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 […]

As Giovanni Marchini Camia notes in this valuable, context-providing review/interview of I Was at Home, But…,  Angela Schanelec’s fourth feature, 2001’s Passing Summer, was the first to give rise (in a Die Zeit review) to the term “Berlin School,” an imprecise but generally accepted designation for contemporaries including Christian Petzold, Maren Ade, Ulrich Köhler, Christoph Hochhäusler, Thomas Arslan et al. As Camia also notes, Schanelec’s relationship to this term is tense; her work is the most overtly severe, and it’s taken her longer to break through than her highest-profile peers. Internationally, Schanelec didn’t receive significant recognition until her ninth feature, 2016’s The Dreamed Path, until […]

A good friend, suffering from an incurable case of acute cinephilia, recently informed me that we are “living in a golden age of horror,” citing breakout hits like Jordan Peele’s doppelgänger-dependent Us and Ari-Aster’s bucolically-tinged relationship drama Midsommar. But for every horror film remade (“reimagined”) to inspired results (Lars Klevberg’s Child’s Play), a muddled, paint-by-numbers redo isn’t far behind (Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer’s Pet Sematary). For every step forward the ever-growing Conjuring Universe took, it’s always as a result of first taking two steps back (the Nixon era period pieces The Curse of La Llorona and, to a lesser […]

For P&I-accredited attendees without the scratch to make it to Berlin/Cannes/Venice (let alone Telluride, with its $780 cost of press entry), day one of TIFF is traditionally a marathon catch-up march through their biggest titles, often scheduled in competing Sophie’s choice slots, with the big-name world premiere titles coming later. All this year’s Cannes main slate awardees are in the program minus two (the pointed omissions are Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe and the Dardennes’ Young Ahmed). This year’s Palme d’Or went to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, which is fine by me: he certainly deserves some kind of significant honorific at this point. Bong’s career […]

The Toronto International Film Festival gets underway today and with it a rush of premiering Oscar-preening specialty titles as well as festival favorites traveling from Cannes, Venice and Telluride. And, yes, anyone attending TIFF this year should have films like Trey Shults’s Waves,  Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems, Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Kasi Lemmons’s Harriet and Rian Johnson’s Knives Out on their must-see list. But at Filmmaker our recommendations stray from the Galas and Special Presentations to the other sections, where films that might not be hitting the multiplex in just a few months are […]

Steven Soderbergh’s most persistently recurring subject is economic inequality, attacked from a number of angles: lone dispossessed protagonist vs. powerful corporation (Erin Brockovich), the ways in which minimum-wage employees are demeaned by employers (Bubble), capitalism as sex work against the backdrop of the last recession (The Girlfriend Experience), white collar crime (The Informant!), attacks on pharmaceutical companies (Side Effects) and private health insurance (Unsane), a general emphasis on stratification and the bottom rung of the ladder (Magic Mike and Logan Lucky, the proletarian Ocean’s Eleven, in which a heist doubles as praxis redistribution). Che speaks for itself, and this year there are two […]

Having already revealed the Foucauldian dynamic that will run through this year’s Camden International Film Festival — a focus on “story and power” — the festival’s parent organization Points North Institute unveiled today the forum and artist programs that will take place over the event’s mid-September weekend. The annual Points North Forum will ask “critical questions about how the documentary film and media community reflects existing power structures, including questions of racial equity, access, funding, and which stories are being told, how, for whom, and by whom,” according to the press release. Other highlights and programs include masterclasses by Apollo […]

Cinematic overdrive takes effect every summer for an 11-day spree at the New Horizon festival in Wroclaw, Poland, a “best-of” assortment of festival bangers from Rotterdam, Berlin, Cannes and elsewhere that also splinters into provocative sidebars, career retrospectives and funky late-night fare. The companion festival to fall’s American Film Festival likewise unspools at Kino Nowe Horyzonty (New Horizons), a contemporary multi-level nine-screen movie complex embedded in the city’s nightlife hub, well-designed as a life support system for cinephiles embarked on 14-hour immersive viewing sessions. (Which is to say, espresso and marvelous pastries are never far from reach). I’ve gotten to […]