Weaving through a tangled web of love and cyber deals
> REEL BRIEF: QUICK TAKES ON SOME OF THIS WEEK’S NEW RELEASES
Deep Web (out of 4) Directed by Alex Winter. 90 minutes. Opening Friday at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. 14A
In Deep Web, actor and director Alex Winter ventured to one of the murkiest regions of cyberspace, the Silk Road, best known as “eBay for drugs.” Its alleged founder, Ross Ulbricht, is appealing a life sentence on numerous charges accusing him as the online drug-selling operation’s mastermind known as “Dread Pirate Roberts.” But there’s more to the story than meets the eye — or nose — the film contends.
Narrated by Keanu Reeves, it plunges into the tangled web of secrecy, accusations and criminal activity — with implications for the future of technological freedom.
Winter believes the Silk Road’s fellow travellers, who combined the anonymity of encryption with the use of the crypto-currency bitcoin to keep their dealings dark, had more in common with the architects of the French Revolution than with organized criminals. Like some revolutionaries, many lost their way and “got in over their heads.”
Ideologically committed to opposing the “war on drugs,” he says, the now-disbanded group left an underground legacy of ideas from Internet decriminalizing of drugs to de-corporatizing U.S. prisons. “To me it was absolutely and consciously constructed as a revolutionary tool. These ideas have not gone away.”
Olivia Ward
Suite Française (out of 4) Starring Michelle Williams, Kristin Scott Thomas. Co-written and directed by Saul Dibb. Opening Friday at TIFF Bell Lightbox. 107 minutes.
Love in wartime. It so seldom ends well. It’s June, 1940, and the advancing German army is raining bombs on Paris as France stands on the precipice of defeat.
In nearby Bussy, the occupying troops roll in as protagonist Lucille (Michelle Williams) fights her own war at home with her haughty and stern mother-in-law while husband Gaston is away fighting the invaders in a hopeless cause.
When German Lt. Bruno von Falk is billeted in their home, it only gets worse for Lucille, who finds a kinship of sorts with the officer over their shared love of music.
Director Saul Dibb does a fine job of creating an atmosphere of genuine tension and fear as Lucille and the other villagers find themselves forced to live with the occupiers, including von Falk, a decent, cultured man among the rabble of chauvinistic invaders.
Dibb has assembled a very solid cast, starting with Williams, who brings a subtlety haunted quality to the role of Lucille. But she’s outdone by two standout performances, Kristin Scott Thomas as Madame Angellier and Matthias Schoenaerts as the conflicted German officer whose loneliness is palpable.
As doomed wartime romances go, the film doesn’t offer anything particularly original. But with palpable tension and poignancy, Suite Française is fine filmmaking well worth watching. Bruce DeMara
Madame Bovary (out of 4) Starring Mia Wasikowska, Rhys Ifans, Logan Marshall-Green, Henry Lloyd-Hughes and Ezra Miller. Directed by Sophie Barthes. 118 minutes. Opening Friday at TIFF Bell Lightbox. 14A
Given her varied roles, from a bratty vampire in Only Lovers Left Alive to an Aussie desert trekker in Tracks, Mia Wasikowska seems most closely associated with period dramas like Jane Eyre.
So she’s perfectly cast in Sophie Barthes’s pared-down Madame Bovary, which strips side plots to put the focus of the story solely on Gustave Flaubert’s 19th-century newlywed who finds marriage to a simple country doctor (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) emotionally stifling and ruinously seeks relief in acquisition and affairs.
Barthes’s cast use their own accents, except for Australian Wasikowska, who opts for something strangely Midwest American. Fair-offace Ezra Miller as one of Bovary’s paramours, the earnest law student Leon Dupuis, sounds entirely too Dude, Where’s My Car? to be credible.
Rhys Ifans is sublimely creepy as shop owner Monsieur Lheureux, who seduces Bovary with finery and an introduction to credit. A wealthy marquis (Logan Marshall-Green) offers something even more tantalizing before tossing Bovary aside.
Brimming with melodrama and gorgeously shot — Wasikowska’s creamy skin was made to be filmed with window light and candles — Barthes adds the interesting element of handheld cameras to make the story feel more immediate. But for a film about passion, it feels oddly flat and often passionless. Linda Barnard
Uncertain Terms (out of 4) Starring David Dahlbom, India Menuez, Cindy Silver, Adinah Dancyger and Casey Drogin. Directed by Nathan Silver. 71 minutes. Opening Friday at the Carlton, VOD July 7. STC
Nathan Silver’s mumblecore drama unspools in an usual setting: an isolated upstate New York home for unwed mothers, where 30-yearold Robbie (David Dahlbom) hides out from his cheating wife and a crumbling marriage. He’s offered his handyman skills to his aunt Carla, the home’s well-meaning, if scatterbrained, owner and a one-time resident of a similar place in her youth.
Played by Cindy Silver, the director’s mother, she’s no actress, yet she handles the naturalistic, unscripted sensibilities of the low-budget film with success, amusingly pinballing around every conversation with loopy ease.
The heavily pregnant teens living in the house are curious about the older Robbie, especially flirtatious backstabber Jean (Tallie Medel). But it’s young redhead Nina (India Menuez, like a Raphael Madonna), already navigating trouble with immature boyfriend Chase (Casey Drogin), who captures Robbie’s attention.
As Nina and Robbie’s offbeat friendship evolves, screenwriters Silver, Chloe Domont and Cody Stokes (also the cinematographer) insert curious tension that belies the unconstructed nature of the film. Is Nina genuinely surprised at her influence, or is she more calculated?
It’s a letdown, then, that the final act turns to a melodramatic showdown with Robbie’s angry wife, Mona (Caitlin Mehner), crashing a birthday party at the house and bulldozing the uncontrived hour leading up to it. Linda Barnard