Toronto International Film Festival 2016
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TIFF 2016: Five Questions for In the Radiant City Director Rachel Lambert
With In the Radiant City, I wrote in my Toronto preview, Louisville, KY native Rachel Lambert has brought to Toronto a debut film that seems like it might be the kind of laconic, unexpectedly emotional regional drama associated with filmmakers like Victor Nunez. Executive produced by Jeff Nichols, In the Radiant City follows a man, Yurley (Michael Abbott, Jr.), estranged from his family, who returns home to finally deal with the aftermath of a violent act in his family’s past. Supporting players include the always excellent Marin Ireland and Paul Sparks. Below, Lambert discusses how she connected with Nichols, why […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 11, 2016 -
TIFF 2016: Five Questions for In Dubious Battle Director and Actor James Franco
Continuing his strike as one of the most tireless and unpredictable multi-hyphenates working in film today, James Franco brings to Toronto the North American premiere of his latest feature, an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s first novel, In Dubious Battle. A tale of labor strife amongst fruit pickers and orchard owners in 1930s California, the work mixes politics with human drama as it captures the rivalries and conflicts that arise in times of activism. In addition to directing, Franco stars alongside Vincent D’Onofrio, Robert Duvall and Selena Gomez. The screenplay is by Matt Rager, who scripted Franco’s other recent Great Novel […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 11, 2016 -
TIFF 2016: Five Questions for Katie Says Goodbye Writer/Director Wayne Roberts
Katie Says Goodbye reps the feature directing debut of Alaska-born NYU writer/director Wayne Roberts. An alumni film of the IFP Narrative Lab, Katie Says Goodbye is described as “a cautionary tale for dreamers,” a dark drama about a young waitress striving to leave New Mexico for a new and better life in San Francisco. There’s a brutal scene at the film’s core, which we circle around in non-spoiler fashion in the below interview, in which we also discuss Roberts’ casting of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl‘s Olivia Cooke in his lead role as well as his advice to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 10, 2016 -
TIFF 2016: Five Questions for Girl Unbound Director Erin Heidenreich
Erin Heidenreich brings the documentary Girl Unbound to the Toronto International Film Festival as a first-time feature director, but she’s already amassed a great amount of experience in the world of independent film. She’s been a documentary producer, executive producer, second-unit director as well as an original employee of Cinetic Media, where she was involved in the sales of many of the most successful independent films of the ’00s. Girl Unbound follows squash player Maria Toorpakai as she competes internationally, representing her native Pakistan in tournaments around the world. But Girl Unbound isn’t simply a sports doc as Toorapaki hails […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 10, 2016 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 3: Hermia & Helena, The Dreamed Ones, Graduation
Matías Piñeiro has been living in NYC for a few years now, so it’s logical he’d eventually make a film set at least partially there. I can’t pretend to a lack of rooting interest: I know, casually or closely, a semi-significant number of people who worked on or acted in this, did a set report (meaning I spent part of the first viewing waiting to see what was actually being said in the shot I saw filmed) and, if you go to a lot of rep cinema in the city, Piñeiro — a serious, inveterate cinephile — is just kind of generally around. Hermia […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2016 -
Five Questions for Lady Macbeth Director William Oldroyd
With William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth now in U.S. theaters, we’re resposting this interview that originally appeared during the Toronto Film Festival. Heading into its world premiere today in the auteur-centric Platform section at the Toronto International Film Festival with considerable buzz is the feature debut of acclaimed theater director William Oldroyd, Lady Macbeth. Adapted by the young British playwright Alice Birch from Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novel, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, a work compared in its day to another work of literature with a strong female protagonist, Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, published just a year later. A Director in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 9, 2016 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 2: Nocturama, A Decent Woman, The Red Turtle
When Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama was conspicuously rejected from Cannes, fest director Thierry Frémaux wouldn’t comment on its absence: was he simply currently leery of any images of mass explosions in Paris, or was there something more offensive to the film? Nocturama is to some (arguable) degree a shallow movie with a flippant/trivializing attitude, rejecting the default gravity granted its subject, which means someone will definitely get upset about the film. It’s also a highly recommended, original and (this may seem like the wrong word, but it’s true) fun work. It’s impossible to discuss Nocturama without getting into the split between its first and second half, which shouldn’t count as […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 9, 2016 -
TIFF 2016: Five Questions for Barry Director Vikram Gandhi
Barack Obama has four months left in office, and no matter one’s politics, one can already detect a wistfulness, a nostalgia, even, for the charismatic, complex and quite human figure at the center of his administration. In a year that’s already seen one Barack Obama picture (Southside with You) go from festivals to theaters, another — one that goes even further back in time — premieres today at the Toronto International Film Festival. Vikram Gandhi’s Barry looks at Obama’s pre-Barrack early years, when he was defining himself intellectually and forging his identity while a student at Columbia University. The film […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 9, 2016 -
TIFF 2016: Five Questions for The Levelling Director Hope Dickson Leach
In 2007, Hope Dickson Leach landed in the pages of Filmmaker Magazine as part of our annual 25 New Faces list. Her darkly comic brother-sister relationship drama, The Dawn Chorus — about siblings who recreate the plane crash that killed their parents — had been tearing up the festival circuit, and the Columbia Film School grad was developing a feature about a teenage girl who blames Princess Diana for her parents’ divorce. Dickson Leach had been working as an assistant for Todd Solondz on his film Palindromes, and her work was occasionally thought of as having the same satiric stripe. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 8, 2016 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 1: Neruda, Toni Erdmann, Julieta
Pablo Larraín really and seriously screws up for the first time with Neruda. Few saw or recall the existence of his debut, 2006’s Fuga, which received a middling response on the festival circuit; I seem to recall interviews around the time of 2008’s amusingly appalling (and vice-versa) reputation-establisher Tony Manero where Larraín said Fuga‘s indifferent reception prompted him to rethink a rather conventional aesthetic and come up with something inescapably different. Each film since his coming-out has, in variously scabrous ways, dealt with Pinochet’s legacy: Manero and Post Mortem taking place at the moment of his coup, the late-’80s-set No a crowdpleasingly cynical comedy re: the political machinations around the dictator’s removal via referendum. Jumping to the present, The […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 8, 2016
