TIFF Originals
TIFF12 Review: On the Road
I’m glad now that I didn’t go to Cannes this year and thus, did not see Walter Salles’ On the Road until its re-cut state here at Toronto. I’d heard some negative buzz about the film out of Cannes, and had almost taken if off my TIFF list as my dance card started getting full….
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The cast and director of Anna Karenina and the actors, director, and co-writers of Rust & Bone kick off the fest.
Read the full article » 9 Comments »The Torontonian Reviews: Argo
If Affleck’s third feature were a cartoon, it would be an feature-length, big-budget episode of “Scooby-Doo”: that is, if Scooby and crew were ever involved in a hostage crisis on the world stage. Affleck’s Tony Mendez plays the role of Shaggy, albeit a more responsible incarnation; the six stranded Americans adopting the various roles of The Mystery Gang. (Speaking strictly visually, the coincidence of this comparison is uncanny. They even drive a van with a striking resemblance to the Mystery Machine.)
Read the full article » 2 Comments »TIFF Dispatch #1: Hit the Ground Running
Thirteen or so hours of travel yesterday, and I’m back at the Toronto International Film Festival. The first couple years I came here, I didn’t enjoy it much, other than the films. Everything was spread out more, the part of town we stayed in (right on Yonge) smelled funky all the time, I couldn’t find a decent pad thai anywhere, and Yonge between the Marriott and Ryerson gets a little dicey late nights.
Read the full article »Hopefuls and Hoped-Fors: Is 20 Plenty Or Too Many?
Taken by the festival’s many sections, the 2012 selection is impressive: paying no mind to those distinctions, the level of promise is frustratingly, gratifyingly, even exhilaratingly high. And as we all know, there’s going to be a whole lot more lighting up downtown Hogtown.
Read the full article » 7 Comments »The Torontonian: The People’s Festival
Readers from another country may not understand the feeling, but growing up Canadian usually involves a national inferiority complex: Canada is the USA’s younger brother, the little cousin, the friendly bumpkin to the North. TIFF has played a major role in changing that. The city is energized. It’s prepped and swept; cleaned and preened. It’s ready to go.
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Thursday the Toronto International Film Festival will kick off, and cinephiles, film critics and industry folks will be running amok all over downtown Toronto, rushing to get to screenings and holding court late nights on the patios of bars and restaurants near the Lightbox and Scotiabank, passionately dissecting the latest Malick or PT Anderson or…
Read the full article »TIFF12: Confessions Of A Film Fest Junkie
For the uninitiated, the Toronto International Film Festival began some three decades-plus ago as the aforementioned F of F. The aspiration of this fledgling event was to cull great films from Cannes, Berlin and the like and put on a show for the local gentry and cinephiles. It kinda worked out… or worked too well.
Read the full article »TIFF12: Special Presentations, Part Two
Anders Thomas Jensen co-wrote the screenplays for my two favorite Susanne Bier films, After the Wedding and In a Better World, and I’m hoping that bodes well for her latest ensemble drama. Paprika Steen’s presence in the cast along with that makes this one of the films I’m hoping to catch at TIFF.
Read the full article »TIFF12 Preview: Special Presentations, Part One
There are 70 films this year in my favorite TIFF block, Special Presentations—meaning I could easily build a fest schedule out of nothing but this slate and still not see everything I’d like to catch. Here are the films from the Special Presentations section of the Festival that are at the top of my “want to see these” list.
Read the full article »TIFF12 Preview: TIFF Docs
Which docs I actually end up seeing this year at TIFF will depend upon my interest in the subject matter or director, and how the schedule I’m putting together on paper actually ends up working out in reality once I’m on the ground at TIFF. I usually end up catching at least of couple of docs at TIFF that end up being among my favorites of the year, and missing more that I end up wishing I’d seen, and probably that will be the case again this year. Hopefully the really good ones I end up not catching will roll over to Sundance or SIFF and I’ll get another chance at those I don’t catch at Toronto.
Read the full article »TIFF12 Preview: Contemporary World Cinema
This year I thought I’d dive right into the deep end of my TIFF Preview with the category I tend to find most challenging: Contemporary World Cinema. I’ve seen some gems in this category and I’ve seen some real duds, and it’s a tough category to get a read on; there’s just not a lot to go on, other than fest catalog descriptions
Read the full article »2012 TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL UNVEILS GALAS AND SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS
July 24, 2012 NEWS RELEASE. Toronto – Piers Handling, CEO and Director of TIFF, and Cameron Bailey, Artistic Director of the Toronto International Film Festival, made the first announcement of films to premiere at the 37th Toronto International Film Festival. Films announced include titles in the Galas and Special Presentations programmes. The announced films include 17…
Read the full article »The Blur Of Indie Sales: TIFF ’11 Edition
with all the chatter about the 30+ sales at TIFF this year, there were a total of 6 buys by companies in those 20 that generate major dollars. Searchlight bought Shame, CBS bought Salmon Fishing in The Yemen (which seems to be the high sale of the year at $4 million), Lionsgate bought two films, one with Roadside (Friends With Kids) and the other on their own, You’re Next, The Hunter, and IFC grabbed Your Sister’s Sister and for their new IFC Midnight division, The Incident.
Read the full article » 4 Comments »DP/30: God Bless America, writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait
Earlier with Bob…. after the jump….
Read the full article » 1 Comment »TIFF ’11 Reviews: Last Roundup — Your Sister’s Sister, Chicken with Plums, Pink Ribbons, Inc. and Lucky
Your Sister’s Sister With her latest film, Your Sister’s Sister, writer-director Lynn Shelton again teams up with Mark Duplass, who plays Jack, an affable slacker caught between two sisters, Iris (Emily Blunt) and Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt) in this lightly drawn but well-executed tale. Shelton has a knack for putting average people into beyond-average situations, as…
Read the full article » 1 Comment »TIFF ’11 Reviews: Oslo, August 31 and Melancholia
Oslo, August 31 One of the last films I caught at TIFF this year, almost by accident, was Oslo, August 31, the sophomore effort of Reprise director Joachim Trier. Oslo, August 31 reunites Trier with Anders Danielsen Lie (who played Phillip, the troubled writer of Reprise) in this spare film about addiction, the choices that…
Read the full article »DP/30 @ TIFF ’11: Your Sister’s Sister
Meet the family of My Sister’s Sister. Writer/director Lynn Shelton and co-stars Mark Duplass and Emily Blunt.
Read the full article »TIFF ’11 Review: Alps
One of my strongest festival memories is of watching Giorgos Lanthimos’ third film, Dogtooth, at TIFF in 2009, and walking out of the theater with a mass of fellow dazed critics, filled with excitement at having just seen this bizarrely brilliant work by an artist who seemed to materialize out of nowhere with the rare…
Read the full article »TIFF ’11 Review: Goodbye First Love
With her latest film, Goodbye First Love, Mia Hansen-Løve handles her subject matter of adolescent love in a way that’s remarkably free of pretense and condescension, even as her youthful characters occasionally make choices that make you want to throttle them. The story is pretty simple: 15-year-old Camille (Lola Créton) and 18-year-old Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky)…
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