Marc Abraham, for his second film as director (prior to that, he was a veteran producer), has chosen his second consecutive mid-20th-century biography, following 2008’s Flash of Genius with I SAW THE LIGHT, which premiered tonight at the Toronto Film Festival and will open in theatres in November.  The life of country music star […]

> Derick Martini’s HICK is like a Sundance movie that took the wrong indie-film exit and wound up in Toronto.  For whatever reason, Toronto’s film festival tends to find itself with fewer stories of young people from small towns who come of age on the road, so Hick has a little air of distinction here. […]

> Welcome to SHOWBUZZDAILY’s coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival, where the reviews will be as plentiful as we can cram into a week. TIFF started things off on a less-than-festive note with Werner Herzog’s documentary “Into the Abyss,” The title isn’t kidding: this is the story of a meaninglessly brutal triple murder committed […]

  As movie bloodbaths go, NO ONE LIVES is almost–but not quite–clever enough to be worth seeing. We start with a backwoods family of petty outlaws, headed by father Hoag (Lee Tergesen) and including his wife, brother, two adult children and their significant others.  Their game is to rob tourists and brutally beat them until […]

  AMERICAN FICTION (Orion/MGM/Amazon – Nov. 17):  The Toronto People’s Choice Award has been something of a golden ticket to a Best Picture nomination over the years, and this year the prize went to Cord Jefferson’s directing debut American Fiction.  Jefferson’s script (based on the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett) for the most part deftly toes […]

  This year’s Toronto International Film Festival had a very solid line-up, so much so that although the titles below are listed in rough order of preference, even the worst of them is of some interest, very possibly worth seeing for those intrigued by the genre or filmmaker.  The Festival, as has been the case […]

  If there were no credits on the new comedy-drama YOU ARE HERE, it would almost be inconceivable that an audience member would imagine it coming from the typewriter of Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men.  It’s not that You Are Here is unwatchably terrible, but that it’s merely OK in a familiar and hackneyed way that’s the […]

  THE LAST OF ROBIN HOOD is an odd miss, a sliver of movie history that seems to have all the right elements but never quite jells.  The title refers to Errol Flynn, legendary swashbuckling star of The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, The Dawn Patrol and many other classic Hollywood adventures, and it’s hard to […]