Every year, compelling moviegoers of all kinds, casual viewers and true believers alike gather at the Toronto International Film Festival to taste samples. Cannes has the red carpet, Telluride has an Oscar nominee, and Sundance might have the next big event. It’s jam-packed with movies of all types, sizes, styles and ambitions. Some are destined for immortality, others will join the Oscar marathon that has already begun, and other titles will fade away on his streaming platform. Some of these deserve a better fate.
The festival, which ends on Sunday, returned to full capacity this month after two years of heavily restricted in-person screenings. With the removal of mask mandates and other restrictions, theater crowds felt closer to pre-pandemic levels, but not the worst. But the most flashy guests, especially Taylor Swift (her aptly titled 10 minutes ofAll to Well: A Short Film) and Harry Styles (one of the stars of gay-era romance)my cop”).
“Harry, Harry, Harry!” One afternoon, as I rushed to the screening, I heard a man and a woman racing to a scrum of security guards and a parked black SUV. Theatrical distribution could rebound once it starts making more movies and direct appearances. transformed into a key industry destination, creating an 11-day spectacle for attendees and onlookers, ‘The Woman King’ opens Friday.
Toronto skims a lot of the cream from other festivals, giving audiences an early glimpse of the major titles that will be much debated in the coming months. Journalists can often preview these productions at home. But seeing a new movie with a packed audience and witnessing the way jokes land and surprises shock is a unique experience. One of her films guaranteed to play very well is Laura Poitras’ elegantly composed documentary about photographer Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which won first prize at the Venice Film Festival. was awarded. A deeply personal and political portrait of Goldin’s opium epidemic, it moved audiences. Distributors must distribute tissues with every ticket.
Spotify should prepare for more streaming of Louis Armstrong’s music. His one of my festival week highlights was the documentary Louis He Armstrong’s Black & Blues, directed by Sasha Jenkins, son of filmmaker Horace B. Jenkins. (Apple has a documentary, but Sacha Jenkins said before one screening that it would also be released in theaters.) Armstrong’s extensive personal archive (including reels of taped musings) Taking advantage, the film is not just a portrait of a genius, but a country he gave grace and didn’t give him the love he deserved. The music is great of course, but some critics wanted more musicology to go along with it.
The audience seemed excited when they saw “Louis Armstrong” together. A festival’s hot house environment can be so misleading that people are so excited to attend that it can render widely reported metrics like standing ovation length irrelevant. Yes (booing is much more beneficial).But watching a film with other festival-goers always heats up the room and creates a lively, evocative atmosphere, which helps when a director introduces his work.Steven Spielberg did just that for the premiere of “”favermansis a poignant coming-of-age story about a young moviegoer growing up and, well, becoming one.
Written by Spielberg and his frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, the story tracks the awakening, cinematic or otherwise, of young Sammy (played by Gabrielle Lovell as a teenager). Children are the least fun part of the movie, and while it probably sounds funny and even insulting, it’s about someone who grows up and creates larger-than-life (Spielberg’s!) fantasies. The father is played by Paul Dano, who seems to borrow Michael Stuhlbarg’s voice, but the film is anchored by Michelle Williams’ sensitive performance as mother Mitzi. . Williams’s influential intensity lends the film regular shocking jolts of passion, dampening an otherwise overly straightforward and overly familiar flow.
“The Fabelmans” didn’t set the festival on fire. Its restrained and lightly-elegiac mood hardly wins most pulse races, even if these qualities work very well. His version of “West Side Story”, also written by Kushner Spielberg, as he did in Mr. and Mrs. Faberman, introduces a kind of poetic realism that we still don’t understand. As you can imagine, he sees his life through the fog. And while showing tears, if not necessarily runny noses, Spielberg, in his unique way, addresses some of the corrosive truths about his childhood, especially regarding Mitzi. It’s an interesting movie that I look forward to revisiting.
Mitzi Fabermann is just one of the many female characters who made Toronto memorable this year. Another is Liv Wright, a feisty British nurse played by the strong Florence Pugh in the period drama The Wonder. Directed by Sebastian Lelio from the novel by Emma Donoghue, the film follows Rib as he travels to an isolated village in the countryside of 19th-century Ireland. There she is hired by strict local men to observe her daughter Anna (Keira Lord Cassidy). That she ate in months. Is her fast a miracle, a fraud, or what? Not all of Lelio’s choices work. In particular, his decision to draw attention to the film’s cleverness (which opens and closes on the soundstage), but its horror and righteous anger is undeniable.
One of the things that makes all these female character boons so enjoyable is the sheer number of them appearing in films directed by women. In the not too distant past, women often felt trapped by their subjects, especially with their meager resources. Now that is no longer the case, and every day in Toronto you could see all manner of female-led photography, from eyeglasses to chamber music. For someone who makes a living writing mostly about movies made by men and for men, it’s especially satisfying. did.
That was true even when the movie didn’t quite work or felt out of place. “We cannot vouch for the historical accuracy of”Emilyis an emotional, sexual drama about Emily Brontë directed by actress Frances O’Connor. Surely we’ve heard about the wilder things this Emily (the excellent Emma Mackie) is doing in her turbulent, tragically abbreviated, dramatically altered life there is not. Yet with its performances, shy romanticism, and visual choices — landscapes, textures, shimmering light and bodies — the film compellingly opens up the artistic consciousness of how Brontë became a writer. is shown. No matter how fanciful the artist’s portrait as a young woman is, it is very effective.
Alice Diop’s electric contemporary drama “Santomer‘ raises a very different question of truth. Partly set in a French courtroom, it focuses on young author Rama (Kaije Kagame) taking part in the trial of another woman, Lawrence (Ghathraj Malanda), who admitted to drowning her baby. I’m here. Intellectually evocative and emotionally harrowing, this tale explores motherhood, race, and post-colonial France with control, clarity, and compassion. This is Diop’s first feature-length work of fiction, a well-established documentarian, so it’s an extraordinarily impressive work all the more.
“Saint Omer” Coming Soon new york film festival And so it will be.”eternal daughter”, from British filmmaker Joanna Hogg. It also has to do with motherhood, but the record is different and has a different purpose. It focuses on the relationship between her mother and her daughter duo, similar characters played with unique nuances by Tilda Swinton. The story mostly takes place in a grand hotel where the two are intimate and come in search of an increasingly difficult vacation. . This, like Swinton’s twin performance, proves to be devastating.