TIFF

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The Reflektor Tapes Directed by Kahlil Joseph Canada, 2015 After Arcade Fire won the Grammy for The Suburbs in 2010, they went from becoming the biggest indie rock band in the world to simply one of the biggest bands in the world. In turn, their sound on their 2013 album Reflektor grew far more eclectic, …

Beeba Boys is acclaimed Canadian director Deepa Mehta’s frenetic entry into the crime movie genre. Mehta’s latest film hits the audience like a sugar rush, walloping them with a fury of colour and violence.

The Rainbow Kid is the debut feature film from writer/director Kire Paputts. The film is a wistful story of a young man with Down syndrome’s loss of innocence as he strikes out across Ontario to prove his self-sufficiency.

She Stoops to Conquer, the innovate and expertly crafted new short film from Canadian director Zack Russell, makes its TIFF debut this weekend as part of Short Cuts Programme 5.

Hamoun, playing at the Toronto Film Festival on Sunday 28th March, was voted the best Iranian film of all time in 1997 within film critic circles in Iran. It was directed by Dariush Mehrjui, the Tehran-born giant of Iranian cinema, and one of the co-founders of the most modern end of Iranian New Wave cinema.

Taiwan’s Hsiao-hsien Hou has often spoken of his admiration for Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu. In the 1993 documentary Talking with Ozu, attached to the Criterion edition of Tokyo Story and featuring such commentators as Claire Denis and Aki Kaurismäki, he compares the man’s work to that of a mathematician: one that observes and studies in a detached, clinical fashion. Often, returning to …

If you have never seen a Hou Hsiao-hsien film, Dust in the Wind is the perfect starting point. Preceding the Taiwanese historical dramas he is best known for—City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993), Good Men, Good Women (1995)—Dust is the most assured work of Hou’s early career, and one of the best examples of Taiwanese New Wave Cinema.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien made this film after directing nine features in Taiwan and was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion at the 1989 Venice Film Festival. A City of Sadness was written by two key screenwriters from the Taiwanese New Wave: Chu Tien-wen and Wu Nien-Ju, both of whom worked with Hou and Edward Yang (the other great director from this film movement) before and after A City of Sadness. The first film of a trilogy by Hou that would deal with Taiwan’s tragic past (followed by The Puppetmaster (1993) and Good Men, Good Women (1995)), A City of Sadness does the seemingly impossible task of distilling an unrepresentable experience into the fate of one family struggling to make sense of their situation following WWII.

The institution of marriage, and therefore divorce, in Israel is regulated exclusively religiously, with rabbinical consent needed to sanction both marriage and divorce. In Fill the Void, rabbinical authorisation is first denied, then granted to an arranged marriage, while Gett tracks a woman’s Kafkaesque divorce proceedings as the years go by. Premiering at the Venice …

Michael Yezerski is an award-winning Australian composer who wrote the score for The Little Death, which is having its North American debut at TIFF 2014. The film is part of the Discovery programming and will be screening on Sept. 7th and Sept. 14th. Kate Kulzick had the opportunity to speak at length with Yezerski about …

Blue Ruin Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier USA, 2013 Stories of revenge aren’t hard to find in American cinema; most are grim shoot-‘em-ups with less interest in the aftermath than in pushing their ultra-determined heroes to pull the trigger and reach a bloody catharsis. So the new independent picture Blue Ruin stands apart from …

The Paul Verhoeven filmography screens at the TIFF Bell Lightbox through April 4th, culminating in a screening of his new “crowdsourced” film, Tricked. Common wisdom dictates that cynicism and sentimentality are carefully linked, if not outright synonymous. In filmic terms, the most comfortable formulation of that argument is to align, for instance, romantic comedies with …

A minimalist gem that first premiered to the world at the Berlinale film festival in February of this year and coming to the Wavelengths programme at TIFF is Ramon Zürcher’s debut feature, The Strange Little Cat. A terrific chamber piece of cinema illustrating one crisp fall Saturday afternoon in the life of a family is a sumptuous journey of visual storytelling that fills its claustrophobic spaces with the animated pace of modern life and its quiet revelatory moments. Loosely inspired by Kafka’s novella, Metamorphosis, and with comparisons made to Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman and the raucous hubbub of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen, The Strange Little Cat is a hypnotic film that places its focus on the comings and goings of a family preparing a dinner for an ailing matriarch.

Review #1 Joe Written by Gary Hawkins Directed by David Gordon Green USA, 2013 Despite his early filmography making him a critical favourite and causing film lovers to sing his praises, David Gordon Green’s recent ventures have moved sharply away from such films. The same can be said of Nicolas Cage, who has unfortunately been …

Promoted as a French comedy in the spirit of In The Loop and Veep, Quai d’Orsay is a very enjoyable watch, full of wit and fun. Based on the graphic novel of the same name written by Antonin Baudry (under the pseudonym Abel Lanzac) and based on his own experiences, the film follows a young politico (Raphael Personnaz) navigating his way as a speechwriter for the French foreign minister (Thierry Lhermitte). Nearly blindsided by the hurdles of his new position, Arthur Vlaminck (Personnaz) works through no to little guidance, some in-office saboteurs, and the slamming doors and blown away papers that mark the minister’s coming and going (to the chagrin of the office cat).

Relax, I’m From the Future Written and Directed by Luke Higginson Canada, 2013 Time travel is a concept that has been explored in numerous movies throughout history, with varying results both commercially and critically. While the real-life technology for the endeavour remains a pipe dream, the exploration of its ramifications and effects has yet to …

Those Happy Years Written by Daniele Luchetti, Sandro Petraglia, Stefano Rulli and Caterina Venturini Directed by Daniele Luchetti Italy/France, 2013 In 2007, Daniele Luchetti garnered international attention with My Brother Is an Only Child, a nostalgic look at a pair of brothers in 1960s and 1970s Italy who find themselves on opposite sides of the …

Until Paradise: Love premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, Austrian director Ulrich Seidl was a relatively unknown figure in the film world. Since then, he has released two more films which follow Paradise: Love to make up a trilogy: Paradise: Faith and this year’s Paradise: Hope. With the release of the three films, Seidl has quickly propelled himself into art cinema stardom earning comparisons to venerable filmmakers such as his fellow Austrian Michael Hanneke.

Now that Alfonso Cuaron’s long-in-the-making sci-fi spectacle Gravity has smashed its way through Venice and TIFF (it’s astounding), its detractors have raised two major objections: first, that its spectacle comes at the expense of its emotional content; second, that its lengthy, whirling camera movements are self-conscious and barely motivated, summarized by Nick McCarthy for Slant …

Dallas Buyers Club is an important film. Not because it tackles AIDS or bigotry or pharmaceutical companies or preservatives, although it does all that and more. It’s important because it shows one man who manages to overcome a 30-days left to live prognosis and makes a positive difference, all the while still being a real jerk, to put it politely. Based off of a true story, the material could have easily fallen into a Lifetime movie or docu-drama or a redemption story, but instead Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club is a compelling film about a real antihero, an alcohol and drug-abusing, flaming heterosexual Texan who contracts H.I.V. and lives to help himself and those around him, in that order.

If we learned anything from Jackie Weaver’s character in Animal Kingdom, it’s that you should never underestimate a man’s mother. Calin Peter Netzer’s Child’s Pose continues the Romanian cinematic renaissance most often associated with Cristian Mungiu, another director whose films unflinchingly task modern Romania’s conservative dogma. Mungiu’s recent films, this year’s Beyond the Hills and 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, position female protagonists as national symbols of struggle, the consequence of either religious or political polemics.

The Last of Robin Hood depicts the last romance of Errol Flynn’s life from the not-so-tender age of 48 until his death. Who was the lucky girl? Beverly Aadland. One person’s definition of luck is most people’s definition of statutory rape—something that Flynn had some trouble with before—as Miss Aadland was under 18 at the time. This is the crux of the conundrum behind this story and what would regularly confound a filmmaker in bringing it to the screen—even Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita screenplay was rejected and reworked by Stanley Kubrick. Fortunately for the audience, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland are no regular filmmakers (see Grief, The Fluffer, Quinceanera). They have written and directed a film about three protagonists (Beverly Aadland, her mother Florence, and Errol Flynn) with a vague outward antagonist—society, perhaps? And somehow, through the grace of such strong characters and writing, it works.