by MATTHEW HAYS

The spirit behind the Magnifico Film Festival, a summer offshoot of the autumn New Film Festival, is certainly something worth celebrating. Each June, a whack of movies are screened in various locales, often outside, and audiences can screen said films for free. This year, we're promised that all the events will be free of charge.

And this year's event unfolds during fifth-birthday celebrations for Ex-Centris, the miraculous, one-of-a-kind movie centre that stands as a potent symbol of both Montreal's love of cinema and the rejuvenation of the Main. Built and launched by Softimage founder Daniel Langlois, the Ex-Centris has proven a stunning success, by any standards. Best of all, as Langlois has repeatedly stated, he didn't build it to make a fast buck, but rather to celebrate and expand the cinematic medium. It's a huge source of civic pride: when I attended the Lake Placid Film Festival last weekend, many of the visiting critics and filmmakers asked me about Ex-Centris - the complex has clearly gained an international notoriety, and rightly so.

This year, Magnifico will premiere eight films, including Takeshi Kitano's eagerly anticipated heavy-on-the-sword-fights epic Zatoichi, Roger Michell's The Mother (a controversial family melodrama written by demigod Hanif Kureishi), Patrice Leconte's Confidences trop intimes (about a woman who mistakes a financial advisor for a shrink and begins to tell her intimate life stories) and Jonathan Demme's celebrated doc The Agronomist.

But there's more! This year sees the launch of Cinéoké, a new and wacky way to impress your buddies while drunk. This is the movie version of karaoke; basically, you choose a scene, go up on stage and act it out while the film runs on a screen behind you. (No, we're not making this up.) It sounds ludicrous, but the more I think of it, there are a few scenes from Planet of the Apes, The Stepford Wives (the original, not the remake) and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? that I need to get out of my system.

Magnifico runs from June 16–20.
Info: 847-1242 or www.ex-centris.com

>> Movie Listings