Festivals: Toronto Film Festival
Friday One Sheet: UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
Brutalism is back, baby! Behold the mighty Winnipeg mortar arches, and thin veneer of snow that together form one of many visual motifs in Matthew Rankin's superbly dry dramedy Universal Language. A large part of the film's delights come from...
Friday One Sheet: THE BRUTALIST
Typography is no stranger to the design of Brady Corbet's "Monumental" new film, The Brutalist. The credits in both the film, and its recent trailer, do interesting things. This carries into this iconic poster, with the Statue of Liberty upside...
A Superb Trailer for Brady Corbet's 70mm Epic, THE BRUTALIST
One of the best films of the year gets one of the best trailers of the year. Harnessing an early scene in the film, before breaking into a montage of the celebration of artictectural form, with the joy and pain...
Friday One Sheet: THE ORDER
I am generally indifferent to collage style posters, particularly when designers transitioned from hand-painted to photoshop. However, I do admire the commitment to verticality taken by design house, Fable, for Justin Kurzel's neo-nazi procedural, The Order. The pull quotes, the above...
Toronto 2024 Review: THEY WILL BE DUST, Love and Death Intertwine in Euthanasia Romance Musical Drama
Director Carlos Marques-Marcet offers an understated exploration of love, mortality, and the choices in facing life's final passage, blending realism with poetic dance sequences.
Friday One Sheet: SHARP CORNER Teaser
This will be a short one today, with this minimalist teaser for Jason Buxton's dark character study, Sharp Corner. A family man (Ben Foster) becomes obsessed with saving the lives of the car accident victims on the sharp corner in front...
Toronto 2024 Review: THE WILD ROBOT, Ground-breaking Animation Powers Familiar Family Tale
Dreamworks Animation presents Chris Sanders' adaptation of Peter Brown's popular children's book.
Toronto 2024 Review: THE CUT, Orlando Bloom Gets Shredded in Harrowing Boxing Drama
Orlando Bloom, Caitríona Balfe and John Turturro lead Sean Ellis' sports drama.
Toronto 2024 Review: CARNIVAL IS OVER, Neo-Noir Thriller Packed With Humor, Danger and Twists
Leandra Lea and Irandhir Santos star in Fernando Coimbra's third feature, a contemporary noir based in Rio.
Friday One Sheet: DEAD MAIL
Delightfully low-fi and textured, the key art for Joe DeBoer's and Kyle McConaghy's Dead Mail not only is a great reflection of the analog style of the film, but also offers a significant amount of information about the plot. The...
Toronto 2024 Review: RIFF RAFF, Riffs on Parenting, The Holidays, And THE REF
The foul mouthed holiday film is now, more or less, a cinema tradition. From Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa to National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation to Harold Ramis’s The Ice Harvest, there are plenty of these anti-Christmas yet still kinda Christmas...
Toronto 2024 Review: BY THE STREAM (Suyoocheon), Hong Sang-Soo's Primer On How To Watch His Work
I have not seen all of Hong Sang-Soo's feature films, but I have seen many of them. Starting somewhere in the late 1990s, it took me years to figure out how to watch them. Had this one been made earlier...
Toronto 2024 Interview: THE GESUIDOUZ Director Kenichi Ugana Talks Punk, Transnationalism, and Childhood
If you're a genre fiend with a taste for the low-budget and oddball, you might have noticed Kenichi Ugana's name appearing time and again over the past few years at festivals such as Fantasia, Japan Cuts, and Nippon Connection. With...
Toronto 2024 Review: THE SHADOW STRAYS, Another Knockout Action Extravaganza From Timo Tjahjanto
A teenage assassin, codename 13, is part of a secret organization of assassins known only as The Shadows. When she fumbles during her last mission she is suspended and shipped back to Jakarta to wait until her mentor, Umbra, calls...
Toronto 2024 Review: SHARP CORNER, An Emasculated Ben Foster Goes to Dark Places
There is a railroad trestle over Gregson Street in Durham, North Carolina, that is a bit lower than it should be. In spite of flashing lights and a few signs, several times a month a cube van or tractor...
Friday One Sheet: GULIZAR
A simple, melancholy image forms most of the design for the key art of Belkis Bayrak's Gülizar. A woman in a car presses her hands up to the glass, eyes downcast, as if saying goodbye to her world for the last...
Toronto 2024 Review: THE ASSESSMENT, Savage Science Fiction Parable of State Authority and Parenting
Giving a whole new meaning to the phrase, “we took a pregnancy test,” Fleur Fortuné’s debut feature, The Assessment, is a saturated, button-pushing provocation on parental anxiety. It is a Kobayashi Maru wrapped in a Voight-Kampff test inside the Stanford Prison...
HOLD YOUR BREATH Official Trailer: He'll Make You do Terrible Things
Karrie Crouse and Will Joines' drama horror Hold Your Breath will have its World Premiere here in Toronto on Thursday. Then it will stream on Hulu on October 3rd. The other day we featured the key art and this week the...
Toronto 2024 Review: SEEDS, Fear The Angry, Kick-Ass Indigenous Woman
Ziggy is Kanyen'kehà:ka, a member of the Mohawk tribe living in the big city of Toronto. Ziggy’s goal is to be an influencer, to quit her job shuttling meals around town on her bike. After work and making her videos...
Toronto 2024 Review: RELAY, Propulsive Paranoid Tradecraft
There is one line of dialogue repeated, over and over in Relay, like a mantra: “Go ahead.” It is spoken by nearly every major character as they communicate through anonymous telephone operators, to preserve each other's privacy. This aspect alone makes for a...
