Everything that’s frustrating about Gladiator II resides in the script. Not everything about the film is a waste, though. Scott has firmly entered an era of doing whatever the hell he feels like, and the best parts of Gladiator II are in its weirder details.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a twisty-turny film that ends up in a completely different place than it started. Focusing on Iranian politics held at arm’s length, initially, it’s not long before civil unrest invades the home of our protagonists. Spoiler alert: The patriarchy is coming from inside the house.
After seeing more than 15 films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, we came away with more than just a set of top five favorite films.
After seeing 16 films at TIFF, here are ScreenRex’s Top Five best films from the festival.
I recently realized there’s an incredibly small subgenre of blockbusters that fall into a particularly niche category. I’m not sure what to call this category, but it’s something along the lines of “In addition to everything else going on, for some reason the real bad guy here is corporate espionage!”
But it’s a big one.
Challengers centers around a tennis match that will define the lives of both men on the court. But if you asked me who won, I’m not sure I could tell you.
You’ve heard the age-old adage: It’s about the journey, not the destination. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire banks on the opposite being true. It’s an exercise in reverse-engineering, taking a few key end points and mapping out a plot that could possibly get us there. We want a shot of Godzilla and Kong side-by-side and flying through the air in slow-mo while trying to punch an enemy – how do we do that? We want Kong to have a cool mecha-arm – why does he have it? Godzilla should be pink! But how?
But how? For a movie about prehistoric creatures prancing around the Earth’s crust like it’s the interior of a wrestling ring, it’s a question Godzilla x Kong is surprisingly concerned with.
The Farrelly brothers, The Safdie Brothers, The Wachowski sisters – there’s no shortage of sibling director duos who have parted ways, either permanently or temporarily, to experiment on solo works. The Coen brothers joined their ranks with Joel Coen’s solo-directed film The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021. If The Tragedy of Macbeth might have given any clue as to who the “serious one” of the duo was, Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls seems designed to give an equally emphatic answer as to the source of the duo’s comedic chops.
ScreenRex highlights five examples of creative work at TIFF that caught us off guard, for better or for worse
If you had to summarize the biggest trend at the Toronto Film Festival this year – apart from the effects of both writers and actors being on strike – it might be that 2023 was the year many actors made the jump to directing.
Christopher Nolan has made some of my favorite movies of all time. But every filmmaker has weaknesses, and over the years Nolan’s have crystallized.
Past Lives, a feature debut for writer/director Celine Song, opens with a simple premise. The camera focuses on a trio, a woman sitting in the middle of two men. Off-camera, voices try to puzzle out their connections: is this a couple and a friend? Siblings and a couple? Are any of the three romantically entangled at all? It’s a hard one, they muse.
Since hearing director Ari Aster describe his film Beau is Afraid as a “Jewish Lord of the Rings but he’s just going to his mom’s house,” my curiosity has been high.
Chances are, you already know about M3GAN.
