Brandon Cronenberg talks ANTIVIRAL
Antiviral marks the feature debut of the scion of one of the world’s most esteemed genre filmmakers. The film will be competing as part of the Un Certain Regard series, an immesely prestigious honor...
View ArticleANNA KARENINA
It’s probably best to admit up front that I’d never actually read Tolstoy’s tome about lust and infidelity in the Russian court. While I’ve made my way through much of the sullen Dostoyevsky, and...
View ArticleWEST OF MEMPHIS
The documentary West of Memphis begins where it should, highlighting the initial victims that are at the heart of the entire tale: Three young boys who were hogtied, murdered and dumped into a creek in...
View ArticleCloud Atlas
Bold, brash, epic, and silly, Cloud Atlas is the latest of a slew of big budget sci-fi epics that’s likely to find far more detractors than fans of its quirky style. Drawn from a popular book many...
View ArticleThe Master
You are going to look at me, and you’re not going to blink. I’m going to tell you a series of things about this film, and if you blink, I’ll have to start again. The Master is a hypnotic film. The...
View ArticleHYDE PARK ON THE HUDSON
It may be difficult to get past seeing Hyde Park on Hudson as anything more than a cynical play at Oscar success, shadowing last year’s The King’s Speech with another tale of the stuttering King, this...
View ArticleBAD25
It’s not so far into Bad 25 when you realize just what kind of film it’s going to be – exuberant, energizing, even at times elegiac, this is very much a straight ahead celebration of a particularly...
View ArticleAFTERSHOCK
Playing in the Midnight Madness section to a ravenous audience expecting thrills every reel, the fact that Aftershock takes its sweet-ass time to get going feels like a bold move indeed. At the outset,...
View ArticleTHE BAY
When it was announced that Barry Levinson was going to be having a film as part of the TIFF Midnight Madness slate, and that it would be a found footage horror piece about infected water, I admit I...
View ArticleSILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK
The trailer for David O. Russell’s follow up to his Oscar nominated The Fighter, combined with the twee title, makes Silver Linings Playbook to be a horrible film about crazy people in love. Its a...
View ArticleLOOPER
In one of Looper‘s most delicious scenes, two versions of the same lead character are discussing the vagaries of time travel. When asked to explain how the technology works, “old” Joe deadpans a...
View ArticleABCs of Death
The anthology film, that strange form of film where a number of directors assemble to tell their own take on a given subject, are strange cinematic beasts. On the one hand, they play like mini...
View ArticleTHE ACT OF KILLING
Easily one of this decade’s most important and most harrowing documentaries, The Act of Killing is a shattering take on the nature of evil. The conceit of the documentary is unique to the form –...
View ArticleTHE ICEMAN
Like a stiff mixed drink that doesn’t live up to the quality of its ingredients, The Iceman proves to be an unpalatable, underwhelming crime drama. All the great parts are there – we’ve got a simmering...
View ArticleLUNARCY!
Lunarcy! is one of those delightful character piece documentaries, akin to where Errol Morris will go down to some swampy Florida town and meet totally unique, bizarre and obsessive individuals and put...
View ArticleLONDON – THE MODERN BABYLON
By any normal measure, Julien Temple’s film London could easily have been terrible. The conceit, a slew of archive footage interspersed with talking head interviews, is the recipe for loads of...
View ArticleGhost Graduation
One of the most charming, silly and rambunctious films of this year’s festival, Ghost Graduation is an unabashed love letter to the cinema of John Hughes, mixed in with bits of The Frighteners or...
View ArticleBLANCANIEVES
When an ostensibly “silent” film takes home the best picture Oscar, beating out another film about George Meliés, you know we’re living in a cinematic landscape where everything nostalgic is ripe for...
View ArticleFREE ANGELA AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS
Let me be completely frank and upfront about this – the world could very much use a fine documentary about Angela Davis. She’s a fascinating woman, extremely intelligent and eloquent. A continental...
View ArticleARTIFACT
One one level, Artifact has elements of that that most egregious of self-serving documentaries, the tale of the woeful band fighting against their evil corporate overlord. We start with the band Thirty...
View ArticleTHERMAE ROMAE
The TIFF programme guide breathlessly extolled the success of Thermae Romae in its native country, declaring the film, based on an extremely popular manga, “Japan’s biggest box office hit of the year”....
View ArticleA LIAR’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY – THE UNTRUE STORY OF MONTY PYTHON’S GRAHAM CHAPMAN
Graham Chapman has been dead for almost a quarter century, but that hasn’t stopped him from starring in a brand new film. If that weren’t notable enough, this work is also the closest we’ll probably...
View Article70mm, 4K, and THE MASTER’s Split Personality
Ever since Paul Thomas Anderson announced that he’d be shooting The Master for large format celluloid presentation, many of us have been drooling at the prospect of a modern, epic 70mm masterpiece...
View ArticleTIFF 2012 in Capsule Form
ABCs OF DEATH – B- Like any anthology film, there’s good bits, decent bits, and awful bits. Luckily, you just have to sit back and wait for another letter to come up in, um, “cue”, and it all gets...
View ArticleARGO and the “Truthiness” Doctrine
Argo is a delightful throwback film, echoing the kind of “political intrigue” style that was commonplace during the Nixon administration. The fact that Argo shares many characteristics with the likes...
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