Amy Adams stars in this sharp-toothed film about the trials of motherhood and societal expectations around that role. Delivering a biting inner monologue Adams is completely engaged as an exhausted and angry Mother. She’s left her aspirations of being an artist behind to be a stay-at-home mom while her next-to-never-there husband (Scoot McNairy) continues with…
Category: Film Festivals
TIFF24: The Life of Chuck dir. Mike Flanagan
Tears. Happy tears. When things just feel right, when something is translated so well from page to screen that it looks the way it did in your mind’s eye. The Life of Chuck moved me to happy tears. Mike Flanagan is at the top of his game. He has proven that he excels at adapting…
TIFF24: The Last Showgirl dir. Gia Coppola
Pamela Anderson delivers a career-topping performance as Shelley an aging Vegas showgirl, whose show, Razzle Dazzle, is closing, bringing her thirty-year career to a grinding stop. Directed by Gia Coppola whose use of shallow focus lenses keeps the story on Shelley at all times, the tale looks honestly at aging and beauty in not only…
TIFF24 Visionaries – Steven Moffat
The Toronto International Film Festival offers a number of industry panels through the course of the week, and they got started this week with their Visionaries program, and their first one featured Steven Moffat – there was no way I was going to miss that! Set in the Glen Gould Studio at the CBC, the…
TIFF24: Santosh dir. Sandhya Suri
“Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” The entire runtime of Sandhya Sur’s Santosh that line of dialogue circulated through my brain repeatedly, as the film plunged the viewer into a morally grey world that was frightening and horrifying as its narrative threw us right into the brutal caste system of rural India, and the ongoing sexism…
TIFF24: Meet the Barbarians dir. Julie Delpy
Julie Delpy directs and stars in the charming, and delightfully satirical Meet the Barbarians. Set in the small town of Paimpont, France, a teacher, Joelle (Delpy) has convinced the local town council to do their part and take in some Ukranian refugees, they’ve studied, they’ve got a home set-up, have donated groceries, and are ready…
TIFF24: Flow dir. Gints Zilbalodis
Animated films have taken us to a variety of places and let us encounter all manner of characters, and they make us feel, which says something incredible about the fact that they started out as sketches or lines of code in a computer. Flow does something we don’t often see in animated films, its characters,…
TIFF24: I, the Executioner dir. Ryoo Seung-wan
I, the Executioner is the follow-up to Seung-wan’s Veteran. I hadn’t seen it, and I loved this one. So don’t let that hold you back from checking this one out. South Korean action films and police thrillers are always engaging, and they aren’t afraid to get dark. Veteran cop, Do-cheol (Hwang Jung-min) works in the…
TIFF24: The Seed of the Sacred Fig dir. Mohammad Rasoulof
Rasoulof examines the patriarchy and religious law in the microcosm of the family in The Seed of the Sacred Fig. For some it can be a tough watch, as it incorporates actual footage from the 2022 protests in Iran following the death Masha Amini who died while in police custody, charged with improperly wearing her…
TAD 2023: Lovely, Dark and Deep dir. Teresa Sutherland
Writer/director Teresa Sutherland delivers a moody, atmospheric hallucination that follows Park Ranger Lennon (Georgina Campbell) as she takes on her new backcountry assignment, and attempts to reconcile an event that has haunted her since childhood. Positing that there are too many missing people in national parks, Sutherland’s story wonders if there is perhaps something more…
