TIFF
-
Off Screen Spaces: Azazel Jacobs on His Three Daughters
Azazel Jacobs’s films treat the tragicomedy of human existence with tenderness and a heartbreakingly honest sense of the absurd. In his first released feature, The GoodTimesKid (2005), the anti-hero (played by Jacobs) is trapped in a repetitive nightmare of mistaken identity punctuated by Marx Brothers slapstick and 1930s movie dance routines. Jacobs made it with colleagues and friends he met when he was getting his MFA from the AFI Conservatory, some of whom became a permanent part of his team, including his wife Diaz, an actor and filmmaker in her own right. Momma’s Man (2008) memorialized the trauma of moving […]
by Amy Taubin on Sep 18, 2024 -
TIFF 2024: Lázaro at Night, Hard Truths
Bell and Bulgari are gone as sponsors, but Listerine is one of 37 new ones at TIFF 2024. This year, the defining image of the fest’s early days has been the 95-milliliter bottles of Listerine Total Care (Mild Mint) neatly arrayed on mini-shelves next to the sinks in the washrooms of the festival’s Lightbox headquarters. There, the walls are branded with mock-movie poster key art for “Listerine: The Movie,” with a bottle of that pink liquid sandwiched between five-star laurels for “Refreshing Plot Twist” and “Breath of Fresh Air.” An employee stocking those bottles estimated that over a thousand are […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 9, 2024 -
TIFF 2022: Other People’s Children, The Inspection
It seemed fitting to enter Toronto by a new route for my first in-person TIFF in three years. Rather than going straight from the airport to the downtown core where the festival unfolds, I took a streetcar further afield to one end of the line, Bathurst Station. The Ed and Anne Mirvish Parkette is just outside, with a plaque dating itself to 2008 that gives a mini-bio of the couple (“Humanitarians, Retail Innovators, Arts Advocates”). A few meters over, a conspicuously newer plaque memorializes Beverly Mascoll as “a community advocate and the founder of the Mascoll Beauty Supply Ltd., a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 9, 2022 -
14 Films We’re Recommending You See at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival
The Toronto Film Festival is underway, the first purely in-person edition since before the COVID-19 pandemic. There are high profile premieres, including Ryan Johnson’s Knives Out sequel, Glass Onion, a number of films traveling on their awards march from Telluride and/or Venice (Florian Zeller’s The Son, Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), as well as smaller acquisition titles that are always in danger of being overlooked amidst the galas. Below are a number of films, most but not all TIFF premieres, that we’re recommending you check out, whether that recommendation is based on pre-screening or just our knowledge […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 9, 2022 -
“I Believe in a Holistic Approach to World Building”: Sophie Jarvis on her TIFF-Debuting Psychological Drama Until Branches Bend
Veteran production designer Sophie Jarvis’s assured feature debut Until Branches Bend is one smartly executed, unexpected gem. Premiering in the Discovery section of this year’s TIFF, the psychological drama (really a contemporary horror film) follows a cannery worker named Robin (2016 TIFF Rising Star Grace Glowicki) whose life is upended after discovering a creepy bug in a peach while (conveniently) alone at break time. Unable to get her boss to take the very real threat of a catastrophic invasion seriously — and perhaps risk a factory shutdown — she decides to go public with her unappetizing finding, which entails sounding […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 9, 2022 -
“We Were Filming at a Time When Putin Was Arresting Opposition”: Sarah McCarthy on Her Telluride-Premiering Doc Short Anastasia
Sarah McCarthy is no stranger to navigating the myriad challenges posed by authoritarian states. Indeed, the Australian doc-maker has shot in precarious political places throughout the world, from the Philippines, to Saudi Arabia to Russia—where she’s returned time and time again. Nor is she a stranger to the Toronto International Film Festival, where following on the heels of feature-length works (The Sound of Mumbai, The Dark Matter of Love) she now debuts her latest short Anastasia; and the innocuous title, much like the film’s titular character, belies one powerful punch. Anastasia Shevchenko is a Russian civil rights advocate who’s been arrested […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 3, 2022 -
TIFF 2021 Critic’s Notebook: Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Earwig
Lucile Hadzihalilovic*’s Earwig is, in broad outline, synopsizable with the same sentence as her first two features, Innocence and Evolution: a child (or group of children) grows up in deliberate isolation from the wider world under the watchful gaze of ambivalently motivated custodians, themselves operating under the direction of obscure masters. Intentions are unclear, but the fundamental fears—of puberty, parents, the body and its sexually-tinged conditioning for adulthood—remain clear and similar. The visual approach is always that of horror’s visual language without its traditional jolting sonic components—i.e., long walks down sinisterly lit hallways or down stairwells, no suddenly violent sounds. When I asked Hadzihalilovic […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2021 -
TIFF 2020 (I): David Byrne’s American Utopia
Even without the pandemic, and the attendant pulling of high-market-value films from the festival circuit until it’s over (?), it’s likely Spike Lee’s David Byrne’s American Utopia would have been the opening night film of TIFF 2020. The goal of gala presentations is to sell out expensive seats, and the Q&A combo of Lee and Byrne after a concert movie would have been a surefire bet. A mostly workmanlike rendering of Byrne’s 2019 Broadway show, American Utopia opens with “Here,” one of two songs co-written with Daniel Lopatin from the fairly poky album of the same name—the least familiar selections, five in all, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2020 -
“I Think Everything is the Director’s Fault”: Steven Soderbergh on The Laundromat, LLCs and Systemic Corruption
Ever the productive workhorse, Steven Soderbergh has released two movies on Netflix this year. The first: High Flying Bird, a sharply scripted drama set behind the scenes at the NBA that follows a canny sport agent whose end game is to shift the financial power from white owners to black players, i.e. to seize the means (or balls) of production. The second: The Laundromat, a Big Short-style anthology film about the Panama Papers leak that explains the proliferation of offshore bank accounts and tax havens, specifically those provided by the firm Mossack Fonseca, and follows the victims of these global […]
by Vikram Murthi on Sep 19, 2019 -
“It’s Not That Strange, and It’s Not That Weird!” Pablo Larraín and Mariana Di Girolamo on Ema
With Ema, Chilean director Pablo Larraín moves away from the biopic (Jackie, Neruda) and the past history of his country (Tony Manero, Post Mortem, No) to turn towards its future. The film centers on Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo), a young reggaeton dancer who sees her marriage with celebrated choreographer Gastón (Gael García Bernal) crumble after their “failed” adoption. A simple enough story, but already in the film’s earliest scene, the surprising behaviors and reactions of the characters hint at their extremely modern identities. Ema and Gaston are unspeakably cruel to each other, but in their own way, they are incredibly […]
by Elena Lazic on Sep 19, 2019
