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 […]

> The Toronto Film Festival has announced its second helping of titles for next month’s worldwide gathering of film professionals and fanatics.  These may be less star-studded than the last group of films announced, but there are still quite a few intriguing titles.  As part of our continuing coverage of the movie awards season that, […]

  As a movie year, 2013 was awfully slow in getting started.  Hardly anything worth remembering opened all winter and spring–only 1 movie in the Top 10 below opened in theatres before late May.  Summer brought some relief, and then the film festival season that began at the end of August opened the doors wide […]

> Lynn Shelton’s Humpday in 2009 was one of the most engaging pictures to come out of the mumblecore movement (“mumblecore,” for the uninitiated = ultra-low-budget, small scale film with dialogue mostly improvised by the actors), and her new film YOUR SISTER’S SISTER, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last night, confirms that she’s […]

  NIGHTBITCH (Searchlight/Disney – Dec. 6):  Writer/director Marielle Heller tries to move outside her comfort zone with Nightbitch, following the small-scale character studies Diary Of A Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and A Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood.  Here, adapting a novel by Rachel Yoder, she shifts into body horror and surrealism… sort […]

  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.  […]

> 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, […]

> If you were going to describe the films of Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, The House of Mirth) in one word, that word would not be “dynamic.”  Or “kinetic.”  Or, well, “exciting.”  Davies directs stately tableaux, impressive and sometimes moving, but rooted in nostalgia and regret. Which is why […]