Cinecenta Films

Fuze
June 12 & 13: 5:00 pm, 7:00 pm
The opening credits of the heist thriller Fuze flicker and shake like action-movie credits used to do back in the good old Tony Scott days. That’s an early indication that the film, from director David Mackenzie and writer Ben Hopkins, has a clear sense of what tradition it wants to honor. The film prizes style, but has no higher ambition than to entertain, with an economy of means and no fussy pretension. …It begins as a story of civic suspense: A London construction crew unwittingly digs up an unexploded bomb from the Blitz, similar to an event that really happened in Plymouth last year. It’s a compelling setup, connecting the sleek modernity of Fuze to a horror of the past. The clock ticks all too swiftly as the police and military work to clear the area and bring in a special team, led by an army major played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who will try to defuse the bomb.-The Hollywood Reporter

LUCID
June 10 & 11: 5:00 pm, 7:10 pm
Victoria Filmmaking heroes/ Co-Directors Deana Milligan and Ramsey Fendall will be on hand for Q&As after the 7:10pm shows!

…Short star Caitlin Acken Taylor returns as lead character Mia, a struggling art student whose dabbling with candy elixir ‘Lucid’ opens up her creativity, but also a forgotten darkness from her past. Whilst the story presented within Lucid is a compelling one, telling of one young woman’s journey to accept both her present and past self; this is a film whose strength lies in its visuals. Considering that the protagonist is an art student, this comes as no surprise, but the imagery itself is. The art experienced in Lucid is not the traditional pastels and watercolours. Mia is conceptual with her work, and the results are grungy and gnarly. There is a grittiness to Mia’s art and this is mirrored through the onscreen grain of Lucid provided by the use of 35mm and 16mm to shoot the film. The use of camera also adds a hazy, dreamy quality to the appearance and helps support the more surreal elements of Lucid that start to take over. The sets and costumes are made of beautiful garbage, everything on screen an extension of Mia herself.-The Hollywood News

“Simply stated: Lucid is a phantasmagorical 90’s banger, whose period setting isn’t simply a nostalgic crutch, but instead an actual device to tell an intriguing story of its time.”-Cinapse

Orlando, My Political Biography
June 9: 5:00 pm, 7:00 pm
Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography as its starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado has fashioned the documentary, Orlando, My Political Biography, as a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto which premiered and took home four prizes at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival. For almost a century, Woolf’s eponymous hero/heroine has inspired readers for their gender fluidity across physical and spiritual metamorphoses over a 300-year lifetime. Preciado casts a diverse cross-section of more than twenty trans and non-binary individuals in the role of Orlando as they perform interpretations of scenes from the novel, weaving into Woolf’s narrative their own stories of identity and transition. Not content to simply update a seminal work, Preciado interrogates the relevance of Orlando in the continuing struggle against anti-trans ideologies and in the fight for global trans rights.

Mile End Kicks
June 3 & 4: 5:00 pm, 7:00 pm
There might never be a better movie released in this era that celebrates the vibrancy of Montreal’s cultural sphere quite like this one. Not even Québec-based productions ever captured the feeling Levack imbues through Grace Pine’s (Barbie Ferreira) journey of self-discovery. The twenty-six-year-old music critic decides to quit her job at an incredibly sexist magazine and move to Montreal, in an attempt to write a book about Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” – a watershed moment not only for Morissette’s journey as an artist, but for Canadian music as a whole. At her apartment in the Mile End, her roommates Madeleine (Juliette Gariépy) and Hugo (Robert Naylor) introduce Grace to the band Bone Patrol, led by singer Chevy (Stanley Simons). The burgeoning author immediately becomes infatuated by the frontman’s charms and vocal talents, but also develops an affinity with the band’s guitarist, Archie (Devon Bostick). What you think will happen happens, but part of the charm of such a predictable coming-of-age tale isn’t necessarily the story being told, but what’s around it. –Film Speak

Agatha's Almanac
May 31 & June 1: 5:10 pm, 7:00 pm
Director Amalie Atkins will be live & in-person for a Q&A after the May 31 7pm show
The focus is solely on Atkins’s 90-year-old aunt Agatha Bock, who spends her highly ritualized days tending to her farm in southern Manitoba. There is no inciting incident or dramatic tension, unless you count Agatha’s long-time war on the bugs who ruin the crops dotting her 64-acre property. Mostly, the film simply follows Agatha from dawn till dusk, the charming subject occasionally reflecting on her life and offering poignant but not exactly mind-blowing pearls of wisdom. Atkins, a multidisciplinary artist, proudly doesn’t obey the almost obligatory rhythms of documentary filmmaking. There are no talking heads, no manufactured narrative momentum. And, blessedly, it avoids the too-crisp digital sheen of contemporary docs, with the director enlisting cinematographer Rhayne Vermette (who has another defiantly avant-garde film out this week with Dead Lover) to capture Agatha on 16mm film, the images so gritty in texture and saturated in colour that they feel unearthed from another era altogether. Age, this time, comes after beauty.-Globe & Mail

The Christophers
May 29 & 30: 5:00 pm, 7:00 pm
96% Rotten Tomatoes
The two artists at the center of The Christophers are introduced not hunched over their easels, but slogging through the dreariness of the gig economy: Cantankerous elder statesman Julian Sklar (a riveting Ian McKellen) is recording half-hearted Cameos for fans, and should-be rising star Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) is running a food truck to offset the loss of her art restoration business. The creative spark of their unlikely partnership becomes the crux of Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, an art heist tale that grows into a refreshingly layered meditation on the messy interplay between artist, muse, and viewer. A potential ticket out of Lori’s artistic slump comes in the form of Julian’s grown children, art school nepo classmate Sallie (Jessica Gunning) and her equally entitled brother, Barnaby (James Corden). Her mission? Complete The Christophers, a series of famously unfinished masterpieces their father made of his lover in the 90s, so the siblings can rake in millions by selling the forgeries.-Chicago Reader