Is it Friday already? Jeez. Where does the time go?
“Arbitrage“: Imagine a really long, really dull episode of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent”, and that’s Nicholas Jarecki’s tedious reworking of “The Bonfire of the Vanities”. If Richard Gere actually gets an Oscar nomination for this, the award has no meaning.
“Beauty is Embarrassing”: Neil Berkeley’s documentary about the rise and fall of artist and production designer Wayne White was one of Susan‘s favorite Hot Docs titles earlier this year; now it’s getting a commercial run.
“Eddie“: A Canadian-Danish co-production about an artist (Thure Lindhart) who befriends a lovable mute (Dylan Smith) who has an unfortunate nighttime habit of snacking on whoever’s nearby. I’m sure it looked great on paper.
“Hotel Transylvania”: Adam Sandler enlists Genndy Tartakovsky, the genius behind “Dexter’s Laboratory”, to be his monkey for a 3D CGI feature about monsters and hipsters. Kiva has trouble with the underlying themes.
“Looper“: James Cameron once wrote, “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves”. Rian Johnson has spent a couple of decades thinking about that statement, and the result is this inventive, genre-bending chase picture in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis discover they have very different takes on their shared future.
“The Perks of Being a Wallflower“: Stephen Chbosky adapts his own 1999 novel about a withdrawn high-schooler (Logan Lerman) who falls into the orbit of two eccentric siblings (Emma Watson and Ezra Miller) into a touching, intelligent study of damage and recovery.
“Pitch Perfect“: Okay, I was already pretty high on Anna Kendrick and Elizabeth Banks, but this just kicked things up a couple of orders of magnitude. Oh, and somebody give Kay Cannon a blank cheque for whatever she wants to do next.
“Vulgaria”: A smash hit in Hong Kong, Pang Ho-Cheung’s comedy about a movie producer (Chapman To) who gets mixed up with a gangster (Ronald Cheng) doesn’t really play in the West, according to Glenn.
“Won’t Back Down”: Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis play dedicated parents trying to save their kids’ faltering school in what Rad describes as an insistently uplifting drama.
There, that’s everything. Oh, except for Nuit Blanche, which takes over Toronto on Saturday night. But that’s not strictly cinema, I guess.