TIFF Archives - Page 4 of 14 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

TIFF ’18: Fahrenheit 11/9

September 17, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****directed by Michael Moore by Walter Chaw Michael Moore is an often-terrible filmmaker and a repugnant human being. His films are scattershot and on the whole unhelpful. In a few meandering minutes of his new film, Fahrenheit 11/9, he notes that members of Trump's inner circle have invested in his films and that when given the opportunity to hold Trump's feet to the fire in a public forum, he played the Jimmy Fallon. He appears to be owning that he's part of this disaster, but it's not clear, ultimately, what the fuck he's on about. Moore also spends time with…

TIFF ’18: The Death and Life of John F. Donovan

September 16, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, TIFF, UK

**/****
starring Kit Harington, Natalie Portman, Jessica Chastain, Michael Gambon
written and directed by Xavier Dolan

by Angelo Muredda Ex-wunderkind, now regular old late-twentysomething Xavier Dolan follows up the Cannes-awarded It's Only the End of the World with his long-awaited English-language debut, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan. Though he has from the start been a confessional filmmaker who, for better or worse, pours himself into his work–revisiting fraught relationships between bratty teen boys and their high-strung mothers and peppering in idiosyncratic song cues from Céline Dion and Oasis–his newest feels even more concretely anchored in his pet interests, telling the story of Rupert Turner, a young, queer child actor (Jacob Tremblay) who strikes up a long-standing epistolary friendship with the eponymous not-out TV star (Kit Harington) that sets the former on a path to adulthood and tanks the latter's career.

TIFF ’18: Boy Erased

September 16, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

*½/****
written by Joel Edgerton, based on the memoir by Garrard Conley
directed by Joel Edgerton

by Bill Chambers Even though it doesn't quite stick the landing, Joel Edgerton's The Gift was one of the more promising directorial debuts from an actor in recent years, but alas his sophomore feature barely ascends to heights from which to fall. Based on the memoir by Garrard "Jared" Conley, Boy Erased opens in the unpleasant dark of dawn as only-child Jared (Lucas Hedges, who either won or lost a coin toss with Timothée Chalamet) shares a deafeningly silent breakfast with his parents, Nancy (Nicole Kidman) and Marshall (Russell Crowe, swollen to the proportions of a Charmin bear), before his first day at the ex-gay ministry Love In Action–a branding that oozes grim irony. Marshall is a Baptist preacher who owns a car dealership in the heartland; he is, in other words, awful, and when Jared returns from college less confident in his heterosexuality than ever, Marshall, scrambling to pre-empt any damage to his standing in the community, invites a couple of snake-oil salesmen into his home in the middle of the night to fix the problem. (As H.L. Mencken put it, "Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.") At this rehab centre, the residents are stripped of their possessions and their identities are tamped down in sexless white shirts. Activities include charting the sinners on one's family tree and, despite the place being co-ed, sorting the boys on a descending scale of manliness. It's all presided over by Victor Sykes (Edgerton himself; what does it say that Jared's three biggest adversaries are played by Australians?), a tacit closet case who strives for avuncular beneath the harsh judgments, leaving the dirty work to the visiting "success story" Flea inhabits with impressive rancour.

TIFF ’18: Climax

September 15, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Musical, Mystery, TIFF

**½/****
starring Sofia Boutella, Kiddy Smile, Romain Guillermic, Souheila Yacoub
written and directed by Gaspar Noé

by Angelo Muredda It's hard out here for a Gaspar Noé hater. The France-based Argentine arthouse trickster surprised even himself at Cannes when his latest, Climax, got positive notices from some who had previously written him off as a snotty provocateur. (Noé has reliably yielded some of the finest mean criticism out there: Consider Mark Peranson likening Enter the Void, in his Cannes dispatch from 2009 for CINEMA SCOPE, to "Entering the void of the cavity that is Gaspar's brain.") Climax, by contrast, was supposed to be as innovative, fun, and watchable as his previous attempts at in-your-face fuckery were punishing.

TIFF ’18: Widows

September 14, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF, UK

***½/****
screenplay by Gillian Flynn & Steve McQueen, based on the novel by Lynda LaPlante
directed by Steve McQueen

by Bill Chambers Sorry, Psycho. Killing off one movie star halfway through isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Killing off three movie stars in the first five minutes. Widows casts Liam Neeson, Jon Bernthal, and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as the husbands, and while the title would seem to give away that they aren’t long for this film’s world, watching established leading men bite it so soon still creates an undeniable moment of cognitive dissonance. It’s thrilling to see co-writer/director Steve McQueen use his cachet to these subversive ends, not to mention apply his formal sophistication to the crime movie. Which isn’t to say he elevates it (we’re talking about a genre that counts Anthony Mann and Jean-Pierre Melville among its pioneers)–more that Widows offers respite from a glut of John Wick wannabes and Neeson’s own assembly-line thrillers. So, Widows. Viola Davis plays the rich one, Veronica. She lives in a swank condo overlooking Chicago that seems to have taken on the icy gleam of the bachelor pad from McQueen’s Shame in the absence of Neeson’s Harry, an idealized vision of whom haunts Veronica’s imagination. (These scenes play like the distaff version of Neeson’s The Grey.) Harry’s partners were not as well off, and their wives, Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), need money desperately enough that Alice’s own mother (Jacki Weaver, perhaps inevitably) tells her to become a paid escort. Harry, it turns out, owed money to a crime lord, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), who’s now running for city council against golden child Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell). Manning wants Veronica to pay up, so she commits to robbing Mulligan and thus finishing what Harry started, enlisting Linda and Alice as her partners. None of them are career criminals, yet Veronica figures that if she can tailor the heist to their individual strengths, they just might pull it off.

TIFF ’18: Cold War

September 14, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Poland, TIFF

**/****written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski by Angelo Muredda Pawel Pawlikowski follows up on the airless perfection of Ida with the ostensibly warmer but equally over-manicured and emotionally distant Cold War, a more historically trenchant La La Land for postwar Poland. Leave it to Pawlikowski, who never met a compelling, age-lined face he didn't want to frame in an artfully-arranged tableau, to mute even the potentially energizing opening montage of folk performers doing their bits before his ethnographic camera and its onscreen extension, the extended mic of pianist and recruiter Wiktor (Tomasz Kot, whose passing resemblance to Will Forte makes…

TIFF ’18: Dogman

September 12, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Italy, Thriller, TIFF

****/****
starring Marcello Fonte, Edoardo Pesce, Nunzia Schiano, Adamo Dionisi
screenplay by Ugo Chiti, Massimo Gaudioso, Matteo Garrone
directed by Matteo Garrone

by Walter Chaw About four scenes into Matteo Garrone's Dogman, I wondered if he was going to be able to keep it up: the invention, the escalating tension, the breathless feat of being something entirely novel. I've never seen anything like Dogman. It's a crime film, a tender picture about a father and his daughter, a look at poverty, a look at addiction and maybe mental illness, a critique of masculinity at its terminal extremities, and a withering conversation about what friendship can look like between two men. It's a film that feels like a fable sometimes; like neorealism at others. It's shockingly violent and then surpassingly tender. There's a monster in Dogman, too, and while it's easy to hate and fear him, there are moments where I felt myself hoping that someone could reach him. I could even feel myself wanting his approval. The picture is unusually smart about the human condition, even though its intelligence appears to be alien in nature. It's impossible to know from one minute to the next what's going to happen in Dogman, which isn't to say it makes no sense but rather that it makes perfect sense, once it happens. It's brilliant.

TIFF ’18: Transit + Shadow

September 11, 20182018, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Romance, TIFF

TRANSIT
*½/****
starring Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese, Lilien Batman
screenplay by Christian Petzold, based on the novel by Anna Seghers
directed by Christian Petzold

Ying
**/****
starring Deng Chao, Sun Li, Zheng Kai, Wang Qianyuan
screenplay by Li Wei & Zhang Yimou
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Bill Chambers If Christian Petzold's previous film, Phoenix, felt like a joke reverse-engineered with the slightest of pretexts to get us to a killer payoff, Transit feels more like his version of "The Aristocrats!", a shaggy-dog story intoxicated with its own brutal rambling–here almost literalized by third-person narration from a bartender (Matthias Brandt), who paraphrases conversations he had with our hero that are comically steeped in minutiae–on its way to a glib punchline. In Paris during the Occupation, Georg (Franz Rogowski, a downmarket Joaquin Phoenix) is entrusted with delivering two pieces of mail to a renowned novelist squirrelled away in a hotel: a letter from the man's estranged wife, and papers that will help him escape to freedom. The writer, alas, is but a stain when Georg gets there, and soon after he agrees to smuggle a dying man (Grégoire Monsaingeon) into Marseilles, where he can kill two birds with one stone by taking care of the author's unfinished business. Transit generates a moment of real frisson when Georg hops off the train in Marseilles: everything is modern, or at least postwar, including the melting-pot citizenry. I'm sure there's a definitive answer as to whether this is WWII as modern-dress Shakespeare, but for the rest of the movie, whenever something as benign as a contemporary bus advertisement appears, the film briefly and instantly becomes a "Man in the High Castle"-esque work of speculative fiction that curdles the blood, given how frighteningly close we are to resurrecting Hitler with the rise of nationalism on the world stage. One might ask why the characters are still dealing with "letters of transit" like they're in Casablanca (i.e., where are the computers?), but I took that as commentary on the dinosaur ideals of fascism itself. If fascism does one thing well, it's "rolling back" progress, currently the Republican party's favourite pastime.

TIFF ’18: Blind Spot

September 9, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Norway, TIFF

Blindsone
***/****
written and directed by Tuva Novotny

by Bill Chambers I'm dense; I hadn't read anything about Blind Spot in advance, and it was a while before I realized I was watching a film that not only hadn't cut yet but was likely never going to. The picture opens with two adolescent girls getting dressed after gym class, scrolling through apps ("Look!" Thea (Nora Mathea Øien) says, waving her phone at her friend, who distantly acknowledges whatever it is she's supposed to see), and walking home from school together, which involves 11 uninterrupted minutes of mindless chatter. While admiring the awesome banality of it all, I somehow failed to notice that the film's form was dictating its commitment to verisimilitude. Maybe that's one of the blind spots to which the title refers–it seems to have a few meanings, both within the story being told and more metatextually. For instance, Thea returns to her family's apartment, has a little supper in front of the teevee while her stepmother, Maria (Pia Tjelta), tends to her baby brother, brushes her teeth, jots something in her diary, checks her phone, and then, for the first time, escapes our gaze, stepping out of frame into a literal blind spot, manufacturing a mystery out of those pivotal seconds before Thea, evidently, tries to kill herself by jumping out the window.

TIFF ’18: A Star is Born (2018)

September 9, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, Romance, TIFF

**½/****
starring Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, Andrew Dice Clay, Sam Elliott
screenplay by Eric Roth and Bradley Cooper & Will Fetters
directed by Bradley Cooper

by Angelo Muredda It says a lot about A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper's directorial debut, that the most emotionally cathartic stuff pours out as freely in the incredible trailer and its savviest meme offspring, where diva Pokémon Jigglypuff croons the entrancing opening bars of Lady Gaga's big stage debut for a rapt audience, than it does in the actual film, a polished first-act pitch in search of a payoff. That everything after the titular birth seems like apocrypha, weirdly playing both too long and as if it's running at 1.5x speed, is disappointing given the first act's charm offensive, though you can't put the blame squarely on the multi-hyphenate's already-overtaxed shoulders. It's probably asking too much of this third official crack at material first made into a vehicle for Janet Gaynor in 1937 to expect it to offer a wholly fresh take on a vaguely eugenic premise about how one half of a creative power couple can only thrive while the other languishes in obscurity. A first-time helmer with a stake in how his character's tragic narrative trajectory plays out, Cooper seems at once fired up by the meet-cute potential of the premise, which he nails, and stuck at a creative crossroads with the more melancholy, sepia-toned stuff that probably first drew the previously-attached Clint Eastwood's attention.

TIFF ’18: One Last Deal

September 8, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Finland, TIFF

Tuntematon mestari**½/****written by Anna Heinämaadirected by Klaus Härö by Bill Chambers Olavi (Heikki Nousiainen) looks like Michael Haneke and projects about the same cuddly warmth as an art dealer whose basement shop has never done better than break even. One day at the auction house he frequently trolls, Olavi is caught in the tractor beam of an unsigned portrait of Christ by an unidentified artist, perhaps seeing a vision of his younger self in the bearded figure. He has a hunch the piece is a bigger deal than the viperous auctioneer (Jakob Öhrman) knows, and decides to bid on it…

TIFF ’18: Monrovia, Indiana

September 8, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

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

by Angelo Muredda To anyone who might still be labouring under the delusion that Frederick Wiseman’s method is simply to point a camera at a bunch of bureaucrats and watch the policy talk and human foibles fly, there’s now Monrovia, Indiana, one of the nonfiction master’s fleetest, funniest, and most conspicuously structured films in some time. Though you could read it as a purposefully timely attempt to dig deep into the earth of a so-called flyover state that the so-called coastal elites attending slam-poetry readings at the New York Public Library might deride, the film more accurately suggests a minor B-side to the loftier work of its predecessor, Ex Libris, which, among other things, considered the library as a necessary and all-too-vulnerable point of contact between the working poor and a wider world that grows increasingly out of their reach. Monrovia, Indiana revels instead in the earthier pleasures of local institutions like Hot Rod’s Barber Shop, where everyone gets the same military-grade haircut, and the surreal space of a grocery store that stocks Donald Duck’s orange juice and lights its lemons, limes, and tomatoes like pop art.

TIFF ’18: Consequences

September 7, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Slovenia, Teen, TIFF

Posledice**/****written and directed by Darko Štante by Bill Chambers A young woman escorts Andrej (Matej Zemljič) into the bedroom at a party but when the layers of clothing start coming off, he balks. She calls his manhood into question, and the next thing you know she's running out the door with a bloody mouth while he wraps his knuckles in a towel. Andrej, who looks mature but is apparently still a minor, appears in court, where his mother (Rosana Hribar) throws him spectacularly under the bus for his recent history of delinquency, emasculating him yet again. Back at home awaiting…

TIFF ’17: Man Hunt + Happy End

September 18, 20172017, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Directors: John Woo, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Hong Kong, TIFF

ManHunt
**/****
starring Zhang Hanyu, Masaharu Fukuyama, Qi Wei, Ha Jiwon
screenplay by Nip Wan Fung, Gordon Chan, James Yuen, Itaru Era, Ku Zoi Lam, Maria Wong, Sophia Yeh, based on the novel Kimiyo funnu no kawa wo watare by Juko Nishimura
directed by John Woo

HAPPY END
**/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz, Toby Jones
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Bill Chambers About five seconds into John Woo’s Man Hunt (no relation to that Fritz Lang movie with George Sanders in a cave), there’s a freeze-frame. Followed shortly by another. It’s glorious. Digital filmmaking has no doubt made it easier for Woo to be himself, as has being back in Asia: Hollywood never did warm to his Peckinpah flourishes, nor his melodramatic flair. But something is off in Man Hunt, which finds Woo returning, a touch desperately, to the Heroic Bloodshed genre in the form of a gloss on The Fugitive. (Officially, it’s a remake of a Ken Takakura vehicle variously known as Manhunt and Hot Pursuit.) Chinese Du Qiu (Zhang Hanyu) is a hotshot lawyer for a pharmaceutical company that frames him for the murder of an alleged lover (Tao Okamoto, bestowing her iconic look on a role that doesn’t thank her in return) to protect its secrets; Japanese Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama) is the hotshot Inspector sent after Du when he escapes custody. Du repeatedly eludes Yamura’s clutches, but over the course of the chase they build a rapport that transcends lawful and cultural barriers and, à la Hard-Boiled, unite against a common enemy, corrupt CEO Yoshihiro Sakai (Jun Kunimura). I should mention the two female super-assassins hot on Du’s trail, since Woo’s daughter Angeles plays one of them. For better or worse, this is personal filmmaking.

TIFF ’17: Brad’s Status

September 18, 20172017, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, TIFF

**½/****
starring Ben Stiller, Austin Abrams, Jenna Fischer, Michael Sheen
written and directed by Mike White

by Angelo Muredda Nobody captures the insidiousness and pervasiveness of depressive thinking quite like Mike White, who returns to the middle-aged professional anxiety and panic-inducing Impostor Syndrome of “Enlightened” with Brad’s Status, a quiet, obstinately minor film that largely unfolds through the emotionally-stunted protagonist’s daydreaming voiceover critiques of his own minimal actions onscreen. Brad’s Status positions itself as a lower-middle-class American B-side to Éric Rohmer in its focus on one man’s interrogation of his own moral failings, a modest goal it mostly pulls off.

TIFF ’17: The Florida Project

September 16, 20172017, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

***/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Brooklynn Kimberly Prince, Bria Vinaite, Caleb Landry Jones
written by Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch
directed by Sean Baker

by Angelo Muredda “Stay in the future today,” a motel sign ironically beams early in The Florida Project, Sean Baker’s gorgeous, ebullient, and, as the kids say, problematic follow-up to his profile-raising Tangerine. The film is a contemporary fable about a cast of poor people, mostly kids, whose transient lives are lived in Kissimmee, Florida against the looming backdrop of Disney World. Their cheap motel rooms, hosted in a purple monstrosity semi-teasingly named The Magic Castle and negotiated week-to-week at best, serve as a temporary respite from homelessness, their inability to invest in a more permanent future rubbed in their faces daily by the tourists just passing through on their way to somewhere better. Dire as that might seem, Baker turns this downbeat ‘America today’ premise into the stuff of everyday beauty and wonder by lining up his brightly-lit but cool pastel aesthetic with the way his 6-year-old protagonist, Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince), sees the run-down souvenir shops, ice-cream parlours, and rival motels around her as a kind of raggedy jungle gym.

TIFF ’17: Molly’s Game

September 15, 20172017, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

*½/****
starring Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Michael Cera, Kevin Costner
screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on the memoir by Molly Bloom
directed by Aaron Sorkin

by Angelo Muredda You can thank anyone who came out of Steve Jobs yearning for Aaron Sorkin’s take on a sociopathic female protagonist with quixotic interests for Molly’s Game, the loquacious screenwriter/producer/playwright’s rancid directorial debut. Apart from some questionable onscreen graphics and stats that turn the film’s opening set-piece–a breakneck tour through the early history of subject Molly Bloom (not the one you’re probably thinking of)–into a gaudy arcade game, Sorkin the director shows some rare restraint, playing some seriously-overwritten material straight. That isn’t to say he’s an especially promising filmmaker, only that he mostly stays out of his cast’s way as actors like Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba stomp through mic-drop punchlines about money–Wall Street bro fist-pumpers like “I had just made three thousand dollars in one night”–and hyper-stylized speeches that tell us what their maestro really thinks about feminism, gossip, and overcharging prosecutors.

TIFF ’17: Motorrad

September 13, 20172017, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Brazil, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, TIFF

**/**** screenplay by L.G. Bayão directed by Vincente Amorim by Bill Chambers There is a whole subtext, nay, context begging to be unpacked in Motorrad, yet the filmmaking never inspires much curiosity about it, and it's all too easy to substitute the legacy of George Miller's Mad Max movies for table-setting. Shaggy Hugo (Guilherme Prates) breaks into a seemingly-abandoned garage and sees a carburetor he would like. The proprietor chases him with a shotgun, but an alluring, tomboyish woman (Carla Salle) intervenes, like the farmer's daughter convincing daddy not to shoot the stranger climbing out her bedroom window. Instead, they…

TIFF ’17: Suburbicon + Bodied

September 10, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Mystery, Satire, Thriller, TIFF

SUBURBICON
*½/****
starring Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, Noah Jupe
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and George Clooney & Grant Heslov
directed by George Clooney

BODIED
*½/****
starring Calum Worthy, Jackie Long, Charlamagne Tha God, Anthony Michael Hall
written by Joseph Kahn & Alex Larsen
directed by Joseph Kahn

by Bill Chambers The best parts are obviously the Coens’ and the worst parts are obviously director George Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov’s. Trouble is, the best parts aren’t that great and the worst parts…yikes. A period piece set in the Eisenhower era, Suburbicon centres around the eponymous suburban development (that the title isn’t just a pun unto itself is the first red flag, to borrow one of the movie’s pet phrases), which has controversially allowed a black family to breach this all-white neighbourhood. Next door, horn-rimmed patriarch Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) lives a pleasant life with his little-leaguer son (Noah Jupe), wheelchair-user wife (Julianne Moore), and sister-in-law Margaret (also Moore). (One of them’s blonde, like the other Elvis in Kissin’ Cousins.) One night, while Jupe’s Nicky is lying in bed listening to the radio, a pair of thugs (Glenn Fleshler and Alex Hassell) breaks in and holds the family hostage. Everyone is chloroformed, but Mrs. Lodge’s system can’t handle it, and Gardner is left a widower. When the home-invaders are caught and put in a police line-up, Nicky can’t figure out why his father won’t positively ID them. They have very recognizable faces, after all. Using the Coen Brothers’ casting director, Ellen Chenoweth, Clooney populates the frame with the sort of memorable oddballs you see in their films, actors who seem like they’re always being looked at through a wide-angle lens.

TIFF ’17: Euthanizer

September 7, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Finland, TIFF

Armomurhaaja **½/**** written and directed by Teemu Nikki by Bill Chambers Veijo (Matti Onnismaa) kills pets for people who can't afford to have them euthanized by a vet: Gas for the small ones, a bullet for the larger varieties. He feigns a mystical connection with animals to exact a steep price, though, shaming owners for being the potential cause of their furry friend's misery, like the young woman he chides for keeping her cat locked up in a tiny apartment. This doesn't stop some of his clients from using him as a glorified hitman, and when his dying father's nurse…