Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl
Well, gotta hand it to him – Manouel is a hundred years young, and still managing to make films. Does that alone make for a good festival experience? Alas, no. The idea was to actually see a remarkable pair of films, this latest work, and his first from from the silent era, shot some 80 […]
Capitalism: A Love Story
There’s a very telling scene towards the end of Moore’s latest screed: he’s photographed causing trouble again, wrapping crime scene tape around the buildings of Wall Street, yelling through a bright red megaphone about the injustice of the bailout. In a tired voice, he admits via voiceover that he’s getting tired of having to do […]
White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band)
Haneke’s films are usually quiet ruminations about character interactions followed by explosions of violence and terror. With White Ribbon, he has crafted an almost dreamlike tale, a throwback to an older, slower, more literary cinematic form. Shot in a stunning black and white palate, this is a poetic, elegiac film without the usual pretension or […]
The Road
How does one rate a film that’s terrifically produced, well shot and directed, with great acting, yet it all seems somehow… hollow? The Road, based on the celebrated novel by Cormack McCarthy, is a cerebral, haunting tale of post-apocalyptic misery. However, through no explicit fault of the film, it all seems so straight forward, so […]
Accident (Yi Ngoi)
A film that’s in desperate need of a (better) remake, Johnny To-produced Accident manages to completely ruin a terrific start. The opening sequence is downright delightful – a group stages murders for hire, making them seem random occurrences. These “McGyvers of murder” are set loose, with the victim subtly pushed towards his doom using normal […]
Daybreakers
Yup, another Vampire flick. But this one is different – it’s smart, witty, gory, supremely well shot and produced. It has an epic feel, has noir overtones, and some fabulous performances by the likes of Willem Dafoe, Sam Neil and Ethan Hawke. It’s a world where humans are farmed for blood, but the source is […]
Under the Mountain
Last at TIFF for Midnight Madness fun “Black Sheep”, director Jonathan King has crafted a well made, post-Harry Potter teen flick with enough spooky mood and moments to keep even the most jaded genre fan happy. Improbably, the fate of the world rests in the hands of a pair of adolescent, precocious teens in Wellington, […]
The Ape
A man wakes up in a pool of blood. Quickly realizing that it’s not his own, he washes up, stumbling out the door to his job as a driver’s instructor. This opening speaks volumes of this work – little details are provided from the outset, but as the story unfolds, we are given glimpses of […]
The Informant!
Soderbergh has crafted a period piece of the weirdest kind, meshing early 90s fashion with a sublime throwback soundtrack by Marvin Hamlisch. It’s surely no coincidence that the music echose the soundtrack for the “Sting”, a film where the plans of the con are meticulously presented, each obfuscation a careful build upon the one before. […]
The Hole
Joe Dante is back, this time with another teen fright fest. Goonies fans, beware! A big selling point of this film has been its 3D projection – let me state firmly that the 3D does nothing to add to this film, as it’s used as little more than a gimmick (look, I’m throwing a ball […]
Jennifer’s Body
Riding the success of her Oscar turn with Juno and the recent bloodlust for all things vampiric, writer Diablo Cody turned her eye towards the 80s horror genre. Megan Fox is Jennifer, the curvy, bitchy pretty thing at her high school, with her best friend Amanda Seifreid. Things go awry when an out of town […]
Imaginarium of Doctor Parnasus
In the end, then, go see this as a modern triumph from Mr. Terry G, not merely in order to placate the posthumous fascination that one may feel for the departed Heath. This is the type of film that they simply don’t make often anymore, and if it was in Spanish and directed by some guy named Del Toro, it’d immediately jump to the top of any cineaste list.
City of Life and Death (Nanjing Nanjing)
Wildly exceeding my expectations, this Chinese produced film is an accessible, nuanced tale about the Japanese occupation of Nanjing just before the beginning of the Second World War. Shot in glorious black and white, the film has a sweeping, epic feel. Production design is impeccable, and the recreation of the action sequences is the equal […]
The Men Who Stare At Goats
A story too weird to not be true – in the 80s, the US army amassed a band of psychic warriors after the Vietnam debacle, harnessing the hippy ethic in order to hug the enemy into submission (before, if needed, slitting their throats). As part of their training of these so-called “Jedi”, goats were brought […]
Creation
The opening gala of this year’s fest, this film promised to be a sweeping love story about Darwin and his wife as he struggled to write his masterpiece. Instead, what we get is a pedestrian period drama, an overly long “I see dead people” flick where Darwin, tormented by the death of his daughter, is […]
Agora
Rachael Weisz as a hottie, end-of-Empire Philosopher/Astroner chick? What’s not to like? Set in Alexandria at a time of great historic tumolt, Amenábar’s film juggles lots of chaos. The rise of Christianity versus the “pagan”, previously dominant Roman religion, the divide between faith and science, heck even the stone throwing Jews show up for an […]
Antichrist
Lars von Trier’s latest is a film certain to divide audiences, some no doubt dismissing it as mere exploitational trash. Written during what he describes as a time of bleak despair, this film is a bleak, at times maddening and depressing onslaught. Yet, at its core, it’s a psychological thriller that owes much to Kubrick’s […]
Chocolate
Last time he was in town, Director Prachya Pinkaew brought the Uptown to ecstasy with Ong Bak. Many (myself included) were ignorant of the Thai school of martial arts, a mix of kicking, elbowing and punching that looked far from the swooping wire-work fight choreography that Hong Kong cinema had been exporting for decades. Quite […]
Patrik, Age 1.5
A gay adoption story set in Sweden, hardly the stuff of normal romantic comedies. Still, this quirky little film, has a comma causing a clerical error (much, it seems, like in Brazil), resulting in the couple adopting a 15 year old delinquent instead of an 18-month old. Certainly this could have been a cloying, saccharine […]
More Than A Game
If you’re going to follow a bunch of inner city kids as they attend a “white” school, and going to follow them for several years, make sure one of them is Lebron James. Set in Akron, Ohio, we see this group of kids grow and bond as they achieve success and suffer failure. Sure, it’s […]
At the Edge of the World
Last seen in Sharkwater, this time the crew of the pirate ship “Sea Shepherd” are trolling through Antarctica, looking to disrupt the Japanese whaling fleet. Using tactics at best described as hostile, they are striving to end the whaling in these international waters, using any means at their disposal (including the infamous “can opener” welded […]
Fear Me Not
Fear Me Not ties a mid-life crisis to an addiction to psychotropic medications. As Mikael, bored with his day-to-day routine decides to become a medical guinea pig, he explores his new found passions in ways that are not entirely appropriate. The film is starkly shot, with Ulrich Thomsen’s Mikael a “Jekyl and Hyde” menace throughout. […]
Achilles and the Tortoise
This is, I think, the most successful of “Beat” Takeshi’s recent films regarding his life and his art. The final part of a planned trilogy (joining Glory to the Filmmaker and Takeshis), this flick playfully satirizes Kitano’s penchant for painting, tracing his development from childhood, through art school, to middle age. The title is explained […]
Pontypool
A zombie movie where we don’t really get to see the zombies, they’re all outside the radio station trying to get in. Clever, but almost too clever by half, McDonald does wonders in stretching his meagre budget and single location shoot into creating a moody, wacky tale of paranoia in small town Ontario. The intimate […]
Witch Hunt
Witch Hunt follows the cases of a number of individuals who were wrongfully jailed for child molestation. Narrated by Executive Producer Sean Penn, this matter-of-fact doc tells of social workers coercing children to testify against their parents, prosecutors zealously trumping up charges and judges giving multi-century sentences to the convicted. While the story is certainly […]
Che
First the good – Benicio is simply mesmerizing in his portrayal. Soderbergh crafts the film in an effective way, and the supporting characters provide convincing and memorable performances (helpful when trying to keep everyone straight in your head). The challenge, however, is that the first half of the flick (basically the first movie), telling the […]
Me and Orson Welles
Linklater tells the tale of a young kid Richard (Zac Efron) who finds himself under the wing of Orson Welles (Christian McKay) as he puts on his rendition of Julius Caesar. As Richard falls for Welles’s assistant (played by Claire Daines), he finds that he must share the affections of his girl with his new […]
Control Alt Delete
Man fucks computer through hole drilled on side of case. Man experiences pleasure, making him addicted to plooking every computer in his office as they prepare for Y2K. Canadian drivel, an embarrassment to our industry, and the type of crap that would never play this fest if it weren’t from the Great White North. Awful.
A Film With Me In It
Who would have thought that a dark Irish comedy with a fairly significant body count would be TIFF 2008’s purest example of farce? Unapologetically silly and fun, A Film With Me In It takes a story of accidents and turns it into a clockwork-like structure of bad news followed by worse. Continuously trumping the “can’t […]
Hunger
There’s a key visual metaphor in Hunger, when Bobby Sands creates a circular work of art on his cell wall out of the only medium available to him, his own excrement. Making art out of shit is the goal of this film, one that it achieves quite dramatically. The film revels in its ambivalence, painting […]