> Rodrigo Garcia’s film ALBERT NOBBS (he shares auteurship with Glenn Close, who served as screenwriter with John Banville and Gabriella Prekop and as a producer as well as star) caters to what used to be called the James Ivory audience, when he was still churning his films out. In NY, these are the audiences […]

> Although Fox Searchlight didn’t actually acquire Steve McQueen’s film Shame until last Saturday, in a sense the marketing campaign for the film began when the producers made it clear that the film would not be edited for US release, and would be distributed with an NC-17 rating. This quickly became the most memorable fact […]

> Derick Martini’s HICK is like a Sundance movie that took the wrong indie-film exit and wound up in Toronto.  For whatever reason, Toronto’s film festival tends to find itself with fewer stories of young people from small towns who come of age on the road, so Hick has a little air of distinction here. […]

> It’s anyone’s guess why Francis Ford Coppola, at the age of 72, with some enduring cinema classics to his name, would decide to make a movie that’s a cross between a David Lynch retread, an old horror cheapie, and a hallucination.  What matters is that the resulting TWIXT is utterly dreadful, the worst film […]

> The first substantial buy of the Toronto Film Festival (Shame had sold first, but for art film prices) turned out to be Salmon Fishing In the Yemen, a modestly engaging romantic comedy from Lasse Hallstrom.  Hallstrom has made a career out of “modestly engaging,” following his early distinction with My Life As a Dog […]

> DRIVE is a self-conscious genre movie, and those are tricky propositions.  On the one hand, you need to make your existential or other textual statement with all the artistry at your command; on the other, you still have to fulfill the demands of the genre you’ve chosen.  If you do it right, you have […]

> In just her second feature film as a director (her first was 2006’s Oscar-nominated Away From Her), Sarah Polley demonstrates that she’s already a filmmaker with rare grace and sensuality in TAKE THIS WALTZ, which premiered tonight at the Toronto Film Festival.  Blessed with yet another superb lead performance by Michelle Williams, Polley’s film […]

> If Arthur Schnitzler had only been a member of the WGA in 1900, when he wrote the play La Ronde, and he’d had the benefit of the format rights guild members receive today, he and his descendants would be very rich indeed.  Schnitzler’s concept, a series of sequences in which, initially, Person A meets […]