BREATHE (Bleecker Street – Oct 13):  BREATHE wasn’t the favored Triumph of the Human Spirit drama at Toronto this year; that title went to Stronger, with Jake Gyllanhaal as a survivor of the Boston Marathon bombing.  Not having seen Stronger, I can’t compare the two, but Breathe has plenty in it to please audiences […]

  THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE (Searchlight/Disney – in release):  The reason for expanding a documentary into a scripted narrative is typically to allow for an exploration of motive and emotional background not available in the existing footage.  A documentary can show what happened, but not necessarily why it happened.  That makes The Eyes of […]

> If Arthur Schnitzler had only been a member of the WGA in 1900, when he wrote the play La Ronde, and he’d had the benefit of the format rights guild members receive today, he and his descendants would be very rich indeed.  Schnitzler’s concept, a series of sequences in which, initially, Person A meets […]

  HIT MAN (no distrib):  A clever, funny, sexy entertainment from Richard Linklater and emerging star Glen Powell, who co-wrote the script with the director (both also produced), inspired by an already-wild true story.  Powell plays Gary Johnson, a philosophy teacher moonlighting as a consultant for a local Texas police department.  He’s supposed to be […]

  CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (IFC):  no release date scheduled – Watch It At Home Olivier Assayas is a dazzlingly ambitious filmmaker, determined to do something totally different with each project he undertakes.  The results range from the spectacular (Carlos) to the tone-deaf (Demonlover), with his new CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA, which premiered at Cannes […]

> 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, […]

  It’s an unfortunate irony that TRUMBO, the story of one of Hollywood’s great blacklisted screenwriters, is undermined by an inadequate script.  It’s written by John McNamara, also the man behind NBC’s low-rated Aquarius, and viewers may find it difficult to figure out just what he and director Jay Roach had in mind, as they […]

  To address the very specific elephant in HYDE PARK ON HUDSON‘s room:  it’s no King’s Speech.  It’s hard to avoid the comparison, because the two movies have a clear overlap, Hyde Park being the story of the 1939 visit King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (aka Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter, but played here by Samuel […]