After this mindfuck of a year, it only feels fitting that we close out the film side of things not with the simple joys of resurrecting comic book characters, but with the more mind-bending and existential experience of wrestling with a revisit to The Matrix.
I’ve had insomnia since I was young. It comes and goes, and I’ve found ways to manage or even predict it over the years. It first struck while I was about 10 years old, where I suddenly found myself with a novel issue: lots of time to kill in the …
One of this year’s best films is a black-and-white portrait of memories-in-the-making. And, no, I’m not talking about Belfast. Sure, Belfast will be a top Oscar contender – it’s a crowd-pleasing, generic film filled with Oscar-bait performances. But I’m talking about the other, better black-and-white film of this Oscar season: C’mon C’mon.
Let’s just state it plainly: The Last Duel looks awful. There’s the hair, to start with the superficial – Matt Damon sports a horrendous medieval mullet, while Ben Affleck’s tresses are bleached to oblivion and shaped into a childish bowl cut. It’s not the kind of thing you’d normally comment on, except these haircuts are so supremely and distractingly awful even the cast wondered if director Ridley Scott knew what he was doing with them.
You can’t really talk about Venom: Let There Be Carnage without talking about what started it all: Venom. When Venom came out in 2018, I didn’t know what to make of it. It felt like it was a random, mad-libs-generated version of a film powered by a strange combination of earnestness and chaos.
This new Terrorizers has a large, but not overwhelming, ensemble cast, focusing on six teenagers in Taipei. It unfolds in chapters, each focusing on a specific character’s point of view, in turn recontextualizing our understanding of events. It’s a fascinating bit of audience immersion in that our expectations are consistently upended the further down the rabbit hole we go and the more characters we’re introduced to. In all, a riveting experience and the best film I’ve seen at TIFF so far.
A few years ago, I was shocked to learn for the first time that not everyone has an inner monologue narrating their life causally running in the background of their minds. You know (or maybe you don’t) – that voice that chimes in to dole out advice, snark, fear, and whatever else we’re thinking but can’t always vocalize. I’ve had one all my life and assumed it was a basic function of living, like hearing and smell. But estimates are that about half of us do, and half of us do not.
Violet is a movie crafted for that half of the movie that knows what the voice sounds like. Or for anyone else curious about how the other half lives.
A strong first feature debut for writer and director Hong Sung-Eun, Aloners is the perfect ode to the universal feeling of loneliness and isolation that was so deeply intensified during the pandemic.
Clocking in at around 70 minutes, this follow up from Celine Sciamma, the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, was my most eagerly anticipated film of TIFF. Petite Maman explores family relationships, grief, and other emotional arcs through a more playful lens of a child.
When then-Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter penned an email in 2014 listing examples of failed super hero flicks that were female led, it’s not hard to imagine he was debating the value of adding a Black Widow solo film into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
A little over a year ago, A Quiet Place: Part II was the next movie on my to-review-list when the world fell apart and everything closed down. So it was only fitting that my first “normal” press screening with colleagues would be this film, some 15 months after it was …
Movies are always a reflection of the times, and so it’s only been a matter of time before we started seeing face masks and hand sanitizer show up in the confines of Hollywood’s fictional mirror. Writer and director Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth is the first pandemic-set movie I’ve seen since experiencing one personally, and if I’m honest, I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. Too soon, anyone?
When you see a movie like Godzilla vs. Kong, you don’t really expect to walk away thinking one of them was a definitive winner or loser. You expect lots of larger-than-life battles as humans scramble to avoid being crushed like ants, near-death knockouts, and something resembling a tie score at the end of the day.
We need a word for when something plays out in a way that makes perfect sense and somehow still manages to be surprising at the same time. And if that word existed, it would be the perfect adjective to describe Promising Young Woman.
The moment a youthful Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) appeared in promos for Wonder Woman 1984, a sequel to the World War I era Wonder Woman, it was clear there’d be some kind of gimmick involved. But really, who cares? The chemistry between the two was great in the first film, and superhero films are rarely planted in realism. It turns out that gimmick is wish fulfillment – and the unexpected price you pay for that wish coming true.
I couldn’t think of a more apt metaphor for both the highs and lows of Wonder Woman 1984.
