Bang Bang Baby Discovery One of the most delightfully loony movies to come out of Canada in ages, this assuredly kooky, gorgeous, and surreal take on 1960s values is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It’s a perfect example of a completely original film that has no comparison and throws everything at the audience including several kitchen […]
The Last Five Years Special Presentations One of the festival’s biggest surprises is Richard LaGravanese’s sparsely staged, but lushly orchestrated and perfectly acted adaptation of Jason Robert Brown’s tightly constructed off-Broadway musical. Jumping back and forth through time between ages 23 to 28 for a pair of young lovers – budding novelist Jamie (Jeremy Jordan) […]
Corbo Discovery With a breakout performance by its young lead, Corbo follows sixteen-year-old Jean Corbo as he explores his own ideals and beliefs about the future of Quebec, breaking away from his political family and joining a militant cell of the FLQ in the decade before the October Crisis. Already a troublemaker at school, Jean […]
The second program in the Short Cuts International program features films that revolve around desire and the lengths some will go to fulfil them, from looks at forbidden love to the quest for an elusive ice cream cone. Kaveh Ebrahimpour’s debut short from Iran, A Ceremony for a Friend drops us in the middle of […]
The first program for the brand new Short Cuts International program this year at TIFF looks largely at the perceived rules and attitudes that we as humans aspire/adhere to within social contexts and how easily that bond can be manipulated. The Warren deals with a nighttime Israeli Defense Force raid into the titular refugee camp, […]
An Eye For Beauty (Le règne de la beauté) Special Presentations An Eye for Beauty marks the return of Quebec’s Denys Arcand after a seven year layoff, and it proves that even the greatest of filmmakers can take a simple premise and screw it up beyond belief. It’s an unmitigated disaster. Luc (Éric Bruneau) is […]
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Leviathan Masters Leviathan is a well acted, beautifully shot film that highlights the best of mother nature and the worst of human nature. Kolya (Alexey Serebryakov), a proud patriarch with a gorgeous Russian seaside property, is rendered helpless when a corrupt city official decides he would like the land for himself. Kolya enlists the help […]
Guidance Discovery The Discovery programme at TIFF is meant to showcase emerging directors with promising futures, which is the perfect place for Pat Mills’ Guidance. Mills not only wrote and directed the film, but also plays the lead, David Gold, a down and out actor who lies to get a job as a high school guidance councillor […]
Two Days One Night Special Presentations Two Days, One Night, the latest film by Jean and Luc Dardenne, has one of those tidy premises that lends itself well to a concise pitch: a woman has one weekend to convince coworkers to give up their bonuses so that she may keep her job. To expand on […]
Pride Special Presentations The true story of a group of queer folks from London setting out to help a Welsh village during the miner’s strike of 1984-85, Pride is a mash of odd couples and triumphs over oppression that satisfies, but predictable archetypes and glossed-over challenges are a drawback. Mark (Ben Schnetzer) forms Lesbians and […]
Songs She Wrote About People She Knows Discovery The solo feature filmmaking debut for Vancouver’s Kris Elgstrand – one of the directors of hilariously surreal 2011 TIFF entry Doppelganger Paul – is a similarly off kilter comedy about how everyone has a song in their heart and how sometimes people should learn that they just […]
Mommy Special Presentations Although it’s quite good has been garnering considerable acclaim since its debut at Cannes earlier this year, Mommy might be Quebecois filmmaker Xavier Dolan’s most over thought film to date. In a fictional 2015 where it has become legal for parents facing hardship to place difficult, unruly, or developmentally challenged kids into […]
In Her Place Discovery Elegantly mounted and austere at the same time, Albert Shin’s debut feature (co-produced by long time filmmaking partner Igor Drljaca, director of Canadian festival favourite Krivina) looks at three generations of women bound by South Korean customs to a terrible situation. A woman seeks to secretly adopt the soon to be […]
It Follows Midnight Madness A suitably atmospheric, but direly serious teen thriller, It Follows takes a somewhat goofy premise and cranks it to eleven but never manages to follow through on a lot of promise at the outset. After making love to her new boyfriend for the first time, nineteen year old Jay (Maika Monroe, […]
