The Words is a complicated bit of screencraft — three interconnected stories nestled one within like a Russian matryoshka doll — but in this week’s MovieStyle, our reviewer Piers Marchant finds it lacking in heft, saying that “rather than explore the ways in which stories come to us ... the film is resolute in its melodrama, assuming that the wispy characters and their struggles with beautiful women are enough to rivet us to the screen.” And maybe they are.
A meatier meal might be made of the “quizzical and sweet” Robot & Frank, which isn’t exactly the sci-fi buddy comedy its title and trailers seem to suggest. Our Philip Martin sees in it an “Alzheimer’s allegory about an old man nearing the end of his usefulness and a bit of temporarily enabling technology.”
Martin was less than thrilled with Take This Waltz, that while it has the considerable virtue of Michelle Williams, struck him as “smug and horrible, a story about nasty twenty-somethings who assume the world should care about them because they’re attractive and aspire to arty lifestyles.” On the other hand, it sure makes Toronto look pretty.
Also in Friday's section, we’ve got Branded and The Cold Light of Day, both of which the studios kindly refrained from screening for critics.