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 […]
In 2007 a group of four comics and creators joined to form Good Neighbor, a sketch comedy team that would go on to breach the ranks of Saturday Night Live. The group is known mostly for Kyle Mooney, a weirdo comic voice whose left-of-center SNL skits often get cut for time. Mooney stars in Good Neighbor’s feature film debut, Brigsby Bear, directed by fellow group member Dave McCary. The film tells the story of a secluded young man with an unhealthy obsession with a TV show literally no one has ever seen. Below, DP Christian Sprenger speaks to the film’s tricky tone, which eschews […]
Playing divorced parents embarking on a strange journey into Death Valley, Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu bring an easy chemistry and rich shared experience to Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love, opening today in the States from Strand. They both play famous actors, one a skeptic and one a life-after-death believer, yoked together on a road trip conceived by their son, who committed suicide in San Francisco several months earlier. He’s written them both letters and given them a map to seven locations, telling them in his posthumously received correspondence that he’ll appear to them at one of the stops. The premise […]
Blind, the feature directorial debut of Joachim Trier’s co-writer Eskil Vogt, is an aesthetically spick-and-span Nordic nightmare, a meditation on loneliness, illness and responsibility. If its effects are a bit sneakier than the wrecking ball to the chest approach of Oslo, August 31, it’s due to the meticulousness of its script, and the complex interplay among its many principal characters. Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) has recently lost her sight, and spends her days cooped up with her computer while her husband Morten (Henrik Rafaelsen) is at work. Unable to relate to the outside world, Ingrid retreats into her imagination, crafting an interwoven tale of […]
“So I didn’t suffer for my art!” Feminist poet and lecturer Elle Reid (Lily Tomlin), an irreverent, confrontational carryover from the hippie era, yells defensively at Olivia (Judy Greer), a much younger former student of great promise as well as her girlfriend in a recent doomed relationship. The bitter ex has just aimed what in literary circles are insulting barbs at the seasoned author. “Writer-in-residence!” she screams outside the café where she is now waiting tables after abandoning her studies, much to Elle’s consternation. “Solipsist!” she adds to the sting. I did suffer for my art. Sort of, and not for […]
Hot on the heels off NYFF announcing Steve Jobs as their centerpiece film yesterday comes the Gala and Special Presentations lineup from TIFF. There are the expected Cannes holdovers, and a handful of world premieres from Julie Delpy, Ridley Scott, Michael Moore, Terence Davies, Rebecca Miller and more. The full list is below. OPENING NIGHT FILM “Demolition” Jean-Marc Vallee, USA (World Premiere) GALAS “Beeba Boys” Deepa Mehta, Canada (World Premiere) “Eye in the Sky” Gavin Hood, United Kingdom (World Premiere) “Forsaken” Jon Cassar, Canada (World Premiere) “Freeheld” Peter Sollett, USA (World Premiere) “Hyena Road” (“Hyena Road: Le Chemin du Combat”) Paul Gross, Canada (World […]
Below you’ll find the as-of-now lineup for the Cannes Film Festival, which takes this play this year from May 13 to 24. A few notes: there will be more titles added to competition soon (fingers crossed for the new Apichatpong Weerasethakul), and this isn’t the full extent of the festival. Next week will see the announcement of the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week sections, and there are other less prominent parts of the festival (such as the ACID sidebar) that also have yet to be unveiled. A special shout-out to Roberto Minervini, whose excellent Stop the Pounding Heart debuted at Cannes […]
Sundance By Scott Macaulay “Can’t we just try to have a good time?” The plea so often heard when going on a family trip — or an evening out with a couple you don’t like so much, or when indulging your partner on a trip back home — is terrible advice for a journalist attending a film festival, especially Sundance. You see, as long as your tickets are in order, you can quite easily have a good time at the Park City festival. By “good time,” I’m speaking in film festival terms, which means “see good movies.” The destination for […]
Slamdance was yesterday, and now it’s the Sundance Film Festival who are putting out their initial competition slates. There’s no single opening movie anymore, but instead Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, Todd Miller’s doc Dinosaur 13, Hong Khaou’s narrative feature Lilting and Nadav Schirman’s Israeli doc The Green Prince kick off things on January 16. I’m always excited to see lineups that have a mixture of work by familiar faces and names that are as yet unfamiliar to me, and this is definitely one of those. In the U.S. Dramatic Competition, there are films from Joe Swanberg, Jim Mickle, Craig Johnson, Carter Smith and the Zellner brothers plus debuts […]
Editor’s Note: This essay on ambiguous film endings contains spoilers for the film Oslo, August 31. Joachim Trier’s latest feature, the formally inventive and genuinely moving Oslo, August 31, really had me in its grip by the end. The film, which is about one day in the life of a recovering heroin addict, finishes with the protagonist returning to his childhood home, which is empty. Earlier in the film, we’ve seen him buy a whole bunch of heroin, and a relapse – or worse – may be imminent. In the opening of the film, the addict, Anders, attempts to kill […]