Battle of the Sexes: Bring it On
Movie review: Battle of the Sexes
Emma Stone and Steve Carell serve and volley into Oscar contention in Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton's detailed recreation of a tennis match that made history and an event that redefined pop culture
Kingsman: Golden Circle a Misogynist Swirl
Movie Review: Kingsman — The Golden Circle
Director Matthew Vaughn loses the satirical dimensions of the graphic novel in this second live-action adaptation of Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons's sendup of the gentleman spy archetype, and not even the A-list cast of Colin Firth, Julianne Moore and Jeff Bridges can save this vulgar parade of obscenity
Mike White Updates Status Consciousness
Movies: TIFF17
The writer-director of Brad's Status is an indie darling, but he says he still wrestles with insecurity and ego issues because we live in a world of false comparisons
By Katherine Monk
TORONTO — “I think you have your epiphany, and then you forget about it,” says Mike White. “Then you remember it again. And you forget it again. It’s like you are inching toward wisdom. Or circling the drain.”
White seems to be doing all of the above, all the time, because his mind seems to radiate ideas. He creates tangent lines mid-sentence, leaving orbit, only to fall back to earth, chained by the full force of gravity.
It’s his ability to levitate and fall with giddy aplomb that makes his voice so unique and his characters so memorable, whether it’s Selma Hayek as massage therapist and healer in Beatriz at Dinner, Laura Dern as a recovering executive experimenting with faith in Enlightened, or the entirely childlike Chuck, from the indie landmark Chuck & ...
The Motive Moves in Mysterious Ways
Movies: TIFF17 Capsule Reviews
Javier Gutierrez stars as a notary struggling to write the great novel without success until he starts eavesdropping on his neighbours in Manuel Martin Cuenca's darkly comic exploration of the writerly quest
By Katherine Monk
The writerly process is a running theme here at the Toronto International Film Festival. Darren Aronofsky’s mother! and Haifaa Al Mansour’s Mary Shellery may be the headliners, but hiding in the background is a little film called The Motive (El Autor), a Spanish film about a notary struggling to write the great novel.
A dark comedy that has an ability to offer a string of surprises out of left field, The Motive stars Javier Gutierrez as Alvaro, the number cruncher with great expectations. He lives in a beautiful flat in Seville with his wife (Maria Leon) — a sexy and successful writer in her own right.
Everyone loves her work, but Alvaro thinks she writes crowd-pleasing pap. He craves substance — writing with real ...
Time-travelling in Uptight Toronto
Movies - TIFF17
Katherine Monk goes back to the future and catches up with the past in a day that includes a haunted Jim Carrey, a brush with the Khmer Rouge, a chilling take on the Chinese stock market and a moving visit to a psychiatric ward in Bille August's 55 Steps
By Katherine Monk
TORONTO (September 12, 2017) — Today, I was a time-traveller.
I started in the mid-1980s in San Francisco, fast-forwarded to 1990 to pay a visit to the Man in the Moon, spent some time dodging the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia circa 1975, then took a break at the modern-day New York Public Library before entering 19th century London to hang out with Mary Shelley and Lord Byron.
By nightfall, I was entering a very uncertain future as I headed to China and realized the entire global economy was a house of cards about to be undone by a game of three-card monty using Mah Jong tiles.
It can all be a little overwhelming. Fortunately, I took notes:
8:45 am: I prepare myself for 55 Steps by ...
Battle of the Sexes Rages On
Movies: TIFF17
Stories about strong women continue to struggle for popular approval while movies about middle-aged men absorbed in their own search for success are celebrated for brave storytelling
By Katherine Monk
TORONTO (September 11, 2017) — Battle of the Sexes is the title of one of the bigger buzz movies at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, but four days into this exhaustive and exhausting celebration of cinema, it may as well be a central theme.
On one side, the festival is showcasing films featuring strong women with the courage to pursue their dreams. On the other, it’s awash in the insecurities of middle-aged men terrified by the prospect of being forgotten. Or, worse yet, being altogether average.
Maybe it was just the course of my day that kicked off with the press and industry screening for Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton’s take on the famous 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King. I thoroughly enjoyed their period ...
Mother! Rips TIFF Audiences Apart with Creative Labour Pains
Movies: TIFF17
Darren Aronofsky's latest is a dark swan dive to the depths of the artistic process that could be read as brilliant biblical allegory or a self-absorbed bid at vindicating failure
By Katherine Monk
TORONTO (September 10, 2017) - Oh, mother! The creative process can be a real bitch. Just ask Darren Aronofsky. The director of the Oscar-winning Black Swan returned to the Toronto International Film Festival with his latest film, mother! And already, it’s dividing audience opinion.
A laborious metaphor about the act of making art, the film stars Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem as a handsome couple renovating an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. He’s a successful writer struggling with a blank page. She is the young muse, fixing and mending broken walls, looking to restore the house to its former glory after a fire burned it to the ground.
The only thing left is a diamond-like stone with a mysterious glow that he carefully places on a ...
Parent-Child Day at TIFF17
Movies: #TIFF17
Three movies the the Toronto film festival present different versions of the cinematic parent — Interfering Mother, Distant Father — with varying success
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — It was parent-and-child day at the Toronto International Film Festival, which is always interesting for those of us who are parents and wonder which of several cinematic categories we might fall into: Distant Father, Interfering Mother, Demanding Taskmaster (or –mistress), Indifferent Hippie or Kooky Eccentric. I think that’s all of them.
We began with a terrific little coming-of-age title called Lady Bird, starring Saoirse Ronan — heroine of yesterday’s movie marathon and providing further proof here that she can do no wrong — as a rebellious high school student growing up in terrifyingly unhip Sacramento, Calif. She laughs with her best friend, dumps the friend for some new rich kids, dumps the rich kids for the old friend, meets a couple of boys who are variously ...
TIFF diary: My day in Auditorium 12
Movies: #TIFF17
What's it like to spend the entire day in one cinema, watching whatever comes along? Jay Stone sets out to find out at the Toronto film festival
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — Today I decided to test the fates by spending the entire day in one movie theatre at the Toronto International Film Festival. Most of the press and industry screenings are held at the Scotiabank cinema on Richmond Street, and I chose Auditorium 12, for reasons that will become more obscure as we go on.
The result was a kind of mini-film festival, with all the delights, disappointments — and meals of dry popcorn — that one associates with the glamorous life of the freelance film critic. This is what I saw:
On Chesil Beach: The first film of the day in Auditorium 12 — which turns out to be the Imax theatre, so you get a nice big screen — is this adaptation of what is, frankly, a rather thin 2007 novella by the otherwise estimable Ian McEwan. It stars Saoirse Ronan (whose appearance in ...
TIFF17 Opens with an Overhead Smash
Movies: #TIFF17
Festival's opening movie, Borg/McEnroe captures, an epic battle at Wimbledon and the two contrasting personalities — the emotional American and the cool Swede — who fought it out
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — A magazine called Screen has a special edition at the Toronto film festival, and it runs capsule reviews of some of the movies showing that day. Wednesday’s edition included a review of Miracle, a Lithuania/Bulgaria/Poland co-production, in which “the owner of a struggling post-Soviet pig farm finds a surprising benefactor in a visiting American investor, whose ‘good’ intentions upend the gentle rhythms of small-town life.”
And that’s the film festival for you: it might be a warm and wonderful comedy, or it could be what you might later describe as the best Lithuania/Bulgaria/Poland co-production of the month. You can’t tell without actually going to watch it, and who has time for that?
As it happens, I was reading this while seated next to ...
