Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
(100 mins, 15) Directed by Matt Johnson; starring Matt Johnson, Jay McCarrol, Ben Petrie
Born from a gonzo Canadian web series – some of which is cleverly incorporated into the film – about a musical duo and their hapless quest to secure a show at a small indie venue in Toronto, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is a gloriously eccentric one-off: a lo-fi time-travel picture that playfully twists the rockumentary format.
In all the years that Matt (Matt Johnson, who directed and starred in BlackBerry) and Jay (Jay McCarrol) have been putting on increasingly outlandish stunts to try to secure a slot at the Rivoli, they don’t appear to have written any complete songs. Matt (enthusiastic, overbearingly friendly to tourists in Toronto) dreams up schemes on a well-used whiteboard; Jay (laconic, resigned) shrugs and, once again, gets sucked into the slipstream of Matt’s questionable ideas.
Their latest plan is to skydive from the observatory platform of the CN Tower, through the roof of the SkyDome, and on to the pitch during a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game. Part of the joy of the film comes from the unscripted interactions between Matt and Jay and various unwitting members of the public. It’s shot using similar guerrilla techniques to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat films; the key difference being that where Borat went out of his way to offend, these guys are about as nice as it’s possible to be.
The time travel aspect is not so much an homage to Back to the Future as a wholesale plot appropriation. When the CN Tower plan fails, Matt fits his recreational vehicle with a flux capacitor, travelling back to 2008 and the band’s early years. Suffice to say, time-hopping can be dangerous in the hands of a doofus.
Birds of War
(85 mins, 15) Directed by Janay Boulos, Abd Alkader Habak; featuring Janay Boulos, Abd Alkader Habak
It’s not a conventional meet-cute that sparks the love story in this affecting documentary. Janay Boulos is a Lebanese BBC journalist based in London; Abd Alkader Habak is an activist cameraman documenting the devastation wrought by Bashar al-Assad’s regime on the ground in Aleppo, Syria.
Their first contact, shown through the polite text messages that pop up on screen, is purely professional. Boulos is looking for stories from Syria; Habak has the courage and connections to provide them. But, gradually, the messages grow warmer; shared with the audience, they are every bit as compelling as the footage of conflict that provides the backdrop to their growing bond.
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This is an exceptionally powerful film, encompassing displacement, exile, revolutions and a pair of cats named Couscous and Fashfash. Drawing on 13 years of archives, the couple, who co-direct the film, explore the contradictions of falling in love – the ultimate act of hope – in a time of profound loss.
Minions & Monsters
(90 mins, U) Directed by Pierre Coffin; voiced by Pierre Coffin, Jesse Eisenberg, Christoph Waltz
The unstoppable yellow force of the Despicable Me/Minions franchise continues unabated with one of the strongest, silliest instalments to date. A series of Big Boss mishaps has left a tribe of minions roaming the globe in search of evil. Instead, they find Hollywood. It’s the silent-film era – playful visual nods to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd abound – and the minions’ gift for inventive slapstick is embraced by the cigar-chomping studio bosses. They become stars, and can do no wrong.
Until the advent of sound, that is, when it becomes clear that blowing raspberries and repeating the word “banana” is not going to cut it. So an enterprising minion named James (voiced by director Coffin) decides to make his own monster movie, with real monsters. Chaos, and sentient goo, ensues.
My Father’s Island
(115 mins, 15) Directed by Vladimir de Fontenay; starring Swann Arlaud, Woody Norman, Tuppence Middleton
Adapted from an intensely personal book by David Vann, My Father’s Island taps into the dangerous allure of the outdoors life and the romanticised myth of self-sufficiency. Formidable young talent Woody Norman – after his terrific breakthrough performance in Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon – plays teenager Roy. He lives an ordinary life with his frazzled single mum (Tuppence Middleton), teetering on the edge of a first love and blundering through adolescence.
Then his father, Tom (Anatomy of a Fall actor Swann Arlaud), invites him to spend a year in a cabin on a photogenic island in the far north (in the book, it’s in Alaska; in the film, it is off the coast of Norway). They will hunt and shoot, live on fish and meat (“Like men,” says his dad). But it’s a precarious existence – one, Roy realises, that his father might not be mentally fit enough to survive. There’s a shocking twist in the book that also features in the film: a disconcerting narrative gut punch, but also a rather disingenuous device that requires an end-credit explanation to unravel the knots.
Photograph by NEON, Jana Ghassan, Illumination & Universal Pictures