There’s lots of choice among the new ones this week. You can laugh, tremble, fume, sympathize or just feel the resonance in one or more of these.
Beautiful Boy: 3 stars
Sharkwater Extinction: 4 ½
Halloween: 3
The New Romantic: 3
Thunder Road: 3 ½
The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales:
The Oath: 2 ½
The Hate U Give: --
BEAUTIFUL BOY: This one will resonate strongly with many parents. Some will feel relief that their children didn’t get into drugs. Others will be gripped by the terrors the film recalls, the feeling that a child has been lost to them, grabbed by an addiction that won’t let go.
Even the occasional good times are scary because as the father, here played by Steve Carell, is told: “Relapse is part of recovery.” In other words, it’s always looming. More distressing is the father’s realization he doesn’t know his son anymore and has no idea what happened to him.
We don’t find out either. The son won’t say much except this, about the first time he took crystal meth: “I felt better than I ever did before.” The world turned Technicolor, he says. Timothée Chalamet, of Call Me By Your Name fame, gives another outstanding performance here. With few words he conveys lots of emotion. For the dad there’s a rising desperation and even guilt. Did he help cause it? Did his divorce contribute?
The film doesn’t go there. Though it’s based on separate memoirs by the two, it dwells mostly on the father’s growing awareness that he’s powerless to fix things. That means we get only flashes—only hints at times—about the son’s life as an addict. That’s not enough but what we do get is a moving, well-acted, well-directed family crisis. (5th Avenue) 3 out of 5
SHARKWATER EXTINCTION: There are several facts I found distressing in Rob Stewart’s new films about sharks. One is that, although his first one, Sharkwater (2006) helped get laws passed in many countries to stop the hunting of sharks for their fins (for soup in Asia), more hunting is going on now.
Much of it is done illegally; some with officials looking the other way. Costa Rica, for instance, a progressive country usually, de-fanged its regulations after a new president came into office. The film finds examples like that in a number of countries and has pictures to prove them.
It also has more of what the first film gave us: beautiful pictures of these creatures swimming underwater, often with Stewart himself beside them. He said “people need to see their softer side. Their intelligence.” He also shows them piled on a cargo ship or snagged as incidental casualties in mile-long fishing nets positioned to catch other fish. Sadly he was an incidental victim himself. He died on his last dive because of a breathing apparatus fault.
Others finished the film for him with recordings of his voice providing the committed narration. His passion for protecting these creatures is there to hear and see. (Scotiabank and suburban theatres) 4 ½ out of 5
HALLOWEEN: This is how you make a sequel when there have already been multiple sequels and at least one re-make. Forget them all, just concentrate on the original, pick up on its spirit and add something new. So, 40 years after the original film we get this one, set 40 years later.
Michael Myers, the killer, is in a mental institution/ prison and he’s about to be transferred to another. Oh, oh. You know what that means. One rainy foggy night with an overturned bus and a lot of crazies running around but no Michael in sight we’ve got the answer.
Meanwhile, Laurie Strode, his target all those years ago (and in four sequels), knows he’s coming for her. Jamie Lee Curtis plays her once again, rife with the same old “paranoia and neuroses” that her daughter (Judy Greer) says made her childhood traumatic and now threatens her granddaughter (Andi Matichak) too.
And sure enough, Michael is coming after them all. Laurie is ready. She’s got a secret shelter below her house and has been taking target practice. The sheriff who was on the case 40 years ago is still on it. He’s now played by Will Patton but somehow Michael eludes them all and we get tension building up to a bloody confrontation. David Gordon Green, the new director, ratchets up the suspense, gives us three or four jump in your seat startles and delivers a pretty good thriller for fans of this kind of movie. They loved it at the Toronto Film Festival. (Scotiabank, Marine Gateway, suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
THE NEW ROMANTIC: “Romance is dead,” proclaims our protagonist in this bright, amusing comedy. Her editor at the student newspaper she writes for doesn’t want a piece saying that and she (played by British actor Jessica Barden) goes out to find material for it anyway. It’s the kind of romance she loves in Nora Ephron movies that’s missing, she says.
After a party and a mix-up she stumbles into another kind, a world of sugar daddies. She becomes a sugar baby to one.
In return for her companionship the older man, a professor (Timm Sharp), gives her a moped, some jewelry and a letter supporting her bid to win a journalism prize. But she is never, she is told sternly, to come around unannounced. How is that new? It doesn’t sound like it. She slowly awakens to the darker side of what she thought was a relationship of equals.
Business and romance go way back, she had rationalized. Now she sees the power component and she’s unnerved by another man who assumes she’s available. That awakening is well-charted in this film co-written and directed by Vancouver-native, now Toronto-resident Carly Stone. There are lessons there but the story is too specific to qualify as universal. (Park Theatre) 3 out of 5
THUNDER ROAD: A 12-minute short film from two years ago is now a full-length feature and I don’t detect anything extraneous here. Jim Cummings, the writer, director and main actor, hasn’t strained to filled it out; he’s added and expanded on it. The first part duplicates the short. He plays a small-town cop in Texas who has to speak at his mother’s funeral but everything goes wrong. He wants to play a song but the cassette machine fails.
He makes a fool of himself by dancing to a tune he can’t hear. “I’m sorry,” he whimpers.
The rest of the movie lays on more problems. His wife is filing for divorce, wants half his salary and pension and full-custody of his daughter. He irritates the judge in court. Gets fired from his job. He lies to his sister about the state he’s in but later says “I don’t know what I’m doin’ anymore now.” It’s an intensely involving character arc we get in this film. “You gotta want more for yourself,” he tells his daughter but wavers between completely hapless and pretending everything is OK. It’s a small film with deep resonance. (VanCity Theatre) 3 ½ out of 5
THE BIG BAD FOX AND OTHER TALES: Here’s a very entertaining animated film from France. It plays like the tales we’ve read to our kids but has far more laughs and some sly twists. Three tales are tied together by a simple device: they’re performed by a theatrical group. Benjamin Renner, the co-director (with Patrick Imkert), originated the stories in a graphic novel and had an Academy Award nomination for a previous film.
In story one: a stork needs help delivering a baby. He gets it from a duck, rabbit and pig in the farmyard that’s home base for all three tales. It’s a wild trip that includes a run-away truck and falling out of a plane.
In story two, a less-than-scary fox and a too-scary wolf team up to raid that same farm yard. They grab some eggs and when those hatch the chicks think the fox is mom. You can see the complications, especially since the lead hen back at the farm is a militant who organizes a chicken militia corps. The third tale has the rabbit, duck and pig teaming up again to save Christmas with, or from, a faulty Santa decoration. All three stories are funny, charming, whimsical and very inventive. (They’re at the VanCity Theatre. Note that the Sunday afternoon screening is dubbed into English. The others are in subtitled French). 4 out of 5
THE OATH: The traditional Thanksgiving movie with plenty of family discord erupting around the table gets a Trump-era update. Pass the politics, please.
Comedian and actor Ike Barinholtz did, after his family dinner last year broke into conservative vs liberal arguments. He wrote, directed and stars in this riff on the idea in which he plays a liberal with a righteous streak, a toned-down Tiffany Haddish plays his sensible wife, and their guests (mom, dad, brother and sister and their partners) are conservatives of various flavours.
The trigger that gets them arguing is a directive from the President to have people sign a loyalty oath by Friday. Ike won’t. Some of the others have. Some we don’t know about. As the talk gets hotter we learn more.
The script is clever and often funny in reflecting American political discord these days. Then it goes further, into hyperbole. We hear about demonstrations, police response, citizens reported to the authorities. Two agents from a new division of Homeland Security arrive at the door, walk right in and issue threats. One (John Cho) is reasonable; the other (Billy Magnussen) is a budding storm trooper. Punching, shoving, a gun and a fireplace poker come into play as the film spins out of the reasonable satire it was, into overload. It’s amusing but hardly a shrewd political commentary. (International Village) 2 ½ out of 5
Also now playing …
THE HATE U GIVE: This young adult story is from the Black Lives Matter movement and a popular novel. A young woman who straddles the two communities –she lives in a black neighbourhood and goes to a white school—sees a friend killed by a white cop and is pressured by both sides to speak up. Will she take a stand?
The film has been getting very good reviews for the wrenching search she undertakes for what to do. There are lots of references, apparently, to slain rapper Tupac Shakur and a much-praised performance by Amandla Stenberg in the lead. I’m anxious to see it. (International Village and suburban theatres)