MOVIES: How to Blow up a Pipeline, plus

Who would you choose? Nick Cage as Dracula or Russell Crowe as an exorcist? I didn't have to choose? The studios did it for me. I only had access to one to preview but there's more to come. Much more. The Wall Street Journal wrote recently that almost 30 horror movies are coming through the rest of the year.

Thank heaven for variety, the Canadian version being celebrated by the Canadian Screen Awards next week and Canada Film Day on Wednesday. Before that, today and on Saturday, the VIFF centre in Vancouver is bringing back a film I've written about a few times as a truthful drama about teen suicide. It's called back home.

And these are the new ones:

How to Blow Up a Pipeline: 4 stars

Showing Up: 4

Plan A: 3

Renfield: 2 ½

One True Loves: 2 ½

Mafia Mamma: 2

HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE: The title is provocative and repeats the name of the book the film is based on. But it's not an instruction manual; more of a discussion of why would you do such a thing. The eight activists in the film all know why: climate change is happening; millions will die, political action isn't enough; so make a statement that everybody will notice. Sabotaging a new oil pipeline in Texas would disrupt the industry which would have to shut it down and inspect its whole length for safety. The film is built of smart thinking like that. And a lot of discussion of ethics. And yet it's as involving as a thriller or a heist movie.

Eight young actors I haven't seen before play the saboteurs, looking and acting like the scruffy activists that were so common back in the anti-Viet Nam war movement. They're absolutely natural. Ariela Barer is Xochitl, the theorist in the group. She lived near an oil refinery and got cancer. Michael (Forrest Goodluck) is First Nations and acting with their issues in mind. He's the bomb maker and we see his work up close. Shawn (Marcus Scribner) wanted to make a documentary but turned to direct action instead. And so on, a diverse group, together representing a range of motivations, and in segments here and there speaking what they think. Are they terrorists? Think of the Boston Tea Party. "Revolution has collateral damage" but don't hurt people and it's OK. The discussion is sharp, the movie is tense and absolutely engrossing. (In many theaters across the country) 4 out of 5

SHOWING UP: Here's another of Kelly Reichardt's tales of a woman in emotional turmoil but this one is laced with more humor than usual. Michelle Williams, her frequent lead actor, plays Lizzy, a sculptor in Portland, Oregon who's struggling to get ready for a show of her work. It's only days away but all sorts of everyday problems are in the way. She has no hot water because her landlady, and best friend, (Hong Chau) is too busy to get it fixed as she's preparing for a show of her own. Lizzy has trouble asking for time off from work (her mom is the boss there) and hears distressing paranoid fantasies from her brother who has stopped taking his meds.

Her cat injures a bird and she can't get rid of it. Throw it out the window, the neighbor brings it back. Several times it returns. It's a funny sideplot that leavens the tough centre of the story: the hard work an artist has to put in to create something new and the distractions that get in the way. The film was originally to be about the B.C. artist Emily Carr who ran a boarding house which impeded her painting. It keeps that theme, brilliantly. Lizzie is an outsider, feels her neighbor has it more together, has a father (Judd Hirsch) who's a retired artist, now hosting a couple of mooches and has to make last-minute repairs to one of her sculptures. Eventually, there's a brief and very funny flash of frustration from her. It's a rich scenario full of small events and details that feel absolutely real. (Arthouse theaters in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver) 4 out of 5

PLAN A: Another example of direct action is discussed by the Isreali brothers Doron Paz and Yoav Paz in this post-Holocaust story. Fiction? I don't know. It may be true in part, at least, because the motivations in it are plausible. A group of Jewish survivors in Germany in 1945 wanted revenge. Not just against the Nazi officials and leaders they hunted, but against all the people. They must have known, they think. “The whole German nation should be on the stand,” someone says. The plan: poison the water system and kill them.

The story follows Max (August Diehl), a survivor who can't get his farm back because the new owner threatens to shoot him. He connects with a group of American soldiers and then a “Jewish brigade” which searches for and executes known-Nazis. We see several of those, usually a single shot to the head. Another group develops the plan to poison the water in major cities and Max is convinced to infiltrate them. “An eye for an eye,” he hears. Also “six million of them for six million of us.” But would that hurt the movement to create a Jewish homeland, i.e. Israel? The film balances that fear with the very understandable desire for revenge and many examples of anti-Jewish actions still going on. And the familiar query: “Why didn't you resist?” It considers all the relevant questions and at the same time plays like a tense but grim thriller. (Now available VOD and digitally) 3 out of 5

RENFIELD: Nicolas Cage fans get what they want here. His over-the-top hissing and snarling re-invigorates good old Dracula and is fun to watch.

Cage has dabbled in this genre before in 1988's Vampire's Kiss but his character was only imagining back there. Here he's the real thing and hamming it up tremendously but stuck in a movie that tries to be funny (and only sort of succeeds), contemporary (with drug dealers and self-help psycho-babble in New Orleans) and extreme violence (blood spatters when heads are ripped off or stomped on).

And caution. Note the title. Drac's assistant is the real centre here. Played by Nicholas Hoult, Renfield has been with the Count for decades, providing “innocents” for him to eat, but now wants to escape. A therapy group meeting he wanders into makes him realize he's a co-dependant to a narcissist and that motivates him. Scenes with that group are the most inspired in the film because they're actually witty. The rest of the plot is standard stuff. There's a woman cop (Awkwafina) trying to show her worth. She takes inspiration from Renfield's ambition and stands up to a crazy drug gang leader (Ben Schwartz) and thereby also his imperious mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo), the real boss. The film struggles to meld these different story strains. It has the gang ally with Dracula and learn to use his powers. That doesn't go very far though. Nor does Drac's reaction to the modern world, which surely must be significant. Missed opportunities and narrative stretches. (In theaters) 2 ½ out of 5.

ONE TRUE LOVES: Calling all Nicholas Sparks fans. Here's another writer perfect for you. I hadn't heard of Taylor Jenkins Reid before but she's had several novels in this teary-romance sector and this one feels like Sparks to me. A couple at a pool party (Phillipa Soo and Simu Liu) watch a very buff guy (Luke Bracey) showing off his diving skills and before you know it she's actually married to him. He goes goes down in a helicopter crash, she's sure he'll return but eventually gives up waiting and gets engaged to the first guy (Simu). Then her husband comes back (he's been on a desert island all this time). What to do now?

You talk a lot about love, that's what. Can you love two men at the same time? Is the marriage still valid? He's been gone so long he was declared dead. "I'll never leave you again," he promises. He doesn't even have a driver's license which causes an amusing scene with a traffic cop. Simu, meanwhile, plays a character in a funk. He's a music teacher, coaching a student band and blurts out his pain: "I met her first." Finders keepers, is how he puts it. The students want to hear all about it. Somehow the story hinges on this: who has changed the right way with this experience. Who says "we didn't stay the right person" and "Our life starts now"? It's mushy but ends with cheers. (Now available digitally) 2 ½ out of 5

MAFIA MAMMA: In the mood for something silly and trivial? The title itself gives you an indication of what you're getting here. Toni Collette plays the woman, an American originally from Italy, drawn back there for the funeral of her gandfather. (Just as she discovers her husband cheating on her with her son's guidance counsellor). In Italy it turns out her grandad was head of a major crime family and willed that she take over as boss. Talk about a fish out of water. She's not qualified for this. The rest of the film shows her growing into it.

There's a war with a competing crime family. They killed the grandfather and demand that his family cede them part of their territory. Monica Bellucci plays Bianca who urges Toni to stand up to them and in effect runs the family until Toni is ready. That happens pretty fast. She kills a hitman, digs her stilletto heels into another killer's eye sockets and suggests a change in business policy: cheap pharmaceutical drugs for poor people who can't afford them. It gets increasingly silly among the gunbattles and bits of feminist thinking like “Never let a man dictate who you are or what you can do.” Catherine Hardwicke, known for better women's stories, directed. (In theaters) 2 out of 5