Wanna read Todd Brown's take on Sono Sion's Why Don't You Play In Hell. No problem. And what did Kurt Halfyard think of the Danilel Radcliffe vehicle Horns? Read on. Meanwhile, Jason Gorber weighs in on Gravity and Ryland Aldrich declares All Cheerleaders Die (for the enjoyment of the cinema going masses), plus, much, much more. And still it's just the halfway mark.
Sono's WHY DON'T YOU PLAY IN HELL Brings The Madness To Midnight By Todd Brown, Founder and Editor
Sono's Why Don't You Play In Hell is absolutely mad. It is every insane urge and image that Sono has had banging around in his head unused over his career distilled down and splashed on screen in all its absurd - and frequently very bloody - glory. Fans, rejoice: This is the Sono film you've been waiting for since Love Exposure.
GRAVITY, An Experience Like No Other By Jason Gorber, Featured Critic
It's clearly no surprise that Gravity is a film about equal and opposite reactions, about the limitations and the possibilities, about the tenaciousness and fragility of human beings. We see the wonders we can build, and the powers that can destroy them. And, yes, it's beautiful to look at. This is simply the reason that 3D cinema has been developed - forget your dismissal of uncomfortable glasses or complaints about dim projection, find yourself an IMAX or appropriately giant screen and revel in this this apotheosis of cinematic wonder. Cuarón stereographic team seems as capable as the rest of the extraordinary technicians and artists that brought this film to life.
ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE Brings A Cosmopolitan Maturity To The Ailing Vampire Genre By Kurt Halfyard, Contributing Writer
Detroit is the new Transylvania in Jim Jarmusch's delightfully detached vampire reverie, Only Lovers Left Alive. The film manages to significantly build upon and outdo Neil Jordan's recent Byzantium in terms of clawing back the genre from its more recent sparkly teen-focus...
...For Jarmusch's last couple pictures, Broken Flowers and in particular The Limits Of Control, his camera has been in love with the way Tilda Swinton walks, sways or sashays. Her travel from North Africa to America (night flights and taxis, natch) are a sensual visual experience in and of itself. When I say I could watch a film of Swinton merely packing her luggage, I actually get that here, in miniature, and it is indeed wonderful to see her throw her copies of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and David Foster Wallace into her carry-on valise.
ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE Lets The Good Times Load By Ryland Aldrich, Festivals Editor
When it comes to the ample challenge of squeezing out profit from an indie film, current dogma would have it that titles closer to the start of the alphabet do better on digital VOD platforms. Therefore you'd be forgiven for believing a film with a VOD-tastic title like All Cheerleaders Die might be playing up to the digital crowd. Indeed a movie filled with scantily clad cheerleaders, pot-smoking high schoolers, and all sorts of supernatural horror has plenty to offer those casually browsing for fun-filled flicks. While it can be accused of throwing everything but the kitchen sink at you, the movie earns points for going for it. It's silly and it's schlocky, but ultimately All Cheerleaders Die is a true crowd pleaser.
THE DOUBLE Confirms Aoyade As A Potent, Fresh Voice By Todd Brown, Found and Editor
[Richard] Ayoade is back now with film number two, The Double. A film that counts Spring Breakers director Harmony Korine amongst its producers, former IT Crowd co-stars Chris Morris and Chris O'Dowd amongst its cast, and is - not surprisingly at the point because we've known it for quite a long time, but still quite odd - adapted from a story by Dostoevsky. And now it can be said definitively: My side of the argument around Submarine was absolutely correct, those who dismissed Ayoade as an Anderson clone were wildly wrong, and what we have here is a fiercely intelligent, hugely idiosyncratic talent who is seemingly capable of going in any great number of directions and making all of them entirely his own. Two films is too soon by far to be labeling someone a master but Ayoade stands alongside Ben Wheatley as vibrant proof that the future of British film is both quite odd and very, very bright. The Double is simply fantastic.
The Devil Is In The Details In HORNS By Kurt Halfyard, Contributing Writer
Radcliffe shines as the confused, lovesick protagonist that may or may not be losing his mind (cue the too familiar Pixies song) but too often the film does not seem to want to be as serious as he is treating the material. Just when you can sink your teeth in to some real drama, all is utterly dropped for computer generated snakes and silly revenge plotting. Shift gears again to all sorts of cutesy sight gags. Pitchforks, including Eve's Diner (with it's apple logo) and a Jazz bar that looks like Hell's favorite nightclub or something out of a Tex Avery cartoon. The most egregious sin is how it equates two homosexual policeman with evil (or even worse, cheap chuckles) for clumsily coming together.
THE FIFTH ESTATE Showcases Benedict Cumberbatch By Jason Gorber, Featured Critic
I guess it all comes down to what one comes to a Wikileaks movie about in the first place. As the film admonishes at the end, if you want the "facts", you're encouraged to go find them out yourselves. As an introduction to the events that led to the rise of the site, the film may be simplistic and overly contrived, but it may in fact spark some discussion by those that are only aware of the white-haired man's notoriety...
...The Fifth Estate proves little more than a showcase for the acting talents of a supreme mime in the form of the lanky Cumberbatch, and despite some florid and at times annoying flourishes, Condon manages to showcase enough of this performer in a positive and compelling enough way that it's sure to get its share of attention come awards season.
INTRUDERS Proves The Power Of Perspective By Todd Brown, Founder and Editor
After winning a great deal of love with his debut feature Daytime Drinking, Noh proves here that his early success was not a fluke nor a flash in the pan. He draws exceptional performances out of his key cast, shoots beautifully compelling film, is gifted with a dry wit, and is a writer willing to make bold and challenging choices. Intruders is unlikely to find the same sort of audience abroad that Daytime Drinking did but it is certainly a worthwhile experience.
12 YEARS A SLAVE Gracefully Examines Our Troubling Past By Ryland Aldrich, Festivals Editor
While it may be more than a bit hyperbolic to call any movie transcendent mere hours after a first viewing, it's all too easy to declare Steve McQueen's 12 Years A Slave more than just a damn good movie. The film is of the utmost technical quality from acting and art direction to music and montage. But there is so much more than that here. The film tackles the darkest corner of American history and humanizes it in a way that allows the audience to experience it without simply being overwhelmed by its tragedy. Perhaps there is no choice but to call it transcendent.
SOUTHCLIFFE Collapses Under Its Own Weight By Todd Brown, Founder and Editor
For the first half of its running time the experience of watching the Tony Grisoni scripted, Sean Durkin directed Southcliffe is not unlike the experience of lancing a boil. It is excruciating, yet also somehow exhilerating to watch this tragic tale unfold, each turn of the needle revealing new nuance and perspective on an unspeakable - and yet all too common, in these days - crime. The tale of a small town destroyed by a random gunman, a mass killing nobody saw coming, is positively littered with sterling performances while Durkin - still riding high from the success of Martha Marcy May Marlene brings Grisoni's beautifully rich writing to life. It is confident enough to be understated, smart enough to trust in the value of subtlety. All the more tragic, then, to watch it all collapse in the second half, victimized by Grisoni's sudden desire to play for Big Drama instead of truthfulness while simultaneously seeming to forget what story it is he's telling at all.
CANNIBAL, A Beautiful And Minimalist Study Of Love By Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg, Contributing Writer
...director Manuel Martín Cuenca's Cannibal is a minimalist thriller, a story of love and pain, stripped of veneer and yet controlled and refined. It is a film about light and shadow, the interior and exterior spaces we occupy, with a incredible central performance by Antonio de la Torre...
...Cuenca gives us a meditative examination of the strangeness of this particular human heart, without resorting to cheap violence, but instead presenting a meditative study in precision, pain, loneliness and redemption.
iNUMBER NUMBER Brings Reservoir Dogs To South Africa By Kurt Halfyard, Contributing Writer
Sweating men, decaying industrial wasteland and corruption of all stripes are all front and center in iNumber Number, an esoteric name for a movie that is all other respects is tight as drumskin. Consider it Reservoir Rats, only replace Tarantino's sharp dialogue with a more pragmatic pidgin of Zulu and English. Though this is Donovan Marsh's fourth feature film none of the previous three appear to be crime pictures making this a calling card for the world to take notice...
...It is a tour de fucking force that will be excellently remixed in the film's lengthy climax making it clear that Donovan captured and invented his own signature style of action cinema. As kinetic genre discoveries go at TIFF, it is what 7 Cajas was for the 2012 festival, and Nuit Blanche was the year before that.
Kurosawa's REAL Is A Bland Disappointment By Todd Brown, Founder and Editor
Acclaimed Japanese director Kurosawa Kiyoshi - a great favorite around these parts - ends a five year absence from feature films with 2013 effort Real, the story of a young man granted the opportunity via high technology to project his consciousness into the mind of his comatose lover in an attempt to restore her to health. Unfortunately he happens to tell this story just a year after Lithuania's Kristina Buozyte tackled the exact same premise with her astonishing Vanishing Waves. Even more unfortunately, Kurosawa's film isn't nearly as good.
Tahrir Doc THE SQUARE Is A Modern Masterpiece By Jason Gorber, Featured Critic
Let's cut right to the chase - Jehane Noujaim's epic, astonishing documentary The Square is easily one of the most complex, most nuanced, and frankly most important documentaries made about the ongoing political developments in Egypt. Heck, I'll go further, it's one of the finer historical documentaries I think that's ever been made, period.
PARKLAND, A Refreshingly Original Take On The Death Of JFK By Jason Gorber, Featured Critic
This is a film that illuminates the little details of the day - a bloodied pair of gloves, the challenge of developing film, the sawing of a plane door - creating memorable vignettes. In so doing, Parkland provides a refreshingly original take on such an historic event. It may not entirely succeed, but it's a noble effort at a new way of dealing with an event of such historical magnitude.
METALHEAD Offers A Searing Portrait Of Grief By Todd Brown, Found and Editor
A powerful portrait of grief never dealt with - of grief so powerful it likely never can or will be dealt with - Metalhead is the film that will very likely finally draw the sort of attention to Icelandic director Ragnar Bragason that he deserved to receive four films ago. The simplest way to put it would be to say that Bragason is the director most likely to follow in Baltasar Kormakur's footsteps and cross over into larger international success but while that's true it also somewhat diminishes Bragason's own unique voice.
THE DOG, An Engrossing Look At The Real Guy Behind DOG DAY AFTERNOON By Jason Gorber, Featured Critic
Behind the sensationalistic story of a bank robbery committed so that a man could get his male wife a sex-change operation, the film effectively traces the story back to what at the time was a near preposterous move, the attempt to solidify gay marriage as a socially acceptable act. Simply as a document for how much has changed in the four decades since, with the onslaught of AIDS and the growing acceptance for the rights of the LGBT community in the US, the film grants us unique and highly provocative access into the early days that set these events in motion.
SEX, DRUGS & TAXATION Is A Gonzo Biopic So Strange It Has To be True By Todd Brown, Founder and Editor
Just as you are unlikely to ever come across a more unlikely friendship than that which blossomed between browbeaten tax lawyer Mogens Glistrup and hedonist playboy Simon Spies through the 1960s in Denmark, you are equally unlikely to settle on a more unlikely filmmaker than Christoffer Boe to tell their story. Best known for serious fare that treads the line between arthouse and genre film while toying with ideas of love, memory and obsession, Boe here tackles a real life story of sex, drugs and discount airlines and the results are utterly compelling.
THE SACRAMENT Will Make You Want To Drink The Kool-Aid By Ryland Aldrich, Festivals Editor
We can spend plenty of time debating the merits of the use of in-world video. It can often be a tricky device as it runs the risk of taking the audience out of the film as they search for visual clues and anachronisms. What we can't argue is its current popularity. Call it what you like, but The Sacrament does it better than most, and that makes for one exciting ride.
DEVIL'S KNOT Adds Little To Tragic Story By Jason Gorber, Featured Critic
For each of the last three years, the story of what transpired in West Memphis, Arkansas on May 5, 1993 has been the subject of a film that has played the Toronto International Film Festival...
...Devil's Knot is clunky, sordid, and at its worst pedantic. It focuses so superficially on these events that comparing it to made-for-TV docudramas does injustice to that form of television. Its performances are arch, its story facile, and perhaps most egregiously it treads on the specifics of the case in order to craft a meagre drama, while overlong scrolling text at the finale tries to tie everything up neatly.
THE STATION Aims For Creature Feature Greatness But Misses The Mark By Todd Brown, Founder and Editor
All of the ingredients are in place for The Station to be a thrilling exercise in crowd pleasing horror. You've got a hot young director in Rammbock's Marvin Kren being given a significant boost in resources to prove what he can do. You've got an absolutely gorgeous location to spread across the screen and give the film scope. And you've got a compelling central premise that promises thrills and chills a'plenty with a multitude of bizarre creatures for shock value. It's all there, all of it driving expectations that are never met with the film sadly ending up as just a pale shadow of the superior pictures which are its primary influences.
RUSH Burns Rubber, Makes Hearts Race By Jason Gorber, Featured Critic
The rush that Rush documents is of a far more sophisticated kind than the likes of the over-the-top ridiculousness of Days of Thunder, and easily lives up to the spirit of the best parts of Frankenheimer's 1966 classic Grand Prix. Like the (fantastic) documentary Senna, this film may just in fact ignite in American audiences an appreciation for this pinnacle of the auto racing world, but I'm not holding my breath. Some remain content to see cars unable to turn right, circling booze-filled stadia while their flock wait for whatever crash is to occur.
CANOPY Is An Interesting But Flawed Experience By Todd Brown, Founder and Editor
Canopy is a film that sets out to be an immersive experience and ends up settling for being an interesting experiment instead. that's not an entirely bad place to be, really, but it is less than what it could have been in surer hands.
BREAK LOOSE Doesn't Quite Hold Together By Jason Gorber, Featured Critic
All the ingredients are here for a fine thriller - political discord, corrupt cops, ruthless proto-oligarchs, and car chases, all set against the backdrop of the waning years of Yeltsin, and the massive social and political change that would take place under Putin ushering Russia into the new Millennium. Alas, despite its slick facade and moments of overly choreographed brutality, one's left after Alexey Uchitel's Break Loose simply wanting more - wanting more believable interactions between our characters, more believable consequences for some of the actions, and simply more excitement.