Big Muddy Discovery With Big Muddy we witness birth to a genre that could best be described as ‘Prairie Noir’ and the feature debut of a burgeoning Canadian talent. In the little Saskatchewan town of Big Muddy, everyone has a secret, each one the dirtier then the next one come home to roost. Martha (Nadia […]
National Gallery TIFF Docs Masterful documentarian Frederick Wiseman turns his ever watchful and unwavering eye to the inner workings of London’s National Gallery for one of the finest films of his illustrious career. As is usually with Wiseman’s film, there’s a point to be made and not necessarily a formal plot or any interaction with […]
Merchants of Doubt TIFF Docs Food, Inc. director Robert Kenner delves into the world of pundits-for-hire with the goal of pulling the metaphorical wool off of our eyes in this powerful documentary. Based on the work of Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, the film investigates how a handful of individuals weave confusion and doubt into […]
The Guest Midnight Madness Possibly the most fun film at this year’s festival, this unabashedly hilarious and thrilling mash-up of spy flicks and 80s slashers from director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett, the minds behind previous TIFF crowd pleaser, You’re Next. Dan Stevens stars as David, an amiable and polite soldier just out of […]
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 […]
Alleluia Vanguard Writer/director Fabrice Du Welz established himself a purveyor of deeply disturbing relationship studies that mutate into horror films in the 2000s with Calvaire and Vinyan. After a painfully long seven-year gap, he’s finally returned with a project that very much delivers a new twist on his old themes. Alleluia is based on the […]
