The fall prestige movies have started to arrive, three this very weekend. So far I have to recommend Sicario, Denis Villeneuve’s terrific drug war picture starring Emily Blunt and Benicio Del Toro. It’s a powerful, violent, gorgeous movie, one that has grown in my estimation in the couple of days since I’ve seen it. Please go here for my more detailed review.
The Martian is a big-ass popcorn movie. It’s getting a bucketload of love from critics. At the two-hour mark I was really wanting it to wrap up, and if I’m feeling that way then something about it didn’t work for me. My review is here.
I’m faced with the same conundrum with The Walk as I was with last week’s Pawn Sacrifice. The story—about a French wire-walker who strode on a cable between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in the early 1970s—has already been explored, quite movingly, in a great documentary called Man On Wire. To bring something new to this, the feature will need to be exceptional.
It’s funny, this semi-professional work of writing about the movies. It’s easy to forget, toiling away in the relative obscurity of Halifax, Nova Scotia, that people might actually read and react to your opinion, sometimes even the filmmakers themselves.
That’s what happened this week when I reviewed Mission To Lars, a documentary about three Spicer siblings who travel from the UK to California to track down Metallica, because brother Tom Spicer, who has Fragile X Syndrome, is maybe the world’s biggest Lars Ulrich fan. You can go here to see my review. (I do want to clarify, since my review was a bit brief, that I enjoyed the film. A doc like this just seems an anomaly in the multiplex. Maybe we need more anomalies! )
When I tweeted said review, Kate Spicer retweeted it along with a slightly cheeky remark about The New York Times casting a more favourable eye than mine on the doc.
Touché!
And for all your Bollywood action comedy needs, Singh Is Bliing has opened, all 140 minutes of it.
Tonight at Carbon Arc, we’re screening When Marnie Was There, the new anime from Studio Ghibli. Advance tickets are sold out, but there will be a few available at the door for both the 7pm and 9:30pm shows. Arrive early to get a ticket.
