Weekend Roundtable: Unlikely Children’s Film Directors
If Cabin Fever and Hostel filmmaker Eli Roth can make a PG-rated children’s movie, what other unlikely director will do so next? Let’s see if we can figure that out in this week’s Roundtable.
TIFF Journal: Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Can You Ever Forgive Me? is far from a great movie, but it will end up being a major player when the ever-irritating awards season rolls around. It’s well done, entertaining enough, smart-ish, sweet-ish, anchored by two soli...
TIFF Journal: Everybody Knows
Following up a pair of Best Foreign Language Film Oscars with a star-studded trip to Spain wasn’t exactly the path I imagined for Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, The Salesman). For his first feature outside hi...
TIFF Journal: Screwball
Director Billy Corben’s 2006 film Cocaine Cowboys was one of the rarest of cinematic beasts: a hit documentary. That doesn’t happen often, but docs are also rarely as rowdy, insane, and relentlessly entertaining as tha...
Lizzie Review: Sympathy for the Devil
Though the latest film based on the parent murderer and Fall River, Massachusetts native Lizzie Borden attempts to frame itself as a thriller, it’s a much more complicated and nuanced tale of death than the sensationalists w...
The House with a Clock in Its Walls Review: A Fun Time for the Ki
If recent history has taught us anything, it’s to expect the unexpected. The past few years have been doozies. We’ve seen footage of a live giant squid and the return of Twin Peaks! So if I tell you that Eli Roth has m...
TIFF Journal: Green Book
I know this may sound absurd, but I always knew that the Farrelly Brothers would someday make a movie good enough that they’d have to be taken seriously. Even though their best work is rooted in the silliest and most insane ...
TIFF Journal: High Life
Broadly speaking, High Life continues Claire Denis’ exploration of the human condition, focusing on notions such as redemption, sacrifice, violence and compulsions. What makes it unique in her filmography is that this is the...
TIFF Journal: Gloria Bell
Fans of Sebastián Lelio’s 2013 Chilean film Gloria may be perturbed to find the director retreading old grounds. Gloria Bell at times feels like a shot-for-shot remake with an English cast headed by Julianne Moore.
TIFF Journal: The Standoff at Sparrow Creek
It’s impossible not to think of Reservoir Dogs while watching The Standoff at Sparrow Creek. Safe to assume that’s deliberate. Debuting writer/director Henry Dunham clearly hopes that his claustrophobic stage-play-as-m...
SteelBook Alert: Time to Bleed
A bunch of recent movies have been announced to get 4k Ultra HD SteelBook editions. Amazingly, not all of them are Pop Art monstrosities.
TIFF Journal: The Old Man & the Gun
It’s not often that you walk out of a cops-and-robbers yarn and can’t stop thinking about how sweet it was. David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun takes a bizarre true story and turns it into an elegant swan s...