Now that the dust has settled, it’s time to unveil the five best films we saw at the Toronto International Film Festival these past few weeks. In a rare bit of consensus, Hannah and I had the exact same top five picks. Incredible, but true! So let’s do this, our last TIFF article is the big countdown and our list of films you should keep top of mind for the Fall and Winter movie season:
5. Poolman
Let’s kick things off with the movie that seemingly only Hannah and I liked (based on the current score over at Rotten Tomatoes). I’ve written about this one pretty extensively already, but we both found Chris Pine’s farcical spin on stoner noir to be a hoot. The more it’s sat with me, the more I’ve come to appreciate it. I wouldn’t dare make this comparison on a quality level, but beyond the Under the Silver Lake/Big Lebowski sun-drenched throughlines, Poolman shares some of the same spirit as Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance. An effort that knows exactly what it’s doing within the confines of its genre and poking holes at your own expectations of what could be around their respective corners. I’m convinced that in a decade, critics and cinephiles are going to pretend like they always loved this one. Just like with Wet Hot American Summer, another fair point of comparison.
4. Woman of the Hour
The premise was so good: “A film about the Dating Game serial killer” that we couldn’t resist. Turns out that Anna Kendrick’s step behind the camera to tell this story was well worth it. Her dueling narratives of Rodney Alcala, the mass murderer of note, and Cheryl Bradshaw, failed actress turned Dating Game contestant is threaded together beautifully. This is one of those stories where you can’t believe it actually happened, but it did (with some liberties taken to help shore up the graciously tight running time). What we both appreciated perhaps the most, beyond how the movie just *moves*, was Kendrick’s focus on the victims of which these crimes were perpetrated against rather than glorifying their killer. And yet, not a moment of the film’s suspense is at all sacrificed. Indeed, this actually heightens it. Of all the films we saw at the festival, this comes the closest to being a potential popular hit. It’ll be on Netflix soon for your enjoyment.
3. Evil Does Not Exist
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s follow-up to Drive My Car, which I’ve written about exhaustively and have thought about a lot in the days since seeing it. I’ll repeat myself a bit by saying it’s a challenging film, and its first 10 minutes will particularly be a stress test for viewers who have slightly more demanding attention spans. But if you come in with your mental accelerator turned down, what you’ll is a beautiful exhibition of nature and evocation of our place within it. Once Hamaguchi gets going though, you’ll also discover at points his most humorous script, particularly from the perspective of his big city “antagonist” that comes to attune himself more with the quiet life. Its ending will be debated for a long time, and we had fellow audience members ask us to explain it to them (and Hannah had to explain some parts to me before that), but its late-breaking puzzle nature gives the film even greater grandeur.
2. The Beast
For its first hour, I wasn’t sure I liked Bertrand Bonello’s latest effort, the first film of his either of us had seen. Its sci-fi concept, of being able to use technology to wipe out the traumatic experiences of your past lives to prevent their impact on your present, was very cool. But I couldn’t help but wonder where this all was going, but once its next nearly two hours rolled past me (they don’t call it The Beast for nothing, gang) I was enraptured. The simplest way to describe the film is “Cloud Atlas made by someone who actually has something to say”, but I’m almost willing to go further for the throat and throw out that this is what would happen if Shane Carruth had ever made good movies. Or at least movies I actually like. Thought provoking, romantic, challenging, with an immense scope, The Beast is all of these things. And in a slightly weaker year for the festival, it would easily top our list. And yet…
1. The Boy and The Heron
What was thought to be Hayao Miyazaki’s third retirement film, and is now apparently no longer that, is a full-blown masterpiece. The kind of movie where I immediately turned to Hannah and said “why do I even bother watching American animation anymore?” This is Miyazaki returning to the fantastical sweet spot that saw him create such canon entries as Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, and taking in the whole of his filmography, it might rank right among them for me. Its tale of a young boy trying to find normalcy after the loss of his mother, which quickly takes a turn for the fantastic, is the rare kind of gem that acts as a template to fire off your own creative juices. I walked away from this thinking that I too should do my part to make better art, as sadly its current masters won’t be with us for all that much longer.