Friday Feb 26 to Thursday Mar 3, 2016

FILMS SHOWING Friday February 26 to Thursday March 3

The Lady in the Van

"Wonderfully funny, terribly touching and a vehicle for the boundless gifts of Maggie Smith." - Wall Street Journal

"It's 16 years since Maggie Smith last played cantankerous Mary Shepherd in Alan Bennett’s hit play about his real-life nuisance neighbour. Since then the veteran actress has carefully honed the art of the acidic one-liner in Downton Abbey and two 'Marigold Hotel' films.

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Brooklyn

Nominated for 3 Oscars, incl. Best Film & Actress. "A superb, emotionally turbulent account of a young Irishwoman's attempt to become an American in the early 1950s." - Hollywood Reporter

"The Lacey women, wrote Irish novelist Colm Toibin in his 2009 book BROOKLYN, could do everything, 'except say out loud what it was they were thinking.' In John Crowley’s lovely film made from the novel, Saoirse Ronan ('Atonement') provides a master class in showing, not saying, what her character Eilis Lacey is thinking.

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Embrace of the Serpent

14A

Oscar Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. "A blazingly original, heartbreaking, meditative, and strange journey into the heart and soul of the Amazonian rain forest."

Free screening presented by Laurier Wellbeing in Film Forum

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Requiem for the American Dream

"Called the 'most important intellectual of our time', the venerable Noam Chomsky focuses here on financial inequality in America and what he calls its corrosive effect on democracy. A documentary that couldn’t be more timely." New York Times

“Thank heavens he ends on an upbeat note! Well, semi-upbeat. For 73 minutes, Noam Chomsky, one of the great intellectuals of the past hundred years, describes how America was founded with a mandate to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” and how it’s only got worse since then.

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45 Years

14A

Oscar Nominee: Best Actress. "A devastatingly intimate tale about a couple unsettled late-in-life, by an unexpected revelation." - NPR

"In the beautifully acted drama '45 Years,' a marriage lives and dies; we watch its agonized struggle, like a butterfly impaled on a pin. It’s a quiet movie, taking place over a week in the lives of Kate and Geoff Mercer (Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay), a retired British couple happily anticipating a party for their 45th anniversary.

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Anomalisa

18A

Oscar Nominee: Best Animated Feature. "Need proof that animation can not only equal live-action filmmaking but beat the flesh-and-blood version at its own game? Try Anomalisa, as haunting and hypnotic an R-rated love story for grownups as you'll see anywhere." - Rolling Stone

“Charlie Kaufman, the mind behind “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” possesses an artistic sensibility unlike any other filmmaker working today. That sensibility informs every word and frame of “Anomalisa,” which received an Oscar nomination for best animated feature.

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Spotlight

14A

Winner! Oscar for Best Picture. "A remarkably assured and tight retelling of the Boston Globe's investigation into the Catholic Church's legacy of child abuse and cover-ups." - Globe & Mail

"Spotlight is a masterpiece. Director Tom McCarthy’s drama embraces both great cinema and even better journalism as it chronicles a Boston Globe investigative team’s real-life expose on child abuse by local priests and the Catholic Church cover-up that followed. Not only is it an amazingly crafted movie, it’s an important one as well.

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Room

14A

Winner! Oscar for Best Actress (Brie Larson). "It's a deeply satisfying, profoundly moving adaptation of a popular novel, an all-too-rare occurrence in modern Hollywood." Winner, Golden Globe Best Actress

"Adapted from Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel of the same name, this captivity narrative about a woman and her young son living in a 10-by-10-foot shed is no one’s idea of a feel-good story.

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Son of Saul

14A

Oscar Nominee! Best Foreign Language Film. "A Holocaust drama like you have never seen before. Movies simply don't get more powerful than this." - SF Chronicle

“38-year-old Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes has made a staggering feature debut with 'Son of Saul', an Auschwitz-set drama that's numbing, provocative and impossible to unsee.

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Cartel Land

14A

Oscar-Nominated for Best Documentary Feature. "Frightening, fly-on-the-wall documentary following the efforts of vigilantes to wrest control of border towns back from ruthless drug cartels operating along the Rio Grande." - Baret News

“It’s a weary old truism that popular revolutions generally end up betraying those they were initiated to defend.

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Norm of the North

March Break Film Festival! All seats $5 "Norm has oodles of charm, a razor-sharp wit and pacing that should keep even preschoolers attentive." - Boston Herald

Norm (Rob Schneider) is an Arctic polar bear who doesn’t eat meat or hunt like other bears. And unlike his Arctic cohabitants — he’s upset to find that there’s no more room for human tourists in the Arctic. Norm simply doesn’t fit in.

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88th Academy Awards

Join us for the 88th Academy Awards! Fully licensed event for you to enjoy a beverage with your Oscars. All-ages. Red carpet broadcast starts at 7:00pm. FREE (must have a ticket - registration now closed!) This is a benefit for the Food Bank of Waterloo Region: please bring a non-perishable food item!

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Friday Feb 26 to Thursday Mar 3, 2016