TIFF 2022
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Canadians in “Space”: Stéphane Lafleur on Viking
While Stéphane Lafleur’s third feature, 2014’s Tu Dors Nicole, chronicled the summer malaise between of aimless Quebecois post-grads, his follow-up, Viking, explores a different, slightly otherworldly strain of existentialism. High school gym teacher David (Steven Laplante) gets the opportunity to revive his dreams of becoming an astronaut by joining a behavioral research team called the Viking Society that will mirror the first manned mission to Mars. This B-team plans to replicate the mission in a controlled environment that resembles the probe—i.e., a Quonset hut in the desert—where they will game out potential interpersonal conflicts between the five-member crew in order […]
by Vikram Murthi on Sep 21, 2022 -
TIFF 2022: Walk Up, Dry Ground Burning and Other Festival Content
Unknown Wonders—a Bulgari ad (or, as the fashion house would have it, “brand film”)—was the second sponsor bumper before every public screening at this year’s TIFF. The first time I saw it, the credit “Anne Hathaway” was unsurprising enough, but being followed by one for Zendaya and “A film by Paolo Sorrentino” had a Family Guy mad libs quality. I laughed helplessly and instantly hated it, even though (or especially because) it’s a predictable commercial in which two stars vibe at a luxurious Italian villa. The assignment perfectly fits Sorrentino’s sensibility, down to a peacock entering the frame, and hence partially […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 19, 2022 -
TIFF 2022: Glass Onion, The Maiden
One argument for the eternally vexed question “Why film festivals?” might be “To watch Netflix movies in a theater.” The streamer does, of course, theatrically release some of its prestige titles but, because of its refusal to accommodate 90-day windows, has effectively barred itself from wide releases. Since I live in New York City, I can go see all of Netflix’s big titles when they come out with ease thanks to their acquisition of the Paris Theater, which isn’t all bad: while some of the programming is grimly reserved for week-long runs of titles like Red Notice, there’s room for pleasant […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 13, 2022 -
TIFF 2022: The Fabelmans, The Good Nurse
After the first UFOs are sighted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a group of true believers gather and wait for more to arrive. A light appears over the horizon, excitement builds—but disillusionment sets in when the approaching vehicles turn out to be helicopters, and everyone scatters. The chopper beams briefly look like trainlights, echoing the mini-train track Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) assembles in his family’s cramped living room and uses to try to demonstrate a math problem to son Barry by sending the train on a collision course towards a stalled miniature stockcar. The Fabelmans tells us where this image, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 12, 2022 -
TIFF 2022: No Bears, La Pupille
I got out of a jam-packed P&I screening of Jafar Panahi’s No Bears literally two minutes after the Venice Film Festival announced a special jury prize for the film. It’s probably not overly cynical to attribute at least part of both my screening’s high attendance and the festival’s award to the sad news that the director is back in jail—his status as a high-profile Iranian dissident is inextricable from his work since 2011 when, under house arrest and banned from making movies, he started making features with him front and center as the lead protagonist. That on-screen character is by now […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2022 -
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
