TIFF Journal: Mouthpiece
Mouthpiece finds veteran Canadian filmmaker Patricia Rozema at the top of her game. It’s an emotionally rich and stylistically assured drama that traces one young woman’s coming to terms with the death of her mother.
Mouthpiece finds veteran Canadian filmmaker Patricia Rozema at the top of her game. It’s an emotionally rich and stylistically assured drama that traces one young woman’s coming to terms with the death of her mother.
Freaks is a highly allegorical tale that combines comic book fantasy, sci-fi tropes, and political metaphor that vacillate between being effective and messy. It’s a work of great ideas where the execution isn’t always ...
Thomas Vinterberg’s Kursk tells the story of the doomed Russian submarine and the foiled attempts to rescue its hapless seamen. It’s a mix of character drama, suspenseful rescue adventure, and political film, with each...
Rosie sheds light on the plight of the working poor in Ireland by following a young family being pushed out of their middle-class lifestyle into one where the days are spent hustling for housing opportunities in a city that’...
To paraphrase my initial reaction as I sat in the theater fuming, Papi Chulo is a poisionously bad, blindly racist and sadistically awful film. Supremely, unconscionable shit.
Since the early 1980s, Chinese director Chen Kaige has made films that have played to international audiences. His most celebrated was 1993’s Palme d’Or winner Farewell My Concubine. He’s delved into historical d...
Few filmmaking careers are as unpredictable as that of director Michael Winterbottom. The restlessly experimental Brit seems to go out of his way to make wildly diverging projects every time he steps behind a camera, ranging from ...
Werner Herzog never struck me as the type of filmmaker interested in fawning hero worship, but then again former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev didn’t seem like the type of historical figure who might get some. Chalk it up ...
Red Joan is little more than a cheap bait-and-switch. The film promises a meaty, spy-themed drama starring Dame Judi Dench only to have the rug pulled out by focusing instead on a dreary, predictable tale told almost entirely in f...
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...
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...
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...