Now that Labor Day has passed us by, it’s time for the fall festivals in the world of film–last weekend, cinephiles and critics descended upon Colorado for the Telluride Film Festival, and tomorrow, one of the biggest of all starts: the Toronto International Film Festival. Movie Mezzanine will be covering TIFF each day throughout the next week and a half, and we start today with our executive editor Tina Hassannia and deputy editor Kenji Fujishima revealing the films they’re most excited to see at the fest. Check it out.
Aquarius
The followup to Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds does seem a little familiar: the corruption of Brazilian society in all aspects of life, particularly the soul-crushing physical spaces of its dissatisfied denizens. Filho’s camerawork, particularly the way it framed itself around the crevices, nooks and crannies of urban life in Recife were astonishing to watch in Neighboring Sounds. If Aquarius has any of that same grit and rigor, it will easily become a festival must-watch. (TH)
The Bad Batch
Western critics devoured Iranian-American director Ana Lily Armirpour’s gothic vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night; its chador-wearing vampire was an enigma that the film teased in unraveling. With her sophomore film Amirpour employs another ilk of blood-thirsty animals: cannibals caught in the desert. It will be interesting to see how Amirpour’s penchant for horror evolves in her second feature with big-name talent like Keanu Reeves. (TH)
Barry
Perhaps it’s too early to suggest a trend afoot in cinema of mythologizing soon-to-be-former-president Barack Obama; Vikram Gandhi’s Barry is, after all, only the second film this year to make him the main character of a docudrama, after Richard Tanne’s Southside With You. But whereas Tanne’s film focused solely on the first date between Barack and Michelle Obama, Gandhi’s film looks to be a more conventional biopic chronicling his formative time as a college student in New York City. Still, Gandhi’s previous film, the intriguing documentary Kumaré—about an ordinary man who acts like a stereotypical Indian guru and dupes a whole bunch of people into following his bullshit religion—offers some hope that Barry might find a fresh angle to its subject. (KF)
Certain Women
Based on three different short stories by PEN/Malamud Award winner Maile Meloy, American independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s latest film features an all-star cast: Michelle Williams, Laura Dern, and Kristen Stewart. The characters are going through different life trials and tribulations, offering a cross section of female experiences. Given Reichardt’s history for making slow-simmering dramas centring around women characters, it will be interesting to see what kind of drama unfolds for this trio of talent in her latest film, notably shot on 16mm. (TH)
Christine
Now that Robert Greene’s boundary-pushing documentary Kate Plays Christine has been exposed to a wider public, one can’t help but be curious about Antonio Campos’s—and, by extension, star Rebecca Hall’s—seemingly more conventional take on the tragic tale of Christine Chubbuck, the Florida newscaster who notoriously committed suicide on the air in 1973. Is it possible that Greene’s film—which, to a considerable degree, was about the limitations of the biopic genre in general—will render Christine moot from the start? In any case, those who know Campos’s previous films—Afterschool and Simon Killer—will have an idea of the kind of starkly detached approach the director is bound to take; it remains to be seen how well or ill it serves its real-life subject. (KF)
Edge of Seventeen
It’s just another coming-of-age movie about a teenage girl navigating the complications of love, so what’s so great about this movie? If you watch the trailer, you’ll understand there’s a depth and humour that must be lying underneath this film, the directorial debut from Kelly Fremon Craig. Bonus: It stars Hailee Steinfeld of True Grit as well as good ol’ Woody Harrelson. (TH)
Justin Timberlake & The Tennessee Kids
Jonathan Demme—one of the all-time champions of the music documentary (witness Neil Young: Heart of Gold, and, of course, Stop Making Sense)—making a concert documentary of Justin Timberlake’s final Las Vegas performances of his 20/20 Experience tour? It’ll be interesting to see what Demme, an avowed music fan, brings to the table in chronicling Timberlake’s high-energy vocal and physical pyrotechnics. If nothing else, though, the potential this film presents of feeling like we’re sharing the stage with this great modern pop star is tantalizing enough. (KF)
La La Land
Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to Whiplash appears—if the voluptuous trailers can be trusted—to hearken back more to his lo-fi 2006 debut feature Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench than that dark, psychologically intense Miles Teller-J.K. Simmons showdown. Hollywood’s been taking stabs at reviving the musical for years now, but most of them have been met with critical indifference. Maybe Chazelle’s film will be the modern breakthrough Hollywood has been waiting for? At the very least, here’s hoping this one comes by its potential charms more honestly than was the case in John Carney’s sugary, overrated Sing Street earlier this year. (KF)
Moonlight
The recent acclaim from Telluride for Moonlight has shot Barry Jenkins’ second film to the top of everyone’s to-watch lists during the festival. The story of a young black gay man trying to survive the system and the injustices of black urban life in Miami is an instant eye-grabber in terms of subject matter, but if Moonlight lives up to its accolades, the film as well as its director, will very well have a chance of surviving the staying game during awards season. (TH)
Neruda
After finding Pablo Larraín’s 2008 debut feature Tony Manero profoundly facile and widely overpraised, I’ve gradually warmed up to him in his subsequent features, seeing in films like No and The Club an increasing maturity. Now, Larraín tackles maybe his biggest subject to date: the life of Pablo Neruda, the Nobel-winning Chilean poet who became a fugitive in the late 1940s after joining the Communist Party. The Club was perhaps Larraín’s most formally conventional film to date, but perhaps working in the biopic genre will inspire the director to bring his full visual imagination to bear. (KF)
nirvanna the band the show
The Toronto cult favourite is back, this time in the official hands of Viceland. After perfecting his covertly-shoot-and-run strategy in films like The Dirties and Operation Avalanche, Matt Johnson has revived his 2007-era web series in which he and best friend Jay McCarroll try to book themselves a show at the well-known Toronto establishment The Rivoli. Now sporting an extra “n” (presumably to avoid potential legal embattlements), nirvanna the band the show will premiere three episodes from their 2017 season during the festival. Such an occasion is even more exciting than “Update Day.” (TH)
Paterson
A film about a bus driver (Adam Driver) who writes poetry sounds just quaint enough to be a Jim Jarmusch film, but at first glance Paterson seems like an intriguing fusion of poetry, music and cultural references that all blend together into something that’s at least trying to do something a little different. Paterson has the extra bonus of starring Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani as Driver’s girlfriend. (TH)
Personal Shopper
Any Olivier Assayas film featuring Kristen Stewart is a must-see after the touching Clouds of Sils Maria, in which it became apparent the French director had found his muse. The new film lacks the charm of Juliette Binoche but given Stewart’s career-turning performance in Clouds, it’s very possible she will steal the show in Personal Shopper, in which she plays a fashion stylist who is also a spiritual medium. (TH)
A Quiet Passion
World-premiering at last year’s TIFF, Terence Davies’s Sunset Song offered a heartening reminder of what makes the British auteur so great: his sense of visual beauty, his emotional sensitivity, and his commitment to melodrama. So count us as completely onboard, sight unseen, with him bringing the life of Emily Dickinson (Cynthia Nixon) to the screen. If anyone could successfully convey the transcendental beauties of Dickinson’s poetry, as well as bring a fresh aesthetic perspective to the biopic, it’s Davies. (KF)
(Re)Assignment
Here’s a high concept for our ostensibly more sexually open age: A doctor (Sigourney Weaver) takes her revenge on an assassin by turning him into a woman (Michelle Rodriguez), which leads the assassin to seek revenge against that doctor. With the great B-movie legend Walter Hill at the helm, this could be either an appalling exercise in bad taste or a high-flying good time that sneaks in some relevant social commentary about gender and sexuality in the modern age. (Or it could be merely a rehash of Hill’s 1989 thriller Johnny Handsome with a gender-queer twist.) (KF)
The Salesman
Renowned Iranian auteur/melodramatist Asghar Farhadi went back to his home country to shoot The Salesman as a “break” before commencing his Pedro Almodovar-produced project in Spain. Given its connection to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman—the two leads are actors in a Persian-language theatrical production of the famous play—as well as the auteur’s own theatre background, this should be an intriguing return to Farhadi’s personal roots. (TH)
Ta’ang
The great Chinese documentarian Wang Bing turns his patiently observant eye toward the civil war in Myanmar, a conflict leading many members of the Ta’ang ethnic minority to flee from the country into China. Politics has never been too off in Wang’s films, even in a film like Three Sisters (2012), which mostly followed the titular girls as they lived all by themselves in a mountain town, but which couldn’t help but quietly suggest questions as to how such circumstances are still a reality in China. Still, even if Wang is handling more explicitly political subject matter in Ta’ang, one fully expects politics to take a backseat toward the deeply, heartbreakingly personal. (KF)
Toni Erdmann
Who is Toni Erdmann? If you haven’t seen the movie, don’t bother looking it up. You don’t need to know much about the film’s premise—it involves a loserish dad trying to reconnect with his adult daughter. Just go in and enjoy. The long-awaited third feature from German filmmaker Maren Ade is all the more intriguing for those familiar with Ade’s understated style after the film was unfairly overlooked at Cannes, nabbing the FIPRESCI award but failing to get the much-deserved Palme d’Or. (TH)
Una
Going into the recent Broadway revival of David Harrower’s 2005 one-act play Blackbird with Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams as the leads, I expected fireworks from the actors. What I didn’t expect was a drama that was genuinely disturbing in the way it flips our sympathies for these two characters—a child molester and the now-adult victim confronting him—ultimately suggesting a perverse kind of folie à deux between them. Harrower’s play has now been brought to the screen, with a different title, British theater director Benedict Andrews at the helm, and Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn playing the leads. We’ll see how Andrews acquits himself in his feature-film debut, but the two leads are known quantities, and hopefully Mara will bring more subtlety to her role than the too-hysterical Williams brought onstage. (KF)
Voyage of Time
As much as I may have been firmly on the naysayers’ side with Knight of Cups, I nevertheless hold out hope for Terrence Malick’s latest, the IMAX documentary Voyage of Time. The 20-minute “creation of the universe” sequence in the middle of The Tree of Life certainly pointed the way toward what looks to be a feature-length expansion of its images and ideas. Maybe directly immersing himself in this kind of broad abstraction will be a blessing for Malick; at least he won’t have to deal with having to clumsily force his transcendental vision into the mouths of ostensible characters. (KF)
