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AKA Doc Pomus, which opened November 29 at Cineplex Yonge and Dundas, is a befitting memorial for its subject, the legendary songwriter and genuine mensch, Doc Pomus. On braces and crutches after being stricken by polio at six in 1931, Jerome Felder (his birth name) loved listening to African-American music on the radio growing up in Brooklyn. His epiphany came around the age of 15, with Joe Turner’s record of “Piney Brown Blues.” Two years later he talked his way onto the stage of George’s in Greenwich Village. As he put it, “I was a white boy hooked on the blues – it was a midnight lady with a love lock on my soul.” After a handful of years, his recording career ended but by then Joe Turner himself had heard him and told Ahmet Ertegun to hire Pomus. Doc became a songwriter, one of the cornerstones of the legendary Brill Building writing for Turner and many more.

AKA Doc Pomus is a straightforward biography told by ex-wives and lovers, sons and a daughter, musicians and writers (Peter Guralnick and Dave Marsh, most notably) and adding even more to the many candid moments of archival footage of the man, there is Lou Reed on the soundtrack reading from Doc’s journals.

The songs speak for themselves: “Lonely Avenue” (for Ray Charles); “Save the Last Dance for Me” (inspired by Pomus’ own wedding and immortalized by Ben. E. King); “Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love” a piece of South Bronx blues encapsulated by Dion and the Belmonts (Bob Dylan said that everything you need to know is in that song). He wrote with Phil Spector and Mort Shuman, wrote big hits for Elvis (“Viva Las Vegas” and a host of movie vocals – when the King was under contract with MGM to make four musicals a year, each with ten songs) and Andy Williams (“Can’t Get Used to Losing You” taken from his own marriage breakdown). He worked with Dr. John, championed Lou Reed and little Jimmy Scott and taught Shawn Colvin and Joan Osbourne in his songwriting course. Dylan asked to write with him; John Lennon was a fan who became a friend. He was a denizen of midtown Manhattan hotels, the centre of revolving, seemingly never-ending musical evenings.

Doc Pomus’ song ended in 1991; AKA Doc Pomus reminds us that the memory lingers on. His life was a work of art of his own creation.

When you’re lost in Juarez these days, you’re in the murder capital of the world (3622 in 2010, for example – El Paso, Texas across the Rio Grande had five that year). Shaul Schwarz’s Narco Cultura is a cinéma vérité look at the Mexican drug cartels’ pop culture influence on a narco corrido singer, Edgar Quintero, with stars in his eyes and bullets in his belt, set against a crime scene investigator who must mask his identity to protect his life in Juarez. The singer makes the brutal life of a cartel member glamorous; fans on both sides of the border eat this stuff up. One journalist puts it in perspective: “Narcos represent limitless power but they are a symptom of a dead society; 92 per cent of murders have not been investigated.” Quintero takes a trip to Culiacán, in the heart of the northwestern state of Sinaloa. Schwarz follows him into a beautiful cemetery with big tombs filled with young dead men. Schwarz’s camera indicts without prejudice making for compelling viewing.  Narco Cultura, which premiered in May at Hot Docs, returns to the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema for a brief run, November 29, 30, December 1 and 5.

The Broken Circle Breakdown, a bluegrass musical and Belgium’s nominee for consideration as Best Foreign Language Academy Award, recently finished its brief engagement at TIFF Bell Lightbox. This lovely film tells the story of Didier, a banjo-playing farmer, Elise, his tattoo parlour worker wife, their six-year-old daughter Maybelle and her battle with cancer. The narrative begins by flashing back seven years to the couple’s first meeting and their intense love for each other, which never ebbs.

Didier is enamoured of the settlers of the Appalachian Mountains, the dirt-poor fortune hunters who lived there mining the slate that was so difficult to crack. To combat their hunger and misery -- he seduces Elise with this story actually – they sang about their dreams of a promised land, about their sorrow and their hunger and their misery, their fear of dying and their hope for a better life. As Didier tells it, each immigrant group brought a specific instrument to the mix: the Spaniard, a guitar; the Jew, a violin; the African, a banjo; and the Italian, a mandolin. It’s the essence of folk music according to Didier and Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, is the greatest musician in the world.

As the movie moves forward (and backward with its many flashbacks) we realized that it’s a country song come to life. Several country songs, in fact, in which love, joy, grief and blame play major parts, but the music is always tunefully sweet. Didier plays banjo in a classic bluegrass quintet; Elise becomes the lead singer and their performances punctuate and comment on the narrative, none more appropriate than Townes Van Zandt’s “If I Needed You.” Watch for The Broken Circle Breakdown at a rep theatre or  on video. It will take you to “the glory land.”

Two other films now playing are worthy of attention. Philomena, the runner-up to 12 Years a Slave for the People’s Choice Award at TIFF 2013, benefits from an Oscar-worthy performance from Judy Dench, a rich screenplay by Jeff Pope and Steve Coogan (who co-stars), a sensitive score by Alexandre Desplats and the remarkable Stephen Frears, who directs without show or artifice but always in the service of the humanism of the film’s riveting, true story.

Dench plays the title character, a retired Irish Catholic nurse whose pangs of regret, guilt and curiosity well up on what would have been her son’s 50th birthday to push her to find the child who was taken from her when she was under the care of the Abbey Sisters of Sacred Heart in Roscrea, Ireland as a teenager in the 1950s. Her companion in this search is a high-profile Oxford-educated ex-BBC television journalist and political scapegoat (played to acerbic perfection by Coogan). As the plot thickens, Desplats’ music (performed with subtlety and warmth by the London Symphony Orchestra) intensifies but never oversteps its bounds. The late John Tavener’s “Mother of God Here I Stand” makes a moving appearance near the end of this first-rate film that sensitively explores the bonds of maternal love, and the many facets of faith. Philomena opened November 29 at the Varsity and other theatres.

Short Term 12 follows foster children in a treatment facility being cared for by former foster children who have overcome the kind of problems that have led their patients into the bungalow they now call home. These are teenagers, mostly, who have been abused or who could not find comfort in their previous domestic life. Thoughtful and compassionate, it’s no docudrama, but a powerful story of parallel lives, propelled by a tour de force of realistic acting (Brie Larson, Best Actress, Locarno Film Festival 2013).

Larson plays Grace, a counsellor whose memories of an abusive childhood experience are unlocked by a new patient, Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever). The staff’s regular modus operandi is to use empathy as a major tool of therapy, so it’s doubly intense when Grace makes it so personal with Jayden.

The movie begins and ends with anecdotes by Mason, Grace’s fellow counsellor and boyfriend, the second of which sends you walking out of the theatre on a high since it reveals a crucial piece of information about another patient who we’ve come to root for.

Joel P West’s instrumental soundtrack is minimal and serviceable but his songs and especially those rapped by Keith Stanfield (who has a key supporting role in the film) deepen the authenticity portrayed onscreen. Short Term 12 is playing at TIFF Bell Lightbox and the Carlton.

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Two historical dramas, both inspired by true events, are appearing in Toronto theatres beginning August 16 and 23.  Lee Daniels’ The Butler (which opens first) follows the Civil Rights movement from the late 1950s tand the turbulent 60s right up to Obama’s election, all through the vantage point of a black White House butler, Cecil Gaines. Gaines’ character is based on Eugene Allen who served eight Presidents from Truman through Reagan (although the film has him beginning his service in 1957 to coincide with the first blast of the federal government’s interventionist role in Little Rock, Arkansas against the segregationist Governor Orville Faubus).

These history lessons never get old, from lunch counter sit-ins to the Bloody Sunday of the Selma march, the Freedom Bus incident with the Ku Klux Klan through the assassination of Martin Luther King and the rise of the Black Panthers, even as they are all too often subsumed by melodrama. That the film’s narrative is never completely thrown off its dynamic trajectory is chiefly due to Forest Whitaker’s nuanced, dignified performance in the title role (Oprah Winfrey is awards season bait as his wife). And to be sure, having one of his sons (played by David Oyelowo) become a participant in the struggles of the 1960s adds a special perspective to balance the cloak of invisibility that Gaines must wear in order to do his job.

The all-star cameo Presidential cast includes Robin Williams as Dwight Eisenhower, James Marsden as JFK, Liev Schreiber as LBJ (memorable sitting on the toilet while conducting a meeting with his advisors), John Cusack (laughable as Vice-President Richard Nixon, but curiously believable as President Nixon) and Alan Rickman (seemingly constipated) as a duplicitous Ronald Reagan.

The period soundtrack is at its best when it turns to R & B hits like Faye Adams singing “Hurts Me To My Heart” (1954) or Shorty Long doing “Function At The Junction.” Dinah Washington’s take on “I’ll Close My Eyes” (1956) enlivens the transition between Kennedy and Johnson; Gladys Knight brings great depth to Lenny Kravitz’s “You and I Ain’t Nothin’ No More.”

But the classical excerpts, like Gerald Robbins and the Moscow Philharmonic with Kenneth Klein conducting Schumann’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in A Minor are too nondescript to make a significant impact, beautiful as the music may be intrinsically. Mozart’s C Major Sonata, K. 545 and his Rondo No 2 for Violin and Orchestra, K. 373 are a solid upgrade on run-of-the-mill movie music but act only as a way to class up the production. Bach’s Praeludium from his Partita No. 1 stands out (undoubtedly because the pianist is Maria Joäo Pires), as does Walter Klien’s all-too-brief moment with Mozart’s Piano Variations on ‘Ah, Vous Dirai-Je, Maman.’

The Grandmaster conflates Wong Kar Wai’s best known film, the über romantic In the Mood for Love with his earlier martial arts homage to Sergio Leone, Ashes of Time. Warm strings and marching drums set up a kung fu match in the rain in Foshan 1936, a brassy orchestral combat between Gong Yutian the grandmaster of northern China and Ip Man (Wong favourite Tony Leung Chui Wai), from a well-to-do southern family. A piano solo introduces us to the Gold Pavilion brothel (which was a social club for martial artists) and to Gong’s daughter, Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi). Lots of facial close-ups serve the iconographic landscape well. Operatic music in the vein of Lakmé follows the breaking of the cake dance, a marvellously well-choreographed battle of wits between Gong and Ip, which Gong wins.

The Japanese invasion is conveyed through the shattering of a Gong family portrait, like going straight to winter from spring. Meanwhile, Ip likewise refuses to collaborate and loses two daughters, moves to Hong Kong in 1950 to support what was left of his family bringing his Wing Chun style of kung fu A-game. (The film is filled with ritual and customs like Ip Man’s stylized acceptance of a cigarette from the “Tai Chi Master.”) The orchestral introduction to “Casta Diva” for a crucial knife fight shows the different use of classical music in the two films. Here it enhances, in The Butler it just fills space. We never hear the voice in the Bellini; Wong Kar Wai knows how to build and savour the romantic moment.

Hyper romantic diffused images and the warmth of a cello set the scene for Ip’s second meeting with Gong Er, in Hong Kong where she is a doctor, having renounced martial arts but paying physically for her old injuries as a martial artist.

“How boring life would be without regrets,” she says. feeding Wong’s remorseful bent, as the soundtrack resonates with the action on the screen; in The Butler the use of classical music feels slapped on.

Wong uses excerpts from several Chinese operas, Deborah’s theme by Ennio Morricone from Once Upon a Time in America, Stafano Lentini’s Stabat Mater for soprano and orchestra and original music by Nathaniel Méchaly and Shigeru Umebayashi to enhance the rich imagery of his film. Meanwhile, the spirit of Wing Chun kept Ip Man going through the 1950s; his most famous pupil was Bruce Lee (an electrifying few seconds of a young boy smiling knowingly precisely capture his precocious talent).

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Lou Reed’s iconic 60s anthem Walk on the Wild Side encapsulated the sound of the decade with the line “And the coloured girls go Doo do doo do doo do do doo.” Right off the top of Twenty Feet from Stardom (currently at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema) filmmaker Morgan Neville’s exuberant homage to the unheralded backup singers who were an integral part of the music of an era, Darlene Love, Janice Pendarvis and Merry Clayton have a joyful reunion where they spontaneously go “Doo do doo do doo do do doo.”

Neville’s instructive documentary then proceeds to illuminate the joys of music making when the people you need to make happy are the people you’re working for. Focusing on the signature voices of (mostly) women who helped make other people stars, the film is a breezy 90-minute jukebox that puts its subjects in a historical context, incorporates major talking heads (Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, Sting and Stevie Wonder) and throws in some academic analysis from Dr. Todd Boyd who talks about “the transformative sound coming out of the backup singers.”

Springsteen is more direct: “It [Phil Spector’s He’s a Rebel] was the sound of youth. You started to pick up that voice [Darlene Love at 18] and you started to have an allegiance to that voice.” Spector made Love the voice of The Crystals who lip-synched to their hits. Love and her girl group, The Blossoms, were the wallpaper of early 60s pop but she walked away from Spector in the 70s, no longer able to bear being exploited by him.

Forced to work as a cleaning woman, she found herself cleaning a house in Beverly Hills when her 1963 hit, Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), came on the radio. She realilzed that she needed to sing (and move to New York City), beginning a rebirth, a solo career and 25 appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman.

But the iconic Love is the exception.

“We come in and sing the hooks,” says noted backup singer and current associate professor of voice at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Janice Pendarvis. “To blend and mesh with the other voices is awesome,” she adds.

“All the harmonies ping,” says jazz singer Jo Lawry, who currently backs up Sting.

“Some people will do anything to be famous, and then other people will just sing,” says Lisa Fischer, the revelation of the film. “I love melodies,” she adds, after scatting effortlessly. In Hounds of Winter, Sting described her as having an “extraordinary ghostly voice.” Trumpeter Chris Botti (with whom she has been performing jazz the last few years) calls her “a freak of nature” noting that Sting turned her “powerhouse voice” loose. She’s been on every Rolling Stones tour since 1989. (Her description of her audition for Mick Jagger was cut from the finished film -- when she started to sing, Jagger got up from his desk and walked over and began moving with her.)

Fischer explains her stunningly beautiful, lullaby-like version of Samuel Barber’s Sure on this Shining Night this way: “You just let yourself go. You never hit your head, you just land.”

She learned a lot about breath from Luther Vandross (who started as a backup singer himself). “Can you give it to me with more air,” he once asked of her.

Springsteen remembers being invited by David Bowie to Philadelphia in 1973 when Vandross was one of the backup singers in Bowie’s Young Americans band: “They bring a world with them,” Springsteen said.

The enthusiastic Waters Family seems happy with its backup role. According to Springsteen they secularized the gospel sound. You may not know them but you’ve heard them singing on the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland/Disney World, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the theme from Growing Pains and even producing bird sounds for the movie Avatar.

Led Zeppelin and Joe Cocker, among other Brits, wanted to sound black and needed backups to do so. Mick Jagger describes Merry Clayton’s work on Gimme Shelter this way: “She sings the lyrics right along with me with a lot of personality.” And when she sang “rape, murder, just a shot away,” Clayton had the good musical sense to go up another octave.

(Clayton willed herself to be a Raelette and then one day Ray Charles was waiting for the right note from her in his choir. Not getting it he punched it out repeatedly on the piano in front of 5,000 people.)

Why do they not make it as up front stars? Lou Adler simply says of Clayton: “Stardom eludes her.” Stevie Wonder is more articulate, talking about the importance of the material you choose and how you work with producers. Sting points out that “It’s not a level playing field, it’s circumstance, luck, destiny – I don’t know what it is.”

But if it takes ego, self-promotion and an understanding of the business to break out, why not satisfy your love of singing and serve another master?

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Welcome to Hot Docs, where content is the star, the story is the glitter and the grit is the glamour. There was no shortage of music-centric docs at the festival’s recently concluded 20th anniversary edition. From the audience award-winner Muscle Shoals to Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer’s courageous young Russian women, from As Time Goes By featuring the world’s oldest jazz combo to the Live Cinema: Image/Sound Mixing performance by Peter Mettler and Biosphere, there were at least 15 films exploring a multitude of musical worlds. Here are ten:

Take a cracking good yarn about a recording phenomenon that reveals as much about well-known (and enormously talented) musicians as it does of the music they make and you have Greg “Freddy” Camalier’s Muscle Shoals, voted Number One by this year’s Hot Docs audiences. It’s a film with many strong components beginning with the northern Alabama terroir where it’s situated, on the banks of the Tennessee River, which sang, according to native folklore. Its central character, Rick Hall, is the key to it all, a musician with childhood scars who started the FAME recording studio in his late 20s, staffed it with a groove-making back-up band, the Swampers, and committed some of the biggest names in soul music to vinyl. From Percy Sledge (“When a Man Loves a Woman”) who had gone from singing in the nearby cotton fields to serenading patients at the local hospital where he worked as an orderly to Aretha Franklin and Etta James. He was making integrated music in the era of the segregationist governor George Wallace. Keith Richards’ priceless recollections of and actual footage of the recording of “Wild Horses” is one of many highlights, but none more potent, in a narrative sense, than the Swampers leaving Hall to start a rival studio.

Anyone who has ever heard the Kronos Quartet’s version of Perfidia in which they accompany a Mexican leaf-blower in one of the most romantic pieces of music ever recorded would be fascinated by Mladen Kovacevic’s Unplugged. This sometimes tongue-in-cheek look at how three Serbians relate to this most primitive of instruments follows two superb practitioners of the art – Vera, an ex-private detective who began refining her technique at the age of five, and Pera, a joyous farmer whose exuberant music making’s only restraint is the miserable state of leaves in the Vlach countryside. Meanwhile, Josip, an amateur inventor and self-taught performer on two dozen mostly unique wind instruments endeavours to add leaf blowing to his resume.

Ryan White’s Good Ol’ Freda is a charming footnote to the Beatles history, telling the formerly untold story of the young Liverpudlian, Freda Kelly, who was hired by Brian Epstein as a secretary and ended up managing the Beatles fan club, answering mail and obtaining autographs with an admirable dedication. She was just 17 when she began her 11-year employment and she dispenses some surprising nuggets as the film progresses, mostly to do with her special relationships with the lads’ parents, especially Richie’s (Ringo’s) mum. “Paul was agreeable, John could be grumpy,” she recalls. “Mr. and Mrs. Harrison loved the fame; Harry Harrison taught her to dance.” In the early days she seemed to have a crush on Paul one week and on John the next, and as the years went by her loyalty and integrity never wavered. The joy of the Beatles from 1961 buoys the film and the soundtrack brings it all back through the use of 19 originals that the band would later cover (Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and the Cookies’ “Chains,” for example) and four bursts of energy by the fabulous foursome themselves used to great effect: “I Will,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Love Me Do” and “I Feel Fine.”

Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer, which examines three young Russian women on trial for performing a politically charged punk song in Moscow’s St. Christ Cathedral, is an apt example of the Brecht quote that opens the film: “Art is not a mirror but a hammer with which to shape it.” Directors Maxim Pozdorovkin and Max Lerner skilfully weave footage of musical protest street theatre with intimate portraits of the principals in their own words and those of two fathers and a mother to convey the fervor with which they pursued their goal  “as artists to change humanity, to be the voice of the voiceless, to change the system.” This chronicle of their bravery lingers long after the movie ends.

As Time Goes By In Shanghai, Uli Gaulke’s loving look at the Peace Hotel Old Jazz Band, so-called because it’s been performing daily in the bar of Shanghai’s art deco wonder since Christmas Day, 1980 -- and whose members range in age from mid-60s to upper 80s – is no “Sentimental Journey.” Rather it’s a tribute to six musicians as they prepare to make an appearance at the North Sea Jazz festival in Rotterdam. Their style evolved from listening to old records and their playing carries the charm of another age. Their stories, too. Memories of the ballrooms of old Shanghai dovetail with the Cultural Revolution crackdown on the arts but it’s the flirtatiousness of Mr. Bao, the drummer with the band’s young female singer and the humour of Mr. Sun, the saxophonist that captivate. When Sun is hospitalized in Rotterdam, he sings the funeral march from Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony. And when the bassist, Mr. Li, describes how he fell for the bass because of the indescribable deep passion he heard in the beginning of Schubert’s “Unfinished” symphony, you realize yet again that music is a universal language.

Toronto-based Peter Mettler, the subject of a retrospective at this year’s Hot Docs, used the extensive technical facilities of the Royal theatre to present Live Cinema, in which the filmmaker worked with a pre-existing music track by Geir Jenssen (who performs under the name Biosphere) and a four-channel mixing board (made by DERIVATIVE) with many options for inserting and blending film and audio clips into images that appear onscreen. Mettler, who has an extensive interest in music (and plays electronic chamber music), acknowledged after the show that a lot of his films are structured like music. He’s been doing these improvisations since completing Gambling, Gods and LSD about ten years ago. It’s as if he’s inviting the audience to “relax and float downstream” in the manner of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Over a strong ambient pulse, the images begin out of a foggy northern lake. For the next 45 minutes this refreshing visual-aural tour touched on outer space, the familiar lava flow from The End of Time and moments from other Mettler magic from paramecia to the double helix. The music was squarely at the service of the images as the images poured out in a random puddle of connectivity.

Forced to abandon his familial Silesian estate as Soviet troops marched westward at the close of WWII, by 1947 the teenaged Chris Strachwitz had made his way to America where his passion for records and roots music eventually led him to found the Arhoolie label and become one of the giants of the niche recording industry. Strachwitz was guided by an unerring sense of what he liked; at first it was New Orleans traditional jazz. His love affair with making records began with a trip with folklorist Mark McCormick to “a Houston joint I’ll never forget.” Lightnin’ Hopkins was “hurting, making up stuff, making up poetry on the spot in the beer joint.” Hopkins’ moving “Tom Moore Blues” spurred the two to discover the farm in Navasota, Texas that was the impetus for the song. That’s where they found Mance Lipscomb.

As McCormick remembered it: “This man had the whole history of rural black families in his head.” Strachwitz made Lipscomb the first of countless artists who would carry the Arhoolie (which means “field holler”) banner for 50 years. Bluesmen Fred McDowell, Big Joe Williams, Big Mama Thornton, Buddy Guy, Robert Pete Williams and Hopkins, Cajun superstar Clifton Chenier, Tex-Mex guru Flaco Jimenez as well as lesser known musicians from Texas, southwest Louisiana and even Appalachia are all testament to a man who “didn’t want to record things I don’t like.” And it helped his company immeasurably that he was the publisher of Country Joe and the Fish’s anti-Vietnam anthem “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag.” Especially after its exposure at Woodstock. There’s nothing inauthentic about Chris Simon and Maureen Gosling’s portrait of  “a classic record man” as Ry Cooder calls him and nothing inauthentic about the music depicted in This Ain’t No Mouse Music -- a clear-eyed documentary that took eight years to make.

Reuben Atlas’ The Brothers Hypnotic follows eight of Phil Cohran’s 23 offspring as they forge a career for the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble through fierce independence and musical smarts, moving from street performances to playing with Prince and  Mos Def. But the film is also a tribute to the musical training their father gave them: “Long tones were the first things we ever learned. It’s the essence. One note. It’s meditation and it connects you to the universe. And because anything that’s worth anything lasts long.” The elder Cohran played trumpet with Sun Ra among others, but was at least as well known for his work with Chicago’s African-American community and his Afro arts centre. Just as important as their musical education was the self love and sense of identity he taught them, which enabled them to inspire and bring joy and happiness to people. You can enjoy them  live July 27 in a free concert at Harbourfront Centre.

When you’re lost in Juarez these days, you’re in the murder capital of the world (3622 in 2010, for example – El Paso, Texas across the Rio Grande had five that year). Shaul Schwarz’s Narco Cultura is a cinéma vérité look at the Mexican drug cartels’ pop culture influence on a narco corrido singer, Edgar Quintero, with stars in his eyes and bullets in his belt, set against a crime scene investigator who must mask his identity to protect his life in Juarez. The singer makes the brutal life of a cartel member glamorous; fans on both sides of the border eat this stuff up. One journalist puts it in perspective: “Narcos represent limitless power but they are a symptom of a dead society; 92 per cent of murders have not been investigated.” Quintero takes a trip to Culiacán, in the heart of the northwestern state of Sinaloa. Schwarz follows him into a beautiful cemetery with big tombs filled with young dead men.

AJ Schnack and David Wilson’s We Always Lie To Strangers lifts the veneer off the showbiz mecca that is Branson, Missouri, a town of 10,000 in the Ozark mountains that is the Las Vegas of middle-American musical entertainment. It’s also a bastion of conservatism and heavily Republican. Exuberant as its performers are they would be hard-pressed to find an audience here in Toronto. Well, there’s just no accounting for taste. And in the middle of the place where the Osmonds, the late Andy Williams and Larry Welk (Lawrence’s son) all filled theatres for years, are the Lennon family, staunch Democrats, blessedly flag-waving and genuinely family-oriented, lured to Branson by Welk (the Lennon Sisters were a staple of the 1960s’ Lawrence Welk Show). The filmmakers’ skill enables us to see the struggles, artistic, economic and political of a world we would never want to imagine while making its participants human nonetheless.

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Two of the most compelling films of the year have recently opened in downtown Toronto, elusive, elliptical, their images propelled by rich soundtracks.

Even though none of the characters in Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder (his follow-up to the Palme D’Or-winning Tree of Life) are musicians, the film’s musical component rivals that of any film released of late. This exploration of love (both sacred and profane) by the masterful collagist of image and sound revolves around a taciturn strong male played by Ben Affleck and two women he loves. One, Marina (Olga Kurylenko, whose occasional voiceover chronicles the course of her ardour), a foreigner with a ten-year-old daughter, is drawn to him while holidaying at Mont Saint-Michel (“The Wonder”) in Normandy. The other, Jane (Rachel McAdams), an old flame whose prime animus is religion, reconnects with him when he moves with Marina back to Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

“Newborn, I fell into the flame. You brought me back to life.” With these words Marina begins this über-romantic rhapsody and it’s her character that speaks to us of passion, unhappiness and love for her child. A priest (Javier Bardem) talks directly to Jesus with a similar passion, unhappiness and love for those unable to help themselves.

To the soundtrack: It’s not only the extraordinary use of Wagner’s “Prelude to Act One” from Parsifal which elevates the Mont Saint-Michel episode – in fact, only Lars von Trier’s alchemy with the prelude from Tristan und Isolde in Melancholia can compare among recent Wagnerian film moments – it’s the way Malick piles on phrase upon phrase with (often) unrecognizable bits of many works, among them Haydn’s The Seasons and Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite no. 2, the second and third movements of Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, the third movement of Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus and Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2 to Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead.

The music adds depth and purpose to what we see onscreen. It gives flight to Emmanuel Lubezki’s rapturous camerwork and underpins Malick’s own ecstatic aesthetic rooted in the wonders of the natural world. When humans connect with it, so much the better.

Shane Carruth’s first film, Primer (2004), has spent the last several years being watched and devoured by many fans, hungry for the meaty morsels hidden in its time travelling framework. Upstream Color, his second feature, is a mesmerizing, trippy cinematic playpen touching on transformation and love, loss of identity and the transcendence of nature. Lines from Thoreau’s Walden punctuate the script, along with orchids that house white worms. The worms are the conduit to drug the movie’s Everywoman, Kris (Amy Seimetz), but piglets also fall under their spell.

Kris is kidnapped, drugged and stripped of her former life by Thief (Thiago Martins). She begins a new life with Jeff (Shane Carruth), the moments of which don’t always follow a straight temporal path. Blue orchids presage a meeting at a pig farm with other victims. No doubt all will become clearer over the next several years. In the meantime, the director’s sharp sensual eye and coruscating sound design keep us in rapt attention. Corruth, a trained mathematician and former software engineer, seems to enjoy engineering human souls, to borrow from the late Josef Skvorecky.

Corruth wrote, directed, produced, acted in, co-edited and wrote the unnerving electronic score for Upstream Color. One night Kris is awakened by mysterious high-pitched sounds. Then she realizes she’s hearing very low sounds as well. Soon it’s music to our ears. There’s a motif that recurs of different characters rolling rocks down the inside of large sewer pipes with great panache. Rarely has an accompanying sound been as playful or as essential.