Cinema Scope Online

TIFF 2015 | Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, UK/ France/ Germany/ Malaysia/ Thailand)—Masters

By Kong Rithdee | 09/09/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Kong Rithdee Originally published in Cinema Scope 63 (Summer 2015). Midway into Cemetery of Splendour, Jenjira Pongpas visits the Shrine of the Two Goddesses with her American husband to make offerings: she gives the goddesses a cheetah figurine for blessings on her bad leg, a gibbon for her strong limbs, and a tiger for…

TIFF 2015 | Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, Colombia/Venezuela/Argentina)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Blake Williams | 09/08/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Blake Williams Ciro Guerra, taking after Werner Herzog, understands the influential power of research narratives when it comes to representing a nation’s colonialist past—especially with regards to meticulous details. Why else would the chief selling points in the loglines of his last two features boast of these productions’ pedantic commitments to, e.g., a surplus…

TIFF 2015 | Cinema Scope 64 Preview | Bleak Street (Arturo Ripstein, Mexico/Spain)—Masters

By Jose Teodoro | 09/08/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

Eternal Damnation: Arturo Ripstein’s Bleak Street By José Teodoro Originally published in Cinema Scope 64 (Fall 2015). There is no such thing as ambient sunlight in Bleak Street. The sun’s rays descend from high above, diffused by a latticework of electrical cables, metal stairs, frayed tarpaulin, and urban flotsam, or slam down in hard sheets…

TIFF 2015 | Francofonia (Alexander Sokurov, Germany/France/Netherlands)— Masters

By Michael Sicinski | 09/08/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Michael Sicinski [SPOILER: James Franco does not appear in this film.] There was no reason to expect something playful from Sokurov, especially after his excruciating take on Faust (2011). But with Francofonia we find Russia’s melancholic master offering up an essay-film take on the Louvre that’s downright breezy. After setting up a contemporary framing…

TIFF 2015 | A Heavy Heart (Thomas Stuber, Germany) — Contemporary World Cinema

By Angelo Muredda | 09/08/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Angelo Muredda Student Oscar nominee Thomas Stuber makes his first tentative mark in features with A Heavy Heart, a close-quarters profile of unsmiling musclehead Herbert (Peter Kurth), whose heyday as a boxer in East Germany—he almost but didn’t go to the Olympics, as his friends remind him—is long gone post-reunification. Now a hired goon…

TIFF 2015 | Lamb (Yared Zeleke, Ethiopia/ France/ Germany/ Norway)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Muge Turan | 09/08/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Müge Turan This year there are two films titled Lamb on the festival circuit. Both are coming-of-age tales. Both have lambs. Kutluğ Ataman’s Lamb is about a boy in rural Turkey who needs to be circumcised, and is told that he’ll be slaughtered and eaten if they can’t buy a lamb for the celebration…

TIFF 2015 | Murmur of the Hearts (Sylvia Chang, Taiwan/Hong Kong)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Shelly Kraicer | 09/08/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Shelly Kraicer Sylvia Chang’s newest film is the illustrious actress-director-writer-producer’s best since Siao Yu (1995). Murmur of the Hearts is a sophisticated family drama whose emotional force sustains a narrative of ambitious power and range. Nan (Lawrence Ko) and Mei (radiant Macanese star Isabella Leong, in a long-awaited return to the screen) are a…

TIFF 2015 | Room (Lenny Abrahamson, Ireland/Canada)—Special Presentations

By Angelo Muredda | 09/08/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Angelo Muredda The first thing a reader of Emma Donoghue’s novel Room will notice about Lenny Abrahamson’s mostly sturdy adaptation is a problem of perspective. The impressionistic early montage of mundane objects (a sink and a toilet, which soon become known to us as the talismanic idols Sink and Toilet) quickly gives way to…

TIFF 2015 | Blood of My Blood (Marco Bellocchio, Italy)—Masters

By Diana Dabrowska | 09/08/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Diana Dabrowska The eternal rebel still has fists in his pocket. In his most recent films, Marco Bellocchio has challenged some of the central pathologies of Italian 20th-century history, including the Aldo Moro case in Good Morning, Night (2003) and the rise of Mussolini in Vincere (2009). Unfortunately, in the quirky and rather bizarre…

TIFF 2015 | Cinema Scope 64 Preview | The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (Ben Rivers, UK—Wavelengths

By Leo Goldsmith | 09/08/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

Leeching Upon the Lifeblood of the Real: Ben Rivers’ The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers By Leo Goldsmith Originally published in Cinema Scope 64 (Fall 2015). Ben Rivers’ recent short, Things (2014), is an intimate tour of the filmmaker’s own domestic space and personal effects. Including…

TIFF 2015 | Looking for Grace (Sue Brooks, Australia)—Platform

By Diana Dabrowska | 09/08/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Diana Dabrowska It begins in an innocent way: wwo teenagers on the road, Grace (Odessa Young) and Sappho (Kenya Pearson), meet Jamie (Harry Richardson), a nice guy with a rebel-without-a-cause vibe. Grace is attracted to him; director Sue Brooks provides the foreplay, a gentle build of excitement and erotic tension. We accompany Grace through…

TIFF 2015 | Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, US)—Special Presentations

By Jay Kuehner | 09/08/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Jay Kuehner Cinema has a thing for journalism, but any reciprocal adulation must certainly be attenuated by the swift, sensational work that movies make of the press’ labours. No small irony then that Spotlight’s story—about a crack but underperforming team of Boston Globe investigative reporters trying to expose the Massachusetts Catholic Church sex abuse…

TIFF 2015 | Dégradé (Arab Nasser & Tarzan Nasser, Palestine/France/Qatar)—Discovery

By Adam Nayman | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Adam Nayman As ambulatory mammalian metaphors go, a manacled and toothless lion is pretty shaggy stuff: chained passively outside a Gaza Strip hair salon operated and populated by a group of women, the poor beast stands in for a society under the thumb of violent ideologues. A kind of distaff Dog Day Afternoon shot…

TIFF 2015 | Der Nachtmahr (AKIZ, Germany)—Vanguard

By Adam Nayman | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Adam Nayman What Kim Gordon is doing in an arty, Berlin-set German genre movie is anybody’s guess, but the strangeness of her extended cameo as an empathetic high-school English teacher at least interrupts the surrounding monotony. In his feature debut, pseudonomynous German video artist (and Banksy associate) AKIZ stages the same scene over and…

TIFF 2015 | Stranger (Yermek Tursunov, Kazakhstan)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Adam Nayman | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Adam Nayman With Kazakhstan going to the dogs, young Ilyas decides to run with the wolves. Stranger isn’t officially an adaptation of The Jungle Book, but there’s more than a pinch of Kipling to its wild-child set-up. The notion that a feral lifestyle on the outskirts of the steppe is preferable to village life…

TIFF 2015 | Cinema Scope 64 Preview | High-Rise (Ben Wheatley, UK)—Platform

By Tom Charity | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Tom Charity Originally published in Cinema Scope 64 (Fall 2015). “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.” That, friends, is an opening sentence: J.G. Ballard at his best. And…

TIFF 2015 | The Treasure (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania/France)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Adam Cook | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

Digging for History: Corneliu Porumboiu on The Treasure By Adam Cook Originally published in Cinema Scope 63 (Summer 2015). Corneliu Porumboiu has always been the joker of the Romanian New Wave, as well as its most consistent and formally rigorous director. Employing the slow pace, long takes, and non-professional actors that have become the calling…

TIFF 2015 | Les êtres chers (Anne Émond)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Adam Nayman | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Adam Nayman Anne Émond bests fellow French-Canadian whippersnapper Xavier Dolan in the Now-That’s-What-I-Call-’90s-Music department in Les êtres chers, as Blind Melon and Elliott Smith give way to Pulp (“Common People,” naturellement). That the first two (dead) artists specialized in songs about suicide and the latter made a habit of we-love-life anthems offers a hint…

TIFF 2015 | Ninth Floor (Mina Shum, Canada)—TIFF Docs

By Mallory Andrews | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Mallory Andrews It’s an all-too-common predicament when viewing a documentary to have to overlook a work’s technical flaws in order to appreciate the potency of its subject matter. To wit, Double Happiness (1994) director Mina Shum’s first nonfiction outing is yet another example of an inherently interesting topic existing within the body of an…

TIFF 2015 | Schneider vs. Bax (Alex van Warmerdam, The Netherlands/Belgium)— Contemporary World Cinema

By Adam Nayman | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Adam Nayman Double Dutch hitmen, separated by a swamp and gunning for each other at the behest of a mutual colleague with his own agenda and no scruples: the set-up for Alex van Warmerdam’s comic thriller is lean and mean. The follow-through, though, is cramped, convoluted, and downright cruel, at times in ways that…

TIFF 2015 | Office (Johnnie To, China/Hong Kong)—Special Presentations

By Shelly Kraicer | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Shelly Kraicer If Hou Hsiao-hsien can make a martial-arts fantasy, then Johnnie To can damn well make a glossy musical. And with Office he has, and it’s splendid. More of a musical than Hou’s The Assassin is a swordfest, Office has, if I counted correctly, ten new songs (some only a few bars long), all…

TIFF 2015 | The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, Ireland/ UK/ Greece/ France/ Netherlands)—Special Presentations

By Angelo Muredda | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Angelo Muredda You’d be hard-pressed to think of a more singular contemporary filmmaker than Yorgos Lanthimos, whose off-kilter satires are perfectly attuned to humanity’s endless capacity for self-delusion. It’s a shame, then, that to this critic Lanthimos’ English-language debut The Lobster recalls nothing so much as My Blueberry Nights (2007), in which Wong…

TIFF 2015 | Hitchcock/Truffaut (Kent Jones, France/US)—TIFF Docs

By Adam Cook | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Adam Cook One of the most sacred texts in cinephilia and certainly for auteurism, François Truffaut’s 1967 Hitchcock/Truffaut (based on a week-long interview Truffaut conducted with Hitchcock in 1962) isn’t just an invaluable in-depth study of one of cinema’s greatest masters, it’s also an incredible text about two artists who admired each other. As…

TIFF 2015 | A Flickering Truth (Pietra Brettkelly, New Zealand)—TIFF Docs

By Richard Porton | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Richard Porton New Zealand documentarian Pietra Brettkelly’s A Flickering Truth focuses on some of the most intrepid preservationists to ever apply their talents to resuscitating celluloid: the staff of Afghan Film, the national film institute dedicated to housing Afghanistan’s imperilled film heritage. Brettkelly’s protagonists are a bickering group of cranky but idealistic film buffs,…

TIFF 2015 | Equals (Drake Doremus, US)—Special Presentations

By Manu Yanez | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Manu Yáñez On its surface, Equals is a modern take on 20th-century dystopic science fiction: a mix of Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451, full of characters who feel like they’ve sprouted from Body Snatchers’ pods. At its core, the third episode of Drake Doremus’ sentimental trilogy—after the memory-based Like Crazy (2011) and present-tense…

TIFF 2015 | Koza (Ivan Ostrochovský, Slovakia/Czech Republic—Contemporary World Cinema

By Michael Sicinski | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Michael Sicinski Ivan Ostrochovský, up to now exclusively a documentarian, draws heavily on that experience for his debut feature, a hybrid work in which the principals play lightly fictionalized versions of themselves. To the credit of all concerned, this was in no way obvious while watching Koza. Ostrochovský worked out the film’s rather slight…

TIFF 2015 | Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhangke, China)—Masters

By Mark Peranson | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Mark Peranson At the start of JZ’s new joint, following the forest-green Chinese Film Bureau censorship logo and toot-tooting fanfare comes the admonition to “Go West” from the Pet Shop Boys, in good old 1.33. I doubt the Boys ever though they’d be addressing the Chinese masses yearning to break free, together, of the…

TIFF 2015 | The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson, Canada)—Wavelengths

By Mark Peranson | 09/07/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

Lost in the Funhouse: A Conversation with Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson on The Forbidden Room and Other Stories By Mark Peranson Originally published in Cinema Scope 63 (Summer 2015). Like being sloppily slapped by a wet salmon to the point of submission, such is the impact of Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s inventive, audacious,…

TIFF 2015 | Closet Monster (Stephen Dunn, Canada)—Discovery

By Adam Nayman | 09/04/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Adam Nayman Murder, masturbation, melancholy, molly—this is one overstuffed Canadian debut feature. Perhaps they should have cut the talking hamster. That said rodent squeaks with the voice of Isabella Rossellini marks a casting coup for this low-budget Newfoundland production about the growing pains of a moody teen. The arch campiness of Rossellini’s bits blends…

TIFF 2015 | Love (Gaspar Noé, France)—Vanguard

By Blake Williams | 09/04/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Blake Williams Originally published in Cinema Scope 63 (Summer 2015). It’s been both amusing and disheartening to watch fellow critics lash out against Argentine-born “French extremist” Gaspar Noé’s new movie, a 3D porno un-ironically titled Love, for failing to achieve such “good movie” goals as “acting excellence,” “believable chemistry,” or “naturalistic dialogue.” Admittedly, Love’s…

TIFF 2015 | Sleeping Giant (Andrew Cividino, Canada)—Discovery

By Jason Anderson | 09/04/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Jason Anderson Originally published in Cinema Scope 63 (Summer 2015). Almost 90 per cent of Canada is uninhabitable. Of those who live in the rest, the overwhelming majority live within 500 miles of the US border. So maybe it’s not so surprising that the nation’s filmmakers—themselves largely clustered in the same few square miles…

TIFF 2015 | The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)—Masters

By Jordan Cronk | 09/04/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Jordan Cronk Originally published in Cinema Scope 63 (Summer 2015). The sounds of silence reverberate loudest in The Assassin, Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first feature in eight years. The film’s opening image, of a donkey quietly grazing in a field, immediately suggests an acute awareness of natural ambience. This impression manifests itself as the…

TIFF 2015 | Te Prometo Anarquía (Julio Hernández Cordón, Mexico/Germany)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Mark Peranson | 09/04/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Mark Peranson Ciudad de México. Skateboarding compadres and casual lovers, Miguel and Johnny have known each other since they were kids—Johnny’s mother, Brenda, is still the maid for Miguel’s well-off family. The two kids spend most of their wasted days skating through the streets of the city, along the overpasses and through the markets…

TIFF 2015 | 45 Years (Andrew Haigh, UK)—Special Presentations

By Angelo Muredda | 09/04/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Angelo Muredda Andrew Haigh branches out from his chronicles of transitory love among gay male urbanites with 45 Years, one of the shrewdest follow-ups to a calling-card picture in recent memory. The filmmaker trades the Nottingham setting of Weekend (2011) and the San Francisco clubs of his HBO series Looking for the flatlands of…

TIFF 2015 | Jafar Panahi’s Taxi (Jafar Panahi, Iran)—Masters

By Adam Cook | 09/04/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Adam Cook Jafar Panahi’s third “film” since being banned from making movies in his native Iran is a complete contrast to both the melancholy yet empowering This Is Not a Film (2011) and the powerful yet navel-gazing Closed Curtain (2013). Jafar Panahi’s Taxi (as it now seems to be called for North American release)…

TIFF 2015 | Youth (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy)—Special Presentations

By Celluloid Liberation Front | 09/04/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Celluloid Liberation Front While allegedly accessing the higher echelons of world cinema, thus benefiting from bigger budgets, many recent Italian films resemble fruitless advertising campaigns, advertising nothing but themselves. In the case of Paolo Sorrentino, what might have been initially mistaken for talent has regressed into an airtight container of formulaic empty gestures, self-parodies…

TIFF 2015 | An (Naomi Kawase, Japan)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Muge Turan | 09/04/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Müge Turan In An, Naomi Kawase returns from the ocean she explored in her ambitious, ultimately stillborn Still the Water (2014) to take up residence in the far more cloistered location of a Tokyo kitchen. Named for the sweet red bean paste that goes in the middle of a dorayaki pancake, An focuses on…

TIFF 2015 | Arabian Nights (Miguel Gomes, Portugal/ France/ Germany/ Switzerland)—Wavelengths

By Mark Peranson | 09/03/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

Cock and Bull Stories: Miguel Gomes on Arabian Nights By Mark Peranson Originally published in Cinema Scope 63 (Summer 2015). Cinema Scope: Miguel Gomes, you need no introduction to the readers of this magazine. Here you are back in Cannes with a three-part, six-hour epic inspired by the Arabian Nights. There’s general consensus among critics…

TIFF 2015 | In the Shadow of Women (Philippe Garrel, France)—Masters

By Richard Porton | 09/03/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Richard Porton Like other recent Philippe Garrel films (e.g., Frontier of Dawn, Jealousy), In the Shadow of Women is a ruminative tale of a love triangle gone awry. What makes this latest installment in Garrel’s ongoing faux-autobiographical saga slightly different is the contribution of veteran screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. Best known for his work on…

TIFF 2015 | Body (Malgorzata Szumowska, Poland)—Special Presentations

By Richard Porton | 09/03/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Richard Porton One of the dreariest films to receive a showcase as a “Special Presentation” at TIFF in recent years, Malgorzata Szumowska’s Elles (2011) starred Juliette Binoche as a journalist investigating the plight of students earning a living as prostitutes, the resulting farrago illuminating neither the intricacies of the French sex industry nor the…

TIFF 2015 | Sicario (Denis Villeneuve, US)—Special Presentations

By Richard Porton | 09/03/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Richard Porton For those who heaped praise on Sicario after its Cannes premiere, all that mattered—in no particular order—were the virtues of Roger Deakins’ cinematography, Emily Blunt’s kick-ass performance as a FBI agent, and Denis Villeneuve’s assured command of the material. What became lost as critics endorsed the most vapid sort of formalism was…

TIFF 2015 | My Mother (Nanni Moretti, Italy)—Special Presentations

By Celluloid Liberation Front | 09/03/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Celluloid Liberation Front If there is any accomplishment to be ascribed to Nanni Moretti’s cinema at all, it would be that it celebrated the irony-less cult of the self long before the word “millennials” entered the vocabulary of marketing gurus. Though already suffering from an indigestible dose of self-obsession, Moretti’s early films were about…

TIFF 2015 | Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Turkey/ France/ Germany/ Qatar)—Special Presentations

By Jordan Cronk | 09/03/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Jordan Cronk As a film about adolescent girls, told from the perspective of adolescent girls, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut feature Mustang immediately stands out amidst the largely male-dominated efforts of contemporary cinema, its concerns distinctly feminine in constitution, its context specific in circumstance yet universal in scope. In a secluded Turkish village along the…

TIFF 2015 | Dheepan (Jacques Audiard, France)—Special Presentations

By Richard Porton | 09/03/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Richard Porton Jacques Audiard is up to his old tricks. Just as Un prophète, his 2009 art-house success, cynically recycled an admixture of motifs from old prison films cross-fertilized with a dollop of Scorsese-like pizazz and a superficial veneer of social commentary, Dheepan sheds a few crocodile tears for the plight of a burnt-out…

TIFF 2015 | Cinema Scope 64 Preview | The Club (Pablo Larraín, Chile)—Special Presentations

By Quintin | 09/02/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Quintín Originally published in Cinema Scope 64 (Fall 2015). The Club, the fourth feature by Pablo Larraín, is set in a small town in coastal Chile. There’s an unassuming house in this town that the Catholic Church runs as an open prison for priests who have committed serious crimes, sheltering them from the prying…

TIFF 2015 | Cinema Scope 64 Preview | No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, Belgium)—Wavelengths

By Andrea Picard | 09/02/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

Film/Art | We Can’t Go Home Again: Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie By Andréa Picard Originally published in Cinema Scope 64 (Fall 2015). “It is in a house that one is alone. Not outside of it, but inside. In the park there are birds, cats. Maybe even a squirrel, a ferret. We are not alone…

TIFF 2015 | Cinema Scope 64 Preview | 88:88 (Isiah Medina, Canada)—Wavelengths

By Phil Coldiron | 09/02/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

Necessary Means: Isiah Medina on 88:88 By Phil Coldiron Originally published in Cinema Scope 64 (Fall 2015). One of the enduring problems of the cinema is that André Bazin’s answer to the question, “What is it?” is so convincing that he was able to pass off an ontology of one of its modes, namely realism,…

TIFF 2015 | Cinema Scope 64 Preview | Lost and Beautiful (Pietro Marcello, Italy)—Wavelengths

By Blake Williams | 09/02/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

Archive Fever: The Films of Pietro Marcello By Blake Williams Originally published in Cinema Scope 64 (Fall 2015). As is true for many of the more interesting Italian filmmakers currently working outside of the country’s “thriving,” increasingly globalized film industry, Pietro Marcello’s films liberally fuse a range of vérité and metaphysical elements to contemplate the…

TIFF 2015 | La Belle saison (Catherine Corsini, France)—Special Presentations

By Mallory Andrews | 09/02/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Mallory Andrews There is no discernible reason for Catherine Corsini’s La Belle saison to take place in the early 1970s other than the fact that the timeframe adds a historically authentic sense of conflict to this lesbian love story set in rural France. Delphine (Izïa Higelin) is a farmer’s daughter who takes off to…

TIFF 2015 | Neon Bull (Gabriel Mascaro, Brazil/Uruguay/Netherlands)—Platform

By Max Goldberg | 09/02/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Max Goldberg Expanding upon the sensual neorealism of his dramatic debut August Winds (2014), Gabriel Mascaro sets his follow-up behind the scenes of northeast Brazil’s vaquejada circuit. A few cowhands ready the bulls for rodeo, sanding tails, branding, cursing. They camp alongside the bullpen with a mother and daughter living in their truck, and scene…

TIFF 2015 | Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous (Christopher Doyle, Hong Kong)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Michael Sicinski | 09/02/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Michael Sicinski Christopher Doyle’s status as one of the greatest living cinematographers in the world seems utterly beyond dispute at this point, but his two previous at-bats as a director have been uneven affairs, to put it kindly. This experimental nonfiction film—one can’t really call it a documentary, for various reasons—is easily Doyle’s finest…

TIFF 2015 | Mekko (Sterlin Harljo, USA)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Jordan Cronk | 09/02/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Jordan Cronk The once fresh idea of integrating a vérité sensibility into drama has grown, in recent years, into one of the most recognizable trends in independent cinema. Adding to this modest lineage is Mekko, an agreeable if unremarkable work of indigenous realism whose familiarity of form is ably offset by the singularity of…

TIFF 2015 | The Whispering Star (Sion Sono, Japan)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Max Goldberg | 09/02/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Max Goldberg Sion Sono continues to imaginatively engage Fukushima’s irradiated landscape in The Whispering Star, a surprisingly sedate space odyssey from the longtime enfant terrible. Megumi Kagurazaka is mostly alone as a Cast Away-like robot on an interplanetary delivery route. Her spaceship is done in the style of a traditional Japanese house, and the robot in turn seems…

TIFF 2015 | Beeba Boys (Deepa Mehta, Canada)—Gala Presentations

By Jose Teodoro | 09/02/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By José Teodoro The new Deepa Mehta movie chronicles a territorial war between competing Sikh gangs in modern-day Vancouver. While based, to whatever extent, on a true story, it is rigorous in its adherence to genre clichés. We’ve got a bunch of guys who curse a lot and kill a lot and boast a lot—the…

TIFF 2015 | The Clan (Pablo Trapero, Argentina)—Platform

By Quintin | 09/02/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Quintín When it was released in mid-August, Pablo Trapero’s new film had the highest opening box-office of any Argentine film of all time, and, shortly afterwards, reached one million tickets sold. The key to that success is simply that The Clan is based on one of the most shocking crimes in the country’s history, the Puccio…

TIFF 2015 | Our Little Sister (Kore-eda Hirokazu)—Masters

By Adam Nayman | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Adam Nayman Surely the most demure manga adaptation in cinematic history—there isn’t a single bad-touching tentacle in sight—Our Little Sister finds Kore-eda Hirokazu in Ozu mode. With its numerous floor-level views of women sitting in repose and its structuring motif of changing seasons, the film could be taken as a tribute from one Japanese…

TIFF 2015 | ma ma (Julio Medem, Spain/France)—Special Presentations

By Jose Teodoro | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By José Teodoro This batshit-crazy mega-weepie from Sex and Lucia (2001) director Julio Medem begins with Madrid schoolteacher Magda (Penélope Cruz) newly unemployed, her philandering philosophy professor husband vacationing on the Costa del Sol with his younger blonde lover, and the discovery that the lump in Magda’s breast is malignant and a mastectomy is required.…

TIFF 2015 | Keeper (Guillaume Senez, Belgium/ Switzerland/ France)—Discovery

By Mallory Andrews | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Mallory Andrews Maxime and Mélanie are in love. Maxime and Mélanie get pregnant. Maxime convinces Mélanie to keep the baby. Maxime and Mélanie are all of 15 years old. This is the primary dramatic thrust of Belgian director Guillaume Senez’s debut feature, an unsentimental look at teen pregnancy about a couple (ably played by…

TIFF 2015 | The People vs. Fritz Bauer (Lars Kraume, Germany)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Max Goldberg | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Max Goldberg The People vs. Fritz Bauer narrows its focus to the period when West German attorney general Fritz Bauer (Burghart Klaussner), working covertly and against the wishes of the many former Nazis in his government’s ranks, aided the Mossad in the capture of Adolf Eichmann. It’s fine material for a procedural, but director…

TIFF 2015 | The Witch (Robert Eggers, US/Canada)—Special Presentations

By Blake Williams | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Blake Williams Robert Eggers’ debut feature The Witch—one of the big talking points to emerge from this year’s Sundance US Dramatic Competition—is a mythopoeic horror film that uses a wealth of unidentified 17th-century journals, records, and myths to construct a slow-burning descent into hysteria. Eggers opts for a cool, autumnal mise en scène (you…

TIFF 2015 | My Internship in Canada (Philippe Falardeau, Canada)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Adam Nayman | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Adam Nayman Good commercial Canadian directors are hard to find—except in Québec, where money and audiences exist to make the effort seem worthwhile. Yet none of the province’s hitmakers have accrued the critical cred of Philippe Falardeau, whose cinema perches an agile seriocomic sensibility atop sturdy mainstream structures: the coming-of-age nostalgia of It’s Not…

TIFF 2015 | Chevalier (Athina Rachel Tsangari)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Adam Nayman | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Adam Nayman More funny games from the ringleaders of the New Greek Cinema: in a country that invented bread and circuses before Rome was even a gleam in a she-wolf’s eye, Athina Rachel Tsangari and her merry band are willing and able to make their own fun. In lieu of comparisons to Yorgos Lanthimos’…

TIFF 2015 | Brooklyn (John Crowley, UK/Ireland/Canada)—Special Presentations

By Adam Nayman | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Adam Nayman A textbook example of international co-production funds well spent—note the flashy film-festival slots from Park City to Manhattan—Brooklyn arrives duly hyped, and disappoints just as reliably. Encouraged by her prematurely spinsterish sister to flee the Emerald Isle for the figuratively greener pastures of America, Ellis (Saoirse Ronan) spends her first year Stateside…

TIFF 2015 | Son of Saul (László Nemes, Hungary)—Special Presentations

By Richard Porton | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Richard Porton Originally published in Cinema Scope 63 (Summer 2015). Dennis Lim’s Artforum dispatch from Cannes pauses briefly to ponder the merits of László Nemes’ Son of Saul and concludes that, either despite or because of Nemes’ “showboating” tendencies, it’s a film that will “spawn a thousand think pieces.” If the ruminations that follow…

TIFF 2015 | Cinema Scope 64 Preview | Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sangsoo, South Korea)—Masters

By Roger Koza | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, Interviews, TIFF 2015

Repetition and Difference: Hong Sangsoo on Right Now, Wrong Then By Roger Koza Interview by Francisco Ferreira & Julien Gester Originally published in Cinema Scope 64 (Fall 2015). Set in Suwon, about 30 kilometres south of Seoul, Hong Sangsoo’s Golden Leopard-winning masterpiece is divided into two sections which are almost exactly the same. Even the…

TIFF 2015 | The Other Side (Roberto Minervini, Italy/France)—Wavelengths

By Celluloid Liberation Front | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Celluloid Liberation Front Away from the gangrenous nepotism and mafia-like favouritism that govern the film industry in Italy, Roberto Minervini has found a way to transcend his accidental birthplace and its current idea of cinema. The Other Side is set in Louisiana, among the communities of white lumpenproletariat very much removed from the redeeming…

TIFF 2015 | The Waiting Room (Igor Drljaca, Canada)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Adam Nayman | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Adam Nayman The past is rear-projected in Igor Drljaca’s sophisticated second feature; while the exact nature of the (student?) film being shot on a soundstage in the film’s centrepiece sequence is unclear, it’s obvious that Yugoslavian actor Jasmin (Jasmin Geljo, who was also in the director’s earlier Krivina) is uncomfortable pantomiming a drive through…

TIFF 2015 | James White (Josh Mond, US)—Discovery

By Blake Williams | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Blake Williams On paper, Josh Mond’s personal and almost unbearably sad debut James White seems to exhibit the same tendencies that have become the signature brand of his Borderline colleagues, whose intelligent and precocious output has been driven by a depraved depiction of human nature with a grim sensibility that already feels out of…

TIFF 2015 | Every Thing Will Be Fine (Wim Wenders, Germany/ Canada/ France/ Sweden/ Norway)—Masters

By Adam Cook | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Adam Cook Once numbered in the same company as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog as masters of the New German Cinema—and still counted a Master by TIFF—Wim Wenders has long since plummeted from the position of art-house reverence he earned with works like Wings of Desire (1987) and Paris, Texas (1984). Every Thing…

TIFF 2015 | The Daughter (Simon Stone, Australia)—Special Presentations

By Jose Teodoro | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By José Teodoro The Daughter begins with Henry (Geoffrey Rush), patriarch of his Australian village’s wealthiest family and proprietor of its century-old sawmill, unable to shoot a wild duck. Is there a metaphor here? Of course there is—this is Ibsen!—though the metaphor I’m thinking of applies to writer-director Simon Stone’s inability to shoot The Wild…

TIFF 2015 | Rams (Grímur Hákonarson, Iceland)—Contemporary World Cinema

By Jordan Cronk | 09/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015

By Jordan Cronk Rams, the second narrative feature by Icelandic director Grímur Hákonarson, represents the kind of thematically familiar, stylistically anonymous filmmaking that comfortably achieves consensus sympathy. Indeed, the film won the top prize of the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes this year, and against some rather formidable competition at that. As per this…

No Line on the Horizon: True/False 2015

By Jordan Cronk | 04/01/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, Festivals

By Jordan Cronk Director Albert Maysles passed away on the evening March 5th, the opening night of the 12th annual True/False Film Festival. Many were shocked and all were saddened when news of his death began to circulate the following morning, and his name was understandably on the tip of many people’s tongues throughout the…

Burn, Hollywood, Burn: David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars

By Adam Nayman | 02/27/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, Currency

By Adam Nayman Back in September, when the world was young, I opined in this space that Maps to the Stars was its director’s worst movie in fifteen years. Six months later, on the eve of its American release, I’m not so sure. It’s a peculiar quality of David Cronenberg’s films that they almost…

Vulgar Auteurism: The Case of Michael Mann

By Andrew Tracy | 01/16/2015 | Cinema Scope Online

From Cinema Scope #40 (Fall 2009) By Andrew Tracy Auteur bloat is one of the defining traits of latter-day cinephilia, with whole fleets of past and present studio craftsmen, from the competent to the questionable, being elevated high above their stations via tendentious interpretations of thematic consistency and a specious formalism that welcomes any…

Mann’s Fate: Michael Mann’s Blackhat

By Adam Nayman | 01/16/2015 | Cinema Scope Online, Currency

By Adam Nayman It’s a measure of Michael Mann’s self-awareness—and, all evidence to the contrary, he must have some—that over the course of Blackhat Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) gets to play at being both Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham. Introduced in manacles and prison whites with a full complement of armed guards monitoring his every…

Last Rites: Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher

By Adam Nayman | 11/14/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, Currency

By Adam Nayman Early on in Foxcatcher, the eccentric and bottomlessly deep-pocketed John du Pont (Steve Carell), heir to an American munitions dynasty and a collector of expensive military gadgets, expresses his frustration about the indifference afforded to young men who’ve served their country overseas. That the veteran in question is a wrestler rather than…

Easy Virtue: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman

By Angelo Muredda | 10/24/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, Currency

By Angelo Muredda What could be a more appropriate fate for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)—a slick film about a disgruntled director baring his soul and guts for unfeeling audiences and critics alike—than its doubtlessly smooth course to award-season glory? While the film is ostensibly an angry manifesto stumping for…

Pursuits of Happiness: David Fincher’s Gone Girl

By Adam Nayman | 10/02/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, Currency

By Adam Nayman [MAJOR SPOILERS ahead] Lest anybody doubt that Gone Girl is a comedy, consider that it includes, in no particular order: a scene where America’s favourite bad actor Ben Affleck is coached on his line readings by a character played by a well-known Hollywood film director (Tyler Perry); that his punishment for uninspired…

TIFF 2014 | Elephant Song (Charles Binamé, Canada) — Special Presentations

By Jose Teodoro | 09/15/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By José Teodoro There are in fact multiple elephants in the room in this adaptation of Nicolas Billon’s play: the awkward struggle to cinematize a story designed to generate tension through sustained enclosure in a single location; the repeated deployment of an overarching metaphor to the point of exhaustion; and the showboating of Xavier Dolan…

TIFF 2014 | Villa Touma (Suha Arraf, no national origin) — Discovery

By Michael Sicinski | 09/12/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Michael Sicinski This is the directorial debut by Arraf, who is best known as the writing partner of Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis on his two most successful films, The Syrian Bride (2004) and Lemon Tree (2008). At the moment, Villa Touma is most notable for being a film that is “stateless,” officially speaking. Set…

TIFF 2014 | A Dream of Iron (Kelvin Kyung Kun Park, US/South Korea) — City to City

By Michael Sicinski | 09/12/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Michael Sicinski To paraphrase Calvin Coolidge, the chief business of cinema is business. As a general rule, festivals like films that can sell; Oscars and acquisitions provide high-level film programmers with industry niches that we critics will never really understand. But now and then, those thoughtful public servants manage to smuggle in something decidely…

TIFF 2014 | Confession (Lee Do-yun, South Korea) — City to City

By Michael Sicinski | 09/12/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Michael Sicinski One of the stronger entries in this year’s showcase of Seoul-based filmmaking, Confession, by first-time helmer Lee Do-yun, takes a while to display its true intentions. Following a prologue in which we meet our three main characters as adolescents and witness a traumatic event that cements their long-term friendship, Confession jumps ahead…

TIFF 2014 | Songs from the North (Soon-Mi Yoo, US/South Korea) — Wavelengths

By Michael Sicinski | 09/12/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Michael Sicinski Songs from the North is a work that practically mirrors the provenance pattern of another film in this year’s festival, Kelvin Park’s A Dream of Iron: an essay film from a Korean-born, US-educated multimedia artist. However, Yoo is a more experienced filmmaker, and as a result Songs is a far more nuanced…

TIFF 2014 | The Theory of Everything (James Marsh, US) — Special Presentations

By Angelo Muredda | 09/12/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Angelo Muredda Stephen Hawking falls in love, gets disabled, and becomes the world’s best-selling cosmologist in James Marsh’s mostly undistinguished The Theory of Everything, the sort of cautious, unoffending profile that tends to arrive in swarms this time of year. For what it’s worth, Eddie Redmayne is fine as the young Cambridge scholar with…

TIFF 2014 | I Am Not Lorena (Isidora Marras, Chile/Argentina) — Discovery

By Michael Sicinski | 09/11/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Michael Sicinski This is an exceedingly slight debut film about an actress named Olivia (Loreto Aravena) beset by an endless barrage of calls from collection agencies, all looking for someone named Lorena Ruíz. In reality, there are some fairly basic steps to take if one finds oneself in a similar predicament. (I speak from…

TIFF 2014 | Le beau danger (René Frölke, Germany) — Wavelengths

By Michael Sicinski | 09/11/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Michael Sicinski “In a world where everything seems programmed, even chaos, chance, or surprise, you’ve got to defy logic and bewilder people.” This is but one of the many lines of prose presented, without overt comment, in Le beau danger, written by the film’s subject Romanian author Norman Manea. However, this sentence seems as…

TIFF 2014 | Wild (Jean-Marc Vallée, US) — Gala

By Toronto Film Review | 09/11/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

Special TORONTO FILM REVIEW Guest Edition (N.B. This is presented absent any editorial intervention.) By David Davidson There is a real problem when even Steven Spielberg is confused about the state of modern cinema. It needs to be said: The old ways of doing things is over. And there needs to be the creation of…

TIFF 2014 | Foreign Body (Krzysztof Zanussi, Poland/Italy/Russia) — Masters

By Michael Sicinski | 09/10/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Michael Sicinski This is a complete mess, but I cannot honestly say whether Zanussi constructed Foreign Body to be exactly the film he wanted it to be and thus he’s just off his rocker, or if he has simply lost control of the medium. How best to describe this unhinged but futile film? In…

TIFF 2014 | The Little Death (Josh Lawson, Australia) — Discovery

By Ian Barr | 09/10/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Ian Barr If nothing else, this Antipodean mash-up of Love, Actually and Neil LaBute’s Your Friends and Neighbors—a combo surely everyone was clamouring for—makes a convincing argument that “edginess” is the least appreciable thing that any text in any medium can strive for. Kicking off the first of its four not-really-criss-crossing subplots, Paul (played…

TIFF 2014 | The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, UK) — Vanguard

By Adam Nayman | 09/10/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Adam Nayman A stray line about a “Dr. Viridiana” early in The Duke of Burgundy gives the game away: after the giallos humour of Berberian Sound Studio, Peter Strickland is chasing Luis Buñuel. Not with too much urgency, mind you: on the basis of his three features to date, the British writer-director is less interested in precise pastiche than evoking…

TIFF 2014 | Adult Beginners (Ross Katz, US) — Discovery

By Sean Rogers | 09/10/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Sean Rogers Had this movie actually centred on the late-in-life learning-to-swim class alluded to in its title (though never depicted onscreen), maybe some of the excellent bit players horsing around its edges could have jumped in and stirred things up a bit. I imagine a film in which the wearable-tech guru portrayed by Nick…

TIFF 2014 | The Editor (Adam Brooks & Matthew Kennedy, Canada) — Midnight Madness)

By Adam Nayman | 09/09/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Adam Nayman The Editor could have used one. Much like the previous Astron-6 production Manborg, this passionately scrawled love letter to Argento, Fulci et al makes a fetish of both its cheapness and its knowingness, neither of which seem very endearing after a while (let’s say about 30 minutes, to be generous). Co-director Adam…

TIFF 2014 | A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Roy Andersson, Sweden/Norway/France/Germany) — Masters

By Celluloid Liberation Front | 09/09/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Celluloid Liberation Front A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is Roy Andersson’s third installment in his trilogy of films “about being a human being.” Regrettably, said trilogy has been on a downward trajectory from the original brilliance of Songs from the Second Floor through the less impressive but still enjoyable You,…

TIFF 2014 | Gemma Bovery (Anne Fontaine, France) — Special Presentations

By Sean Rogers | 09/09/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Sean Rogers Adapted from the literate, gently sardonic graphic novel by Guardian cartoonist Posy Simmonds, Anne Fontaine’s Gemma Bovery retains little of the source material’s Renoirian humanism and none of its murky thematic and visual greytones, but regrettably most of its plot. Since the outlines of Simmonds’ Gemma were themselves lifted from Flaubert’s Bovary—in…

TIFF 2014 | Revenge of the Green Dragons (Andrew Lau & Andrew Loo, US) — Special Presentations

By Bart Testa | 09/09/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Bart Testa This film is credited as an American production through the enabling of producer Martin Scorsese, and is set in the Flatbush section of Queens during the 1980s, when Mainland Chinese immigrants flocked there and young gangs flourished—as did human trafficking, centred there on the notorious “snakehead” Sister Ping. But this is all…

TIFF 2014 | Pasolini (Abel Ferrara, France/Italy/Belgium) — Special Presentations

By Celluloid Liberation Front | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Celluloid Liberation Front Willem Dafoe takes on Pasolini’s last three days on earth in a difficult, almost impossible film that Abel Ferrara directs with respectful audacity. Seventy-two hours in the life of the heretical Catholic and erotic Marxist poet, columnist, theorist, filmmaker, and tumultuous and gentle earthling. We get to see enacted glimpses of…

TIFF 2014 | The Sound and the Fury (James Franco, US) — Special Presentations

By Celluloid Liberation Front | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Celluloid Liberation Front Oh boy! Where to even start? Let’s try from the beginning: a Shakespeare quote opens the film, which tells us that James Franco reads the preeminent Elizabethan playwright or Wikiquotes, which as far as the film is concerned doesn’t make that big of a difference. The guy has actually had the…

TIFF 2014 | Seymour: An Introduction (Ethan Hawke, US) — TIFF Docs

By Michael Sicinski | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Michael Sicinski “He’s a very deep guy … It’s like Zen and the Art of Archery, or whatever.” Oh my God, shut up. Ethan Hawke, who has made a very lovely portrait of virtuoso pianist and teacher Seymour Bernstein, is going to be his own worst enemy in terms of getting people to actually…

TIFF 2014 | Goodnight Mommy (Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala, Austria) — Vanguard

By Christoph Huber | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Christoph Huber Don’t be fooled by the inane Haneke comparisons lavished by lazy critics on the first fiction feature by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, who previously made the beautiful portrait-essay Kern and the underseen drinking-game short Dreh und Trink (full disclosure: they are also my best friends, but that’s not why I…

TIFF 2014 | Rosewater (Jon Stewart, US) — Special Presentations

By Jay Kuehner | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Jay Kuehner Political film without a politics of filmmaking, Jon Stewarts’s earnest directorial debut repurposes journalist Maziar Bahari’s memoir about having spent 118 days in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison after he was accused of being an American spy into a palatable polemic about Iran’s theocratic rule circa the 2009 elections. The London-based, Iranian-born Bahari…

TIFF 2014 | Red Amnesia (Wang Xiaoshuai, China) — Special Presentations

By Celluloid Liberation Front | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Celluloid Liberation Front Deng, an aging but relatively sprightly old woman, spends her retirement taking care of her house and her grown-up children, who nonetheless appear to be better off when she is not around (one is busy building a successful heterosexual family, the other slacking about in front of the computer). Only the…

TIFF 2014 | Return to Ithaca (Laurent Cantet, France) — Special Presentations

By Celluloid Liberation Front | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Celluloid Liberation Front A nausea-inducing film of simplistic primitivism, Return to Ithaca is Laurent Cantet’s contribution to the debunking of the myth of Caribbean socialism (as if there were any illusions left). We are in the sado-Marxist island of Cuba, where any human right is cruelly crushed bar those of being able to have…

TIFF 2014 | Gyeongju (Zhang Lu, South Korea) — City to City

By Michael Sicinski | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Michael Sicinski The deeply antisocial protagonist of Gyeongju, Choi Hyeon (Park Hae-il), is a well-regarded poli-sci professor in Beijing, back in Korea for the funeral of an old colleague. Recalling a memorable time he, the deceased, and another scholar had in the title-city many years ago, Hyeon returns to wander around in a doomed…

TIFF 2014 | Phoenix (Christian Petzold, Germany) — Special Presentations

By Mark Peranson | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Mark Peranson In a loose adaptation of Hubert Monteilhet’s 1961 novel Le Retour des cendres, Berlin School stalwart Christian Petzold has decided to move further back in history, leaving East Germany behind (a fine decision as far as I’m concerned) for Germany 1945, and asking what it takes to rise from the ashes in…

TIFF 2014 | The Equalizer (Antoine Fuqua, US) — Gala

By Michael Sicinski | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Michael Sicinski Looking back, it’s hard to believe that Training Day was as watchable as it was. (And it isn’t faulty memory or collective knuckle-dragging on racial issues. I caught it on cable a while back and it’s fine.) But Antoine Fuqua can’t direct, and this is abundantly clear in the opening seconds of…

TIFF 2014 | Hill of Freedom (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea) — Masters

By Michael Sicinski | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Michael Sicinski Recently, some South Korean masters have made significant inroads into the English market. (We can call them “masters,” if you prefer a grain of salt in your bibimbap: Kim Jee-woon and Park Chan-wook are inevitably problematic figures to some. But I’ll accept no guff regarding Master Bong and his Piercer of Snow.)…

TIFF 2014 | Teen Lust (Blaine Thurier, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

By Adam Nayman | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Adam Nayman If Satan came back and saw the movies that were being made in his name, he’d never stop throwing up (pea soup, probably). Our Dark Lord is invoked routinely in Teen Lust, in which the virginal son of suburban Baphomet-worshippers endeavours to get laid before he becomes a sacrificial lamb—a premise already…

TIFF 2014 | Li’l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont, France) — Contemporary World Cinema

By Adam Nayman | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Adam Nayman It’s not HBO, it’s (French) TV, and it’s also paradoxically the best movie that Bruno Dumont has made since L’humanite (1999)—a good point of comparison because Li’l Quinquin is basically a remake, give or take. Rural religious community? Check. Wobbly, possibly retarded police officer? Check. A random, ritualistic slaying? Check. Meditation on…

TIFF 2014 | Heartbeat (Andrea Dorfman, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

By Adam Nayman | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Adam Nayman In which a lapsed Halifax folkie very gradually gets her groove back. It’s every bit as thrilling as it sounds. Look: it’s clear that writer-director Andrea Dorfman—making her first feature since the well-liked Love That Boy (2003)—adores her star Tanya Davis, whose droopy eyes and dopey smile don’t seem like a put-on,…

TIFF 2014 | Bird People (Pascale Ferran, France) — Contemporary World Cinema

By Adam Nayman | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Adam Nayman A film ideally screened at film festivals—where its scenes of characters logging into hotel wi-fi on their laptops and thrashing around in the throes of jetlag will pack an affective punch—Bird People has divided critics as neatly as its own bifurcated, his-and-hers narrative. Set almost entirely inside the confines of a Parisian…

TIFF 2014 | [REC] 4: Apocalypse (Jaume Balaguero, Spain) — Midnight Madness

By Adam Nayman | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Adam Nayman Call it the [REC] of the Edmund Fitzgerald. This third and (I’m guessing) worst sequel to the 2007 Spanish found-footage horror flick is set at sea, for no good reason other than that the franchise hasn’t gone there yet. So a year after World War Z gave us Zombies on a Plane,…

TIFF 2014 | Merchants of Doubt (Robert Kenner, US) — TIFF Docs

By Jason Anderson | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Jason Anderson There’s a wealth of valuable and urgent info in Robert Kenner’s study of how business and ideological interests—and, of course, the Koch brothers, the favourite boogeymen of American liberals—create the illusions of debate and doubt over such issues as climate change in the media arena when none ought to exist. At the…

TIFF 2014 | Men, Women & Children (Jason Reitman, US) — Special Presentations

By Adam Nayman | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Adam Nayman With Labor Day, Jason Reitman announced his intentions to become the new Sam Mendes. People should be careful what they wish for. Men, Women & Children could have easily been titled Fall Prestige Picture, or maybe Oscar Movie—you know, something with that nice, concise Seltzman/Friedberg ring. But that would promise a comedy,…

TIFF 2014 | Eden (Mia Hansen-Løve, France) — Special Presentations

By Kiva Reardon | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Kiva Reardon For the first time, Mia Hansen-Løve hasn’t made a movie about a woman. But Eden isn’t about a man either, but rather a sort of man-child. This is an important distinction, given that for this particular creature there’s nothing more terrifying than the inevitable passage of time, which brings with it the slow…

TIFF 2014 | Coming Home (Zhang Yimou, China) — Special Presentations

By Shelly Kraicer | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Shelly Kraicer Admirers of Zhang Yimou’s ground-breaking work from the late 1980s and early 1990s might puzzle over his transformation from innovative artist to state-sponsored populist after seeing his latest domestic hit, Coming Home. A film not without interest, particularly considering it reunites him with his actrice fetiche Gong Li, star of those influential ’90s masterworks (Red Sorghum, Ju…

TIFF 2014 | Los Hongos (Oscar Ruiz Nava, Colombia) — Discovery

By Alexandra Zawia | 09/07/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Alexandra Zawia Los Hongos translates to “The Mushrooms,” and while there are a couple of joints smoked in Oscar Ruiz Navia’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut feature Crab Trap, the alluded-to hallucinogens never arrive. Metaphorically speaking, young graffiti artists Ras (Jovan Alexis Marquinez Angulo) and Calvin (Calvin Buenaventura Tacon) might be mushrooms; their street-art…

TIFF 2014 | The Guest (Adam Wingard, US) — Midnight Madness

By Jose Teodoro | 09/06/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By José Teodoro Still grieving the loss of their son Caleb to some unspecified military misadventure, the Peterson family finds their lives rejuvenated by the unexpected arrival of David Collins (Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens), a handsome, polite young veteran claiming to have been “very close” to Caleb while serving abroad. David says he’s come all…

TIFF 2014 | Cut Snake (Tony Ayres, Australia) — Contemporary World Cinema

By Jason Anderson | 09/06/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Jason Anderson Though the title of Tony Ayres’ slow-burn thriller is borrowed from an Australian expression for a wild and crazy sort of fella, any potentially phallic connotations cannot be considered accidental. In fact, Ayres ultimately depends too heavily on Cut Snake’s most carnal element—a relatively novel re-ordering of the typical sexual dynamics between…

TIFF 2014 | Backcountry (Adam McDonald, Canada) — Discovery

By Adam Nayman | 09/06/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Adam Nayman The obvious point of reference for Adam McDonald’s feature debut is The Edge, except that there’s (more) sexual chemistry between the two leads. (Sorry, Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin.) Stubbly Jeff Roop and springy Missy Peregrym star as a city couple who make the (possibly, but no spoilers here) fatal mistake of…

TIFF 2014 | Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, US) — Special Presentations

By Adam Nayman | 09/06/2014 | Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014

By Adam Nayman “I’m not going to hire a fucking thief,” exclaims a character early on in Nightcrawler, and while the name-check of Michael Mann’s debut feature is likely entirely coincidental, it serves to place Dan Gilroy’s debut feature in the proper context. As in Mann’s Heat, Los Angeles plays itself here, a star turn that’s…

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