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 ...
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 ...
The Post Delivers Big Message Sans Emotional Stamp
Movie review: The Post
Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep play second fiddle to a 7,000-page stack of paper and an old Xerox machine in Steven Spielberg's well-intentioned history lesson about lying Presidents
Inferno: To Hell and Back
Movie review: Inferno
Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones get lost in a sea of attractive scenery and classical references in Ron Howard's decryption of Dante's Divine Comedy
Sully feels like a dead stick landing
Movie review: Sully
Tom Hanks has enough emotional charisma to keep Clint Eastwood's hero conventions in the air, but this cinematic salute to Chesley Sullenberger's heroism loses thrust
Wintour is Coming… to home entertainment
What's Streaming: August
The nights are getting shorter, but there's more to sink your eyeballs into when the sun goes down as Tom Hanks, the Met Gala, a High-Rise horror and The Lobster hit home
By Katherine Monk
The First Monday in May (3/5)
Who doesn’t want to go behind the scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? I know I do, even if I’m just getting access to the costume gallery – that small square of space accessible by freight elevator and remote staircases in the bowels of the storied institution on Fifth Ave. Ever since its inception in 1946, the costume institute (now named after Vogue editor and chief fundraiser Anna Wintour) hosts the museum’s annual fundraising ball, which makes or breaks the annual operating budget on the first Monday in May. With so much riding on the Met Gala, you can feel the stress in curator Andrew Bolton’s fashionable fibers from the moment the movie opens. And it ramps up from there as we watch him prepare for the opening of ...
A Hologram for the King an empty projection
Movie review: A Hologram for the King
Tom Hanks's latest feels like a collection of the beloved actor's greatest hits all rolled into one big lump of fish-out-of-water comedy that flops around on deck for the duration
Spielberg burns Bridge of Spies with boredom
Movie Review: Bridge of Spies
Cold War thriller warmed over: Tom Hanks shuffles his favourite deck of characters to take on the role of a real life insurance lawyer who ends up tangled in the concertina wire of East-West tensions