According to CBC’s Chris Boyce, the goal of this weekend’s CBCMusic.ca Festival is twofold. First and foremost, the CBC wants to celebrate Canadian music. Second, it wants to celebrate CBC Music, the broadcaster’s online music service, which launched a little over a year ago.

In 1996, Theatre Columbus premiered playwright Michael O’Brien’s “freely adapted” take on the famous Beaumarchais play The Barber of Seville, which was written in 1775. O’Brien’s version mixed in music from the 1816 opera of the same name by Gioachino Rossini, as well as original tunes by composer John Millard. The adaptation also propelled the story forward a couple centuries, with pop culture references galore. With Theatre Columbus co-founder Leah Cherniak at the helm, the musical ended the season with six Dora Award nominations (it won three) and plenty of critical acclaim.

Seventeen years later, Soulpepper Theatre is remounting this zany reimagination of The Barber of Seville, updated once again by O’Brien, Millard, and Cherniak. But, for some reason—the change in decade, or company, or sense of humour—whatever had made the original so magical, has faded, save for a few key performances.

At rep cinemas this week: A lament for rep theatres, a coming-of-age story set in Toronto, and a genre-crossing thriller.

Big Picture Cinema (1035 Gerrard Street East)
Showtimes

Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
Showtimes

“You never see someone walking out saying, ‘That sucked,’” Kevin Smith observes of repertory movie theatres early in Morgan White’s The Rep, an illuminating history of independent theatres that soon turns into a lament for them. Seeing a film one already knows and loves with a rapt audience or viewing a rare print among fellow esoteric types can reduce even the most hardened cinephile to tears, but The Rep hinges on the premise that such euphoric moments are not long for this world, given the sorry state of the industry since the switch to digital projection and home video.

Embedding himself with the programming and managerial team of the recently departed Toronto Underground Cinema, whose very brief rise and subsequent struggle the film chronicles, White considers the strange mix of heart, business acumen, and foolhardiness it takes to run such theatres in an age where repertory programming is endangered on multiple fronts. He does a good job of delineating the personality clashes of the Underground Cinema’s staff, three very different people bound by an all-consuming job that never quite pays off, for all its perks. But White’s greatest coup is his ability to fit his insights into Toronto’s repertory scene within the larger North American context, all without losing sight of how rep programming affects its passionate (if eccentric) audiences, who are as hungry as ever for good films, even as their numbers decline.

Picture Day
Directed by Kate Melville

TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Showtimes

Before she landed a premiere slot at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2012, Toronto filmmaker Kate Melville cut her teeth on work as diverse as the CBC’s adaptation of Timothy Findley’s play Elizabeth Rex and several episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation. Odd as it might seem on paper, Melville’s experience with both the high and low ends of the cinematic spectrum pays off nicely in Picture Day. Starring up-and-comer Tatiana Maslany as Claire—a victory-lapping high school senior who befriends her former babysitting charge, moody ninth grader Henry (Degrassi’s Spencer Van Wyck)—the film turns out to be rather more than its familiar tale of coming-of-age growing pains would suggest, thanks to Melville’s ease with young actors and knack for guiding them through tricky, dramatically charged dialogue.

Promising as it is, Picture Day often betrays its humble origins, both as a play that Melville first conceived while she was a teen and as a first feature. It relies too heavily on its wall-to-wall indie soundtrack and clever situations to advance the emotional lives of its characters. Despite that occasional awkwardness, though, this is a tender and surprisingly nuanced portrait of youth. The film is brave enough to let these kids explore their unseemly sides and behave in ugly ways that teen movies usually sanitize. The film is also a star-maker, sure to expose the luminous and very funny Maslany to wider audiences than the handful who noticed her in more standard fare like The Vow.

Side Effects
Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
Showtimes

If Steven Soderbergh’s insistence that Side Effects will be his last theatrical release turns out to be true, he’ll have mustered an impressive filmography by the time he takes his early retirement. His movies make an oddly diverse group, from the heady science fiction of his Solaris remake to the micro-budgeted Bubble, through to his recent spate of experimental star vehicles (for MMA fighter Gina Carano in Haywire, and former adult film star Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience, to name just two). As last films go, Side Effects is on the slight side, but it’s very much in keeping with the freewheeling spirit that’s defined Soderbergh’s work since he burst onto the world stage at Cannes in 1989.

The film starts as a melodrama about mental illness, then changes without warning into both a courtroom procedural and a trashy sex thriller in the vein of Fatal Attraction. The story, inasmuch as it can be described without spoilers, centres on Emily (Rooney Mara), a young woman with a mood disorder that is triggered for the first time in years when her financier husband (Channing Tatum) is released from prison after time spent there for insider trading. Her intense depression takes her to a new psychiatrist, Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who is all too happy to ply with her a profoundly mind-altering new drug pitched to him by a motley crew of pharmaceutical lobbyists that includes Emily’s former doctor (Catherine Zeta-Jones).

Zeta-Jones’s hammy demeanor in her early scenes tips us off to some of the more surprising tonal mutations Soderbergh has in store for us later on. Some of these are more fruitful than others. In particular, one late plot turn is simultaneously homophobic, misogynistic, and callous toward those suffering from mental health issues—an unholy trifecta. Still, one does not go to a thriller for moral instruction, and Side Effects works perfectly well as an efficient delivery system for Soderbergh’s career obsession with playing at the crossroads between different genres.

At rep cinemas this week: a kidnapping thriller from the Philippines, a prizewinner from Mexico, and Chris Marker’s ode to cats and cosmic accidents.

TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Showtimes

The kidnapping thriller is a hoary old genre, so credit to Ron Morales for giving it new life in the tense, eerily assured Graceland. A Filipino riff on bigger-budgeted American cousins like Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, Graceland transcends many of the films it resembles by casting off frills and staying focused on its bruised protagonist, a man seriously out of his depth.

That questionable hero is Marlon (Arnold Reyes), a morally-comprised driver to scummy Filipino congressman Chango (Menggie Cobarrubias), for whom he regularly picks up (and then deposits) a host of underage sex workers. It’s not long before this bad behaviour is punished with a botched kidnapping that finds both men’s daughters snatched from Marlon’s car and delivered into the hands of a menacing guy with a longstanding grudge against Chango. That makes Marlon, who knows just a bit more than his boss, both the lone witness to a major crime and the chief negotiator for the kidnapping, despite his deferential temperament.

Though the film is generally tightly plotted, its tangents are weak. Attempts to develop Marlon’s hospital-bound wife and Chango’s own long-suffering spouse seem out of place, and could be discarded without much fuss. Ultimately this is a film about the sins of a pair of co-implicated fathers being visited upon their innocent daughters. On that front, Morales delivers. Graceland goes to some dark places, but the destination feels earned.

Aquí y Allá
Directed by Antonio Méndez Esparza

Big Picture Cinema (1035 Gerrard Street East)
Showtimes

The Critics Week Grand Prize winner at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Antonio Méndez Esparza’s debut feature, Aquí y Allá, is simultaneously bold and muted—a dense work that reveals itself only gradually. Shot on location in Guerrero, Mexico, the film follows Pedro (Pedro De los Santos) as he returns to his home village after two years of working menial jobs in the United States. Pedro dreams of being a musician, and tests his guitar compositions out on his giggling daughters and wife, but Esparza is more interested in the day-to-day grind of life in the village than in Pedro’s more extravagant hopes.

Despite its structural echoes of the returning-hero journey in The Odyssey, Pedro’s story is a modest one of feeling like a drifter at home, and so it’s stretched to its breaking point by its protracted running time. Gorgeously composed as they are, some of Esparza’s static shots of characters lounging before the camera in idle conversation can feel like formal experimentation at the expense of his cast. But the overriding tone here is affectionate, and Esparza’s patient and observational approach pays dividends in several lovely, long takes of family members indulging in one another’s company, betraying their feelings with the slightest, but most humane, gestures.

Sans Soleil
Directed by Chris Marker

TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Thursday, May 16, 6:30 p.m.

Sans Soleil is often held up as the highest—and ostensibly the clearest—example of the essay film, a protean genre that roams back and forth between documentary and fiction. The first of the film’s many cheeky turns is its ambiguity about its own authorship. On the face of it, what we see is a travelogue in the form of a cinematic letter from a mysterious cinematographer named Sandor Krasna, who details his travels to locations as disparate as Japan and Guinea-Bissau. But without Krasna to vouch for it in person, the letter needs a translator, an unnamed friend who reads from those letters as the images they expound upon flicker across the screen.

Beyond even the disembodied voice of our female narrator, though, there’s the distinctive tenor of director Chris Marker, a kind of unseen Cheshire cat. Cats are important to Marker, who titled his 1977 look at the unfulfilled potential of France’s New Left movement A Grin Without a Cat, and who in later years took to offering a photo of a cat in lieu of one of himself. (The Criterion edition of the film appropriately comes stamped with a drawing of Marker’s feline companion Guillaume, and his signature of approval by proxy: Guillaume’s paw print on a certificate.) Cats are just as important to Sans Soleil, where Krasna shows us a temple in Tokyo consecrated to the animal, and reminds us that the code words used to launch the Japanese offensive on Pearl Harbor were “Tora, Tora, Tora,” the thrice-repeated name of a missing pet whose owners we see mourning in the film. It’s also the Japanese word for tiger.

That happy cosmic accident is the kind of mystery in which Marker revels. These are in evidence throughout Sans Soleil, with its brilliant juxtapositions of unrelated events in Japan and Africa and its otherworldly soundscape. While Krasna’s musings are often about memory and the film image, the hidden subject and guiding star here is contingency—the chance encounter or furtive glance, held for just a moment. “Not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure,” Krasna muses at one point, thinking about the random intrusions of American television commercials. Marker’s work cuts deeper than such ads, no doubt, but requires that same spirit of generosity toward what is not immediately understood.

Toronto’s extensive work on the silver screen reveals that, while we have the chameleonic ability to look like anywhere from New York City to Moscow, the disguise doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny. Reel Toronto revels in digging up and displaying the films that attempt to mask, hide, or—in rare cases—proudly display our city.

In 2000, as you surely recall, a little film called The Skulls came out, and our culture was never the same. Before the year was out, it would end up as the 72nd highest grossing film of the year and quickly rise to become the 1,901st biggest movie ever. With those kinds of numbers it’s no surprise that what once seemed a one-off movie became a franchise that, um, defined a generation. Yes, they made not one but two stunning sequels to The Skulls, and don’t let the fact that they went direct to video make you think they’re any worse than the original: they are precisely as sucky as the original, but without Joshua “Pacey” Jackson as the star.

The original movie, a tale of the dark, thrillery things that go on at places like Yale, was filmed on the cheap right here, so it’s no surprise that when the budgets got even tighter they came right back to Toronto.

The first flick used U of T to double as a quasi–Ivy League school. Toronto film lovers like you, dear reader, get much more of the same here. Why, the very opening shot of The Skulls II (suggested subtitle: “The Skullening?”) pans across the old Varsity Stadium…

…in all its glory…

…and, hey, you can even see the ol’ planetarium.

Before they’re done, the two Skulls sequels will hit all your favourite St. George Campus hotspots. Why, there’s Convocation Hall…

..the front campus…

…Unviersity College and the adjacent Croft Chapter House (wherein The Skulls do their dirty deeds)…

…the UC quad…

…seen from all sorts of photogenic angles…

…and then the quad…

…and main building of Victoria University…

…and the always pitureesque chapel at Knox College.

The exterior of the of the chapel scene was filmed rather nearby, up at Bloor Street United.

Our pouty, Pacey-like hero parks his car on Huron Street…

…but when they see some dude watching them from across the street, they seem to be a few blocks over, on Devonshire Place. (You can see OISE there in the background.)

Not-Pacey goes strolling with his gal pal down Bloor Street West…

…stopping at this shop, right across from New Generation Sushi. (The Pita Pit is now a Jamba Juice. And why not?) He spots a Ducati motorcycle in the window that he despearately wants to own, and if you don’t think it’s actually a shallow metaphor for the way he’ll sell his soul before learning that material things aren’t all they’re cracked up to be…well, then you need to bone up on your Skullology.

Naturally, his wealthy-but-possibly/likely-evil benefactors get him said Ducati and he drives it down Queen’s Park Crescent…

…and onto King’s College Circle.

Oooh, here’s a shadowy meeting in a dark alley. It’s been a while for us, but it’s our old pal, the Distillery District! If these guys shot anything at Casa Loma we might have to give them some kind of prize for hitting all our favourite and most obvious spots!

What the what now? It’s Casa Loma! Outside…

…and in! Now we’re starting to feel bad for picking on the The Skulls franchise, what with all they’ve done for our fair city.

But, seriously folks, Casa Loma isn’t the only local mansion to get some facetime. Here’s Skulls III baddie Barry Bostwick (!) at his handsome retreat, which is a major location in the movie.

It’s actually Graydon Hall, up in North York, which we’re kind of surprised we don’t see more often. Casa Loma ain’t all that, after all.

And those aren’t the only places you can have shadowy meetings, either! You can have one at High Park…

…or the University Avenue courthouse.

And with the right lighting, even the adjacent Osgoode Hall library looks scary as all get out.

Oh, we’ve got some chases too! Here’s one that starts on Victoria Street (note the King Eddie in the back)…

…and goes down Leader Lane.

This police station, since torn down, is the old OPP headquarters on Harbour Street. (If you guessed it was replaced by condos, well, bully for you!)

They do all sorts of chasing behind it, where it’s rather hard to miss the Gardiner…

…and from this angle it’s even harder to miss the Rogers Centre.

As you can see by the window in the back, this hispter eatery is the dear, departed Gypsy Co-Op.

Perhaps because Skulls I starred erstwhile Dawson’s Creek resident Joshua Jackson, the producers felt they needed a Katie Holmeseque girl for Skulls III. In this one the twist is that she wants to be the first girl in the club. Will she get in? Will she, like Ducatiboy, learn some harsh lessons about the true cost of power and wealth? No spoilers here, suckers. Watch it yourselves! Anyway, she makes fearful phone calls from all sorts of photogenic places, like the middle of University Avenue…

…and, a little hard to be sure with how it’s framed, but we think also from the corner of Front and Church Streets.

She also competes as a swimmer, including at this meet…

…at North York’s Douglas Snow Aquatic Centre.

Look, we can’t tell you whether you should or shouldn’t watch one or all of the The Skulls movies. Certainly, if you’re young and wondering how to get into a secret club so you can be rich and powerful there are some moral lessons to be gleaned here. If you’re into U of T architecture porn, they’re pretty good for that too.

It’s not like we haven’t seen crappy sequels filmed here the odd time or six. But usually those franchises started with some sort of success before going off the rails. Here, as Wikipedia deftly puts it, “The [first] film was critically panned, but successful enough to spawn two direct-to-video sequels.” What does that say about the world we live in? That’s the real, existential question.

Get funky with Finding the Funk. Image courtesy of Hot Docs.

It ain’t over until it’s over, and there is still one full weekend of Hot Doc’ing left! First up, get grooving and body-moving with Finding the Funk (, 1:30 p.m. Bloor Hot Docs Cinema), a history of the musical genre of funk. Interviewing James Brown, George Clinton, and Sly, the doc looks back at the good old days to see how the genre influenced contemporary tunes.

Today is the last day to see the excellent Anita (4 p.m. Isabel Bader Theatre). Oscar-winning director Freida Mock looks at Anita Hill’s story: the woman who stood up before Clarence Thomas was sworn into the U.S. Supreme court as he had sexually harassed her. In a time when feminism is thought of as a dirty word, this is a powerful testament to recalling why the movement remains important.

Also playing for the last time today is Michelle Latier’s Alias (, 8:45 p.m. Scotiabank Theatre). We’ve already suggested checking it out, but we’ll do it again! The doc is a nuanced and beautiful portrait of not only her subjects (rappers from Regent Park), but also this city.

Canadian Sepctrum is unique among the 11 programmes on this year’s Hot Docs schedule, because it features only films by Canadian documentarians, be they veterans or first-timers. Hot Docs’ mandate is to promote our national film culture, so the docs that fall under this heading are particularly important components of the festival.

Click any of the images below for more information about a particular Canadian Spectrum film. Or, check out our nifty Hot Docs 2013 hub for a list of all our reviews to date.

TALES FROM THE ORGAN TRADE DIRECTED BY RIC ESTHER BIENSTOCK

NCR: NOT CRIMINALLY RESPONSIBLE DIRECTED BY JOHN KASTNER

THE GHOSTS IN OUR MACHINE DIRECTED BY LIZ MARSHALL

CHI DIRECTED BY ANNE WHEELER

BUYING SEX DIRECTED BY TERESA MACINNES AND KENT NASON

ALIAS DIRECTED BY MICHELLE LATIMER

15 REASONS TO LIVE DIRECTED BY ALAN ZWEIG

Zen as medicine in Free the Mind. Image courtesy of Hot Docs.

Hot Docs day nine and we’re feeling fine! Here’s what to see to keep those nice vibes going.

Kick things off by letting it all go with Free the Mind (, 6 p.m., ROM Theatre), a doc about how yoga can help vets and kids with PTSD. It’s both a portrait of those suffering from the syndrome and a look into the science of studying the human brain.

Gangster of Love (, 9 p.m., Scotiabank Theatre) looks at the (hetero) dating game in Croatia and, in the process, proves man-children aren’t only a North American problem. Following matchmaker Nedo as he tries to find a life partner for Maya, the doc falls into some romantic comedy conventions, but is a spirited take on the subject.

Not to harsh the nice buzz we have going, but Blood Brother (, 9:30 p.m., Isabel Bader Theatre) might not be the best way to end the day. Though it won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance this year, the film is a classic white-guy-doing-good-in-[insert impoverished nation] tale. Here, two young Americans travel to India and find themselves, but also ignore the real stories of the people in front of them.

Rock and roll gets brotherly in Mistaken for Strangers. Image courtesy of Hot Docs.

On the eighth day of Hot Docs, the film gods gave to thee…three docs that got our reviewers’ thumbs up.

Straight from Sundance, The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear (, 6 p.m., Scotiabank Theatre) looks at the lives of young Georgians (that’s Georgia the country, not the state) in an innovative way. Director Tinatin Gurchiani put out a casting call for citizens between the ages of 15 and 25 who felt their lives merited being in a doc. Mixing interviews with reenactments, the result is a compelling look at life in one corner of Eastern Europe.

A Dream in the Making (, 9:45 p.m., TIFF Bell Lightbox) is set in one of the most impoverished neighbourhoods in Warsaw, Poland. The film’s young protagonist idolizes Bruce Lee and dreams of becoming a stunt man. Though the story is slight, Bartosz M. Kowalski shoots beautifully and refuses easy allegories and generalizations of Polish youth.

Last but not least, the Nightvision program continues to impress with Mistaken for Strangers (, 11:59 p.m., Bloor Hot Docs Cinema). A new take on the “rockumentary,” here the creative differences fall along family lines, as the frontman for The National invites his younger brother to tour with the band as a roadie.

After Tiller looks at the abortion debate. Image courtesy of Hot Docs.

A week into Hot Docs 2013—my how time flies when you’re having a doc of a good time!—and today’s offerings keep up the pace.

Torontonian Liz Marshall’s The Ghosts in our Machine (, 6:30 p.m. Bloor Hot Docs Cinema) is a complex and intricate look at animal-rights activism, through the (literal) lens of photojournalist Jo-Anne McArthur. Eschewing sensational grim imagery—though there is some of that—the doc finds hope in an aspect of human behaviour that some of us never think twice about: eating animals.

Also playing today is Buying Sex (, 6 p.m. TIFF Bell Lightbox). Focusing on a recent Ontario court ruling that legalized some aspects of prostitution, Teresa MacInnes and Kent Nason’s film looks at both sides of the debate, allowing sex workers to speak in favour and against. It’s a balanced look at a complex issue, though it lags a little near the end.

A must-see at the festival rounds off the day: Martha Shane and Lana Wilson’s After Tiller (, 9 p.m. Isabel Bader Theatre). After the assassination of Dr. George Tiller in 2009, access to third-trimester abortions in the United States became incredibly limited. The documentary follows the four remaining doctors who still do the procedure. It tells their stories, professional and private. Set largely in abortion clinics, the film seeks to pull back the curtain on this highly political medical practice, taking it, and those who work in the field, out of the abstract.

International Spectrum is the most polyglot of Hot Docs 2013′s 11 film programmes, with a slate made up of submissions from countries that include Egypt, Serbia, Brazil, Finland, Denmark, and China, to name just a few. You won’t necessarily find many familiar names or topics among these selections, but then that’s the whole idea.

Click any of the images below for more information about a particular International Spectrum film. Or, check out our nifty Hot Docs 2013 hub for a list of all our reviews to date.

12 O’CLOCK BOYS DIRECTED BY LOTFY NATHAN

LOVE STILL DIRECTED BY GUZMÁN GARCIA

THE LAST STATION DIRECTED BY CATALINA VERGARA AND CRISTIAN SOTO

FOREST OF THE DANCING SPIRITS DIRECTED BY LINDA VASTRIK

DRAGON GIRLS DIRECTED BY INIGO WESTMEIER

ANOTHER NIGHT ON EARTH DIRECTED BY DAVID MUNOZ

Getting down for the environment in Fuck for Forest. Image courtesy of Hot Docs.

On day six of Hot Docs, love—or, at least, sex—is in the air. And Gaza, too! What? Just roll with it, folks.

First up is the excellent Fuck for Forest (, 4 p.m. TIFF Bell Lighbox). Michal Marczak’s documentary embeds his camera with a Berlin-based group that makes porn and uses the profits to try and save the earth. Even during intimate moments, the film maintains an interesting observational distance from its subjects, which gives it a nature-documentary feel.

On a different note, Gaza Calling, from director Nahed Awwad, (, 6:30 p.m. ROM Theatre), examines the physical and symbolic gap between Palestinians and Israelis. Looking at the daily lives and struggles of those in the Palestinian territories, the doc captures the strife of a landless people trapped by bureaucracy.

If you’re still in the mood for love, Guzmán Garcia looks for romance at a Uruguayan dance hall in Love Still (, 9 p.m. Scotiabank). The film’s 11 vignettes, starring elderly patrons, reveal that even late-in-life matters of the heart remain beguiling, complicated, and, at times, painful.