Click on the titles to read the full review:
MUST-SEES
Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson (Feb. 9-March 30, TIFF Bell Lightbox): Robert Bresson set some awfully lofty goals for himself, as he did for anyone else committed to his vision of what cinema should be—a church whose adherents include Martin Scorsese and Lars von Trier. Screening in a new retrospective at TIFF Bell Lightbox, the 13 features he made between 1943 and 1983 comprise one of cinema’s most revered oeuvres. Here are films in which no sound or image goes wasted—or at least that’s the case according to his admirers and acolytes.
BACK-UP PLANS
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (7/10): Despite its title, veteran French director Robert Guédiguian’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro isn’t another screen adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway story. Rather, it’s a feel-good humanist drama about a working-class Marseille couple who become victims of a brutal home invasion that ends up bringing out the best in them.
Safe House (6/10): Let’s face it: No one goes rogue better than Denzel Washington. In his new CIA thriller, Safe House, he passes the torch onto Ryan Reynolds as he plays the sage master teaching the rookie how things really work in the CIA. It’s compelling to watch their relationship unfold cautiously as the student slowly learns to trust the teacher, but solid performances from both actors can’t help shake the feeling that we’ve seen this all before.
The Vow (6/10): Of the handful of implausible aspects in Michael Sucsy’s romantic dramedy The Vow, the plot is not one of them. That’s largely because the film’s stars, Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum—who play Paige and Leo, a totally in-love married couple whose relationship is virtually erased when a car accident robs Paige of the past five years’ worth of memories—have a remarkable chemistry in both good times and weird ones.
ABORT MISSION
We Need to Talk About Kevin (5/10): One common problem with adapting books into films is that material that may have been fresh on the page can seem far more familiar when put on screen. Much like the way John Hillcoat struggled to make his adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road distinguishable from the umpteen post-apocalyptic survival stories that had come before it, director Lynne Ramsay is unable to prevent her version of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin from getting mired in the most tired conventions of another movie subgenre: thrillers about parents who discover that their offspring is bad to the bone.
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (3/10): It didn’t have to be this way for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, an authentically authoritative—and awesomely aerodynamic—screen presence who could have been a major action star. Instead, the former WWE champion has become a hardened veteran of feeble family flicks. Case in point: Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, a sequel to the forgotten (but profitable) 2008 adaptation of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
