Both departure and summa, My Winnipeg is Maddin’s funniest and most Canadian film to date, a tribute to the hometown that has inspired and irritated him—in more or less equal measure—since he began making movies. A documentary of sorts, but primarily of the reality that is Maddin’s mind, the film has a ludicrous through line: the director (or his surrogate, actor Darcy Fehr, who also played “Guy Maddin” in Cowards Bend the Knee) rides a nighttime train, desperately trying to escape the city and its ghosts—and his mother, “a force as strong as all the trains in Winnipeg.”

But how do you escape the metropolis whose very existence you have done so much to poeticize? Maddin’s Winnipeg is not one that many see—a romantic, magical burg in the geographic centre of North America; the coldest city in the world; a supernatural place with secret lanes that have never existed on maps, and other streets named after brothel madams. But it’s also the city that abandoned and then destroyed Maddin’s beloved Winnipeg Hockey Arena—in recounting this, the director’s voice rises with the same ire he uses in describing Mom’s passive-aggressive manipulations. A movie like no other and an absolute delight.

My Winnipeg is now playing at the Varsity (55 Bloor St. W.).”

Pixar is not a studio to compromise on quality, at least as far as visuals are concerned. Their new WALL-E is expertly rendered; the CGI animation is breathtakingly realistic, arguably beyond anything we’ve ever seen from them, or anyone else. And to begin with, WALL-E presents a concept to match. The eponymous robot is a remnant among remnants. Some time in the future he was created to compact garbage; in the far future in which this film is set, humans have long since abandoned earth for a flotilla of corporatized life-support systems in outer space. WALL-E still goes about the task he has been programmed for on earth, however. He wheels between obelisks of trash, forever building, and goes home at night to a lonely bunker, where he watches the same scene from Hello, Dolly! over and over again on a beat-up television. It seems WALL-E, in addition to his industriousness, is an archivist, and an incurable romantic.

It takes half an hour to establish these aspects of WALL-E’s existence, during which time he meets a sleek robot interloper, EVE, with whom he falls in love. This section is flat-out ingenious: tragic, poignant, scary, fun and funny, sociologically and environmentally relevant. But this is not a contemporary recasting of the myth of Sisyphus; it is a Pixar movie for kids, and soon after EVE’s introduction we are taken with her to those who sent her on her mission: a ship full of humans. And with these humans, the film loses a lot of its magic. Language is introduced, as well as a conventional escape plot with much too much cutesy capering (but with, admittedly, Promethean undertones). Plus, these are Pixar humans with the studio’s trademark physiognomy; WALL-E has already been watching real humans in Hello, Dolly! and on billboards, and the contrast is cheapening. One might say WALL-E’s mistake is turning into a cartoon, when it has already proven to us that it can be so much more.

WALL-E is now playing at AMC Yonge and Dundas (10 Dundas St. E.), SilverCity Yonge-Eglinton Centre (2300 Yonge St.) and Rainbow Cinemas Market Square (80 Front St. E.).

Few directors could get away with making a film like Encounters at the End of the World, and Werner Herzog is one of them. The documentary is a lot like his others: a cinematic logbook, this time about his journey to Antarctica. It rests on Herzog’s cultivated Teutonic persona, expressed in a voice-over narration that makes everything he presents seem both fallacious and fascinating.

Encounters begins at McMurdo Station, which Herzog likens to “an ugly mining town” (“Of course, I did not expect pristine landscapes and man living in blissful harmony with fluffy penguins,” he asserts). He is eager to escape it, but first interviews some people who seem to typify the Antarctic character: placeless, unassuming, but insatiably inquisitive. After a stint at a bizarre wilderness awareness session (for which participants are made to place buckets over their heads in a simulation of a whiteout), he and his cameraman head outward to meet with scientists and researchers. Here is where Encounters takes off, with stunning underwater images, and a final encounter at Mount Erebus, a massive, active volcano.

Through it all it is apparent that Herzog is looking—or, rather, hunting—for elements in this setting that accord with his overarching themes: the amoral, catastrophic qualities of nature, and the decadence of the human species. He finds them, and states them with an almost derisory gravity; who wouldn’t chuckle at hearing him ask, “Is there such a thing as insanity among penguins?” Yet he tends to deliver on what might only be jokes. Minutes later he is filming a penguin that appears to be fleeing the flock in a mad frenzy, toward certain death. One feels satisfied with this existential oddity, however exaggerated it may be. Encounters wouldn’t be a Herzog film without it.

Encounters at the End of the World is now playing at the Cumberland (159 Cumberland St.).

For all Expelled’s asinine tautologies, one must concede a few things to its creator and smothering presence, anti-Darwinist Ben Stein. First, Stein is right to imply that scientists are not philosophers; to look to science for existential solace is, for most, a cold comfort. This is the primary oversight of Stein’s bête noire, Richard Dawkins, who, with his intellectual sanguinity, wants everyone to be capable of abandoning the irrational fear and hope that ties them to religion in favour of science’s perpetually unfolding world of facts. Second, Stein is not completely off in pointing to an ideological lineage connecting Darwin to eugenics and Nazism. The Nazis perverted the evolutionist’s ideas (they did the same to Nietzsche, Wagner and many others), but to completely divorce the two, as reactionary critics of Expelled have done, is inaccurate. It’s like saying Betty Friedan had nothing to do with Madonna.

Of course Darwin himself was not a Nazi or a race purist, and this is precisely what Expelled implies. Stein associates the man not only with the Holocaust, but also with abortion and euthanasia. The logic and value judgments surrounding this are so ludicrous as to deserve no comment. What does is Stein’s paranoia about atheism, which he reads as total ethical and moral mayhem. In his view, there’s no reason for humans to behave if a deity is not watching over them, guaranteeing an afterlife. It suits Stein’s agenda not to talk of humanism, then, or of the power of art in addition to that of science and religion. But this is precisely what people who are interested in the controversy surrounding Expelled need to be reminded of. If only a film featuring contemporary philosophers speaking on the ramifications of Darwin’s ideas—on the meaning and purpose of human consciousness in a secular society—were as popularly debated as Stein’s idiotic thesis.

Expelled is now playing at The Cumberland (159 Cumberland St.), Scotiabank Theatre (259 Richmond St. W.) and The Queensway (1025 The Queensway).

Get Smart the ’60s television show, co-created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, was full of gags and groaners. There was little sophistication in it, but Get Smart the 2008 blockbuster has even less. It rehashes the series’s most popular jokes (the Cone of Silence, for instance) and adds a lot more asinine, prim ones for the sake of its intended Middle American demographic.

True to form, Steve Carell weighs Get Smart down. It is not that he tries to compete with Don Adams, the original Maxwell Smart (he is wise not to imitate him, aside from two perfunctory “Missed it by that much”es), but that he has little with which to replace his predecessor’s antics. Carell depends on boy-child irony; it is supposed to be cute but gets redundant quickly, and has, as Evan Almighty and Dan in Real Life have proven, little appeal. His banter with Anne Hathaway’s 99 is stultifying, consisting of playground-style insults; intimidated by Hathaway’s prowess as an agent, Carell repeatedly takes out his feckless gadgets and says, with po-faced glee, “You don’t have this? Hmmm.” Compare this inept May-October pairing with other comedic ones from the past (such as Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in Charade) and shudder.

The film stoops much lower, however. Its slapped-together scenarios teem with uninteresting vulgarity: fat people jokes, sodomy jokes, Arab jokes, deaf people jokes, mooning, all done extra-blandly, with no special intent other than to draw out titters. One feels obliged to point to the irony of the title, and to use it as a corny caveat in the spirit of the original show: get smart and ignore this junk.

Get Smart is now playing at SilverCity Yonge-Eglinton (2300 Yonge St.), SilverCity Yorkdale (3401 Dufferin St.) and AMC Yonge and Dundas (10 Dundas St. E.).

Before the Rains’ Henry Moores (Linus Roache) is a British developer in late-colonial India with ambitious plans to construct a road through the mountains. T.K. (Rahul Bose) is his indispensable assistant, and also a prominent member of a local Nayar community, which is just beginning to become swept up in the independence movement. T.K.’s flip-flopping is strained as he discovers an affair between Moores and Sajani, Moores’ maid, who is married to a brutish Hindu traditionalist. Then Moores’ wife arrives with their child, Peter, at the same time as Sajani’s husband begins to accuse her of infidelity, and a clash of wills and cultures follows.

This is W. Somerset Maugham and E.M. Forster territory, though one expects Before the Rains’ director, Santosh Sivan—an Indian who makes his English language debut here—to want to take us beyond what these white writers did. He doesn’t, really, despite Bose’s T.K., who gives us a conflicted colonial perspective (which is, admittedly, similar to Forster’s Dr. Aziz’s), and Sajani, whose predicament is humanized through Nandita Das’s captivating performance. Indeed, these elements are demeaned by Sivan’s slushy soundtrack and the constructed exoticism of his setting. Before the Rains is also conceptually inelegant, from the mountain road that symbolizes British India’s misguided hopes, to the dragonflies that Sajani teaches Peter are conduits for human souls, and which Peter releases from a jar at an opportune moment.

Before the Rains actually does less than Forster’s A Passage to India to handle the conflicts that characterized the period: for example, the ways in which India was both subjugated by its colonizers and able to use the lessons of their rule to effect emancipation. Sivan is more like Maugham, who privileged his soap operas over the political resonance of his contexts, using his characters’ sexual indiscretions as lessons in the dangers of mingling East and West and—in a parallel, reductive equivocation—nature and civilization.

Before the Rains is now playing at the Cumberland (159 CumberlandSt.).

The Incredible Hulk washes away Ang Lee’s eccentric and despised Hulk (2003) and puts in its place a competent franchise. Audiences who enjoy blockbuster superhero films—the predictable yet engrossing plot arcs, the populist tropes of heroism and individualism—will connect with this reworking, which takes no risks yet gets the job done without any major guffaws. And comic book aficionados (who no doubt already know this) will be thrilled by The Incredible Hulk’s teasers, which tie its narrative to that of the recent Iron Man, predicting in-development Marvel Studios projects about Thor, Captain America and, eventually, The Avengers (the writer for which is slated to be Zak Penn, who wrote The Incredible Hulk along with lead Ed Norton).

The Incredible Hulk’s proficiency does not make it stimulating, however. This is unfortunate (at least for a critic), for the best, most memorable superhero movies are the ones that add some intellectual provocation to their spectacle. At first, The Incredible Hulk seems up to the challenge: not bothering with the tale of the Hulk’s origins (which are given synoptically during the credits), the film begins in a Rio de Janeiro favela where Norton’s Bruce Banner is hiding out from glowering U.S. General Ross (William Hurt) and his newly hired maniacal henchman Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth, in a tedious, ridiculous performance), who want to harness Banner’s freakish powers for the military. The labyrinthine environment of the slum is pure cinema—recalling Pépé le Moko (1937) or the Bourne franchise—and Banner’s undercover job (working in a factory bottling radioactively hued pop) is a sly dig at globalization. But this is as far as The Incredible Hulk goes. When Banner leaves Rio, it’s pretty much a series of chase and fight sequences until the end of the film.

What The Incredible Hulk needs is allegory, something Ang Lee’s Hulk had too much of. It is a wasted opportunity, though, to re-envision the franchise without this, especially since the new film trades Lee’s hunky Eric Bana for the slight, nerdy Ed Norton. But the semiotics of Norton’s physique are really all The Incredible Hulk has to do with the original comic’s themes of unleashed id, of the meanings and effects of power, of the fine line between rationality and irrationality. It is astoundingly weird, actually, that a movie about a skinny braniac who, when angry, morphs into a giant green thug, can be so clueless about its dependence on metaphor.

The Incredible Hulk is now playing at SilverCity Yorkdale (3401 Dufferin St.), Rainbow Cinemas Market Square (80 Front St. E.) and AMC Yonge and Dundas (10 Dundas St. E.).

M. Night Shyamalan is the critics’ favourite whipping boy because his films represent everything that’s wrong with auteurism. His idol is Hitchcock, yet Hitchcock was an auteur of another era—one who worked with ideas and scripts he did not conceive himself, and hired actors who could contribute their own considerable charisma to his films. Conversely, Shyamalan’s execrable new The Happening falls apart because it is in its director’s fist; nothing escapes his smothering purview.

Take, for instance, the dreadful work done by The Happening’s three leads—Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel and John Leguizamo—which suggests either that they were at the mercy of Shyamalan’s wrong-headed orders, or were just ignored outright. In any case, these actors are capable of greatness (interestingly, they’ve all proven they can outshine bad direction before), but have been summarily humiliated by having to say and do preposterous things. (Yes, the rumours are true: The Happening contains a scene in which Wahlberg apologizes to a fake plant.)

A lot of blame, then, must be placed on The Happening’s script, inspired by The Birds (1963) in its aim to be a B-grade disaster plot with existential implications. The problem is not with the concept—a strange virus, thought to have terrorist origins but eventually attributed to plants, makes people commit suicide—but with how it develops. Committing suicide is notoriously difficult to do, and the virus’ victims manage to do it right away; not once is someone shown failing, or stopped by a kind, healthy soul.

To his credit, Shyamalan refrains from the twist ending that has become his trademark and for which he’s been incessantly derided. There are also some remarkable images in The Happening, reminders of his real forte. Indeed, despite the hopes of many that this film will do Shyamalan in for good, one might hope instead, and with more compassion and naïveté, that its failure will finally wake us all up to the dangers of positioning directors as cinema’s unimpeachable kings.

The Happening is now playing at AMC Yonge and Dundas (10 Dundas St. E.), Rainbow Cinemas Market Square (80 Front St. E.) and SilverCity Yorkdale (3401 Dufferin St.).

Maggie, a.k.a. Irina Palm, the heroine of Sam Garbarski’s latest film, is a poor, 50-something widow who gets a job jerking men off at a London sex club in order to pay for her ill grandson’s operation. She is played by legendary singer and hard-liver Marianne Faithfull. Despite this—and against all logical principles of storytelling and moviemaking—Irina Palm is basically dull and humourless. It trusts the authenticity of its conceit, and squanders the talents of its lead, a woman famous for her wryness.

Irina Palm’s primitive script explains little about the rationale that leads Maggie into sex work. Minutes into the film, we see her enter a club and get the job that gives her her titular pseudonym; at this point we’re essentially ignorant of her financial situation, and of the circumstances of her widowhood. Garbarski slowly fills in the gaps, but this is the editing of a novice: all he seems concerned with is getting Maggie to the club so he can dwell on the outrageousness of her predicament, which doesn’t actually make much sense (she works behind a wall with an automated glory hole, a contrivance explained by a quick quip from the club’s manager: “I see them in Japan; no one else here has anything like this.”). There is a lot of prudery to such clunks: the same driving techno music, for instance, plays every time Maggie opens the door to her new workplace.

Irina Palm does get a little funny. This can’t be helped, but Garbarski, who is committed to his film’s maudlin qualities, can’t see what might make things really clever and satirical. Maggie injures her elbow after she becomes a superstar at her job, and this is referred to, with numbing repetition, as “penis elbow.” The stupid joke gets stupider when Maggie has to go to her local convenience store and explain her sling to acquaintances. Garbarski only seems to want us to pity her, to feel embarrassed for her as she prevaricates, even though he’s got the great, shameless Faithfull spitting out her lines (the woman played God on AbFab, for crying out loud). Irina Palm is best summed up by Maggie’s laconic lament to her boss about her grandson: “He’s dying. I’m wanking. It’s a mess.”

Irina Palm is now playing at the Carlton (20 Carlton St.).

Now in his 40s, Adam Sandler is in a deep, widely acknowledged creative funk (correspondingly, he’s gotten meatier and logier-looking, as if he’s been on the same diet and weightlifting regime for too long). Last year’s I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry wasn’t as execrable as fearful liberals said it was (the Alexander Payne–Jim Taylor–Barry Fanaro script actually had many bright moments), but Sandler’s performance was distinctly turgid. With You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, Sandler returns to co-writing after a hiatus (his last effort was in 2002’s animated Eight Crazy Nights, and before that 2000’s Little Nicky), and he is in poor shape. Zohan regurgitates the conceits of his ’90s comedies, complementing them with a distastefully simple-minded take on contemporary ethnic politics.

Zohan opens in Israel, with its titular Mossad agent hamming it up on the beach with a bevy of scantily clad beauties, and then abruptly getting called to duty. Zohan is a superman against his terrorist enemies (“Rembrandt with a grenade,” says his hummus-slurping father), but he wants more: a stylist job at Paul Mitchell’s in New York, to be exact. So he fakes his own death, goes to America, gets rejected by Mitchell, and finds the only employer in New York that will take him: a down-on-its-luck Palestinian-owned salon. Zohan is a hit with the ladies of the post-menopausal set (whom he shtupps in the back room after their cuts), but his popularity threatens to blow his cover.

True to the Sandler template, Zohan’s plot reconciles itself inoffensively, with peace and love on offer for everyone involved. Still, there’s a unique reek here. Like other Sandler films, Zohan doesn’t spare its stereotypes, but it’s worth mentioning that even though everyone gets it, some get it more than others. Rob Schneider’s Arab cab driver is easily the most unfunny and questionable of the bunch, and it’s conspicuous that none of the film’s other main Arab characters are played by real Arabs (Emmanuelle Chriqui, Zohan’s Palestinian love interest, is Jewish, as are Schneider and Sandler; Italian John Turturro, hitting a new career low, is Zohan’s arch-nemesis).

Whatever this means (some will call it a coincidence; others will point to Sandler’s recent contributions to Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign as evidence of an Israeli bias), it is safe to say that Sandler is in way over his head in attempting to make such subject matter comedic. Zohan may be just another dumb movie, but the conflict it portrays is dire, contentious and immediate in ways even the Cold War—the context for so many good dumb movies—was not. It would take a brilliant, compassionate artist to lift the horror for even one light chuckle; obviously Sandler, and for that matter most of his contemporaries (note that Judd Apatow is one of Zohan’s co-writers), just ain’t it.

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan is now playing at Rainbow Cinemas Market Square (80 Front St. E.), SilverCity Yonge-Eglinton Centre (2300 Yonge St.) and Beach Cinemas (1651 Queen St. E.).

Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol—nominated for an Oscar as this year’s Best Foreign Language Film—is being marketed in North America as a jolty, gory war epic à la 300 (2007), which isn’t quite accurate. The film is violent, as any recounting of Genghis Khan’s early career must be, but its commitment to stylization owes more to precedent than to contemporary video games (though it does indulge in the obnoxious recent trend of filming fights at high speeds, so that every drop of blood is discernible). Bodrov, who is Russian, seems sympathetic to the graphic inroads made by Soviet cinema: many choppy sequences echo Eisenstein or Bondarchuk; depictions of ancient ritual bring to mind those in Sergei Parajanov’s cult classic Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964).

Mongol is also like Ben-Hur (1959), for its main narrative involves the relationship between Temudgin (Genghis Khan’s birth name) and Jamukha, his friend and eventual rival. Such a tale is well worn, the basis of hundreds of samurai films in addition to Hollywood epics, but this is just Mongol’s point. There is a primitive magnificence to it—enforced by Rogier Stoffers and Sergey Trofimov’s impressive camera work, done largely on location in China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia—and also a convincing horror. Bodrov’s dependence on imagery is just right (the film, spoken entirely in Mongolian, doesn’t really need subtitles). Like a bad dream, Mongol sees history as a Yeatsian gyre, in which ignominy engenders bloodthirstiness, and strength lies in the ability of leaders to shepherd entire clans into battle. In this respect the film is a tad too soft in its depiction of Temudgin’s wife, Borte (by birth a member of the antagonistic Merkit tribe), who might be mistaken as a mere love interest or damsel in distress, not as the shrewd co-conspirator that she was. Bodrov rectifies this sentimentality near Mongol’s end, however, appropriately acknowledging how remote the film is from modern morality, and how close it is to the bone.

Mongol is now playing at the Varsity Cinema (55 Bloor St. W.).

Daniele Luchetti’s My Brother Is an Only Child (Mio Fratello è Figlio Unico) will suffer from inevitable comparisons to Bertolucci, whose high-period films remain the gold standard for art films about Italian revolutionaries. Indeed, Luchetti’s film is so close in theme to Bertolucci that it would seem redundant were it not for a slight tweak in context: instead of the ’40s, My Brother gives us the Republican ’60s, when Mussolini’s legacy was present in the fascist-nationalist MSI party and vehemently rejected by the popular Communist Party.

This divide is illustrated in Luchetti’s film through the lives of two brothers. The eldest, Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio), is a self-righteous leftist who tries and fails to shape the ideological tendencies of the younger, Accio (Elio Germano)—an anxious Catholic as a boy, who grows up putting Il Duce in place of His Holiness. Luchetti and screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli—who wrote the acclaimed The Best of Youth (2003)—know how to make the most of this allegory: Accio’s masculine insecurities as the baby of the family are projected onto his view of Italy as wrongfully disgraced and deposed by the Allies; Manrico’s pride as his parents’ first-born makes him want to act as shepherd to the entire country. Both feel ashamed of their working-class origins. Particularly intriguing are the Freudian suggestions that a mother, and in turn her offspring’s sexual habits, are impetus for political affiliation. Manrico is coddled while Accio is spurned and chastised; Manrico is a Don Juan while Accio is a repressed cynic.

There is a twist three-quarters of the way into My Brother Is an Only Child that partners the brothers, but this doesn’t necessarily make the film better. The twist is Bertoluccian, especially in its depiction of a botched terrorist act, but it is not as mannered or as clever in its execution. My Brother Is an Only Child is most memorable as a series of vignettes. One doesn’t expect its siblings to accomplish much, and when they do, however sloppy it is, they become caricatures of political extremism, rather than plausible actors within it.

My Brother Is an Only Child is now playing at The Royal (608 College St.).

Sex and the City used to be a good show—a fact that faded further from view during its last few seasons, and of which the movie version seems terrified to remind us too often. This goodness was not rocket science. People liked the show’s four strong female leads, their unblushing attitudes toward sex, and especially the way they talked with each other: an assortment of bons mots, ribald neologisms and frank, sisterly advice. Sex and the City was always a fantasy, but its characters had authenticity. They wanted irrational things; were driven to absurd, humiliating lengths in pursuit of them; and were usually made to face, in the series’s perpetual moral, some form of compromise.

Carrie Bradshaw’s desire in the movie version of Sex and the City is nothing short of marriage to jerky capitalist Mr. Big—and it’s all wrong. The problem is not that the wedding she aggressively plans in the movie’s first half-hour thwarts her, but that this thwarting is only temporary. Humanity and equilibrium are missing from this particular rendering of Sarah Jessica Parker’s faux-feminist character; writer-director Michael Patrick King (who also wrote and directed for the show) either has her blithely indulging her own happiness via designer shopping sprees and redecorating schemes, or all ashen-faced and pouting about being jilted. (When she says, in response to someone mistaking her for Big’s new wife after he deserts her, “That was like taking a bullet,” one only wants to chortle, or perhaps puke.)

Kim Catrall’s Samantha and Kristin Davis’s Charlotte have little to contribute to the unfolding Cinderella story, other than to provide brief reminders of the series’s penchant for gross-out humour. Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda does her part in this respect as well, though thankfully she does a bit more, functioning, as she always has, as a voice of pragmatism, intellect and principle. It seems futile to wish this frivolous film were about her, for then it would have to deal with a working woman raising a kid in Brooklyn with a guy who makes less than her—instead of an indolent, whiny Manhattanite who finally lands that rich husband who’ll pay all her bills at Blahnik’s.

Sex and the City is now playing at the Beach Cinema (1651 Queen St. E.), Scotiabank Theatre (259 Richmond St. W.) and SilverCity Yonge-Eglinton Centre (2300 Yonge St.).

The Strangers’ awfulness is manifold. The thin, shock ’n’ schlock plot is based on true events (as a booming, Cops-like voice tells us at the beginning, reading aloud text that appears onscreen, as if the audience is illiterate) and concerns that oh-so-American of subjects, home invasion. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman are the beautiful couple that arrives at the latter’s parents’ vacation home after an already-rocky night, during which Tyler rejects his proposal of marriage. They walk in at four in the morning; she takes a bath, her face tear-stained; he, brow furrowed, digs into some ice cream. Then there’s a pounding at the door and, well, that’s that.

The predictability of The Strangers’ set-up is matched by consistent stylistic banalities: a crackly, tinny old record player that gets turned on and off at key moments; ear-splitting sound cues that repeatedly dupe the audience into fearing the presence of something spooky; criminals with little-girl voices and wearing masks (which look as if they were created by Max Fleischer—indicating, in combination with the record player, that the film is for 14-year-olds, for whom early-20th-century pop culture is deeply strange and thus horrific).

What is most upsetting about The Strangers is that, after all its stupid gore and cheesy manipulations, it ends with no revelation, no lesson. The invaders are simply psychopaths out for a good time. Naturally, the film is being pitched as a cautionary tale—this could happen to you, so be careful—and one is compelled to offer another proviso: stay away from The Strangers as if your life depended on it.

The Strangers is now playing at AMC Yonge and Dundas 24 (10 Dundas St. E.), Queensway Theatre (1025 The Queensway) and Coliseum Scarborough (300 Borough Dr.).

Planet B-Boy is a well-made look at the culture of B-boying, popularly known as breakdancing, across the world. The thesis of director Benson Lee’s (Miss Monday) film is that B-boying is a craft, a way of life—not a retro fad that just happens to have lingered on 30 years after its inception. The focus of the documentary is a recent Battle of the Year, full of enthusiastic international athletes who in many cases have given up a lot, or have overcome some kind of socio-economic adversity in pursuit of their dreams.

B-Boy illustrates these struggles fairly well. Lee has his subjects sit down next to their parents, which makes them visibly awkward, but relates effectively the circumstances that make them who they are. Lil Kev lives in the projects-packed Parisian commune of Chelles, and squirms as his mother admits her initial racism toward her son’s uniformly black B-boy friends. A Korean subject, the diffident B-Boy Joe, must face his father directly as he admits to his disappointment in his son’s career choice.

Lee might be criticized for jumping into his Battle of the Year trajectory too quickly. He doesn’t give those unfamiliar with the sport enough time to absorb it: How do B-boys learn their moves, for instance, and what kind of training do they go through? A preliminary explanation of the way in which B-boying spread to other countries is similarly truncated; we are shown how the dance worked its way into early ’80s mainstream products such as Flashdance, but are not given a sufficient lead-up to the present day. Such information would only help to dramatize his subjects’ participation in the battle, on which they have clearly staked not only their respect, but in many cases, their very livelihoods.

Planet B-Boy is now playing at The Royal (608 College).