TIFF Journal: Birds of Passage
Christina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s Birds of Passage is a film of great beauty and great brutality. It crafts a deeply moving tale of one family’s rise and fall as a crime empire in the desert-like sands of Colombia.
Christina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s Birds of Passage is a film of great beauty and great brutality. It crafts a deeply moving tale of one family’s rise and fall as a crime empire in the desert-like sands of Colombia.
Jamie Bell stars in Donnybrook as Jarhead Earl, an ex-Marine with a penchant for violence. He wants one last bare-knuckled victory to gain enough cash to escape with his family from their impoverished circumstances. When Earl come...
Like so many Jason Reitman productions, The Front Runner isn’t necessarily a terrible movie so much as a frustrating one. Compelling points could be made from mining the story of disgraced U.S. Senator Gary Hart and the prec...
After 17 years, Alfonso Cuarón finally made a follow-up to Y tu mamá también. During his time in Hollywood, Cuarón had a more personal and distinctly Mexican project planned that he was determined make. It took a few hundred milli...
In Boy Erased, Joel Edgerton directs a coming-of-age drama about conversion therapy, the dubious and often destructive practice of attempting to “cure” homosexuality through a combination of half-baked psychological pr...
Free Solo is an exemplary documentary about the act of ropeless cliff face climbing. The film introduces audiences to this particularly impressive/insane sport where the limits of concentration and endurance are brought to bear on...
After specializing in a harrowing brand of art house misery in pictures like 12 Years a Slave, Hunger, and Shame, pretty much the last thing anyone expected out of Steve McQueen (no, not that one – the director) was a rollicking h...
It may be heresy to say, but David Gordon Green’s version of Halloween isn’t just better than the (overpraised) original, it’d work perfectly well if it were a standalone film that toyed with general slasher movi...
Zhang Yimou has lost favor of late with international audiences. His latest film, Shadow, manages to reclaim a bit of that luster.
Beautiful Boy is a powerful true story about the effects of addiction that never quite settles into the film it tries to be. On the one hand, it’s commendable that it never devolves into histrionics where the melodrama of th...
Ten years ago, if you’d pointed at the poster for Superbad and had to guess which of the two actors sporting dazed faces would go on to direct, Jonah Hill likely wouldn’t have been the top choice. Then again, whoever w...
Countless movies have attempted to blend the science fiction and horror genres, but not many have done it as well as the original Predator. (Witness, for example, most of its sequels and spinoffs.) With that franchise returning to...