Throughout his strange career, Guillermo del Toro has made it a mission to fuse horror and fairy tales until they become indistinguishable. The guy has done a remarkable job weaving those dreams together so far, but something abou...
‘Suburbicon’ is a film made by talented people and with the best intentions that somehow went wrong. It started as a discarded Coen brothers screenplay that was picked up by George Clooney to direct. It still feels lik...
From the moment it was announced that Louis C.K. had made a secret movie over the summer that would play at TIFF, it was safe to say the film wouldn’t exactly be a safe bit of light entertainment or a ‘Pootie Tang̵...
A pop feminist dramedy is just the ticket for a crowd-pleasing awards bait picture. With writer Simon Beaufoy (‘Slumdog Millionaire’) and co-directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (‘Little Miss Sunshine̵...
Brad’s Status is a film about narcissism and self-pity from a fairly successful middle-aged and middle class man played by Ben Stiller. That should mean that it’s an almost unwatchable bit of navel-gazing, but in the h...
An extraordinary exploration of how vulnerable trans women are to mistreatment and bigotry, Sebastián Lelio’s ‘A Fantastic Woman’ is often a harrowing experience. It’s also a story filled with such dignity,...
Writer/director Armando Iannucci has a knack for finding comedy where it shouldn’t be. He essentially invented cringe comedy (anything ‘Alan Partridge’ related) and even made political comedy mainstream (relative...
The life of author Mary Shelley is more than worthy of cinematic exploration for a variety of reasons, but unfortunately this glossy new bio-pic from director Haifaa Al-Mansour reduces her life and work down to the world’s m...
If there were an award issued by the BFI for “Stuffiest and Britishest Film of the Year,” then ‘The Children Act’ would be a frontrunner destined to win by a landslide. The movie is about closed-off emotion...
‘The Ritual’ is another of those horror movies where a group of guys go out to the woods and creepy things happen to them within the winding branches. Thankfully, it’s a pretty good one. The film toys with trauma...
Alexander Payne is the least likely filmmaker one would expect to make a sweeping sci-fi thinkpiece, and that’s exactly why ‘Downsizing’ is so intriguing. The writer/director who dedicated his career to mining th...
Aaron Sorkin finally directed one of his screenplays and the results are pretty much what you’d expect. That snappy, Sorkiny dialogue explodes out of characters’ mouths at a fever pitch. Rat-a-tat snark and smarm slowl...
