Film Friday: The Ghosts of Wolverine's Past

Today is the first full day of Hot Docs, but there are a lot of films out there that aren't documentaries.

This week's most eagerly hyped is X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which has famously been available as an illegal download for ages. So we could have seen it, if we weren't completely uninterested in the idea of watching a work print of a film on our laptop… or really just the idea of a Wolverine film in general (though having said that, we do look forward to seeing how Ryan Reynolds manages as Deadpool). If it doesn't succeed, we're sure piracy will be blamed, even though by all accounts it isn't up to much. Eye Weekly's Adam Nayman review points out something notable, as he quips "the only pleasure to be taken here is the confirmation of director Gavin Hood’s slick-hack status," as the director of Wolverine is in fact the director of TIFF 2005 people's choice award winner, Tsotsi.

The director of this week's "film for ladies" Ghosts of Girlfriends Past arguably has a better track record, putting out, amongst other films, Mean Girls. However, it also has the cinematic horror of Matthew McConaughey (yeargh) and Jennifer Garner (eeurgh) so… yeah. NOW Magazine's Radheyan Simonpillai calls it "a trite and derivative assembly-line product featuring a stale romance and little comedy."

Also out this week: Lemon Tree, the story of a lemon grove framed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Bart Got a Room, notable as much for William H. Macy's haircut as it is for being only the second film we can think of to use Hollywood, Florida as a location (the first being King of Kong, as Billy Mitchell's restaurant is there); and Adrift in Tokyo, said to "shares its deadpan sense of humour with the early movies of Jim Jarmusch" by Jason Anderson at the Star.