MOTHER’S DAY FLICKS THAT ARE BETTER THAN BRUNCH
Treat mom to a trip to the movies this weekend with these celebratory picks, all showing at local theatres
Mother’s Day movie-going: As appreciative as they may seem, some moms are a little bored with the flowers and fancy brunch that their progeny typically use to mark Mother’s Day.
Thankfully, local movie theatres offer a few more interesting options for the person you should be celebrating this weekend. Opening at the Carlton on Friday,
Mom & Me is a documentary that explores the complex dynamics between sons and mothers.
Irish filmmaker Ken Wardrop shows how this bond can be affected by everything from Alzheimer’s to prison sentences to more mundane issues that may or may not include a reluctance to clean your bedroom.
Meanwhile, Cineplex’s Classic Film Series celebrates this Mother’s Day with a Hollywood musical that just about everybody loves: Singin’ in the
Rain. Six locations including YongeDundas and Fairview Mall host matinees of the Gene Kelly classic on Sunday. The Royal opts for a rather darker view of motherhood with weekend screenings of Mommie Dearest and Rosemary’s Baby. Joan Crawford devotees can savour more of her unique parenting methods when the Royal’s Retropath series presents her in the 1964 thriller Strait-Jacket on Wednesday.
Hounds of Love: A teenage girl faces a set of thoroughly horrific circumstances after she is abducted by a creepy couple in Hounds of Love, an Australian thriller that opens Friday at the Carlton.
A first feature by writer-director Ben Young that debuted at Venice last year, the film draws many of its ugliest details from the true story of David and Catherine Birnie, who committed a series of brutal crimes in the mid-1980s in Young’s hometown of Perth. Young’s effort also bears the influence of Animal King
dom and The Snowtown Murders, two other similarly lean and bracing Australian crime flicks of recent years. Guest critics from VICE, Rue Morgue and Screen Anarchy are on hand for discussions after the evening screenings of Friday and Saturday, too.
Chasing Trane: Jazz fans had to wait 50 years for one of music’s greatest titans to become the subject of an authorized biography.
Made with the co-operation of the sax great’s family by director John Scheinfeld, Chasing Trane belatedly delivers the goods on its subject’s action-packed career, tracing John Coltrane’s rapid evolution from sideman to Dizzy Gillespie and Eddie Vinson, through his increasingly bold innovations as an architect of postbop and free jazz, to his early death of liver cancer at the age of 40 in 1967.
The film combines archival footage, narration by Denzel Washington and new interviews with the likes of Wynton Marsalis, Sonny Rollins and Carlos Santana, as well as a somewhat less legendary sax player named Bill Clinton. Chasing Trane opens Friday at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. Toronto Film Society’s May Movie Magic: The Toronto Film Society hosts a big weekend of classic Hollywood cinema at the Carlton. The generous 22-film lineup dives deep into the tough-guy oeuvre of Edward G. Robinson with such highlights as the 1933 gangster classic Little Caesar (Friday) and the 1940 biopic Dr. Ehr
lich’s Magic Bullet. The series also includes several choice demonstrations of the racier sensibility of American motion pictures in the years before the Hays Code sanitized the nation’s screens. May Movie Magic runs Friday to Sunday.
Call of the Forest: A new Canadian eco-doc, Call of the Forest: The Forgot
ten Wisdom of Trees follows scientist and author Diana Beresford-Kroeger as she travels the globe to examine the challenges facing our ecosystem and to emphasize the importance of forests to our environmental, biological and spiritual well-being.
Beresford-Kroeger takes part in panel discussions on “greening the planet” after the screenings at the AGO’s Jackman Hall this weekend. The event on Friday includes Dr. Faisal Moola of the Suzuki Founda- tion and Dan Kraus of the Nature Conservancy while the Saturday panel features the doc’s Winnipegbased makers, Jeff McKay and Merit Jensen Carr.