Film Festivals Archives - Page 3 of 47

Fantasia Festival ’24: The Silent Planet

August 1, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/****
starring Elias Koteas, Briana Middleton
written and directed by Jeffrey St. Jules

by Walter Chaw Jeffrey St. Jules’s The Silent Planet, despite a small detail about hypoxia, doesn’t appear to be the long-awaited franchise adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s “Space Trilogy.” Rather, it occupies a space with Duncan Jones’s Moon, Walter Hill’s Supernova, David Fincher’s Alien³, and especially Jack Smight’s “Twilight Zone” episode “The Lonely,” in which poor James A. Corey (Jack Warden), a murderer sentenced to solitary confinement on a remote asteroid, is suddenly given a mysterious female companion (Jean Marsh) to ease the horror of his days. The aging murderer sentenced to Life in The Silent Planet is Theodore (Elias Koteas). Terminally ill and convinced that “alien gas” is making him revisit unpleasant episodes from his past, he carves out the monitoring device embedded in his chest, triggering an automated system to presume him dead and ship out his replacement: convicted terrorist Niyya (Briana Middleton). Niyya, orphaned as a child and raised by an alien race called the “Oieans” (who look vaguely like how C.S. Lewis described his pfifltriggi–but again, the film is not based on his Out of the Silent Planet), is understandably embittered about the human government sanctioning the oppression and genocide of her adopted people. Resigned to her fate, she’s unhappy to learn she’s sharing her interstellar oubliette with some nutsy old dude who’s clearly Going Through Something.

Fantasia Festival ’24: A Samurai in Time

July 31, 20242024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan, Time Travel

***/****
starring Makiya Yamaguchi, Norimasa Fuke, Rantaro Mine, Yuno Sakura
written and directed by Junichi Yasuda

by Walter Chaw Jun-ichi Yasuda’s A Samurai in Time is a lightweight, nostalgia-streaked, deceptively sad little flick in which a bedraggled Edo-period samurai named Kosaka Shinzaemon (Makiya Yamaguchi) finds himself, at the moment of his most meaningful duel against the evil Kyoichiro Kazami (Ken Shonozaki), finds himself transported to the present and mistaken for an extra on a samurai television show. Guided by old-world decorum and generally astonished as a fish-out-of-water, he falls under the kind auspices of script supervisor Yuko (Yuno Sakura), who takes him under her wing and helps him get progressively better roles as the sort of fight extra–a kiraeyaku–who “gets slashed” in jidaigeki productions like hers. A Samurai in Time doesn’t break any new ground, but it trods those worn boards with a spring in its step. I loved a moment where Kosaka tastes a little dessert and, in horror, asks if they made a mistake giving it to someone as lowly as he. When told that anyone has a right to eat such miracles in modern Japan, he weeps and declares his relief that a country he left in war and on the brink of collapse would become such a generous, egalitarian society as to treat all its citizens, from top to bottom, as royalty. I appreciate science-fiction that’s aspirational rather than apocalyptic. It’s hard to see sometimes how far we’ve come.

Fantasia Festival ’24: Kryptic; The Beast Within; Vulcanizadora; Animalia Paradoxa

July 30, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Chile, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, UK, Werewolf

KRYPTIC
*½/****
starring Chloe Pirrie, Jeff Gladstone, Jason Deline, Ali Rusu-Tahir
written by Paul Bromley
directed by Kourtney Roy

THE BEAST WITHIN
*/****
starring James Cosmo, Ashleigh Cummings, Kit Harington, Caoilinn Springall
written by Greer Ellison & Alexander J. Farrell
directed by Alexander J. Farrell

VULCANIZADORA
***½/****
starring Melissa Blanchard, Joshua Burge, Joel Potrykus, Solo Potrykus
written and directed by Joel Potrykus

ANIMALIA PARADOXA
****/****
starring Andrea Gomez, Daniela Ossa, Javiera Reyes, Hormazábal Rocío
written and directed by Niles Atallah

by Walter Chaw The problem with Kourtney Roy’s Kryptic is that its subtext is text. It’s well-shot, well-performed, even has some nice Yuzna-esque goop effects, but it’s so didactic that all that hardly matters. When the message becomes exposition, it indicates a lack of faith in both the audience and the material. I’m as tired of writing about this as you are of reading about it, I’m sure, and I must confess it takes a lot out of me nowadays to finish films like this, however well-made and however promising its director might be, should they ever get out of their own way. Kryptic would be less frustrating if it weren’t so good in so many ways. It opens with shy, socially anxious Kay (Chloe Pirrie) on her drive to a guided cryptid hike, repeating positive affirmations to buck herself up for meeting new people and maybe making new friends. In the woods, she strays from the group and encounters the terrifying Sooka (glimpsed only in flashes), sending her into a fugue state wherein she forgets who she is and what she does. “I’m a dentist?” she asks. “I’m a veterinarian?” Most likely, she’s a cryptozoologist named “Barb” who has been missing in these woods for some time. Also likely is that Barb went missing because she was fleeing her abusive husband, Morgan (Jeff Gladstone).

Fantasia Festival ’24: The Dead Thing

July 27, 2024Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

***/****
starring Blu Hunt, Ben Smith-Petersen, John Karna, Katherine Hughes
written by Webb Wilcoxen and Elric Kane
directed by Elric Kane

by Walter Chaw There’s a scene in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse where one of the last surviving citizens of an apocalyptic Tokyo stumbles into a forbidden room–the sort of room Tarkovsky locates in his wastelands now and again–and meets a phantom who tells him that death is “eternal loneliness.” The Internet has become the kind of trap divers warn about: a technological rapture of the deep that presents a sanctuary for the wayward spirit, the parts in everyone that are lost, never mind that there’s no air in there and the pressures of continuing to exist as a version of yourself are obliterating. Elric Kane’s The Dead Thing has similar thoughts on its mind, 23 years down the electric road from Pulse (a gap which, if measured in terms of gadget generations, may as well be millennia ago), in considering what happens to the soul when courtship and physical touch is primarily, if not exclusively, mediated through viewscreens and algorithms. The Dead Thing wonders what would happen if you invested so much of yourself into an electronic web that when you died, an echo of you lived there forever. I mean, is that even science-fiction? It’s a good ghost story, in other words, but it’s an even better spiritual piece about the nature of eternity.

Fantasia Festival ’24: The Soul Eater

July 25, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Crime, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Thriller

Mangeur d’Âmes
*½/****
starring Virginie Ledoyen, Sandrine Bonnaire, Paul Hamy, Cameron Bain
written by Annelyse Batrel, Ludovic Lefebvre
directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo

by Walter Chaw Alexander Bustillo and Julien Maury’s first film, 2007’s Inside, is a prominent member of the brief but incandescent French New Extremity movement, and so fucking good it reverberates still, 17 years later, showing up in the fetus reaction shots of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part Two and contributing to the slight feeling of dread I’ve come to feel about changing lightbulbs and getting into fender-benders. Inside‘s stylishness, lawlessness, and formal gamesmanship left such a mark on me that I found an all-region release of Bustillo and Maury’s follow-up, Livid, before it secured an American release and did the same thing again with Among the Living. Neither was as good as Inside, but both were slick enough to suggest there might be more live rounds in the barrel. I was thrilled when they landed a prequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Leatherface, and disappointed when it failed to push any boundaries–a running theme, as it turns out, for their follow-ups: the monster film Kandisha and the underwater haunted-house flick The Deep House. They’re still promising filmmakers, but after setting the world on fire, their work has lacked danger and urgency.

Fantasia Festival ’24: Oddity

July 23, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Ireland, Thriller

****/****
starring Gwilym Lee, Carolyn Bracken, Tadhg Murphy, Steve Wall
written and directed by Damian McCarthy

by Walter Chaw Damien McCarthy’s Oddity is the perfect campfire story: self-contained, tantalizingly high-concept, and terrifying as fuck without necessarily carrying any existential baggage or greater stakes than, “Hey, some fucked up things happened to these people once, gather ’round while I tell the tale of a night just like this.” It’s the kind of story I’d love to hear while camping on the moors–the kind of thing Harlan Ellison used to write in the front window of Dangerous Visions bookstore in Sherman Oaks as a parlour trick: give him a prompt and watch him go. In Oddity, the blind proprietress of a cursed oddities shop (curses removed upon purchase) seeks to discover the murderer of her twin sister. That’s it, the long and the short of it, but what McCarthy conjures from a one-sentence pitch is an exercise in unbearably ratcheting tension, with tremendous performances and impeccable filmmaking craft. Consider a prologue that, in the first minute, establishes the existence of a motion-activated camera documenting the movements of a lone woman in an isolated location. Its shutter clicks once when she crosses before it, and then again when nothing crosses before it. I mean “nothing” in the Goodnight Moon sense, the Wallace Stevens sense, where the camera captures a nothing we can see and a nothing we can’t. The woman leaves the relative security of her home twice, and both times, McCarthy offers us a point of view on her that isn’t attached to anything. She’s being watched, see, and it’s awful. The second time, at night, she makes it to safety, but before we can relax, the pitch-black outside tests the doorknob as soon as she locks it behind her. I thought of the scene in Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton’s The Leopard Man where a mother tarries in unlocking the door for her terrified daughter, who is given to crying wolf, and then the pleas stop, and a slow pool of blood begins to spread under the door.

Fantasia Festival ’24: Bookworm

July 21, 20242024, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, New Zealand

**½/****
starring Elijah Wood, Michael Smiley, Nell Fisher
screenplay by Toby Harvard
directed by Ant Timpson

by Walter Chaw Kiwi jack-of-all-trades Ant Timpson’s sophomore feature after his strong hyphenate debut Come to Daddy reunites him with that film’s star, Elijah Wood. Bookworm, a quiet, charming echo of Hunt for the Wilderpeople, tells a familiar tale of wayward fathers and precocious daughters in a light, warm-hearted way. The girl is 11-year-old Mildred (Nell Fisher), and her dad is failed illusionist Strawn (Wood). When Mildred’s mother, Zo (Morgana O’Reilly), suffers a terrible accident, landing her in a coma, Strawn materializes out of the past to reunite with the child he sired but abandoned to pursue his dreams of becoming the next David Copperfield. Meanwhile, Mildred is convinced that if she can find proof of the Canterbury Panther, a legendary cryptid that allegedly lives in the New Zealand wilderness, she’ll be able to bring her mother back from the brink. Of course, the $50,000 prize money wouldn’t hurt, either. The problem is that Strawn is fairly useless as a father and even more so as an outdoorsman, but working in their favour is Mildred’s confidence and Strawn’s desire to finally do the right thing here in Mildred and Zo’s moment of crisis. Hilarity ensues.

Fantasia Festival ’24: Introduction

July 11, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Canada, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

by Walter Chaw There is such a thing as a “festival glow”: the consequence of seeing something new in the company of other zealots while the creators, more often than not, crouch in the wings, hungry for first reactions. There are catered parties and lanyards and the promise of “breaking” the next hot moment, or catching the crest of it before it peaks. It’s a social-media phenomenon now, but distribution companies were always caught up in it. Every year, Sundance will produce a “sure thing” that’s only that one time out of ten. I can’t say I’ve always been immune to the effects of the glow. Biases are hard to root out, and there’s a reason filmmakers want their films to debut at certain festivals and maybe not others. Imagined to be egalitarian, festivals are, after all, anything but. Still, I’ve always loved Canada’s Fantasia Festival, a celebration of genre that has consistently programmed the outer limits of the proverbial envelope in defiance of any boardroom interest that might water down its presentation. Each year I’ve done it, I’ve seen at least one movie that made my end-of-year list. Whenever I sit down to watch a Fantasia film, I expect to see a new favourite.

SDAFF ’23: New Strains

November 20, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Sci-Fi

***½/****
starring Artemis Shaw, Prashanth Kamalakanthan
written and directed by Artemis Shaw & Prashanth Kamalakanthan

by Walter Chaw Prasanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw’s New Strains is perhaps the definitive film about the COVID shutdown, addressing it both straight-on and metaphorically in adopting the central conceit of Michael Tolkin’s dystopian novel NK3, in which a world-ending virus has as its primary symptom the infantilization of the infected. “New Strains” refers to both viral evolution and the manifold tensions introduced into the new romantic relationship of vacationing couple Kallia (Shaw) and Ram (Kamalakanthan), who land in the Big Apple right when the world shuts down. Trapped in a well-appointed, centrally-located flat, they bicker, watch television, have spiritless sex, and disagree over how seriously to take the risks of infection. Kallia, giving off some Lena Dunham vibes, is loose about masking and decontaminating when entering the living space. Ram, notably more uptight, freaks out a time or two in response to her laxness. It doesn’t help that she deals with strife through giggling and taunting. Indeed, for all of Ram’s irritating quirks–his fastidiousness and jealousy–I instantly despised Kallia for her schoolyard cruelty.

SDAFF ’23: Grounded

November 14, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Time Travel

***/****
starring Whit K. Lee, Katherine Leidlein, Angela Chew, Alfredo de Guzman
written and directed by Justin Chan

by Walter Chaw Justin Chan’s Grounded is triggering for me. It opens with a sunny prologue in which William (Whit K. Lee) proposes to longtime girlfriend Mackenzie (Katherine Leidlein). She accepts–with the caveat that he must finally introduce her to his parents (Angela Chew and Alfredo De Guzman) after three years of dating. If that seems like a long time, well, he’s Asian-American, and she’s happy to say how often she’s mistaken for Nicole Kidman. My wife and I share the same racial dynamic with William and Mackenzie, though I had no problem introducing her to my parents, because a large part of me hoped they would disapprove of her and I could complete my divorce from them. I mean, I did care, but I was angry and looking for the fight. I wanted them to present me an ultimatum so I could choose not-them. Grounded made my blood-pressure rise immediately–the ol’ fight-or-flight closer to my surfaces than I thought possible after all this time. The danger of films like this lies in how I will struggle to find any distance between it and my exposed nerves; Grounded cleaves so close to the bone I thought about tapping out a few times. I’m glad I stuck with it.

SDAFF ’23: Day Off

November 13, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Taiwan

Ben ri gong xiu
本日公休
½*/****
starring Lu Hsiao-fen, Fu Meng-po, Annie Chen, Shih Ming Shuai
written and directed by Fu Tien-Yu

by Walter Chaw Fu Tien-Yu’s Day Off is heartfelt pap in the Garry Marshall style: soft-focused, episodic, sprawled like a drunken floozy across a flight of stairs in a Tennessee Williams melodrama. It’s a movie scored, every inch of it, with the kind of music honey and treacle would make if they had sticky little tentacles. The film is insinuating, probing for soft spots to geek for uncontrollable emotional gag reflexes: dying fathers, generational trauma, reunions, separations, triumphs… You know that minor chord you learned in your first guitar lesson? Think about a sad day and play that chord. Play each of the strings individually. Slowly. Close your eyes. You want a job, kid? Day Off is genuinely awful. It shares a personality with Precious Moments figurines. Moreover, it shares a vibe with the lonesome old lady you somehow got trapped in a conversation with who is shoving her Precious Moments figurines in your face and asking what you think. “This is A Decade of Dreams Come True, isn’t it sweet? And this is My Heart Beats For You, isn’t that adorable? ISN’T IT?” It isn’t. It’s sad, a lonesome transference of underdeveloped and frustrated social longing onto a plaster mold of literal children pretending to be adults.

SDAFF ’23: The Secret Art of Human Flight

November 10, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**½/****
starring Grant Rosenmeyer, Paul Raci, Lucy DeVito, Maggie Grace
written by Jesse Orenshein
directed by H.P. Mendoza

by Walter Chaw Ben (Grant Rosenmeyer) isn’t doing very well. He writes children’s books with his wife (Reina Hardesty), but she just died of an allergic reaction; all those arguments they used to have seem so stupid now. H.P. Mendoza’s The Secret Art of Human Flight is about being grateful for what you have while you have it–which isn’t novel, you’ll agree. One night, while doom-scrolling through TikTok, Ben watches what appears to be footage of a guy killing himself but is, in fact, footage of a guy who has taught himself to fly, blasting off from the edge of a cliff. Why he needs to jump in order to fly is what I think liberal arts majors call a “metaphor.” Also a metaphor is how Ben gets on the Dark Web to buy the multi-step process through which he, too, might learn to fly. What he doesn’t know is his five grand is buying the personal attention of flight inventor Mealworm (Paul Raci), who, with a combination of unctuous Peter Coyote cult-leader charisma, puts Ben through his paces. It’s that kind of movie.

SDAFF ’23: Quiz Lady

November 8, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Awkwafina, Sandra Oh, Jason Schwartzman, Will Ferrell
written by Jen D’Angelo
directed by Jessica Yu

by Walter Chaw I don’t hold any particular rancour for Jessica Yu’s confused, miscast Quiz Lady. No bile, even when it seems to be trafficking in racist tropes rather than satirizing them, even when its feeble attempts at wit and timing fall shrilly by the wayside. It’s always a minefield for me to review a film by an Asian American this negatively, especially an Asian American woman working from a script by a (white) woman, but there’s a point at which our community should be allowed to make disasterpieces and still get another shot, if equality is the real goal. There’s a point, too, where pulling punches or pretending not to have seen something becomes patronizing and an act of making a work invisible, which is what we’re often complaining about in the first place. I’ll allow that Quiz Lady likely has an audience and that this film exists at exactly the wrong frequency for me to tolerate, much less appreciate; I do worry, however, that the range in which it vibrates is the one in which people who like to laugh at my people live.

SDAFF ’23: In Water

November 7, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

물안에서
Mul-an-e-seo
***/****
starring Ha Seong-guk, Kim Seung-yun, Shin Seokho
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad lately, It’s the time of year when he died, and though I’m terrible with dates, my body seems to remember. I usually think my moods must have something to do with autumn and the change in the weather–but I love the autumn, the smell of rotten leaves, the halo around the moon, the chill. And then I remember. Korean master Hong Sang-soo reminds me of my dad, too. It’s how he’s so irritatingly self-assured, I think. So mulishly iconoclastic. My dad never really listened to anything anyone else told him. Sometimes that worked out for him; often it didn’t. But the path of his life was defiantly his. My dad was learned, extraordinarily well-read in books written in languages I can’t read, and tortured. He’s been gone twenty years this year. Is it the “china” anniversary for death, as it is for marriage? Are the traditions the same, or do we fail to memorialize loss in the same way? My dad’s death is almost old enough to drink. When I was much younger, I would ask him big questions–life, the universe, everything–and he would answer with quotations and philosophies: aphorisms, fables, poems. I don’t remember anything about them except that they made me feel frustrated, mocked a little, and left to worry my thoughts alone like a cat with a tail of yarn. And now he’s gone.

SDAFF ’23: Cobweb

November 6, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

거미집
Geomijip
**½/****
starring Lim Soo-jung, Oh Jung-se, Song Kang-ho
written by Kim Jee-woon, Yeon-Shick Shin
directed by Kim Jee-woon

by Walter Chaw Kim Jee-woon is such a fine technical director that, for a while, the slapdash of his behind-the-scenes, Living in Oblivion insider piece feels like a meticulously orchestrated machine where every piece hits its mark instead of what I think is intended: silly slapstick arising from sloppy improvisation. There might be a path charted for this picture, but it all plays a little like Calvinball. What I like least is how many edits are timed to various shrieks: the last refuge of the desperate and the wayward. Screams of comic frustration, screams of theatrical fear, screams of manufactured ecstasy, screams of the righteous artist at war with a corporate machine trying to grind him down. Such is the plight of Kim (Song Kang-ho), a director labelled as a peddler of pop “content” who, wounded for the last time by a table of smug film critics, rewrites the ending to his latest endlessly-replicable soaper and, swimming upstream, seeks to wring two extra days from a fickle cast under the nose of state regulators suspicious about the sudden change in direction in a state- approved and financed picture. Kim Jee-woon handles the meta, film-within-a-film conceit by shooting Director Kim’s magnum opus in Universal Horror black-and-white while leaving his studio-bound escapades in vivid, drawing-room colour. The picture he’s making looks to be a Hitchcockian thriller of some kind–a metaphor for the labyrinthine cobweb the truly inspired must navigate in order to realize their vision.

SDAFF ’23: Monster

November 5, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Thriller

****/****
starring Ando Sakura, Kurosawa Koya, Nagayama Eita
written by Sakamoto Yûji
directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

by Walter Chaw Hirokazu Kore-eda is a keeper of secrets, a guardian of hidden things and a priest of the ritual of childhood. Watching his stuff feels like an invitation into intimate spaces, and I can’t shake the feeling, however impossible, that they’re places I’ve been before. I recall, for instance, a little half-loft built into the silversmithing store my father used to own. When I was too young to work or too tired from working, I’d climb up into it to read, or sleep, or peep down onto the sales floor, where customers would mill in and out. I hadn’t thought at all of that tiny vantage, a crow’s nest floating above a turgid sea of confused nostalgia, until I saw Kore-eda’s new film, Monster, which, of course, has nothing to do with silversmithing stores or fathers who have journeyed past the horizon or boats unmoored and lost in listless seas.

TIFF ’23: Seagrass

September 28, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
starring Ally Maki, Luke Roberts, Nyha Breitkreuz, Chris Pang
written and directed by Meredith Hama-Brown

by Bill Chambers I always brace for gloom when out come the tiny title fonts–in Canada, they’re the cinematic equivalent of a funeral director solemnly gesturing towards the casket–but Meredith Hama-Brown’s FIPRESCI-winning Seagrass quickly dispelled my cynicism by being so obviously good. Judith (Ally Maki) and Steve (Luke Roberts) are a mixed-race couple with two young daughters, 11-year-old Stephanie (Nyha Breitkreuz) and six-year-old Emmy (Remy Marthaller). Theirs is a troubled marriage, complicated by the recent death of Judith’s mother, and so they’ve travelled with the kids to a couples retreat on the Pacific coast for therapy and respite. There, they meet their mirror image in Pat (Chris Pang) and Carol (Sarah Gadon), handsome marrieds who appear to be farther along in their reconciliation. (Either that, or they’re better at presenting a united front.) Judith regards Pat with undeniable yet enigmatic interest and Steve picks up on it, creating a lopsided tension between the two men. But gradually, from the nature of Judith’s complaints about Steve–how he never wants to go anywhere exotic; how he doesn’t seem to appreciate the depths of her grief, or comprehend her nostalgia for a childhood that sounds like it was mired in hardship–it becomes clear that whatever her physical attraction to Pat, he’s thrown Steve’s whiteness and all that that implies into stark relief. (Because it’s set in the 1990s, unenlightened Steve falls easily into syllogistic traps like asking how he could be a racist when he has a Japanese wife, while Judith lacks the language of rebuttal.) She looks at Pat and wonders, perhaps, if an Asian partner would make her feel less conspicuous. Less ashamed. Less alone.

Telluride ’23: Daddio

September 21, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride

***/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Sean Penn
written and directed by Christy Hall

by Walter Chaw Girlie (Dakota Johson) gets in a cab from JFK to Manhattan, and over the long drive through construction slowdowns and other diversions, she and driver Clark (Sean Penn)…talk. Girlie receives a few lewd texts from her lover, sure, but Clark praises her for how little she’s on her phone in this age of screen intermediaries. He’s surprised again when she wants to know his name: “You are a human being,” he says, and there’s hardly anyone who could deliver this line the way Penn does: free of insinuation or sarcasm, hinting at emotions like gratefulness and even flattered surprise. Penn is one of our great “face” actors. Robbed of tools other performers rely upon, he won an Oscar for Dead Man Walking, where he spent most of his time behind a glass partition, shackled to a table. The four inches reflected in the rearview mirror in Daddio are a better actor than almost anyone who’s ever done this. His persona outside of film has outgrown him in many ways, but I was shocked by how glad I was to be in his company again. Penn’s large humanitarian gestures and vile history of abuse, spotlighted whenever he shares his unevolved and indeed apparently devolving Neanderthal viewpoints on women and consent have obscured his accomplishments as an actor. Perhaps rightfully so. Seeing him on a big screen again made me realize how much I’d missed him in this context–and how much I wish it were the only context in which I knew him.

TIFF ’23: Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros

September 20, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Frederick Wiseman

by Angelo Muredda Frederick Wiseman sets his sights on legacy-planning in Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, the venerable documentarian’s staggering but typically graceful 240-minute tour of La Maison Troisgros, a fine-dining restaurant in Roanne, France that has held onto its three Michelin stars for decades. A family-run establishment, the place is shepherded by gruff third-generation chef-owner Michel, who we meet sampling the wares in the market with his more subdued son and protégé, César, before they settle into a favourite Wiseman scene: a sit-down meeting to plan the evening’s menu that’s equal parts absorbing and boring. Though Wiseman treats the day’s market-fresh cauliflower and mushrooms like movie stars in a rapid montage of stills resembling a credit sequence, the real stars and main anchor points he returns to throughout his amiably rambling cross-section of the restaurant–which sets aside a full 30-minute chapter for the cheese man–are the Troisgros men, different kinds of chefs whose diverging styles while working under the same roof embody the restaurant’s past, present, and future.

Telluride ’23: All of Us Strangers

September 19, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Telluride, UK

****/****
starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy
screenplay by Andrew Haigh, based on the novel by Taichi Yamada
directed by Andrew Haigh

by Walter Chaw What if I could? What if I did and they were there, my parents as I remember them when I was 12, and I was not so fixed in time and grief? When I was a child and needed them even though I thought I didn’t, but now, as the old man who knows I still do. What if I went to the place where I grew up and rang the bell and they answered it, and I could tell them the things I had done that would make them proud of me? And the things I never could tell them because I was afraid they’d reject me again for everything I could’ve helped and everything I couldn’t. I can see them in the living room. I can see them in the kitchen. What if they, knowing how short the time had gotten, could tell me what was in their hearts so I didn’t have to wonder? Was there love there that had hardened? Or had it retreated to an armoured place to protect it from breaking? In Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, a man tells his new lover how something awful happened to him once, but it’s okay because it was a long time ago. His lover corrects him: “A long time ago” doesn’t matter when you’re talking about terrible things. “Oh,” the man says, and quieter, “oh.”