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| Antoine Olivier-Pilon in Mommy |
It’s a big day for film as festival favourites
Mommy and
Maps to the Stars! Xavier Dolan’s
Mommy, Canada’s Oscar contender and a frontrunner in the Best Foreign
Language Film category, finally makes its way to Ottawa after taking festivals
around the world by storm and the lighting up the Canadian box office. The film
is one of my favourites from this year’s Toronto International Film Festival where
it made its Canadian debut after premiering at Cannes where it won Dolan the
Jury Prize. He should have won the Palme since
Mommy is such a masterful force of raw, distinctly cinematic
emotion.
Read the 5-star review of Mommy (which
I was just invited to have reproduced in a textbook… so cool!).
Mommy opens today at
The ByTowne. Buy a
membership, since you’ll want to see it a few times for Anne Dorval alone.
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| Julianne Moore in Maps to the Stars |
Mommy’s
tour-de-force performance by Anne Dorval
might have gone home empty-handed at Cannes, but Canadian audiences still had
reason to cheer since the prize went to Julianne Moore for her gutsy
performance in David Cronenberg’s
Maps to
the Stars (
read the TIFF review here)
. Maps, another TIFF favourite, is one of Cronenberg’s best films
in years, as he ingeniously takes an off-kilter direction to Bruce Wagner’s
razor-sharp script that takes aim at the hollow, empty ugliness of Hollywood.
Moore’s brilliantly unhinged performance stands out in a strong ensemble that
includes Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack, and Sarah Gadon, and Canadian film fans
will doubtlessly enjoy the novelty of seeing Moore’s puffy-lipped starlet cling
to a Canadian Genie as validation of her success.
Maps to the Stars opens in Ottawa today at
Landmark Kanata,
SilverCity Gloucester, and the
Cineplex Coliseum, which could possibly the
funniest place ever to see a Cronenberg film… they won’t know what hit them!!!
How often do we get two new films from Canadian masters on
the same day? We are spoiled!
