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 ...
George Clooney and Margaret Atwood on Jay Stone’s TIFF List
Movies: #TIFF17
The Toronto International Film Festival hits middle-age with an entourage of famous faces and a long history of cinematic conquests that seems destined to continue with a slate of intriguing titles from the world's best filmmakers
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — The Toronto film festival turns 42 this year, which is a dangerous age: if it was a man, it would probably buy a fancy red sports car that was entirely unsuitable to Canada’s roads or its climate and leave its perfectly serviceable wife for a doctoral student — studying something impractical, one imagines, having to do with postmodern cultural analysis — young enough to be its daughter.
The festival hasn’t exactly done that, although one notes that it has lost some of its older friends — 81-year-old auteur Woody Allen, for instance, is taking his new film Wonder Wheel to the New York festival, bypassing Toronto — in favour of younger, more with-it voices. And while festival director Piers Handling ...
Sam Elliott Holds On for The Hero
Movie Review: The Hero
An aging cowboy actor looks for a final big role — and a chance to redeem his personal failures — in a drama that has many parallels with its memorable star
Despicable Me 3 Loses Its Despicability
Movie Review: Despicable Me 3
The latest episode in the animated family films adds a former child star, a twin brother, and a trip to Fredonia. Thank heavens the Minions are still around to create chaos
Olli Maki answers the bell
Movie Review: The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki
Part boxing movie and part love story, this Finnish film tells the story of a true Scandinavian hero, a prizefighter who fought for a title he didn't really seem to want
I Am Not Your Negro cuts to root of Strange Fruit
Movie Review/ Streaming/ DVD: I Am Not Your Negro
The words of the late James Baldwin provide a searing portrait of race relations in the United States, and prove how little things have changed in the decades since they were written
Sense of an Ending eludes closure
Movie Review: The Sense of an Ending
In the film version of the ambiguous Julian Barnes novel, Jim Broadbent shines as an older man whose quiet life is interrupted by a letter that makes him re-evaluate the past
