The surprise Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, ‘The Square’ marks the return of queasy art comedy specialist Ruben Östlund following his 2014 breakout success ‘Force Majeure’. Östlund’s latest is a 2.5-hour epic about humiliation, the ...
Proving that film festivals are never short of artistically-mounted misery, ‘In the Fade’ arrives in TIFF after a successful and award-winning run at Cannes. Despite the deserved accolades, it’s not exactly a movie and that can or...
With his English language debut ‘The Lobster’, ‘Dogtooth’ director Yorgos Lanthimos proved that he would lose none of his morbid surrealism or uncompromising cinematic style simply by working with movie stars. His follow-up, ‘The ...
‘Call Me by Your Name’ is so emotionally specific that it transforms into something universal. It’s a queer love story set in a privileged estate in Italy in the early 1980s, yet so perfectly captures pained glances, hushed suspen...
Cinematic misery lovers of the world unite! That nasty, fiercely intelligent, and undeniably talented Michael Haneke (‘Amour’, ‘Funny Games’, ‘Caché’) is back! Once again he’s delivered a film about wealthy and privileged people w...
Some years, two movies about the same subject inexplicably compete for viewers’ attention. You know, like ‘Volcano’ vs. ‘Dante’s Peak’ or ‘Armageddon’ vs. ‘Deep Impact’. Well, that happened again this year, and for some reason the...
Werner Herzog is a brilliant filmmaker when his unique imagination matches up with the right material. Given that the guy tends to make movies even faster and in greater numbers than Woody Allen, that means that his talents syncin...
Ana Lily Amirpour had a striking directorial debut with the black-and-white Iranian vampire Western ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night‘. Clearly a filmmaker of great talent and imagination, she’s returned this year with a bitter dy...
In many ways ‘Voyage of Time’ is the movie that Terrence Malick has been building toward over the last decade of his career. It’s purely a collection of extraordinary nature imagery chronicling the history of the Earth from the Bi...
When you see a pregnant woman, the first thoughts that come to mind are typically friendly and lovely. That’s exactly what writer/director/star Alice Lowe is hoping for in ‘Prevenge’. It’s not the message of her movie by a long sh...
Last TIFF, Osgood Perkins made his directorial debut with the chilly and arty horror yarn ‘February‘ (subsequently retitled ‘The Blackcoat’s Daughter’). The film wasn’t perfect, but it showed that the director was capable of the t...
Even as a crusty cynic, it was remarkably difficult to shake off the charms of ‘La La Land’. A mixture of homage to the oldest and corniest of Hollywood musicals as well as a modern parable about the perils of chasing dreams, this...
