TIFF Journal: ‘Elle’
Paul Verhoeven is as much an intellectual prankster as a filmmaker. Now that he’s abandoned Hollywood to work exclusively in Europe, the provocateur seems as dedicated to upsetting viewers as entertaining them. He deliberate...
Paul Verhoeven is as much an intellectual prankster as a filmmaker. Now that he’s abandoned Hollywood to work exclusively in Europe, the provocateur seems as dedicated to upsetting viewers as entertaining them. He deliberate...
A few years ago, Jason Bateman tried his hand at directing and did such a good job mounting the bad behavior comedy ‘Bad Words‘ that no one made fun of him for it. Now Bateman has returned with a far more ambitious dar...
The first feature by Osgood Perkins (son of Anthony Perkins) is a fairly conventional horror yarn bent and contorted until it starts to feel like something fresh. It’s a lesson in narrative construction that proves even old ...
Cult Canuck filmmaker Bruce McDonald made an unexpected late career shift into horror seven years ago with ‘Pontypool’, and it worked out so well that many hoped he’d get back into that spooktacular saddle. Thank...
The filmmaking output from Turkey isn’t normally described a wild, graphic or intense. Generally speaking, those folks fall onto the subtler side of the spectrum when it comes to their filmmaking. Or at least that was true u...
‘Born to Be Blue is a perfectly decent bio-pic of the late, great jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. The film serves up some clever reinventions of overly familiar bio-pic forms in the hopes of reinventing the genre. For a while, it...
Dark comedy is a difficult beast to tame. It’s a fine line between shock laughs and pandering tedium. It’s all too easy to numb your audience with outrageousness if you’re unable to top yourself or at least stumb...
It’s pretty typical for an action/comedy to include a romantic sub-plot. It’s also quite common for that to be the worst part of the movie. However, ‘Mr. Right’ is a welcome exception to the rule. This big,...
Six years ago, Australian director Sean Byrne established himself as a film nerd genre director to watch with ‘The Loved Ones’, which played like a John Hughes movie with graphic dismemberment flourishes. The flick bec...
Two years ago, Alfonso Cuarón’s son Jonás helped him script the stunning blockbuster ‘Gravity’. Around the same time, Jonás Cuarón was also writing his own movie, ‘Desierto’, which was a similarly str...
Ilya Naishuller’s ‘Hardcore’ is a tricky movie. One the one hand, it’s a pretty amazing technical accomplishment that’s almost without precedent and will pin genre fans to their seats. On the other ha...
After a few years away getting up to god knows what (presumably debauchery of some sort), bad boy filmmaker Gaspar Noé has returned. For over a decade, the director has hyped up a dream of making an X-rated entertainment for the a...