alice braga

A big slate this weekend. The movie of the moment that everyone’s raving about, me included, is Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. It’s a must-see, and Anne Hathaway is Oscar’s first It Girl. Then there’s a deck of jokers to choose from—Canada’s Michael Cera, America’s Bill Maher and Britain’s Simon Pegg—in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Religulous and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People respectively. But if you’re in the mood for a thought-provoking drama to accompany world economic collapse, the movie of choice is Blindness. This elegant disaster movie—a Canadian co-production blessed with an unusually wide North American release—is no walk in the park. But with the world as we know it going down the tubes, it has a timely resonance and gives you something to talk about after the final credits.

This weekend’s new releases include an air-headed Hollywood confection, an earnest CanLit adaptation, and some hard-boiled David Mamet. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each of these films is troubled in its own way, but they all have their pleasures. The candy-floss comedy of What Happens in Vegas and the fight-club fetishism of Mamet ’s Redbelt both have quite preposterous plots. The difference is that Mamet is actually attempting realism and falling short—yet it is still the better movie. The Stone Angel, based on the classic Canadian novel by Margaret Laurence, has a narrative that remains dutifully plausible from start to finish, and it’s a bit of slog. Yet it’s as good as can be expected, given that it’s spun from the hide of a complex, interior narrative that resists adaptation with a stubbornness rivaling that of its heroine. And Christine Horne, making her film debut as the young Hagar Shipley, delivers a star-making performance.