BlackBerry's Director Made One of the New Films This Week

One of the four new films this week comes from a Toronto director best known for a movie about a collapsing Waterloo phone company. Matt Johnson, who made BlackBerry, has followed it with Tony, an A24 drama about a 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain washing dishes in a Cape Cod kitchen in the summer of 1975. Dominic Sessa plays him. Antonio Banderas plays the restaurant owner who takes him on.

Johnson's film opened August 14 alongside three others: The End of Oak Street, a Warner Bros creature feature with Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor; Lady, a small British comedy from writer-director Samuel Abrahams; and a restored 8K version of Peter Brook's The Mahabharata. Screen Daily put the scale of each in numbers — 648 cinemas across the UK and Ireland for Oak Street, roughly 100 for Tony, 56 for Lady.

That spread tells you how the week plays out here, too. Canadian bookings follow much the same logic: the studio picture goes nearly everywhere, the A24 title opens in a handful of big-city rooms, and a restoration turns up at a repertory house for an afternoon or not at all. Which of these you actually see may come down to your postal code rather than your taste.

Dinosaurs, But Really a Marriage in Trouble

The End of Oak Street was directed by David Robert Mitchell, who made It Follows, and co-produced by JJ Abrams. A cosmic event rips a suburban street out of its neighbourhood and strands the residents somewhere with very large animals. Hathaway and McGregor play a couple whose marriage was already failing before the sky opened. Maisy Stella and Christian Convery play the kids.

Critics have been unusually warm. Variety framed it as a looser, better Jurassic picture, and Rotten Tomatoes rounded up the first reviews as the summer's biggest surprise. It runs 110 minutes, and it isn't the small-kids option — Ireland's censors rated it 15A, Canadian provincial boards rate separately, and the actual family booking this week is the new Paw Patrol.

Bourdain Before Anyone Knew His Name

Tony is set in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, years before the books, the television years and the fame that ended with Bourdain's death in 2018. Screen Daily credits the script to Todd Bartels, drawing on Bourdain's memoir, with Johnson co-writing and directing. Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall and Dagmara Domińczyk round out the cast. It runs 106 minutes.

The Hollywood Reporter singled out Sessa, who was the discovery of The Holdovers. Other reviews keep circling back to Banderas as the mentor who makes a punishing kitchen worth staying in. The Irish Times gave it four stars. On 100 screens in the UK and Ireland, it is a fraction of Oak Street's footprint, which is normal for A24 and not a verdict on the film.

A 332-Minute Epic Back From the Vault

The Mahabharata is the week's outlier. Brook staged the Sanskrit epic in 1985 as a marathon theatre production and filmed it later in the decade with a cast drawn from Poland, India, Trinidad and France, alongside a young Ciarán Hinds. His son Simon Brook oversaw the restoration, scanning the negative at 8K — described by the team as a first for a European heritage film — and generating 450 terabytes of data.

The restoration premiered at Venice in 2024 and has since played dates including BAM in New York. The version at the centre of this release runs 332 minutes. That's five and a half hours, longer than three ordinary features back to back. The BFI issued a two-disc Blu-ray this month with a 1989 making-of and Simon Brook's 2002 portrait of his father, though Canadians would be importing that.

The Small Comedy That Turns Strange

Lady is the release most likely to slip past you. Abrahams wrote and directed it, and Sian Clifford, from Fleabag, plays an upper-class woman chasing attention through a local talent show. It begins as a mockumentary and then, as the Irish Times put it, veers toward Buñuel — surreal rather than satirical. Ninety-five minutes, three and a half stars, 56 cinemas. If it skips Canadian screens, expect it on demand.

How to Choose From the New Films This Week

If you want the big screen to earn its ticket

Oak Street. It's the only one built for a large room and a loud sound system, it's playing almost everywhere, and the reviews suggest the spectacle is bolted to something human. Under two hours, no background needed, easy to book on a Friday night without planning.

If you'd rather have a story than a spectacle

Tony. Check listings early. A24 titles open narrow in Canada and widen only if the opening weekend holds, so a film that isn't near you now may be in two weeks. Don't assume a small first run means it skipped the country entirely.

If you can give up most of a Saturday

The Mahabharata, and only in a cinema. A 332-minute restoration is a scheduling decision, not a movie night — food, a break, a clear afternoon. These runs are usually one date at a repertory venue or a festival slot, not a week-long booking.

Check listings before the weekend rather than after it. Oak Street will still be showing in two weeks; Tony may not be, and Lady and The Mahabharata could each get a single date in your city. If a repertory house near you does book the Brook restoration, that screening is the one to plan the day around — the other three will wait.