8 years ago
Festivals (10 posts found)
Fantastic Fest Review: “The Witch”
Forms of storytelling never really die – the functions they serve simply migrate and reappear somewhere else. The folk tale is one such manner of expression that seems rather obsolete in the modern world, not yielding any overtly major works in the past two ce...
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NYFF Review: “De Palma”
My Roger Ebert website questionnaire asked for a movie I loved but everyone else hated. I chose Wise Guys, a movie that even hardcore Brian De Palma fans won’t endorse. Released in 1986, the Danny DeVito-Joe Piscopo movie marked its director’s return to comedy...
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Fantastic Fest Review: “Green Room”
Jeremy Saulnier’s breakout film Blue Ruin depicted violence as an elemental force; a practically innate disposition of the human condition. In that spin on a classic revenge tale, Saulnier metes out precious little information on the characters hell-bent on de...
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NYFF Review: “Mia Madre”
Mia Madre, the latest film from Cannes festival darling, Nanni Moretti, is a companion piece of sorts to his 2001 Palm d’Or-winner, The Son’s Room. That film, which dealt with the loss of a child, is the more emotionally successful affair; a parent burying the...
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NYFF Review: “Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton”
The most succinct summary of Guy Maddin’s latest short film, made in collaboration with Evan and Galen Johnson, comes from Toronto critic Adam Nayman, who declared, “there’s never been shade-throwing of this magnitude in the history of Canadian cinema.” The fi...
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TIFF Review: “Francofonia”
Aleksandr Sokurov takes on fresh formal territory in his latest film, Francofonia. Having previously dabbled in nonfiction (his early documentaries on artists like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Dmitri Shostakovich), historical docudrama (Moloch, Taurus, The Sun) ...
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TIFF Review: “London Fields”
An adaptation of Martin Amis' 1989 novel, Matthew Cullen's London Fields distills the book's ideas into an unfortunate series of cliches and archetypes, never quite hitting upon the brilliance of Amis' peculiar world-building and prose – this, despite the fact...
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TIFF Review: “Louder Than Bombs”
Joachim Trier has built a strong body of work that explores the deep interiors and emotional fissures of depression and loss, and he continues exploring these preoccupations in his latest, Louder Than Bombs, an American middle-class-family melodrama based on t...
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TIFF Review: “Legend”
The Kray brothers enjoy a special place in British history as the notorious gangsters who controlled East End London in the 1960s, and in Brian Helgeland's Legend, the twin brothers are played by the beautiful and weird Tom Hardy twice over. He brings his odd ...
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TIFF Review: “About Ray”
Even though About Ray revolves around a transgender teenager, this isn’t the hot-button topical-issue film one might expect. Certainly, there is very little anguished hand-wringing about transgender issues; among most of the main cast of characters, transgende...
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