The story’s setting is lovely, thematically and visually. It’s 2006 in Bhutan, and the nation has just started to receive Internet and television. Its gorgeous hills and serene mountainsides remain unchallenged, but it makes the slowly growing number of TVs and satellite dishes pop when we see the outsides of homes. It’s exciting how the … Read more
From this unusual starting point, Michel Franco (“Sundown”) weaves a tale of a unique relationship. Sylvia knows how to care for people as a worker at a public home, but she co-exists with her trauma in a way that has led to addiction in the past. She alternates work, AA meetings, and caring for her … Read more
Atom Egoyan is one of Canada’s proudest filmmakers, although his latter-day work has not earned nearly the same international attention as his earlier hits like “Exotica’” and “The Sweet Hereafter.” Nevertheless, loyal fans were excited to see him team up again with Amanda Seyfried, the star of his 2009 film “Chloe.” Written and directed by … Read more
A woman credited only as Girlie (Dakota Johnson) exits a plane and walks out to a cab, telling the coordinator that she needs to go to midtown Manhattan. She ends up in the back seat of a vehicle driven by Clark (Sean Penn), a tough guy who wishes he had a better name like Vinny, … Read more
Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour is a solid, true-crime debut for the talented actress. It should play well now that Netflix acquired it. PLOT: The true story of an actress (Anna Kendrick) who, in the seventies, went on The Dating Game and was matched with Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), who was later revealed to … Read more
Similar to Burt Lancaster’s “Birdman,” Colman’s Divine G is a soft-spoken, meditative intellectual. Every six months, Divine G’s theater group—a team of incarcerated men at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, led by director Brent (Paul Raci)—chooses a new play to perform and new members to bring in. This time, they’ve chosen Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin), the … Read more
Someone who has been through the star system and back again is Michael Keaton, who brought his own directorial effort about a hired assassin—murder is definitely a trend on the fest circuit this year—in the frustrating “Knox Goes Away.” Keaton is such a stoic performer, a phenomenal actor whose low-key energy can sometimes be deployed … Read more
The biopic “Nyad” also shows the visceral extremes of what it takes to push your body to its limit to achieve greatness. At 28, marathon swimmer Diana Nyad (Annette Bening, never better) attempted to swim from Cuba to Key West in Florida. It was going to be her last swim. When miscalculations and bad weather … Read more
Chris Pine’s directorial debut, Poolman, is a deadly dull flop that’s easily the worst movie playing at TIFF this year. PLOT: A spacey pool cleaner (Chris Pine) discovers a plot to steal water from Los Angeles during a drought. REVIEW: In the fourteen years I’ve been covering TIFF, I’ve seen only a handful of movies that … Read more
Williams then doubles back from that opening frame, retracing how slavery shifted from a color-blind system that included Slavs, before eventually becoming a practice primarily used to put Africans in captivity. His film compares favorably with Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” as a work interested in the falsities that have informed the act … Read more