Fri Feb 3, 2012
Film

The Friday Film Fix: Feb. 3

Click on the titles to read our complete review

MUST-SEES

Pink Ribbons, Inc. (8/10): “We used to march on the streets—now you’re supposed to run for a cure.” As spoken on screen by American writer Barbara Ehrenreich, this sardonic comment is echoed many times in Pink Ribbons, Inc. Based on a book by Queen’s University professor Samantha King and directed by Swiss-born, Quebec–based filmmaker Léa Pool, this NFB doc takes a hard look at the culture that now surrounds breast cancer.

BACK-UP PLANS

Albert Nobbs (7/10): If the sad story of Albert Nobbs’ title character is a fair indication, being a drag king in 1890s Dublin isn’t nearly as much fun as it might sound. Played by Glenn Close in an impressively precise performance that just earned her an Oscar nomination, poor Albert is almost a non-entity: He’s determined to disappear into the background and attract the minimum of attention. His immaculate manners and self-control can’t entirely conceal his constant terror at being found out as something other than a man, a guise he adopted decades before so as to make a very hard life a smidgen easier.

The Innkeepers (7/10): It’s safe to say that the talented young director Ti West has a thing for stark stories about adorable young women passing time in scary spaces. In 2009’s The House of the Devil, it was a babysitter padding impatiently around her client’s remote abode, unaware that she was being prepped for a demonic ritual. In The Innkeepers, it’s an aimless wage slave (Sara Paxton) who senses something uncanny going on at the hotel where she works at the front desk.

Le Vendeur (7/10): The snowbound French-Canadian art film is becoming a bit of a cliché after the successes ofCurling and Familiar Ground, but Sébastien Pilote’s debut feature is a slightly different animal. In lieu of studied weirdness, Le Vendeur employs a sort of documentary observation, setting its sights on a widowed, sexagenarian used-car salesman plying his trade in a rural Quebec town that’s reeling from the effects of a strike at its pulp mill.

Inside Lara Roxx (7/10): Cautionary tales about the perils of the adult-film industry are hardly uncommon, but the one recounted in Inside Lara Roxx is particularly bleak. In 2004, a troubled 21-year-old Montrealer working under the nom de porn Lara Roxx became one of several performers who contracted HIV from a male co-star. The Quebec media leapt on the story, giving Lara a very different kind of fame than she originally sought when she arrived in Los Angeles only a few months before.

Miss Bala (6/10): The camera rarely stops moving in Miss Bala. That’s because it’s shadowing the frantic trajectory of Laura (Stephanie Sigman), a 23-year-old Tijuana beauty pageant contestant who unintentionally falls in with some drug runners and then tries—over and over again—to escape their orbit.

ABORT MISSION

The Woman in Black (5/10): Daniel Radcliffe swaps his Harry Potter specs for a pair of Victorian-era sideburns in his first post-Hogwarts film, The Woman in Black. That’s about the boldest choice he makes in this standard-issue gothic ghost story, which provides the erstwhile boy wizard with a remarkably unchallenging transition from the blockbuster franchise.

Big Miracle (4/10): Like Free Willy and Dolphin Tale before it, Big Miracle is the heart-squeezing account of an aquatic creature in distress and how it changed the lives of all the humans within splashing distance. It is also, as is customary in the marine mammal–redemption genre, inspired by a true story—in this case, the rescue of a trio of California grey whales who were trapped near Barrow, Alaska in 1988. And director Ken Kwapis doesn’t let you forget that for an instant. The action is regularly punctuated by dusty-looking late-’80s news segments anchored by Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, who offer real-life updates on the real-life whales’ fates. Alas, their clipped reports contain more drama (and better writing) than the rest of the narrative, which runs aground on an ice floe of clichés.

Moon Point (3/10): The already crowded quirky-loner-on-a-journey genre gets even more sardine-packed withMoon Point, a low-budget Canadian comedy that’s far less endearing than it tries to be.

W.E. (2/10): With its ever-swirling camera, plush period decor, oversized performances, purple-prose dialogue and delirium-inducing montages, there’s not a second of restraint in W.E., Madonna’s second attempt to establish her credentials as a filmmaker.