Enfin, it arrives.  

As we await the editing and uploading of the roundtable, here are our Toronto-present writers’ selections of their favourite films they’ve seen during TIFF (in a cinema, in Toronto, during the Toronto International Film Festival). To wit, not the best films of the festival, as who could possibly be equipped to make that assertion, what…

Phil Coldiron I was planning on starting this little capsule by noting how I had never seen anything by Kim Ki-duk prior to this viewing. Turns out, I still haven’t; and given that, this obviously isn’t a review, or even really about Pieta at all. If you’re wondering, based on the thirty-some minutes that I…

But tomorrow, this guy gets his:

By Andrea Whyte Black TV (Aldo Tambellini, USA, 1968) Burning Star (Josh Solondz, USA) When Bodies Touch (Paolo Gioli, Italy/France) Ritournelle (Christopher Becks, Peter Miller, Germany) Watch the Closing Doors (Jim Jennings, USA) View from the Acropolis (Lonnie van Brummelen, Siebren de Haan, The Netherlands) De la mutabilité de toute chose et de la possibilité…

By Samuel La France I am micro (Shumona Goel, Shai Heredia, India) Class Picture (Tito & Tito, The Philippines) Francesca Woodman: Selected Video Works (Francesca Woodman, USA, 1975-78) Ich auch, auch, ich auch (Friedl vom Gröller, Austria) Waiting Room (Vincent Grenier, USA/Canada) The Transit of Venus I and II (Nicky Hamlyn, UK, 2004-5/2012) August and…

By Aliza Ma Pacific Sun (Thomas Demand, USA) 21 Chitrakoot (Shambhavi Kaul, USA/India) Many a Swan (Blake Williams, Canada) Concrete Parlay (Fern Silva, USA) Departure (Ernie Gehr, USA) Auto-Collider XV (Ernie Gehr, USA) Filing into the familiar (and familial) cinema space of Jackman Hall for the inaugural installment of Wavelengths 2012, devout patrons of the…

  By Michael Sicinski Untitled, 35 mm glass slides (Luther Price, USA) Phantoms of a Libertine (Ben Rivers, UK) A Minimal Difference (Jean-Paul Kelly, Canada) Shoot Don’t Shoot (William E. Jones, USA) Sorry Horns (Luther Price, USA) Orpheus (outtakes) (Mary Helena Clark, USA) Pipe Dreams (Ali Cherri, Lebanon/France) UFOs (Lillian Schwartz, USA) Although the first…

Augustine (Alice Winocour, France)—Discovery By Adam Nayman Less Prestige-ious than David Cronenberg’s recent period-piece account of psychoanalytic one-upsmanship, the pre-Freudian drama Augustine actually gets down and dirty with its (diagnosed) hysterical female patient: a 19-year-old maid whose spectacular seizure suffered while ladling out supper to her employers gets her packed off to a sanatorium. Once…

Camp 14: Total Control Zone (Marc Wiese, Germany)—TIFF Docs By Adam Cook Camp 14 is not the most enjoyable film: it’s not easy to watch, it’s slow, and the subject matter is difficult territory, but it’s territory explored with commendable moral intelligence by director Marc Wiese. The main subject of the film is Shin Dong-huyk,…

Antiviral (Brandon Cronenberg, Canada)—Special Presentation By John Semley Maybe the most frustrating thing about the debut by David Cronenberg’s twenty-aught son is that calling it “Cronenbergian” doesn’t really work: it’s less a value judgment on its glaring paternal influences than a statement of fact. To be sure, Brandon Cronenberg has inherited more than a genetic…

The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, Anonymous, Denmark/Norway/UK)—TIFF Docs By Adam Nayman Like most other documentaries about certifiably insane people, The Act of Killing raises questions about the exploitation of its subjects. A related question: is it possible to exploit men who freely—and in some cases gleefully—admit to the torture, rape and murder…

The Discomforts of Home: Far from Afghanistan (John Gianvito, Travis Wilkerson, Jon Jost, Minda Martin, Soon-Mi Yoo, USA)—Wavelengths By Aaron Cutler and Mariana Shellard When Chris Marker gathered his Nouvelle Vague and Left Bank colleagues to make the omnibus film Loin du Viêtnam in 1967, nearly half a million American troops were stationed in Vietnam…

Short Cuts Canada By Hugh Gibson This year’s Short Cuts Canada section is cast into new light due to two recent developments.  First, with the elimination of Canada First (and before it, Perspectives Canada, the so-called “ghettos” for national cinema), it becomes the festival’s sole Canadian-specific program.  Second, with the sudden announcement that the Worldwide…

La cinquième saison (Peter Brosens, Jessica Woodworth, Belgium/Netherlands/France)—Wavelengths By Mark Peranson Once upon a blue moon there comes along a very special film so wrong-headed, so deeply, deeply ridiculous, but made with the utmost confidence, that a wide swath of critics, programmers, and spectators mistake its balls-out look-at-me! posturing for high-minded, state-of-the-earth profundity. Oftentimes this…

 Blackbird (Jason Buxton, Canada)—Discovery By Kiva Reardon The first film from Canadian director Jason Buxton is not without flaws, but it is these very problems which make it all the richer and beguiling, as it’s difficult to tell whether they are inadvertent or exacting and calculated. Set in the fictional rural town of Eastport—a perfect…

Cinema Scope 52 Preview Après mai (Olivier Assayas, France)—Masters By Andrew Tracy As one is virtually a companion piece to the other, it is only natural to begin discussion of Après mai (Something in the Air) with Olivier Assayas’ 2002 memoir A Post-May Adolescence, just published in an elegant English translation by the Austrian Filmmuseum…

Cinema Scope 52 Preview Burru’s Abominable Dialectic: Nicolas Rey’s autrement, la Molussie (France)—Wavelengths By Michael Sicinski In composing this essay on Nicolas Rey’s latest film, I have opted to follow a principle similar to the one that gives his film its overall shape. The essay consists of six semi-autonomous sections, which I have assigned an…

Cinema Scope 52 Preview Rebelle (Kim Nguyen, Canada)—Special Presentation By Kiva Reardon The year in cinema has been stamped with a modicum of magical realism. First up at Sundance was Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film routinely described as “lyrical” and “heartwarming.” Now there is Montréal director Kim Nguyen’s Rebelle, arriving at…

Cinema Scope 52 Preview The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)—Special Presentation By Gabe Klinger The evolution in Paul Thomas Anderson’s oeuvre towards impeccably researched, stunningly visualized mythological explorations of the American character in There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master represents a sterling 180-degree turn. Staying within a certain autobiographical comfort zone in his…

Cinema Scope 52 Preview Viola (Matías Piñeiro, Argentina)—Wavelengths Role Models: The Films of Matías Piñeiro By Quintín Like most of his colleagues in recent Argentinean cinema, Matías Piñeiro is a graduate from the Universidad del Cine, and, like many of them, works outside the national funding system. Born in 1982 in Buenos Aires, Piñeiro, despite…

Cinema Scope 52 Preview Wandering in Vienna: Jem Cohen and the Adventure of Museum Hours (Austria/USA)—Contemporary World Cinema By Robert Koehler “Kunsthistorisches. It’s the big old one.” This is how Vienna’s massive, venerable, lovely and, indeed, elderly central art museum is termed in Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours, and it neatly sums up the film’s warm,…

Cinema Scope 52 Preview Lost in the Moment: Peter Mettler on The End of Time (Canada/Switzerland)—Masters By Jason Anderson After travelling through such far-flung sites as Detroit, Hawaii, India, and the geek-tacular labyrinth that is CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Peter Mettler’s latest documentary finally leaves the material world altogether, arriving at a ripping…

If we’re typing this with hands that can barely move, that must be a sign that festival season in Canada has begun, yet again. Because something seems to be in the air regarding lists and numbers, and because why the hell not, this year’s goal for the Cinema Scope Online TIFF coverage is to top…

Cinema Scope 52 Preview Blood and Thunder: Enter the Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel, France/UK/USA)—Wavelengths By Phil Coldiron Let’s start with a coincidence. The title of Part I, Chap. 1 of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: “Of Sense.” The name of the Harvard project headed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, whose new film, made in collaboration with Véréna Paravel,…