, and a microcosm of a country whose fortunes once depended on oil.

What holds all this, mostly, together to the presence of Mulligan (An Education, Shame) and her own ambiguous performance.

Although The Dissident is, arguably, unnecessarily juiced-up with the editing and scoring of a Hollywood thriller, the excesses are balanced by the procedural rigour worthy of a crack prosecutor.

The Prom, as it progresses from camp to earnest messaging, is like a sermon you believe, but still find too preachy.

Both the Arctic survival story and the spaceship drama are derivative, and while action sequences are well done in isolation, they never develop a convincing momentum.

Hanks and young German actress Helena Zengel (Shock System) play off each other faultlessly, with minimal dialogue, relying on gaze, gesture, and tone and we can easily understand how the twice-orphaned Johanna can look into Kidd’s warm, melancholy gaze and recognize a fellow misfit and survivor, accepting him as her protector.

You want to escape? Well, there’s a couple of hundred million U.S. dollars up on the screen for action and special effects, and retro amusement provided by pastel-coloured shopping malls, big shoulder pads, and Sony Walkmans.

Queer Japan serves as a series of lively snapshots of a multifaceted and shifting subject and comes up a little short on the issues of day-to-day experience of Japanese gay life.

The urge to find hope in tragedy is as inevitable as the one to recognize shapes in clouds. But Funny Boy leaves an unsettling chasm between this one slender story and the grim history it represents.

In its corner, Baron offers the often-entertaining prospect of watching extremely large men beat each other up in acrobatic ways. The recent winner of the dramatic feature award at Toronto-based imagiNative Film and Media Arts Festival, it has a crowd appeal familiar to WWE fans, but some snappy dialogue from screenwriter John Argall and a family-friendly message to accompany the cracking bones.

That core idea here, the pole in the middle of the merry-go-round, is that the stuffy, secretive King, as Robertson Davies suggests, is the embodiment of Canada’s locked-down colonial psychology. The Twentieth Century is a strange creation, though but there’s nothing unusual in the notion that Canadian blandness may be a form of camouflage. Anyone who has read history, or for that matter, watched a hockey game, knows that.

Mank is not, ultimately, a movie to embrace or believe but to study with a certain uneasy fascination.

Granted a rare degree of access to reporters, and later to the Minister of Health, Collective is a tribute to people who work together to uncover the truth, even if the immediate benefits are not obvious.

There is much to admire and contemplate in Martin Eden, including Marinelli’s performance, the marvelous range of faces that appear onscreen, the disorienting time shifts and melancholic seascapes that form many backdrops. While the tension between Martin’s right-wing superman fantasies and working-class status is a rich field, it’s not obvious that there’s a coherent intellectual framework behind the collage of beautiful moments.

More care for pacing and character development, and less focus on moment-by-moment wow-factor, would have made a less strenuous film. Still, the sheer exuberance and skill of the visual design and performances are uplifting.

With the words, the coffee-table monochrome images of the aged troubadours hard at joyful labour, and the moody drone shots of the snow-covered New Jersey woods, Letter To You is an opportunity to listen to the new album at a bargain.

Wheatley gives us one grotesque dream sequence of guests at a masquerade ball, but the rest is palely conventional. Like the character who gives the film its title, the adaptation is pretty much dead in the water.

Though most of the content here is too familiar for the film to qualify as an exposé, Totally Under Control adds background context and highlights some of the voices who raised early alarms about the dangers of the disease and the impending social disruption.

The film employs a punk-inspired cut-and-paste collages, smashing together footage of police and protestor clashes, rock concerts, television shows and political marches, all annotated with animated handwritten letters, posters, newspaper clippings, and excerpts from RAR’s fanzine, Temporary Hoarding.

In theory, it should be possible to have a comedy about a competition between an elderly man and a child to injure and humiliate each other, but it would need to be substantially sharper than The War with Grandpa to make the case.

There are some strong elements here.

If the film takes the “landscape as character” conceit to excess, there are also some strong performances, especially from its two leads.

There’s some reward in watching good performers working to bring veracity to these awkward and artificial scenarios.

A movie with a sincere social message and an exploitation movie sensibility, Antebellum is a clumsy cousin of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, an allegory of racism in a horror film about entrapment that goes wide of the mark.

While the performances are heart-warming, the characterization of Reddy feels reductive, overlooking the real-life contradictions, flinty humour, and eccentricities that might have made the performance less generic.

Although the comic scenes are well-crafted, I Propose stumbles in the over-plotting.

Though much of it is glum and muddled, it does find an anchor in Hugo Weaving (Lord of the Rings, The Matrix) as a gravely wise, ailing crime boss named Duke.

While all of this is too niche for wide interest, the film touches the troublesome heart of adolescent girls’ gymnastics, which is both a triumph of art and athletics and a sport riddled with a legacy of abuse. That abuse is the secondary but most interesting theme in The Golden Girl.

If this were a pilot for a TV series, home audiences might be willing to baby it along until it grows stronger. As a stand-alone movie, this particular mutation looks like a badly-adapted dead-end.

The film certainly does not ignore O’Connor’s attitudes and fictional treatment of race. It just doesn’t make it particularly central to her reputation.

Relentlessly episodic and missing the taut focus of the first film, Peninsula compensates with overkill, populating the screen with long-stretches of CGI action (Yeon’s background is in animation) including nighttime car chases and oodles of zombie splatter.

Like the small bistro that is the film’s setting, Nose To Tail is minimal and uncompromising in the details, from the delicious tasting dishes onscreen to the retro jazzy score from Ben Fox, that propels the action forward.

In the current moment, with our wary physical distancing and awkward artificial socializing, Family Romance LLC’s gaze into the uncanny valley absolutely chimes with the times.

Starring two grande dames of French cinema, Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, The Truth is a mistress-class in the art of French close-up acting, from the twitch of a dismissive eyebrow to a pout of disappointment.

What’s mildly interesting about The Beach House, the low-budget debut feature from Jeffrey A Brown is that, while human beings have their struggles and conflicts, the universe doesn’t much care.