Steve McQueen (the filmmaker) doesn’t take it easy on audiences.  His first feature Hunger provided an excruciatingly detailed look at the fatal hunger strike of the Irish convict Bobby Sands, and he followed it with Shame, a cooly unsexy portrait of the ravages of sexual addiction.  His new film 12 YEARS A SLAVE is […]

  ROMA (Netflix – Dec. 14):  Alfonso Cuaron is one of the master filmmakers of this era, and Roma confirms that all over again.  It’s a deceptively simple memory piece, a semi-autobiographical story set in the Mexico City of his youth in 1970-71, with most of the action revolving around an upper-middle-class family with three […]

  HEROES REBORN:  Thursday 8PM on NBC, starting September 24   This year, for the first time, the Toronto Film Festival has included a slate of television productions from around the world in its line-up, formalizing the degree to which the status of TV has changed in the last few years.  That’s completely logical.  What […]

  WAVES (A24 – November 1):  Trey Edward Shults’ third film (after the micro-budgeted indie Krisha and the horror movie They Come By Night) manages the remarkable feat of feeling both experimental and grounded, as propulsive as an episode of Euphoria without that show’s smug affectations.  There isn’t a lot of plot, and what there […]

  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 […]

  There’s no cutesiness to be found in John Curran’s film TRACKS, a bracingly non-Disneyfied true-life nature tale.  In the mid-1970s, a young Australian woman named Robyn Davidson decided to walk across almost two thousand miles of desert to the Indian Ocean, accompanied for the most part by only a few camels and her faithful dog. […]

  LA LA LAND (Summit/Lionsgate – December 2):  No film arrived at Toronto this year with more hype to live up to than Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, the follow-up to the filmmakers’s Oscar-winning Whiplash and the recipient of white-hot raves in Venice (where Emma Stone won the Best Actress award) and Telluride.  Chazelle’s rapturous […]

  WEIRD: THE AL YANKOVIC STORY (Roku – November 4):  A comic book fantasia of a celebrity “biography,” Eric Appel’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (co-written with Yankovic himself, who’s also one of the producers), takes some fragments about the parody musician’s life and work, and transforms them into a nonstop array of gags that […]