I rewatched Motherless Brooklyn the other day, and it’s absolutely worth another look for movie lovers and New York City lovers alike. Edward Norton’s performance as a private eye coping with Tourette’s is one of last year’s best. The movie’s film noir style, gang narrative, and unexpected love story make it worth a rental, especially now. An added bonus? There’s lots of cameos to look forward to, including Bobby Cannavale, Alec Baldwin, and Willem Dafoe.—Dana Mathews
Kingdom of Heaven (Director’s Cut)
Ah, the director’s cut: a movie you (usually) love, but more of it. Sometimes you really do need 45 more minutes. No director proves this better than Ridley Scott, who has been packing extra footage onto DVDs throughout his career, often to transformative effect. Take Kingdom of Heaven: the theatrical release was a middling adventure vehicle for Orlando Bloom that fizzled with critics and audiences, but the director’s cut, all 194 minutes of it, is a multi-layered historical epic worthy of your time. So start with that and then make your way to Blade Runner and beyond (and thank me later).—Colin Groundwater
The F Word
There are New York movies. There are Chicago movies, Boston movies, Baltimore movies. There are movies set in Gotham City, in Raccoon City, and in Derry, Maine. But there aren’t a whole lot of Toronto movies, despite it doubling for all the places I just mentioned for decades. The same warm glow I felt as a kid seeing another Asian face pop up on television, I feel now whenever my hometown gets to play itself in a feature film. And in the last decade, no movie’s used Toronto more effectively than the 2013 romantic comedy The F Word.
Just a couple of years earlier, Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim adaptation was a fun-as-hell showcase for the city, but locations-wise, it stuck mainly to the hits: tourist traps like Casa Loma, iconic landmarks like the now-demolished Honest Ed’s, fast food franchises like Pizza Pizza and Second Cup. The F Word, by contrast, captures what it’s really like to be single, broke, and completely directionless in Toronto in your early twenties—all of which I happened to be in 2013. The loaded cast—including post-Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe, Zoe Kazan at her alluring best, Girls-era Adam Driver, a ready-to-breakout Mackenzie Davis, and an always-on-point Rafe Spall—amble aimlessly through parks during the day and bars at night. They crash on their siblings’ couches and try on clothes they can’t afford. They watch old movies alone at The Royal, chomp burgers at the George Street Diner, and show up at their nephew’s karate tournament with a bunch of their friends just to have something to do that day. The whole thing is held aloft by the perfectly calibrated, enormously charming script by Elan Mastai, who also wrote the decade’s most romantic Vonnegut-y time travel romp of a novel, All Our Wrong Todays.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
