Only a few films could pack a 2,300-seat theater at a 12:30 Thursday morning screening as did Gaspar Noé’s 3-D orgiastic opus Love when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Sight unseen, it had already gained notoriety for the director’s declared intention to add emotion to explicit sex within a love story. Well, in […]
There are very few actors with the charisma and sex appeal of Idris Elba, as witnessed five years ago at the Tribeca Film Festival. He made an appearance there to support his starring role in a British indie, Legacy. At the box office, filmgoers, most of them women, bought a ticket for a film whose […]
One challenge at the Toronto International Film Festival is having enough time to check out films and directors that you may not know, in search of a gem that you (and thousands of others) can discover and claim as your own. Fortunately, a handful of shot-in-the-dark experiences were among the most memorable this year. A […]
Even if you’ve read Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room or already heard about this film adaptation, there is little chance that too much foreknowledge will lessen the story’s complexity. At the recent Toronto International Film Festival, it was perhaps the most talked about selection; I couldn’t cover my ears in time before I found […]
The Toronto International film festival is so vast that it’s hard to get a handle on it. With a selection of 288 feature films, TIFF is really about a dozen festivals under the umbrella of one. A viewer can only hope to taste a slice of the programming. Even if festivalgoers intend on solely exploring, […]
The premieres of films by internationally known directors attracted most of the coverage at Cannes: consider the critical love that was bestowed upon Todd Haynes’s Carol or the thumping Gus van Sant received for The Sea of Trees. Big names were represented from all over: Asian auteurs (Jia Zhang-ke and Hou Hsiao-Hsien) and the big […]
Of all the films in the official Cannes Film Festival competition this year, Carol should have been awarded the Most Valuable Player. It ticks off nearly all the boxes: strong acting all around; a rich, muted, Edward Hopper–esque palette; impeccable period details, namely the prim and proper costuming; and, most importantly, the straightforward direction by […]
It was only the third day of the Cannes Film Festival when Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips rightfully predicted that the first feature film by Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes would win a top jury award. He wasn’t exactly sticking his neck out. Even if the official competition’s lineup were strong this year, and it wasn’t […]
John C. Reilly was a triple threat at Cannes, costarring in Lobster and sharing screen time with Salma Hayek in Tale of Tales, two films in the competition. He also popped out of nowhere in a cameo in Thomas Bidegain’s debut, the French-language Les Cowboys, one of the most ambitious films in the entire festival. […]
