MOVIES: Francis Ford Coppola is back but not at his best. Kate Winslet IS at her best

This is a scene from Megalopolis (Courtesy of Lionsgate)

If you're following the American election, and aren't we all, you should check out a new HBO documentary that started on CRAVE a while ago. It's called Stopping the Steal and is about, no surprise, Donald Trump's claim that his election loss was rigged, stolen. The film shows in detail what he tried to do about it. I thought I knew it all but found plenty in it that's new to me. And it puts bigger focus than I've seen before on John Eastman, the lawyer and alleged constitutional scholar who came up with the cockamamie scheme that Mike Pence refused to implement. 

More telling are comments by many people who worked closely with Trump, including his former Attorney General, William Barr, about his character and what he's really like. It's not flattering. Consequential, though. 

These are the movies I review this week, including three from the Vancouver International Film Festival that started last night. 

Megalopolis: 2 ½ stars

Lee: 4

My Old Ass: 3 ½ 

VIFF: Anora: 4 ½

VIFF: So Surreal Behind the Masks: 4

VIFF: Black Dog: 4 

MEGALOPOLIS: For many, a new film by Francis Ford Coppola is a must see. For me, this one is only a could see. The craft and the ambition are both high and it has a strong point of view. But that is undercut by excess and a strained analogy. The United States is like the Roman Empire, doomed to collapse, Coppola says, both in live statements and metaphorically in his film. It's set in the imagined future city of New Rome which feels a lot like New York City. So there are chariot races in what looks like Madison Square Gardens. And orgiastic parties in nightclubs. And a huge fight over real estate involving a developer named Cesar. The comparison is hardly new and seems to be Coppola's reaction to the Reagan years of the 1980s, which is when he first wrote the script. I bet Trump was on his mind too when he re-wrote it. He calls it a fable and wants us to learn from it. 

         Courtesy of Lionsgate

 He starts it well, establishing the US-Rome analogy easily. Then he lets it get meandering with too much story and inert with long speeches and quotes from Marcus Aurelius, Petrarch and even Hamlet's “to be or not to be” soliloquy. That's as Cesar (Adam Driver) proposes to clear the slums and build a city of the future. He's won a Nobel Prize and has the ability to stop time (a story element that's not well-explained). He's opposed by the mayor (Giancarlo Esposito) who'd rather build casinos and by a conniving cousin (Shia LaBeouf) who wants the poor to rebel. There's more: Cesar starts seeing the mayor's daughter (Nathalie Emmanuel) while an unscrupulous reporter (Aubrey Plaza) with the odd name Wow Platinum is attracted by his power and also carries on with him. Still more. There's an old murder charge, unsuccessfully prosecuted by the man who is now mayor and also now, according to Cesar “The Chief Slumlord.” It's clear what Coppola is trying to do. As he puts it: “Is the society we live in the only one available to us?” The issues are in there. Real people? Not so much. (In theaters including IMAX ) 2 ½ out 5 

LEE: I don't often predict like this but I'm sure that Kate Winslet is going to get another Academy Award nomination for this. She's vibrant, intense, not at all glamorous as Lee Miller, the model turned fashion photographer turned war photographer in World War II. Her photos appeared in Vogue Magazine which I find remarkable since they show the horrors of combat. There's destruction, battle, like at St. Malo, the liberation of Paris and most startling, the extreme horror of the Buchenwald and Dachau death camps. In a lighter vein, there's a photo of her taking a bath in Hitler's own bathtub. It was taken by a friend, played by Andy Samberg, stepping out of his usual comedy image. 

It was her chutzpah though that got her to the front, over British objections, and into sites that guards were blocking. That's exactly who she was, relentless when she figured out where she wanted to go and fearless when she got there. That's according to the biography written by her son that the film draws on. Interesting that the film doesn't feel like the standard biography. It's like a real woman's real life as told years later in an interview. 

The word determined applies and could also describe Winslet for whom this was a passion project. She produced it, she says, to show what women can do and who they are. She helped finance it, hired Ellen Kuras, a set designer she had worked with, to direct it and brought in a high-powered cast, including Josh O'Connor, Andrea Riseborough, Alexander Skarsgård and Marion Cotillard (who incidentally handed her the Oscar when she won it back in 2009 for The Reader). It deserves to happen again. (In Theaters) 4 out of 5 

MY OLD ASS: It's a crude title but a cute film about being young and ruminating about getting old. It was written and directed by Megan Park who won awards for her last film, Fallout, and it was co-produced by Margot Robbie who is again pushing some fun vibes like she did with Barbie. 

 In this fantasy about growing up, Maisy Stella (terrific) plays a teen named Elliott who takes a mushroom trip with friends one night and has a vision of an older version of herself, age 39, played by Aubrey Plaza, appearing and offering advice. No financial tips. Not the next Apple stock or anything like that. Just be nice to your mom and brothers and stay away from Chad. Who? She doesn't even know a Chad, but as you can well imagine she soon meets one. He's played by Percy Hynes White and seems so nice, why should she stay away? 

The older one has put her number in Elliott's cellphone, listing herself as My Old Ass. Teen cheekiness, yes, but also this. Young Eliott can call the number and talk to her older self. She does that a few times, learns that the older is still at university, working on a PhD, but gets no further advice. She has to deal with Chad herself. He's funny; she's serious. She works on her family's cranberry farm in Ontario's Muskoka region and will be off to the University of Toronto soon. He's a new hire on the farm. 

Elliott is charmed and attracted by him, although she had thought she was gay. The film is funny as it works through that complication and quite candid about teenagers and sex. And then tosses in an emotional twist. Megan Park has acted in teen stories before. That was probably a good preamble to writing her own movie. She's Canadian, lives both in Toronto and Los Angeles and her film is enjoyable, sure. (In theaters) 3 ½ out of 5 

Three VIFF reviews: 

ANORA: This is my favorite film of the year so far. It was popular too at Cannes (top-prize winner) and at TIFF (not enough screenings, people complained) and is showing twice at VIFF. Catch it now, or when it gets regular theater play next month. You won't be disappointed. There's so much going on in it it's hard to summarize. Basically its a Cinderella story and a screwball comedy that erupts into very funny chaos, all deftly written and directed by Sean Baker. You might remember previous films of his like The Florida Project and Red Rocket. He specializes in finding humanity in the underclass, although in this film he also wanders up into the world of the rich and privileged to show the class divisions. 

That's not immediately apparent. It feels like a low level comedy at the start about a sex worker, Anora, though she prefers to be called Ani, played by Mikey Madison in a winning performance. She gives hot lap dances in a New York club and takes a liking to one client who turns out to be Russian and as the son of oligarchs, very rich. He's Ivan, played by Mark Eydelshteyn as nice but impulsive and a bit lost, but back at his house (a big mansion) hot in bed. She's smitten; he takes her to Las Vegas where they get married. His parents freak out and send three guys to handle things, except they don't. Ani fights back, Ivan runs away. His parents come to take charge. His mother is steel angry and his dad's main factotum says Ivan's a child who has never grown up. We've detected that too. The parents order the marriage be annuled and there are more scenes of carefully stoked chaos to come, with yelling arguments and many laughs, topped with a surprise tender scene. Good work. (at VIFF today and Tuesday and in theaters in two weeks) 4 ½ out of 5  

SO SURREAL: BEHIND THE MASKS: Here's a lesson in Indigenous history in Canada that informs, enlightens and at the same time plays like an entertaining thriller. The history is Canada's supression of the potlach, a key part of native culture, at least on the west coast. Families held it to give away possessions and show status. It was outlawed for over 65 years but people were known to hold it anyway, in secret, risking arrest, confiscation and even prison. The thriller is a detective story as local groups try to track down where the confiscated goods went, hoping to get them back. 

Masks, we learn, have a deep spiritual significance. They're a conduit between this and the spirit world but ended up in museums and with collectors far away, including some well-known surrealist artists. A group in Alert Bay in Vancouver Island has been tracking how they got there. The film by Neil Diamond, a Cree filmmaker from Quebec and Joanne Robertson, a producer who grew up as a settler on the west coast, takes us on the search, uncovering clues, naming an Indian agent, a museum buyer, auction houses and a small antiquities shop along the way. We see them trying to contact a socialite in Paris who may have moved to Florida. A complex raven transformation mask is the most sought after artifact among them and as Diamond says in narration "They were only meant to travel to the other side, not to a museum in New York." It's a very engrossing film. (at VIFF Sunday and Tuesday) 4 out of 5 

BLACK DOG: You want a positive view of humanity for a change? Look no further. It's indisputable in this film from China though first it has some competition to overcome to really shine. The story is a fable set in the north, on the edge of the Gobi desert. We see the windswept landscape suddenly overrun by hundreds of dogs. A bus flips over on the road. The passengers are taken to a small town that's clearly in decline. We learn that an oil facility has shut down, most people have left and the dogs they abandoned are running free. There's a bounty on one, thin and black and said to be carrying rabies.

Lang, played by Eddie Peng, is also an outcast of sorts. He used to be a rock star and is back in town after a jail term. He had accidentally caused the death of a young man who's father wants revenge. His own father is living in a rundown zoo and drinking constantly. Much of the town is being demolished to be re-built to coincide with the Beijing Olympics. But first the dogs have to be caught. Peng signs up for the team doing that and, you guessed it, he encounters the black dog that is said to be such a menace. It doesn't start well--the dog bites him--but gradually they recognize they're both lost souls and become friends. There's still a turn or two to come in this small, very moving film by Guan Hu, who usually directs big spectacle films. Special praise for the dog, a terrific performer. (at VIFF tonight + Monday) 4 out of 5