Columns By Kim VoynarVoynar@moviecitynews.com
TIFF Review: Dirty Girl
I put Abe Sylvia‘s Dirty Girl on my maybe list primarily because it’s set in late ’80s Norman, Oklahoma, and I am an Oklahoma Girl. I put it on my definite list when the Weinsteins bought it the other day, because love the Weinsteins or hate them, they tend to have good taste in their…
Read the full article »And Now, a Brief Break for Something Only Vaguely TIFF-related
Okay, this is interesting (at least to me). I’ve been tracking this Bradley Rust Gray lesbian-werewolf project, Jack and Diane, since way back in 2008, when Ellen Page was attached to the project with Juno co-star Olivia Thirlby, then suddenly not attached post-Juno’s success. So as I was poking around on IMDb to learn a…
Read the full article »TIFF Dispatch Day Six: Catching Up
Time to lighten things up a bit, after that last dispatch, eh? As we near the homestretch, this has been a really good fest for me. In a lot of ways I feel like this fest represents a bit of a coming full circle for me from last year’s devastating fest-spent-in-a-hospital bed, which was all…
Read the full article »DVD Geek: City Island
Do not touch the ‘Eject’ button during the first 20 minutes of City Island, a wonderful film about a dysfunctional family that has been released by Anchor Bay Films. You may be sorely tempted to cut the movie short at the beginning, because to set things up it regurgitates seemingly tiresome stereotypes—the husband and wife, played by Andy Garcia and Julianna Margulies, fighting; the son in his bedroom surfing porn; the daughter leading a secret life—but there is then a terrific and quite unexpected plot turn.
Read the full article »TIFF Review: Another Year
Mike Leigh is one of those rare directors you can almost always count on to deliver something good, interesting and completely original. His latest film, Another Year, is tonally very different from the last film he had at Toronto, Happy-Go-Lucky, (actually, to be more precise, I’d say it’s tonally different from much of his previous…
Read the full article »TIFF Review: Passione
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of John Turturro‘s Passione, which is screening at TIFF in the Special Presentations category, but I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised by this engaging, colorful, music-drenched journey into the musical culture of Naples. The documentary is about as non-traditional structurally as one could imagine (and I mean…
Read the full article »TIFF Review: I Saw the Devil
I was on my way to the Susanne Bier film today when a couple of friends talked me into going to see I Saw the Devil instead. I asked one of them to quickly pitch me on why I would want to see it, and he pitched it thusly: Did you like The Good, The…
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: Casino Jack, My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done?, Breathless, Crumb and more …
Alex Gibney‘s Casino Jack and the United States of Money is the amazing, genuinely scary and totally sobering story of Jack Abramoff, the supreme Republican lobbyist/dealmaker/moneyman, and also the poster child for a decade crazed by greed and contemptuous of rules, regulations and the problems of the common man and woman.
Read the full article »DVD Wrap: Prince of Persia, Letters to Juliet, Killers, The Black Cauldron, Cemetery Junction, and more…
In Hollywood’s Cathedral of Concepts, the Reverend Jerry Bruckheimer presided over the marriage of a beloved amusement-park attraction to the classic swashbuckler. Nine months later, the fruit of their union arrived in the form of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Other children would follow. At the same church, seven years later, Reverend Bruckheimer would unite a popular action-packed video game with a direct descendant of Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad, with the result being Prince of Persia: The Sand of Time.
Read the full article »TIFF Dispatch Day Five: It’s Kind of a Funny Film Festival Story …
So tonight I want to talk a little bit about something interesting that’s happening at the fest around the film It’s Kind of a Funny Story, directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. I was catching up with indieWIRE’s Day Four Hot Topic, where film critics drop in the Film Lounge to chat about What’s…
Read the full article »The Weekend Box Office Report
Weekend Estimates – September 10-12, 2010 Title Distributor Gross (average) change Theaters Cume Resident Evil: Afterlife Sony 26.9 (8,390) New 3203 26.9 Takers Sony 5.9 (2,710) -45% 2191 47.9 The American Focus 5.7 (2,020) -57% 2833 28.2 Machete Fox 4.1 (1,520) -64% 2678 20.7 Going the Distance WB 3.8 (1,260) -45% 3030 14 The…
Read the full article »Frenzy on the Wall: Robert Rodriguez – Exactly What We Thought He Was
It seems that with every new Robert Rodriguez film folks talk about how he wasted all the promise that was evident in El Mariachi. To which I say, “huh?” The film shows a lot of ingenuity – in the sense that he made it for so little money – but not a whole lot of originality. The fact that he basically re-made that film two times says a lot about the kind of filmmaker that he is, too.
Read the full article »TIFF Review: Made in Dagenham
The film with the strongest “female empowerment” vibe at TIFF may just be Made in Dagenham, a film about the feminist movement taking over an unlikely corner of working class England in 1968, when female factory workers who sewed seat covers for the Ford Motors plant went on strike. For once, we have a film…
Read the full article »TIFF Dispatch Day Four: Mixed Bag
I ran into a friend today who mentioned that he was enjoying these dispatches and wanted me to keep writing them. So here you go, this one’s for you. Today was a real mixed bag for me, screening-wise. I logged about four hours sleep last night and woke up with my head aching and stuffed…
Read the full article »Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie
One anticipated film that Toronto received the very first look see is Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter. It screened yesterday for press including the army of junket scribes that attend about 20 interview roundtables during TIFF’s opening weekend. They were grumbling about the filmmaker only doing two interviews during his stay and having to go to New York in October for the official press junket.
Read the full article »TIFF Dispatch Day Three: The Best Laid Plans
I’ve finally gotten myself to the point of feeling more or less fully immersed in my Toronto routine (read: catching my sleep in four hour power sessions, fueling on coffee and Balance bars all day when there’s no time to eat between back-to-back screenings and Starbucks runs out of paninis, spending so much time in…
Read the full article »TIFF Review: The Illusionist
The Illusionist, Sylvain Chomet‘s animated adaptation of an unproduced script by French comedic legend Jacques Tati, is a sad, soulful, touching tale about a vaudeville magician past his prime and his friendship with a young girl. Chomet, who previously made the excellent The Triplets of Bellville (which referenced Tati’s Jour de Fête), uses his uniquely…
Read the full article »TIFF Review: Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen
Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, revisits an iconic character originally played by Bruce Lee (in Fists of Fury) and Jet Li (in Fist of Legend). Here, Donnie Yen reprises the role of Chen Yen from a 20-episode 1995 television series version of Fists of Fury. This time around, Chen Zhen returns…
Read the full article »Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie
Toronto has also evolved along these lines. It runs arguably the best programmed cinematheque in North America, touring film programs and underwrites scholarly research and publications that otherwise would be marginalized. The Lightbox marketing employs the catch phrase: The House That Film Built and, considering past good works, it should be a home base that’s both state of the art and sturdy.
Read the full article »TIFF Review: Biutiful
When a great director has teamed repeatedly with a brilliant writer over the course of a career, one has to ponder how much the unique chemistry of two artistic minds working on a common canvas shapes the quality of the end result. Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s films Amores Perres, 21 Grams, and multiple-Oscar nominee Babel (which…
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