NIGHTCRAWLER (Open Road) – Opens October 31 – Worth A Ticket Over the past few years, Jake Gyllenhaal has seemed determined to scrub the wholesomeness out of his screen image, in movies like Zodiac, Brothers, End of Watch and Prisoners.  He achieves true creep-ness in NIGHTCRAWLER, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival before […]

  Note:  this will be our final installment of Toronto reviews, although the festival runs on until Sunday. It’s been a good if not classic festival, with a trio of legitimately great presentations in La La Land, Jackie and Moonlight, as well as the enormously fun if not particularly artistic Sing, and other strong titles […]

  HIS THREE DAUGHTERS (no distrib):  The premise of Azazel Jacobs’ film is simple enough to be staged as a play:  as their father Vincent (Jay O. Sanders) lies dying in an unseen room of his Bronx apartment, Katie (Carrie Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) get in each others’ ways as they wait […]

> Although the word “International” is part of the name of the Toronto International Film Festival, it’s still Canada’s premier festival, and naturally features quite a few homegrown films.  Some of the most notable of these have already been announced (like David Cronenberg’s A DANGEROUS METHOD), and today TIFF announced the bulk of the rest.  […]

  The Toronto International Film Festival is, of the major North American festivals, by far the most pleasant to attend.  Its line-up of films and clout are matched only by Sundance’s, and it substitutes balmy 70 degree weather and large, well-appointed theaters for that festival’s snowy winds and converted high school auditoriums and hotel ballrooms.  […]

  The writer Peter Morgan is a whiz at boring into little-remembered (and in the US, sometimes little-known) crannies of recent history and scooping out the rich drama inside, with scripts like The Deal, Frost/Nixon and The Damned United to his credit, along with the more celebrated The Queen.  (His occasional forays into pure fiction […]

  The allegory is piled on so thickly in Yorgos Lanthimos’ THE LOBSTER that after a while, it’s not clear just what the underlying subject is supposed to be.  Lanthimos is a cult-favorite filmmaker (the cult mostly consists of critics and film festival selection committee members) whose arresting Dogtooth was an unlikely Best Foreign Film […]

  FAHRENHEIT 11/9 (Midwestern – opens September 21):  In the course of Fahrenheit 11/9, Michael Moore takes a shot at Jeff Zucker and Les Moonves for admitting that Donald Trump has been good for their businesses, but it’s a weakness of Moore that he lacks the self-knowledge to recognize that the same is true for […]