LUCY IN THE SKY (Fox Searchlight/Disney – October 4):  Lucy In the Sky may be Noah Hawley’s first feature film, but he’s already establishing himself as quite the overdirector.  Hawley’s X-Men off-shoot series Legion had a repertoire of shifting aspect ratios, surreal imagery and dislocations in sound, space and time that felt exciting and […]

  Natalie Portman certainly hasn’t made it easy for herself with her debut as a writer/director, A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS.  The film, which premiered at Cannes (but tellingly, doesn’t yet have a US distributor) before its first North American screening at the Toronto Film Festival tonight, is a period piece shot almost entirely […]

  SATURDAY NIGHT (Columbia/Sony – Sept 27):  It’s easy to imagine a film about Saturday Night Live making a statement about the cultural, political and financial impact of the show, or recounting its long journey from being a shout of youthful abandon to one of the last remaining pillars of traditional broadcast television.  That isn’t the […]

  BROS (Universal – Sept. 30):  Notwithstanding its occasional meta self-deprecation, it’s clear that Nicholas Stoller and Billy Eichner (both writer/producers and respectively director and star) want Bros to be Hollywood’s first mainstream big-screen gay rom-com hit.  It’s fitting in a way, then, that like so many straight rom-coms before it, Bros suffers from third […]

  PETERLOO (Amazon – November 9):  Not so much a movie as an illustrated historical recitation.  Mike Leigh’s film concerns the brutal 1819 government militia attack on civilians listening to a public address at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, England, which came to be known as “Peterloo” because the bloodshed was likened to the then-recent […]

  JUDY (Roadside – September 27):  Oscar bait in its fullest form, a showbiz celebrity biography built around the work of a performer making a comeback, requiring said performer to alter appearance and render services beyond mere acting.  Judy the film has already become the story of Renee Zellweger the Best Actress candidate, a story […]

> See also: THE BIJOU @ TIFF:  FIRST TITLES ANNOUNCEDTHE BIJOU @ TIFF:  FESTIVAL TITLES, ROUND TWOTHE BIJOU @ TIFF:  O CANADIAN TITLES! The Toronto International Film Festival prides itself on being one of the more comprehensive in the world, and today a slew of additional titles were announced for next month’s TIFF.  After the […]

  IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK (Annapurna – November 30):  Barry Jenkins’ follow-up to Moonlight received a rapturous standing ovation at its Toronto premiere, and it’s unquestionably a beautiful piece of filmmaking,  Jenkins reunited with most of his Moonlight creative team, including cinematographer James Laxton and composer Nicholas Britell, and with a higher budget at […]