Heartbeat Contemporary World Cinema Insufferably precious, drowning in quirk, and filled with an astounding amount of thematic mixed messages, Andrea Dorfman’s tale of a wannabe musician overcoming her fears is a painful thing to sit through. Justine (Tanya Davis) is in so much of a depressed rut that she’s essentially becoming her deceased grandmother, right […]
Maps to the Stars Gala From the cold, calculating, and cynical brain of David Cronenberg comes an unexpected Hollywood satire. At first, it’s jarring to see Cronenberg staging a gleefully foul mouthed and filthy comedy amidst a group of drugged up, self-obsessed, La-La-land phonies. The script from Bruce Wagner is not particularly funny, but an […]
Mr. Turner Special Presentations Mr. Turner encapsulates the spirit and intent of the kind of stories that writer/director Mike Leigh likes to tell. When you aren’t laughing your face off at his latest, you’re in a dark, deeply emotional state. J.M.W. Turner (Timothy Spall), isn’t a household name, but before Renoir or Monet, he was […]
Foxcatcher Gala Certain to get noticed for its trio of electrifying leading performances, this unnerving and stylish true life tragedy still feels a bit off thanks to director Bennett Miller (Moneyball, Capote) overcompensating where he doesn’t need to. Olympic gold medal wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) has just come back from the 1984 Olympics and […]
The third program of the Short Cuts Canada series is a stellar line-up of shorts about various forms of societal marginalization or the awkwardness felt by being an outcast. There isn’t one out of the bunch that doesn’t muster up true emotion or deeply contemplative thoughts about how we approach and deal with people who […]
A Hard Day City to City When you first meet Detective Ko Gun-soo (Lee Sun-kyun), it’s clear that he’s at the dawn of a real, real bad day. Driving to his mother’s funeral procession while on the phone with his snack-hungry daughter, a stray dog appears on the road causing him to swerve head on […]
Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons deliver the best leading performances of their careers in this intensely heart-pounding game of musical one-upmanship.
Over Your Dead Body Vanguard It’s been a while since we’ve seen the side of Takashi Miike that’s on display in Over Your Dead Body. Miike continues to live up to his legend by making multiple films every year and including and least one sequence of toe-curlingly visceral violence. But he hasn’t trotted into the […]
Considering that the major showpieces of this year’s opening Short Cuts Canada program are a restorations of a pair of iconic national classics, it only stands to reason that the rest of the films should fall in nicely behind them. Recently restored to its 3D glory for the digital age, Norman McLaren’s stereoscopic opus Around […]
Preggoland Special Presentations A charmingly foulmouthed, bad taste comedy that can do for faking a pregnancy what Bridesmaids did for bachelorette parties, the latest film from Canadian filmmaker Jacob Tierney (The Trotsky, Good Neighbours) benefits from a stellar script and a star making performance from writer and lead Sonja Bennett. Ruth (Bennett) is in her […]
The deeper meaning of human interaction and personal relationships seems to be the unifying concept behind the shorts in this year’s second, Quebec filmmaker heavy Short Cuts Canada package. In the best of the shorts, Elizabeth Lazebnik’s Russian language meditation Liompa, an old man on his death bed realizes that not only will be not […]
It’s a sweltering late July afternoon, but I’m still sitting down over a cup of warm tea at Canteen in the lobby of the TIFF Bell Lightbox and talking to Colin Geddes the day after most of his choices for the heavily watched and buzzed about Midnight Madness and Vanguard sections had been announced. (Really […]
Coming Home Special Presentations Coming Home chronicles a difficult political time where one unfortunate accident changes the courses of events for one unsuspecting family. The cultural revolution was stressful time for countless in mainland China, but when long imprisoned Lu Yanshi (Chen Daoming), a teacher who clashes with the establishment, comes home after years away […]
[REC] 4: Apocalypse Midnight Madness Picking up where [REC] 2 left off, no one is safe as the authorities struggle to contain a viral zombie outbreak of now demonic proportions. It won’t set the world on fire in terms of originality or craft, but if this is the final entry in the franchise, it could […]
Infinitely Polar Bear Gala Although somewhat awkwardly mounted by first time director Maya Forbes, her retelling of her own childhood with a bipolar father in late 70s Boston holds a wealth of empathy and emotion that more than makes up for any technical shortcomings. Not long after suffering a severe manic episode, Cameron (one of […]
