Posts Tagged ‘Toronto Film Festival reviews’
 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Reviews: “The Death of Stalin,” “I, Tonya” & “Kodachrome”

  KODACHROME (no distrib):  AKA that page of the indie movie playbook marked “Dysfunctional Family Road Trip To Redemption.”  Jonathan Tropper (This Is Where I Leave You) wrote the script, and it has his nove...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Reviews: “Destroyer” & “Climax”

  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 fa...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Reviews: “Breathe” & “3 Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”

  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 ...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Reviews: “Peterloo” & “Viper Club”

  PETERLOO (Amazon – November 9):  Not so much a movie as an illustrated historical recitation.  Mike Leigh’s film concerns the brutal 1819 government militia attack on civilians listening to a public address...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Reviews: “Disobedience” & “Roman J. Israel, Esq.”

  DISOBEDIENCE (no distrib):  Sebastian Lelio’s adaptation (with Rebecca Landiewicz) of Naomi Alderman’s novel is one of the surprises of the festival.  It would be perfectly reasonable for the idea of Rachel...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL Day 4 Capsule Reviews: “Sing,” “Denial,” “Nocturnal Animals,” “Moonlight” & “Queen of Katwe”

  For this audience member, it was the day Toronto moved into high gear. MOONLIGHT (A24 – October 21):  Barry Jenkins’s second film, after his little-seen but much-praised Medicine For Melancholy, is a validat...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Reviews: “Mothering Sunday,” “Petite Maman” & “All My Puny Sorrows”

  MOTHERING SUNDAY (Sony Classics – Nov 19):  Eva Husson’s film, adapted by Alice Birch from a Graham Swift novel, has many of the rote trappings of prestige costume drama.  We’re back in the English co...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Reviews: “Bergman Island,” “True Things” & “France”

  BERGMAN ISLAND (IFC – Oct. 15):  Mia Hansen-Love’s Bergman Island asks to be poked and scrutinized in several ways.  It takes place on the island of Faro, where Ingmar Bergman filmed some of his most celebr...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Fesrival Reviews: “Her Smell” & “Non-Fiction”

  HER SMELL (no distrib – TBD):  Writer-director Alex Ross Perry (The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip) is a fan of invective, and the punk rocker Becky Something (Elizabeth Moss), when she’s in the full flower o...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Reviews: “Widows” & “The Front Runner”

  WIDOWS (20th – Nov. 16):  Widows is a genre movie that isn’t sure it wants to be one.  That’s not a shock, because the idea of the aesthete director Steve McQueen, of Hunger, Shame and 12 Years A Slav...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL Day 6 Capsule Reviews: “La La Land,” “Deepwater Horizon, “Brimstone” & “Wakefield”

  LA LA LAND (Summit/Lionsgate – December 2):  No film arrived at Toronto this year with more hype to live up to than Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, the follow-up to the filmmakers’s Oscar-winning Whiplas...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Reviews: “One Second,” “Wolf” & “Silent Night”

  ONE SECOND (Neon – TBD):  Zhang Yimou’s film was notoriously the subject of controversy with the Chinese government, which held it back from its originally scheduled film festival debut in 2019, and forced s...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Reviews: “Ford vs. Ferrari” & “The Laundromat”

  FORD VS. FERRARI (20th Century Fox/Disney – November 15):  If the Academy decides to award James Mangold’s Ford vs. Ferrari, which is certainly a possibility, it will be able to have some metaphorical cake a...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL Day 2 Capsule Reviews: “Snowden,” “American Pastoral” & “Carrie Pilby”

  SNOWDEN (Open Road – Sept 16):  Oliver Stone’s return to politically-charged biography is subdued by the standards of his Nixon or W.  It’s a hagiography that follows the character arc of his Born of ...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Reviews: “Roma” & “Green Book”

  ROMA (Netflix – Dec. 14):  Alfonso Cuaron is one of the master filmmakers of this era, and Roma confirms that all over again.  It’s a deceptively simple memory piece, a semi-autobiographical story set in th...
by Mitch Salem