There’s an embarrassment of riches at cinemas in the lead-up to the Academy awards. Ergo, lots of great new films at the ByTowne and the Mayfair, plus plenty of older treats for every taste.
Let’s start with three new films I’ve seen recently. Two are on my personal “10 best films of 2022” list. The first is Tár. In many ways (rather like its eponymous main character, Lydia Tár), this film is in a league of its own. An excellent script, direction, and cinematography, and superlative acting by the entire cast (kudos particularly to Nina Hoss). Cate Blanchett gives a career-best performance as Lydia Tár, a world-famous classical conductor and composer who has everything she could desire—wealth, power, international prestige, a supportive spouse, and a sweet daughter. Then her world starts to unravel as disturbing facts from her past begin to surface. At both cinemas.
The second film on my “best of 2022” list is No Bears from Iranian director Jafar Panahi. No Bears makes it clear why Panahi is a threat to the Iranian regime—so much so that in July they imprisoned him for six years for the crime of making movies. In No Bears, Panahi plays himself as a director who cannot leave Iran (true in real life) and who has decamped to a small village in northwestern Iran to direct, from a distance, a film set in a Turkish town across the border. His assistant director takes instructions from Panahi via cell phone and shares the daily rushes via Internet and smuggled hard drives. His film is about two Iranian refugees trying to immigrate to Europe. We soon find out that the actors are in fact an Iranian couple trying to escape their home country. Meanwhile, in the village, Panahi has inadvertently taken a photo of a young couple who should not be seen together (she’s betrothed to someone else). The village is in an uproar about this affront. The evil influence of political repression is clearly but subtly critiqued, and Panahi raises questions about the artist’s responsibilities to those he uses to make his art. This film is the product of a fearless master. At the Mayfair.
The Menu is a dark satire of celebrity chefs and the over-entitled ultra-rich that morphs into a horror show. A disaffected famous chef (Ralph Fiennes) invites a bunch of despicable one-percenters to his private island for an ultimate dinner—in more ways than one. This is a disturbing film with an improbable plot, but you won’t have time to ponder the bizarre behaviours as the chef speeds his guests through increasingly perverse courses. At the Mayfair.
Turning to new films that I haven’t yet seen, but look promising:
Living is the film I’m most looking forward to. A remake of one of Akira Kurosawa’s most beloved classics, Ikiru, Living changes the time and country from post-WWII Japan to early 1950s England. Bill Nighy plays a punctilious civil servant who has spent his life being a perfect bureaucrat. Then he’s told he has incurable cancer and decides to use his remaining time to turn his life into something meaningful. The script was penned by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. At the ByTowne.
I’m keen to see the Canadian documentary Geographies of Solitude, a biography of environmentalist and naturalist Zoe Lucas. She’s been living for 40 years on Sable Island, a strip of sandy land with a rare ecosystem 300km off mainland Nova Scotia. To date, the film has won 19 national and international awards. Barry Hertz of The Globe and Mail called it “poetic and ultimately powerful.” At the ByTowne.
The Fabelmans is Steven Spielberg’s recounting of becoming enthralled with Hollywood movies as a child, then spending his teen years making films and fighting anti-Semitic bullying at his high school, all despite his parents’ unhappy marriage and their disagreement about whether being a film director was a viable career choice. Seems his mother was right. At the ByTowne.
The director of Shoplifters and one of the stars of Parasite have collaborated on the film Broker, about a couple of guys who sell abandoned infants to affluent couples circumventing the Japanese bureaucracy of legal adoption. It looks rather sweet. At the ByTowne.
Saint Omer, a courtroom drama about an immigrant mother accused of murdering her 15-month-old child, is told from the POV of a pregnant novelist attending the trial. It’s based on a real 2016 trial in Paris that the director, Alice Diop, attended. At the ByTowne.
The Mayfair is screening a new feature film from (gasp!) Ottawa: Enter the Drag Dragon. (The ByTowne will show it in early February.) Rather than me trying to describe this VERY unusual creation, if the title intrigues you, I suggest you view the trailer (but not at the office). See how many names and faces you recognize (I spotted four!). No rating yet, but I predict it will be X-rated.
[Editor’s note: Trailer contains mature content and is definitely not safe for work! Viewer discretion is advised.]
Let’s turn to some classics. Do you follow lists of “best films ever made”? The British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound magazine conducts an exhaustive poll of industry experts (critics, directors, etc.) every 10 years. In December, for the first time in 70 years, this poll was topped by a film directed by a woman: Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai de commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Not for everyone, it’s a story of a humble widow leading a dull life who occasionally resorts to prostitution to make ends meet, and is almost 3 1/2 hours long—but it’s worth seeing if you’re a cinéaste. At the ByTowne.
Want more mainstream classics? The ByTowne is running a “What’s the MacGuffin?” series. (A MacGuffin is something key to the plot and characters’ motivation but unimportant in itself, e.g., the Maltese falcon). My favourite in the series is Pulp Fiction. (Its MacGuffin is the briefcase with the glowing interior, first used in another film in the series, Kiss Me Deadly, and then used in Repo Man.)
Love car chases? Then you have to see Bullitt, which includes arguably the best car chase ever filmed. The rest of this gritty classic is “straight cop against a crooked system.” At the Mayfair.
Finally, we come to audience participation! At the ByTowne, there’s a singalong of the John Travolta/Olivia Newton-John musical Grease.
Dates, times and tickets for the ByTowne are at www.bytowne.ca. Dates, times and tickets for the Mayfair are at www.mayfairtheatre.ca.
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