Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, documentary, genre and mainstream films, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.

Lots of movies use kids. Some try for a young audience, others have young characters. And the two types don’t necessarily overlap. This week I’m looking at three movies: a chiller-thriller about two kids and a haunted mirror they can’t escape; an art film with kids reenacting the Algerian War; and an animated film from Uruguay about a girl with an envelope she can’t open.

Oculus
Dir: Mike Flanagan

Kaylie and Tim (Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites) are sister and brother. Kaylie is a decisive, take-charge kind of girl with long red hair like her mother. Tim is brown haired like his dad. A decade earlier, something violent and terrible happened in their home. And by the time it was over, they were orphans. They locked up 10-year-old Tim in a mental hospital. Now, they declare, he’s all cured. No more of that childish nonsense he used to spout – about voices and mind-control and a demon who lives inside a mirror. He’s a responsible adult now, ready to live in the real world. (Like a babe in the woods.)

Except… what’s the first thing big sister Kaylie does? She drags him back to the house where it all happened, and says – we’re gonna get that demon – the one in the mirror – and kill her!

Apparently that antique mirror has been spawning grisly murders for centuries. It possesses all it encounters and muddles their thoughts until they can’t tell illusion from reality. So Kaylie has rigged up a complicated system, involving cameras, computer screens, alarm clocks, and a lethal-looking blade that’s always poised to smash the mirror.

The return home triggers strong memories in Tim’s mind – he begins to relive the old days alongside the recent events. Are Tim and Kaylie strong enough to resist the demon’s illusions?

This is a good, scary movie with the two stories – now and flashbacks – unfolding side-by-side, and occasionally overlapping. Parts feel hackneyed, but the two sets of actors (in their teens and twenties) are totally convincing.

Suitable for children? Only if they can handle extreme violence, gore and nightmarish horror.

Loubia Hamra (Bloody Beans)
Dir: Narimane Mari

It’s Algeria. Boys dressed in stylish shorts and silk neckties are playing on the beach. They swim in the ocean, float on beached tires and lie in the sun. Until one of them farts.

You fart like an Frenchman! they shout. It’s those bloody beans — loubia make you fart. So they raid the picnic basket the girls brought. The girls warn them there are soldiers on the streets: war is coming.

(Context: Algeria is a north African country, once colonized by its neighbour across the Mediterranean. France annexed it and hundreds of thousands of Europeans settled there. A War of Independence broke out in the 1950s. The Algerian War was notorious for the violence, torture, and cruelty used by both the French military and the FLN revolutionaries. A third group, the OAS –  French extremist-nationalists who refused to leave Algeria – terrorized both the French and the Algerians.)

So the revolutionary boys and girls who want more than just beans to eat set out along the beach, just as the sun sets. They don wigs, scarves, masks and capes. They paint their faces and bodies with drawings and fake beards. At a French monastery they gaze at the statues, fillagries and icons. They fight an evil man in a pigs mask, and make friends with a French soldier who was drafted to serve. And they project their shadows against a white washed building, making animal noises.

Bloody Beans is a beautiful and strange reenactment, 50 years after the end of the Algerian war. It includes lots of subtle details: women fighting alongside men, the colonial division between the French haves and the Algerian have-nots, and the violence and torture on both sides. It ends with a floating recitation in the ocean, with the boys and girls repeatedly asking: is it better to be than to obey? (Vaut-il mieux etre que d’obeir?).

This complex film is a work of art that uses video as the canvas, kids as the paint.

Anina
Dir: Alfredo Soderguit (Uruguay)

Anina Yatay Salas is a girl with wild, red hair and a triple-barreled name. Her dad loves the symmetry of her palindromes, words where the head matches the tail. And each day Anina looks at her bus ticket to see if its number is a palindrome like her.

One day, on the school playground she bumps into blonde Yisel, sending her sandwich flying through the air and down a drain. This starts a big fight. Anina calls Yisel, a big girl, “the elephant”. Yisel makes fun of Anina’s palindromic names.

Their punishment? The principal gives them both mysterious black envelopes, closed with red sealing wax. They have to keep it safe and unopened for a week. Will this strange punishment teach them a lesson?

Anina is a very simple film, but it looks amazing. It’s an animated cartoon in a dusty and smudgy, retro style. It’s filled with fascinating details that shout Uruguay: eggs wrapped in paper, strange fried foods, kids wearing white smocks to school. At the same time, its buses, classrooms, and playgrounds look just like here.

But the movie is at its best when Anina’s imagination takes over: her bus turns into a riverboat, she gets lost in an imaginary hedge maze. And there’s a fantastic nightmare sequence where the Principal and a mean teacher morph into a ghostly judge and jury – ready to punish her for what she did to her black envelope.

Anina is clearly a kids’ movie but everyone can appreciate its amazing look.

Oculus opens today in Toronto, check your local listings; Anina is part of the TIFF Kids film festival, on now (tiff.net), and Bloody Beans is playing April 14th at Toronto’s Images festival of moving art (imagesfestival.com).

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website  culturalmining.com