Film Festival 57 results

Daily Updates from Film Festivals Around the World from veteran Ex-Press critics.

Beautiful day in the Oscarhood: Academy Award hopes of TIFF

The Toronto film festival features several movies that could be in the discussion for this year's top movie awards, Jay Stone writes By Jay Stone   TORONTO — The Toronto film festival is known as a launching pad for Oscar movies. Here are a few of the early contenders.   A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The re-evaluation of Fred Rogers — from figure of fun in a thousand parodies of his children’s program to American hero in a famous Esquire magazine article to secular sainthood in the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? — continues in this movie that’s actually based on that Esquire article. Tom Junod, an investigative journalist, was assigned in 1998 to do a short profile of Rogers (Tom Hanks) and emerged with a 10,000-word cover story that painted him as an unexpected wise man, a life coach whose simple wisdom could heal fractures of the heart. It was as if Being There had come to life as a puppet show for children.   In this ...

TIFF 2019: When the theme is the theme

Movies: #TIFF19 Jay Stone discovers that you can go from dance to geriatric sex at the Toronto film festival, with barely time for a refreshing doughnut By Jay Stone TORONTO — One of the secrets of formerly professional film criticism (I can now reveal) is to find a common theme around which you can elucidate your theories of the creative imagination. The good news is, if a common theme doesn’t occur to you, you can always make one up because who cares really? So it was the other day that I saw a 3-D movie about dance and a black-and-white drama about geriatric sex, then attended a lunch party that was so jammed with loud freeloaders that I could barely get to the dessert table for a second doughnut. What do these things have in common?, I asked my daughter, who got me into the party because she knows a guy who knows a guy. “Three things you don’t like,” she ventured, which is a pretty good guess. But it’s a daughter guess. I actually liked the party, especially ...

Fascism, Feminism and the big buzz movies at TIFF19

Movies: #TIFF19 The Toronto International Film Festival is the equivalent of Christmas morning to a movie critic, and oftentimes, the most appreciated gifts are the ones in humble packages, writes critic Katherine Monk By Katherine Monk TORONTO — For film critics, the Toronto International Film Festival feels like waking up on Christmas morning. Pretty, promising packages bathed in sparkling light and and a tangle of reflected tinsel have arrived at the foot of the Bell Lightbox, just waiting to be torn open. They will either be loved and cherished, or completely forgotten, disposed of with the next day’s trash. There’s no way to predict the reception, but after a few decades of scrolling through schedules, pondering publicists’ press releases, and reading between the glowing lines penned by festival programmers, you start sifting, and making lists. The first list is always the buzz sheet: What movies are coming to the festival with some advance hype — either from ...

The dark recesses of TIFF19 and some great expectations

Movies: #TIFF19 Smelling something familiar in the air? It’s the gentle fragrance of auteurism, leavened with the sharp odour of Oscar bait. In other words, it’s the dawn of TIFF19. Jay Stone places his bets on Tom Hanks, Nicole Kidman and Ed Norton’s directorial debut as a detective with Tourette’s. By Jay Stone SOMEWHERE ON THE WAY TO TORONTO — And here we go again, heading to the Toronto International Film Festival with a suitcase packed with black clothes and a head filled with dark hopes. Will our feet hold up? Can we stay awake through those evening screenings? Will we ever eat dinner before midnight? Did someone remember to pack the Lipitor? Also: Will the movies be wonderful? Some of them always are, but you never know: the hot buzz titles can land with a clunk, while the unknown thing you walk into because you have nothing else to do or the title grabs you — I always remember the unheralded documentary Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business as the ...
3.5Score

The Front Runner circles lapse of judgment in a losing cause

Movie Review: The Front Runner Jason Reitman recreates the late-80s political landscape to survey the moment when the sober Republic turned into All-American spectacle: Gary Hart’s soiled Presidential bid, spoiled by sex scandal and the rise of tabloid TV.
3.5Score

Outlaw King reimagines tribal history, bares Pine’s parts

New on Netflix/Movie Review: Outlaw King Chris Pine plays national folk hero Robert the Bruce in David Mackenzie's blood sausage of a costume epic that rewrites a few historical details to serve its dramatic cause, and quench our thirst for more Game of Thrones.

Sharkwater Extinction: A matter of death, and life, for the Stewarts

Movies: Sharkwater Extinction Shattered by their son Rob’s death in a diving accident, Sandy and Brian Stewart found inspiration in his message and turned pain into positive action by completing the film he died trying to make.

Still time to VIFF and get avay from it all

Movies:  #VIFF18 The Vancouver International Film Festival enters final stretch with enough twists and turns to recalibrate your personal GPS

#VIFF2018: A big fattie of a film festival that will alter perception

Movies: Vancouver International Film Festival, #VIFF2018 Boasting more than 216 feature films from 55 countries, The Vancouver International Film Festival is one of the beefiest film smorgasbords on the circuit. It can all be a little overwhelming, but veteran critic Katherine Monk offers five vetted bets to get your cinema season started.

At #TIFF18, it’s all about the music

Movies: #TIFF18, Toronto International Film Festival The soundtrack of movies can leave you with the exhilaration of the dance floor, or bring you down into the existential angst of neo-noir By Jay Stone (September 8, 2018) TORONTO — There was a great moment at the movies this morning, near the end of Gloria Bell, Sebastian Lelio’s English-language remake of his own 2013 drama Gloria. Julianne Moore, replacing Chilean actress Paulina Garcia in the original, stars as a 50ish divorcee — are they still called that? — who has a productive but somewhat lonely life that she spices up by going to dance clubs and letting herself get lost in the candy sounds of disco. A romance with a divorced man (John Turturro), who seems not quite totally divorced, disrupts her balance, but in the final scene, we see Moore back on the dance floor, raising her arms and swaying from side to side as Laura Branigan sings the old hit Gloria. You can sometimes forget the importance of music in ...