By Steve Macfarlane When Mexican director Felipe Cazals died this past October at the age of 84, domestic and international press alike cited the political importance of his films, while Guillermo del Toro called Cazals an “exemplary and noble teacher” on Twitter. But if the filmmaker’s stature within his home country is ironclad today, his…

By Steve Macfarlane Every day is a film festival on Netflix, and so Nicole Holofcener’s unfortunately-titled The Land of Steady Habits (I guess it’s a slang phrase for Connecticut) touches down as the lights adorning #TIFF18 are finally unplugged. Even if Steady Habits weren’t, as trade critics like to say, “better than it has any…

By Steve Macfarlane Every TIFF features at least one epic-length historical documentary whose subject matter is way too depressing to penetrate the fog of cinephile and awards-season discussions encircling the neighbouring Town Crier, but kicks around in the back of the mind as probably advisable viewing anyway. Once I realized it was on the lineup,…

By Steve Macfarlane Was Vince Vaughn the Owen Wilson to Jon Favreau’s Wes Anderson? As woebegone drug runner Bradley Thomas, Vaughn delivers a rock-solid command lead in S. Craig Zahler’s Brawl in Cell Block 99 that carries the raggedy mantle of Nolte, Kristofferson, Bronson, McQueen, etc. It’s a film that makes it easy to remember…

By Steve Macfarlane Short of insider knowledge, there’s no way Veep creator Armando Iannucci could have anticipated the appetite for Russploitation accompanying the meteoric rise (and/or fall) of America’s 45th president. Nevertheless, The Death of Stalin arrives at the intersection of mid-career Beckett and later-career Mamet, cocked and loaded for maximum chortling at all things…

From Cinema Scope #68 (Fall 2016) By Steve Macfarlane It arrives as both throwaway moment and photo-historical anachronism: dozens are adorned in white on a sand dune, whiling away the hours before dusk; a girl is passed a 19th-century stereopticon, brings it to her eyes, and sees images in motion—glimpses of a city on “the…

By Steve Macfarlane Long before “poverty porn” was popular parlance, a tight-knit network of filmmakers and artists in Colombia made Agarrando Pueblo (The Vampires of Poverty), a satiric mockumentary about Latin American documentarians “selling images of poverty to Europe” to boost their own careers. The 28-minute short gets a few minutes’ special attention in Luis…

By Steve Macfarlane There is no such thing as a “minor” Terence Davies. If anything, the divisive response at Toronto to the Liverpool-born master’s new Sunset Song (based on a 1932 novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon) verifies the preciousness with which critics have been holding Davies’ auteurism, and perhaps their own experiences of his work,…

By Steve Macfarlane A fictionalized, present-day reimagining of Rachel Boynton’s terrific 2005 documentary of same name, Our Brand is Crisis would have an uphill battle on its hands even if it were a masterpiece, which it most certainly is not. David Gordon Green’s latest is instead a pleasant enough if decidedly un-hip studio diversion starring…