Your weekend preview: What to see (and what to skip) in the theatres

This week’s big buzz film is Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood  (Rating: A) the director’s ninth film and his most cinema-nostalgic yet. A buddy picture starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt against the background of the Manson killings and the beginnings of the New Hollywood, the film  is replete with imaginary and real movie and TV clips, music and fashion of the period, as well as its stars (Connie Stevens, Steve McQueen, Bruce Lee) with Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate. 

Reviewer Liam Lacey calls the film is a fanciful cultural gift basket and Tarantino’s warmest film since Jackie Brown

Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood.

Canadian director Laurie Lynd’s Killing Patient Zero (A) is a documentary look back at the panic surrounding the AIDS epidemic and the myth of “Patient Zero”, widely and wrongfully identified by the media as Air Canada steward, Gaétan Dugas. Reviewer Jim Slotek says Patient Zero reminds “how we react as a society to the unknown, especially when fueled by the fire of ignorance and moral judgment.”

Forty five years after The Apprenticeship  of Duddy Kravitz, Richard Dreyfuss is back in another Canadian film as a guy with outsized dreams. The film, Astronaut (B minus) follows optimistic senior, Angus (Dreyfuss), who is hoping to win a lottery to become a passenger on a space flight. The seasoned Can-Con cast includes Graham Greene, Colm Feore, Colin Mochrie, Art Hindle and Mimi Kuzyk. Jim Slotek says it’s a slow, sweet movie is which space plot is a mrere framework on which hang the arcs of the characters.

 In this week’s podcast: we compare notes on Tarantino, argue about the hideous trailer for Cats (Karen Gordon disagrees!), preview the Toronto International Film Festival and give you the inside scoop on the festival’s opening night documentary, Once Were Brothers; Robbie Robertson and the Band.

Have a great weekend.