OMAHA (no distrib):  A tiny tragedy that doesn’t reveal the true depths of its sadness until the very end.  One morning, a widowed father (John Magaro) hurries his children, 9-year old Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and 6-year old Charlie (Wyatt Solis), out of their house as it’s being foreclosed, and tells them to pack […]

> In September, SHOWBUZZDAILY will be attending the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF, for short).  This is the first in an intermittent series of pieces about the experience of TIFF-ing. Every film festival has its own personality and place in the movie calendar.  TIFF has become hugely popular and important, especially in the last decade, […]

> 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 […]

  IT’S A DISASTER:  Worth A Ticket – And They Feel Just (More Or Less) Fine   IT’S A DISASTER is the movie Seeking A Friend For the End of the World aspired, but failed, to be:  a laugh-out-loud, throat-clutching comedy about catastrophe.  Disaster, which premiered at this year’s LA Film Festival, doesn’t yet have […]

  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 […]

  Earnest and low-key to a fault, Liza Johnson’s HATESHIP LOVESHIP might have felt more at home in the Narrative Competition at Sundance than in Toronto.  It has a dramatic recessiveness, almost a passivity, for much of its length, that makes it hard to see just what kind of story it thinks it’s telling.  Ultimately, though, it […]

  CAUSEWAY (Apple – November 4):  After a decade as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, there was reason to wonder whether the Jennifer Lawrence who first came to prominence with the Sundance movie Winter’s Bone still had a gritty indie-movie gear.  She returns to those roots with Causeway, for which she also serves as a […]

  THE HUMANS (A24/Showtime – Nov. 24):  There are typically two strategies for adapting a celebrated play about a small number of people in a limited space to the screen.  One is to “open it up,” adding scenes, characters, or at least locations outside the original set.  The other is to lean into the claustrophobia, […]