Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 7: The Nothing Factory, Wavelengths Shorts
The very first thing I saw after arriving at TIFF was Pedro Pinho’s The Nothing Factory: a three-hour film is tough to slot into any festival schedule for practical reasons even before factoring in day-wearing-on exhaustion, and seeing it as a stand-alone first night entry point to the fest seemed like the right move. After some establishing shots of a squat silo being torn down and a factory in action, Pinho cuts to a couple having a sex scene. A phone call letting Ze (José Smith Vargas), the male half, know there’s trouble at the workplace intrudes: capitalism as coitus interruptus. […]
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“The Line Between Industry and Filmmakers is So Blurry Here”: Previewing the 2017 Camden International Film Festival and Points North Forum
An opening night world premiere, more North American film premieres, an expanded Storyforms VR section, and the return of its popular Points North Forum are all notable elements of the 2017 Camden Film Festival, which runs today through September 17 across Camden, Rockport and Rockland, Maine. Hot on the heels of Toronto, CIFF is a growing festival that is luring more and more filmmakers as well as funders to take part in discussions about non-fiction in an enviably bucolic environment. “The line between industry and filmmakers is so blurry here,” says Ben Fowlie, Executive Director of the Points North Institute, […]
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 6: Brawl in Cell Block 99, Prototype
S. Craig Zahler’s Brawl in Cell Block 99 replicates the structural mutations of his first film, Bone Tomahawk, at first a realistic Western that expands into a gorefest with inflections of Mad Max. Likewise, Brawl begins as a fairly low-key thriller (minus the part in which Vince Vaughn dismantles nearly half a car with his bare hands) that continuously ratchets up the bloodiness in uncreasingly unreal settings. Zahler’s definitely a gore enthusiast, which isn’t really my thing: it doesn’t particularly bother me, but I’d just as soon not deal with it. But, like Jeremy Saulnier, gore enables what I’ve liked about his work: Tomahawk relished […]
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 5: The Disaster Artist, Plonger
James Franco has been annoying a lot of people, myself included, for a variety of reasons, not least his relentless direction of a shocking number of movies, most quite poorly received: if I’m counting the credits on his IMDB page right, The Disaster Artist is his 16th feature since 2005 — not precisely Fred Olen Ray levels of shoddy productivity, but not that far off either. For easily his most mainstream effort (and, full disclosure, the only one I’ve seen), Franco recreates the making of Tommy Wiseau’s infamous cult movie The Room. I’m not much of a so-bad-it’s-good consumer, but I have […]
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 4: 3/4, Faces Places
Ilian Metev’s deliberately small-scale, extremely precise 3/4 puts a trio of non-actors through fictional paces. The family unit: teen classical pianist Mila (Mila Mihova), preparing for an audition that, if all goes well, will let her continue her studies in Germany; oft-annoying younger brother Niki (Nikolay Mashalov); physicist dad Todor (Todor Veltchev). (Mom is unseen: I’m the umpteenth to note that the title is both a time signature and way of noting that three out of four family members are present.) Mila’s stress over this impending potential pivot point in her life is transferred onto father and son, who react in different ways. Niki […]
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 3: Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri and The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Martin McDonagh and his brother John Michael started making movies about the same time; for The Guard, the most uncomplicatedly funny and successful of the films they’ve both made, I’m inclined to give the latter the edge. They’re very much brothers with a shared sensibility grown more matched over years spent living together as adults, while they wrote their separate work and watched the same movies: a gift for idiomatically spry humor, often in the insult-directed vein, balancing out an attendant tendency to go heavy on Catholic guilt and a fairly simplistic form of moral “complication.” Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, […]
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 2: The Death of Stalin, Molly’s Game
In its own way, it’s an enlightening experience to attend, at least once, a Big TIFF Premiere, which I didn’t do during my first time attending last year. The Death of Stalin premiered in the Winter Garden, a venue on the seventh floor of a building whose ground level houses the Elgin theater; per Wikipedia — in a phrase which Googling only traces to there, so perhaps there’s a different way to refer to this — they are the world’s only surviving “stacked Edwardian theaters.” The Elgin seats 1,561, the Winter 992, so you can gauge the perceived star value and […]
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 1: Canadian Border Security, Call Me By Your Name, Bodied
It’s customary, when diving into a series of festival dispatches, to include some prefatory, contextualizing stuff up top, which has always been tough for me. This year, though, reality has made it easy: by having me arrive at Sundance a day late thanks to Air Force Two speeding Trump off to the inauguration, and in Canada in the form of a border security official, one officer Nicoara. I’d remembered last year that Canadian customs is a little more severe than you’d expect: I think I answered about five minutes’ worth of questions about anything and everything relating to my TIFF […]
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25 Films We’re Looking Forward to at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival got underway today with Janus Metz’s Borg/McEnroe as Opening Night and a number of heavily anticipated Fall titles — including mother!, Battle of the Sexes, Downsizing, I, Tonya — making either their world or North American premieres. Vadim Rizov will be on the ground filing his critics dispatches for Filmmaker, and we’ll have select interviews and other editorial as the fest goes on. But before diving into our preview of 25 films we’re especially excited about, I want to comment on what may be TIFF’s biggest news this year, which arrived a week before the […]
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Camden International Film Festival Announces 2017 Slate and Expanded VR Section
The Camden International Film Festival, which takes place September 14 – 17 throughout Camden, Rockport and Portland, Maine, announced its 2017 lineup today. Opening the festival is a world premiere, Dustin Nakao Haider’s basketball doc, Shot in the Dark, and the lineup also contains eight films, including The Reagan Show, All That Passes By Through A Window That Doesn’t Open and Whose Streets?, that received support from parent organization Points North Institute’s Artist Programs. “Screening at CIFF this year feels like a homecoming,” said Sabaah Folayan, Director of Whose Streets?, in a press release. “This community believed in our project […]
