judy garland 3 results
3.5Score

Review: Judy burns Garland’s ghost at the stake for sizzle’s sake

Movie review: Judy Director Rupert Goold turns Judy Garland’s final act into a passion play that focuses on suffering and female martyrdom. It’s a sad descent redeemed by Renée Zellweger’s unfamiliar face and fleeting hints at humour.  

All the mothers of TIFF 2019

There are many problems for mothers in this year's Toronto film festival movies, but Jay Stone finds that his real-life mother is still going strong By Jay Stone   TORONTO — The other night I played hooky from the Toronto film festival to have dinner with my mother, who lives in north Toronto. She’s 97, but she’s in terrific shape. She works out every day at the gym, and, as she tells it, the people at the retirement home are less amazed by the fact that she can still get down to stretch on the Pilates ball than they are by the fact that she can get back up.   This gives me a tremendous genetic advantage in life: Robert Benchley once wrote that one of the keys to a long life is to keep one’s parents alive, at gunpoint if necessary. It also gives me a huge edge over a lot of people in movies at the festival, many of which feature plots revolving around mothers who have just died, although they continue to haunt their offspring with varying dramatic ...

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 ...