MUN Cinema Series

It doesn’t get much more entertaining than this. TUNER is a terrific, understated heist film starring the great Dustin Hoffman who plays Harry, a NY piano tuner mentoring his protégé, sensitive-eared Leo Woodall who plays Niki. We know and adore handsome British actor Woodall, too, from ‘White Lotus’ and ‘One Fine Day.’ The pair form the sweetest of accomplices, as Niki falls into the clutches of a mobster who could well exploit Niki’s safe-cracking potential. This is a first-time feature from Oscar-winning documentarian Roher, and he does a fine job of packaging these actors in an elegant envelope of charm.

The Spanish title means ‘pilgrimage,’ and so it is that Marina, the central character, embarks on a quest to get a document identifying the names of her deceased parents. She requires the evidence to secure a Barcelona-based film school scholarship. Off she goes to the Galician town of Vigo to get the job done, but because her parents both died of AIDS, Marina’s search is tinged with family drama, shame, and distorted histories. Director Simón based this film on her own experience of grief and loss and so this film is comfortably tagged as a semi-autobiographical narrative. It’s a moving journey that takes Marina and the viewing audience back to the past in order to claim a brighter future. Well worth the pilgrimage to the theatre.

Director Soderbergh is nothing if not interesting. Here he tries his hand at a wonderful British comedy, the best kind, sure. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gave it five (FIVE!!!) stars, generally unheard of. Brilliant actor Ian McKellan stars as a crooked English painter named Julian Sklar. This is a role pretty much designed for him. Once a major player on the scene, Sklar is now a disaffected boho, railing against the marketplace and all things pretentious. Michaela Coel plays one of Sklar’s former art students, Lori Butler, who has fallen on hard times, but now hired by Sklar’s obnoxious kids to locate some celebrated early paintings called ‘The Christophers’ from Sklar’s collection, paintings honouring his former lover. The dynamic between the two, rich with the best, witty, high-end English dialogue, is worth the whole show. If you like art you’ll love this film. But please stay for the astonishing performances.

How a small masterpiece like this hasn’t burst forth is a too-common mystery in our noisy dumbed-down age. Whatever. Canadian director Romvari has drawn from her own experience to shape a complex narrative about family in all its tense and often unforgiving ways. Essentially, the film explores young Sasha’s relationship with her half-brother brother Jeremy, a troubled, unreadable agent of disruption. As immigrants, the family eventually settled on Vancouver Island after many false starts. From the child’s point of view, the threads of her parents’ conversations that point to darker secrets and the glimpses of her brother’s transgressions are baffling and disturbing. It takes the older woman-artist-filmmaker to make some sense of chaos and memory. This is a tour de force, arguably the best Canadian film of the year.

You have to be here to see this remarkably appealing documentary about the making of GODSPELL, the unassuming Toronto-produced operetta that changed the world of comic-musical theatre. It was 1972 and the Royal Alex Theatre was showcasing a production starring a bunch of unknown talents. We’re talking Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Victor Garber, Gilda Rander, and Andrea Martin. Who knew how things would turn out for this bunch of clowns? It’s easy to say the rest is history, but it is well worth indulging in 98 minutes of nostalgia, comedy, and good old Canadian accomplishment. By the way, the film’s full title is You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (In a Canadian Kind of Way). The irrepressible Martin Short really helped make this doc happen. For him and his great big smile we are grateful.

Here is another brilliant representation of a child’s point of view, a tale told by two young sons in 1993 small-village Nigeria, on the eve of a presidential election. The times are charged with uncertainty and fear, while the boys are suddenly confronted with the appearance of their long-gone father. And then just as quickly as Fola returns to their lives he has to return to Lagos to claim wages, or so he says. This time he brings his sons along to the big city where they are awed by the sheer bustle of that world. Tagging along with Fola they learn new things about him, some puzzling, some uncomfortable as he engages with various adults with whom he obviously has familiarity. This is such an exquisite coming-of-age story, gorgeously shot and lushly rendered. A must-see big screen experience.

You’ve likely heard about this smart, warm film about Scottish activist John Davidson, played masterfully here as an adult by Robert Aramayo. Davidson started showing signs of Tourette’s Syndrome in school where he was cruelly bullied. The condition informs everything in his life, as his outbursts, often obscene, get him into one tricky situation after another. Some of these events lead to unintended comedy while others lead to dangerous confrontations and even incarceration. The film opens us up to a much deeper understanding of Tourette’s than most of us might be aware of, challenging us to question the labels we assign to those who seem different from common norms of social behaviour. And it honours the bravery of Davidson who has confronted his condition not as a disability but as an uncanny advantage. You’ll fu*%$#@*&* love it.