Courtesy of TIFFHappening (Audrey Diwan) The recent ruckus over Roe v. Wade makes the Happening more topical than expected. But the harrowing story about a smart and electric young French college girl (Anamaria Vartolomei) in the early-60s seeing her opportunities and freedoms dwindle away when she gets pregnant is powerful even without that context. Vartolomei gives a wonderfully precise performance of vitality being restrained, as her Anne explores every horrifying avenue to end a pregnancy at a time when abortions were criminalized. As depicted, those moments feel honest, harrowing, and per ..read more

Courtesy of NetflixOzark: Season 4, Part 2 (Bill Dubuque, Mark Williams) Dubuque and Williams’s highly addictive series about an upper-middle class family caught up in money laundering, drugs and murder in the Ozarks region of Missouri has ended with a bang. Not a surprising bang, mind you, but one that sounds a lot of bleak truths about class, money and power in America. After the promising first half of the final season introduced some new people – including the hot-headed Mexican drug cartel contact Javi (Alfonso Herrera) and the bad-cop-turned-PI Mel (Adam Rothenberg) – this final batch of ..read more

Courtesy of Marvel Studios DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS (Sam Raimi). 126 minutes. Opens Thursday, May 5 in theatres everywhere. Rating: NN You may have already heard that director Sam Raimi added some ghoulishness to his entry into the Marvel (questionably) Cinematic (never-ending) Universe, Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness. Raimi is the director who broke the movies with the now 20-year-old and still pretty amazing Spider-Man. The movie starring Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst became the first to make nine figures on opening weekend and spawned an even bett ..read more

Memory (Martin Campbell) Memory is the latest from Liam Neeson in Charles Bronson-like reaper-of-vengeance mode, a post-Taken career tract that gave us blissful highs like The Commuter and Cold Pursuit, and lows that I’d rather just forget. Memory belongs with the latter, despite its promise. The movie is directed by Casino Royale’s Martin Campbell, who knows his way around an action scene, and comes with a nifty log-line borrowed from a Belgian movie called Memory Of A Killer. Neeson is Alex Lewis, a hitman for hire suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s. He’s taking people out and then check ..read more

Courtesy of Bell Media WE OWN THIS CITY (Reinaldo Marcus Green). New episodes every Monday on Crave Canada beginning April 25. Rating: NNN The Wire creators David Simon and George Pelecanos are back with another Baltimore cops-and-criminals saga; only in We Own This City, the cops are explicitly the criminals. That point is bolded and underlined throughout the six-part series, which lacks the earlier show’s nuance, finesse and overall greatness. The Wire is arguably the crown jewel of television. Living in its shadow is an unenviable position. We Own This City acquits itself well eno ..read more

Conversations With A Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes (Joe Berlinger) After his hugely successful Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, director Berlinger (Paradise Lost) takes a look at yet another notorious serial killer, John Wayne Gacy, the seemingly upstanding midwest businessman who in the 1970s raped and murdered at least 33 young men and boys and buried their bodies in his suburban home’s crawl space. The hook is Berlinger’s access to more than 60 hours of hitherto-unreleased interviews Gacy gave his defence team, much of which is filled with bravado and misdirection which ..read more

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore (David Yates) Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore is just trying to get it over with. There were supposed to be five of these movies but this third installment ends on a note of half-hearted closure, as if everyone will be just as satisfied to quietly sweep it all under the magic carpet. You can’t blame them. The prequel cycle to the Harry Potter franchise has been more memorable for the embarrassing drama behind-the-scenes than anything put up on screen. Johnny Depp, who played the villain Grindelwald in the first two Fantastic Beasts movies ..read more

Courtesy of Universal PicturesAmbulance (Michael Bay) There’s a beautifully unhinged marriage between Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Bay in Ambulance. The actor gives a jacked up, wildly charming and hilarious performance as if he’s trying to level up for Bay, the maestro of mayhem whose movies tend to assault the senses with skydiving drone shots, glistening bodies and anything that blows up real good. Bay’s cardiac arrest cinema is rarely as fun as it is in Ambulance (not since 2013’s Pain And Gain), and a lot of the credit for that goes to Gyllenhaal for keeping things interesting when they sh ..read more

Everything Everywhere All At Once (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) Imagine sitting through DJ Snake’s Turn Down For What music video for two-and-half-hours. If that sounds good, boy do I have a movie for you. Everything Everywhere All At Once has all the spastic energy, phallocentric humour and visual wit directors the Daniels brought to that Lil’ Jon video about bodies gyrating with seismic force, but with one extra and essential ingredient: Michelle Yeoh. At its best the movie is a love letter to the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon actor’s legacy and multifaceted talents, which are spread acro ..read more

Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video Canada Ben Affleck is in Deep Water with ex-girlfriend Ana de Armas. Deep Water (Adrian Lyne) There’s a couple of bad marriages in Deep Water, director Lyne’s return to the screen two decades after Unfaithful. The first is the wedded couple portrayed by Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas who famously hooked up in real life while shooting. They play a modern-day take on Vic and Melinda, the couple from Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel. Theirs is a sad, toxic and (in the screen version at least) confused relationship. She flaunts her affairs. He grins and bears it; or so ..read more