TIFF didn't announce an opening night film alongside today's announcements of Galas and Special Presentations for their 2014 festival this September, but they announced plenty to get people excited for the event.
The first thirty minutes of Divergent , the first in yet another young adult novel series trying to cash in on the success of The Hunger Games and the lack of Harry Potter in the marketplace, are really incomprehensibly bad. Then, almost miraculously, the film gives the audience two more hours of film and actually finds a way to make it entertaining.
We talk to Theo James, leading man of the next big YA novel adaptation Divergent about his character’s internal struggles, what being in a franchise could mean for his career, his fears of being objectified, why people seem to be drawn to dystopian narratives, and why he approaches every job the same way regardless of size or potential success.
A major misstep for the usually reliable Jason Reitman, the flat out bizarre romantic drama Labor Day can never settle on a tone or feel remotely believable for a single second. It wastes a perfectly capable cast by giving them roles that could never been seen as functional human beings, and it’s so latently sexist and just all around uneasy that it fails at whatever it’s trying to attempt.
Labor Day Special Presentation Director: Jason Reitman Since 2005’s Thank You for Smoking , Reitman has produced quirky, critical character studies, each slices of odd, complicated inhabitants in their near-highs and terrible lows. (And usually JK Simmons waves hello). In Labor Day , Reitman travels far outside of his comfort zone for a tense drama […]
Earlier today our head film critic had his faith in movies nearly destroyed by Hansel and Gretel:Witch Hunters, tonight our other main film writer suffers the same nervous breakdown inducing fate fate at the hands of the already infamous Movie 43 .
Arriving in theatres almost to the day of the 100th anniversary of the allegedly unsinkable ship’s tragic demise, James Cameron’s Titanic looks and sounds as great as it did upon release 15 years ago.
Director Steven Soderbergh takes on a deadly viral outbreak in his latest film, Contagion , with the same episodic story structure that he employed when he took on the war on drugs in Traffic . What this means is that Contagion is a very well made and often fascinating film that feels longer than it really is and it forgets about most of its characters at fairly inopportune times. The two films could really play side by side as a double bill of Soderbergh procedurals. They have almost the exact same strengths and the exact same faults.
