There’s not really a heck of a lot to say about Chernobyl Diaries, the latest microbudgeted horror from the brain of Paranormal Activity mastermind Oren Peli, but that shouldn’t really be taken in an altogether negative fashion. About as standard as a horror film can get, genre buffs who love their jump scares and spooky noises will find enough to like here to warrant a recommendation, and first time director Brad Parker does some really interesting things here on a technical level, but overall there’s never any doubt where Peli’s story is headed or how it’s getting there. Still, Chernobyl Diaries at least has the sense to cop to its formula up front and hits its beats with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel.

Four American tourists – two brothers (Jonathan Sadowski and Jesse McCartney) and two girls (Olivia Taylor Dudley and Devin Kelley), one of whom is about to be proposed to – and an Aussie couple (Ingrid Bosol Berdal and Nathan Phillips) join up just outside of Kiev while travelling across Russia to join an “extreme tourism” jaunt to the abandoned ghost town of Pripyat in what is now Ukraine. Infamous for the tragic 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant, residents were forced to flee without taking anything with them leading to the place becoming a haunting, desolate wasteland. Unfortunately for these horror movie clichés, something has stayed behind and their previously competent tour guide (Dimitri Diatchenko) can’t get them out of a place they illegally snuck into in the first place.

While it’s a departure from the “found footage” sub-genre for writer Peli, the film has an almost documentary-like intimacy (which, if you want to be crass about it, means a whole lot of running, shaky cam, and long takes) and story beats that wouldn’t feel out of place in the writer’s comfort zone. Peli also loads on the standard “we’re lost, scared, and in the dark” tropes quite liberally. There’s about fifteen to twenty sequences of people running away from things, scenes where something pops up out of the dark, scenes where people get separated and are forced to should each other’s names repeatedly, the final video left behind by someone who’s dying, spooky shadows, creepy kids that might be hallucinations, a Geiger counter that literally spells out to the audience when danger is around, and plenty more stereotypes of this kind of film that I’m probably forgetting.

But, if you can hang with that sort of movie without getting bored (and even at a lean 85 minutes, restlessness does start to set in), there’s some great stuff going on beyond the margins of the actual film. Peli throws in some nice jabs in his script about the types of films he’s best known for. The cast all rises to the occasion, putting in equally strong and physical performances. The recreation of Pripyat in Serbian and Hungarian locations feels authentic and well thought out without making it look like a standard horror movie setting. Parker shows an assured hand and always keeps the action moving, even using elaborate camera moves in action scenes that feel fluid and unforced.

It’s all suitably grim and gritty even if it still manages to be a film where audiences will be divided over whether or not there’s an actual payoff, but this type of film has also been done far worse in recent years. I guess the biggest complaint would be that the title is totally misleading since the film isn’t actually a diary of anything. Sure, we get a title card that states that the action takes place roughly ten years ago, but this also isn’t a found footage movie. What’s up with that?

If movies were judged purely on their level of forced quirkiness, then Jesus Henry Christ would be in the running for the best of the year. Thankfully, we don’t live in that world and this movie will be quickly forgotten. This is another one of those unfortunate post-millennium comedies that Wes Anderson may not have made, but has to answer for. Much like how Quentin Tarantino spawned dozens of infinitely inferior pop-culture charged crime comedies, Anderson’s instant cult status bred a generation of filmmakers seduced by his deadpan whimsy who crank out movies that are more designed than directed. It’s ironic for a filmmaker who can’t seem to stop telling stories about fractured families that he’s spawned a sea of inferior children who he probably isn’t too fond of. Thankfully his films continue to stand out against shameless Xeroxes like Jesus Henry Christ, a movie that sneaks its best joke into the title, and even that one isn’t particularly good.

Dennis Lee’s second feature (following up the almost unwatchable family melodrama Fireflies in the Garden) is about a 10-year-old child prodigy named Henry (Jason Spevack) with photographic memory and the ability to complete a college entry exam in two minutes. Henry was born to single mother Patricia Herman (Toni Collette), who lost her mother and four brothers when she was a child and grew up embittered to the idea of families with a dink of a father who is essentially a poor man’s Royal Tenenbaum and not worth discussing. She was a political activist to all liberal causes though, so decided to have a test tube baby as personal act of rebellion. Her kid turned out to be a genius who eventually worked out that his father is Professor Slavkin O’Hara (Michael Sheen), a man who donated his sperm years ago when his doctor cruelly claimed he had testicular cancer as part of his plan to seduce O’Hara’s wife. However, O’Hara did manage to shoot out a daughter named Audrey (Samantha Weinstein) before the marriage collapsed, who he raised as a sociological experiment on sexual identity. Henry brings these four lost souls together to form a fucked up makeshift family custom made for some semi-dark quirky comedy.

The main problem with Jesus Henry Christ is that while Lee may have decided on the style of his movie early on, he never quite figured out the tone. Early scenes outlying the many deaths in Patricia’s family have a very dark, arch, and cynical edge to the humor, while at other times he seems to be trying find weepy emotions in his collection of one-note damaged goofballs. The movie is all over the place, clearly created by a filmmaker more interested in showing off just what a clever director he can be rather than someone with a story to tell or even something to say. As a visual stylist he’s even less assured, trying way to hard to show off his skills with-ever roving cameras and a near limitless supply of reverse zooms that add little to the storytelling. That said, he throws so many jokes at the wall that a few stick and the rigid adherence to the Wes Anderson playbook at least assures that the movie looks nice and moves along at a brisk pace. However, when that’s the best you can say about a filmmaker’s abilities, it’s not a good sign. Particularly for someone who clearly considers himself some sort of smartypants artist.

The main factor that makes the movie bearable is a cast far too good for this material. Toni Collette may have played at least five too many bitter single moms at this point, but she is quite good at it and knows how to balance comedy and pathos well. Michael Sheen is gradually turning into a fantastic semi-comedic character actor of the Stanley Tucci school and gets far more out of his role than he should. But even better than Collette and Sheen are the kids, Jason Spevack and Samantha Weinstein, who underplay play their roles in monotone with bursts of emotion in performances that are mercifully free of cutesy kid acting. The entire cast is strong enough to suggest that Lee at least has some skill with casting and working with actors, so perhaps once he stops trying to emulate other filmmakers and do his own thing he might have some promise. Although “might” is the key word there since all of these folks are so talented that they probably didn’t need much direction.

Jesus Henry Christ is definitely a disposable derivative effort that will receive a resounding round of apathy at the box office, but at least it isn’t painful to watch. Part of Lee’s constant desire to make his presence known behind the camera thankfully involves zippy pacing that never dwells on a bad joke or failed attempt to massage the tear ducts for long. Plus, the actors are always compelling even when the script isn’t and enough jokes land to keep the crickets at bay. As far as bad Wes Anderson knock-offs go, this movie is in the upper echelon. It’s still kind of crap, but crap that’s passably enjoyable. It’s a failed movie that won’t ruin your night. Now that’s a poster quote for the desperate.

Labaki’s story takes place in an isolated Lebanese village. The small population does everything together even though they are split down the middle between Christians and Moslems with all of the irrational prejudices that implies (segregated cemeteries, childish name-calling, the occasional fistfight, etc). However, things are fairly peaceful overall until a small TV comes into the town brining with it controversial news stories that gets the whole down in a divided tizzy. Well, at least that’s true of all the men in town. The women recognize how ridiculous, petty, and tragic all this fighting can be, with a death toll that has mounted over time (at one point one of the eldest women in the community poignantly cries out, “”Do you think we exist simply to mourn you?” and gets nothing but chilly silence in response).

This being a painfully patriarchal community, the women’s feelings are never acknowledged. However, they all get together and realize that as a team, they can manipulate all of the men in the communities using the good old fashioned techniques that women have used for decades, primarily sex n’ food (men are a weak bread, there’s no denying it). Their plans start with staging fake miracles to bring the rivals together and when that doesn’t prove to be strong enough, they import a collection of Ukrainian belly dancers to keep all the men distracted and hold a communitywide party catered with hash-laced pastries to get everyone giggling together. All of the hate and conflict built up over several stressful weeks quickly melts away via the magical powers of soft drugs and bare midriffs.

It’s a fairly amusing little tale whipped up by Labaki and one that is well performed by a talented cast of established actors and civilians with intriguing faces. Unfortunately this kind of light comedy with dark themes is a very tricky combination to get right and seems just slightly out of reach of the Labaki who is only on her second film as a director. The first third of the story drags on far too long with very little indication that the film is in fact a comedy. Then when the women hatch their plan, the humor arrives in fairly broad and goofy set pieces that clash awkwardly with the serious drama surrounding them. Musical numbers about hash, slapstick physical gags, double takes from horny old men leering at scantily clad young women, Labaki leaves no clichéd comedy technique unexplored, at times desperately reaching back into the silent era for ideas. Sometimes the gags work (the unexpected hash n’ stripper party is pretty great), but the filmmaker is never quite seems as comfortable going for laughs as she does in staging the more serious sequences.

Where Do We Go Now is never quite as funny as it wants to be, but it can’t be entirely written off since the ideas involved aren’t exactly geared to belly laughs. Labaki is trying to make a point with all her pratfalls and those themes resonate strongly as do the intermittent dramatic sequences. Considering the origin of the production, it’s quite refreshing to see a practically feminist movie emerge and Labaki’s ideas about favoring female compassion in society over male dick-waving and ego-fueled fisticuffs is sound. It’s a shame that she wasn’t able to find someone more adept at crafting comedy to help her with the screenplay because this could have been a fantastic little satire if the laughs were there. She didn’t find that funny co-conspirator though and in fairness, this isn’t the easies subject to mine for humor. In the end, Where Do We Go Now warrants a mild recommendation for concept and audacity alone even if it’s probably a better idea for a movie than an actual movie. A for effort, C- for execution. Just like my grade school gym class results.

They say that original movies don’t get made anymore (lord know I’ve whined about it through tears and/or booze-fueled rage many a time), but how about this concept: a film about the Victorian doctor and his drunken inventor pal who gave the world the gift of the vibrator. That’s right; it’s a costume drama about the birth of the world’s first sex toy. Is it the greatest film ever made? Absolutely not, but I certainly have to admit that I’ve never seen this movie before. The entertaining little project definitely wins points for the charm and novelty that makes up for the occasionally ho-hum storytelling. Simply put, if you’re only going to see one movie about vibrators this year, Hysteria should be at the top of your list.

The tale takes place at a particular highpoint of British stuffiness. Doctors across England noticed that women were suffering from an outbreak of “hysteria.” At all social classes woman seemed uptight and overwhelmed by an inexplicable hunger. Fortunately, Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce) had a cure. Using the finest imported oils, the good doctor found that these mysterious attacks could be momentarily quelled with a gently vigorous massage in the nether realms of their pelvic region. Of course, this procedure was never considered sexual because women of that era didn’t experience sexual pleasure (according to “research”). Enter a young doctor named Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) who takes a job at Dalrymple’s practice after being booted out of nearly every other medical establishment in London for his radical beliefs in germs and following current medical research. All the ladies of the practice seem to really appreciate the handsome doctor’s massage, business starts booming, and Dalrymple contemplates not only giving over his practice to Granville, but also the hand of his youngest and most painfully obedient daughter Emily (Felicity Jones).

Life seems perfect for Granville, until he starts experiencing hand-cramps due to his workload. He also becomes somewhat confused about the exact nature of his medical services after spending time with Dalrymple’s rowdy, independent, suffragette daughter Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who defies her father’s wishes by working for the poor and supporting women’s rights (seriously, where does she get off?). However, Granville also understandably doesn’t want to lose the only medical job available to him in London and tries to come up with a solution. Enlisting the help of a wealthy drunken friend (an absolutely hilarious Rupert Everett), they invent an electronic massager that seems to work even better than an elderly doctor’s shaking hands. Thus, the sex toy industry is born and thanks to a love affair with Charlotte, a push for women’s rights also sneaks in to make sure everyone leaves the theater happy.

Director Tanya Wexler’s film works primarily because it never revels in the titillating or controversy-bating elements of the story. Instead, she plays the film as a gentle comedy, mocking the confused thoughts and ideals of old-timey England without ever digging too deeply. There’s a much darker film to be made about the same subject with a harsher look at the rampant misogynist repression of the era, but this ain’t it and the sitcom version is probably far more enjoyable anyways. The performances are strong across the board from the impossibly dapper doctor leads to the string of sour/elated faces of British character actresses playing their clients. However, the show is definitely stolen by Gyllenhaal who takes a character essentially comprised of rants outlining the filmmaker’s thesis and turns her into an endlessly charismatic early feminist. Her part still gets a little preachy in a way that often sits awkwardly against the featherweight tone of the film that surrounds her, but Gyllenhaal dives into the role with such glee that she somehow makes it work.

It’s safe to say that Hysteria is far from a masterpiece. This is ultimately just comedy fluff with a socially conscious agenda snuck in ever so slightly. There isn’t much to the movie beneath the surface and given the often ridiculous subject matter, Wexler and her cast never really hit the delirious comedy heights they were clearly striving for. Instead, this falls into a very specific brand of British comedy that treats dirty material in an impossibly genteel manner, as if the mere mention of a vagina is enough to cause uncomfortable chuckles from the audience. It’s a dated brand of sex comedy, but one that feels entirely appropriate to the Victorian setting. Though the conservative sexual jokes would never work if the movie was set in the modern day, they feel appropriate in this deeply repressed era and nostalgically naughty. The film will never win awards or become a favorite of British comedy snobs. Yet if you find the idea intriguing, I find it hard to believe you’ll be too disappointed. Hysteria is a strange and unique little comedy for thoughtfully perverted viewers and costume comedy lovers everywhere.

Agent K (Jones) and Agent J (Smith) are at a bit of an impasse in their professional partnership when K refuses to tell J the truth about escaped alien serial killer Boris the Animal (Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement), who wants K dead so his previously extinct race of universe destroying beings can destroy the world. In order to achieve his goal, Boris has to go back in time and…

Well, to tell you the truth, I honestly don’t know what the hell happens because none of it makes a lick of sense. Apparently Boris successfully goes back and kills K causing him to disappear from the present, but leading to an alternate reality where J is the only agent who remembers K’s existence in the present, but he really died in 1969. So, to stop K from dying in the past, J procures the only other time traveling device in the universe to try and kill Boris before K ever crosses paths with him. J fails in his mission and is introduced to young K (Josh Brolin) and teams up with him to track down Boris before he can come into contact with the motormouthed entity Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), who can simultaneously see all of the universes infinite timelines at once and also holds an amulet of some sort that can protect the universe. I can go into further spoilers, but you would probably just get more and more confused once I start adding more specifics.

Every detail outside of the cinematography and production design – both of which are top notch – is as arbitrary as possible. Even the stunning creature design is arbitrary since none of them exist except for the express purpose of getting blown away by the MiBs and turned into a steaming pile of goo. There’s zero tension with anything that transpires on screen because the staff of four writers never bother to develop any sort of characters or coherent story, simply coasting by content that the wacky idea of time travel will whisk away all of the film’s gaping logical and emotional holes.

Here’s the problem with time travel as a plot device: You can be lazy and use the theoretical paradoxes of time travel to explain away the logical problems, but it can’t cover up a complete lack of character motivation and lazy plot structuring. The problems in the present timeline of MiB III are barely addressed by the end and an entire subplot involving new bureau director O (a woefully slumming Emma Thompson) provides the biggest logical fallacy of the film. Well, that and the laughably inappropriate, illogical, and cloyingly “heartwarming” conclusion that nearly caused me to break my 3-D glasses over my knee and walk out.

Well, maybe it’s not exactly a logical fallacy because every character in the film constantly lies to every other character on screen. Possibly. I don’t even know. Maybe I need to go back to school and get my Ph.D. just to figure this thing out. They keep misinforming each other because this is the kind of movie where if just a single character told the truth, there wouldn’t be a movie. Then again, they could have just left it at everyone lying to one another since they wouldn’t have even needed the time travel device in the first place.

Since its flat out impossible to talk about the film’s structure any further without spoiling it (which you shouldn’t see, clearly, but I don’t want to ruin it for you if you’re dead set on going), let’s move onto the other biggest problems with the film, which are the performances almost across the board. Jones can’t be bothered to really care about what’s going on and Smith is only given recycled catch phrases for dialog leading to a complete lack of chemistry between the two of them that makes it look like they never worked together before in. Smith’s natural charisma can’t save this material. Despite a three year absence from the silver screen, even he seems tired here.

Clement is completely wasted in a villainous role that gives him nothing to do except act as a vessel for Rick Baker’s make-up effects. Finally there’s Stuhlbarg, who’s flat out doing the most hamfisted Robin Williams impression ever. Decked out in a woollen hat and winter jacket the entire time, his character proves to be entirely useless and thoroughly annoying to watch because he could at any time end the movie JUST BY FLAT OUT TELLING EVERYONE WHAT TO DO BECAUSE HE KNOWS EVERYTHING THAT WILL EVER HAPPEN AT ANY TIME IN THE UNIVERSE. But no, we just get a weak riff on Mork from Ork because that seems to be the era that Sonnenfeld’s mind seems to be stuck in.

I guess another plus for the film would be Brolin’s spot on impression of Jones, but again, the film doesn’t give him anything even remotely amusing to do with it. Even the gorgeous redesign of the late 1960s goes nowhere because the plot simply cobbles together the first moon mission, the Miracle Mets, jokes about segregation, and the rise of Andy Warhol into an incoherent mishmash of outdated references that were probably stale early in the 70s.

Men in Black III has absolutely no reason to exist, nor should it. Someone should go back in time and either fix this movie from being more complicated than it needed to be or prevent it from ever being made. Or better yet, go back even further and stop the second film from being made. Unless we’re in the alternate timeline where the second film was a good one and the first film was a bad one. Then maybe the Red Sox would’ve never won the World Series and Tommy Lee Jones would have never owed someone a favour or needed to pay someone a large sum of money. But if that happened, then my first cat wouldn’t have run away and my mother would have tipped that waiter at Benihana more than three dollars back in 1982, and then I wouldn’t have been bo………

As the dark title screen of The Samaritan dissolves into grainy focus, we get a point of view shot of some bruised and battered guy with a gun barrel to his forehead begging for his life, seconds away from getting his brains blown out. The scene sets the stage for a very intimate and gritty film that director David Weaver has attempted to make with The Samaritan, but it’s a shame that this neo-noir’s gloomy tension only leaves us high and dry.

The Samaritan follows the story of ex-tough guy Foley (Samuel L. Jackson) who we see released from a 25 year prison stint for a crime we’re initially given little information about. This is good, as Weaver uses Foley’s ominous allusions to his mistakes only to give us a taste of the bitter and corrupted past that precedes the now reformed Foley.  Although Jackson’s role in the film is essential to The Samaritan, it unfortunately only contributes to the film’s lesser success as a ‘hard boiled’ styled thriller, and instead only adds to it’s larger failure as a film of this genre.

We meet Foley as he lies awake in his decrepit jail cell, haunted by memories of his past. It’s watching Foley’s lonely glide through the prison gates amidst other rehabilitated felons in loving embrace with their family members, solitarily drifting off into the lonely horizon that sets Foley apart from the rest. Weaver hits a nerve here and Jackson’s quiet and mysterious demeanour are well acted- for this portion of the film at least. As Foley visits desolate bars and walks empty downtown streets with steam pluming from every subterranean orifice, Weaver’s handle of the traditional ‘hard boiled’ atmosphere here is formidable. Filmed and set entirely in Toronto, it’s really quite interesting to see our typically shiny and sleek metropolis become a dingy Gotham City of sorts and when the nefarious playboy Ethan (Luke Kirby) comes into the picture, it’s clear that we have our Joker.

At first, Ethan is just as cryptic as Foley’s:  he asks Foley to accompany him to his night club, offering him Cocaine and sex with a cracked out, yet somehow beautiful, prostitute Iris (Ruth Negga). Weaver sets this early part of the story up wonderfully as he recreates the essential allure that most noir’s strive on: the absolute uncertainly that we as spectators have about any character’s motives, and the undeniable desire to sort out the pieces to this often deadly puzzle.

All of this sounds pretty good, right? Well the real problem with The Samaritan begins once Foley starts dating heroin addict Iris, I guess as some kind of homage/ alternate reality to one of the grittiest films of all Taxi Driver. Unlike the more or less single note (and towards the end psychotically obsessive) societal cynicism that Martin Scorsese’s Travis Bickle exudes, Foley transitions from the ‘man with a haunted past’ persona to ‘old guy in awkward relationship with young girl’ disposition. This isn’t something I would typically find detracting from a film, but seeing as The Samaritan starts off in such an abrasive manner (we literally feel like we’re holding a gun to the beaten up dude’s head), it’s unbelievable and just weird watching Jackson make out with someone 40 years his junior.

When Foley is manipulated by Ethan’s disturbing revelation of the true nature of Foley and Iris’ relationship, we see Weaver paying homage to one of the most notorious revenge plot films ever made (without giving too much away, its Korean if that helps) with The Samaritan. But when the film radically shifts gears to become a heist picture of sorts, it becomes increasingly obvious that The Samaritan is a confused film.

So, here’s a strange story and please keep in mind it’s true. Bernie Tiede moved to the East Texas town of Carthage in the 1990s. He took a position as an assistant funeral director and instantly become a beloved talking point of the bored small town with no secrets. He loved his job, painstakingly preparing the corpses, delivering hymns and sermons, consoling widows even weeks after their partner’s death, providing gifts to almost everyone, and generally endearing himself as the nicest man in town. Sure he was a little light in the loafers in a way some Texans don’t appreciate, but he was so kind and giving that it was never really commented on. The big surprise was when he struck up a friendship with 81-year-old Marjorie Nugent, the most loathed bitter old woman in town and also the richest.

At first she didn’t take too kindly to Bernie’s attempts to console her after her husband’s death, but gosh darn it his kind soul wore her down. Soon they were inseparable, attending musicals, taking long vacations overseas, and Bernie even took over her finances. Eventually even his sweet charms weren’t enough to subdue Marjorie’s acidic ways and she started to abuse the poor man and monopolize his time.  Bernie might be the nicest SOB around, but even he’s got his limits and one afternoon he fired four shots into Marjorie’s back with a rifle and killed her. It was nine months before the body was found in a freezer and during that time Bernie and spent of $600,000 of her money helping the community, but murder is muder…well, maybe not in Carthage where there was such local love to Bernie that he actually had to be put on trial elsewhere so that his murder charges weren’t overlooked. Again, I can’t stress this enough: true story.

Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, School of Rock) discovered the tale of Bernie the genteel murderer in an issue of Texas Monthly back in 1998 and has spent a decade trying to turn it into a movie, writing the script with the article’s author Skip Hollandsworth. The years of perseverance were worth it because Bernie is easily one of the finest movies ever spun out of Linklater’s relaxed Southern drawl style of filmmaking. Perhaps what’s most surprising is his approach to the movie, both in the darkly/sweetly comedic tone and the use of interviews with actual Carthage residents. It’s almost like an Errol Morris documentary version of the tale (Gates of Heaven comes immediately to mind) spliced with a comedic fictionalization. The affection the actual Carthage residents feel for Bernie is genuine and hearing that spill out of their own eccentric mouths curbs the surreal nature of the bizarre comedic Southern Gothic. The humor that comes out of those people and their world is rather special. This isn’t some sort of sneering or condescending redneck comedy, but a film filled with affection for the Texas community that finds humor in their behavior without judgment. In many ways it calls to mind Jonathan Demme’s brilliant Melvin And Howard, both in the amusing n’ judgment-free view of the community and in the way it defies narrative convention to follow the messy and ever unpredictable structure of life.

Classifying the movie in genre terms is damn near impossible. There’s that odd blur between documentary and reality that complicates things and that’s only the start. It’s consistently funny, but never really constructs conventional jokes or gags like a comedy. It’s a true crime story, yet the crime itself never feels like the climatic focus, instead acting as more of an entry point to these characters and their world. The film is also a star vehicle in a way, but one that doesn’t highlight the central cast’s infamous charms, only their talent. Jack Black stars as Bernie in easily his best performance since, well the last time he worked with Linklater on School of Rock. His arched eyebrows and wailing screams make no appearance, with Black sublimating his natural personality and movie star charisma to disappear into Bernie’s unique, vaguely effeminate Southern charms. Though he still gets laughs out of Bernie’s unique personality, walk, and pants worn at wedgie-inducing heights.

Shirley MacLaine takes on the fiendish role of Marjorie with her lemon-sucking scowl and worn face reveling more than her sparse dialogue. She creates a believable old witch without ever forcing empathy. Some folks are just nasty and MacLaine clearly enjoys reveling in that type. Then there’s Matthew McConaughey as district attorney Danny Buck, who struts around town like a sheriff and is the only person in the community who actually wanted to punish Bernie for murder. It’s a wonderful thing that McConaughey has moved past the shirtless rom-com portion of his career. Now a little more weary and soft around the edges, he’s returned to actually acting. He’s damn good at it too, crafting a man who takes his job a little too seriously and righteously, never more than a few seconds away from some grand pronouncement or theory. He just needs someone willing to listen to him long enough to pick up on his nuggets of wisdom.

Bernie is a unique and strange little movie that will never be a hit, but has a damn good chance on slipping onto its share of top ten lists at the end of the year. Linklater’s deliberately meandering “hang-out” writing/directing style strives to simply observe characters and their world without forcing them into a narrative, which is perfectly suited to this material. If he filmed the story with a more conventional structure, it would be hard to swallow as fact. Played in this more ramshackle structure with deep compassion and understanding for all the characters involved, the film is as fascinating, sweet, unpredictable, and quietly arch as Bernie himself. It’s movie to get lost in and will reward repeating viewings that will undoubtedly reveal more nuances in the characters with every time. One of those rare films that makes viewers feel sad when it’s over, not because the ending is particularly tragic, but because the characters are no longer part of their lives. Days later, I still think about Bernie and even though I’m not normally one to cry out for sequels, I would love to see Black continue the role of the world’s sweetest murderer behind bars (apparently Bernie now leads church groups, sing-alongs, and cooking classes in prison). Don’t be surprised if you feel the same way.

Struggling to find a seat in the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema’s packed auditorium, it wasn’t a total shock that so many people showed up to see Kevin Macdonald’s Bob Marley docu-bio Marley. Like most others in attendance, I’ve grown up in what I like to call the Marley A.D. age: a time when the red, green, and yellow Rastafarian colours have become synonymous with Marley’s status as a cultural icon. I’m speaking about the rebellious, yet deeply soulful essence, which Marley’s music carries; the unique mood which becomes a rite of passage for many young and posthumous fans like me. I’m speaking about the reggae phase (a close cousin of the emotional-teen Beetles obsession) in which blasting Marley’s “We Don’t Need No More Trouble” every morning becomes the norm. Haven’t we all felt the spliff smoking Marley poster was necessity for the christening of a dorm room at some time in our lives?

As I sat in this theatre filled with families, senior citizens, and every ethnicity known to the streets of Toronto, Marley’s legacy had never become more realized to me than at that moment- a feeling I was delighted to see beautifully mirrored in Marley. Weaving through the grassy hills of Jamaica, Macdonald gently sets us down in Bob’s quaint and rural birthplace, the village of Nine Mile in Saint Ann Parish. Giving first hand and utterly authentic information from Bob’s family, friends, teachers, and lovers Macdonald gets unabashedly close and personal to this fallen reggae folk icon and before long Marley bridges the same irreplaceable intimacy that Bob’s music maintains with listeners all over the globe.

Eventually leading us to the poverty stricken slums of Kingston Jamaica, Macdonald bases us in the utter reality of Bob’s earliest beginnings and in doing so the legend of Bob Nesta Marley is comfortably deconstructed showing who Bob really was: an outsider. We learn that Bob, son to an absentee white Royal Marines officer and his native Jamaican mother Cedella Marley- Booker, was an outcast in his own community because of his mixed heritage. Seeing Marley in the vulnerable state which spurned Bob’s great desire to share the message of liberty and love with the world, Macdonald offers a rare position of this fallen legend. Following Bob so closely, we too feel as if we sleep only 4 hours each night, travel on dinghy tour buses, and get paid next to nothing for our work. Marley’s greatest asset is that it allows us to watch Marley’s creative gears turn; to witness the exhausting and unrelenting attitude that is the price of really creating revolution.

Marley includes a lot of rare footage of Bob performing with other Reggae legends like Peter Tosh, and it’s because of candid instances like this that Macdonald is capable of bringing us closer than ever to this spiritual artiste. Above all else that this film explains about Bob’s legacy, Marley is magnificent because it doesn’t simply show what Reggae music did for Bob Marley, but much rather what Bob Marley did for Reggae music. Unfolding the state of Reggae before Bob became involved, Marley  shows the striking and surprising contrasts of Bob’s political, soul and folk fused undertones- his passionate drive towards delivering  the message of an oppressed people. An instructional in Rastafarianism, a tribute to Bob’s life, a portrait of an artist and icon whose image will endure for ever- all these perspectives of Bob’s intricate being are delicately weaved together by Macdonald and are precisely the reason why Marely is hands down the documentary experience of the year.

If surprise is crucial to humour, then I fear that Cohen’s brand of shock-comedy may have an even shorter shelf life than most. Following the mixed-to-hostile reception that greeted Bruno, The Dictator feels like a retreat to the comfort zone. President Aladeen (Cohen) is allegedly the dictator of the fictional North African nation of Wadiya, but his braying voice, his vaguely Middle Eastern ethnicity, and his racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny (to a pregnant female character: “Will you be having a boy, or an abortion?”) may give you flashbacks of a certain reporter from Kazakhstan. This time, the action is entirely scripted; Cohen can’t really be expected to maintain the Candid Camera schtick as his fame grows, but given that we’ve seen this kind of humor in the high-wire context of Cohen and Charles’ docu-comedies, The Dictator can’t help feeling a little watered-down.

But that wouldn’t matter if the laughs were there. The deeper problem is that Aladeen is the most repellant character Cohen and Charles have yet given us. Ali G, Borat, and Bruno were not good people, but they were more ignorant than cruel. Aladeen is the first Cohen protagonist who is proudly evil, executing staff members for minor infractions and talking about rape as if it were brunch. When Aladeen arrives in New York to speak at the United Nations, revolutionaries kidnap him, switching him with a double to bring civil rights to Wadiya (they disguise Aladeen by shaving his ludicrous beard, and the audience is startled by a rare appearance of Sacha Baron Cohen’s unadorned face). Aladeen is rescued by Zoey (Anna Faris), a vegan/feminist/environmentalist grocery store owner who mistakes him for a freedom fighter, and when Aladeen tours her store, he punctures the PC atmosphere with a torrent of verbal abuse: a black employee is “a sub-Saharan,” a woman with amputated hands is “Captain Hook,” and so on.

The Dictator has a lot of scenes like that, where the laughs curdle and die from the sheer unpleasantness of the material. We’ve come to expect taboo-busting comedy from Cohen and Charles, but this time there is little meaning except to simply pick at taboos. Consider a contrived scene where Aladeen has to deliver a baby on the grocery store floor: the gags are predictably gross (up to and including a POV shot from a body part not known for its POV shots) but also arbitrary, as if Cohen and Charles felt the need to push the envelope and so landed on a scenario that involved a vagina and a newborn. Cohen and Charles sometimes succeed in shocking us, like when Aladeen goes on an extended riff about the time he raped a group of 14-year-old boys, but there is no satirical point to redeem the ugliness of the comedy. All Cohen and Charles tell us is that we’re easily shocked by child rape.

What The Dictator lacks is a reason for its offenses. Borat said that America was little more advanced than the xenophobic Kazakhstani, and the admittedly scattershot Bruno was at least a full-frontal assault on America’s sexual hang-ups. The Dictator only starts to cook in its last ten minutes, when Aladeen delivers a speech about the joys of oppressive dictatorship – a system in which 1% of the country controls the wealth, elections are rigged, one man and his family controls the media, and uses fear to turn the populace against its own best interests. The notion that Wadiya’s dictatorship is as free as America’s democracy is the kind of ballsy idea worthy of Cohen and Charles; had it been the thesis instead of a throwaway gag, The Dictator might not have been a big-budget summer comedy, but it would have been something.

What we’re left with is the niggling question of why Cohen and Charles wanted to make this movie in the first place. In Borat and Bruno, the grossness of their cultural stereotypes was often redeemed by the potency of their satire and the audaciousness of their approach. For most of The Dictator, they’re content to stick with the culture-clash shenanigans. Perhaps a tortured argument could be made that Cohen and Charles are using comic excess to demystify evil, a la Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, but I think this gives them too much credit. I don’t think I’m out of line to be offended by a gag in which a black man’s decapitated head is used for fellatio, and I think Cohen’s Jewishness is becoming an increasingly thin defense for his many jokes about the Holocaust and Holocaust denial. I’m also beginning to grow weary of his caricatured depiction of the Middle East. Cohen and Charles are smart filmmakers, but The Dictator makes a good case for all that recent talk of “hipster racism.”

While definitely closer in tone to what director Tim Burton should be making with his vivid imagination, wit, and eye for detail, Dark Shadows shouldn’t be heralded as a comeback for the director just yet. Very loosely based on Dan Curtis’ vastly more serious gothic drama, Burton’s tongue-in-cheek approach boasts great performances from a game cast, and some top notch production design, but the material never once rises above anything more than a mild amusement. The potential for this film to serve as a middle ground between the big haired auteur’s beloved Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice feels somewhat squandered by a lightweight script and a really terrible final 20 minutes.

Returning once again to the Burtonverse is Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins, a former English blueblood living in a coastal Maine town named after his family, who becomes cursed after spurning a young lover that turns out to be a witch named Angelique (Eva Green). Transformed into a vampire to prolong the suffering brought on by the death of his true beloved, Barnabas is eventually buried alive in the woods by an angry mob and awakened almost 200 years later in 1972.

Retuning to his beloved Collinwood Manor, Barnabas seems pleased to see his bloodline still in possession of the estate, but dismayed at the state of disrepair the family fishing business has fallen into. New patriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer) simply throws up her hands when it comes to dealing with her creepy son (Gulliver McGrath), her brooding, moody rocker daughter (Chloe Grace Moretz), and her scheming, unfaithful husband (Jonny Lee Miller). Add to that a lackadaisical groundskeeper (Jackie Earle Haley), a chronically hungover shrink hired to keep David in line (Helena Bonham Carter), and a new nanny (Bella Heathcote) who looks like a dead ringer for Barnabas’ deceased love, and you have a full house of familial dysfunction that has become a staple for Burton.

The main through line for the story is the continued passionate and economic rivalry between Angelique and Barnabas, as she also now has a town named after her and stolen away most of the fishermen in the state to drive the Collins’ clan further into poverty. The story works quite well because Depp and Green give the movie most of the energy and life that doesn’t come from Bo Welch’s admittedly stunning production design.

The character work turned in here by Depp is shockingly good considering he was very close to becoming a caricature of himself after the Pirates of the Caribbean films and his most recent collaborations with Burton. The buttoned up and occasionally vicious Barnabas, also manages to have a lot of heart and disarming politeness, putting the character in line with the oddballs Depp patented earlier in his career rather than the one’s he’s become known for these days. But if anyone walks off with the movie under her arm, it’s Green who seems to be channeling Meryl Streep from Death Becomes Her or was taking notes from Pfeiffer about her Witches of Eastwick performance in the best possible ways. She walks the fine line between malevolence and camp that Burton clearly strives for here, and it comes in extremely handy as the movie progresses.

It’s a shame about the rest of the cast, though, because Burton commits so fully to building the world of the Collins’ that it becomes clear that most of these supporting characters are going to be footnotes that only come into play at the very end when the film feels the need to speed up and reach a good looking, but terribly flawed conclusion. Miller and Hayley do great work and get some of the biggest laughs in the film, but they get shrugged off in Seth Grahame-Smith’s loosely constructed screenplay because the movie simply doesn’t know what to do with them. Ditto Pfeiffer (who it’s great to see in anything these days) who has a character that seems like it’s going somewhere, but it never does.

The movie plays up the fact that Heathcote’s character will have great importance, but she’s forgotten about almost entirely for the middle portion of the film, only to be trotted out for the obvious conclusion. As for Carter and Moretz, they’re fine, but what happens to them in the middle and final thirds of the film, respectively, serves to very arbitrarily set up the films’ final scene which reeks of wishful thinking.

The film gets by just fine on mildly amusing fish out of water gags and a good balance between the dark and the light. Dark Shadows isn’t the full on bubblegum confection that the marketing suggests, and overall the film’s a lot better for it. The jokes actually don’t start coming until a good 20 minutes in and after a fairly melancholy opening. Even when the jokes do arrive, they aren’t in the vein of the hyper-awareness of 21 Jump Street, another comedic take on a far too serious television series. When the film sticks to the campy nature of watching Barnabas talking to stoned hippies and trying to figure out who this Alice Cooper character is, Burton’s creation and vision manages to be quite charming.

But that all stops once the special effects heavy dénouement kicks in and the film stops being logical even within its own kooky world and plot elements arrive seemingly out of left field in a lazy assembly of happenings simply designed to end a film the writer had no clue how to end. By about the 90 minute mark of this nearly two hour film, you can almost hear the projector trying to race to the finish line. The ending looks great, but none of it really signifies anything and the final sting makes the audience care even less about what they just saw because it feels like it really was all for nothing.

The ending doesn’t fully derail the enjoyment I got from the film, though. There’s definitely an undeniable amount of entertainment to be gained from Dark Shadows, and it’s not that I’m being overly charitable towards Burton after his past few stinkers. Overall, the movie’s pretty mediocre. There’s laughs, some thrills, a couple of chills, and I will probably forget the whole endeavour before the week is out, but I’m not going to remember it as a failure. It marks a slight return to form for Burton, but it’s also nothing that we haven’t seen from him before. It’s like a greatest hits album. You know all the songs, and they can make you smile when you’re listening, but then you kind of wonder why you bought it in the first place and you probably never listen to it again.

After premiering recently at Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival, the doc Theo Fleury: Playing with Fire debuts tonight on HBO Canada. The film follows Theoren Fleury – among the most controversial and memorable figures in contemporary hockey history – on a promotional book tour. Director and producer Larry Day hasn’t produced a puff piece in any sense, this is a shocking and honest portrait of a man who has battled personal demons, addiction, and sexual abuse. While Theo Fleury has found a measure of success and sobriety recently, the documentary examines his career and his life, but really dwells on the scars, self-inflicted and otherwise, that Fleury carries with him.

The first shot we see is of Fleury against a green screen, getting made-up for the cameras when his smart phone rings. He picks it up, scoffs, and shows his call display to the camera “Oh, it’s the government of Manitoba,” he says “you know what that’s about? Graham James.”

There is a montage of Fleury’s career, his rage and his struggles – before the documentary deals immediately with Fleury’s motivations that led him to write his book, “Playing with Fire.” Fleury, and his co-writer are explicit: Fleury was broke (despite making over 50 million dollars US during his playing career), and he saw the book, at first, as an answer to his issues. It quickly grew into more than that however, and we see that Fleury believes strongly in his message, drawing strength and a sense of purpose from speaking about abuse, and from helping others dealing with those issues.

The competitiveness that made Fleury (who stands only 5’6″ and can’t have weighed more than 175 pounds in his prime) one of the leagues premiere point producing pests during his career, is still evident throughout the film. He complains and is deeply hurt by finishing fifth on the CBC reality show Battle of the Blades, for example. As we see him say at one of his talks “I always want to win” and in the case of the book, that meant he wanted it to be “a bestseller.”

Theo Fleury grew up in an abusive, addiction riddled house-hold. His parents are interviewed, and Day gives the viewer a textbook description of an “at risk youth.” Fleury’s abuse at the hands of the man who mentored him and held his professional prospects in those same hands, is described in graphic detail. At one point in the documentary, Theo Fleury’s father says that if he were in one of his drinking moods, he could see himself stabbing Graham James.

This isn’t a documentary about Theo Fleury’s hockey career, it’s a documentary about a deeply troubled and complicated man. The film touches on Fleury’s rise to the top of the professional ranks, but only to provide context for the fall. The fissures that eventually cracked Fleury’s life wide open were accelerated in New York and he really bottomed out in Chicago. In New York, Fleury was spending $400,000 every two weeks, and talks openly about spending ten grand a night at various Manhattan strip clubs. In Chicago, it’s explained that Fleury once spent well over a million dollars on a weekend long binge at the Drake hotel. Eventually, he even became a heroin user, a street person and a junkie. He describes at length how he considered suicide.

While the portrait is a sympathetic one, Day isn’t afraid to contradict his narrator, and he does so remorselessly when Fleury talks about apologizing to people in his life, and his relationship with his children. Day also shows the audience scenes of Fleury becoming extremely confused – in one sequence he’s unable to find his old home in Santa Fe. He talks about the toll that drugs, alcohol and making a living playing a dangerous game have taken.

Fleury burned nearly every bridge, both personal and professional, over the course of a troubled but wildly successful hockey career. He continues to do so in the film, taking a bunch of shots at Eric Francis and the Calgary Sun late in the film. His former employers seem to want nothing to do with him, really the only people from his former life who greet him warmly are the car attendants at Madison Square Garden who Fleury explains, he used to generously tip. While Fleury has got the numbers and the accolades of a sure-fire Hall of Famer, the likes of Brian Sutter explains that with his rap sheet, he’s unlikely to be inducted.

It’s sad really. While Fleury is and was a troubled man, with an awful lot of rage, he’s probably the best little-man in hockey history. Further, when you think of all that he’s been through, that he’s even alive – much less sober and successful – is as extraordinary a feat as anything he ever pulled off on the ice.

Theo Fleury: Playing with Fire airs tonight at 9 PM on HBO Canada.

In this collaboration with co-writer/director Zal Batmanglij, Marling plays Maggie, the baffling leader of an L.A. new age cult. The protagonists are Peter, a substitute teacher (Christopher Denham), and his burned out former Hollywood wild-child girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius), who infiltrate the cult with plans to debunk it as a hoax in a documentary. At first, that seems like an easy task when they gain access to a suburban basement through a ridiculous handshake with a hippy leader and they proceed to meet Maggie, who walks into the room clutching an oxygen tank and claiming that she can’t stomach the earth’s atmosphere since she’s from a post-apocalyptic 2054.

It all seems so silly and worth the hidden camera footage they struggle to capture. But the more time they spend listening to Maggie, the harder she becomes to dismiss. In particular, she forges an intense emotional relationship with Peter and seems wise in an otherworldly manner. The wannabe documentary filmmakers can never seem to decide if this is real or a hoax as every evocative sentence to slip out of Marling’s mouth is quickly followed by something easily dismissed (most amusingly, she’s asked to sing a song from her time and spits out a 90s pop hit too perfectly chosen to spoil here). Determining the level of the cult’s bullshit is even more challenging for the audience who also get to see tantalizing side characters like a grade school girl building mysterious statues and some sort of secret agent. Wisely, if frustratingly, Batmanglij and Marling never answer a question without raising two more in it’s place.

Sound of My Voice is a fascinating mind game that stumbles mainly because it’s vague in a way that suggests the filmmakers themselves might not have a handle on what conclusions are supposed to be drawn from the story. In that respect, it’s reminiscent of another no-budget time travel movie Primer (or even Another Earth for that matter). There’s nothing wrong with encouraging the audience to leave the theater scratching their heads, however, there’s a difference between a movie with a clear mystery to unlock and something designed by pseudo intellectuals who just, like, totally think it’s better if we don’t decide, man. It’s difficult to pin down exactly where Batmanglij and Marling fall on that spectrum, but their film works well enough that it’s worth giving them the benefit of the doubt for now. Apparently Batmanglij wants to continue the story through internet shorts, so that at least suggests he’s thought it through until the digital spin off proves otherwise.

The film is shot in the standard jittery handheld indie style, forgivable only because it’s never excessive and was clearly used out of financial necessity instead of stylistic laziness. Marling creates a fascinating character that instantly draws the viewer in without giving enough of the character away to spoil the mystery. Her chemistry with Denham is deeply compelling, but Vicius doesn’t fare quite as well playing his girlfriend who’s jealous that Marling is capable of giving him “an emotional orgasm”. Their twisted love triangle provides a necessary tension to keep the story spinning, but Vicius isn’t quite as strong of an actor as her co-leads and her limitations become all to obvious in such a small performance driven movie. Thankfully, she has the least demanding role and is able to get away with it, even if she damages things slightly.

I know I’m being very vague is describing the movie, but it’s hard to approach Sound of My Voice any other way. Giving anything away would immediately deflate the hypnotic mystery tone Batmanglij creates and the film doesn’t offer many concrete moments to latch onto, anyway. Ultimately, the appeal of the movie comes down to your feelings about this brand of head-scratching sci-fi mystery. If you like being led down a confusing trail without any sort of conventional resolution, then it’s a movie that will keep you pondering for days. However, if that sort of thing frustrates you, I can guarantee that you will be screaming at the screen like a madman after the final shot.