8 years ago
Festivals (10 posts found)
The Best of TIFF 2014
After two weeks of wall-to-wall movies, writing, late nights, coffee, deadlines, and sleep deprivation, the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival has come to a close. Thankfully, right before our writers on the ground collapsed from exhaustion, they wrote a...
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TIFF Review – “Electric Boogaloo”: Shooting Nostalgia Out of a Cannon
The hexagonal Cannon Group logo should be familiar to anyone who wasted their 80’s-era adolescence at the movie theater. Its appearance onscreen became so ubiquitous in Reagan-era America that the mere sight of it evoked memories of an old friend coming to vis...
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TIFF Dispatch #4: “Hill of Freedom”, “It Follows”, and “Amour Fou”
Hill of Freedom - Hong Sang-Soo’s films about unrequited love never fall into predictable patterns, even if they’re all exceedingly similar. The same holds true for Hill of Freedom. Hong’s latest narrative puzzle features Mori, a young Japanese man heartsick f...
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TIFF Review: “Clouds of Sils Maria” is Oddly Worth Remembering, But Not Watching
If there is any merit to Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria it’s that it serves the memory in a finer way than it does the eye. Asked to take on a revival of the play that made her famous as a youth, Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) must take on the role opp...
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TIFF Dispatch #3: “99 Homes”, “The Duke of Burgundy”, and “Phoenix”
99 Homes - The American home foreclosure crisis, the subject of Ramin Bahrani’s latest film, is the stuff of Michael Moore-style documentaries. The film observes various middle-class families fighting tooth and nail to hold onto their family homes, only to be ...
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TIFF Review: “Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet”
One of the more pleasant surprises of TIFF 2014, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet combines musings on life with incredible visuals. A passion project from producer Salma Hayek, the film adapts the poetry of Lebanese artist, poet, and writer Kahlil Gibran in a serie...
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TIFF Dispatch #2: “Love & Mercy”, “Eden”, and “Tokyo Tribe”
Love & Mercy, Bill Pohlad’s biopic about musical genius Brian Wilson is an empathetic but trite examination of the Beach Boy’s life, structured like a temporal see-saw occupying two specific periods. There’s the mid 1960s, when Wilson (Paul Dano) brainstor...
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TIFF Review: “Hungry Hearts”
With a knife in hand and her husband breathing over her neck inside their kitchen, Mina (Alba Rohrwacher) tells Jude (Adam Driver) that she feels like he's controlling her. They have a child together, but to say that her pregnancy was an act of union would be ...
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TIFF Dispatch #1: “Foxcatcher”, “Clouds of Sils Maria”, and “Maps to the Stars”
So many films—regardless of their genre or origin—deal with the psychology of interpersonal discord that it’s scarcely worth mentioning them as some kind of classifiable phenomenon. But when you watch a variety of films that have little to do with each other—f...
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Special Report from Telluride Film Festival
Much ink was spilled in the run-up to this year's fall festival season about a supposed face-off between Telluride and Toronto, with the latter taking a stand against Telluride's custom of "stealth" premieres by banning Telluride entrants from showing during ...
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