Liam Lacey

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.