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Reviewed: Enemy; Our Man in Tehran; Good Vibrations; The Selfish Giant

Times Colonist movie writer Michael D. Reid is covering the Victoria Film Festival. Watch for his reviews at timescolonist.com/vff. Ratings are out of five stars. Enemy Where: Cineplex Odeon When: Saturday, 7:15 p.m.

Times Colonist movie writer Michael D. Reid is covering the Victoria Film Festival. Watch for his reviews at timescolonist.com/vff. Ratings are out of five stars.

Enemy

Where: Cineplex Odeon

When: Saturday, 7:15 p.m.

Rating: 3/5 stars


In this dark, existential and often exasperating thriller — a movie best described as a mind screw (I’m being polite) — Jake Gyllenhaal plays Adam, a mild-mannered history professor who becomes obsessed with what appears to be his doppelganger — Anthony, a sex-obsessed movie bit player and biker. As the lookalikes’ disparate lives crisscross to their mutual horror, and the understandable confusion of their respective blond, similar-looking wives, Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve eerily, and in slow-motion, takes us on a trippy excursion into the subconscious, alternately teasing and tormenting us with fragments of a Kafka-esque puzzle with a tip of the hat to David Cronenberg. Adapted from Jose Saramago’s novel The Double, this aggressively enigmatic journey is both compelling and confounding, with Villeneuve using a mournful score and a dreary, almost dreamlike Toronto backdrop to great atmospheric effect. It’s a head-scratcher, to be sure, and not for filmgoers seeking easy answers. You’ll either love or loathe this artful metamorphosis if you’re ever done trying to figure it out.

Our Man in Tehran

Where: Vic Theatre

When: Saturday, 5 p.m.

Rating: 4/5 stars


While Joe Clark and Flora MacDonald might not have the sex appeal or box-office pull of actor-director Ben Affleck in his Oscar-winning thriller Argo, the former Canadian prime minister and foreign affairs minister deliver star power of a different sort in this taut, captivating documentary from first-time filmmaker Drew Taylor and documentary veteran Larry Weinstein that tells the real story of how big a role Canada played in hiding and covertly extracting six U.S. Embassy officials during the Iran hostage crisis in 1979-80. Title character Ken Taylor, then Canada’s young ambassador to Iran, calmly and articulately provides historical context augmented by input from his wife, Pat; former CIA operative William Daugherty, one of the 52 people held hostage after Iranian militants seized the U.S. embassy; journalists Joe Schlesinger and Carole Jerome; and a surprisingly understated Tony Mendez himself, the retired CIA agent Affleck portrayed . A nostalgic and refreshingly balanced tapestry of commentary and archival footage, this fascinating flashback also corrects inaccurate reports that Taylor housed all six hostages, rather than two, and reveals not just the complexities of getting the Canadian government to issue phony passports so the hidden Americans could escape by posing as a Canadian film crew scouting locations for a fake sci-fi flick, but how a CIA technical blooper almost botched the operation. By the time it’s over, you’ll feel darned proud to be a Canadian.

Good Vibrations

Where: Cineplex Odeon

When: Saturday, 4:30 p.m.; Feb. 16, 6:45 p.m.

Rating: 2.5/5 stars


Despite its pervasive rock movie clichés, there’s a lot to love about this rousing if rough-edged and somewhat pedestrian musical biopic that has nothing to do with the Beach Boys hit and everything to do with Belfast’s emerging punk rock scene in the 1970s at the height of “the troubles.” Richard Dormer is engagingly charismatic as Terri Hooley, the irrepressible political activist and small-time pub DJ who became known as “the Godfather of Belfast punk” after his record shop and label of the title provided a showcase for Irish punk bands like the Outcasts and later his discovery of the Undertones, whose Teenage Kicks was a minor hit. While Hooley’s success was limited — partly because of his own ineptitude and alcoholism — his blend of enthusiasm, blind ambition and unabashed idealism makes for a great story, flawed and embellished as it might be. You can forgive such missteps by directors Lisa Barros D’Ía and Glenn Leyburn, however. They deserve top marks for their depiction of a dangerous time and place. It’s so grittily evocative you can practically smell the stale lager, urine-soaked alleys and musty record jackets.

The Selfish Giant

Where: Odeon

When: Saturday, 9:45 p.m.

Rating: 4/5 stars


It’s depressing as hell, but fans of the Ken Loach school of grim social realism won’t want to miss writer-director Clio Barnard’s bleak, devastating and perversely engrossing cinéma vérité-style portrait of life in an impoverished northern England town as seen through the eyes of two ostracized and mercilessly exploited youngsters society has failed miserably. Non-professional actors Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas as Arbor, an ADHD-afflicted “bad influence” whose brother steals and sells his Ritalin; and Swifty, his quiet, blindly loyal best friend with an abusive father, are grittily naturalistic as their characters — expelled from school and with no positive role models — sell stolen scrap metal loaded onto a horse-drawn cart to a shady scrapyard operator. Warning: coarse language and accents so thick, subtitles are required.

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