Egoyan is back, this time with a film that many were surprised when it was not selected as the opening Gala, an honour that's usually bestowed upon a Canadian film (Creation starting things off instead). Making no secret of its Toronto location, Chloe is a tale of doubt, recrimination, and humiliation.

While the film doesn't entirely succeed, it's from no fault of the cast - Neeson manages to eke out a nuanced role, and Amanda Seyfried manages to stay toe-to-toe with the always superb Julianne Moore (or, as the no doubt "titillating" draw of the film would have it, boob-to-bob). Alas, while a very sensual film, well shot with a certain amount of erotic creepiness, the story simply falls flat. Relying on a twist that's telegraphed from the opening voiceover, the story simply fails to shock in ways that it's clearly meant to. Concentrating simply on the characters, rather than the contrived narrative, may have made for a more interesting story.

As it stands, the film relies upon the hard-to-swallow thought that Neeson's reaction to hearing that his beautiful wife has had an affair with an equally beautiful young woman would be anything less than, "Great! Can I join in, please?", given the proclivities he has demonstrated throughout the film to that piont.

Crude, perhaps, but this type of subversion of typical cuckolding simply doesn't not hold the same societal narrative weight that the same tale told from the opposite gender perspective would contain. It may be unfair to lump our gender specific views of infidelity onto this film, but as it stands it simply strains credulity, given the world of this film, and with the added altercations that ensue the pieces simply don't fit together. Worth seeing, perhaps, for the steamy performances, but hardly the comeback to form that I was hoping from our dear, local auteur.

A broad resetting of Sokurov's 1999 film Moloch, replacing Hitler's Eagle's Nest with a castle atop a mountain in contemporary Haiti. Trading fascist Europe for a neurotic, despostic leader on a Tropical island is a bold and interesting move. The scope of the film aims for the Shakespearean, with heightened dialogue and situations, an almost court-like affair of patrons and attendants keeping the leader in check while he's breaking down like his country surrounding him.

It's a bold, brave film, but in the end I think it fails quite convincingly to live up to its ambitions. The stilted dialogue and overt meolodrama deflect from any sense of real horror or tension. Things appear too contrived, too over-the-top, the metaphorical evil subsumed into something more formal and predicatible than provocative or engaging. It's a spoiled premise, a disapointing and boring film, unfortunately.

Boy, this film on paper should have rocked my world. Tim Blake Nelson, stalwart performer from the Coens' Oh Brother..., treads into their pool, making a genre defying thriller/comedy about twin brothers. You've got the usually exemplary Edward Norton playing both twins, one a knockabout weed dealer who woos the other sibling, an accomplished professor of Philosophy, back to the homestead he vowed to never return to. Madness ensues.

There's so much here that could have been mined - the small town Synagogues, the quirky mix of ultraviolence and surreal country folk mixed with a dash of Heideggerian epistemology. Yet, in the end, it's all a contrived mess, a film almost unwatchable when it takes clunky turns away from its core story. This type of mashup requires great dexterity, to balance the horror and the lightness, and in the right hands it can be astounding. Unfortuantely, this script misses on almost every shot, losing its way in one of the more shockingly tasteless endings in memory.

Silly, jiggly, Bitch Slap is a Russ Meyer-wannabe girl gang flick.