Starring Dwayne Johnson, Vin Diesel. Written by Chris Morgan. Directed by Justin Lin. PG. 130 min. Opens May 24.

Can a movie ever be too fast or too furious? The sixth instalment of our era’s hardiest street-racing action-movie franchise, Fast & Furious 6 does its best to provide an answer to that question by trumping its predecessors with a brazenness that’s weirdly gleeful. With its wild flair for excess, all-consuming love of velocity, and cheeky attitude towards its own clichés and absurdities, it somehow embraces self-parody while staying true to the series’ original mission statement. While the summer may yield better movies, it’s hard to believe any will be so much fun.

Hell, even the ever-stony features and subwoofer voice of Vin Diesel can’t conceal the prevailing tone of giddy bravado. After pulling off a $100-million heist in 2011’s Fast Five, Diesel’s Dom Toretto, Paul Walker’s Brian, and their multiracial motley crew are living large in countries with lax extradition policies. But they put the good times on hold when their federal-agent ally Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) enlists them in a scheme to foil Shaw (Luke Evans), a super-villain with his own team of speed-racing hotties, gearheads, and overly ripped musclemen.

It takes some doing for one major character’s case of amnesia to not be the plot’s most ludicrous element. (By the time we’re through with the mayhem, it’s not even in the top five.) But director Justin Lin understands that viewers will buy just about anything as long as he sells it with panache, and Fast & Furious 6 rarely lacks for showmanship.

What’s more, with its emphasis on old-school car stunts and smartly choreographed fight scenes—with Haywire’s Gina Carano and The Raid: Redemption’s Joe Taslim both being invaluable additions to the cast—the series understands a central but oft-neglected tenet for exploitation cinema, which is the need to ground the silliness in aspects of the real. However outlandish the franchise has become, its action sequences still have a visceral charge missing in the all-digital demolition derbies that fill our superhero and science-fiction spectaculars. At this rate, the seventh Fast & Furious could very well make your head explode.

Starring Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper. Written by Todd Phillips, Craig Mazin. Directed by Todd Phillips. 14A. 100 min. Opens May 23.

A Hangover movie that doesn’t start with a hangover is bound to confound fans who bust a gut over the franchise’s raunchy take on bachelor parties gone very wrong. Instead of the Wolf Pack waking up in a state of squalor in yet another sin-filled city, with The Hangover Part III we get a prison riot and a decapitated giraffe, two gags that accurately indicate the darker, weirder direction taken by the saga’s self-proclaimed “epic finale.”

Even if the results are spottier and less epic than intended, director Todd Phillips and his crew of miscreants display an appealing eagerness to mess with the formula. The modifications include giving central prominence to the franchise’s two wildest wild cards. Though still a mercurial man-child— especially now that he’s off his meds and buying zoo animals on a whim—Alan (Zach Galifianakis) is trying to do some growing up. Unfortunately, his pen-pal relationship with the trusty chaos-generator Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong) puts the Wolf Pack on the bad side of Marshall (John Goodman), a gangster out to settle an old score with Chow.

Frequently sidelined by the action, Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms) seem as bewildered as viewers might be by the material’s shift from smutty comedy to violent, Coen Brothers–style crime caper. By the time they arrive back at Caesar’s Palace—where this whole sordid saga began two movies ago—it can feel less like a circle being completed than a downward spiral (and not an especially funny one at that). Yet Galifianakis and Jeong rarely waste the greater licence they’re given, and two scenes with Melissa McCarthy as a pawn-shop proprietor lend an unexpected poignancy to a series that’s usually prided itself on its misanthropy. Rare is the three-quel that provides so many surprises, even if some are more welcome than others.

Now in its 23rd year, the Inside Out LGBT Film Festival is one of the best opportunities to see works by queer filmmakers from around the world. Attending also basically guarantees that you’ll bump into that special someone who ain’t that special anymore. To ensure that the drama stays onscreen, we’ve tried to predict where certain characters might turn up so you can enjoy the best of the fest while avoiding your ex. May the fierce be with you!

Click here for our ex-free guide to Inside Out.

The Inside Out LGBT Film Festival runs from May 23 to June 2 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. 350 King St. W., 416-977-6847, insideout.ca.

He’s not as dangerous as you might expect.

Ken Jeong landed his big break six years ago, when Judd Apatow picked him to play an unfriendly obstetrician in Knocked Up, a role that reflected the 43-year-old Korean-American’s former career as a doctor of internal medicine (no kidding). But while he’s earned the love of comedy geeks for his supporting parts in other hits and his time on TV’s Community, Jeong is best known as Mr. Chow, the frequently pants-less criminal who provides many of the wildest moments in The Hangover and its two sequels. In town last week to promote The Hangover Part III, Jeong says he doesn’t mind when strangers presume he’s as gonzo as his screen alter ego. “I would feel the same way if I met someone I knew from the movies who was always doing the kind of crazy, outlandish things that Chow does,” he says. “I’d be very curious about his DNA.” That curiosity factor can only increase with the character’s big role in the new instalment, in which the bond between Chow and Zach Galifianakis’s man-child Alan brings fresh trouble for the Wolf Pack. “I looked at this as an epic tale of morality, with Chow as Lucifer. The Wolf Pack basically does a deal with the devil in the first movie and for the next few years, Chow just keeps creating havoc due to Alan’s tight relationship with him. Now Alan needs to move on from this life but in order to do this, he’s got to dance with the devil again.”

Day jobs can be fun, too.

Though Jeong clearly enjoys unleashing his id as Chow, he’s been even more fun on Community as Chang, a former Spanish teacher whose personality takes a turn towards the diabolical. Since the critically adored cult comedy has never done well in the ratings, it’s spent much of its existence under threat of cancellation. That’s why fans breathed a collective sigh of relief when NBC recently announced its renewal for a fifth season. “No one was more relieved than me,” says Jeong. “I’m still giddy from it.” But he’s as surprised as anyone by the hardiness of the ingenious meta-sitcom. “Something like that is not supposed to last for five years—it’s not supposed to last beyond one year! It is a dream job because it doesn’t feel like a TV show; it feels like I’m shooting a movie year-round. It’s the ultimate day job.”

The world doesn’t need another Patch Adams.

Jeong knows a thing or two about day jobs, having been a full-fledged MD while he was developing his skills as a stand-up and actor. And despite his screen success, he continues to renew his physician’s licence every few years, though not because he needs a fallback gig. “It’s a reminder of who I am. I don’t plan on going back to practising like before, but I owe it to myself to keep up that licence because I worked my ass off for it.” What’s more, he loved being a doctor. It’s just that he had no interest in being the next Patch Adams. “Not many people know this, but as a doctor I was completely serious and intense. A lot of what I was dealing with was life-and-death situations, so I’m not going to wear a clown nose and a water flower. I keep in touch with some patients and they’re like, ‘I never knew you were funny because you were so intense at work; I’m just glad you had an outlet because you seemed so stressed out!’ I was always a taskmaster.”

Seeing your dad’s tiny private parts in a movie doesn’t have to be traumatic.

Jeong made a memorable entry to the Hangover franchise when Chow first burst out of a car trunk and began beating up the Wolf Pack while buck naked. The third entry provides yet another opportunity to behold the character’s disconcertingly tiny penis. Jeong admits to feeling some trepidation about what he’ll do when his twin girls are old enough to see the movie that made their father famous. “I’m just gonna say it wasn’t me,” he quips. “But I think our family is pretty unique. The twins are five-years-old now and they have an amazing sense of humour about life that’s been cultivated by me and my wife. They know that daddy’s an actor and that daddy’s silly.” He’s confident they’ll get the joke should they ever see Chow in all his fleshy glory. “I know that my kids will be able to view that career choice—or even that scene choice—and think, ‘Oh, he was doing that because in a comedy that was called for.’ Because it wouldn’t have been The Hangover if Chow came out of that trunk with clothes on.”

The Hangover Part III opens on May 23.

Starring Amanda Seyfried, Josh Hutcherson. Written by Tom Astle, Matt Ember. Directed by Chris Wedge. PG. 102 min. Opens May 24.

For a city girl who’s been magically reduced to the size of a thimble and stranded in an enchanted forest where the inhabitants are in the midst of a pitched battle between good and evil, Mary Katherine (Amanda Seyfried) seems surprisingly nonplussed for the duration of the animated adventure-comedy Epic. Her reaction may have something to do with the familiarity of what’s going on around her. Perhaps, like the rest of us, she saw Avatar a few years ago and suspects that everything is going to work out okay in the end.

It’s not just the protagonist who’s been shrunk down in Epic; it’s the ambition of the filmmakers. This umpteenth variation on the tale of an outsider who stumbles across a hidden civilization and falls in love with one of its warriors is based on William Joyce’s book The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs, but it’s derivative of a half-dozen other movies, from FernGully to The Secret World of Arrietty. While its lack of flip pop-culture gags distinguishes it from the rancid likes of Shrek, it’s still too formulaic to be truly rousing.

Top vocal acting honours go to Christoph Waltz as the miniature demagogue Mandrake, whose plan is to kill the forest’s glamorous Queen Tara (voiced by Beyoncé, typecast as a super-powered goddess) before she can choose an heir. Colin Farrell sounds unusually droopy as the stoic Ronin, leader of the “Leafmen,” who seem to be this society’s equivalent of the Secret Service. Chris O’Dowd and Aziz Ansari try to bring some wiseacre wit to their roles as dopey slugs—classic wacky-sidekick archetypes in search of some funny lines. In fact, all of the characters are clichés: Mary Katherine’s father (Jason Sudeikis) is a nutty professor, and her love interest, Nod (Josh Hutcherson), a hotshot rookie. It’s that same shameful lack of originality that turns Epic into an epic bore.

May 23–June 2 at TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Although the simulcast screening of HBO’s Behind the Candelabra at TIFF Bell Lightbox (May 26, 9 p.m.) isn’t technically part of Inside Out’s official lineup, it figures to be a hot ticket. Based on Scott Thorson’s best-selling account of the years he spent as Liberace’s live-in lover, the film also premieres next week at Cannes, and it’s certainly an event. Michael Douglas’s measuredly flamboyant performance in the lead role is unlike anything he’s done before, and the gaudy ’70s production design is a period-appropriate riot. But Steven Soderbergh’s direction is strangely lazy, easing into backstage-melodrama clichés that were old when his subject was just an up-and-coming kid on the showbiz circuit.

Behind the Candelabra pegs Liberace as a relic of a bygone era, but the grand pianist would have probably appreciated the showmanship displayed by Merrill Nisker in Peaches Does Herself (May 24, 9:15 p.m.), a hybrid concert film/burlesque review that’s both a star vehicle and a stylized biopic of her titular pop-star alter ego. Based on a live stage show Peaches performed in Berlin in 2010 and 2011, the movie opens with a German philosophy professor dryly deconstructing the singer’s aesthetics before getting rudely interrupted by a female punk rock duo. Peaches then appears and takes us through her career one arid electro-pop production number at a time, with assists from all kinds of freaky friends (including sexagenarian stripper Sandy Kane as her cowboy-hatted muse).

The other famously shameless performer on display at Inside Out is the late female impersonator/kamikaze superstar Harris Glenn Milstead (a.k.a. Divine), who is affectionately enshrined in Jeffrey Schwartz’s documentary I Am Divine (June 1, 7: 15 p.m.). Featuring interviews with many of Divine’s friends, family members, and collaborators—most notably and entertainingly, John Waters—the film is a worthy tribute to a truly outsized talent. There’s a subtler tone to Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth (June 2, 7:30 p.m.), which profiles the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and tries to reconcile the difference between her self-effacing personality and her strident, uncompromising writing. The most interesting material has to do with Walker’s retreat from view after the rocky reception to her novel The Color Purple made her a sort of critically acclaimed pariah. The film also examines her complicated personal relationships (including her early marriage to a white Jewish man) and her nuanced assessments of the state of the American feminist movement.

The narrative features at Inside Out are more of a mixed bag. Spanish director Marcal Fores’s Animals (May 29, 7:15 p.m.) suggests nothing so much as Ted directed by David Lynch. Its hero is a teenaged boy whose best friend is a stuffed teddy bear named after the noise-rock band Deerhoof. Animals is a little too self-consciously surreal to be truly enchanting, but it has its moments, which is more than can be said for the Polish drama In the Name Of… (May 23, 8 p.m.), which centres on a sexually repressed priest (the very good Andrzej Chyra) struggling with his desires in a backwater parish. Handsomely photographed, admirably earnest, and surpassingly drab, it’s a film that foregrounds anguish where so many of Inside Out’s strongest efforts revel in a more celebratory vibe.

Directed by Barry Avrich. 14A. 80 min. Opens May 24 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema.

An opening salvo of lavish praise from the two great Larrys of contemporary American comedy establishes the affectionate tone for this documentary profile of David Steinberg. While Borat director Larry Charles dubs the Winnipeg-born funnyman a “visionary,” Larry David comes off as even more effusive when he states that Steinberg “set the tempo for the way a lot of comedians wanted to work, myself included.” (As a director and key collaborator on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Steinberg would help set the tempo for David’s show, too.)

Several more peers praise him for the bravery and ingenuity he displayed in the first phase of his career at Second City in Chicago in the ’60s and then as a stand-up in the ’70s, when his fondness for political satire earned him a place on President Nixon’s Enemies List. Plenty of other milestones—like the time he got the Smothers Brothers kicked off the air over the network’s attempt to keep Steinberg’s trademark mock-sermons off their show—are duly noted in Quality Balls, which serves as an engaging if perfunctorily packaged reminder of its subject’s often overlooked role in the past half-century of comedy history.

One reason Steinberg hasn’t entirely gotten his due is his relatively early retirement from performing. Despite the profile he earned from his innumerable appearances on Johnny Carson’s couch and his mid-’70s TV series The David Steinberg Show (essentially a prototype for SCTV), he’s largely preferred to work as a director in the decades since. Included along with new interviews of Steinberg sharing well-honed anecdotes, the performance clips in Quality Balls emphasize the snarky vitality he displayed in his younger days—no wonder several interviewees testify to his prowess as a ladies’ man, though the low standard of hunkiness among comedians no doubt enhanced his batting average.

Others highlight his significance as a Jewish comic who was unafraid to make religion a central part of his act. (His father was a rabbi, after all.) And even if Steinberg’s life and work deserve a wider and more detailed survey than director Barry Avrich provides here, there’s no disputing his status as a mensch’s mensch.

Starring Tatiana Maslany, Spencer Van Wyck, Steven McCarthy. Written and directed by Kate Melville. 14A. 93 min. Opens May 24.

Degrassi meets Dirty Girl in Kate Melville’s Picture Day, the set-in-Toronto tale of two high–school misfits who form an unlikely bond. While writer-director Melville’s feature debut gets no marks for originality, it does deserve more than a passing grade for its sensitive script, and for providing rising star Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black) with another role to prove she’s Canada’s answer to Jennifer Lawrence.

Maslany stars as Claire, promiscuous groupie by night and failing student by day. Forced to repeat senior math in order to get her diploma, she becomes re-acquainted with Henry (Spencer Van Wyck), the little kid she once babysat, who is now a Grade 9 freshman. Henry’s a science brainiac but has zero girl-baiting skills, so Claire decides to give him an image makeover. She dyes his hair blue and puts out the word that he’s a troubled loner who tried to kill himself. “Attempted suicide will get you more ass than a toilet seat,” she assures him. Trouble is, Henry has really got a long-time crush on Claire, but she’s hanging out with James (Steven McCarthy), an older-guy musician.

Melville, a Degrassi scribe, toggles uneasily between the John Hughes–style antics involving Henry and the grubby realism of Claire’s aimless life. In the end, realism wins out, thanks to Maslany’s intelligent, unsentimental performance as the glib but miserable “bad girl.” She’s well-paired with Van Wyck (another Degrassi alum) as callow Henry, whose obsession with his ex-babysitter—he secretly collects everything from her panties to her used chewing gum—is just this side of creepy. McCarthy, the real lead singer of Toronto funk-punk orchestra The ElastoCitizens, is both charming and chilly as James. The ElastoCitizens themselves appear as James’s band and contribute to the indie soundtrack that blasts from lonely Claire’s ever-present headphones. While Picture Day lacks focus, it does offer a memorable snapshot of a lost young woman looking for love.

Starring Clément Métayer, Lola Créton. Written and directed by Olivier Assayas. 14A. 122 min. Opens May 24 at TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Teenage dreams get a wake-up call in Something in the Air, director Olivier Assayas’s partly autobiographical drama about early-’70s French student revolutionaries trying to live up to the legacy of May ’68. It would be too harsh to say that Gilles (Clément Métayer) is a rebel without a cause; arriving in a Paris university a few years too late to participate in France’s defining moment of countercultural upheaval, he’s earnestly looking for a place to channel his youthful idealism.

The wisest thing about Something in the Air is the way that it shows how its characters’ political awakening is closely related to—if not perhaps entirely contingent on—their burgeoning sexuality. In their circle, leftist leaflets and shouted slogans serve as much as aphrodisiacs as talking points. Assayas doesn’t mock Gilles’s conflation of biological and ideological impulses, but neither does he enshrine his onscreen surrogate’s rebellious behaviour. The plot hinges on an act of campus insurrection gone violently awry, after which Gilles and his girlfriend, Christine (Lola Créton), hightail it to Italy—Gallic spring-breakers fleeing the consequences of their actions.

Assayas is one of the great modern directors of stand-alone extended sequences, and Something in the Air has a few beauties, including a house party scene that simmers with pent-up adolescent passion before literally becoming engulfed in flames. If the film as a whole feels rather episodic, that’s likely Assayas’s intention. We’re meant to see Gilles, Christine, and their friends as figures being swept along by history even as they do their damnedest to make a political stand. Something in the Air may strike some viewers as too serene and detached for its own good, but distance has given Assayas a finely honed perspective. This wise and tender movie captures the contradiction between youth’s elusive sensations and the underlying desire to leave a mark on the world.

Starring Pierce Brosnan, Trine Dyrholm. Written by Susanne Bier, Anders Thomas Jensen. Directed by Susanne Bier. 14A. 116 min. Opens May 24.

Though Love Is All You Need treads some awfully familiar rom-com territory, the latest by director Susanne Bier often strives to deviate from the usual pathways. The most striking evidence may be her film’s choice of heroine. A middle-aged Copenhagen hairdresser who’s recovering from a mastectomy and her latest round of chemotherapy, Ida (Trine Dyrholm) clearly has other things on her mind besides a new romance. Worse yet, her feelings of relief after receiving an optimistic prognosis from her oncologist are promptly dashed when she interrupts her husband shagging another woman.

Nevertheless, Ida is determined to keep her wig straight and put on a brave face when she journeys to Italy to attend the wedding of her daughter Astrid (Molly Blixt Egelind). And whether it’s the pretty scenery or the excellent vino, it’s not long before sparks fly between Ida and the groom’s British father, Philip (Pierce Brosnan), a widower and grouchy workaholic who quickly softens in her company.

Given that a certain ABBA musical also sent the former 007 to a destination wedding in a sunny Mediterranean villa, it’s tempting to see Love Is All You Need as Mamma Mia! minus the singalongs. Yet Bier and co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen clearly want their movie’s rosiest elements of escapist fantasy to co-exist with the harsher take on the human condition displayed in films like Bier’s 2010 Oscar-winner In a Better World or The Celebration, an earlier Danish export that also starred Dyrholm and the great Paprika Steen, seen here as Philip’s self-centred ex–sister-in-law.

Unfortunately, these competing ambitions fail to coalesce into any kind of unified whole; the surplus of tedious subplots and sketchy supporting characters undermines the appeal of the central love story. That Dyrholm and Brosnan are able to invest their scenes with such warmth and tenderness may speak more to their skills as performers than Bier’s comfort level with terrain better navigated by Nancy Meyers and the dearly departed Nora Ephron.