The SunBreak at TIFF: Take Three

I was thinking that I had been lucky at TIFF so far. That while everything I saw hadn't been exactly to my liking, every film had had something interesting about it, and none of the films were truly bad. And then I saw Passion Play. The film stars Mickey Rourke as an old broken-down piece of meat (the role he will continue to play until whenever he decides to stop acting again), this time as a washed-up, ex-druggie jazz trumpeter who falls in love with Mexican circus sideshow bird girl Megan Fox. Not even Bill Murray as a murderous corrupt businessman/pimp named Happy can redeem this film (though he certainly tries). And the romance between the two leads is certainly cringeworthy, since it's not so much beauty and the beast as it is beast and the beast--one is a circus freak, and the other is Mickey Rourke.

Casino Jack (not to be confused with the Alex Gibney documentary on the same topic with nearly the same name) stars Kevin Spacey as Jack Abramoff, another asshole role that Spacey can add to his asshole filmography. Spacey takes on the role with great relish--due to Abramoff's real-life love of movies, he gets to show off his impersonation skills--with Barry Pepper as his partner in crime, Michael Scanlon. While the film has its moments (and Jon Lovitz, as a mob-affiliated businessman, steals nearly every scene he's in), I still prefer the documentary to the narrative feature, if only because the truth is always stranger than the fictionalized version thereof.

Speaking of truth, The Whistleblower marks director Larysa Kondracki's feature debut, and she picked a big story to tell: that of Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraskan cop who went to work for the UN peacekeeping force in post-war Sarajevo, only to stumble upon a huge human trafficking sex ring operating underground in war-torn Bosnia. It has all the hallmarks of a tense international thriller (exotic locales, double-crosses, quick pacing), but the facts of the story give it an emotional heft. And Rachel Weisz as Bolkovac is just as good as you'd expect: tender, smart, and tough. She's one flinty dame.