THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER (Apple – September 30):  Peter Farrelly’s Green Book was one of the clearest beneficiaries of winning Toronto’s People Choice Award, vaulting from being entirely under the awards radar to a (somewhat divisive) Oscar for Best Picture a few months later.  No doubt the premiere of his follow-up The Greatest […]

  THE WHALE (A24 – December 9):  The fall film festivals usher in awards season, and no performance this year screams “Oscar bait” more than Brendan Fraser’s in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale.  That’s not a knock on Fraser’s work, which is sensitive and moving, just a recognition that the attention of an Academy voter will […]

  These haven’t been glory days for the Toronto Film Festival.  The WGA/SAG strikes dampened the vibe, of course–of the 27 films I saw at TIFF, only 4 screenings featured appearances from the cast.  Beyond that, for whatever reasons, TIFF also wasn’t favored by the studios with some of the major releases that instead opted […]

>   THE DESCENDANTS:  Worth A Ticket – Flawed But Heartfelt It’s taken an unaccountable 7 years for Alexander Payne to follow up Sideways, the biggest hit of his career,  with THE DESCENDANTS, which will hit theatres in time for a serious awards season push in late November.  Sideways and Payne’s earlier Election are two […]

  Like his Oscar-winning A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s THE PAST is concerned with the abyss of uncertainty and mystery that lies under seemingly straightforward actions, the ever-increasing complications that become evident whenever one scrutinizes the events and motives of everyday life. Although the setting this time is Paris, and the characters aren’t the same, in many ways, The […]

> 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 […]

  DESTROYER (Annapurna – Dec. 25):  Another fractured-time thriller, this one trickier than most, because the script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi features a sort of time-loop within a loop.  All that structural fanciness aside, Destroyer is mostly a vehicle for Nicole Kidman’s aggressively deglamorized performance as an end-of-the-line LAPD detective named Erin Bell.  […]

>SHOWBUZZDAILY will be at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and today TIFF announced the first group of movies being screened (there are plenty more to come over the next few weeks).  Here’s the full list, and some titles worthy of initial enthusiasm: GALAS ALBERT NOBBS:  Oscar Bait Alert, with Glenn Close as a […]