“Who is this film made for, in what way is power present, how does the film understand its relationship to its subjects, and who benefits from the film being made?” That’s Samara Chadwick, Senior Programmer at the Camden International Film Festival, on this 2019 edition’s theme of “Story and Power.” But if you’re attending the festival, don’t look for this theme to be a didactic one, she says. “It’s less a series of affirmations and arrival points and more about the process of questioning — opening up a space where the questioning of power is normalized instead of invisibilized.” The […]

Ava DuVernay will receive the Director Tribute and Sam Rockwell the Actor Tribute at the 2019 IFP Gotham Awards, IFP (Filmmaker‘s publisher) announced today. DuVernay, whose feature credits include Selma (2014), The 13th (2016) and A Wrinkle in Time (2018), will receive the award following the acclaim given to this year’s When They See Us. A four-part series released by Netflix in May, When They See Us dramatized the injustice faced by the so-called Central Park Five, who were wrongfully convicted of the rape of a jogger in Central Park. DuVernay also created and executive produces the series Queen Sugar, […]

Following on the eccentric construction of the first program, where the coherence of a quartet of formally disparate films was established by a shared interest in alternative means of image production (gender, as The Bite reminds us, being one of these as well), the second slate of Wavelengths shorts traced a much clearer arc, as all six works offered variations on the home movie. Though I found it lesser in quality than the night before, Picard’s curation here was brash and confrontational in a way it rarely is, a charmingly punk gesture to make in primetime on the festival’s first […]

Less a motion picture than a picture of still photographs projected in succession, Alan Berliner’s latest documentary, Letter to the Editor, takes as its inspiration the vast photography featured in The New York Times over the past four decades. Berliner, now 63, began collecting and categorizing thousands of photographs since Ronald Reagan’s first year in the White House (1980) and continues unabated to this day, or at least until Letter to the Editor made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this past Saturday evening.  Comprised entirely of typically hi-res photographs first published in The New York Times […]

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is the inspiring story of a magazine writer, Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), who filed way over word count (by 9,600 words!), which delighted his editor so much that Vogel got the cover. It’s 1998, and Vogel, on staff at Esquire, has developed a reputation as a savage profiler no one wants to talk to anymore. Editor Ellen (Sakina Jaffrey) throws him a softball: 400 words on Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) for an issue on cultural heroes. Vogel tries to beg out of the ill-fitting assignment, but no dice—as Ellen correctly notes, “Didn’t I hire you to do […]

In March Diana Sánchez was promoted to the newly created role of Senior Director of Film for the Toronto International Film Festival. Previously, Sanchez was the Spanish language selector for the Canadian festival. She now oversees the programming strategy for the main festival; TIFF Cinematheque; Film Circuit, the Canadian organization’s nationwide film network; and theatrical programming at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Given the size of that job, it was inevitable that she would have to relinquish her role as Artistic Director of the Panama Film Festival, the festival she helped start in 2011. Under her direction, the Panama Film Festival […]

A passion project Rian Johnson has been mentioning since at least 2010, Knives Out will presumably be a cornerstone of some future retrospective on movies made after fulfilling the imperative to successfully execute a blockbuster, alongside Ridley Scott’s The Counselor and Colin Trevorrow’s The Book of Henry. In 2010, Johnson pegged it as “an old fashioned murder mystery, like an Agatha Christie,” and I’d be curious to read the earliest draft to compare/contrast with the final product — the world has worsened considerably since, and the present is unavoidably imprinted. This begins as a locked-room mystery, concerning the suicide (or is it murder, etc. […]

It grows more difficult with each passing edition to assent to the standard line that the Wavelengths program is a small clearing for artistic purity amidst a shrill, militaristically corporate environment. This has nothing to do with Andréa Picard’s curation—as deft and illuminating this year as any in the decade I’ve attended the Toronto International Film Festival—and everything to do with ongoing shifts in the social and institutional situations of artists interested in making work whose form is other than that of the commercial narrative feature. Shifts within the institutional priorities of the festival itself have required that Picard take […]

Eddie Murphy was all of 21 when he started shooting 48 Hrs. There were no years of supporting player quips to work himself up the ladder—instead, he landed the lead in an excellent, commercially successful movie first time out. He wasn’t the kind of comic who needed a movie to be built around his limitations, but an instantly seasoned player with serious dramatic chops. There’s a moment in Coming to America where the subway doors slam shut on him registering surprise and disappointment, and Murphy nails the look without overplaying—I think at that point in his career he was capable of […]

Does Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield have an obvious/meaningful relationship to his other work, and what attracted him to this adaptation in the first place? The former is easier to answer: Iannucci, age 55, studied English literature at Oxford and almost wrote a PhD on Paradise Lost, so it’s not surprising he has an affinity for Charles Dickens, any more so than it’s unexpected that the overeducated Oxbridge students at Monty Python’s core would perform a sketch about Proust. Nor is Iannucci’s love for Dickens recent news: check out his hour-long 2012 BBC special Armando’s Tale of Charles Dickens, where […]