The following reviews of festival films are by Rick Groen, Liam Lacey, Fiona Morrow, James Adams, John Doyle and Jennie Punter. Films are rated out of four stars.
Screening today
Chloe
Atom Egoyan (Canada)
***
Toronto has never looked more glamorous and sexy than it does here, "playing" itself (and not Manhattan or Cleveland or Chicago) in Egoyan's adaptation of the 2004 French hit Nathalie. With a script by Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary, Fur), Egoyan torques the action far beyond the Gallic cool that Anne Fontaine brought to the original. Of course, it's a twisty meditation on desire, repression, sexuality, infidelity and commitment in a cold climate - but the look, pacing and tone owe more to Brian De Palma and Adrian Lyne than Bergman, say, or Antonioni. Julianne Moore is fine (and courageous) as the big-buck Yorkville gynecologist who, convinced that her husband (Liam Neeson), a charismatic, much-travelled university music professor, is fiddling about, hires a gorgeous escort (Amanda Seyfried, of Mamma Mia! fame) to test his loyalty. A sleek film of alluring - and dangerous - surfaces, Chloe should restore Egoyan's lustre at the box-office. J.A.
Granville 7: Oct. 14, 4 p.m.
An Education
Lone Scherfig (Denmark)
****
A flat-out charmer of a film, the Sundance hit is based on English journalist Lynn Barber's memoir, adapted for the screen by novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy) and Danish director Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners). Newcomer Carey Mulligan stars as 16-year-old Jennie, in love with all things French and bored with her unsophisticated parents (a terrific Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour). When a handsome, wealthy man in his 30s (Peter Sarsgaard) takes an interest in her, both Jennie and her parents are flattered. Though this is ultimately a story of betrayal, An Education bursts with the energy of new discovery in a London emerging from postwar drabness in the early years of the sixties. L.L.
Granville 7: Oct. 14, 11 a.m.
Empire State Building Murders
William Karel (France)
**
It sounds like the stuff of a movie geek's dreams: clips from classic Hollywood film noir sliced together with a new narrative built around the Empire State Building. The "plot" features James Cagney and Lauren Bacall as mobster and moll, Kirk Douglas as the detective trying to build a case against Cagney, and all manner of other stars from the period (James Stewart, Richard Widmark, Glenn Ford) flitting past as some 50 movies are raided for useful scenes. The mosaic is given another layer by the likes of Cyd Charisse and Ben Gazarra playing along and giving Karel new interviews in character, reminiscing about times past. Alas, director Karel (The World According to Bush) and his co-writer, crime novelist Jerome Charyn, appear so enamoured of their idea, they forget to make it add up to anything more than a curio. The novelty soon wears off. F.M.
Cinémathèque: Oct. 14, 1:30 p.m.
We Live in Public
Ondi Timoner (U.S.)
***
Before Facebook and Twitter, there was Josh Harris, an Internet pioneer who predicted the end of private life through social networking on the World Wide Web. Director Ondi Timoner (of the rock doc, DIG!) takes us deep inside Harris's bizarre ego trip over two decades, as he rose to fame and eventually squandered his $80-million fortune on parties and sometimes sadistic experiments where he used himself and his friends as human guinea pigs. In his most famous project to celebrate the turn of the millennium, he put about 100 people in an underground bunker fixed with multiple cameras, an interrogation room, an open bar and a gun range. The tension here comes from the contradictions in Harris's personality: His personal social skills are negligible, but his vision of society has been spot on. L.L.
Granville 7: Oct. 14, 9:30 p.m.
Screening tomorrow
