TIFF Archives - Page 3 of 14 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

TIFF ’21: Flee

September 18, 20212021, Animation, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Norway, Sweden, TIFF

**½/****
directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen

by Angelo Muredda The past is as fluid as the rotoscoped animation used to bring it to life in Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee, a high-concept work of creative nonfiction whose unconventional style promises an immersiveness it can’t really deliver. Rasmussen’s animated documentary profile of his childhood friend, pseudonymously named Amin Nawabi to protect his identity, is intermittently moving and insightful about the horrors, the exhausting subterfuge, and the briefest moments of levity that define his life as a queer Afghan refugee, first in Russia and then in Denmark. But the opacity of its subject–whose story of family suffering, persecution, hiding, and now something like domestic stability, has frequently shifted not just for state officials but also for his friend and biographer–leaves the film as vague as its buzzword title. Moreover, Rasmussen’s inability to do more with those discrepancies besides shrug at the ambiguities of first-person storytelling from far afield places plagued by civil war flattens the closing emotional pitch.

TIFF ’21: Benediction

September 16, 20212021, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, UK, War

***½/****
starring Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi, Gemma Jones, Ben Daniels
written and directed by Terence Davies

by Angelo Muredda Queer melancholia and stifled antiwar resistance collide in Terence Davies’s Benediction, a luxurious and achingly blue profile of First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon. Ever the personal filmmaker no matter the period he’s recreating nor the artist he’s profiling, whether it should be Emily Dickinson (A Quiet Passion) or himself (Of Time and the City), Davies finds the perfect irascible surrogates in Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi as the younger and elder Sassoon, respectively. The one is vital but in danger of being flattened by military hypocrisy and transient love affairs with a rotating cast of men doomed to early deaths and loveless marriages, while the other has settled into his surly senescence, despite a late-in-life turn to Catholicism in search of some kind of permanence. (“You could get something unchanging from dressage without the guilt of Catholicism,” sniffs his son.)

TIFF ’21: The Humans + Lakewood

September 16, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

THE HUMANS
**½/****
starring Richard Jenkins, Beanie Feldstein, Steven Yeun, Amy Schumer
screenplay by Stephen Karam, based on his play
directed by Stephen Karam

LAKEWOOD
*/****
starring Naomi Watts, Colton Gobbo, Sierra Maltby
written by Chris Sparling
directed by Phillip Noyce

by Bill Chambers Richard Jenkins leads an all-star cast as the nightmare-plagued patriarch of the Blake family, who have gathered for Thanksgiving at the new home of daughter Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) and her boyfriend Richard (Steven Yeun): a duplex in the middle of Chinatown that’s falling apart, Polanski-style, in symbiotic echo with the dysfunctional Blakes. Erik (Jenkins) and his wife Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell) have been keeping something from their children that’s bound to sting, while their other daughter, Aimee (a dynamite Amy Schumer, which is the film’s biggest surprise), is intent on protecting the dinner table from the life-altering medical prognosis she’s received. Then there’s Erik’s mother, Momo (June Squibb), who sits in a wheelchair muttering in a secret language between brief periods of lucidity. It’s a long day’s journey into night in which truths are laid bare but none of the characters experience catharsis, since all this TMI does is create space between them–and more room for their personal demons. The Humans is pretty on-brand for distributor A24 in that it dabbles in the syntax of genre, but how scary you find it will probably depend on how much you relate to Erik, a dinosaur who can see the asteroid coming for him now that nobody really depends on him anymore.

TIFF ’21: Scarborough

September 15, 20212021, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**½/****
starring Liam Diaz, Essence Fox, Anna Claire Beitel, Felix Jedi Ingram Isaac
screenplay by Catherine Hernandez, based on her novel
directed by Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson

by Angelo Muredda “You’re a good boy,” a mother whispers to her bullied preteen son Bing (Liam Diaz) while he sleeps early on in Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson’s Scarborough, a reverent and rambling adaptation of Catherine Hernandez’s buzzy Canadian novel of the same name. While Bing may well need the affirmation in the grips of his abuse at the hands of classmates, it largely underlines one of the festival darling’s more nagging qualities: a tendency to annotate all its emotional beats. An ostentatiously literary cousin to cloying ensemble family dramas like “This Is Us”, given texture mostly by its notes of regional specificity and trio of unaffected child performances, Scarborough goes out of its way to chart the relative goodness of its characters whenever possible, as though its filmmakers think we might not arrive at the right conclusions without moralizing notes.

TIFF ’21: Dash Cam

September 14, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF, UK

Dashcam
*½/****
starring Annie Hardy, Amar Chadha-Patel, Angela Enahoro
written by Gemma Hurley, Rob Savage, Jed Shepherd
directed by Rob Savage

by Bill Chambers Rob Savage's Host dared to suggest our new digital fortresses were inadequate shield against the old insecurities and became a cultural phenomenon as a result. There had been movies like it (Unfriended and its sequel, for instance), but the pandemic subtext gave its core premise–a haunted Zoom call–mass appeal, and having the actors play "themselves" à la Blair Witch added a veneer of documentary credibility. With Dash Cam, his much-anticipated follow-up (and his first film for horror factory Blumhouse), Savage again sets things against the backdrop of COVID and continues the neo-realist conceit of giving the lead the name of the actress playing her, but he's in murkier conceptual territory here, tipped off by the early and frequent abandonment of the titular gimmick. Real-life musician Annie Hardy, from the band Giant Drag, stars as a version of herself, seemingly the worst version of herself (though I gather her online persona is somewhat controversial), an MC who hosts BandCar, "the Internet's #1 Live Improvised Music Show Broadcast from a Moving Vehicle." At the beginning of the film, Annie abandons her L.A. apartment and feline roommate for an extended stay in England with former bandmate Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel). Boarding the plane, she turns out to be the type to let their mask droop below their nose. It's the first real hint of an impulse to troll that is reflexive bordering on pathological and seems to particularly flare up around the socially conscious or anyone who tells her "no." In the case of Stretch, these are one and the same, and after she manages to alienate him completely, she steals his car and looks for trouble in London (which is really as simple as not wearing a mask), broadcasting it all for the amusement of her followers and sometimes their tips.

TIFF ’21: Violet

September 12, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
starring Olivia Munn, Luke Bracey, Erica Ash, Dennis Boutsikaris
written and directed by Justine Bateman

by Bill Chambers In her taped introduction to Violet, actress-turned-filmmaker Justine Bateman describes it as an immersive experience, tantamount to putting on a coat. I would say it’s slightly more akin to having a pillow on your face. Though not explicitly autobiographical, the picture indeed betrays an insider’s grasp of Hollywood politics in its portrait of a production executive plagued by self-doubt and industry sexism, including, fairly, the internalized misogyny of a female underling. Violet (Olivia Munn) has reached a ceiling in her current job that probably can’t be broken. Her passion project is in limbo, the perfect man (Luke Bracey) is Just a Friend, and she’s still shook from a relationship that ended badly when she accidentally burned down their apartment. A scene where her boss (the great Dennis Boutsikaris) gets her pumped up about the book of poetry she dreams of turning into a film only so he can sucker punch her in a meeting with talent, Scorpion-and-the-Frog-style, captures something essential of toxic power dynamics in the entertainment industry that a more straightforward lampoon of a Rudin/Weinstein type probably would not. Another truthful moment, opposite in effect, finds Violet making a move on Bracey’s Red that surprises even her. It’s genuinely swoony. Then she spends the drive back to his place worrying she’ll be judged for dating beneath her station. (Red’s a screenwriter.) The irony of Violet being an eminently relatable mess of insecurities in an Olivia Munn-shaped package fades over the course of the film, perhaps in a way it wouldn’t have before “the great equalizer” of our current pandemic.

TIFF ’20 ‘Quibi’: Another Round; Falling; Spring Blossom

September 22, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF, UK

by Bill Chambers To wrap up our TIFF coverage, some ‘quick bites’ in honour of the fallen streaming service, Quibi. Movies about alcoholism always make me want to drink, so maybe it’s true that there’s no such thing as an antiwar movie. Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round (***/****), to be fair, makes drinking inviting because it depicts it almost exclusively as a social activity, when few us have socialized in months. Mads Mikkelsen stars as Martin, a high-school teacher in the throes of a mid-life crisis that’s jeopardizing his career and putting a strain on his marriage. After confiding his gloomy outlook to three of his colleagues–Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), and Peter (Lars Ranthe)–while out celebrating Nikolaj’s 40^th birthday, they get to talking about Norwegian philosopher Finn Skårderud, who allegedly believes that human beings would function better with a Blood Alcohol Content of 0.05%. Thus begins an experiment among the foursome to secretly maintain a constant state of tipsiness, which, lo, does yield some positive results, including the adorable runt of Tommy’s soccer team, Specs, becoming champ for a day. The first half of Another Round (whose Danish title, Druk, means “binge-drinking”) is a bit like watching X-Men discover their superpowers–but, y’know, it’s booze, and the four men eventually can’t resist drinking past the point of “ignition,” leading to domestic strife and even tragedy. For all that, the film is more realistic than moralistic, a feature-length expansion of Reese Witherspoon’s credo from James L. Brooks’s How Do You Know: “Don’t drink to feel better. Drink to feel even better.” Mikkelsen is touchingly wistful in a role that’s 180° removed from Hannibal Lecter but still counts on his innate combustibility, and the film engages in some hilarious internal debate over whether drinking is good or bad for politics.

TIFF ’20: Still Processing + Every Day’s Like This

September 21, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Short Films, TIFF

STILL PROCESSING
***½/****
written and directed by Sophy Romvari

EVERY DAY’S LIKE THIS
***½/****
starring Kacey Rohl, Daniel Kash, Francis Melling, Krystina Bojanowski
written and directed by Lev Lewis

by Angelo Muredda Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari mourns and preserves the past in her wrenching new nonfiction short, Still Processing, whose title puns on the intricate work of processing photographic images along with the spectral traces of those they depict. Evoking a tradition of poetic but philosophically robust memorial essay films and literary texts about engaging with the material record of the dead, from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil to W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the film is nevertheless shot through with Romvari’s modest sensibility. Though Romvari herself is front and centre throughout, the film is a quiet affair, shot in the loneliness of archives, darkrooms, and bedrooms, frequently lit by faint glowing lights and punctuated by a running subtitle track that elucidates the filmmaker’s emotional state. A compelling marriage of form and theme, the film is also gorgeously photographed. Particularly striking is a sequence that finds Romvari working solo among the cold brutalist architecture of York University, taking old photos of her deceased brothers David and Jonathan out of the humble archive of the box they’ve been housed in for the first time. She delicately arranges their faces on a nondescript table that soon becomes a kind of installation, effectively massaging her siblings back to life through her hands in real-time, as if gesturing to the labour and art of processing grief that only filmmaking can accomplish.

TIFF ’20: The Truffle Hunters

September 20, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Greece, Italy, TIFF

***/****
directed by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw

by Angelo Muredda “I can’t send you the aroma by phone,” a truffle dealer tells a prospective high-end client between eroticized sniffs of his own product early in Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s sad and mordantly funny The Truffle Hunters. The impossible challenge of translating the singular olfactory pleasures of sampling a top-shelf white truffle into words over the phone is something of an apt analogy for Dweck and Kershaw’s project. The filmmakers convert the idiosyncratic private lives and nonstandard labour of several elderly, taciturn northern Italian mushroom foragers and their dogs (who are also their business partners) into crowd-pleasing documentary fodder for foodies as well as people who go to nonfiction for a chance to gawk at eccentrics. It’s deceptively simple work, equally warm when profiling the dynamics of the cross-species tag teams, bemused when surveying the frosty culinary scene (and clandestine back alleys) where truffles are bought and sold, and striking when it’s framing the hunters as small figures navigating a big green world in beautiful, naturalist tableaux.

TIFF ’20: Penguin Bloom

September 20, 20202020, Australia, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

*/****
starring Naomi Watts, Andrew Lincoln, Rachel House, Jacki Weaver
screenplay by Harry Cripps & Shaun Grant, based on the book by Cameron Bloom & Bradley Trevor Greive
directed by Glendyn Ivin

by Angelo Muredda Naomi Watts should stop vacationing in Thailand. That’s just about the only lesson worth heeding in the faux-inspirational, would-be edifying Penguin Bloom, which plays out like an unofficial remake of J.A. Bayona’s otherwise forgettable The Impossible, the last time Watts played a wealthy Westerner with a pack of sandy-haired boys getting gored on holiday in Southeast Asia. Glendyn Ivin’s anonymously directed and bone-tired disability melodrama stars Watts (also a producer) as real-life well-to-do Australian mom turned ParaCanoe athlete Sam Bloom, who experiences a life-changing spinal-cord injury after a rooftop railing gives way under her. (As in The Impossible, we see the traumatic injury several times, including in uncanny nightmare sequences that mark the only time either film could be called stylish.) Newly disabled and deflated as she wheels around her spacious home, Sam finds her way back to life–which in Ivin’s limited imagination appears to consist of being a good mom even though she might not be able to reach over and put bandaids on her kids’ scraped knees like before–by nursing an injured magpie the family dubs Penguin. Meanwhile, Sam’s eldest son, Noah (Griffin Murray-Johnston), makes a video essay celebrating his mother’s resilience and mourning for the charmed life the family has lost, which conveniently doubles as a thematic narration track, in case any of the messages (presumably ported wholesale from the Cameron Bloom/Bradley Trevor Greive book on which the film is based) pass us by.

TIFF ’20: I Am Greta

September 20, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sweden, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Nathan Grossman

by Bill Chambers A deceptively stock rise-to-influence documentary, I Am Greta has haunted me like nothing that begins with “Hulu Presents” reasonably should. The film is, of course, about teen activist Greta Thunberg, who went on a school strike in her native Stockholm to bring awareness to climate change and became a global phenomenon. It begins at the beginning, in 2018, as Thunberg takes a seat outside the Swedish parliament building with a simple sign that reads “Skolstrejk för klimatet.” One older woman stops to scold her, more or less, for risking her future by skipping school. Thunberg counters that at the rate we’re destroying the planet, she has no future to risk. The woman walks away in a huff: kids, right? This fearless interaction not only establishes a key theme of I Am Greta–Thunberg’s ability to make Boomer heads explode, Scanners-style–but is also something of a miracle, given that Thunberg, who has Asperger’s, once went three years without speaking to another living soul except her parents. What triggered this mutism was her horrified reaction to an educational video about the impact of climate change on polar bears; what snapped her out of it was her realization that she could change her ways (going vegetarian, unplugging power cords, etc.)–and potentially those of others, by drawing as much attention to our environmental crisis, the looming Sixth Extinction, as possible.

TIFF ’20: City Hall

September 19, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

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

by Angelo Muredda Frederick Wiseman brings his penchant for humanist sketches of bureaucracy, policy-making, and the mundanity of board meetings with communal water jugs and bad air conditioning to Boston municipal government in City Hall. Though it clocks in at a hefty 275 minutes, City Hall is never a slog, unfurling as a series of fleet, wry vignettes that guide us in and out of different chambers of the titular institution. These range from a communal workspace full of tech-support agents on headsets, politely asking their clients not to yell at them, to chaotic strategic-planning jam sessions led by earnest people in ill-fitting suits, to holiday food-bank events where a procession of Butterball turkeys get choreographed for kitschy photo shoots.

TIFF ’20: New Order + Fauna

September 18, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Thriller, TIFF

Nuevo orden
*½/****
starring Naian Gonzaléz Norvind, Dario Yazbek Bernal, Mónica Del Carmen, Sebastian Silveti
written and directed by Michel Franco

FAUNA
***½/****
starring Francisco Barreiro, Luisa Pardo, Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez, Teresa Sánchez
directed by Nicolás Pereda

by Bill Chambers I’d heard that Michel Franco’s New Order was the new Parasite but from the rich people’s P.O.V., and I’m here to tell you that Parasite from the rich people’s P.O.V. wouldn’t be Parasite. Still, I did find the basic premise of New Order quite promising as social commentary: In Mexico City, mounting class resentments spark an uprising against aristocracy on the same day a local heiress is due to be married. I imagined a modern-day storming of the Bastille, but this is a film, for better or worse, of 21^st-century ideas, and it introduces a wrinkle into our eat-the-rich fantasies–military intervention–that becomes a tsunami. An elderly man (Eligio Meléndez) who used to work for the family of the bride, Marianne (Naian Gonzaléz Norvind), shows up at the wedding claiming his sick wife needs money for an operation. (If you watch HBO’s “Succession”, you know the kind of territory he’s wading into.) The mother (Lisa Owen) wants to help but is cowed by the guests’ stinginess, while Marianne’s brother (Diego Boneta) tips him like a bellhop and expects him to shoo. They’re unwittingly justifying the fury of the vandals and looters advancing on their home; only Marianne is truly sympathetic to the old man’s plight, going so far as to leave her own wedding (with one of the help in tow) to pick up his wife and drive her to the hospital. But during her absence, the military hatches a diabolical plan to manipulate the situation so as to solidify the caste system rather than see it evolve: they will abduct any wealthy citizens who’ve strayed from home–mostly the younger set, which leads to a lot of youthful flesh being exploitatively displayed as hostages are stripped naked and hosed down–and ransom them back to family members, pinning the responsibility for these kidnappings on the protestors.

TIFF ’20: MLK/FBI

September 17, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

***/****
directed by Sam Pollard

by Angelo Muredda Documentarian and editor Sam Pollard peers into the recently declassified files on the FBI’s aggressive counter-intelligence operation against Martin Luther King, Jr. in MLK/FBI. Pollard’s nonfiction essay is an infuriating and timely document undermined at times by its glossy, cinema-of-quality treatment. It is at once a sobering work of public significance and a slickly produced project that risks overly flattering its hypothetical spectators with too many ironic vignettes, zooming in to an old television set at one point to marvel at Ronald Reagan droning on about heroes and villains in the movies. In its first hour alone, it comes replete with black-and-white animations of vintage tape recorders, microfiche, and superimposed text and solemn voiceovers from a who’s-who of historians, activists, and former agents (whose faces are not revealed until the last act). More curiously, it concedes surprisingly long stretches to Resistance Democratic favourite James Comey, a career agent and former director who offers up nothing more insightful than his recognition that, sure, the Bureau might have been a bit heavy-handed when it came to King.

TIFF ’20: Shiva Baby

September 15, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Film Festivals, TIFF

***/****
starring Rachel Sennott, Polly Draper, Fred Melamed, Dianna Agron
written and directed by Emma Seligman

by Angelo Muredda Hell is other people waiting in line outside the bathroom at a function where you hate everyone in Emma Seligman's cringe comedy debut Shiva Baby, which impressively sustains something of the fever pitch of the Satanic ritual in the Castevets' apartment from Rosemary's Baby for most of its 77-minute runtime. More proof of concept for future films than a proper knockout, Shiva Baby is at least a nimble showcase for star Rachel Sennott, reprising her role as Danielle, the sullen and pleasantly inscrutable protagonist from Seligman's earlier short of the same name.

TIFF ’20: Notturno

September 15, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Italy, TIFF

**½/****
directed by Gianfranco Rosi

by Bill Chambers Notturno, meaning “nocturne” or simply “night” in the original Italian, opens with an epigraph stating that the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the end of WWI left the Middle East vulnerable to violent power-grabs in the decades that followed. What we’re about to see, we are told, was shot over a period of three years in Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon, during the recent campaign of terror by ISIS forces, and one of the bones I have to pick with Gianfranco Rosi’s latest observational documentary is the unresolved friction between this pithy summary of how the Middle East became a global blind spot and Notturno‘s conflation of those four Islamic countries on screen into one endless desert. Hypocritical might be too histrionic a word for it, but I can’t think of anything better in that ballpark. The film begins with a cluster of older women garbed in jilbaabs, I believe they’re called, filing into an abandoned, cavernous building and snaking up the stairs in a way that feels ceremonial. Is it a place of worship? The surroundings are difficult to parse. The women reach a small, cell-like room, and one of them cries out for her son, who died there while being held prisoner. Her anguish echoes across the next few passages, including cryptic shots of a guy staked out in the wilderness with a rifle, scenes of soldiers perhaps running drills, and rehearsals for some kind of play that the movie soon adopts as a framing device.

TIFF ’20: Get the Hell Out; Nomadland; David Byrne’s American Utopia

September 13, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Concert Doc, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, Film Festivals, Taiwan, TIFF, Zombie

GET THE HELL OUT
**/****
starring Bruce Hung, Megan Lai, Tsung-Hua To, Chung-wang Wang
screenplay by I-Fan Wang, Shih-Keng Chien, Wan-Ju Yang
directed by I-Fan Wang

NOMADLAND
***/****
starring Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Linday May, Swankie
written for the screen and directed by Chloé Zhao

American Utopia
***/****
directed by Spike Lee

by Bill Chambers Have the ticking time bombs the world is sitting on and TIFF’s significantly reduced slate resulted in the 2020 iteration of the festival–the COVID-19 TIFF, the pre-election TIFF, the world’s-on-fire TIFF–being programmed with increased political fervour? Three of the four films I’ve watched at TIFF 2020 suggest that’s the case in their topicality, though I will allow that the silliest of these, Taiwan’s Get the Hell Out, would not resonate nearly as much as it does were it not for these unremovable pandemic goggles I wear now, which transform everything old and new into ironic commentary on this moment in history. Get the Hell Out begins in medias res after a (sigh/jerk-off motion) zombie outbreak in parliament, then backtracks to show how the headstrong Hsiung (Megan Lai) was literally muscled out of office for refusing to endorse a chemical plant that will contaminate the environment with the rabies virus. She manipulates a lovestruck security guard with chronic–and portentous–nosebleeds named Wang (Bruce Ho) into running in her place, hoping to use him as a sock-puppet against her misogynistic former colleagues. Alas, he has his own cock-eyed agenda, and so the plague proceeds apace. Trapped in the parliament building, Hsiung and Wang are forced to fend off hordes of cannibalistic MPs as well as their nefarious rival, Li (Chung-wang Wang), the movie’s nominal Trump stand-in.

TIFF ’20: Inconvenient Indian

September 13, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Michelle Latimer

by Angelo Muredda “You have to watch out for the stories you’re told,” Thomas King dryly intones early in Michelle Latimer’s Inconvenient Indian as he ambles through a repertory-cinema lobby and sits down in his chair in Toronto’s Fox Theatre to take in the film we’re ostensibly watching. Latimer’s unorthodox essay film, which doubles as a curatorial programme on the futures of Indigenous art and life emerging from a history of settler colonialism, is energized by that cautionary note about the high stakes of storytelling, a seemingly benign activity that’s charged with both generative and destructive power. It cuts through the blizzard of whitewashed, endlessly recirculated images of Indigenous people as cultural throwbacks, from Nanook of the North onward, to anchor itself in Indigenous work of the present.

TIFF 2019: Waves

October 1, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

**½/****
starring Kelvin Harrison Jr, Lucas Hedges, Taylor Russell, Sterling K. Brown
written and directed by Trey Edward Shults

by Walter Chaw The first thing I’d say about Trey Edward Shults’s Waves is that I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea that this is his story to tell. The tale of the devastation wrought upon a black family by internal and external social pressures is at once obvious in a broad racial sense and relatively superficial in Shults’s treatment of it. Narratively, there are no new insights here, although a tremendous cast exhibits truth and grace no matter the shakiness of the picture’s framework and genesis. Well into the second decade of the new millennia, however, I guess I’m advocating for stories like this to be told from a different point of view. Failing that, Waves is ultimately a Stanley Kramer melodrama with a banging, transcendent Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross soundtrack/score. It has the best of intentions, no question, but I’ve seen this story told in this voice before.

TIFF 2019: Atlantiques

September 17, 20192019, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Senegal, Streaming, TIFF, Zombie

Atlantique
***/****
starring Mama Sané, Amadou Mbow, Ibrahima Traoré, Nicole Sougou
screenplay by Mati Diop, Olivier Demangel
directed by Mati Diop

by Angelo Muredda Working from her own 2009 short Atlantiques, first-time feature director Mati Diop makes a bold impression with Atlantics. An elegant film that will hopefully lose the ungainly subtitle "A Ghost Love Story" by the time it makes its way to Netflix (where it's bound in the coming months), it's an awfully strong directorial calling card with a distinctive rhythm and point of view, its tactility and sensuousness evoking the work of Diop's former director and mentor Claire Denis without losing its own youthful verve.