TIFF Journal: ‘Sicario’
A brutal, brilliant and culturally relevant thriller, Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Sicario’ announces itself with a punch to the gut of cinematic bravado. Roger Deakins’ evocative and immaculate camerawork pulls the...
A brutal, brilliant and culturally relevant thriller, Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Sicario’ announces itself with a punch to the gut of cinematic bravado. Roger Deakins’ evocative and immaculate camerawork pulls the...
The big question at the end of ‘Legend’ is just how much an impact can a single actor have on the overall result of a movie. For the most part, Brian Helgeland’s take on the notorious London gangsters the Kray br...
Lenny Abrahamson’s ‘Room’ is an unsettling yet richly moving portrayal of a horrendous human tragedy. Taking a sadly familiar set of circumstances, the filmmaker creates a hopeful tale of two young lost souls who...
Based on the 2001 Pultizer Prize winning Boston Globe exposé of corruption within the Catholic Church, Tom McCarthy’s latest film ‘Spotlight’ is both a sprawling study of a disturbing issue and an intimately smal...
Billed as a New England folk tale, Robert Eggers’ rather brilliant directorial debut ‘The Witch’ mixes the paranoid reality of the Salem witch trials with the folklore that fuelled the panic until the true nature...
The latest entry in China’s ongoing commitment to propaganda on a blockbuster scale, ‘Dragon Blade’ is a horrible movie. Despite all the money that was clearly funneled into the production (which is already a hit...
‘A Walk in the Woods’ offers pretty much the experience that you’d expect from the title. It’s a movie about two old white men going for a long walk. It’s a comedy, in that there are some jokes even t...
Given that so much of the success of ‘The Transporter’ series lived and died on Jason Statham’s unmistakably Stathamesque performance, you’d think that it would be impossible for the franchise to continue w...
Considering how badly it bombed at the box office, it’s remarkable how strong a legacy Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Grindhouse‘ left behind. Made by a handful of east coast Canucks with a VHS c...
Few films about teenagers (especially teen girls) capture that fragile era of life with the necessary level of awkward pain, discomfort and confusion. Teen stories are typically all about raunchy ruckus or inspirational coming-of-...
Some post-apocalyptic tales are big and action-packed like this summer’s ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’. Others are small and quiet like this week’s ‘Z for Zachariah’. One thing that all movies in this ge...
It’s amazing how well some seemingly uncinematic ideas can work as films. Take ‘The End of the Tour’. Based on an abandoned magazine interview that David Lipsky conducted with author David Foster Wallace (which w...