Clean: Maggie Cheung and her ex-husband/director Olivier Assayas get the loudest cheers for this Canada/U.K./France copro, about the junkie widow of a rock star trying to win back her son. It’s his best work since 1996’s Irma Vep, says Hal Niedzviecki in Now Magazine, noting the ‘intimate and natural’ turn by Cheung and the ‘gorgeous urban cinematography’ of Hamilton, ON, and other globe-hopping locales by Eric Gautier. And yet the script’s ‘blind alleys and pointless subplots’ lost points with the Toronto Sun’s Bruce Kirkland and seemed ‘dull’ and lacking in the requisite drug-addled dirt to the Toronto Star’s Geoff Pevere. ‘It’s not so much a movie in three acts as three movies stuffed into a single casing,’ agrees Rick Groen at The Globe and Mail.

Daniel and the Superdogs: Critics howled like dying schnauzers at the big-screen debut of the real-life performing pups – complaining that it’s sugary and formulaic even by boy-meets-dog standards. ‘Enough pathos and plot… for an entire season of The Littlest Hobo,’ groaned the Calgary Sun’s Louis B. Hobson, adding that writers Pierre Billon and Richard Schlesinger ‘leave no cliché unexplored.’ The kids flick is ‘not much fun,’ agrees Liam Lacey at The Globe and Mail, noting that the titular pooches make only a brief appearance. The story is a (someone had to say it) ‘dog’s breakfast,’ according to the Toronto Star’s Susan Walker, but is held together somewhat by strong performances from 14-year-old star Matthew Harbour and the supporting cast. ‘More like a series of happy accidents than a highway pile-up,’ says Walker.