> 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 […]

  THE SURVIVOR (no distrib):  So many films and television productions have tackled the subject of the Holocaust over the decades that it takes real effort to break through with a story that feels fresh.  Barry Levinson’s The Survivor is his strongest film in years, and it manages to have an impact.  The script by […]

ANORA (Neon – Oct. 17):  Sean Baker has been making quirky, captivating character studies for some time now, starting with Starlet in 2012 and following it with Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket.  The rollicking Anora, which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes and will be aggressively pushed by Neon for awards, seems like it may be his […]

> It’s anyone’s guess why Francis Ford Coppola, at the age of 72, with some enduring cinema classics to his name, would decide to make a movie that’s a cross between a David Lynch retread, an old horror cheapie, and a hallucination.  What matters is that the resulting TWIXT is utterly dreadful, the worst film […]