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Chicago – “Safe House” is so overly familiar that you not only will think that you’ve seen it before and know exactly where it’s going before it gets there, but you will also barely remember having seen it once it’s over. It’s cinematic fast food – relatively streamlined but also not difficult to make for anyone involved, generally bad for you, and totally forgettable. It’s all so, well, “Safe.”

Rating: 2.0/5.0

It seems clear to me that “Safe House” started life as a better film. Here’s the pitch and the movie I wish I had seen – “Keyser Soze goes to a safe house.” Imagine that movie. A world-famous, notorious criminal ends up in a safe house run by a relatively green agent and the poor guy has to deal not only with the lunatic now in his care but also everyone who wants him dead. That movie could have been great.

In which we learn, if you’re a C.I.A. operative who’s captured a world-class baddie, whatever you do, do not got to a safe house. In Safe House, directed by Daniel Espinosa (Snabba Cash), safe houses are the most dangerous places in the world.

Poor young Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) just wants a better gig, having paid his dues for a long, boring year at an empty safe house in Cape Town. He puts in a call to his upper-tier mentor David Barlow (Brendan Gleeson) and tells him just that. Barlow tells him to hold tight, things will happen.

Enter that world class baddie, Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington). Sporting gray-tipped hair spiking upwards and outwards, Washington has his usual amount of fun playing a character like this. On one hand, watching the aging-but-never-old movie star take so much time off (his last film was in 2010) and then...

The 6th annual Montreal Underground Film Festival presents 3 nights of wild and wooly short films from around the world at various venues around the city on May 12-14.

The fest kicks off with a lineup of 8 short films, plus the World Premiere of Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare’s Main Attraction, about a magician and his resident freaks fending off an eviction from their home. DeGiglio-Bellemare is a member of the Montreal media arts collective Volatile Works and features special effects by underground artist Rick Trembles and Andy Mauro. Also in the Opening Night kick-off is the not-to-be-missed hilarious music video Goths! On the Bus by Karen & Jaimz Asmundson.

Then, the fest continues on the 13th and the 14th with several programming blocks of short films hailing from Canada, the U.S., Germany, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Finland, the U.K. and other countries.

Some standouts in the fest include Zachary Epcar‘s...