Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 7: Hold the Dark, The Factory
It gives me no pleasure to slag on Jeremy Saulnier’s Hold the Dark; his previous two films, Blue Ruin and Green Room, were good bleak fun, laconic in general, tersely amusing when dialogue emerged. But Hold the Dark has no interest in being fun; it’s much more interested in being taken Seriously, as a Serious Movie, and that’s a very bad trade. I have not read William Giraldi’s source novel, but I conferred with someone who has, who confirmed that many of this movie’s bad ideas — primarily, a heavy metaphorical and literal emphasis on the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan — are organic to […]
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Ten Films to Anticipate at the 2018 Camden International Film Festival
Commencing while the Toronto International Film Festival is underway and overlapping with the first weekend of IFP Week, the Camden International Film Festival is an intimate documentary festival that, this year, is building upon the strengths of its 2017 edition with a line-up that includes a number of North American premieres as well as gender-parity across all sections. The team at the festival also stresses synergy between CIFF’s various sections as well as the intermingling of public and industry programming. Comments Executive Director Ben Fowlie, “As Camden grows into a festival that has more and more major films making their […]
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“Silent Solidarity” and Portraying Sexual Violence on Screen: Jayisha Patel on Her TIFF Short Circle
London-based director Jayisha Patel has amassed an impressive resume in a remarkably short period of time. Since 2014 Patel’s documentary shorts have screened LAFF, SXSW, NYFF, the Berlin International Film Festival and beyond, racking up numerous awards along the way. Her latest VR project — Notes to My Father, the world’s first live-action 360-degree documentary on sex trafficking, commissioned by Oculus — premiered at Sundance. Her most recent short, the Berlinale-premiering Circle, a sensitive portrait of an adolescent rape survivor caught in the endless loop of India’s gender-based violence, made its Toronto debut this week. Currently an artist in residence […]
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Head Over to Instagram to Win Tickets to IFP’s Screen Forward Talks on Sunday
The 40th anniversary edition of IFP Week is coming up, and we have 10 free tickets to give away to the opening day of Screen Forward Talks, which include luminaries like Boots Riley and Nina Yang Bongiovi (Sorry to Bother You), Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Terence Nance (Random Acts of Flyness), Cathy Yan (Dead Pigs, upcoming Birds of Prey), Lauren Wolkstein (The Strange Ones), Julie Cohen & Betsy West (RBG), Nicholas Ma (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?). (Oh, and I’ll be moderating a panel on producing that includes some luminaries as well: Josh Braun, Julie Goldman, Riva Marker, […]
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TIFF 2018 Critic’s Notebook 6: Maya, A Million Little Pieces
Mia Hansen-Løve is on my shortest list of favorite working filmmakers; after the extremely strong opening one-two of All is Forgiven and The Father of My Children, Goodbye First Love and Eden were whiffs. She came back strong with Things to Come, and now there’s Maya, almost certainly destined to be the most poorly-received of her films to date, in part for reasons that I’ll get into below. It appears, talking to a lot of colleagues, that they simply didn’t think the film was very good, but I liked it a lot: Maya‘s got unexpectedly strange energy, does a number of things Hansen-Løve hasn’t done before […]
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TIFF 2018 Critic’s Notebook 5: Her Smell, Rojo, A Faithful Man
World premieres x3, appraised in greater haste (and mercifully smaller word counts) than usual, starting with this morning’s viewing. I woke up to a slew of tweets saying that the first half of Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell is an impossibly testing experience that dares audiences to walk out; now that I’ve seen it, it appears people have a remarkably low tolerance for abrasion. Five real-time scenes tracking the disastrous, inevitable rock bottom and sort-of rebirth of ’90s riot/it-grrl-turned-serious-hot-mess Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss), Her Smell strays noticeably outside of ARP’s normal comfort zone, in which people are reflexively, casually bruising and vicious to […]
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 4: Widows
The first shot of Steve McQueen’s Widows is in keeping with the Master Shot Severity of Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave: an overhead two-shot of Veronica (Viola Davis) and Harry Rawlins (Liam Neeson) in bed, held at great length, allowing for durational “naturalistic” acting in a rigorously defined space. “Severity” is descriptive, not necessarily a pejorative: the solemn Steadicam virtuosities and meticulously imprisoning static compositions of Shame only heightened the silliness of the story of a rich man who does zero work onscreen while having sex with an effortlessly accrued slew of partners but who, like Brian Wilson, sometimes still feels Very Sad. McQueen’s […]
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TIFF 2018 Critic’s Notebook 3: In Fabric, The Grand Bizarre
Like The Duke of Burgundy, Peter Strickland’s In Fabric isn’t a giallo but feints at the genre, wrapping itself in lovingly reproduced trappings to pursue an entirely different agenda. Burgundy was an unexpectedly emotional examination of the difficulties of mutually negotiating the obstacles of a long-term relationship; Fabric is unemotional, its primary instincts either mischievous or satirical. It’s a pretty good time—too long, which makes it just like pretty much every cult movie ever made, so that’s appropriate. The opening credits list legendary British soundstage Twickenham Studios as one of the production companies, and the credit’s no joke: the movie takes place almost entirely […]
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TIFF 2018 Critic’s Notebook 2: Our Time, Hidden Man, Ulysses and Mona
Our Time stars Carlos Reygadas and his wife Natalia López as Juan and Ester, a married couple whose definitely fictional open relationship in no way bears any resemblance to the performers. Even the TIFF write-up barely pretends to believe in this author-vs-character divide: “It’s fascinating when you realize that the director is effectively filming himself secretly watching his real wife’s affair.” Setting this aside (at least until someone asks Reygadas about it in an interview), the premise isn’t a huge change of pace: for all its Dreyer trappings, Silent Light is an adulterous love triangle, and Reygadas’s manic peak Post Tenebras Lux made one […]
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Venice 2018 Critic’s Notebook: Sunset, Vox Lux and Monrovia, Indiana
Walking out of László Nemes’ Sunset, I was gripped by the same stupefaction I had felt upon first seeing such films as The Dreamed Path or Post Tenebras Lux: though unable to make full sense of the experience or form a definite judgement, I was pretty sure I had just witnessed something genuinely great. This impression has only grown stronger since. In Sunset, Nemes employs a formal strategy very similar to the one from Son of Saul, stringing together a series of propulsive and staggeringly complex handheld shots that stick close to the protagonist at all times, while the intricate […]
