DON'T MISS... Margaret | this week only!

Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan made a remarkable first film that's not mentioned too often these days, but which was an extreme favourite of mine. YOU CAN COUNT ON ME (2000) introduced me to both Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo, in remarkable performances.

It's taken over a decade for his second film to reach the screen. MARGARET is praised by everybody who sees it - though that "everybody" is a very small everybody, since it's mostly only been screened in New York, and even that in limited runs. Anna Paquin and Matt Damon headline, Mark Ruffalo's back and Jean Reno is in the cast, but I'm equally excited to see playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis (Jesus Hopped The 'A' Train, The Last Days Of Judas Iscariot) onscreen.

THREE SHOWINGS ONLY, this week, at the Vancouver International Film Centre (AKA the VanCity).

Mon Jan 2, 8pm
Wed Jan 4, 8pm
Thu Jan 5, 8pm

This from the VIFC website:

Hollywood doesn’t produce too many movies like this, and when it does, it doesn’t know what to do with them. Lonergan’s long-awaited, troubled follow up to You Can Count On Me is a volcanic, raw, turbulent drama, probably the most ambitious American film of the year.

Seventeen-year-old Lisa (Anna Paquin) is rocked with guilt after a woman is killed in a traffic accident (she had inadvertently distracted the driver). But that’s only one thread in a teeming social tapestry this intense, passionate teen must negotiate as she comes of age in a time of contradiction and confusion.

“Bursts with ambition and specificity… Paquin deserves the highest accolades for her ferociously committed performance…The film has a cumulative power – solidified by a devastating opera-house finale – that’s staggering. This is frayed-edges filmmaking at its finest.” Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

“Wildly ambitious… embraces big and rich themes and sumptuous tones and moods with a remarkable scope and nuance… For all its awkwardness and uncertainty, the film is a city symphony, romantic yet scathing, lyrical with street life and vaulting skylines, reckless with first adventure, and awed by the abstractions, both intellectual and poetic, on which the great machine runs.” Richard Brody, The New Yorker