Starbuck

This Québécois comedy about a man who made a prodigious amount of sperm bank donations in his youth was a huge hit across Canada and picks up on themes explored in 2010 documentary Donor Unknown. Now in his forties, but still not behaving like a grown-up, chubby schlub Patrick Huard is confronted with the fact that he has sired 533 children, and 142 of them want to know his identity. He anonymously inserts himself into some of their lives, while facing the prospect of knowingly becoming a father for the first time with long-suffering girlfriend Julie Le Breton. However, Huard's fecundity could just be the least of his problems, as he is also $80,000 in debt to some ruthless mobsters. Taking its title from a famously potent Holstein bull, this is an amiable enough rites-of-passage tale. But, while Huard makes an engaging antihero and finds an acerbic sidekick in lawyer pal Antoine Bertrand, writer/director Ken Scott and co-writer Martin Petit are overly prone to a fair amount of manipulative mawkishness.