Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan are a fine duo in the offbeat teenage hitwoman dramedy Violet & Daisy, but the film will be best remembered for one of the sweetest, most touching performances from the late James Gandolfini.
Despite a wildly inconsistent tone and gags that don't always work, the core ideas behind TIFF 2011 audience award winner Where Do We Go Now are fresh and new.
Writer and actor Vinay Virmani wasn’t nervous at all during the filming of his feature debut Breakaway a film based around a stand-up act from comedian Russell Peters about an all-Sikh ice hockey team trying to make a name for themselves. Despite the presence of some heavy hitting Hollywood and Bollywood regulars on set, Virmani said he didn't have time to be nervous.
Moreso based on Yasunari Kawabata’s The House of the Sleeping Beauties than the popular fairy tale, Emily Browning, whose butt you may remember from Sucker Punch, is Lucy, a university student who is very comfortable with performing tasks for money.
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s new horror film Intruders seems to be an attempt to bridge British and Spanish horror motifs: the haunted house of the former, and the significance of children of the latter. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite succeed. The premise is fairly strong: parallel stories are told, one of young Juan in Spain, who invents […]
Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Dogtooth disturbed and impressed a lot of people, and I doubt his new film ALPS will receive a different reaction. Following a similar narrative line, about a strange situation between a group of people that is revealed and observed during the film, it stands as farcical comedy where the previous film was […]
We Canadians are often stereotyped as nice and polite, and even our bank robbers follow this pattern. Edwin Boyd is a biopic of Canada’s most famous thief, and it is a solid first feature, written and directed by Nathan Morlando.
The last weekend of TIFF 2011 is upon us. For many, the festival ended when the celebrity circus packed up and left town, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of great films playing between now and Sunday. Here is a list of ten films (in no particular order) that might have escaped you during the festival proper that are getting encore screenings this weekend.
Everyone, from the most devout Catholic to effusive evangelist, has a concept of Jesus and Satan, and what he or she would look like if they ever manifested in human form. But there is no concept, and the devil, or Jesus, could be a rich man or a strange drifter. Award-winning French director Bruno Dumont ‘s new film Outside Satan is a strange, disquieting and disturbing film about a drifter who could be Jesus or Satan, or perhaps both.
Twixt is not a blockbuster, but it is certainly a genre piece; a dream-inspired, Dan Deacon scored, Poe-themed vampire ghost murder story genre piece. The film is a weird stand out even in the Francis Ford Coppola portfolio. It’s definitely nowhere near Apocalypse Now, it’s not even Rumble Fish, but Twixt, for all of its uneasy flaws, is incredibly fun to watch.
In Sarah Palin – You Betcha! British documentarian Nick Broomfield and his tiny team cozy up in Wasilla, Alaska to try to gather opinions and footage from Palin's friends, colleagues and even Palin herself. Two thirds of those goals do not go very well at all, and for some bizarre reason Broomfield lets you in on every production misfortune.
Lost in a sea of major Hollywood releases and hyped international films are the hidden gems of the Toronto International Film Festival. has picked three films that are defintely not your typical fare, but that he believes are nonetheless worthy of your time and attention.
The Skin I Live In is a hypnotizing feat, a contemporary reflection of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die resulting in a Frankenstein tale making sweet, Spanish love to body politics. Almodóvar is gently taking us by the hand down and leading us down a trail of science gone mad, and it feels as classically minded as it does completely original.-
Despite the glamour and glitz associated with the TIFF, there are few things more lovingly dorky than a major film festival. This doesn’t necessarily extend to people who work within the industry (the talent, the buyers, the movers, the shakers) or the people who have to deal with the industry types, but for film lovers a festival is no different than playing video games for hours on end or obsessively collecting action figures.
The 2011 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival kicks off tomorrow and will run until September 18th. Now you're going to hear a lot about the celebrities in town, the parties going down and the massive queues, but at the end of the day TIFF is about the movies. And with over 330 movies playing this year, there's definitely no shortage of films to choose from.
