Throughout the film, you’ll be cheering for Irene
High school is cruel, especially to young women like Irene Willis.
She’s overweight and wears glasses, just the kind of person fellow teenagers love to taunt and ostracize.
Fortunately Irene is made of sterner stuff, thanks in part to the inspiration she receives from her imaginary mentor, the real-life Geena Davis, who speaks to her via a poster in her bedroom.
We’ve seen this story before so writer/director Pat Mills has quite a task on his hands to make it fresh and he succeeds, up to a point.
Mills has a knack for irreverence, starting with the fictional smalltown setting of Parc, Ont., “the sh---y plaza capital of the world.” (Parc spelled backwards is Crap.)
He’s also great at writing witty dialogue and creating memorable characters such as the free-spirited, nongender-conforming Tesh.
There’s also Irene’s mother, Lydia (played with brio by Anastasia Phillips), whose strict rules and overpowering personality keeps her daughter down.
Scott Thompson of Kids in the Hall gets some hilarious moments as Barrett, the administrator of a seniors’ residence where Irene is forced to serve a two-week suspension.
There Irene meets a host of old folks, including newcomer Charles (Bruce Gray), and decides to enlist them to audition for a talent-show competition that will also allow Irene to indulge her love of cheerleading. This is where things get a little clunky. With the best of intentions, Mills seeks to broaden the message of personal empowerment for everyone, including the elderly. It might have been better to keep the focus on Irene’s particular plight.
With so much juggling involving so many characters, there are moments when the film’s energy definitely wanes and not all the jokes and repartee hit the mark.
But there is much that works, especially Michelle McLeod, who creates a wonderfully plucky and empathetic character in Irene. She’s just so darn likeable and real that one can’t help rooting for her.
The climatic performance with Irene and friends is so wonderfully exuberant that it buoys the film, allowing the audience to overlook some of its earlier shortcomings.
Mills is certainly a filmmaker with a load of talent and an eye for good storytelling. He needs to exhibit a little more discipline in how he paces a story and in fine-tuning dialogue.
Nonetheless, there’s a warm-hearted tale here suffused with wit and a positive and life-affirming message about having the confidence to achieve your goals in the face of adversity. Bruce DeMara It’s a bit hard to tell if this is a serious film or an extended promo for Toronto’s annual all-night arts festival, Nuit Blanche.
Five directors unveil six storylines over the course of the night and the results are mostly worthy.
The music of Stephen Joffe and the Birds of Bellwoods anchors the film throughout, with great tunes that lift the spirits as the night wears on. And it does at times feel a bit wearing, just like the real event.
Characters include Sully and Violet, two friends without benefits dreading the approach of 30, as well as Frank, who dons a superhero mask and spends the night trying to do good deeds.
There’s Emily, still busily constructing an art installation consisting of cardboard boxes, and Melanie, who finds herself on the streets after hopping a bus from Quebec.
Stacey provides blankets and comfort to the homeless and there’s Ryley, a guerrilla photographer on magic mushrooms.
The cinematography makes the city look great, though the results are only mildly diverting. BD This French drama takes its time covering the stages of rejection and acceptance common to cominghome-to-die movies. But predictability can be forgiven with the luminous talents of Catherine Deneuve and riveting Catherine Frot ( Marguerite) as long-estranged women reunited in writer/director Martin Provost’s drama.
Deneuve’s Béatrice was the mistress of Claire’s (Frot) Olympicchampion father 30 years before. Their affair ended when Béatrice disappeared. Dying of cancer, she has returned to Paris to make amends.
Free-spirited hedonist Béatrice tries to break the reserves of Claire, who blames selfish Béatrice for a family tragedy. Midwife Claire is also undergoing upheaval, as the hospital maternity clinic prepares to be closed and replaced by a soulless new birthing centre.
A side plot about a romance with a long-distance trucker is designed to show Claire’s emotional awakening but it’s the superb — and realistic — scenes of her at work with labouring mothers that is a true testament to her caring. Frot is brilliant. Linda Barnard Jonathan Teplitzky’s war drama presents Winston Churchill not as the lion rampant of lore, inspiring Britons with his defiance of Hitler, but as a cranky old tabby fearfully mewling against D-Day invasion plans.
Brian Cox’s Churchill is depressed and close to defeat in June of 1944, as Britain’s wartime prime minister struggles to regain his authority. He’s been outsmarted by Allied commanders Eisenhower (John Slattery) and Montgomery (Julian Wadham), who are set on Operation Overlord, the June 6 storming of Normandy’s beaches.
Cox makes an impressive Churchill, an imposing man of physique and intellect who, closing in on 70, has been laid low by age and circumstance. But no favours are rendered by Alex von Tunzelmann’s reductive screenplay. What redeems the film is the honest effort to depict leadership’s heavy toll on all concerned. Miranda Richardson’s Clementine Churchill emerges as Cox’s equal, far beyond the usual dutiful spouse.
Extras include a making-of featurette. Peter Howell Charlie Brown’s saddest Halloween costume has been resurrected in ethereal form and to haunting cinematic effect in David Lowery’s Sundance 2017 sensation, a film that shows even phantoms get the blues.
Casey Affleck (here known as “C”) and Rooney Mara (“M”) have quite a history together, living in a house troubled by a restless spirit. But this spectre isn’t evil: unable to communicate yet desperate to, it watches their relationship from the sidelines, waiting for information to explain this brilliant vision of purgatory.
The film illustrates the passage of time, plus memory and loss, with an almost wordless screenplay that tugs at our deepest fears about emotional and physical detachment. You’ll soon stop smirking at the costume of bedsheet with dark-hole eyes, which acquires an air of wistful profundity.
A Ghost Story is the most unusual and loneliest phantasm saga ever to give you the shivers. And it’s exactly what you’d expect from genre-busting writer/director Lowery ( Ain’t Them Bodies Saints). Extras include audio commentary, deleted scenes and making-of featurettes. PH