Rep Cinema This Week: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The 50 Year Argument, and Leviathan

By Angelo Muredda

The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.

Still from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.

At rep cinemas this week: a genre-mixing vampire western smash from last year’s edition of Sundance, Martin Scorsese’s in-depth tour of The New York Review of Books, and Russia’s Oscar hopeful for Best Foreign Language Film.

TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Showtimes

Like so many Sundance wunderkinds before her, Ana Lily Amirpour burst out of the gate after a series of promising shorts before making her feature debut: 2014’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. A half-ironic, half-sincere vampire western set, in a twist on both genres, in an Iranian ghost town identified only as “Bad City,” Amirpour’s film feels like a throwback to a strand of retro-influenced late-‘90s indies made by certified cinephiles like Jim Jarmusch and, at the risk of being obvious, Quentin Tarantino.

There’s no denying Amirpour’s steady directorial hand and sharp minimalist aesthetic, whose stillness and penchant for capturing dreary industrial wastelands in inky black and white reminds one of Jarmusch as well as Montreal’s Denis Côté. That said, beyond the unimpeachably cool style and the filmmaker’s clear cinephile bona fides—from a certain angle, our heroes look like James Dean and Anna Karina—it’s tough to get a grip on just what this film is doing apart from playfully remixing genres. Some will no doubt find its blend of woozy romanticism and understated horror beats beguiling, but we suspect others a bit closer to our own hearts may be more curious about where Amirpour is going next.

The 50 Year Argument
Directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi

Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)
Showtimes

Martin Scorsese and co-director David Tedeschi do print journalism a solid in The 50 Year Argument, not just a history of the venerable institution of The New York Review of Books but a persuasive argument about why we still need such outlets today. The film splits its time about evenly between a present-day portrait of founding editor Robert Silvers’s day-to-day operations as the magazine’s singular guiding voice, and a mixed-media tour through some of the journal’s most famous contributions to American cultural and political life from luminaries like James Baldwin and Joan Didion—the former approach registering more strongly as cinema, even as the latter is more inherently interesting.

If Scorsese and Tedeschi lean too heavily at times on the prose of the magazine’s most famous contributors—tracking its winding progression on-screen in extreme close-ups, with underlines and other ostentatious typeface experimentations used for emphasis—they nevertheless make the case for the Review’s importance as an outlet that shaped the conversation at various satellite points in American political and cultural history, from Vietnam to second-wave feminism. We would have appreciated a greater sense of the magazine’s readership outside of its own celebrity pool of authors, as well as some consideration of how a publication like the Review positions itself as a populist (but still high-minded) alternative to academia, but such quibbles don’t detract from what is obviously a polished and well-researched look at a major cultural institution.

Leviathan
Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev

TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Showtimes

Andrey Zvyagintsev won an award for screenwriting at Cannes for Leviathan, a character-driven national epic in miniature about Kolya (Alexey Serebryakov), a stubborn homesteader who refuses to sell his land for development, much to the chagrin of the coastal town’s corrupt mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov), who shows up drunk on his citizen’s property with a cocked fist and a bevy of hired goons. Before long, Kolya’s resistance—and decision to call in a favour from his big-city lawyer friend and military junior Dima (Vladimir Vdovitchenkov)—will put not just his land but his whole family in jeopardy.

Aided by a sparingly used score from Philip Glass, Zvyagintsev brings a masterful touch to the material, steadily teasing out Kolya’s Job-like downfall under the eyes of an unmoved God. His hand is so steady, and the actors’ performances so naturalistic, that one is inclined to forgive the last act’s descent into bathos—if not its flat use of Kolya’s wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) as a narrative prop to exact our tears.