TIFF Journal: ‘Men, Women & Children’
Jason Reitman is a tough director to pin down. He clearly wants to be taken seriously and often attempts to dive into dark subject matter. Yet, he’s also a crowd-pleaser who tugs on emotions freely and...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Adult Beginners’
You know how hilarious it can be to watch grown-ass adults behave like children? Well, ‘Adult Beginners’ is another one of those movies. Thankfully, it’s also a pretty good one. Nick Kroll stars as a...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘While We’re Young’
Middle-aged Noah Baumbach just had his greatest success with ‘Frances Ha‘, which dealt with the plight of the twenty-something with warmth, compassion and good humor. Now he’s made a move that feels...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘The Duke of Burgundy’
‘The Duke of Burgundy’ is an old-timey sexploitation movie filmed through art house pretensions. It’s naughty and fun with bursts of abstract filmmaking and intellectual impulses. In other words, this...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Escobar’
So you get to make a movie about the notorious Colombian cocaine king Pablo Escobar and even get the dependably excellent Benicio Del Toro to play the title role. How could anyone possibly screw that...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Yakuza Apocalypse’
After being the premiere voice in extremist cinema in the 2000s, Takashi Miike (‘Audition‘, ‘Ichi the Killer‘) took about a decade off from delivering his usual cinematic assaults of absolute madness....
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Love’
After a few years away getting up to god knows what (presumably debauchery of some sort), bad boy filmmaker Gaspar Noé has returned. For over a decade, the director has hyped up a dream of making an...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Hardcore’
Ilya Naishuller’s ‘Hardcore’ is a tricky movie. One the one hand, it’s a pretty amazing technical accomplishment that’s almost without precedent and will pin genre fans to their seats. On the other...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Desierto’
Two years ago, Alfonso Cuarón’s son Jonás helped him script the stunning blockbuster ‘Gravity’. Around the same time, Jonás Cuarón was also writing his own movie, ‘Desierto’, which was a similarly...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘The Devil’s Candy’
Six years ago, Australian director Sean Byrne established himself as a film nerd genre director to watch with ‘The Loved Ones’, which played like a John Hughes movie with graphic dismemberment...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Mr. Right’
It’s pretty typical for an action/comedy to include a romantic sub-plot. It’s also quite common for that to be the worst part of the movie. However, ‘Mr. Right’ is a welcome exception to the rule. This...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Kill Your Friends’
Dark comedy is a difficult beast to tame. It’s a fine line between shock laughs and pandering tedium. It’s all too easy to numb your audience with outrageousness if you’re unable to top yourself or at...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Born to Be Blue’
‘Born to Be Blue is a perfectly decent bio-pic of the late, great jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. The film serves up some clever reinventions of overly familiar bio-pic forms in the hopes of reinventing the...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Baskin’
The filmmaking output from Turkey isn’t normally described a wild, graphic or intense. Generally speaking, those folks fall onto the subtler side of the spectrum when it comes to their filmmaking. Or...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Hellions’
Cult Canuck filmmaker Bruce McDonald made an unexpected late career shift into horror seven years ago with ‘Pontypool’, and it worked out so well that many hoped he’d get back into that spooktacular...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘February’
The first feature by Osgood Perkins (son of Anthony Perkins) is a fairly conventional horror yarn bent and contorted until it starts to feel like something fresh. It’s a lesson in narrative...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘The Family Fang’
A few years ago, Jason Bateman tried his hand at directing and did such a good job mounting the bad behavior comedy ‘Bad Words‘ that no one made fun of him for it. Now Bateman has returned with a far...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘American Honey’
‘American Honey’ is a tricky movie because most of its greatest strengths double down as its biggest weaknesses. The American debut from British filmmaker Andrea Arnold (‘Fish Tank‘) is a rambling road...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘Loving’
‘Loving’ is one of those important historical dramas about groundbreaking folks who changed America. It’s also an incredibly intimate character study of two simple people uncertain of why their pure...
View ArticleTIFF Journal: ‘(Re)Assignment’
Walter Hill was one of the great pioneers of the American action movie in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Of course, as Hollywood tends to do, the master was spit out of the mainstream once his style of...
View Article