Reviews

Lodging itself eventually in the creepy-people-doing-creepy-things tradition of religious/occult horror films like The Wicker Man and Rosemary's Baby, director Ben Wheatley's hit-man horror flick Kill List comes on, initially, like a bad-boy bit of British Social realism.

It's rough around the edges, shaggy and idiosyncratically edited, with dialogue so unpolished and authentic-seeming that it's occasionally hard to decipher. It's filled with a handful of legitimately great performances by actors allowed to work improvisationally, seemingly, lending the first half of the film an incredibly charming unpredictability, a low-key volatility that had me bouncing back and forth between moments of disturbing darkness and happy familial pleasantries. Then it gets really crazy.

Jay and Gal are ex-army, estranged friends and partners in crime. Eight months after a disastrous (and mysterious) gig in Kiev, Jay's home life is disintegrating, and after a raucous dinner party with his ex-partner and his creepy new girlfriend he agrees to get back in the saddle and take a job. They're given a list - three targets - and soon they're settling back into a charmingly macabre groove, carousing "salesmen" on the road from town to town and target to target. But after an inadvertent discovery during a routine bit of hit-man work derails their plans, the pair realize they may be part of something much bigger - and much darker - than a back-room murder-for-hire.

Kill List a stunning piece of very smart genre filmmaking. Wheatley not-so-gently inserts chunks of spooky, disturbing horror into what's already a charmingly dark kitchen sink drama. It's this transition - that either a social realist framework can be twisted into a framework supporting high horror or that a horror film can work filled with improvisational dialogue and broody bits of working-class British anxiety - that makes the film such an immense, jarring pleasure.

Will it work for horror fans used to slick, post-'80s supernatural spookery? Will Ken Loach fans do with a little blood and forest horror? Who knows. For fans of both, it's a stunning - literally - hybrid, something completely unexpected, a real discovery. Kill List is a brilliant idea, brilliantly well executed.

Director Eduardo Sánchez begins his newest spooky feature Lovely Molly with a deliberate shout out the the film that brung him here, The Blair Witch Project (co-directed with Daniel Myrick). A crying woman confesses into a videocamera, capturing herself in a moment of distress and hoping to leave a clue to be discovered after she inevitably succumbs to an off-screen terror. Sánchez hasn't returned exactly to his old stomping ground of first-person documentary horror - Lovely Molly is for the most part a spooky old fashioned psyche-out horror film - but it's a nice touch in a film filled with them.

Molly and new husband Tim (Gretchen Lodge and Johnny Lewis) are ripped from sleep in their new inherited home by a squalling alarm. Someone has opened their back door and is thumping around in the kitchen, but police find nothing out of the ordinary and chalk it up to the wind despite Tim's insistence that he locked the door.

He's a truck driver, and is away from home for stretches of time in which Molly is left alone to deal with a growing malignancy, a presence in the house that manifests itself as sung voices, crying children, clomping horse hooves and slamming doors. Molly's afraid to reach out to her sister or husband for help, fearing that they'll assume she's lapsed back into substance abuse. She instead begins to videotape her encounters, and it's this footage, as well as taped footage of someone stalking neighbours and visiting an odd underground shrine of some sort, that forms the frightening backbone of the film.

As Sánchez himself claimed in a post-screening q&a, the film is as much an "indie relationship" film and "actor's piece" as horror film. The entire weight of the film is on newcomer Lodge's back and she pulls the whole thing off dazzlingly well, transforming from a slight, trembling girl into a stalking, haunted and threatening woman crawling through an empty house. It's a performance good enough, combined with Sánchez's legitimate gift for crafting arresting moments of weird, totemic and animalistic horror, to transcend the film's kind of tired "is it a ghost or a hallucination" set-up, and take the whole thing into straight-up spooky, straight-up original territory.

Cameron Diaz does what she can with what little she's given to work with in James Mangold's brainless, hyperactive and utterly rote spy-romance-thriller Knight and Day. Paired with the increasingly wooden, increasingly off-putting Tom Cruise as half of a pair of mis-matched adventurers on the run with a valuable MacGuffin fighting off arms dealers and CIA agents alike, she seems to be the only one in the flick that's got a half-inch worth of ambition.

Diaz is asked to play one of those uniquely stupid Hollywood-committee takes on a modernized cute-woman-in-peril-who-learns-to-handle-her-own-uzis, a tough-talking Bostonian who raised her younger sister and is totally girly, and cute, and goofy, and likes boys, but wears boots (!!) and fixes up muscle cars (!!). Cruise plays agent Roy Miller, the agent gone rogue who swoops into her life and together, they have a series of absolutely predictable kung-fu & fireball escapades across a series of scenic European rooftops.

Knight and Day attempts to enliven its muddled, characterless story by kicking things off with the zenithal version of one of the tiredest Hollywood tropes - characters "meeting cute" - and it succeeds well enough in its early stages, where Diaz is allowed to stretch her cute-chops talking to herself in an airplane bathroom while Cruise's Miller wreaks havoc outside.

It's all downhill from there, though, as Cruise robotically manufactures a performance that at best is reminiscent of the cocky, aggressive charm he could exude in decades past. The film trades in its early attempts at characterization for repeated slapstick gags and hard to follow plot twists, all of which it then tries to paper over with breathless action and hokey romance.

To be fair, the film doesn't shoot very high. It wears its low-brow goofiness right there on its sleeve, and it mostly achieves its goal of being a light-hearted, dumb as a rock summer action movie, which is more entirely than can be said for, say, Ashton Kutchers' repellent Killers. See it in a good mood with low expectations and you might be well enough convinced that it's light rather than stupid, fun rather than ridiculous, charming and cute rather than manufactured and plastic. That last part is probably a stretch though. 4/10

Thanks to Tom Berger for another animated movie review! Toy Story 3 finishes off the franchise that was started 15 years ago by Pixar's first feature length film, Toy Story. It's an unsurprisingly fitting end to a great series of films, maintaining all of the charm, humour and heart of the previous two films while illustrating what 15 years of evolution can do to CG animation.

The film finds the human star of the series, the not-so-young-anymore Andy, getting ready to pack up for college. Asked to figure what to do with his now long neglected toys Woody and Buzz (voiced by Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, respectively) so his younger sister can inherit his bedroom, Andy decides to take Woody along to college, consigning the rest of the maudlin, worried crew to the attic. A misunderstanding by Andy's mom finds the toys on the curb, waiting for the garbage truck. After a narrow escape, the toys manage to get themselves donated to Sunnyside Daycare, where they can finally be played with and appreciated again. Shortly after arrival, they meet the grizzled toy patriarch of the daycare, Lots-O-Huggin Bear (Lotso, voiced by the very good Ned Beatty), who ensures them that their years of neglect are behind them and they can look forward to a lifetime of joy and attention thanks to an ever changing line-up of toddlers.

It becomes quickly clear, however that life at Sunnyside isn't quite as bright as the picture painted, and the toys are now left to hatch an escape plan from the tyranny of Lotso's reign.

The story is gripping and suspenseful, the action is dynamic and exciting (including an amazing Barrel-O-Monkeys nuclear explosion), and the humour, as always, is top notch. There's a formula here, not a complex one but consistent none the less: a little danger, a little emotion, and a laugh every minute-and-a-half, no matter what. Of particular note is Buzz Lightyear set to the Spanish default, and the sexually ambiguous Ken doll strutting his stuff for Barbie in a wide variety of vintage fashions.

The film plays to its strength: its characters and its witty, moving script, and in doing so boils up an engaging story rich with legitimately bitter-sweet themes of separation, loss and transition. Close to home for anyone that has ever outgrown a childhood toy, the film manages to make what might be a modern retelling of "The Velveteen Rabbit" sweet and funny while, true to Pixar form, striking a heartfelt nerve. It's not just a great piece of animated storytelling, it's a great film, bar no qualifiers what-so-ever.

Noteworthy as well is the opening Pixar short, Night and Day. It's a remarkable innovative piece, and an inspired hybrid of classical 2D with 3D animation that almost defies description. In fact, the short was such an unexpected joy, I encourage you to watch it knowing as little about it as you can. My favourite Pixar short by a landslide.

Another day, another remake. Another safe choice during apparently rocky times - this wintry economic climate, don't you know - and we're off and watching Joe Carnahan's big-screen version of the A-Team. In 2010.

Why now?

Well now because any time previous, in the late 80's after the TV series ended in 1986 or in the two decades following, an A-Team movie would have been a sad thing, a pitiable thing, a ridiculous idea, as people in the late 80's or in the two decades following would remember the thing about the A-Team show, the thing being that it was ridiculous, and often terrible, and a pitiable thing itself. Time heals all wounds, and makes bad jokes funny.

Now though it, like G.I. Joe and Marmaduke and Miami Vice and Charlie's Angels and Dukes of Hazzard and Clash of the Titans retains only the rosy glow of nostalgia. We can smilingly sing the brassy theme music - daah dah dah, dun duun dun - and recall B.A.'s catchphrases and fear of flying and mohawk and that Face was something of a scoundrel and the cigar and the van but we've forgotten things like the episode where they accidentally hire Boy George to play at a rough and tumble oil pipeline country and western bar and then have trouble 'n' such. Time carves away those bad bits and leaves a false memory, a goofy ideal, ripe for resurrection.

The good news is Carnahan's remake makes the most of those well-trod, resilient bits of remembered corniness. Face (Bradley Cooper) is a scoundrel non-pareil; B.A. Baracus (Quentin "Rampage" Jackson) is a volatile crusher so unmanned by the thought of flight with the manic Murdock (Sharlto Copley) that he must be repeatedly tricked, drugged and heaved onto the plane, whereafter the smiling, smoking Hannibal (Liam Neeson) must distract and bribe him with food. There's none of it surprising, but that they're there at all, these little character-jokes and quirks, is enough to recommend the film despite its howling macho idiocy. That's how low the bar has been moved. That's how little the money folks think of us action movie fans, as they crank out retread after sequel after prequel after reboot after reimagining after remake. That's how bad things have gotten. I like the A-Team movie because the people in it smile and don't do cool slow-motion stylish gun-shooting. Seriously.

The characters in the A-Team movie seem happy, most of the time. Their jokes are creaky and I've heard them all before (in 1983) but they seem to be having fun blowing things up, which is more than can be said for most of the dour goings-on in comparable action films of late. The second Transformers movie, the fourth Terminator movie, this year's A-Team clone The Losers or even Ridley Scott's (A-Team co-producer) own Robin Hood: they all evince a weird need to be slick, stylish and frowny-faced, to let their characters suck as little joy as possible from their stories. The A-Team might be shallow and loud and old and hackneyed and more than a little misogynist and freighted down with ridiculous "serious" sub-plots, but it at least cracks jokes. Its characters, over-familiar and goofy, are interesting if not compelling, and the story moves and changes according to their choices like a story should (mostly). Some child, somewhere, could see a thing in Face, or in Murdock or B.A. or Hannibal that they might, being a child, want to emulate, to aspire to be, which is a bit of cheap magic that nonetheless lifts this whole creaking TV remake pile a little bit above the tide. 6/10

The funniest joke in the long-awaited live-action/CGI adaptation of everyone's second-least favourite comic strip Marmaduke is actually intentional, which is kind of impressive. Of course, it's not funny in the way that the filmmakers intended it to be funny so that's too bad I guess but it is actually a joke that is actually funny. Some connection had been made, through the layers of awful script and boring staging and legitimately creepy CGI. They intended to make me laugh, when they had the mean dog Bosco call out our Owen-Wilson-voiced hero in the middle of the hero's crowning moment, a big raucous "O.C. rager" of a party, icing our dog out with a growled, "Marmaduke? More like… Marmafake." And they did.

I laughed, I admit it. Marmapuke, Marmapoop, Marmadreck… there's a lot of ways the screenwriters could have gone, and they chose Marmafake, which…well dog-gone it, it doesn't even rhyme. Notes: I also laughed when the filmmakers, seeking to set the tone after Marmaduke & family's big cross-country move to the O.C. from Kansas so the dad (Lee Pace) could work for a dog-food company with a mean boss (William H. Macy, for some inexplicable reason) by mixing "California" by Phantom Planet almost directly into "California Love" by 2Pac. I assume they'd spent all the soundtrack licensing money by that point, because they left out "California" by Belinda Carlisle and "California" by John Mayall and "California" by Joni Mitchell and "Going back to Cali(fornia)" by L.L. Cool J and "Hotel California" by the Eagles. Too bad.

Anyway Marmaduke is, we're told, a big, gangly goofy dog played by two or more real dogs in the film, that talks with a creepy CGI animated mouth. I'm pretty sure, at least, that they used more than one dog because sometimes Marmaduke has a big, dangly pair of testicles, and sometimes he doesn't, which is obviously problematic and I started thinking, while on-screen Marmaduke was having another interminable dialogue session with some other dog about something that to so brazenly, as filmmakers, use dogs with varying levels of testicle-havingness is kind of bold, almost as if they're saying "Yeah, sometimes 'duke's got nuts and sometimes he doesn't. We don't care, because nobody will notice, and if they do notice, it's because you're a perverted weirdo who both looks at and notes dog's nuts." Which left me feeling vaguely insulted, and terribly aggrieved.

So Marmaduke has some friends that are dogs and some enemies, and he makes some mistakes and eventually gets sad and runs away from his family and his haughty girlfriend, voiced by Fergie from the Black-Eyed Peas, who is actually a better voice actor than she is a singer. Marmaduke then falls into a sink-hole along with another funny-looking but faithful and nice dog (voice of Emma Stone) and then or perhaps before then there is a dog-surfing championship and everything is fine, even the sub-plots about 'duke's dad's mean boss and his kid that hates soccer.

Kids might like it, but I doubt it, as aside from being creepy and awkward and really poorly plotted it's just… dull. One of the first thing they teach you in screen writing school is "show, don't tell", that expository dialogue is a no-no and narrators all the more so. But dogs can't really act, and they don't really do anything except run around and eat sandwiches so for the film to have a narrative structure the dogs have to talk, a lot, explaining everything, and because dogs don't drive or frame houses or fold clothes they talk while just… standing there looking around. It's hellaciously boring, but probably unavoidable as Marmaduke is clearly an intellectual property that fans have literally been screeching and rending their clothes to see brought to the big screen and given the ol' Hollywood treatment.

I don't have anything more to say about Marmaduke. 2/10

It's not quite Pixar-like, Judd Apatow's streak of very funny, very good films, but it's close. As a producer, he's as close as it gets to Mr. Automatic, going from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy to The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Talladega Nights to Superbad to Pineapple Express with only a couple Year One's and Walk Hard's to queer the run. Apatow's done it the right way, by surrounding himself with a gang of truly funny people and by recognizing what a lot of timid, gloss-obsessed Hollywood folks won't: that guys like Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Steve Carell and Seth Rogan could carry pictures. They're all... these are odd-looking dudes, these Apatowian fellas, and it's hard to make them look good blown up billboard size. But all of them can write their own jokes, all of them are funny, and as Hill proves in the new Get Him to the Greek, all of them can carry the weight of a big film on their back, despite their schlubbiness, despite the films not being SNL spin-offs. There's just talent and comedy, that's both fresh and charmingly old-fashioned. With Get Him to the Greek there's a weird bit of Hollywood story/actor oddness that evaporates as soon as the picture gets rolling: writer/director Nicholas Stoller is taking characters from a previous film that he directed (that was written by and starred Jason Segel), Forgetting Sarah Marshall, keeping one intact (Russel Brand's rock god Aldous Snow) and slightly tweaking one other (Jonah Hill's disturbed-fan maître d' becomes a shy music intern), and sets them loose in a completely unconnected narrative. Snow is the last true rockstar, recently fallen hard off the wagon post-a disastrous, career-threatening single about starvation in Africa called "African Child". Worried about slumping record sales and a label-head (the surprisingly entertaining Sean "Diddy" Combs) looking for "the next thing", intern Aaron Green (Hill) suggests the company return to its rock roots and sponsor a gig at the Greek theatre in L.A., to mark the 10th anniversary of a legendary Aldous Snow show. Green is sent to London to collect him, packing an adrenaline shot and instructions to do whatever it takes to get the slippery, deluded, hard-partying rock god to L.A. in three days. Very funny hijinks ensue.

Brand as Snow is the spectacle, the wild spark that animates the whole film. Snow vacillates wildly from petulant artistic preciousness to aggressive junkie posturing to anarchic drug logic and back. Story-wise, tt's a dangerous thing to chance, as the rock-excess thing has been parodied to near-death. Brand, though, limns the edges of his chaos with occasional moments of human frailty. The film notes late in the going that Snow's self-appointed rock messiah is intelligent, and it's a small ignorable moment that speaks to the subtle bits of originality in the film's script and in Brand's performance: he's a pompous idiotic waster in true rock fashion, but there's a cruel, manipulative intelligence underneath it all that helps the whole film feel fresh and funny, even if it's going over well-trod Spinal Tap ground.

The discovery of the film, though, is Jonah Hill as Aaron Green, the spectacular punching bag at the heart of a film that mercilessly visits every kind of humiliation and degradation on him. He stands square in the furnace blast of Snow's rock-superstar excess and the shrivelling, repeated "mind f__ks" of his conniving, unbalanced boss: he pukes, he's sexually assaulted by more than one person, he's threatened, cursed, party to a stabbing. But what makes Hill's performance truly funny is that while he is in essence a nebbish, a victim, a barf-coated ill-looking cannonball of a man he nonetheless retains a really kind of compelling dignity and oddly endearing self-confidence. There's a depth to Hill's performance in this film (and in Forgetting Sarah Marshall as well) that's actually… special. He's not an oversize wild-man, he's not a tiny Michael Cera-esquire mumbler. He's doing something new, and it along with everything else in this film is very very funny. 8/10

What to do, what to do. You've made a mint, a fortune. An incomprehensible pile of dough from your HBO TV show and syndication and DVD sales and the film version which made half a billion dollars and you know, you know in your bones because your product is good, that there is more money sitting there, waiting to be made.

Your fans still love you, and haven't been won away to other shows: your brand is sacred and almost uncontested in its niche. But... well, it's getting to be a stretch. Sexy single women in their 30's struggling to make it in the big city have become married mothers in their 40's with fortunes of their own, fortunes that seem a little tacky maybe in these days of conspicuous economy and restraint.

What you should do is say, "We had our run".

What you definitely shouldn't do is make your coda a two-and-a-half-hour long slapstick romp about rich, dull women that look like ropy hunks of lacquered wood with jewels glued to them having a very expensive vacation in Abu Dhabi. Despite the impulse.

Catching up with the girls two years down the road from the first film, Sex and the City 2 catches Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) as she struggles with the boring realities of her marriage to Mr. Big (Chris Noth) and spends her time decorating their new apartment "12 floors down" from their previous penthouse. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is barely hanging on, dealing with her daughter's terrible twos and the fear that her husband may have a thing for their fetching Irish nanny (Alice Eve). Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is chafing in her lawyer job, trapped under the glass ceiling while P.R. agent Samantha (Kim Cattrall) struggles with the onset of menopause. Getting the girls together out at the premiere of a film, Samantha is asked by a Sheik to visit his hotel in Abu Dhabi to design for him a P.R. campaign, and she whisks her three friends off to the U.A.E. for a fabulous, each-to-her-own-stretch-Maybach-limo vacation. Some drinks, some shopping, some dishing, a couple of romantic crises that arrive apropos of nothing and fizzle away into meaninglessness almost immediately.

The film also suffers from its mightily weird choice to have the four sexually open imbibers spend their last hour of screen-time among the burqa-ed ladies of Abu Dhabi. That hour is spent pin-balling violently from hilariously simple cultural dismissiveness - the ladies' response to Carrie's observation that veils make it seem like Muslim men "don't want women to have a voice" is to go to a nightclub and sing "I am Woman" to rapturous applause - to facile commentary on the real dirty pool being played in that part of the world - slave labour building 7-star hotels - to borderline offensive exoticism to openly rude flaunting of the cultural mores of the city they've decided to visit. It's uproariously moronic. Samantha, shrieking and haggard and shaking under the stress of her aging vagina, throws handfuls of condoms at men in the Soukh, and then panics when they get mad and shouty, you know, as those Muslims do. Thankfully, the ladies are whisked away into safety by robed women, who doff their robes to reveal, for some reason the spring '10 Versace line. This is supposed, I assume, to mean something.

It's not just pointless, it's also enthusiastically rude: a whole-hearted celebration of the clueless, rich American abroad. Furthermore - and most tragically - it's decidedly not Manhattan, the locale that transcended setting to become a living, breathing character itself in the original series.

Almost all of what made the original TV show so great - its verve, its spark, its keenness of observation and snappiness and willingness to be up-front and unapologetically adult and funny and sexy - is gone. What remains is limp. It's shiny, to be sure, and there are a few short scenes of the girls sitting around the pool trading quips and bawdy barbs, but they're a melancholy pleasure buried under hours of pointless, boring agonizing over the really minor minutiae of grown-up life. A loud baby, a braless nanny, a TV in the bedroom, a mean boss: this is hardly sexy, provocative stuff, and outfits and jewelry and shoes alone can't keep this massive, gaudy thing afloat. 3.5/10

The right combination of an appropriately awkward protagonist, a clever script with not a single pop culture reference, and truly remarkable animation (including 3-d flying scenes that trump anything in Avatar), made this flick a blast from start to finish.

A group of Scottish(??) Vikings live on a small island, stubbornly rebuilding their wooden homes after they are burned to the ground by the islands other inhabitants: dragons of myriad shapes and sizes that steal their sheep and raze their village. Over and over again. Beefcake adults with proved mettle act as dragon slayers, fighting off the scourge. The young, gangly Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) aspires, in his way, to join their ranks and prove himself to his father and Chief, Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler). Short of brawn but heavy on brains, Hiccup invents a catapult type device, which he uses to bring down the legendary Night Fury, a dragon so notoriously fast and deadly that they've never even been seen with the naked eye.

When he finds the fallen dragon, injured and helpless in the tangles of his trap, Hiccup cannot bring himself to slay it and instead sets it free, thus starting one of the most endearing "boy and his pet" relationships in movie history. That night, two hearts change - Hiccup decides he doesn't want to become a slayer, while Stoick decides Hiccup deserves a chance. His father's will too strong, Hiccup reluctantly begins slayer training, where he will learn to bring down - and kill - the beasts.

The story is simple and straightforward; a zero-to-hero tale with few surprises (think Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Disney's Hercules, or the on-the-nose straight to video sequel Hercules: Zero to Hero). But the strength of the characters, humour of the script, and more importantly the remarkable execution of flying and dragon vs. dragon fight scenes make the film enjoyable throughout. Hiccup is an endearing protagonist, appealing to teen awkwardness and a desire for acceptance from both peers and family. The supporting cast is a good mix of headstrong and suitably jerky-come-friendly teenagers, while Stoick, as his name might suggest, is a strong but distant patriarch, making for one of the funniest "good talk" scenes between father and son.

The dragons are by far the best part of the film, which offers up a half-dozen or so of uniquely characterized beasts, including a two headed menace with one head that spews gas and another that acts as pilot light, and a giant spindly red dragon that tends to set itself on fire. Hiccup's pet dragon, dubbed Toothless (for his retractable razor sharp teeth), is clearly modeled after your dog (and everyone else's) and his puppy-like naiveté trapped in a sleek, pebbled, 30 foot frame will strike a chord with all pet owners. Oh, and he's also a major bad-ass black dragon that you can ride and he has laser-precise blue fireball action and is capable of speeds likely measured in "Mach"s and you want one. The flying scenes in this film are captivating and fun and represent some of the most engaging use of 3D technology I've seen.

How to Train Your Dragon is pure vicarious wish fulfillment, watering a seed planted in older viewers by The Never Ending Story, and likely planting one in younger viewers too young to remember Atreyu and Falkor. Endearing, enchanting, and engaging, a fun movie for anyone who ever wanted to ride a dragon. 8/10

Larpers (more properly L.A.R.P.ers, i.e. Live-Action Role Players, i.e. folks that dress up like goblins and wizards and engage in foam-sword combat in the woods) have been one side of a cinematic love affair, of late. Documentaries like Darkon and Monster Camp try and peel back the fake fur and face paint to see the real people beneath, while comedies like Role Models see in the admittedly nerdy hobby a wellspring of both laughs and weirdly noble self-realization.

In director Alexandre Franchi's debut film The Wild Hunt, larping is something altogether more serious, and much more sinister. Erik Magnusson (Ricky Mabe), a Canadian born to an Icelandic father whom he now reluctantly cares for, is bothered by repeated dreams of a banging door and the sound of his girlfriend Evelyn (Tiio Horn) crying out in fear. Evelyn has left him for the weekend, to role play a princess in Erik's older brother Bjorn's larp-group, a viking and troll setting Bjorn (Mark A. Krupa) has all but disappeared into. To win her back, Erik must navigate the confusing, threatening larp world, where he discovers that some of the players aren't just escaping workaday responsibilities but are instead building a framework to work out some of their darker, more violent fantasies.

It's an enjoyable film, troubled by a difficult script. On the one hand it's enjoyably novel: setting a murder-and-revenge story amongst the assumedly meek, awkward foam-sword and teva-sandals crowd is an entertaining twist, and Franchi, helped enormously by good Gothic set dec and often beautiful cinematography by Claudine Sauvé is able to wring surprisingly high drama out of the whole thing. On the other hand, in building up to the grand guignol finale the film strains and struggles, testing credulity both in terms of character motivation and in terms of basic emotional mathematics: it's hard at points to understand why Erik doesn't just dismiss the whole mess and go home. That said, there's rather more of the former dark beauty than the latter character weirdness, and the film (especially as a Canadian film artifact) is massively enjoyable on its merits, of which there are plenty. Missteps along a very original path are easily excused. 8/10

Exit Through the Gift Shop, the first film directed by reclusive street-art legend Banksy, is a little puzzle-box of a documentary. It's perfectly designed and pitched to be enjoyable on multiple levels: on one as an entertaining, illuminating mini-history of "street art" and on another - one entirely more convoluted and entertaining - as a light-hearted "up yours" to both street artists and their patrons.

Ostensibly (to take the film's word for it) Banksy's film came about when he, as the premiere 21st Century graffiti art darling, was approached by Thierry Guetta, a French-born Los Angeleno. Guetta wanted to make a documentary about street art, and Banksy was the last major figure whose participation he felt he needed, as an affable personality, a love of video cameras and a chance relationship to Invader, a French street-art pioneer who networked with other artists like Shepard Fairey, had left Guetta with hundreds of hours of footage documenting the birth of the art.

After tracking Banksy down and shooting him working, Guetta retired to the cutting room. He emerged months later and showed it to Banksy. He didn't like the film, a couple of minutes of which are excerpted and are plainly terrible, and offered to take over Guetta's doc while Guetta returned to Los Angeles to turn himself into a street art sensation, named "Mr. Brainwash" or MBW. Transforming overnight from an affable, helpful documentarian to a one-man hype-monster artiste, MBW's enormous spraypaint cans, TV monsters and Warhol-style send-ups captured the attention of the LA art crowd, who spent over a million bucks on his stuff, much to the chagrin of Fairey and Banksy. Guetta's film about Banksy changes into Banksy's film about Guetta and street art, and the rise of a new unfortunate talent.

Except, as I and a lot of other folks believe, it's all made up. It's a hoax, it has to be, it's too hilariously perfect to be anything but. Banksy, as a street artist, has seen the perception of his works - by design temporary, and by design defacements - change from graffiti into art that needs preservation, that is cut out from walls and sold. Banksy, in making Exit Through the Gift Shop with Fairey and Guetta has found a way to deface, scrawl over and heap lighthearted disdain all over both himself and the people who snap up his art.

It's spectacular, it's brilliant and all the more so in that it's still a documentary, still a record of events. It's not artificial, not a mockumentary in the way that Spinal Tap is. MBW exists, having been created by Guetta or Banksy or both, and the film documents his arrival. Exactly who it is that arrives is the film's mystery.

Exit Through the Gift Shop captures the birth of a prank, an elaborate, entertaining gotcha that fits perfectly in Banksy's nose-tweaking, politically-aware, cheeky body of work. Moreover, the film doesn't rely on any rug-snapping-out to really work. It works if it's true, it works if it's not, because it's a construction that's above all entertaining. It's a glimpse, anyway, of a world that's built at night, by streetlight, one that's fascinating even if it is in the middle of pulling the wool over our eyes. It's genius, plain and (not so very much at all) simple.

El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes), director Juan José Campanella's pot-boiling mystery romance, comes to North America loaded with the freight-load of expectation. Earlier this year the picture picked up the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, to some surprise, as it beat out two films everyone assumed were duking it amongst themselves: Michael Haneke's Das Weisse Band and Jaques Audiard's Un prophète, two absolutely astonishingly good films.

The bad news is that Campanella's film is not as good as Haneke's and Audiards are, but the good news is that it's a close-run thing. While Haneke and Audiard work at the outer limits of biggish-budget narrative film-making - coldly documenting the roots of fascism in the pettiness and cruelty of village life in 1910's Germany in the case of the former and grittily, violently exploring the tension between Arab and Corsican inmates in a Parisan prison in the latter - Campanella's film is old fashioned. Charmingly so, in fact.

Argentinian superstar Ricardo Darín plays federal justice agent Benjamín Espósito. Set partly in 1999 and partly in 1974, the film follows Espósito as he tries to complete a novel about a case that he had undertaken 25 years earlier, with the help of his alcoholic assistant Sandoval (Guillermo Francella) and ivy-league educated boss, Irene (Soledad Villamil). As the three investigate the case - the brutal rape and murder of a young woman - they must not only piece together enough evidence to find the killer, but also deal with Argentina's slide into political violence under Isabel Perón, a widow with his own agenda and a budding, impossible romance.

It's classic retro mystery film-making, made with an incredible eye for atmospheric detail, made by people talented enough to create suspense and old-fashioned thrills without having to resort to cheap action-movie shootouts. It's occasionally corny and often melodramatic, but it is stacked top to bottom with great performances - comedian Francella as the heroically dissolute Sandoval chief among them - and a script that takes us and the trio from authentic-seeming 1974 Buenos Aires dive bars to a riotous football match, from the paper-jammed offices of a well-meaning judge to the gleaming polished wood of a fascist, scheming operative. It succeeds because of its occasional corniness, because packaged along with everything else that the film does so well it doesn't offend, it just seems… pleasant, and old fashioned and warm, an entertaining reminder of how un-glitzy, un-rock and roll mystery film-making used - and still can - be. 8.8/10

Our Family Wedding is a grim prospect on its face: a frantic wedding movie meets an uproarious culture clash movie, where two patriarchs - the smooth African-American and the fiery Latino - do hilarious battle and then there's some romance somewhere. It fails to deliver even on that meagre promise. Forest Whittaker and Carlos Mencia play the fathers of young lovers Marcus and Lucia (Lance Gross and America Ferrera) who return home to L.A. to announce their surprise engagement and plans to be married immediately. Things get complicated, when we learn that Lucia's family don't really like black people, and Marcus' father, a neat-freak radio DJ-cum-ladies'-man, doesn't like Mexican people. Predicaments predictably follow, in the proper order and to factory specifications.

Despite a legitimately (for the most part) talented cast and a set-up almost guaranteed to be worth at least a few forced laughs, the film manages to be almost completely devoid of humour. It's a punishing, depressing display. The film knows what beats to hit, and tries with heroic, military determination to hit them only to fail, every single time. We're presented with the really uncomfortable knowledge that the film knows it should be funny, here, here and here, and is really trying, honest - see how the goat tries to have sex with the fancy man!? - but just can't quite haul it's hackneyed self anywhere close to an actual laugh. It's ugly and it tries to make you complicit in its ugliness, like when you walk in on your roommate three quarters of the way through an extra large pizza and they try and make you eat the last slice.

To do the obvious thing and fail at it is the worst thing an artist can do. To offer a thin-gruel compromise to your audience, to say "here's a trite, rote ethnicity-clash wedding comedy that you know will be derivative but what else are you going to watch come on it can't be terrible" and then to hand them something terrible is just... rude. To ask us to watch Carlos Mencia flail his way through a grim, graceless Mr. Hulot-inspired bit of non-comedy is mean, and makes us feel badly about ourselves and the choices that brought us here.

One bright spot: Anjelah Johnson as the tomboy sister of the bride is the only actor in the film that's able to wring a couple of laughs out of it, and the sisters' relationship is one of the only interesting things in a film that's otherwise not much more than a grim procession of joyless clichés. 2/10

I didn't expect much going in to watch Kevin Smith's Cop Out, which was maybe the key to why I enjoyed it as much as I did. Expect nothing, and any small glimmer or pinprick of light will end up being a pleasant surprise. Smith's been on a hell of a rough streak: he's affable, an entertaining, accessible twitterer and speaker and someone who makes some not very good movies. With Cop Out, though, he made something that's inoffensive and just somehow manages to hang together, which might have something to do with the fact that Smith is, for the first time, directing someone else's script. He's seemingly outside his comfort zone, for once taking on a big-ish budgeted broad Hollywood comedy. That can't be without it's challenges, especially considering Smith's to-date history of personal, dialogue-driven output, but this is a Warner Brothers movie with gun play and car-chases. Luckily, television writers the Cullen Bros. penned a script that Smith was able to work with; light on action and heavy on the potty-mouthed (but occasionally smart) dialogue. Smith moves the story along scene by scene and doesn't let things bog. He made this movie. It wasn't too bad,and I'm weirdly sincerely proud of him for it. He's improving. He's honing his craft. He's working on his directing chops, maybe recognizing that scatological slices of personal angst and white-dude heartache can only take a director so far.

Don't get me wrong; Cop Out's not perfect. It isn't a great movie. Occasionally, sloppy editing sadly exposes a few weak links here and there and the camera-work is sub-par, but as far as straight-up Hollywood buddy cop movies go, it works well enough. Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan play NYPD detectives in the process of royally screwing up a drug case. As the film opens, they hand in their badges and guns, which kicks off a 30-day suspension without pay. Trouble: Willis' daughter is getting married and he needs money to pay for the wedding. He tries to sell his dad's old baseball card which gets stolen in a robbery being committed by Sean William Scott. The cops track Scott down but he already gave the card to the drug dealers from their aforementioned case, who are looking for a mysterious Mercedes Benz. See? There's enough interesting, goofy stuff going on to at least keep the film moving, which is great. At times, the twisty-turny plot even feels vaguely (vaguely) reminiscent of Coen Bros. style comedy (think Lebowski's series of unfortunate events) even though it never quite gets there. The dialogue, although sometimes uneven and eerily Smith-esquire (lots of tired, unfunny dick jokes), does have its share of laughs. Unfortunately, a handful of neat story moments and funny one-liners can't overcome the film's rougher patches - most distracting of which is Morgan's jealous husband subplot, which is a) tedious and unfunny and b) a bad fit for Morgan's character.

In some cases Cop Out's weaknesses are smoothed over by decent performances. Willis is perfect and Morgan is sporadically funny, although your tolerance for his schtick will be tested. He does dial back his hyper-wacky TV persona just enough to let a goofy-but-responsible police officer character rise to the surface, but he also sticks his tongue out in one scene while saying the words 'orally fixated' which made me throw up a bit in my mouth. So there's that. Sean William Scott is absolutely hilarious, and by far the best part of the film. I always kind of hated this guy but he keeps surprising me, and his character in this is just offbeat and weird enough to actually refresh this whole affair. He isn't integral to the plot but without his performance the film would've sucked large, to be perfectly blunt. Well played, Stiffler, well played. And, of course, what would a buddy cop film be without a rival partnership within the force? Kevin Pollack and Adam Brody are perfect as the department's more-successful, cowboy-boot wearing drug-squad superstars, and even though it would have been great to see more of them, what little they did add gave the story a much needed... something.

I liked it, warts and all. It's pleasing to see Kevin Smith trying something different, something newish and freshish, at least to him. It's obvious that after seeing Cop Out he's still got a long way to go as a filmmaker, but for the first time since Clerks he seems to have shown a glimpse of what he's capable of when he's just focused on making a plain old movie. Not very deep, not very personal, but entertaining and more or less by the books, which I never thought possible. What a surprise! 6/10

It's hard, it has to be, to be a filmmaker in the 21st century intent on remaking a genre classic like Universal's legendary The Wolf Man. You're going to find yourself, much like The Wolfman (the remake loses a space) director Joe Johnston has maybe found himself, square in damned if you do and damned if you don't territory. You're handed the keys to the kingdom, you find yourself responsible for a profoundly important cultural artifact like wolfie, and you have to deliver. Do you "update" and "re-imagine" and risk the absolute thrashing you'll take, word-of-mouth, from the reverent nerd crowd? Or do you go old fashioned, do it faithful and old-school, and risk alienating audiences more used to slasher flicks and Werewolf versus Dracula inside the Techno Dome techno-monster thrillers like Underworld? Thankfully (to this nerd, any way) Johnston went old school. Way old school. His remake features Benecio and Anthony Hopkins as the cursed father and son of Blackmoor, competing beasts cursed by fate to burst into full mane every full moon and tear up the hedgerows of the sleepy countryside. The wolfman in The Wolfman is no sleek CGI beast - we're talking full on Lon Chaney Jr. man-with-a-hairy-face style beast-man style, and it's both silly and impossibly great to see, thanks to the diligent old-fashioned hair-by-hair makeup by Rick Baker.

That they did it, that they were faithful to the original aesthetic and idea of the 1941 original is near enough to make me happy, if only because it could have been so, so much worse. As it is, the film is herky-jerky, rushing at a sprint through important character moments and then slowing to an inexplicable crawl when there's not really much going on. Emily Blunt, del Toro and Hopkins are all as good as they could be, but where they succeed wildly as actors in creating a dreadful, haunted atmosphere they fail due to a poor script at creating much in the way of emotional resonance. The film is beautiful, dark and gloomy and spectacularly well designed but at the same time leaden, morose and not in any way affecting. It crawls and sprints, it looks great when it doesn't look hilariously goofy, the characters are mysteries to us and to each other, and it falls way short of both the original and the grand dank tragedy it was trying to be. It could, though, have been a million times worse. 5/10

Trying to level any serious criticism at director Michael Lembeck's Tooth Fairy is like four hardened grizzled WW II vets hand-cranking one of those rotating anti-aircraft guns with four different barrels pointing at a bunch of screaming Japanese Zeros around so they can blast an orange kitten out of a tree. Except the kitten is kind of an asshole and it's 1956 so we're not actually at war with Japan anymore, so you know... maybe it's not the worst idea in the world.

Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson plays Derek "the Tooth Fairy" Johnson, the beloved bruising left-winger on the local minor hockey team. He started as a skill player, a dangler, an offensive prospect that had his dreams dashed by a shoulder injury, and he's now happy to play a couple of minutes a night, hammer the opponents' star player, and spend the rest of the game in his custom recliner in the penalty box. He's a cartoon pragmatist, dispensing hard truths about the impossibility of dreams coming true to young hockey players wanting to be just like him.

As a result, he is summoned to Fairyland, and sentenced by head fairy Lily (Julie Andrews) to two weeks' duty as a Tooth Fairy, a real-deal winged creeper with a bat-belt full of spy gadgets and a lanky, awkward case worker with fairy aspirations of his own (Stephen Merchant, co-creator with Ricky Gervais of The Office). Lessons are learned, a whole bunch of obvious groaner gags are hatched, and everything, eventually, from a guitarist kid's fear of failure to a single mom's love to a future hockey star's cockiness and on and on is resolved in a Really Pleasant Way.

It's a kids movie, pure and simple, endlessly saccharine and full of pratfalls, Healthy Moral Lessons and magic fairy dust. It's also incredibly dull, and a massive waste of what's actually a great cast - Merchant is consistently funny and Billy Crystal is in vintage form as Fairyland's gadgetmaster Q equivalent, and Johnson is as charming as ever. Six year old kids will probably laugh their six year old heads off, but the dullness of the script, the predictability of the gags and the moral convenience and simplicity of the story is going to bore anybody not actually invested in the "ok wait is there actually a tooth fairy or not, dad" debate.

You want this film to be better, just because it could have been. It's stuffed full of legitimate talent and it remarkably doesn't feel like a cynical cash-in, it just feels diluted. It is going to accomplish its ostensibly stated goal, entertaining children, but outside of a few laughs here and there it's not going to do much for anyone else. 4/10

Youth in Revolt stars Michael Cera as Nick Twisp, the nebbish-gone-wild hero of Miguel Arteta's adaptation of C.D. Payne's cult-favourite novel of the same name. Trying and failing to win the attention of the sexually sophisticated Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), Nick is visited by the realization that he needs to create an alter-ego, an edgy bad-boy named Francois Dillinger. Francois has blue eyes and a moustache, he smokes, he trashes Nick's record collection and coaches him through a spree of arson, property destruction and sexual triumph.

The film, like Payne's book, is slightly… off, in a very good way, three quarters heart-warming, smart character study and one quarter aggressive comic nihilism. There's an edge here, a very very pleasant one. It's left-field humour and frankness about boners makes the film feels like the work of people who are interested in the film as a funny film rather than as a vehicle. It's old-fashioned, a little punk, a little tiny bit jagged and very funny. The cast is outstanding, including performances by Jean Smart, Fred Willard, Ray Liotta, Steve Buscemi, Zach Galifianakis and newcomer Adhir Kalyan as Nick's partner-in-crime, Vijay. Arteta has filled the film, whose script is dense and literary, with more than enough visual humour and style to keep the film from getting too bogged down in its own witty verbosity.

Arteta (who rose to deserved indie prominence with the excellent Star Maps and Chuck & Buck) has found in Cera a really rare comic actor at a really rare moment; a genuine talent on the verge of deserved super-stardom. Cera absolutely mastered (at 15 or 16 seemingly) the smart-funny anxious and awkward comedy of sweaty palms and gawkish, aware nerd-hood, starring as cousin-loving Michael in "Arrested Development" and Evan in his breakout hit Superbad. He's doing similar things in the very funny Youth in Revolt but what matters, what's exciting, is that Cera seems willing to modulate his image (an image that's worth literally millions of dollars) by taking roles in films like Arteta's not-exactly-totally-run-of-the-mill teen sex flick and this past summer's very neat, very brave Paper Heart. His role in Youth in Revolt belies both a self-awareness and a willingness to take risks, to poke and twist his safe "Paulie from Juno" image. Which is why he's still funny, despite the occasional disaster (Year One, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist). It's suggestive of longevity and legitimate wit, and as somebody who wholeheartedly loves funny people in funny films, it's exciting. My score: 8/10

There's a shot in a scene near the beginning of Scott Cooper's Crazy Heart that's so jarring that it has to have been a choice, but I can't for the life of me unpack what it means. Jeff Bridges plays forgotten country legend Bad Blake, drunk and down on his luck, a one-time great forced to play tiny New Mexico bars for tiny over-the-hill crowds. As he cruises into town in his rusty Suburban and empties out his pee bottle, he realizes that his manager has booked him to play in a bowling alley, where he begins to drink prior to the show. There's a shot of him at the bar that is an exact visual echo of Bridge's most famous character of recent years, the similarly booze-addled Dude from The Big Lebowski, famously bellying up to a bowling alley bar, talking to a cowboy. It's odd and unmistakable, as Bridges' the Dude in the Cohen Bros. first-cult-then-full-blown classic dopey caper movie has become iconic, his sozzled, affronted complaints as firmly lodged in the minds of movie folk as Travis Bickle's spookyisms or the monologue by the guy in Network who got mad and told everybody to go yell out the window.

Where the Dude's drunk and drugged wanderings seemed blessed, though, by a cinematic ray of Private Eye light that kept him safe through to the end of his caper, Bridges' Bad Blake is broken down, on the way out. A member of his backing band that he had mentored, Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), has moved on to find incredible success on his own and exists, but is unwilling to do an album of duets that Blake and his lizard-skin booted agent need to pull his career out of the toilet. He meets a young journalist (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who herself has had a rough patch and their bruised romance sees Blake back on some kind of road to life.

Bridges inhabits the role as thoroughly as is seemingly possible - he quite simply is Bad Blake. Much of the music (composed by T-Bone Burnett, who among other things did the music for the Coens' O Brother, Where Art Thou?) Bridges sings himself and he's got a not-half-bad country voice, but it's in the busted-boot gait and whisky-sipping slouch that Bridges carves the character out. The rest of the film is almost as good as he is. Cooper's script has a habit of freely dipping into the well of cliché - the whisky soaked forgotten crooner lost in the shadow of inauthentic "new country", salvation and sobriety at the feet of a sad single mother who doesn't want to be hurt again - but then at the last minute, swerving away into if not original then certainly less clichéd territory. Tommy Sweet, when he makes his entrance into the story, is not half the villain the first half of the film would have you believe, and Gyllenhaal's single mom is something a hair's breadth more interesting than a sucker for punishment, loyal to a fault. The film could have been a disaster, and at times it's half-way there, but there are enough smart choices in the script and good performances from interesting actors that the film ends up (for the most part) overcoming its own flaws.

It does country well, and it's as authentic as a film can be to a genre of music (like punk, or metal, or rap) that is itself so utterly cliché ridden that arguments over whether so-and-so is "real country" are a common fervent pastime for fans and the artists themselves. Bad Blake seems as much of a real, breathing human being as Merle Haggard or Waylon Jennings, which is obviously somewhat of a back-handed compliment. Crazy Heart's story is an old one: a busted down, down and out nobody screws up, hits bottom, and becomes somebody again. We've seen it before, but it has enough soul and Bridges' Blake has enough human hitch in his step, that it manages to be moving, if not refreshing. 7/10

Austrian director Michael Haneke's icily beautiful The White Ribbon is a film very close to the perfection of a certain cinematic type. It lingers, it unfolds slowly and resolutely and unfolds further still when you start to try and unpack it after the fact - the film gets better in retrospect. Set in a small Protestant village in northern Germany in 1913, the film's various narrative threads interweave elegantly, obscurely, dreadfully until eventually, the bottom drops out underneath them all.

The film is narrated by a school teacher (Ernst Jacobi as the elder, Christian Friedel as the younger) reflecting on the time he spent as a youth in the village of Eichwald. Picturesque and seemingly idyllic, the village is shaken when the town's doctor is thrown from his horse after riding into a wire strung across his path by dun dun dunnnn... persons unknown. Is it the weird group of extremely polite creepazoid kids? Is it the humiliated midwife? The resentful libertine Baroness? As the schoolteacher attempts to woo a young nanny working for the Baron, a series of strange events unfold, small mysteries playing out: a barn is burnt, the son of the Baron is kidnapped and abused, the Pastor's bird is killed, the handicapped son of the midwife goes missing. The mysteries pile on top of each other, each small and unexplained, dour omens. The schoolteacher is witness and participant, observing without knowing a revelation of the dark, anxious and cruel character of the village. While Haneke and the cinematographer and frequent collaborator Christian Berger do an astounding job of very very slowly ratcheting up the tension in the film, it eventually becomes clear that they're not particularly interested in the MacGuffin details of any of the small, petty cruelties the film documents. Instead, it becomes cruelly clear that the film, as Haneke himself has said, is about the origins of terror, a story about the lashings-out of a town in the repressive grip of the state, the church and above all else a moral code mandating repression, self-control and the keeping-up of appearances. Haneke's film with its worm-holes of petty violence, cruelly and sexual abuse mining their way through a very crisp, fastidiously maintained façade of order and control is his own architecturally constructed, logically designed statement on the specific human flaws that led a generation later to the rise of Nazism.

Haneke's film is the rarest of things, a bit of very clever sleight of hand that doesn't leave its audience resentful or surly at having been misled, as the point of the film, its sub-textual ending-place is much much more interesting and a much better bargain than the film seems to be offering for the vast part of its textual bulk. This is something that Haneke does (but not always well - in his English-language film Funny Games he tries a similar trick and in that film it's incredibly irritating) and when it works, like it does in The White Ribbon or in his previous film Caché, we're given works that are the literal antithesis of so much disposable generic fare, one that offers unexpected insights and rewards careful attention, and offer more the deeper into them one digs.

Thankfully, Haneke is a skilled enough craftsman that his film doesn't wait until its conclusion to offer up its rewards. It's not a lecture, or a lesson, it's anything but hard to sit through. It's arrestingly beautiful, shot originally in colour and desaturated in post, classically composed and beautifully lit. The performances match the script - minimal, ascetic and austere - and from this very careful control the film spins out slowly a very real, insidious, creeping dread and human anxiety, a Hitchcockian unease and suspense. It's smart without pretense, complex without disappearing into itself, slowly paced without boring. It's masterful, a dark pleasure to watch and even more so to unpack in the hours and days after seeing it, and if it's not the best film of the year, it's very very close. 9/10

Building on the genre-clash crossover theme that was solidly established the first night of TIFF's Midnight Madness with the slasher flick cum teen girl comedy Jennifer's Body, programmer Colin Geddes has delivered another interesting hybrid: the futuristic, sci-fi-vampire film Daybreakers.

Set 10 years into the future and after the bat-spawned vampire plague converted the vast majority of humans into blood-sucking chain-smoking nocturnal regular joes who have to shave by watching themselves in a video feed, Daybreakers is directed by the twin Spierig brothers. They're MM vets, these dudes, as their last film (2003's Undead) famously closed out the beloved Uptown theatre here in Toronto, the still-mourned theatre that was home to the midnight TIFF screenings before they moved to the cavernous, impersonal and enormous Ryerson hall.

Ethan Hawke plays vampire Edward, the reticent, kind-hearted Chief Hematologist of the giant multi-national corporation tasked with farming the remaining few humans for their blood and developing a substitute to feed the billions of vampires teetering on the edge of starvation as resources dwindle. The film is a neat enough allegory any number of take-your-pick conservation issues, food, water, oil; one of the things that makes the film work is that it's sci-fi of the best kind, true speculative fiction that talks about what's happening now, or could happen soon, through a lens that both abstracts it slightly and makes it easier (if at times much too much and too obvious) to see. The Spierig bros' film is entertaining from the start, it takes an immediate heart-warming leap into territory any genre film-lover will like. The film says "ok, this is a vampire movie, it's in the future, the humans lost, the vampires have their own society now" and instead of just telling that story, the story of the battle, Daybreakers takes that as pat and asks "ok, now that you've accepted that in the prologue, what happens to vampire society when it runs out of blood?".

It's joyous just in its premise, so reminiscent and redolent of true movie-monster-nerd basement fantasy conversations about who would win between Dracula and Predator or what would happen if the Nazis had werewolf soldiers that any number of technical shortcomings, like a jumbled, poorly paced and overlong second act or a handful of not-very-good performances can be overlooked easily and gladly. While much of the film feels (and not just due to the presence of Ethan Hawke, who oddly spends the last half an hour of the film looking exactly like Han Solo) like vampire Gattaca as the machinations of the rebel - underground - vs - evil - corporate - overlords - and - there's - also - a - family - betrayal - subplot revolve, there are a handful of truly scary, truly sublime scenes of the best kind of vampire carnage, gory and stylish and terrifying. For lovers like me of genre freakouts, Daybreakers offers a flawed but thoroughly enjoyable, happy-making trip, one foot firmly in vampire flick tradition and the other in entertaining, creative and original speculative territory. I was sold the moment I didn't see Ethan Hawke's reflection in the rear view mirror of a sleek, futured-up Chevy cruising through the best Blade Runner future two Australian indie filmmaker brothers could create. 8.1/10.

We have a video version on our site, http://www.thesubstream.com .

As a fan of movie theatres and of the going to of them to see awesome movies, the holidays should, If I buy into the enormous marketing budgets of all the big distribution companies, be my favourite time of year. They seem to hold back all the cool movies for the days when the snow starts to fall. Why? Why now? Well, as it's been in the past and as it always shall be, the movies released during the last chunk of the year in North America that don't have ghosts or explosions in them might just be gunning for an Oscar. That's how it is, and being that it's well after TIFF, the Oscar buzz is flying free and easy, which means PR people everywhere get carried away and I start to roll my eyes. Previous to yesterday, everything I'd heard about Up in the Air seemed to confirm that it was a sure 'front-funner' in this big race that hasn't even officially started, which, for me (a cynical bastard who can't help but want in on the conversation) meant that I had to see it for myself. Prove it, Jason Reitman, director of Thank You For Smoking and Juno. Prove to me that Up in the Air is all that and a golden statuette, an important movie for smart, sophisticated folk, winter movie folk, folk who'd cross the street to avoid a summer blockbuster movie lovin' jerk. I dare you.

So anyway, as if you didn't know where this was going already, I am now definitely 100% convinced of Up in the Air's worthiness as Oscar-bait. My Oscar sense is tingling, big time, which didn't even happen after I saw A Serious Man(which was my previous favourite for 2009, but now, who knows?). I know, I know, I'm just throwing more Oscar-buzz logs onto the Oscars fire (editor's note: good one, Rajo), but this movie seems to have all the right moves: good-looking, talented actors, up-and-coming, sensitive, 2nd generation Hollywood director who knows what he's doing, a story very much set right here, right now. It's even nice to look at. But what makes it extra-super Oscar worthy is that Up in the Air doesn't even feel like it's trying that hard, which, especially at this time of year, is remarkable and refreshing. The planets just seem to have aligned for Reitman, and as a result, we movie-goers get what is basically just a great little movie, pure and simple.

Besides being beautifully crafted, fun and easy to watch, Up in the Air poses some meaningful questions about western human interaction at this exact moment in time in the universe, what with technology and isolation, and the internet and the facebook and the iPhone. It does so without going too far off the 'dated reference' deep end (with the exception of some slightly on-the-nose deux ex machina stuff - webcam technology threatens the livelihood of Clooney's character). It features maybe a few too many musical montages, but they don't do anything to diminish the well thought-out, thoroughly entertaining and sophisticated storytelling at play here. In Up in the Air George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a compassionate loner whose job it is to fire you when your boss is too much of a coward to do it him/herself. He flies across the country for 80% of the year, which he prefers to staying grounded, as he also happens to believe in a philosophy that paints deep relationships with other human beings as a burden. Naturally, because this is a movie, he bumps into other characters along the way that cause him to start questioning exactly what he wants, and where he's going. But interestingly, the film manages to handle this kind of relatively high-concept characterization and metaphor-laden story of human growth as if it's no big deal. Almost as if these people, all travelling through life in completely different directions, some with lots of baggage, some with little-to-none could actually exist, maybe. Which only endears them and their wacky little story to us even more.

Reitman, a huge fan of the ritualistic necessities of flying, poured a lot of himself into Ryan Bingham and it shows; the old saying, 'write what you know' strikes again. And besides getting the many, many details right, and casting some great actors (Clooney is charming and handsome, again, and Vera Farmiga is surprisingly good), the movie has some great music, the year's best title design and it's edited superbly well, allowing the twisty-turny story to seamlessly flow towards its satisfying if unconventional end. It basically has everything, which is why critics are going absolutely freaking nuts over it. I now have to count myself among the believers. I would gladly go see it again, and I highly recommend it to anybody who doesn't know which Oscar contenders to back, or who might just want a great night out at the movie house. It is exactly the kind of movie that is worth waiting all year for: subtle, smart and funny and sure, sophisticated. I'll just go ahead and say it: with the Best Picture nominees doubling this coming Oscar ceremony, it will not be a surprise to see Up in the Air counted among them. Deservedly so. It's that good. 8.7/10

Fashion all-star Tom Ford's directorial debut is an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's landmark novel A Single Man. Set in 1962 (and brought to life by the production design crew responsible for the razor-sharp Mad Men series), the film stars Colin Firth as George, a gay English professor living in Santa Monica, trying and failing to deal with the loss of his lover of 16 years. He visits with his friend up the road, the similarly bereft Charley (Julianne Moore), and is pursued by a student, the young Kenny (Nicholas Hoult).

Deeply romantic and with an absolutely vicious attention to period detail, Ford's film at time seems like a (surprisingly pleasant) extension of a mid-90's cologne ad into an hour-and-a-half-long film. Everyone in it is physically stunning, occasionally to the point of distraction as I'm not sure they made men as waifishly thin as the Prada-ad model-gaunt liquor-store parking lot boy in cuffed jeans George runs into. George's apartment and car and clothes are all precise and perfectly tailored and matte and incredibly expensive – we are to assume that George's deceased partner was the breadwinner, I assume – and he moves through it with the preoccupation and handsome distraction of a man remembering an old lover's smell. George lies in a flashback in ridiculous repose on a jagged German Expressionist rock, an afternoon dalliance in the desert of sad memories or something like that. It gets a little ridiculous, but in the exact absolutely pleasurable way that fashion photography is ridiculous. If I knew George, I'd find him insufferable. I'd much rather be George. Ford and Firth's quiet, lush detailing of George's desperate grief attacks head-on the issue of gay rights by being adamantly anti-polemical. That George is gay is both intrinsic to the story and utterly inconsequential: aside from being beautiful and looking like it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars his sadness is normal, and ordinary, and real, and that Firth manages it so well is unsurprisingly the true grace of the film. He is one of the best actors working, and is perfect in the role. The effectiveness of Ford's film rests entirely on Firth, and his subtlety is perfect.

It's slow, and measured and at times, it's dull, Ford's film reawakens what's become lately an unfortunately idle idea in cinema: that there is pleasure to be found in looking at handsome people. Firth, looking thinner than normal, is jaw-droppingly handsome, in his narrow suit and big glasses, in his nice car and beautiful home. There are moments in the film, such as the one when George sits looking into the smoggy sunrise that are as true in a way to the heart of cinema, the heart that's not voyeuristic but artistic and beautiful, in a way that has been almost forgotten. 8/10

The Princess and The Frog could have, probably should have been good.

Disney's return to classic 2D features Ron Clements (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin), the godfather of Disney's late 80's renaissance at the helm. Those films were landmarks: visually captivating, filled with bright, inventive environments, fast paced action and animation both subtle and vigorous. More important, though, is Clements' ability to create endearing, engaging characters and shape stories that often carry the timeless quality of true fairy tales. All of the traditional Clements elements are in The Princess and The Frog – a down-and-out protagonist with ambitions just beyond her grasp, a self-assured, cocky yet charming companion who gets knocked down a peg or two, an evil antagonist with supernatural powers and a support cast of talking, singing animals. The elements are there, but something in the mix doesn't quite work, certainly not in the way that Clements' earlier work did.

The animation feels flat and uninspired. Scenes are blocked quite wide, and takes are long and sustained, often slowing the pacing down to a grinding halt. Musical and action sequences are full of missed opportunities, scenes that should be good simply aren't. One musical number features thousands of fireflies lighting the path through the darkened bayou for the protagonists, but lacks the cinematic splendor that it should possess. It's almost as if in an attempt to throwback to films like Aladdin and Mermaid, he overshot the mark by an extra 30 years, and the result feels oddly old-fashioned. Clements' films usually have a good sense of humour – a humour that stems from situation and character rather that the pop-culture-reference well that films like the Shrek series have taken non-Pixar animation. However, jokes in The Princess and The Frog are too few and far between. It's not that they're lame, it's that they're just not there, and the support characters (the aforementioned talking animals) that should provide a steady stream of comic relief simply aren't that funny.

The film does possess some endearing qualities. The spoiled Charlotte La Bouff (Jennifer Cody) and her bend-over-backwards father, the wealthy "Big Daddy" provide laughs but don't have enough screen time. The protagonist Tiana, voiced and sung by Anika Noni Rose has some serious vox, but her songs are forgettable (as, for that matter, are all of the rest of them). Older audiences may appreciate a level of meta-Princess tale – the tongue in cheek remarks to "sleeping beauty", "prince charming" and advice like "when you wish a star, and work really hard towards your goals, your dreams might come true", as well as the clear nods to other Clement films – previous Disney princesses appear as dolls on a bookshelf, the evil Dr. Facilier is likely a distant cousin of Jafar, King Titus makes and appearance as a parade float, and so on, and so on. But these elements will likely be overlooked by the intended audience, and aren't enough to sustain adult interest.

Maybe I'm just too old to appreciate this movie, but I think it panders to a demographic of pre-cognitive, non-discerning 5-year olds who may hold this film nostalgically in their adolescence due to their parents' claims that "you used to love this movie". Though filled with good intentions, it's mostly boring, hardly funny, and easily forgettable. Watch the One Jump Ahead sequence from Aladdin for more entertainment and inspiration in 2.5 minutes then Princess and the Frog carries in 80. 4/10