Film Festivals Archives - Page 26 of 46

TIFF ’12: Everyday

September 14, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Christmas, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**½/****
directed by Michael Winterbottom

by Angelo Muredda Michael Winterbottom makes projects more than he makes films, and happy are the rare few that bridge the gap. Everyday comes close at times, with no thanks to the unnecessarily tricked-out structure, which picks up with a young British family at holiday satellite points spread out over a five-year period and watches them cope with separation anxiety in between. In theory, this narrative-by-checkpoint strategy most resembles 2004's dismal 9 Songs, where Winterbottom watched a dull relationship bloom and die over the course of nine dull concerts and miserable sex scenes, but the film can't help but be improved by the material this time.

TIFF ’12: Frances Ha

September 13, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda There's a lot to love in Frances Ha, but the highlight is surely a tracking shot of star, muse, and co-writer Greta Gerwig clumsily bounding through the streets of Brooklyn to the sounds of David Bowie's "Modern Love." (In a daily dispatch for mubi.com, Fernando Croce astutely toasts her "galumphing radiance.") You could read this moment as either a joyous corrective to Michael Fassbender's miserable NYC jog in Shame or a direct lift, down to the song's abrupt stop, from Leos Carax's Mauvais sang–think of Gerwig as the Ginger to Denis Lavant's Fred. Or you could just accept it as the clearest expression of the film's ambling structure: a lovely headlong dive through traffic en route to somewhere safe but rewarding.

TIFF ’12: The Iceman

September 12, 20122012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Gangster, TIFF

*½/****
directed by Ariel Vroman

by Bill Chambers Although The Iceman proves that a movie cannot get by on Michael Shannon's dark charisma alone, Shannon has reached that point in his career where his casting supplies the lion's share of subtext. Hence, a line like "I dub cartoons for Disney"–uttered not two minutes into the film, before there's enough context for it to be a joke or a lie–induces titters of recognition. Of course, most will know going in that Shannon's playing real-life contract killer Richard Kuklinski, who's thought to have dispatched over 100 people, professionally-speaking. In The Iceman, the film version of his life, smut-bootlegger Kuklinski starts a family with winsome Barbara (a baby-talky Winona Ryder) at the same time mobster Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta) makes him an enforcer. He keeps Barbara in the dark about his new profession (his old one, too), telling her he's a stockbroker to explain the conspicuous infusions of cash; by the time their angelic daughters are in middle-school, he's settled comfortably into the schizoid role of suburban-dad-slash-serial-killer. Eventually, he sub-contracts himself out to Pronge (Chris Evans, so skeevy I mistook him for Bradley Cooper), a free agent who operates out of a Mr. Softee truck and gives Kuklinski the idea to freeze his victims, and thus his eponymous nickname.

TIFF ’12: To the Wonder

September 12, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Terrence Malick, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

**/****
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Angelo Muredda For a long time, it seemed like Terrence Malick would vanish altogether before he made a serious misstep, but for better or worse, he's now delivered To the Wonder, the bum note that forces you to warily retrace a major artist's career. A muted greatest-hits compilation of Malick's oeuvre, To the Wonder borrows whole apostrophized lines to God from The Tree of Life, nicks The Thin Red Line's trick of meting out disembodied humanist voiceovers across the cast (including an underused Javier Bardem), and re-stages Pocahontas's carefree romp through the palace gardens in The New World via a young girl's joyous dance through the aisles of a supermarket. It's all here, in a manner of speaking, but as the little girl tells her mother at one point, "There's something missing."

TIFF ’12: Tabu

September 10, 2012****/****, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Portugal, Silent, TIFF

****/****
directed by Miguel Gomes

by Angelo Muredda Tabu opens, fittingly enough, at the movies, with an old melodrama about an explorer who's just been turned into a brooding crocodile. That's the first of many transformations in a protean film that shifts gracefully from ironic postcolonial critique, to essay on the cinema as a means of appropriation and reincarnation, to thwarted love story. While those layers may seem impossible to navigate, take heart: Director Miguel Gomes's great coup is to let this complex material flow instinctually from its emotional core. Fluidity is key to Gomes's aesthetic, which pairs the breathless momentum of a page-turner with the non-sequitur progression of a dream. Case in point, a moment when Pilar (Teresa Madruga), the first half's protagonist, sees a movie with the stuffy man who loves her. Pilar is visibly moved by what's on screen, but we never see it, hearing only a Portuguese cover of "Be My Baby" on the soundtrack–a thread left dangling only to be gingerly picked up in the second half. "You know what dreams are like," as one character tells us: "We can't command them."

TIFF ’12: Antiviral

September 9, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Film Festivals, Horror, Satire, Sci-Fi, TIFF

*½/****
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

by Bill Chambers Featuring more close-ups of needles piercing flesh than a booster-shot training video, Antiviral, the debut feature by Cronenberg offspring Brandon, takes place in a world evolutions ahead of TMZ, where fans pay to have themselves infected with viruses extracted from their celebrity crushes. ("Biological communion," the film calls this process–a phrase that links father and son filmmakers as efficiently as a paternity test.) The slightly repulsive Caleb Landry Jones is Syd March, a rogue technician for The Lucas Clinic who breaks protocol by contaminating himself with the disease that is rapidly, unexpectedly killing superstar Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), making him a target of Hannah's family–who figure he'll be useful in their search for a cure–and fans, who want to watch him expire as a proxy for their beloved Hannah. Yes, it's pretty silly.

TIFF ’12: Ship of Theseus

September 7, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, India, TIFF

***/****
written and directed by Anand Gandhi

by Angelo Muredda The feature debut of Indian playwright (and occasional soap writer) Anand Gandhi, Ship of Theseus puts its dramaturgical origins up front. Gandhi's film begins with a philosophical conceit from Plutarch–the question of whether a ship that's been repaired using parts from other vessels can be considered the same ship at all–and workshops it through three seemingly-disconnected stories set in modern-day Mumbai. All three strands, which unfold like a series of one-act plays, are preoccupied with the biological analogy of Theseus's broken-down ship, a leaky body that needs an organ transplant to survive. And while the finale that brings them together is unnecessarily tidy, the individual segments strike a fine balance between humanism and intellectual rigor.

TIFF ’12: Argo

September 7, 20122012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Ben Affleck

by Bill Chambers Ben Affleck's films as a director are no longer surprisingly good–they're expectedly good. The surprise of his latest, Argo, is twofold: first, put a beard on Affleck and suddenly he's an actor of gravitas; second, that this directing detour his career took may have been born of not just self-preservation, but real movie love. You can see it in his hoarding of genre staples for one-scene (Adrienne Barbeau) and in some cases one-line (Michael Parks) roles, but more importantly, you can see it in the gentle Hollywood satire Argo briefly–perhaps too briefly–becomes. Set in 1979, the picture is suffused with a passion for filmmaking, if also a tinge of wistfulness for that bygone era in filmmaking. Though it may be period-authentic when Affleck shows the Hollywood sign in a state of disrepair, I think it's meant as commentary on the present. Argo is the second Warner release this year to revert to the golden-age Saul Bass logo–it fits better here.

TIFF ’12: A Royal Affair

September 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

En Kongelig Affære
***/****
directed by Nikolaj Arcel

by Angelo Muredda A Royal Affair isn't exactly Barry Lyndon, but as period pieces go, it's surprisingly robust, the rare costume drama that takes a genuine interest in how the unruly personalities of rulers and politicians determine a nation's political outcomes as much as the ideologies they represent. It doesn't seem so promising at first, beginning as it does with a title card that sets the scene with ominous overtones. "It is the Age of Enlightenment," we're told in the tasteful font of "Masterpiece Theatre", and while the rest of Europe has gone through a massive philosophical and ethical shift with respect to its perception of peasants and landed gentry, Denmark has remained an outpost of the old, thanks in no small part to the conservative court that pulls the strings of mad young King Christian (Mikkel Følsgaard, Best Actor winner at Berlin). Enter his blushing new Welsh bride and our narrator, Caroline (Alicia Vikander), a revolutionary intellect–her book collection doesn't pass the Danish board of censors–who flounders in the country she now rules until things are livened by Johann Friedrich Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen), a German doctor and secret pamphleteer of the Enlightenment sent to bring sense back to the erratic King.

TIFF ’12: Reality

September 3, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Film Festivals, Italy, Satire, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Matteo Garrone

by Angelo Muredda Reality, Matteo Garrone's follow-up to the urban planner's nightmare of Gomorrah, is a nasty little thing, at once an indictment of the mass delusion of celebrity culture and a finely-wrought character study of Luciano, a fish merchant and small-town Neapolitan crook who dreams of being a contestant on "Big Brother". Luciano is played with wide-eyed wonder and deep sincerity by Aniello Arena, a mafia hitman currently serving a life sentence for a triple-homicide–unlike his modest fictional counterpart, who's involved in a baffling scheme to resell pastry-making robots on the black market. It's a terrific performance, somehow sweet and deranged in equal measure, and it's the reason Reality works as well as it does when it begins to assume his warped perspective.

TIFF ’12: The Hunt

September 2, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

Jagten
**½/****
directed by Thomas Vinterberg

by Angelo Muredda The Hunt hinges on a misunderstanding, a nasty story born of a child's bruised ego and happily seized by a pack of overeager concern trolls calling themselves adults. But there's a whole other story about misunderstanding to be spun from how the film will surely be received in different quarters as either a devastating portrait of small-town life or a grim black comedy. That one is all on director and Dogme 95 cofounder Thomas Vinterberg. While it's always dicey to ascribe authorial intent, Vinterberg seems to waffle between middlebrow tragedy and scattershot satire not out of some postmodern commitment to walking the edge of irony, but because the script can't really sustain a further push in either direction. That makes The Hunt a provocative film, sure, but also a bit of a lazy one–a conversation starter without much follow-through.

TIFF ’12: Rebelle

September 1, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

***/****
written and directed by Kim Nguyen

by Angelo Muredda A firm refusal of the charge that Canadian filmmaking is unable to see much farther than its own backyard, Kim Nguyen's Rebelle tackles a complex sociopolitical situation without reducing it to easy lessons learned. The most recent reference point for what Nguyen is doing with this first-person chronicle of Komona (Rachel Mwanza), a 12-year-old abducted from her home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and turned into a child soldier for rebel forces, is probably Denis Villeneuve's Incendies. But though that film also reaches for global significance in tracing the grim trajectory of a politically disenfranchised child, its vagueness stands in sharp contrast to Nguyen's accomplishment here, which is to ground Komona's story in a particular milieu.

TIFF ’12: Picture Day

August 31, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, Teen, TIFF

***/****
written and directed by Kate Melville

by Bill Chambers 27 according to the IMDb but convincingly aged down, Tatiana Maslany gives a star-making performance in Picture Day as 18-year-old Claire, who's forced to repeat the twelfth grade after failing math and phys-ed. It seems obvious that she in fact chose not to be jettisoned from the womb of high school just yet, though she shows little interest in actually attending classes, to the consternation of the vice principal (Catherine Fitch). ("You can't stay in high school forever, Claire," the VP tells her. "You did," Claire snaps.) One day, she joins a kid who's deviated from his gym class to smoke up–are teenage potheads really this brazen now?–and discovers that he's Henry (Spencer Van Wyck), the timid boy she used to babysit, all grown up. A science wiz who turned down a private-school education (he sort of resents his intellect–plus, it was an all-boys academy), he even grows his own marijuana, in a closet that contains, among other things, a shrine to Claire filled with enough traces of her DNA–chewed gum, soiled tissues, hair bands–that one wonders if he intends to clone her.

TIFF ’12: Amour

August 30, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Palme d'Or Winner, TIFF

***½/****
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Angelo Muredda From the moment it screened at Cannes, Amour became the odds-on favourite to win the Palme d’Or, and no wonder: Terrence Malick worked more or less the same formalist-auteur-goes-humanist formula to great success just last year. But while The Tree of Life‘s cosmic drama was hardly a stretch for Malick, you have to think Amour, which ultimately did cop the big prize, was a harder nut to crack for Michael Haneke. He was, of course, first awarded the Palme for a thuddingly obvious Village of the Damned knockoff designed for people who don’t do horror. Would he prove himself human after all?

TIFF ’12: Rust & Bone

August 30, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, France, TIFF

De rouille et d'os
**/****
directed by Jacques Audiard

by Angelo Muredda On paper, the most troubling thing about Rust & Bone is the suggestion, right from the title, that we're in for a yarn about maimed bodies that go bump in the night, grinding their way into oblivion. You have to give some credit to Jacques Audiard–who's otherwise taking a decisive step back from A Prophet–for going surprisingly easy on the figurative potential of a love story between Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), a whale trainer turned double-amputee after a rough day on the job, and Ali (Bullhead's Matthias Schoenaerts), a brutish security guard and distant father who moonlights as a back-alley boxer. Based on two short stories (it shows) from Toronto-born author Craig Davidson, the film puts itself squarely in the specious Paul Haggis tradition of the crisscrossing tragedy but keeps the stakes pretty low much of the time, mostly sparing us the usual tortured hymns about how we're all connected at some primal level. As a disability film, a problem genre that finds little middle ground between triumph-of-adversity celebrations and euthanasia apologies, it's also fairly attuned to mechanical matters that usually lie outside the bounds of melodrama. Consider Stephanie's insurance-paid apartment, a smartly-organized space for a wheelchair user, down to the widened doorframes and easily-accessible washer and dryer. Ephemera counts for something.

The Female Eye Film Festival

June 21, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blog, Film Festivals, Theatrical

by Angelo Muredda Following the boys-only slate of the Cannes Film Festival, which made room for tepidly-received efforts from the likes of Andrew Dominik and Lee Daniels but shut out women in a comparable phase of their careers, June has been a surprisingly fruitful month for female directors of North American independents. Not that it's compensation for that snub, but it's heartening to see Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister and Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz get the lion's share of positive indie press in recent weeks, putting them in good company with Wes Anderson, whose Moonrise Kingdom did make Cannes's official selection. You could think of the Female Eye Film Festival, now entering its tenth year and running through June 24^th at Toronto's Carlton Cinemas, as a low-key companion to those higher-profile releases.

Hot Docs 2012: Summer of Giacomo (d. Alessandro Comodin)

May 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Italy

by Angelo Muredda Conceptually sandwiched somewhere between Maren Ade’s terrific Everyone Else and Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Alessandro Comodin’s Summerof Giacomo is a richly textured portrait of dumb love in the grass, times two. As the lengthy credits of electric blue font superimposed on black and scored to languid birdsong suggest, this is chiefly an aesthetic experience, and Comodin delivers a gorgeously lensed (on 16mm) account of twentyish Giacomo and Stefani’s wayward hike through the countryside in search of a river by which to set up camp for the afternoon. The press notes tell us that Stefani is a childhood friend, but that hardly matters: all that we gather and need to gather is that something might have happened at some point, but outside of this hike, it’s over. What we’re left with, then, apart from their pathfinding and inevitable squabble, is a dense sensory record of the seriously goofy and – this is nicely underplayed – deaf Giacomo’s experience. His cochlear implant is briefly glimpsed in the first over-the-shoulder shot of him clanging randomly at a drum set, and you could happily read the film as an experiment in attending to the sounds, both slight and explosive, that pass through the device en route to his dufus skull.

Hot Docs 2012: Only the Young (ds. Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet)

May 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda Like a delicate magic trick, Only the Youngis best watched in a state of rapt fascination. An unostentatious feature debut from Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet, the film chronicles a few months in the lives of three impossibly sweet teens in a desert town. Impressively, it does so without signposting major events along the way. Instead, we weave through their relationship and family dramas with only their changing hairstyles as obvious chronological markers, catching everyday lyricism in first car rides and teen girls’ catlike head nudges.

Hot Docs 2012: Loose ends

May 5, 20122012, Australia, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

by Angelo Muredda

The Betrayal (d. Karen Winther): The director returns to her spotty history in this intermittently affecting but mostly flat exercise. Winther combs through old journals and interviews both her parents and former friends in her effort to get to the bottom of a colossally stupid and damaging decision, when she was a troubled 15-year-old, to volunteer her far-left friends’ whereabouts to a known neo-Nazi group. As a portrait of 1990s Oslo's political bifurcations, the film is fairly compelling, but Winther is maddeningly vague about her ideological inclination in any phase of her life, and her frequent voiceovers about uncovering why she did what she did grate more than they illuminate. In any case, it's the wrong question. **/**** (Special Presentations)

Hot Docs 2012: The World Before Her (d. Nisha Pahuja)

May 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda The winner of Hot Docs’ Best Canadian Feature award, granted just two weeks after it snagged top doc honours at Tribeca, Nisha Pahuja’s The World Before Her is a fearless and intricately structured portrait of a nation split down the middle. The film sets out to explore women’s uneasy place in an increasingly modernized and globally inflected but still traditional India by observing how a pair of institutions go about raising girls, and to what end. Pahuja’s riskiest and ultimately smartest move is to juxtapose the personality-making rituals of the Miss India pageant with a Hindu nationalist training camp that prepares young girls to marry young, obey, and take up arms against Muslim and Christian neighbours, should the good fight of a united Hindu nation come to their doorsteps.