The following short reviews of films opening on Saturday, Sept. 11 at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival are by James Adams, James Bradshaw, Guy Dixon, Rick Groen, Liam Lacey, Gayle MacDonald, Dave McGinn, J. Kelly Nestruck, Johanna Schneller and Brad Wheeler. The star ratings are out of four.
Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie
Sturla Gunnarsson (Canada)
4 STARS
Constructed around a filmed speech that scientist-broadcaster David Suzuki gave to a sold-out audience at the University of British Columbia, this documentary about his life could be the most persuasive argument yet that saving the environment is the most critical fight for human rights occurring today. Without clean water and air, as Suzuki says, we are not only destroying the environment; we are destroying us. The speech can indeed be compared to Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream when describing the air we breathe and the atoms we share as an irrefutable commonality – a bond with the past, present and our children's future. The documentary itself is a little deceiving, though: It is well-paced and well-produced. But by seamlessly incorporating stories of Suzuki's life and how he came into science and environmentalism, the film accomplishes the immensely difficult task of accentuating Suzuki's extraordinary, historic speech and yet not distracting from it. G.D.
Sept. 11, 3 p.m., Ryerson; Sept. 12, 3:45 p.m., AMC 3
The Town
Ben Affleck (USA)
4 STARS
He hit a home run with his directorial debut of Gone Baby Gone in 2007. But with the high-paced thriller about a posse of low-life bank robbers in his hometown of Boston, Ben Affleck hits it out of the Fenway ballpark. Tightly woven, with edge-of-your-seat chase scenes that seem artlessly interspersed in an unlikely love story, Affleck directs and stars in this adaptation of the acclaimed book, Prince of Thieves. Flawless and totally believable performances by Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner, Jon Hamm and Blake Lively bring the tough streets of Charlestown to despairing life in a redemptive tale about childhood friendship, loyalty, a woman (Hall) who finds herself in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong guy. G.M.
Sept. 11, 9:30 p.m., Roy Thomson; Sept. 12, 11 a.m., Elgin; Sept. 18, 9 p.m., Elgin
Waiting for ‘Superman’
Davis Guggenheim (USA)
3 STARS
The United States (and, let's face it, Canada to a varying degree) has major problems with its public schools. The worst are dubbed “dropout factories,” and the cause boils down to the simple exchange of knowledge and support from teacher to student. The solution is of course vastly more complicated. Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) has a knack for making documentaries that are accessible and yet fact-filled. Still, he can only cover so much within 111 minutes on the problems which have plagued policy-makers, principals and pupils for decades. Unions and bureaucracies come off as barriers to implementing higher standards; independent charter schools as the guiding light toward better education. The doc concedes that there's more to it than that. Yet the heartbreak among children denied a proper education is irrefutable. G.D.
Sept. 11, 4:30 p.m., Winter Garden
Made in Dagenham
Nigel Cole (U.K.)
3 STARS
Every generation needs one – a rousing, based-on-a-true story tale of workplace victory. This British entry from director Nigel Cole (Calendar Girls) is Norma Rae with the feminism amped up. In 1968, 187 upholstery seamstresses at a Ford plant in industrial Dagenham, England, went on strike to raise their pay grade. Led by Rita O’Grady (Sally Hawkins), a mild-mannered wife and mother who discovers she has a tiger inside, the cause escalated to equal pay, period, and spread to Ford plants, and then all workplaces, across England, culminating in an equal-pay law. Though there isn’t one crystallizing moment as iconic as Sally Field standing on a table holding a “Union” sign, there’s a lovely, quiet scene on a laundry-festooned balcony between Hawkins and Rosamund Pike (as a caged corporate wife). And Miranda Richardson – as Barbara Cole, the Minister of Labour who pushed for the equal-pay legislation – delivers a great, spitting speech about the cause’s “credence.” J.S.
