Cinecenta Films

Agatha's Almanac
May 31 & June 1: 5:10 pm, 7:00 pm
Director Amalie Atkins will be live & in-person for a Q&A after the May 31 7pm show
The focus is solely on Atkins’s 90-year-old aunt Agatha Bock, who spends her highly ritualized days tending to her farm in southern Manitoba. There is no inciting incident or dramatic tension, unless you count Agatha’s long-time war on the bugs who ruin the crops dotting her 64-acre property. Mostly, the film simply follows Agatha from dawn till dusk, the charming subject occasionally reflecting on her life and offering poignant but not exactly mind-blowing pearls of wisdom. Atkins, a multidisciplinary artist, proudly doesn’t obey the almost obligatory rhythms of documentary filmmaking. There are no talking heads, no manufactured narrative momentum. And, blessedly, it avoids the too-crisp digital sheen of contemporary docs, with the director enlisting cinematographer Rhayne Vermette (who has another defiantly avant-garde film out this week with Dead Lover) to capture Agatha on 16mm film, the images so gritty in texture and saturated in colour that they feel unearthed from another era altogether. Age, this time, comes after beauty.-Globe & Mail

The Christophers
May 29 & 30: 5:00 pm, 7:00 pm
96% Rotten Tomatoes
The two artists at the center of The Christophers are introduced not hunched over their easels, but slogging through the dreariness of the gig economy: Cantankerous elder statesman Julian Sklar (a riveting Ian McKellen) is recording half-hearted Cameos for fans, and should-be rising star Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) is running a food truck to offset the loss of her art restoration business. The creative spark of their unlikely partnership becomes the crux of Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, an art heist tale that grows into a refreshingly layered meditation on the messy interplay between artist, muse, and viewer. A potential ticket out of Lori’s artistic slump comes in the form of Julian’s grown children, art school nepo classmate Sallie (Jessica Gunning) and her equally entitled brother, Barnaby (James Corden). Her mission? Complete The Christophers, a series of famously unfinished masterpieces their father made of his lover in the 90s, so the siblings can rake in millions by selling the forgeries.-Chicago Reader