New year, new cinema — let’s dive right in!
Anomalisa: Glenn and I both love Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s stop-motion psychodrama, in which a depressed and directionless motivational speaker (voiced by David Thewlis) finds an unexpected connection with a member of his audience (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Also, Tom Noonan is in there, and he’s fantastic.
Arabian Nights: Miguel Gomes’ six-hour riff on Scheherazade — transposed to present-day Portugal, and wandering back and forth from reality to fiction as Gomes is wont to do — is a thing to behold, though Rad didn’t have quite the patience for it that I did. (Conversely, he loved Gomes’ Tabu a lot more than I did, so maybe it’s just how we were feeling on the day.)
Les Démons: Philippe Lesage’s disquieting coming-of-age drama gets a few commercial screenings at The Royal this weekend ahead of Tuesday and Wednesday’s Canada’s Top Ten slots. It is good. You should see it. Read my capsule review here.
The Forest: You know how there’s always a terrible horror movie dumped into the first week of January? Well, this is that one for 2016. At least Natalie Dormer won’t be taking any of the blame for this.
Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words: The legend’s life, recounted in the least contentious way possible. But with home movies!
The Revenant: Hey, remember how I warned everybody that Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Oscars for Birdman would only encourage him? Well, I TOLD YOU SO. His masturbatory survival thriller is a hallucinatory jerkoff of phenomenal proportions, in which Leonardo DiCaprio mugs and capers for the oh-so-present camera and the whole movie keeps showing you how dangerous and risky it is. As I watched it, I kept thinking Larry Fessenden could tell this story far more effectively for a sliver of the budget — and it’d be an hour shorter, easy. (Rad was a little easier on it. But not much.)
Also, Don Hertzfeldt’s World Of Tomorrow is finally screening in Toronto — at the Carlton, in the 17th Annual Animation Show Of Shows. That’s the focus of today’s web column. And don’t forget, I’ll be live-tweeting the Golden Globes on Sunday night because it’s expected of me and my life is a meaningless hellscape. Enjoy my suffering!