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.
TIFF Journal: Donnybrook
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...
TIFF Journal: The Front Runner
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...
Fear the Walking Dead 4.14 Recap: “Someone Will Help UsR
That crazy dreadlocked lady on Fear the Walking Dead finally has a name. She gets some backstory this week too. I wish I could fully buy into it.
TIFF Journal: Roma
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...
TIFF Journal: Boy Erased
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...
TIFF Journal: Free Solo
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...
TIFF Journal: Widows
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...
American Horror Story 8.01 Recap: “The Stew Is Stu!”
All the promotion for the eighth season of American Horror Story, dubbed Apocalypse, has promised the show’s most ambitious and craziest storyline yet. Sadly, the only thing notable about the premiere episode is how extraord...
TIFF Journal: Halloween (2018)
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...
TIFF Journal: Shadow
Zhang Yimou has lost favor of late with international audiences. His latest film, Shadow, manages to reclaim a bit of that luster.
TIFF Journal: Beautiful Boy (2018)
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...