“When the doors slid open, furious flashes of light jolted me out of my reflections. That’s why they had cuffed by hands in front. As far as I could see, reporters and photographers were crowded into the lobby. Trying hard not to look surprised, I lifted my head, straightened my back and between the two agents, made the long walk through the light flashes and staccato questions toward the caravan waiting outside.” These lines from Angela Davis’s 1974 autobiography, written at the age of 28 and edited by Toni Morrison, describe the way she remembers a humiliating perp walk four …

Post Tenebras Lux, the film that won Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas the Best Director award at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, has a story. But what it’s really about, first and foremost, isn’t narrative but texture: The grainy wetness of mud in an open field. The harsh bristle of matted dog fur. The wet steam of a tiled sauna. It’s also about sound, from the giggle of a boy being tickled by his father to the thunder of rugby cleats on a hard floor. Shot in a box-y 4:3 aspect ratio with intermittently hazy edges, Post Tenebras Lux (the title translates …

The optimist and the contrarian may find common ground in anticipation; to be a festivalgoer at the Toronto Film Festival is to be a bit of both. Particularly when preceded by negative reviews trickling out of earlier festivals in Cannes, Locarno, Venice and Berlin or less-than-enticing trailers, the debut of new work from filmmakers who have proven themselves capable of greatness can have cinephiles’ hearts in their throats. What if the hype is true, and your favorite living director is no longer creating essential work? Yet with reports of boos just might come a sneaking desire to go to that movie anyway. See …

“I want to want you,” says the cripplingly depressed Miranda (Selma Blair) to her suitor with excruciating honesty. The coddled, overweight Abe (Jordan Gelber), a compulsive collector who still lives at home with his parents (Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken), will take what he can get. “That’s enough for me,” he breathes. In Todd Solondz’s Dark Horse, the queasy tale of a 35-year-old man-child who decides to add a wife to his possessions, the writer-director’s dialogue is as sharp as ever, each line an arrow poisoned with sincerity. Known for colorful, stylized, cynical films including Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), …

The adventurous Wavelengths experimental film programs at the Toronto International Film Festival, curated first by Susan Oxtoby and then, in recent years, by Andréa Picard, are a true festival highlight. 2011 was exemplary in this regard, its five experimental programs marked by a diverse range of aesthetics and artistic projects. An eerie mood pervades the smart, surprising Sea Series #10 by John Price, one of the only films in the 2011 Wavelengths experimental program at the Toronto International Film Festival explicitly inspired by world events. An intertitle explains that the film was made “10,190 km from Fukushima” on May 21, 2011, two months after the deadly Japanese …

For fans of experimental film, 2011 has been a year of heavy losses. Yet even as we mourn the deaths of pioneer filmmakers including Jordan Belson, George Kuchar, George Landow (aka Owen Land), and Adolphas Mekas, the 2011 Wavelengths programs at the Toronto International Film Festival indicated that experimental film is alive and well… and living in Canada. Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber Disclosure is a site-specific live projection performance that was a highlight of this year’s festival. In the projection booth, Brooklyn-based artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder distilled a found 35mm commercial film print into rich, gorgeous beams of light that danced on …

Are you surprised that this year, some of the most anticipated films at the Toronto International Film Festival actually are by (gulp) Canadian filmmakers? Largely known to many for their solicitousness, their skills in the rink, and their charming way of saying the letter “o,” the Canadians often inspire jealousy in their film-loving neighbors to the south because of the wide-ranging institutional support that they provide for national filmmakers. The National Film Board of Canada, for instance, both produces films and distributes them to the far reaches of the country… and has been doing so for over 7o years, when …

As globalism renders the world ever smaller, national boundaries seem increasingly porous, if not outright irrelevant to the study of cinema. Yet Errol Morris still strikes me as a distinctly American filmmaker. From pet cemeteries in California (Gates of Heaven) to death row in Texas (The Thin Blue Line), from the Vietnam War (The Fog of War) to the Iraq War (Standard Operating Procedure), and in ads for the presidential campaigns of John Kerry and Barack Obama, Morris tends to bring his insatiable curiosity and searing intellect to stories and characters that, for all their strangeness and improbability, are inseparable …

Moral questions about science, war, justice, and ethics were at the forefront of some of the strongest international work at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “He’s really not judgmental of his characters at all, is he?” said one party-goer of the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. Between bites of warm peaches and pistachio ice cream at a reception for the filmmaker’s sleek, stylish new thriller, The Skin I Live In, party-goers discussed the dark, unsettling tale of a mad scientist (played with panache by Antonio Banderas) who develops a miraculous new variety of human skin and a fraught relationship with his sad, beautiful …