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 […]

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 […]

On the heels of last week’s announcement of TIFF 2019’s opening night film, today the festival dropped the first titles announced for its Gala and Special Presentation sections. Per usual, this first wave announcements is heavy on big-name festival titles. Among the galas, world premieres include Marielle Heller’s follow-up to Can You Ever Forgive Me?, the Tom Hanks-starring Mr. Rogers biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighbhorhood; Western Stars, a performance film co-directed by Bruce Springsteen for his latest album; the Eddie Murphy-starring Rudy Ray Moore biopic directed by Craig Brewer; and Rian Johnson’s Agatha Christie-inflected murder mystery comedy Knives Out. Other prominent titles include […]

In celebrating 25 years of Slamdance, I’m reflecting on the journey of first-time filmmakers. Many have passed through the hallways and screening rooms of Slamdance’s long-standing headquarters at Treasure Mountain Inn, through Sundance’s theaters, and many other new festivals over the past couple of decades. Yet from Stanley Kubrick’s coming of age as a filmmaker in the 1950s to the new digital technologies of today, it’s been an endeavor “against all odds,” through hurdles of financing, casting, scheduling, production and distribution. I have always been fascinated by Stanley Kubrick’s early career, specifically his first three feature films: Fear and Desire, […]

Here’s what I did not expect to see last Monday: Béla Tarr, hunched by a door before the fourth and final screening of the experimental Wavelengths shorts programs so crucial to my annual TIFF experience. I’d missed a trick–news that he’d be with us had been tweeted out that morning, but I’m glad I didn’t know. Dropping in one of the crucial film figures of the last 30 years was a shock to the system; the red-carpet clutter unavoidably inseparable from nearly any festival faded away, and for a few minutes there was just Tarr, as stringent as expected, talking about the young […]

The first shot of Steve McQueen’s Widows is in keeping with the Master Shot Severity of Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave: an overhead two-shot of Veronica (Viola Davis) and Harry Rawlins (Liam Neeson) in bed, held at great length, allowing for durational “naturalistic” acting in a rigorously defined space. “Severity” is descriptive, not necessarily a pejorative: the solemn Steadicam virtuosities and meticulously imprisoning static compositions of Shame only heightened the silliness of the story of a rich man who does zero work onscreen while having sex with an effortlessly accrued slew of partners but who, like Brian Wilson, sometimes still feels Very Sad. McQueen’s […]

Like The Duke of Burgundy, Peter Strickland’s In Fabric isn’t a giallo but feints at the genre, wrapping itself in lovingly reproduced trappings to pursue an entirely different agenda. Burgundy was an unexpectedly emotional examination of the difficulties of mutually negotiating the obstacles of a long-term relationship; Fabric is unemotional, its primary instincts either mischievous or satirical. It’s a pretty good time—too long, which makes it just like pretty much every cult movie ever made, so that’s appropriate. The opening credits list legendary British soundstage Twickenham Studios as one of the production companies, and the credit’s no joke: the movie takes place almost entirely […]