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    Blood Quantum (Jeff Barnaby, Canada)

    By Mallory Andrews In CS83, Currency, From The Magazine
    The hook is intriguingly straightforward: in Blood Quantum, an infectious zombie disease spreads through the world, save for the residents of a Mi’kmaq community along the Québec-New Brunswick border who appear to be immune to the undeadly virus. In the post-apocalyptic remnants of their town, Sheriff Traylor (Michael Greyeyes) and his deputies guard the boundaries of their land against the violent hordes of “Zeds.”
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    Long Live the New Flesh: The Decade in Canadian Cinema

    By Adam Nayman In Canadiana, CS82, From The Magazine
    Let’s get it right out of the way: by any non-subjective metric—which is to say in spite of my own personal opinion—the Canadian filmmaker of the decade is Xavier Dolan, who placed six features (including two major Competition prizewinners) at Cannes between 2009 (let’s give him a one-year head start) and 2019, all before turning 30. Prodigies are as prodigies do, and debating Dolan’s gifts as a transnational melodramatist and zeitgeist-tapperis a mug’s game, one that I’ve already played in these pages.
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    Cinema Scope 82: Editor’s Note — Best of the Decade

    By Mark Peranson In Columns, CS82, From The Magazine, Top Ten
    And so goes the decade, and perhaps all of humanity as we know it—it was fun while it lasted. As a supplement to the Top Ten lists published here, which semi-scientifically summarize the privately expressed preferences of our regular contributors, I decided to do something a little different to glance back at the past ten years. By the time of publication you can find numerous examples of excellent writing on all of the films in our decade-end list, both in previous issues of Cinema Scope and also in other publications, in print and online, on the occasion of revisiting the past ten bountiful years in cinema.
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    Global Discoveries on DVD: Second Thoughts & Double Takes

    By Jonathan Rosenbaum In CS82, DVD Reviews, From The Magazine
    I find it astonishing, really jaw-dropping, that Midge Costin’s mainly enjoyable Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2019),available on aUK DVD on the Dogwoof label, can seemingly base much of its film history around a ridiculous falsehood: the notion that stereophonic, multi-track cinema wasinvented in the ’70s by the Movie Brats—basically Walter Murch, in concert with his chums George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola—finally allowing the film industry to raise itself technically and aesthetically to the level already attained by The Beatles in music recording.
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    Cinema Scope 81 Table of Contents

    By Cinema Scope In CS81, From The Magazine, Table of Contents
    Interviews Anything Is Possible: Josh and Benny Safdie on Uncut Gems by Adam Nayman A Concept of Reality: Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral by Daniel Kasman Fairytales and Freudian Females: A Conversation with Jessica Hausner by Jordan Cronk Features They Are All Equal Now: The Irishman’s Epic of Sadness by Robert Koehler I Shall Be Released: Amazing [...]
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    The Twentieth Century (Matthew Rankin, Canada)

    By Josh Cabrita In CS81, From The Magazine, Spotlight
    By Josh Cabrita William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s tenth and longest-serving prime minister, is an emblem of our nation’s repressed, ineffectual masculinity. A staunch centrist and bureaucrat, Mackenzie King accomplished little during his 22 years in office: his main contributions were his ability to win elections despite his apparent lack of charisma, and his power [...]
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    The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers & Kathleen Hepburn, Canada/Norway) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Josh Cabrita In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Josh Cabrita The sad, slow, melancholy words of Joni Mithcell’s “Little Green” feature prominently in a mournful scene from the latest by Vancouver filmmakers Kathleen Hepburn and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers. While East Vancouver hipster Áila (Tailfeathers) speaks over the phone with a female crisis centre, the “extremely pregnant” Rosie (Violet Nelson)—whom the former happened upon [...]
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    Easy Land (Sanja Zivkovic, Canada) — Discovery

    By Anna Swanson In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Anna Swanson For the mother-daughter pair of Sanja Zivkovic’s directorial debut Easy Land, the old sentiment that the grass is always greener on the other side resolutely rings true. Jasna (Mirjana Jokovic) is a Serbian immigrant committed to her dream of giving the teenage Nina (Nina Kiri) a better life in Canada. She’s an [...]
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    Collective (Alexander Nanau, Romania) — TIFF Docs

    By Michael Scoular In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Michael Scoular There’s nothing that can do justice to the terror of the footage that plays near the start of Alexander Nanau’s Colectiv: a fire, breaking out in the middle of a packed album-release show for metal-core band Goodbye to Gravity, destroys a venue with no sprinklers or fire exits, and what we see [...]
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    Clifton Hill (Albert Shin, Canada) — Special Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Adam Nayman Good thrillers live or die by their specifics, and Clifton Hill is nothing if not precise about its tourist-trap environment (the Canadian side of Niagara Falls) and its inhabitants, including trashy gambling addicts, possibly psychopathic land developers, French-Canadian husband-and-wife tiger-trainers, and—if you hadn’t already heard—David Cronenberg emerging like Ursula Andress (except fully [...]
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    The Twentieth Century (Matthew Rankin, Canada) — Midnight Madness

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Michael Sicinski  Hats off to Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky for selecting this singular, albeit somewhat counterintuitive, homegrown oddity. Certainly a cult item in the making, The Twentieth Century represents the sort of Freudian-perverse take on national mythmaking that one finds in the work of Jim Finn, combined with the stark Futurist abstraction of [...]
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    The Song of Names (François Girard, Canada) — Gala Presentations

    By Josh Cabrita In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Josh Cabrita  Though the designation of a “late work” is usually reserved for revered masters who in their twilight years distil their style down to its supposedly purified essence, I see no reason why that term couldn’t also apply to a decidedly mediocre (and rarely brilliant) filmmaker like François Girard. Adapted from a book [...]
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    Paris Stalingrad (Hind Meddeb, France) — TIFF Docs

    By Madeleine Wall In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Madeleine Wall The only static aspect  of Hind Meddeb’s documentary Paris Stalingrad is the area from which the film takes its name. Beginning with this eponymous space, Meddeb expands to the treatment of the refugees who must stay there, focusing as much on the newcomers  as the Parisians and their varying levels of aid. [...]
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    The Australian Dream (Daniel Gordon, Australia/UK) — TIFF Docs

    By Beatrice Loayza In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Beatrice Loayza It’s no coincidence that the title of Daniel Gordon’s documentary portrait of Australian footballer Adam Goodes echoes the concept of the “American Dream”: after all, the history of Australia, like that of the United States, is a story of colonization and of the violence and racism that both fuelled it and still [...]
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    Coppers (Alan Zweig, Canada) — TIFF Docs

    By Angelo Muredda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Angelo Muredda “Cops are by far the biggest liars,” a subject admits early in Alan Zweig’s Coppers, which brings the filmmaker’s signature conversational style to bear on a profile of retired Toronto police officers, about a dozen of whom are interviewed at rest and in ride-alongs to the scenes of past arrests and disaster [...]
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    Tammy’s Always Dying (Amy Jo Johnson, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Adam Nayman Tammy’s also always yelling—and cursing, and drinking, and threatening suicide, and making a messy spectacle of herself in public and private. That’s just who Tammy is, and it’s also just the sort of movie that Tammy’s Always Dying is trying to be: a smile-through-tears comedy-drama about the need to hold our loved [...]
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    This is Not a Movie (Yung Chang, Canada/Germany) — TIFF Docs

    By Steve Macfarlane In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Steve Macfarlane “The person who denies the genocide in Armenia will deny the Jewish holocaust in Europe, and will deny any other kind of massacre that comes to hand.” That’s Robert Fisk, among the most celebrated war correspondents of the last quarter-century, getting the bio-doc treatment in Yung Chang’s documentary This is Not a [...]
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    Guest of Honour (Atom Egoyan, Canada) — Special Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Adam Nayman The subtext of Atom Egoyan’s latest mid-late-career work is that you shouldn’t be mean to people online—a plaint that looks retrospectively prophetic in light of the film’s Venice reception, which included an attempted murder in the pages of Variety. Suffice it to say that Guest of Honour is not nearly so bad [...]
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    I Am Not Alone (Garin Hovannisian, Armenia/US) — TIFF Docs

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Michael Sicinski  An up-close, day-by-day chronicle of the 2018 Armenian revolution that deposed autocrat Serzh Sargsyan and brought reform-minded activist Niko Pashinyan to power, I Am Not Alone is a fascinating look at the contemporary structure of power and protest. While unabashedly pro-Pashinyan, the film reveals a bit more than it probably intends to [...]
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    My English Cousin (Karim Sayad, Switzerland/Qatar) — TIFF Docs

    By Meg Shields In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Meg Shields My English Cousin is probably what it would actually feel like to be a fly on the wall: people scratch their asses, bicker harmlessly with loved ones, and pack and repack their bags. It’s a hard truth: most people just aren’t that interesting. The documentary follows director Karim Sayad’s cousin Fahed, who [...]
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    American Woman (Semi Chellas, Canada) — Gala Presentations

    By Angelo Muredda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Angelo Muredda  TV-to-feature transitions are always a fraught jump for writers of sparkling, monologue-heavy prose, and Mad Men writer Semi Chellas’ American Woman is no exception. Faring a bit better than Chellas’ former boss Matthew Weiner’s dispiriting Are You Here but falling well short of the intimacy and idiosyncrasy of David Chase’s Not Fade [...]
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    Anne at 13,000 ft (Kazik Radwanski, Canada/US) — Platform

    By Josh Cabrita In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Josh Cabrita Published in Cinema Scope #80 (Fall 2019) With his first two features, Tower (2012) and How Heavy This Hammer (2015), Toronto-based director and MDFF co-founder Kazik Radwanski established something of a recurring archetype: sad, lonely, and horny men whose unpleasant or uninteresting qualities are accentuated by the director’s unrelenting approach of shooting [...]
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    Antigone (Sophie Deraspe, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Jaclyn Bruneau In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Jaclyn Bruneau  Sophie Deraspe has picked up Sophocles’ eponymous tragedy and hurled it headlong into the present. Our orphaned heroine (Nahéma Ricci) immigrated to Montréal (from a home country never stated, in what is, I suppose, an attempt to level all Canadian immigrant experiences) as a child, along with her grandmother Ménécée, sister Ismène, [...]
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    Castle in the Ground (Joey Klein, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Adam Nayman The swift, ruinous descent from normalcy into substance abuse is hardly a subject lacking for cinematic treatment, and Joey Klein’s Castle in the Ground offers one more. In terms of casting, this Sudbury-set feature is above reproach, juxtaposing sad-eyed Henry (Alex Wolff, already an old hand at being put through the physical [...]
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    Murmur (Heather Young, Canada) — Discovery

    By Mallory Andrews In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Mallory Andrews Almost any movie featuring an animal doubles as a documentary about an animal that doesn’t know it’s in a movie—that is perhaps not the intended animating conflict of Murmur, but it’s the thought that most entered my mind most when watching the canine star of Heather Young’s docufiction first feature. Donna (Shan [...]
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    It Must Be Heaven (Elia Suleiman, France/Qatar/Germany/Canada/Palestine/Turkey) — Masters

    By Richard Porton In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Richard Porton Published in Cinema Scope #79 (Summer 2019) In conversations addressing the plight of what was once known as the “Third World,” one of the central debates still involves the inevitable tension between nationalism—as well as the quest for national identity—and the rather amorphous concept known as “cosmopolitanism.” In the Palestinian intellectual milieu, [...]
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    White Lie (Calvin Thomas & Yonah Lewis, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Madeleine Wall In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Madeleine Wall Taking place during a barren Hamilton winter, Calvin Thomas and Yonah Lewis’ White Lie is as intimate as it is claustrophobic. Katie (Kacey Rohl) is a cancer poster child, a star of local fundraisers and surrounded by supporters. But Katie begins her day shaving her head, her chemo appointments involve getting empty [...]
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    Black Conflux (Nicole Dorsey, Canada) — Discovery

    By Mallory Andrews In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
    By Mallory Andrews A “conflux” or confluence is the juncture where two rivers meet, seamlessly connecting into a single body. This convergence becomes a recurring visual motif in Nicole Dorsey’s small-town coming-of-age story set in 1980s Newfoundland, a portent of the coming collision between its two main characters, teenage Jackie (Ella Ballentine) and intense loner [...]
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    Cinema Scope 79 Table of Contents

    By Cinema Scope In CS79, From The Magazine, Table of Contents
    Cinema Scope Issue 79 with Features including .. Truth and Method: The Films of Thomas Heise by Michael Sicinski, Thinking in Images: Scott Walker and Cinema by Christoph Huber, 58th Venice Biennale, Cannes and DVD Reviews.
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    The Hottest August (Brett Story, Canada/US)

    By Adam Nayman In CS79, Currency, From The Magazine
    It is, it seems, the End of the World as We Know It. Forty-two years after R.E.M. wrote the West’s definitive apocalypse-now anthem, the song’s essentially optimistic subtext has become even more sharply double-edged; its parenthetical proviso can be interpreted as much as a sign of denial as resignation, a means of keeping any anticipatory psychic torment at bay.
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    Cinema Scope 78 Table of Contents

    By Cinema Scope In CS78, From The Magazine, Table of Contents
    *The Land of the Unknown: Roberto Minervini on What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? By Jordan Cronk. “Poetry floats up in my memory like sailboats in the fog”:Alexei German’s Khrustalyov, My Car! By Daniel Witkin. With Forever Presence: Jonathan Schwartz (1973-2018). By Max Goldberg. *Soft and Hard: Claire Denis on High Life. By Adam Nayman.
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    Répertoire des villes disparues (Denis Côté, Canada)

    By Josh Cabrita In CS78, Currency, From The Magazine
    To appreciate the historical scope and layered references of Denis Côté’s Répertoire des villes disparues, we would do well to begin before the film does, at a time when some of the apparitions that haunt Irénée-les-Neiges, the film’s fictional northern Québec setting, would have existed as flesh and bone.
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    Mothers of Invention: Ana Urushadze’s Scary Mother and Rolla Tahir’s Sira

    By Ela Bittencourt In Cinema Scope Online
    By Ela Bittencourt Ana Urushadze’s Scary Mother and Rolla Tahir’s Sira screen at TIFF Bell Lightbox on Thursday, February 14 as part of MDFF Selects: Presented by Cinema Scope and TIFF. A tense, seemingly “realistic” family drama that, in its absurdist, uncanny accents, betrays an affinity to more fantastical storytelling and existentialist literature (particularly Franz [...]
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    On the Outskirts: Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky’s Interchange

    By Madeleine Wall In Cinema Scope Online
    By Madeleine Wall Signs of progress involve mobility, whether in the form of a shorter commute, or simply the ability to go farther, faster. As a city grows, its populations move from one point to another, and some spaces only exist as transitory places. Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky’s Interchange focuses on the spaces [...]
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    Issue 76 Editor’s Note

    By Mark Peranson In Columns, CS76, From The Magazine
    By Mark Peranson.  The night that Mariano Llinás arrived in Locarno, I ran into him drinking with his producer Laura Citarella and a few friends, occupying a few tables in a streetside café. Soon after I joined them, I asked Llinás the most pressing question in my mind about his 14-hour La Flor: “What’s the [...]
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    Angels Are Made of Light (James Longley, US/Afghanistan) — TIFF Docs

    By Steve Macfarlane In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Steve Macfarlane James Longley’s unfortunately titled Afghanistan documentary Angels Are Made of Light spans three years in the lives of a handful of schoolchildren (all boys) in Kabul. It’s a significant achievement in the gathering of footage, shot by the filmmaker himself, who manages to give ordinary day-to-day moments a sheen that’s elegant to the point [...]
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    Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier & Edward Burtynsky, Canada) — Special Presentations

    By Steve Macfarlane In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Steve Macfarlane Coined by scientist Paul Crutzen in the early 2000s but popularized by the Iraq War veteran cum essayist Roy Scranton’s 2015 book Learning to Live and Die in the Anthropocene, the phrase “anthropocene” (wildly popular among totebag-wielding anarchists, autonomists and accelerationists in New York City) refers to the era of Earth’s history [...]
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    American Dharma (Errol Morris, US) — TIFF Docs

    By Clara Miranda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Clara Miranda Scherffig Many viewers “only” know Steve Bannon as the bad-skinned evil plotter behind Donald Trump: a racist, a fascist, an occasional movie producer, a failed media mogul—in other words, not exactly a cinephile. Errol Morris’ documentary about Bannon, American Dharma, includes excerpts of classic American films picked by Bannon to illustrate his [...]
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    Carmine Street Guitars (Ron Mann, Canada) — TIFF Docs

    By Shelly Kraicer In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Shelly Kraicer Electric craft becomes a stand-in for analogue’s humanity in Ron Mann’s elegiac Carmine Street Guitars. Rick Kelly is the master guitar maker of the beloved, eponymous Greenwich Village guitar shop. He’s been scavenging wood from historic, mostly demolished 19th-century NYC buildings and turning them into lovingly handcrafted electric musical instruments for decades. [...]
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    Clara (Akash Sherman, Canada) — Discovery

    By Chelsea Phillips-Carr In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Chelsea Phillips-Carr Crumbling under the grief of a lost child and subsequent divorce, astronomer Isaac (Patrick J. Adams) throws himself into searching for extraterrestrial life, with research assistant Clara (the actor’s real-life wife Troian Bellisario) slowly opening him up to new possibilities. Characters question what could be more important than finding alien life, while [...]
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    The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (Xavier Dolan, Canada/UK) — Special Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Adam Nayman It’s a bittersweet symphony, this life: that’s the thesis (and arguably the most expensive-to-license hook, assuming friend-of-the-director Adele offered hers for free) in Xavier Dolan’s The Death and Life of John F. Donovan. A famously troubled production that fired one of its two biggest stars via Instagram and betrays scars of that [...]
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    Edge of the Knife (Gwaii Edenshaw & Helen Haig-Brown, Canada) — Discovery

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Michael Sicinski The first feature film produced in the Haida language, currently spoken by upwards of 20 individuals, Edge of the Knife is notable simply as a cultural survivance project. If there should come a time when Haida is no longer a living language, the film may serve as a kind of Rosetta Stone [...]
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    Fausto (Andrea Bussmann, Mexico/Canada) — Wavelengths

    By Josh Cabrita In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Josh Cabrita and Adam Cook Published in Cinema Scope 76 (Fall 2018)   “Most people want to be kings and queens, but not enough want to be Faust.” —Jean-Luc Godard, Le livre d’image When Goethe wrote his Faust, adapting the German legend about a scholar who makes a pact with the Devil to attain [...]
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    Firecrackers (Jasmin Mozzafari, Canada) — Discovery

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Adam Nayman It’s a town full of losers and they’re pulling out of there to win: that’s the premise of Jasmin Mozzafari’s Firecrackers, which expands the director’s 2013 short of the same name into a conspicuously stylish, intermittently impressive debut that feels very much of the moment in young Canadian cinema, like a faster, [...]
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    Freaks (Zach Lipovsky & Adam Stein, Canada) — Discovery

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Adam Nayman Too grim for a straight-up YA audience and too goofy to be taken too seriously, Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s Freaks at leads owns its curious at-oddsness: it’s a weird, scrappy, palpably Canadian mutant that’s actually more likeable for not quite passing as mainstream fare. That earnest-misfit ethos begins with its seven-year-old [...]
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    Giant Little Ones (Keith Behrman, Canada) — Special Presentations

    By Angelo Muredda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Angelo Muredda From its YA market-friendly nonsense title to its insistent poptimist score and tired elevator pitch—it’s about that One Moment Everything Changes for a sensitive, good-looking teen who has the whole world on his plate—Giant Little Ones has a lot of strikes against it. It’s a bit of a surprise, then, that Keith [...]
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    Ghost Fleet (Shannon Service & Jeffrey Waldron, US) — TIFF Docs

    By Jay Kuehner In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Jay Kuehner Apparently they aren’t watching much Errol Morris over at Paul Allen’s Vulcan (the woke producers here), or else The Thin Blue Line has become neglected in documentary programs, lest a telejournalistic “exposé” such as Ghost Fleet, unwittingly indulging its own spurious methodology while attempting to uncover another, be mistaken as meta. Fulminating [...]
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    Graves Without a Name (Rithy Panh, France/Cambodia) — TIFF Docs

    By Angelo Muredda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Angelo Muredda Late in Rithy Panh’s elegant successor to The Missing Picture, which more squarely faces his own family losses in the Cambodian genocide of the late ’70s, the filmmaker’s longtime surrogate narrator Randal Douc wonders if he has shot so many images of death in order to forget that he himself is dead. [...]
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    The Great Darkened Days (Maxime Giroux, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Elena Lazic In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Elena Lazic It’s a testament to French-Canadian director Maxime Giroux’s control over his material that, as seemingly random or absurd as the events and imagery in The Great Darkened Days may appear, they all feel ruled by a genuine and moving emotion at their core. Giroux’s film centres on Philippe (Martin Dubreuil), a Québécois [...]
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    Heartbound (Janus Metz & Sine Plambech, Denmark/Netherlands/ Sweden) — TIFF Docs

    By Kelley Dong In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Kelley Dong Hidden in the grassy seaside of northwestern Jutland, the matronly Sommai has arranged for hundreds of marriages between Thai women and Danish men for more than 30 years. Between 2007 and 2018, documentarian Janus Metz (Borg vs McEnroe) and anthropologist Sine Plambech (Trafficking) closely followed Sommai and her construction of a migration [...]
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    Kingsway (Bruce Sweeney, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Mallory Andrews In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Mallory Andrews Are there citizens of any other nation who have as strained a relationship with their national cinema than Canadians? This may well be one of the only countries in the world to call its own cinematic output by name: they’re not just movies, they’re Canadian movies, an unofficial shorthand to denote a [...]
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    Maria by Callas (Tom Volf, France) — TIFF Docs

    By Madeleine Wall In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Madeleine Wall Compiled from archival footage of Maria Callas’ stage performances, interviews with the press, Super 8 home movies and the occasional letter, Maria by Callas attempts to create a portrait of a woman using as many angles as possible. Tom Volf’s film is more interested in Callas’ personal life than the professional career [...]
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    Meeting Gorbachev (Werner Herzog & André Singer, Germany/UK/US) — TIFF Docs

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Michael Sicinski While Errol Morris is busy sitting down with unrepentant fascists, Werner Herzog is making time with one of the key figures of the 20th century, a leader so visionary that he essentially reformed himself right out of a job. This is not to say that Meeting Gorbachev is a free meeting of [...]
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    Monrovia, Indiana (Frederick Wiseman, US) — TIFF Docs

    By Lorenzo Esposito In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Lorenzo Esposito At the end of the screening of Monrovia, Indiana in Venice, a young man approached Fred Wiseman and told him, “Maestro, your films will be understood in 20 years.” Wiseman, laughing, replied: “I wanna be there!” It is not a joke, but maybe the closest thing to Wiseman’s idea of ​​cinema that [...]
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    Mouthpiece (Patricia Rozema, Canada) — Special Presentations

    By Girish Shambu In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Girish Shambu One idea has persisted in film culture for nearly 75 years: that of the “auteur” as a lone genius who not only directs his [sic] films, but also conceives of and writes them himself. The results on the ground of this notion have been, shall we say, mixed. Take, for example, Olivier [...]
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    Putin’s Witnesses (Vitaly Mansky, Latvia/Switerland/ Czech Republic) — TIFF Docs

    By Celluloid Liberation Front In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Celluloid Liberation Front Almost 20 years after having filmed a promotional campaign movie on Putin and his inner circle during Putin’s first run for president, Vitaly Mansky has returned to this material to look back at the early stages of Putin’s rise to power. The intimacy of the footage paradoxically reveals little of the [...]
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    Reason (Anand Patwardhan, India) — TIFF Docs

    By Steve Macfarlane In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    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, [...]
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    Roads in February (Katherine Jerkovic, Canada/Uruguay) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Josh Cabrita In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
      By Josh Cabrita When Sarah (Arlen Aguayo Stewart) arrives in South America during the month of February there is a natural contrast between her original location and eventual destination—for just as her home in Montreal is being lambasted by the flurries of Quebec winter, her grandmother’s village in Uruguay is enjoying the blistering heat [...]
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    Les Salopes, or The Naturally Wanton Pleasure of Skin (Renée Beaulieu, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Angelo Muredda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Angelo Muredda What can be said about Renée Beaulieu’s Les Salopes, or The Naturally Wanton Pleasure of Skin that isn’t already conveyed in the title? The Québécois filmmaker and University of Montréal film professor’s second feature—which concers a biologist whose research on the potentially scandalous connection between desire and dermatology—sits at an awkward juncture [...]
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    Splinters (Thom Fitzgerald, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Michael Sicinski From its lingering focus on silent theatrical gestures that are ill-suited to the screen, to its narrative that’s structured entirely around an elevator pitch, to its irksome reliance on sub-coffee house white-boy folk music that’s woven right into the diegesis, Splinters could very well serve as Exhibit A for why English Canadian [...]
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    The Stone Speakers (Igor Drljaca, Canada/Bosnia & Herzegovina) — Wavelengths

    By Pedro Segura In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Pedro Segura As in Krivina and The Waiting Room, Igor Drljaca explores identity concerns and still-dormant wounds inherited from the Yugoslavian Civil War in The Stone Speakers, his first documentary feature, in which the observational analysis of tourism allows him to explore nationalism by its manipulative fictional bases. With a clinical and distant approach [...]
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    Through Black Spruce (Don McKellar, Canada) — Special Presentations

    By Angelo Muredda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Angelo Muredda You almost have to admire the chutzpah of Through Black Spruce, which hits TIFF with an inscrutable mix of sheepishness and self-confidence. Don McKellar’s adaptation of Joseph Boyden’s Giller Prize-winning novel couldn’t be arriving at a worse time, a cultural moment where writers like Jen Sookfong Lee and Alicia Elliott have proclaimed [...]
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    The Truth About Killer Robots (Maxim Pozdorovkin, US) — TIFF Docs

    By Robert Koehler In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Robert Koehler In the span of eight months, nonfiction filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin has produced two features on what are, on paper, vital topics: Our New President, which premiered at Sundance, addresses his native Russia’s gullible openness to the Putin propaganda machine’s relentless promotion of Donald Trump before and after his US election; now, with [...]
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    Walking on Water (Andrey Paounov, Italy/US) — TIFF Docs

    By Mark Peranson In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Mark Peranson In June 2016 on Lake Iseo in Italy, the Bulgarian-born artist Christo at last realized The Floating Piers, an orange-coloured, three-kilometre walkway on top of the lake that allowed people the experience of metaphorically becoming Jesus. The rollicking documentary Walking on Water takes us through the process of the execution of The [...]
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    What is Democracy? (Astra Taylor, Canada) — TIFF Docs

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2018
    By Michael Sicinski The latest philosophical documentary by Astra Taylor (Examined Life, Zizek!) takes on a very timely question, one she can’t be faulted for failing to answer in just under two hours. However, What is Democracy? does suffer from a rather scattershot approach, as though the sheer monumentality of the problem undermined the clear [...]
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    Exchange Rate: The Silent Partner at 40

    By Adam Nayman In CS75, Features, From The Magazine
    By Adam Nayman “I think Toronto is a wonderful town, smart and up to date, just like a good American city…makes me feel like I’m back home in Cleveland.” These words, spoken by a “Mr. Chester Vanderwick” (an apparently authentic Midwesterner, although I’ve always thought he looks and sounds like a bad actor) sum up [...]
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    Issue 75 Editor’s Note

    By Mark Peranson In Columns, CS75, From The Magazine
    By Mark Peranson Believe me or don’t, but it wasn’t until we started to lay out this issue maybe a week or so prior to my typing this that I realized, hey, we’ve reached Issue 75, three-quarters of the way to a century. I guess some people might consider 75 to be a kind of [...]
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    Inbetweeners: The 2018 Images Festival

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, Festivals
    By Michael Sicinski If you happen to frequent experimental film festivals (and, if you’re reading this, there’s a better-than-average chance that you do), you know that each of them has its own unique ambiance. Part of it, of course, has to do with the types of films shown, which in turn affects the community of [...]
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    Canadiana | Hometown Horror: Robin Aubert’s Les affamés

    By Lydia Ogwang In Canadiana, Columns, CS74, From The Magazine
    By Lydia Ogwang It’s an epidemic: the populist appeal of genre cinema is undeniable, even here at home. In a bit of a surprise, Robin Aubert’s Les affamés won Best Canadian Feature at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, and then the Temps Ø People’s Choice Award at the Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montréal. [...]
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    Issue 73 Table of Contents

    By Cinema Scope In CS73, From The Magazine, Table of Contents
    Interviews Sightsurf and Brainwave: Blake Williams’ PROTOTYPE by Michael Sicinski In the Shadow of the Magic Kingdom: Sean Baker on The Florida Project by Adam Cook Giving Credibility to the Universe: Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani on Laissez bronzer les cadavres by Christoph Huber Features The Uses of Disenchantment: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of [...]
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    The Green Fog (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, US/Canada)

    By Lawrence Garcia In CS73, Fall Festival Spotlight, Festivals, From The Magazine, Spotlight
    By Lawrence Garcia That Guy Maddin’s feature-length follow-up to his most monumental work to date—the staggering mise en abyme of The Forbidden Room (2013)—would be The Green Fog, a 63-minute, found-footage video reimagining of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), is entirely apropos (and a rather Maddin-esque sleight-of-hand) when one considers the fanfare with which The Green [...]
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    Ephraim Asili’s Immeasurable Equations

    By Jesse Cumming In CS72, Features, From The Magazine
    By Jesse Cumming If it is not here It must be there For somewhere and nowhere Parallels In versions of each other …. where Or even before something came to be —Sun Ra, “Parallels” (1970) Described as “A Video Film on Space and the Music of the Omniverse,” Ephraim Asili’s Points on a Space Age (2009) [...]
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    The New Workout Plan: Denis Côté’s Ta peau si lisse

    By Adam Nayman In CS72, From The Magazine, Interviews
    By Adam Nayman William K.L. Dickson’s Sandow (1894) is a three-part documentary study of the Prussian muscleman Friedrich Wilhelm Muller, who adopted the more flamboyant nom de plume after he dodged the draft and joined the circus. Sandow’s placement on undergraduate film studies curriculums the world over owes to its unique historical value: it was [...]
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    Mañana a esta hora (Lina Rodriguez, Canada)

    By Angelo Muredda In Currency, Web Only
      By Angelo Muredda The first image we see in Lina Rodriguez’s deceptively modest second feature Mañana a esta hora (This Time Tomorrow) is something of a puzzle: a gradually lightening shot of a tree in a leafy park in Bogotá, standing sturdy and still. While this depopulated, evergreen overture might seem to promise an [...]
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    Les Affamés (Robin Aubert, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema)

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Michael Sicinski While it could be said that the last thing the world needs is another zombie movie, Québécois director Robin Aubert has managed to offer a solid and at times even original survey of this well-trod terrain. Where so many other genre filmmakers make the mistake of trying to add their unique spin [...]
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    Alias Grace (Mary Harron, Canada/USA) — Primetime

    By Angelo Muredda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Angelo Muredda Margaret Atwood’s most genre-bending, postmodern novel gets a mostly straightforward Victorian adaptation in Mary Harron’s CBC-bound miniseries Alias Grace, at least on the basis of its first two episodes. Atwood has a lot of fun with the lurid rubbernecking appeal of the story of Grace Marks (Sarah Gadon), the maid turned prisoner [...]
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    Ava (Sadaf Foroughi, Iran/Canada/Qatar) — Discovery

    By Mallory Andrews In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Mallory Andrews “The bird that would soar above the level of plain tradition and prejudice must have strong wings,” the protagonist of Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel The Awakening is advised; “it is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.” Ava (Mahour Jabbari), the teenage title heroine of Sadaf [...]
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    Azmaish: A Journey Through the Subcontinent (Sabiha Sumar, Pakistan) — TIFF Docs

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Michael Sicinski While certainly informative and laudably humanist in intent, Azmaish poses a certain problem for this reviewer, simply from the standpoint of context. This new documentary/road movie from Sabiha Sumar (Dinner with the President) is a kind of primer on the conflicts between India and Pakistan, offering a crash course that starts with [...]
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    Black Cop (Cory Bowles, Canada) — Discovery

    By Josh Cabrita In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Josh Cabrita The inciting central incident in Cory Bowles’ debut feature is an all-too-recognizable altercation between two belligerent, white Toronto PD officers and a hoodie-wearing black man (Ronnie Rowe Jr.) leaving a convenience store mid-run. Starting with the officers’ quasi-congenial attempts to get the jogger’s attention while his earbuds blare, a tumult of racially [...]
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    The Breadwinner (Nora Twomey, Canada/Ireland/Luxembourg) — Special Presentations

    By Chelsea Phillips-Carr In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Chelsea Phillips-Carr In its reductive exploration of misogyny in Afghanistan, The Breadwinner is reflective of how a children’s film, with its simplified, toned-down, and easily conveyed ideas, is not conducive to discussions of serious political problems. But equally faulty is the very obvious issue of who is discussing what, and for whom. A film [...]
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    BOOM FOR REAL The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (Sara Driver, USA) — TIFF Docs

    By Phil Coldiron In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Phil Coldiron GELDZAHLER: So they’re kinds [sic] of indexes to encyclopedias that don’t exist? BASQUIAT: I just like the names. Given that this exchange between curator and artist is typical of the latter’s saintly tendency towards terseness, Sara Driver’s decision to render her portrait of the five years before Basquiat exploded onto the art [...]
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    Cardinals (Grayson Moore & Aidan Shipley, Canada) — Discovery

    By Lydia Ogwang In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Lydia Ogwang Canadian newcomers Grayson Moore and Aidan Shipley strike gold with veteran Sheila McCarthy in the lead role of Cardinals. McCarthy is masterful as the damningly self-convicted Valerie, a mother of two recalibrating to free civilian life after serving time for apparent alcohol-induced vehicular manslaughter. While her daughters (played by Grace Glowicki and [...]
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    The Carter Effect (Sean Menard, Canada/USA) — TIFF Docs

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Adam Nayman Filming Drake (billed as a “rapper/actor,” in a nod to his Degrassi stint) in front of some dinosaur skeletons at the Royal Ontario Museum is the wittiest touch in Sean Menard’s barely feature-length, sure-to-be-bought-for-television account of Vince Carter’s tumultuous tenure with the Toronto Raptors, not that said tumultuousness is really given its [...]
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    Cocaine Prison (Violeta Ayala, Australia/Bolivia/France/US) — TIFF Docs

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Michael Sicinski There’s a scene early on in Cocaine Prison where we see several of the little brothers of Deisy Torrez, one of the film’s main subjects, rolling around in dried coca leaves, playing in the foliage like so many New Englanders have at the height of autumn. This is beautiful and sad, since [...]
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    The Crescent (Seth A. Smith, Canada) — Midnight Madness

    By Josh Cabrita In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Josh Cabrita Seth A. Smith’s perplexing and propulsive The Crescent strips away nearly all exuberance from its mise en scène and presents Nova Scotia’s naturally picturesque vistas in bleak hues. Using the anxieties of a survivalist psyche to radically realign our perception of specific tropes, Smith capitalizes on fears of economic isolation within the [...]
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    Don’t Talk to Irene (Pat Mills, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Robert Koehler In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Robert Koehler After the dark pleasures of his debut feature Guidance, writer-director Pat Mills wanders into the deep Toronto suburban bush with his considerably less funny follow-up Don’t Talk to Irene. High school seems to be Mills’ bailiwick: Guidance took school counselling to extreme, twisted places, mining good sources of satire; Don’t Talk to [...]
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    Ex Libris – The New York Public Library (Frederick Wiseman, USA) — TIFF Docs

    By Tom Charity In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Tom Charity Published in Cinema Scope 72 (Fall 2017) Let’s start with this: the transitions in Fred Wiseman’s new film (and there are many) have a simple and specific beauty. They double as establishing shots, each comprising a brief cluster of New York street views, usually including an intersection sign to pin us to [...]
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    Fluid Frontiers (Ephraim Asili, USA/Canada) — Wavelengths

    By Jesse Cumming In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Jesse Cumming Published in Cinema Scope 72 (Fall 2017)   If it is not here It must be there For somewhere and nowhere Parallels In versions of each other …. where Or even before something came to be —Sun Ra, “Parallels” (1970) Described as “A Video Film on Space and the Music of the [...]
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    Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond (Chris Smith, USA/Canada) — TIFF Docs

    By Pamela Jahn In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Pamela Jahn When Jim Carrey auditioned to play Andy Kaufman in Miloš Forman’s 1999 biopic Man on the Moon, he was a man on a roll: Ace Ventura, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber (all released in 1994) had made him a star and the best-paid comic actor of his generation, and he exceeded [...]
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    The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches (Simon Lavoie, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Josh Cabrita In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Josh Cabrita A tale of a reclusive, degenerate family in rural Quebec in the 1930s, Simon Lavoie’s follow-up to Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves (winner of last year’s Best Canadian Feature prize at TIFF) wastes no time shoving our noses into some truly vile shit: an abusive patriarchy, incest, [...]
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    Living Proof (Matt Embry, Canada) — TIFF Docs

    By Aurelie Godet In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Aurélie Godet Canadian filmmaker Matt Embry is living proof that one can do well despite being stuck with multiple sclerosis, provided that one circumvents the medical establishment’s augur of incurability by diversifying sources of information on the causes and treatment of the disease. This is the main takeaway of Living Proof, a documentary that [...]
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    Luk’Luk’I (Wayne Wapeemukwa, Canada) — Discovery

    By Chelsea Phillips-Carr In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Chelsea Phillips-Carr Set and shot during the last days of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, in Luk’Luk’I Wayne Wapeemukwa attempts to puncture the veneer of Canadian nationalism by turning away from the event’s image of national prosperity and togetherness in order to focus on marginalized communities. Working with a cast of mostly nonprofessional actors, [...]
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    Makala (Emmanuel Gras, France) — TIFF Docs

    By James Lattimer In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By James Lattimer For all the recent criticism of Cannes’ reliance on the same big names, perhaps the bigger problem is the festival’s continuing failure to find new ones to replace them, as the chances of making a real discovery on the Croisette seem to dwindle further with each passing year. French director Emmanuel Gras’ [...]
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    Mary Goes Round (Molly McGlynn, Canada) — Discovery

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Adam Nayman “Are you a piece of shit?” This is the question being pondered by 29-year-old Mary (Aya Cash), who suspects that she might be and knows for a fact that she’s a hypocrite, peddling substance abuse-program platitudes at her day job while getting fucked up by night (and in the afternoon, and on [...]
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    Meditation Park (Mina Shum, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Josh Cabrita In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Josh Cabrita Mina Shum’s first narrative feature since 2002 (following a decade-long stint directing Vancouver-based television) is contained within the few blocks surrounding the intersection of Renfrew and Hastings in East Vancouver, a community largely made up of longtime Asian immigrants. One of these residents is the silently resilient Maria (Pei-Pei Cheng), who has [...]
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    Never Steady, Never Still (Kathleen Hepburn, Canada)—Discovery

    By Lydia Ogwang In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Lydia Ogwang Determining the sum total of Kathleen Hepburn’s formally accomplished feature debut is daunting arithmetic. Protagonist Judy, a longtime sufferer of Parkinson’s disease, lives with her husband and 18-year-old son in warm domesticity. The film’s opening moments deliver a soft, rose-coloured naturalism, but a prologue delivered in voiceover establishes loss and vulnerability as [...]
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    Of Sheep and Men (Karim Sayad, Switzerland/France/Qatar) — TIFF Docs

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Michael Sicinski First of all, let me compliment Mr. Sayad’s directorial prowess: I watched Of Sheep and Men with no foreknowledge, and I honestly thought it was a fictional feature. That’s because this documentary is so tightly structured in terms of its focus on two protagonists and their gradually shifting milieu, and even though [...]
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    Our People Will Be Healed (Alanis Obomsawin, Canada) — Masters

    By Josh Cabrita In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Josh Cabrita Now in her 85th year and making her 50th film, indispensable Indigenous documentarian Alanis Obomsawin appears to have fallen into an atypical mood of optimistic self-reflection. In her previous film, the nearly three-hour, Wisemanesque We Can’t Make The Same Mistake Twice, she chronicled, with deliberate drudgery and opacity, a years-long judicial suit [...]
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    Porcupine Lake (Ingrid Veninger, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Angelo Muredda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Angelo Muredda Micro-budget Toronto filmmaker turned production maven Ingrid Veninger hits her sweet spot with Porcupine Lake, which trades some of her scrappier aesthetic instincts for a more polished veneer but keeps the heart and prickly specificity of her best work. Like Andrew Cividino’s recent Canadian indie darling Sleeping Giant, which staged its small-scale [...]
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    PROTOTYPE (Blake Williams, Canada) — Wavelengths

    By Phil Coldiron In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Phil Coldiron Early in the autumn of 1900, four months before Edison closed the Black Maria and five years before the Lumière brothers left the cinematograph business altogether for what they supposed to be less trivial concerns, a storm landed at the booming port town of Galveston, Texas and killed perhaps as many as [...]
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    Pyewacket (Adam MacDonald, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Adam Nayman The hands-down winner of the TIFF 2017 “Google the title to understand it” award, Pyewacket finds Adam MacDonald—who came to the festival in 2014 with a tough, impressive little thriller called Backcountry—swapping generic models, trading survivalist realism for occult-tinged horror. It’s a lateral move, and also not an improvement (albeit one that’s [...]
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    Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart (Tracy Heather Strain, USA) — TIFF Docs

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Michael Sicinski Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart is a TV documentary about the life and work of the late African-American playwright/activist Lorraine Hansberry. Produced for PBS’ American Masters series, Sighted Eyes is meticulously researched, well assembled, and has most of the appropriate expert commentary. It is instructive to remember just how much Hansberry accomplished in her [...]
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    Ta peau si lisse (Denis Côté, Canada/Switzerland) — Wavelengths

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Adam Nayman Published in Cinema Scope 72 (Fall 2017) William K.L. Dickson’s Sandow (1894) is a three-part documentary study of the Prussian muscleman Friedrich Wilhelm Muller, who adopted the more flamboyant nom de plume after he dodged the draft and joined the circus. Sandow’s placement on undergraduate film studies curriculums the world over owes [...]
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    The Tesla World Light (Matthew Rankin, Canada) — Short Cuts

    By Jason Anderson In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Jason Anderson Published in Cinema Scope 71 (Summer 2017) International devotees of Canuck pop-cultural arcana may pride themselves on knowing every single line that Drake ever uttered on Degrassi: The Next Generation, but there’s another treasure that Canadians thus far have been able to keep for themselves. These are the Heritage Minutes, a series [...]
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    Tulipani, Love, Honour and a Bicycle (Mike van Diem, Netherlands/Italy/Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Mallory Andrews In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Mallory Andrews What is the aesthetic advantage of whimsy, especially in a work presumably meant for an adult audience? These questions preoccupied me throughout Mike van Diem’s Tulipani, Love, Honour and a Bicycle, a primary-coloured fable recounted to Anna (Ksenia Solo), a young woman who travels from Montréal to Italy after her mother’s death [...]
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    A Worthy Companion (Carlos Sanchez & Jason Sanchez, Canada) — Discovery

    By Angelo Muredda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2017
    By Angelo Muredda Evan Rachel Wood works hard to put on a tough face in Carlos and Jason Sanchez’s unconvincing debut feature, the kind of miserablist festival fare that has given English Canadian cinema a bad name for too long. Wood stars as Laura, a thirtysomething house cleaner with unsavoury sexual appetites (so a moralizing [...]
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    Electroshock Therapy: Matthew Rankin on The Tesla World Light

    By Jason Anderson In CS71, Features, From The Magazine, Interviews
    By Jason Anderson International devotees of Canuck pop-cultural arcana may pride themselves on knowing every single line that Drake ever uttered on Degrassi: The Next Generation, but there’s another treasure that Canadians thus far have been able to keep for themselves. These are the Heritage Minutes, a series of government-made, bilingual 60-second shorts for television [...]
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    Global Discoveries on DVD: A (Mainly) Alphabetical Listing of 24 Items

    By Jonathan Rosenbaum In Columns, CS71, DVD Reviews, From The Magazine
    By Jonathan Rosenbaum Blow-Up (Criterion Blu-ray). I’ve always had somewhat mixed feelings about Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1967 Swinging London hit: awe and admiration for his uncanny handling of space, colour, mood, and non-narrative stasis in juxtaposition with his metaphysical detective story, and irritation about the show-offy, fashion-plate ambience that seemed far more responsible for the movie’s [...]
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    First Do No Harm: Hugh Gibson on The Stairs

    By Angelo Muredda In CS70, From The Magazine, Interviews
    By Angelo Muredda  Early in Hugh Gibson’s The Stairs, we meet Marty, a recovering addict working as a social worker for drug users in Toronto’s Regent Park. A loquacious eccentric who clearly relishes the Aaron Sorkin-inflected walk-and-talk of his onscreen introduction, Marty seems equally comfortable leading a tutorial on packing safe injection kits at work [...]
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    Orchestrating the Apocalypse: The Survival Horror of Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evils

    By Christoph Huber In CS70, Features, From The Magazine
    “This is a product of the Umbrella Corporation. Our business is life itself. Some side effects may occur.” —commercial announcement lead-in to the end credits of Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)
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    Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié n’ont fait que se creuser un tombeau (Mathieu Denis and Simon Lavoie, Canada)

    By Adam Nayman In CS69, Fall Festival Spotlight, Festivals, From The Magazine, Spotlight
    By Adam Nayman How in the world did Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié n’ont fait que se creuser un tombeau (Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves) win the Best Canadian Feature prize this year at TIFF? I’m wondering this not because I think the film is unworthy, or necessarily [...]
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    Global Discoveries on DVD: Awards and Extras

    By Jonathan Rosenbaum In Columns, CS68, DVD Reviews
    By Jonathan Rosenbaum. DVD Awards 2016, Il Cinema Ritrovato Jurors: Lorenzo Codelli, Alexander Horwath, Lucien Logette, Mark McElhatten, Paolo Mereghetti, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. (Although Mark McElhatten wasn’t able to attend the festival this year, he has continued to function as a very active member of the jury.) BEST SPECIAL FEATURES Coffret Nico Papatakis (France, 1963-92) [...]
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    Hello Destroyer (Kevan Funk, Canada) — Discovery

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Adam Nayman It’s either genuinely ballsy or calculatedly smart for a young Canadian director to attack the culture and codes of junior hockey. The fact is that Kevan Funk’s Hello Destroyer is set to get a lot of attention at TIFF and beyond, and it’s constructed sturdily enough to stand up to any forthcoming [...]
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    Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (Steve James, US) — TIFF Docs

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Michael Sicinski Most of the films related to the 2008 financial meltdown (documentaries and features) have assumed an audience thoroughly cowed by the very topic. In fact, the films themselves have often seemed flummoxed by their very subject, doing their best to present the complexities of 21st-century international finance in broad strokes and simple [...]
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    All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone (Fred Peabody, Canada) — TIFF Docs

    By Alysia Urrutia In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
      By Alysia Urrutia Taking its title from legendary independent journalist I.F. Stone’s guiding maxim, Fred Peabody’s All Governments Lie expands its critical scope by tracking down other deceptive public institutions whose credibility also deserves debunking, mainly corporate organizations and the mass media. Despite money and power being common denominators among the suspected liars, the [...]
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    Amanda Knox (Brian McGinn & Rod Blackhurst, USA/Denmark) — TIFF Docs

    By Jose Teodoro In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By José Teodoro What’s finally most objectionable about Amanda Knox is encapsulated right in this glossy and obnoxious film’s title. Its fundamental sensationalism bubbling under a patina of seriousness, exemplified by cocoon-like, squarely composed, quasi-Errol Morris interview sessions, Amanda Knox revisits the botched investigation—and re-investigation—into the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a British exchange student, [...]
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    ARQ (Tony Elliott, US/Canada) — Discovery

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Michael Sicinski Bearing a surface resemblance to Primer (2004) and Edge of Tomorrow (2014), ARQ thrusts its viewers into a vaguely futuristic world that [REBOOT] Bearing an unnervingly derivative resemblance to Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004), which did much more with considerably less, the debut feature by TV writer Tony Elliott (most recently of Orphan [...]
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    The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography (Errol Morris, US) — TIFF Docs

    By Jay Kuehner In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Jay Kuehner As a portrait of a portrait artist, Errol Morris’ framing of Elsa Dorfman is scaled with commensurately intimate and life-sized means, perhaps surprisingly given the director’s predilection for the everyday uncanny (you’d suspect Diane Arbus to be the more fitting subject). Morris drops in on Dorfman’s studio for a guided tour of [...]
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    Below Her Mouth (April Mullen, Canada) — Special Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Adam Nayman Nomi Malone’s swimming-pool gyrations in Showgirls (1995) have nothing on the scene in Below Her Mouth where fashion editor Jasmine (Natalie Krill) brings herself to orgasm via a full-blast bathtub faucet while perched perilously over the porcelain basin; if nothing else, it’s quite a display of upper-body strength. So, credit director April [...]
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    Birth of the Dragon (George Nolfi, US/China/Canada) — Special Presentations

    By Steve Macfarlane In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Steve Macfarlane When it comes to biopic treatment, everybody deserves better. But this is especially true for Bruce Lee, who left behind a rich and varied filmography, lest we forget—by my lights, the drinking sequence in The Big Boss (1971) is as termitic a portrayal of shit-facedness as the movies have offered, facing competition [...]
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    Bezness as Usual (Alex Pitstra, Netherlands) – TIFF Docs

    By Robert Koehler In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Robert Koehler Dutch filmmaker Alex Pitstra’s mother Anneke, trying to bounce back from a bitter divorce, vacationed in a Tunisia beach resort in the late ’70s, where she met and fell for local playboy Mohsen Ben Hassen. Together, back in the Netherlands, they had little Alex, soon after she had learned that Mohsen was [...]
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    Bleed for This (Ben Younger, US) — Special Presentations

    By Robert Koehler In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Robert Koehler Fun fact about the tenacious American boxer Vinny Paz, or as he was known during his heyday, Vinny Pazienza: In his final bid for the WBC world super middleweight title, he lost to Canada, represented by Quebec’s Eric “Lucky” Lucas. No Canadian has made a movie about Lucas, not yet anyway, but [...]
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    Chasing Trane (John Scheinfeld, US) — TIFF Docs

    By Jose Teodoro In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
     By José Teodoro If you own one jazz record, it’s probably Kind of Blue; if you own two, the other one’s probably A Love Supreme. John Coltrane plays on the former and is composer and bandleader on the latter, and it is not unremarkable that the legacy of this once popular musical form is now [...]
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    The Cinema Travellers (Shirley Abraham & Amit Madheshiya, India) — TIFF Docs

    By Shelly Kraicer In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Shelly Kraicer Mohammed, Bapu, and Prakash are three cinema magi: half wizards, not-quite-ghosts, intelligent and hard-working men who have been keeping the art of film (and we mean celluloid) projection alive in the Indian state of Maharashtra. The first two run travelling cinemas, where ancient 35mm projectors show old films inside tents to rural [...]
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    Close Relations (Vitaly Mansky, Latvia/Germany/ Estonia/ Ukraine) — TIFF Docs

    By Alysia Urrutia In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Alysia Urrutia Adding to the robust shelf of documentaries that have scavenged Ukrainian soil in the wake of the Euro-Maidan Revolution, Vitaly Mansky’s Close Relations takes a sharp turn away from a propagandist approach and steers into the up-close-and-personal framework of a home movie. Its intimate and conversational nature, along with Mansky’s bold decision [...]
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    Colossal (Nacho Vigalondo, Canada/Spain) — Vanguard

    By Josh Cabrita In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Josh Cabrita Nacho Vigalondo’s discombobulating rom-com monster movie occupies an awkward middle ground. Neither committing to its darker undertones nor giving itself over to unhinged absurdity, the film shifts between an ironic and forthright treatment of its preposterous concept: that thirtysomething alcoholic Gloria (Anne Hathaway) is responsible for unpredictable monster sightings and attacks in [...]
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    Forever Pure (Maya Zinshtein, Israel/UK/Denmark/Norway) — TIFF Docs

    By Mallory Andrews In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Mallory Andrews They call themselves La Familia, and the mob connotations don’t end there for the yellow-and-black-clad uber-fans who reliably fill the stands during each game of Beitar Jerusalem F.C. But in exchange for their loyalty, they exact a high price. In Forever Pure, Maya Zinshtein follows the controversial 2012 season, when Beitar recruited [...]
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    Gaza Surf Club (Mickey Yamine & Phillip Gnadt, Germany/Palestine/US) — TIFF Docs

    By Josh Cabrita In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Josh Cabrita Whether it’s admirable wish-fulfillment or just plain dishonest, Mickey Yamine and Phillip Gnadt’s Gaza Surf Club is a “feel-good” documentary that wants to be—and is about being—distracted from injustice. Focusing on the bourgeoning surfing culture in the Gaza Strip, the film follows three interconnected individuals: a female adolescent who can’t swim because [...]
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    Gimme Danger (Jim Jarmusch, US) — TIFF Docs

    By Jose Teodoro In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
      By José Teodoro As with Year of the Horse (1997), Gimme Danger is an outlier in Jim Jarmusch’s filmography in that it’s both a documentary and a temporary vacation from the strictures of a signature style for this most style-conscious of filmmakers. Combining interviews executed in laundry nooks and public washrooms with archival materials [...]
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    I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, US/France/Belgium/Switzerland) — TIFF Docs

    By Steve Macfarlane In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Steve Macfarlane This past summer, I attended a screening and panel discussion hosted by the New Negress Film Society in Brooklyn; standing outside the venue afterwards, a flustered British gentleman took the evening’s general political timbre to task as follows: “I’m just a bit tired of hearing about the whole ‘white supremacy’ conversation. It’s [...]
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    I Called Him Morgan (Kasper Collin, Sweden/US) — TIFF Docs

    By Jose Teodoro In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By José Teodoro Trumpeter Lee Morgan belonged to that wave of early-’60s Blue Note recording artists that included Sonny Clark and Ike Quebec, guys who did not embrace the radically dilating apertures of free jazz but, rather, confined their explorations to the vernacular of bebop. Over time, these musicians have understandably become overshadowed by the [...]
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    India in a Day (Richie Mehta, India/UK) — TIFF Docs

    By Jay Kuehner In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Jay Kuehner Never mind the city symphony—here is the cacophony of an entire country. The “user-generated doc” is enlisted to reveal (or effectively colonize, depending on your view) its own vast territory, in this case the world’s largest democracy, India. By virtue of sheer plurality and simultaneity—and under the dubious tutelage of Ridley Scott [...]
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    Into the Inferno (Werner Herzog, UK/Austria) — TIFF Docs

    By Robert Koehler In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Robert Koehler Like certain kinds of sports fans, those who are into volcanoes can’t understand those who aren’t. (I’ve met a few, and I’ve found little else in life to discuss with them.) So Into the Inferno, Werner Herzog’s third film addressing volcanoes, and the first taking a global perspective, is not for those [...]
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    It’s Only the End of the World (Xavier Dolan, Canada/France) — Special Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
      By Adam Nayman As in Tom at the Farm (2013), It’s Only the End of the World finds Xavier Dolan more or less on his best behaviour, humbly (as much as that’s possible for him) adapting a pre-existing play (by the late Québécois writer Jean-Marc Lagarce) rather than weaving his melodrama out of whole [...]
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    The Ivory Game (Kief Davidson & Richard Ladkani, Austria/USA) — TIFF Docs

    By Jay Kuehner In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Jay Kuehner A “call to action,” a “wake-up call”—call it what call you will, The Ivory Game is stylized broadcast journalism for the Netflix set, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, considering how smart elephants are; if only they can outlast cinema when it comes to extinction. To be fair, the ivory trade is [...]
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    Jean of the Joneses (Stella Meghie, Canada) — Discovery

    By Ethan Vestby In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Ethan Vestby Perhaps it’s not fair to Jean of the Joneses to interpret it as a direct answer to the lily-white “millennial artistic type makes their way through Brooklyn” narratives of recent times, be it Girls, Frances Ha (2012) or Listen Up Philip (2014). Yet as it opens on its eponymous Jamaican-American heroine (Taylour [...]
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    Karl Marx City (Petra Epperlein & Michael Tucker, US/Germany) — TIFF Docs

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Michael Sicinski An impressive outing from the pair who made the rather shambolic Gunner Palace back in 2004, Karl Marx City is that rarest of objects: an exploration of family history that avoids solipsism and manages to connect the personal to much broader things. Petra Epperlein and her family grew up in the GDR; [...]
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    Loving (Jeff Nichols, US) — Gala Presentations

    By Richard Porton In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Richard Porton There’s little question that Jeff Nichols’ Loving deals with one of the most fascinating, and little known, incidents in the history of American racial strife. Inspired by Nancy Buirski’s documentary The Loving Story (2011), Nichols retells the remarkable saga of Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred Loving (Ruth Negga), an interracial couple whose [...]
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    Mali Blues (Lutz Gregor, Germany) — TIFF Docs

    By Alysia Urrutia In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Alysia Urrutia You might remember her minor but memorable performance in the Oscar-nominated Timbuktu (2014), but in Lutz Gregor’s Mali Blues singer Fatoumata Diawara’s electrifying pizzazz rightfully earns her the spotlight. Gregor documents Fatou’s journey of self-discovery on a concert tour of her native land, a country whose occupation by radical Islamists separated its [...]
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    Maliglutit (Searchers) (Zacharias Kunuk, Canada) — Platform

    By Jay Kuehner In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Jay Kuehner There’s something poetic in the notion of an indigenous reworking of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), although it does not appear to be the motivating principle behind Zacharias Kunuk’s Maliglutit, which fashions itself as a western told in an Inuit way. There are of course a host of political/theoretical implications to such [...]
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    Mean Dreams (Nathan Morlando, Canada) — Special Presentations

    By Angelo Muredda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Angelo Muredda Early in Nathan Morlando’s Mean Dreams—a Canadian production with American aspirations—kewpie-doll runaway Casey (Sophie Nélisse) gets moony-eyed as she remembers her dead mother’s wish to get away from the dour country that entrapped her and light out for the ocean. It might be a testament to the film’s restrained Northern ethos (in [...]
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    Miss Impossible (Emilie Deleuze, France) — TIFF Kids

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Michael Sicinski It may be a painfully obvious point, but the simplest gauge of Miss Impossible’s unassuming success is to consider all the cheap, ingratiating tics you’d see in an American version of the same material. This is a very small film buoyed by a lead character, 13-year-old Aurore (newcomer Léna Magnien), whose snark [...]
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    My Life as a Courgette (Claude Barras, Switzerland/France) — TIFF Kids

    By Jordan Cronk In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Jordan Cronk Don’t let the TIFF Kids designation fool you: Swiss animator Claude Barras’ My Life as a Courgette, one of the bright spots of this year’s Quinzaine, is one of the most emotionally acute and sharply observed films in recent memory. Scripted by Céline Sciamma (director of Girlhood and Tomboy) from a novel [...]
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    Nelly (Anne Émond, Canada) — Vanguard

    By Ethan Vestby In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Ethan Vestby Curiously placed in Vanguard despite a biopic pedigree seemingly guaranteed a spot in the bottomless pit of the section known as Special Presentations (unless the programmers of Midnight Madness’ “cooler older sister” thought sexploitation was the “genre” supposedly being turned on its head), Nelly is, regardless, a case of a film that [...]
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    Off Frame AKA Revolution to Until Victory (Mohanad Yaqubi, Palestine/France/Qatar/Lebanon) — TIFF Docs

    By Robert Koehler In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Robert Koehler Beyond the rare screening of Far From Vietnam (1967), viewers today have few chances to encounter the Third Cinema movement, that brief but intense burst of nonfiction work generally informed by Marxist-Leninist internationalism whose superstar was a radicalized Jean-Luc Godard. If you attended North American universities in the mid-’70s you would have [...]
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    Old Stone (Johnny Ma, Canada/China) — Discovery

    By Ethan Vestby In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Ethan Vestby Cab driver Lao Shi (Chen Gang) has his worst fare ever when an inebriated passenger unexpectedly grabs his arm, causing his car to strike a motorcyclist. Quick to act when an ambulance won’t show up, Lao Shi rushes the injured man to the hospital. Yet his good deed only brings him misfortune, [...]
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    Politics, Instruction Manual (Fernando León de Aranoa, Spain) — TIFF DOCS

    By Steve Macfarlane In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Steve Macfarlane If one major lesson can be drawn (as opposed to countless small and terrifying ones) from the last few years of populist upsurges, maybe it’s this: a consistent, well-sold policy—whether Bernie Sanders’ or Nigel Farage’s—can still resonate with dissatisfied voter blocs in a major way, wild-carding the amnesiac Central Casting burlesque that [...]
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    Prank (Vincent Biron, Canada) — Discovery

    By Josh Cabrita In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Josh Cabrita There’s a self-reflexive moment in Vincent Biron’s feature debut where a group of delinquents watch Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011) stoned in a backyard. It’s an odd cinephilic reference point for a film that is ostensibly the bastard child of Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (2009) and Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the [...]
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    (Re)Assignment (Walter Hill, Canada/France/US) — Special Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Adam Nayman A potential powder keg of (trans)gender politics provided anybody ever actually sees it after its TIFF premiere, Walter Hill’s (Re)Assignment is sort of two movies in one: a low-rent, bullet-in-the-head revenge thriller that embraces clichés like long-lost friends, and an inconngrously high-minded disquisition on style that cribs from Shakespeare and Poe en [...]
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    The Stairs (Hugh Gibson, Canada) — TIFF Docs

    By Shelly Kraicer In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Shelly Kraicer Hugh Gibson’s fascinating documentary The Stairs takes us into the lives of three harm reduction workers in Toronto’s Regent Park, a housing project now under hopeful renewal that has long represented Toronto’s most disadvantaged communities. Martin, Greg, and Roxanne are all current or past drug users who also work at the Regent [...]
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    Two Lovers and a Bear (Kim Nguyen, Canada) — Special Presentations

    By Richard Porton In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Richard Porton A decidedly whimsical take on amour fou, Kim Nguyen’s Two Lovers and a Bear stretches a thin premise to its limits. Lovers with daddy issues Roman (Dane DeHaan) and Lucy (Tatiana Maslany) reside in the Canadian Arctic. Supremely photogenic, as well as inseparable, the couple weathers a crisis when Lucy decides to [...]
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    Unless (Alan Gilsenan, Canada/Ireland) — Special Presentations

    By Angelo Muredda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Angelo Muredda The last novel and late-career manifesto of Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Shields gets a visceral but disjointed adaptation in Alan Gilsenan’s Unless, which, like its source, follows the mysterious transformation of Norah (Hannah Gross), a college student who suddenly goes silent and abandons her life of middle-class comfort to camp out on [...]
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    Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours of Life (Fariboz Kamkari, Italy) — TIFF Docs

    By Robert Koehler In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Robert Koehler There’s no excuse making a poor film on the life and work of one of cinema’s greatest cinematographers. A film about Carlo Di Palma should practically direct itself: stitch together clips from his major (and some of his minor) work—from Pietro Germi’s Divorce Italian Style (1961) and Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964), Blow-up [...]
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    We Can’t Make the Same Mistake Twice (Alanis Obomsawin, Canada) — Masters

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Adam Nayman There is a moment near the end of Alanis Obomsawin’s purposefully epic-length courtroom-procedural documentary We Can’t Make the Same Mistake Twice where the camera catches a lawyer’s convictions wilting—he can’t even really make eye contact with the tribunal he’s trying to convince, much less sell them on the idea that the Canadian [...]
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    Werewolf (Ashley McKenzie, Canada) — Discovery

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Adam Nayman The title’s a metaphor, of course. New Waterford-based Ashley McKenzie’s feature debut, after a string of sterling shorts, tracks two methadone-swigging wastrels whose chemical dependencies have them eking out a feral existence in small-town Nova Scotia. The narrative materials are generic—plenty of down-in-the-mouth Canadiana out there—but the filmmaking is vivid and specific. [...]
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    Weirdos (Bruce McDonald, Canada) — Special Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Adam Nayman Having given Bruce McDonald a pretty rough ride in this space last year for the so-bad-it-had-to-be-contractually-obligated horror movie Hellions, I’m inclined to go easier on Weirdos, which has the same rambling, open-road sensibility of the director’s very best movies. Not that this gentle period comedy (dateline: Antigonish, 1976) ever really challenges the [...]
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    Window Horses (The Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming) (Ann Marie Fleming, Canada) — Special Presentations

    By Angelo Muredda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Angelo Muredda Though it’s a bit scrappy on first glance, Window Horses director Ann Marie Fleming’s drawing style has a good story behind it. After surviving a car accident while she was an animation student, Fleming resorted to the barest of shorthands in her minimalist sketches of a character she called Stick Girl, made [...]
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    X Quinientos (Juan Andrés Arango, Canada/Colombia/ Mexico) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2016
    By Adam Nayman The sinister shadow of Iñárritu hangs over Juan Andrés Arango’s tripartite character study, which doesn’t explicitly interconnect its stories Babel-style but nevertheless seems similarly intended as a commentary on universal issues of displacement and alienation (sans international movie stars, of course; this is a Canadian co-production after all). As such, it’s pretty [...]
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    Issue 69: Table of Contents

    By Cinema Scope In Columns, CS69, From The Magazine, Table of Contents
    This the full table of contents from Cinema Scope Magazine #69. We post selected articles from each issue on the site which you can read for free using the links below. This is only possible with support from our subscribers, so please consider a subscription to the magazine, or  the instant digital download version. 
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    The Gag of Realism: Nathan for You

    By Benny Safdie In CS67, Features, From The Magazine
    By Benny Safdie When you become obsessed with creating realism you create something fake. When you become obsessed with recreating reality you can create something hilarious. This idea hit me hard while watching the “Smokers Allowed” episode of Nathan Fielder’s Comedy Central series Nathan for You. For the uninitiated, Nathan for You plays like a [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Event (Sergei Loznitsa, Netherlands/Belgium)—Wavelengths

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski Following Maidan, last year’s impeccable the-revolution-is-live bulletin from Ukraine, Sergei Loznitsa returns to the found-footage format with which he first came to international prominence. The Event is in many respects a logical follow-up to Maidan, and attentive viewers will detect certain formal and ideological echoes. Centred on the military coup that represented [...]
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    Cinema Scope presents the Toronto premiere of Lewis Klahr’s SIXTY SIX

    By cscope2 In Cinema Scope Online
    Experimental film opus Sixty Six to screen in Toronto on May 24 Cinema Scope magazine is proud to present the Toronto premiere of Lewis Klahr’s Sixty Six (2015), in partnership with the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, and sponsored by The Beguiling. Date: Tuesday, May 24 Time: doors 6:30 p.m.; screening 7:00 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Every Thing Will Be Fine (Wim Wenders, Germany/ Canada/ France/ Sweden/ Norway)—Masters

    By Adam Cook In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Exquisite Corpus (Peter Tscherkassky, Austria)—Wavelengths

    By Daniel Kasman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    Strip Tease: Peter Tscherkassky and The Exquisite Corpus By Daniel Kasman Originally published in Cinema Scope 63 (Summer 2015). Sex seems the inevitable returning controversy du jour at the Festival de Cannes, every couple years another auteur revealing some supposedly new transgression set to scandalize an international press corps wholly ignorant that, outside their bubble, [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood, UK)—Gala Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Adam Nayman “In war, truth is the first casualty,” Aeschylus assures us on the opening crawl of Eye in the Sky, which only partially accounts for why Gavin Hood’s dramatic thriller feels mostly phony. Actually, there’s something authentically Greek—Socratic, even—about the film’s structure, which toggles between various American and British political and military authorities [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson, Canada)—Wavelengths

    By Mark Peranson In 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, [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Francofonia (Alexander Sokurov, Germany/France/Netherlands)— Masters

    By Michael Sicinski In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Frenzy (Emin Alper)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Diana Dabrowska In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Diana Dabrowska Turkish cinema currently lives under the sign of Nuri Bilge Ceylan; Frenzy throws a new name into the ring. Emin Alper’s 2012 debut Beyond the Hill was a family drama that transformed repressed violence into a sociological parable; his follow-up is a metaphorical study of madness and paranoia as an expression of [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Men & Chicken (Anders Thomas Jensen, Denmark / Germany, Vanguard)

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski Not only Anders Thomas Jensen’s best directorial effort by a country mile (faint praise, that), but far more satisfying than many of his scenarios for other, better directors, Men & Chicken is a black comedy about extreme family dysfunction. What begins as a kind of odd-couple brothers’ tale soon goes way off [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Full Contact (David Verbeek, Netherlands/Croatia)—Platform

    By Tom Charity In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Tom Charity Dutch filmmaker David Verbeek adopts an (initially) opaque, almost Apichatpongian tri-partite structure in this boldly visualized response to the alienated nature of the War on Terror. French-born lieutenant Ivan Delphine (Claire Denis fixture Grégoire Colin) “pilots” drones, calling down missile strikes on unsuspecting al-Qaeda targets in the Middle East from the security [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Girls Lost (Alexandra-Therese Keining, Sweden/Denmark/Norway)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski Here we have a film that begins as mere hackwork, and finishes as something actually quite offensive. A teen movie from Sweden that for all its sincerity displays all the subtlety of pulpy Hollywood entries like The Craft or even the recent low-budget B-picture The Sisterhood of Night, Girls Lost has no [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Minotaur (Nicolás Pereda, Mexico/Canada)—Wavelengths

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski Nicolás Pereda’s recent work, particularly his last two features Greatest Hits (2012) and Los ausentes (2014), already represented a substantial reduction of means when compared to the relatively action-packed Perpetuum Mobile (2009) and Summer of Goliath (2010). But with his latest, Pereda has achieved a genuine comedy of stasis. How much further [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Mississippi Grind (Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, US)—Gala Presentations

    By Aurelie Godet In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Aurélie Godet Having long self-diagnosed myself with an addictive personality, combined with a rather unhealthy relationship with money, I dread movies about gamblers. So while watching Mississippi Grind, I spent half an hour standing at the back of the theatre, ready for my exit. But I never left, eyes drawn to the screen as [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Heart of a Dog (Laurie Anderson, US)—TIFF Docs

    By Boris Nelepo In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Boris Nelepo After being approached by Arte three years ago, renowned musician Laurie Anderson started developing a personal film essay in memory of her beloved rat terrier Lolabelle, who died in 2011. Though the pet had gone blind not long before death, Anderson still managed to teach her painting, sculpture, and music. Initially conceived [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | 11 Minutes (Jerzy Skolimowski, Poland/Ireland)—Masters

    By Manu Yanez In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Manu Yáñez In his unorthodox answer to Hollywood action movies, Jerzy Skolimowski has made a film that is more than (or maybe exactly) what it seems. In narrative terms, there’s the (unconscious) battle for survival of a human pack that faces its destiny between 5:00 and 5:11pm on a given day. The extraordinary here [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Hellions (Bruce McDonald, Canada)—Vanguard

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Adam Nayman One hopes that Bruce McDonald’s heart wasn’t in Hellions. At times, it’s feeble enough to be mistaken for backyard filmmaking, except that it lacks the joy—the getting-away-with-somehing giddiness—of kids remaking Halloween with a consumer-grade camcorder. John Carpenter’s classic is evoked a half-dozen different times over the course of the truly incomprehensible storyline, [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Cinema Scope 64 Preview | 88:88 (Isiah Medina, Canada)—Wavelengths

    By Phil Coldiron In 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, [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Afternoon (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)—Wavelengths

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski Following the release of his 2013 film Stray Dogs (a work that some consider his masterpiece), Tsai Ming-liang announced his retirement from feature filmmaking. He’s been busier than ever since this alleged bowing out, producing a stage play and the Walker series of medium-length films (Tsai released the latest one, No No [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | My Internship in Canada (Philippe Falardeau, Canada)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Adam Nayman In 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 [...]
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    Editor’s Note: The Cinema Scope Top Ten of 2015

    By Mark Peranson In Columns, CS66, From The Magazine, Top Ten
    The Cinema Scope Top Ten of 2015 1. Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) 2. Arabian Nights (Miguel Gomes) 3. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien) 4. The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson) 5. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sangsoo) 6. Visit, or Memories and Confessions (Manoel de Oliveira) 7. Lost and Beautiful (Pietro Marcello) 8. [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Al Purdy Was Here (Brian D. Johnson, Canada)—TIFF Docs

    By Angelo Muredda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Angelo Muredda An old CanLit staple whose braggadocio feels out of tune with the relative civility of contemporary Canadian letters, Al Purdy is a fitting subject for Brian D. Johnson’s doc, which also feels a bit out of time. Al Purdy Was Here operates as both an extended eulogy for the scrappy poet as [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | My Name is Emily (Simon Fitzmaurice, Ireland)—Discovery

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski This story of a troubled teenaged girl (Harry Potter actress Evanna Lynch) taking a road trip to retrieve her father (Michael Smiley) from a mental institution seems to have the potential to break with the clichés of the coming-of-age template. Emily’s mother died when she was young, and Dad eventually became so [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Homesick (Anne Sewitsky, Norway)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Ian Barr In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Ian Barr The catch-all programme title “Contemporary World Cinema” carries with it a threat of homogeneity, and films like Anne Sewitsky’s incest drama Homesick do little to dispel that impression. The film’s first warning bell is an overly convenient therapy-session opening scene, in which Charlotte (newcomer Ine Marie Wilmann) attempts to evade her shrink’s [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | My Skinny Sister (Saana Lenken, Sweden/Germany)—TIFF Kids

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski Although some critics will undoubtedly refer to Saana Lenken’s film about teenage bulimia as Afterschool Special material, let’s be clear: no American or Canadian film would approach the seriousness or cruelty with which Lenken addresses her Swedish audience. More than once, the relationship between Stella (Rebecka Josephson) and her sister Katja (Amy [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson, US)—Special Presentations

    By Boris Nelepo In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Boris Nelepo Charlie Kaufman has been sorely missed. It’s hard to believe that following his series of screenwriting smashes in the early 2000s, and his underrated directorial debut Synecdoche, New York (2008), he slipped under the radar for a good seven years. His comeback feature Anomalisa has grown out of the eponymous play he [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous (Christopher Doyle, Hong Kong)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Michael Sicinski In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Honor Thy Father (Erik Matti, Philippines)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski Erik Matti’s recent actioner On the Job (2013) was a big hit at home and even got a moderate release in North America, not that the film managed to bring in those coveted Crouching Tiger, Heroic Grandmaster crossover dollars. But there is a sheen of transnational professionalism that coats Matti’s work—quite distinct [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Apostate (Federico Veiroj, Spain/ France/ Uruguay)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Jose Teodoro In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By José Teodoro Federico Veiroj’s A Useful Life (2010)—in which a middle-aged programmer finds himself out of a career after his Montevideo cinematheque fades to black—considered a post-cinema existence and decided it was just fine. Yet the film’s irreverence with regards to its own medium was undercut by a formal elegance and sense of play [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | How Heavy This Hammer (Kazik Radwanski, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Angelo Muredda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Angelo Muredda There’s a moment in Kazik Radwanski’s impressive feature debut Tower (2012) where a dentist tells thirtysomething man-child Derek (Derek Bogart), a better-adjusted, Torontonian Travis Bickle, that he has an impacted tooth coming in from the side long after most people’s wisdom teeth cease to bother them. Radwanski looks to another late bloomer [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Neon Bull (Gabriel Mascaro, Brazil/Uruguay/Netherlands)—Platform

    By Max Goldberg In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Hurt (Alan Zweig, Canada)—Platform

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Adam Nayman Real-life stories don’t come much more metaphorically resonant than that of Steve Fonyo, the B.C.-born amputee who followed in Terry Fox’s footsteps in a cross-Canada run for cancer research in 1985—an inspirational route that has led him 30 years later into total ruin. The mystery of how a national hero was so [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Ninth Floor (Mina Shum, Canada)—TIFF Docs

    By Mallory Andrews In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Hyena Road (Paul Gross, Canada)—Gala Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Adam Nayman Canada, Fuck Yeah. Written, directed, starring, and narrated by Paul Gross—close-shorn and bearded like a badass—Hyena Road tries to show that war and war movies aren’t just for Americans. Our boots are on the ground and filled by strapping specimens like Rossif Sutherland, cast here as a northern cousin to American Sniper’s [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Cinema Scope 64 Preview | No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, Belgium)—Wavelengths

    By Andrea Picard In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | No Men Beyond This Point (Mark Sawers, Canada)—Vanguard

    By Tom Charity In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Tom Charity Providing a welcome counterpoint to the pregnant pre-teen boys in Evolution, Mark Sawers’ documentary traces the rise of the Virgin Birth in the latter half of the 20th century, the redundancy of the male sex, and anticipates man’s imminent extinction as womankind inherits the planet. This is all in jest, of course—a mockumentary, [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | I Smile Back (Adam Salky, US)—Special Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Adam Nayman “Do you want to hear about the daddy issues or the drugs?” queries Laney (Sarah Silverman) to her doctor on the first day of rehab; 28 days later, she’s had ample time to talk (and think) about both, but it’s unclear as to whether or not she’s been healed. Because Laney is [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Beasts of No Nation (Cary Fukunaga, US)—Special Presentations

    By Jay Kuehner In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Jay Kuehner Lodged somewhere in spirit between two defining moments of its protagonist’s horrific trajectory into a child-soldier abyss—a swift machete blade etched, thunk, into a suspected enemy’s skull, and a corruptive, charismatic leader’s luring of a young disciple to his abusive lair—Beasts of No Nation holds sway with cogent, putrid effect, at once terrifying and [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Northern Soul (Elaine Constantine, UK)—City to City

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski Given that these online reviews offer a comments section, I’d like to invite readers to chime in here, as if we were doing a radio call-in show: did anyone who attended TIFF this year, critic or regular filmgoer, actually see any of the City to City films? Honestly, I haven’t heard a [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | In Jackson Heights (Frederick Wiseman, US)—TIFF Docs

    By Boris Nelepo In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Boris Nelepo Frederick Wiseman’s modus operandi was perhaps best described by German film critic Olaf Möller: “[His] work is about civilization and its creation, the work it takes.” In Jackson Heights adds another chapter to Wiseman’s monumental ongoing treatise while also offering another installment in a separate cycle devoted to various isolated communities (a [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Beeba Boys (Deepa Mehta, Canada)—Gala Presentations

    By Jose Teodoro In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | La Belle saison (Catherine Corsini, France)—Special Presentations

    By Mallory Andrews In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Into the Forest (Patricia Rozema, Canada)—Special Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Adam Nayman It’s the Time of the Wolf, Canadian-style. But where big bad Michael Haneke quickly gets his apocalypse on the Road, Patricia Rozema keeps her characters in the Cabin in the Woods—all the better to see them emote, my dear. Adapted from Jean Hegland’s allegorical novel about an unspecified near-future catastrophe that leaves [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Cinema Scope 64 Preview | Bleak Street (Arturo Ripstein, Mexico/Spain)—Masters

    By Jose Teodoro In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Other Side (Roberto Minervini, Italy/France)—Wavelengths

    By Celluloid Liberation Front In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Invention (Mark Lewis, UK/Canada)—Wavelengths

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski Considering the degree to which Mark Lewis’s work has evolved over the years, its origins in the Vancouver art scene of the ’80s and ’90s can go only so far in explaining it. But however inadequate such periodization may be, perhaps one way to consider Invention is as a kind of conceptual [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | One Floor Below (Radu Muntean, Romania/ France/ Germany/ Sweden)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Muge Turan In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Müge Turan The “New Wave” tag can feel like a little arbitrary, even crude, when applied to the diverse array of recent Romanian films, but it’s interesting to note how frequently the Dostoyevskian themes of morality, guilt, and criminality feature as the central preoccupations of these works. At the core of these narratives lies [...]
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    Room (Lenny Abrahamson, Ireland/Canada)

    By Angelo Muredda In CS65, Currency, From The Magazine
      By Angelo Muredda Another awards-season thoroughbred is foaled in Room, Lenny Abrahamson’s take on Ireland-born, Canada-based Booker Prize nominee Emma Donoghue’s best-seller. For all its touchy subject matter, Room is the sort of film for which People’s Choice awards were made: a lightly conceptual, sturdily acted piece of redemptive cinema that peers into the [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | It All Started at the End (Luis Ospina, Colombia)—TIFF Docs

    By Steve Macfarlane In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson & Galen Johnson, Canada)—Wavelengths

    By Mark Peranson In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Mark Peranson Wherein Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson give Paul Gross’ wannabe populist war epic Hyena Road a right and proper cuadecuc-ing. Who would have thought Pere Portabella’s legendary experiment shot on the set of Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (1970) would inspire not one, but two films at this year’s TIFF—well, three, [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Our Brand is Crisis (David Gordon Green, US)—Special Presentations

    By Steve Macfarlane In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Ixcanul (Jayro Bustamante, Guatemala/ France)—Discovery

    By Jay Kuehner In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Jay Kuehner Like its eponymous volcano, Ixcanul smoulders. A lavishly raw ethnographic fiction with documentary elements set among a Kaqchikel Mayan community on the Guatemalan plateau, Jayro Bustamante’s debut follows the rituals of a coffee-farming village in his native country that sits in elemental proximity to an active volcano, the surrounding landscape both blackened [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Our Last Tango (German Kral, Germany/Argentina)—TIFF Docs

    By Tom Charity In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Tom Charity We all know it takes two to tango, and that’s a problem for this mildly engaging but lop-sided strut down memory lane with Maria Nieves Rego and Juan Carlos Copes, the Ginger and Fred of Argentine tango. Maria, at 80, is eager to revisit the past, reminiscing about dancing with the broom [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Brooklyn (John Crowley, UK/Ireland/Canada)—Special Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Jack (Elisabeth Scharang, Austria)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Tom Charity In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Tom Charity About three-quarters through Elisabeth Scharang’s film about the Austrian murderer turned literary sensation Jack Unterweger, the reformed and released killer is excited to meet with a leading European filmmaker (identified as “Neumann”). Neumann receives him politely, but not with the enthusiasm Jack has become accustomed to. “Don’t try to be an artist,” [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, UK/ France/ Germany/ Malaysia/ Thailand)—Masters

    By Kong Rithdee In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Our Little Sister (Kore-eda Hirokazu)—Masters

    By Adam Nayman In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Parisienne (Danielle Arbid, France)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Diana Dabrowska In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Diana Dabrowska An abusive uncle tries to rape his beautiful Lebanese niece, Lina (Manal Issa). The Lebanese girl manages to defend her dignity and runs away from home. She gets lost in the darkness of the night, while Paris in the background begins glow. Meeting different men and lovers, young Lina discovers the faces [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Chevalier (Athina Rachel Tsangari)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Adam Nayman In 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’ [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Pearl Button (Patricio Guzmán, Chile/France/Spain)—Masters

    By Max Nelson In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: The Films of Patricio Guzmán By Max Nelson Originally published in Cinema Scope 63 (Summer 2015). At one point in his new film The Pearl Button, Patricio Guzmán visits a friend’s painting studio and asks the artist to unroll one of her current projects: an immense, to-scale cutout model of Chile. [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Clan (Pablo Trapero, Argentina)—Platform

    By Quintin In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | James White (Josh Mond, US)—Discovery

    By Blake Williams In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Journey to the Shore (Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Japan/France)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Muge Turan In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Müge Turan Mizuki (Eri Fukatsu) is a young piano teacher. One night Yusuke (Tadanobu Asano), her husband who went missing three years ago, materializes out of the blue in their apartment. He confirms that he’s dead and invites her to go on a journey to meet the nice places and people who showed him [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Closet Monster (Stephen Dunn, Canada)—Discovery

    By Adam Nayman In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The People vs. Fritz Bauer (Lars Kraume, Germany)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Max Goldberg In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Price of Love (Hermon Hailay, Ethiopia)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski Hermon Hailay’s third feature is a somewhat puzzling melodrama centered on Teddy (Eskindir Tameru), a young Addis Ababa cab driver with a chequered past. His attempt to keep on the straight and narrow is disrupted by a chance encounter with Fere (Fereweni Gebregergs), a beautiful sex worker who is “owned” by Marcos [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Cinema Scope 64 Preview | The Club (Pablo Larraín, Chile)—Special Presentations

    By Quintin In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Keeper (Guillaume Senez, Belgium/ Switzerland/ France)—Discovery

    By Mallory Andrews In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Rabin, the Last Day (Amos Gitaï, Israel/France)—Masters

    By Manu Yanez In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Manu Yáñez In a meditative and torrential fashion, Rabin, the Last Day thoroughly analyzes the socio-political environment that, according to Amos Gitaï, triggered the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the last reliable hope for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Avoiding the languor and affectation of many Gitaï films while remaining faithful [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Danish Girl (Tom Hooper, UK)—Special Presentations

    By Diana Dabrowska In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Diana Dabrowska Copenhagen, 1926. Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) and his wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander) are happily married. He is a painter of muddy, sad-looking landscapes inspired by his childhood memories, while her interests are portraits, although her husband believes she’s still searching for inspiration. In truth, though, it’s Einar who’s waiting to be thunderstruck: [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Lace Crater (Harrison Atkins, US)—Vanguard

    By Steve Macfarlane In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Steve Macfarlane A queasy demise is the best-case scenario on the other side of a one-night stand in Harrison Atkins’ Lace Crater, a s-s-s-s-s-s-spooky and inventive indie debut that’s best seen, if possible, in a packed theatre. The ever-reliable Lindsay Burdge stars as Ruth, a twentysomething in the aftermath of a heinous breakup with [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Daughter (Simon Stone, Australia)—Special Presentations

    By Jose Teodoro In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Rams (Grímur Hákonarson, Iceland)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Jordan Cronk In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Remember (Atom Egoyan, Canada/Germany)—Gala Presentations

    By Jose Teodoro In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By José Teodoro How much of our sense of duty, resolve or morality is merely the aggregate of decisions we made long ago—or decisions that were made for us? From the start of Remember we’ve no reason to feel certain that Zev (a sublimely baffled Christopher Plummer) is acting of his own free will. He [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | SPL 2: A Time for Consequences (Soi Cheang, China)—Midnight Madness

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski It’s been ten years since Wilson Yip’s SPL (unceremoniously retitled Kill Zone for its North American home video release), and apart from the reappearance of Simon Yam in a completely different role, there’s not much connection between the first film and this supposed sequel. Helmed by Milky Way protégé Soi Cheang (Accident, [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Demolition (Jean-Marc Vallée, US)—Gala Presentations

    By Toronto Film Review In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    Special TORONTO FILM REVIEW Guest Edition (N.B. This is presented absent any editorial intervention.) By David Davidson It’s a gift for his public how that in recent years Jean-Marc Vallée has been bringing each year a new film to TIFF. Demolition in particular is unique in that instead of using the premiere platform to build [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Legend (Brian Helgeland, UK)—Gala Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Adam Nayman Last year, Tom Hardy came to TIFF with The Drop, a drab Brooklyn crime film that afforded its star the opportunity to talk like Adam Sandler; this year, with the Kray brothers biopic Legend, we get two strenuous Hardy vocal performances for the price of one. Perish the thought that our man [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Whispering Star (Sion Sono, Japan)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Max Goldberg In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Demon (Marcin Wrona, Poland)—Vanguard

    By Diana Dabrowska In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Diana Dabrowska Five years after The Christening, young director Marcin Wrona returns with Demon, a meditation on Polish memory that hints at the need to exorcise the past. He’s attempting to make a serious movie within a genre framework, and he succeeds in balancing the right amounts of fear, humour, and grotesquerie. Peter (Itay [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Return of the Atom (Mika Taanila & Jussi Eerola, Finland/Germany)—TIFF Docs)

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski There are plenty of small-town industrial malfeasance stories that could serve as a valid point of comparison for the blinkered corporate idiocy profiled in Return of the Atom, but since it’s the most recent (and most sorely mishandled) let’s choose True Detective Season Two. Instead of the imaginary town of Vinci, California, [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Steps (Andrew Currie, Canada)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Adam Nayman For generating the mental image of Chad Kroeger getting head from Sloane from Entourage, The Steps warrants scorn; it’s a weak Canadian movie indeed that has to namecheck Nickelback in order to get a laugh. Actually, the funniest moment in Andrew Currie’s film is when Big Apple broker Jeff (Jason Ritter) phones [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The White Knights (Joachim Lafosse, France/Belgium)—Platform

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Adam Nayman Everything about this fact-based account of French aid workers plotting to transport African orphans back across the Atlantic to pre-paid adoptive parents—under the guise of a fictitious NGO whose mandate is geared towards in-country education—is scrupulously realistic. And the questions it asks about Western altruism in the Third World are pertinent and [...]
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    Sleeping Giant (Andrew Cividino, Canada)

    By Jason Anderson In CS63, Festivals, From The Magazine, Spotlight
    By Jason Anderson 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 of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal—regard the hinterlands with [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Story of Judas (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, France)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Aurelie Godet In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Aurélie Godet Three years ago, French-Algerian filmmaker Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, a consistently ambitious auteur, played the title role in his film Les chants de Mandrin (Smugglers’ Song), a beloved outlaw of pre-Revolutionary France who was barbarically executed in a public square. In a sort of amplification of that project’s scope, the writer-director proposes with Story [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Desdé Alla (Lorenzo Vigas, Venezuela/Mexico)—Discovery

    By Diana Dabrowska In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Diana Dabrowska Alfredo, a wealthy, middle-aged man, travels by bus, tempting underage teenagers with large sums of money. They don’t even have to sleep with him or touch him. Alfredo only watches as a harmless voyeur. The rules are very simple: turn around, lean against the wall, pull off your t-shirt and slightly slide [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom (Evgeniy Afineevsky, Ukraine/US/UK)—TIFF Docs

    By Boris Nelepo In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Boris Nelepo The Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity by now has been the subject matter of a slew of movies, each dramatically different from the other. There was Sergei Loznitsa’s auteur project Maidan; the reportage Kiev/Moscow by Alexander Rastorguev and Pavel Kostomarov; and the chronicle Stronger Than Arms by the #BABYLON’13 collective. Winter on Fire: [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Cinema Scope 64 Preview | Lost and Beautiful (Pietro Marcello, Italy)—Wavelengths

    By Blake Williams In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Desierto (Jonás Cuarón, Mexico/France)—Special Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Adam Nayman “Welcome to the land of the free,” growls self-styled border patrolman Sam (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), mere moments after shooting up a group of Mexicans trying to sneak into the United States. With his pickup truck, sleeve tattoo, antenna-mounted Confederate flag and “Don’t Tread on Me” sticker—not to mention his high-powered rifle—he’s the [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Louder Than Bombs (Joachim Trier, Norway/ France/ Denmark)—Special Presentations

    By Muge Turan In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Müge Turan Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s leaden English-language debut is a study of a dysfunctional family in turmoil, surveying grief, lack of communication and painful secrets (as well as the generational gap) between a schoolteacher father (Gabriel Byrne) and his sons (Jesse Eisenberg and Devin Druid) as they cope with the loss of the [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Sleeping Giant (Andrew Cividino, Canada)—Discovery

    By Jason Anderson In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Cinema Scope 64 Preview | Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sangsoo, South Korea)—Masters

    By Roger Koza In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Sunset Song (Terence Davies, UK/Luxembourg)—Special Presentations

    By Steve Macfarlane In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    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, [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Devil’s Candy (Sean Byrne, US)—Midnight Madness

    By Ian Barr In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Ian Barr Sean Byrne’s 2009 prom-night chamber-horror comedy The Loved Ones was a promising debut feature. This belated follow-up—a satanic haunted-house chiller, with Shining references galore and a droning Sunn O))) score—is equally promising, further suggesting that Byrne will eventually deliver a film worthy of his already distinctive wit and stylistic virtuosity. One’s enjoyment [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Room (Lenny Abrahamson, Ireland/Canada)—Special Presentations

    By Angelo Muredda In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | ma ma (Julio Medem, Spain/France)—Special Presentations

    By Jose Teodoro In 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. [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Witch (Robert Eggers, US/Canada)—Special Presentations

    By Blake Williams In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Son of Saul (László Nemes, Hungary)—Special Presentations

    By Richard Porton In 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 [...]
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    Canadiana | What Does It All Mean? Canada’s All-Time Top Ten List

    By Adam Nayman In Columns, CS63, From The Magazine
    By Adam Nayman TIFF All-Time Top Ten 1. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, 2001) 2. Mon oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra, 1971) 3. The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997) 4. Léolo (Jean-Claude Lauzon, 1992) 5. Jésus de Montréal (Denys Arcand, 1989) 6. Goin’ Down the Road (Don Shebib, 1970) 7. Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988) [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Magallanes (Salvador del Solar, Peru/ Argentina/ Colombia/Spain)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Roger Koza In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Roger Koza Extortion, kidnapping, violence, corruption, brutality—all those nouns are applicable to a whole vein of Latin American films celebrated in almost all the international film festivals that follow the successful and much trodden path of squalour and sordidness. In this adaptation of Alonso Cueto’s novel La pasajera, cab driver and ex-soldier Magallanes (Damián [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Disorder (Alice Winocour, France/Belgium)—Gala Presentations

    By Blake Williams In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Blake Williams Alice Winocour’s Disorder—that’s of the post-traumatic stress variety, no pigs unleashed on congested Guangzhou highways here—occupies a point on the line one could conceivably trace between Claire Denis’ cryptic, visceral genre pictures and Kathryn Bigelow’s post-“Shock and Awe” work. Which is to say, stylistically speaking, this has nowhere near the same DNA [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Santa Teresa and Other Stories (Nelson De Los Santos Arias, Mexico/ Dominican Republic/ US)—Wavelengths

    By Leo Goldsmith In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Leo Goldsmith Nelson De Los Santos Arias’ Santa Teresa and Other Stories is a (very) loose adaptation of parts of Roberto Bolaño’s epic novel 2666 which the filmmaker interweaves with the stories of friends and collaborators. The title is a hint: Santa Teresa and Other Stories is something of a grab-bag, shot on a [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | This Changes Everything (Avi Lewis, Canada/USA)—TIFF Docs

    By Tom Charity In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Tom Charity Apocalyptic fantasies are in heavy rotation these days at both the multiplex and the art-house. In this climate-change documentary, anti-capitalist crusader Naomi Klein pronounces herself a late convert to saving the world, and gets things rolling with the disconcerting admission that she doesn’t much care for climate-change documentaries. Heck, next thing you [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Maggie’s Plan (Rebecca Miller, US)—Special Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Adam Nayman No, it’s not an alternate title for the Thatcherite satire of High-Rise: Rebecca Miller’s abrupt slide into conventionality after a string of spiky efforts follows the Machiavellian machinations of a thirtyish single gal (Greta Gerwig) who steals the writer husband (Ethan Hawke) of an eccentric academic (Julianne Moore) and then tries to [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Song of Songs (Eva Neymann, Ukraine)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski This is an unusual case, an exceedingly brief (only 76-minute) film that still manages to feel overstuffed and meandering. This could be the result of director Eva Neymann’s decision to freely adapt Sholem Aleichem’s short fiction, yoking together characters and scenarios from no less than ten stories from the eponymous collection. As [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Women He’s Undressed (Gillian Armstrong, Australia)—TIFF Docs

    By Mallory Andrews In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Mallory Andrews The biographical documentary presents a number of problems for a filmmaker, primarily the fact that the genre’s standard format—the forward plodding of the subject’s life events punctuated by their notorious claim-to-fame moments—is staid and tired. But Gillian Armstrong’s attempt to shake things up on a formal level in her Orry-Kelly doc Women [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, Colombia/Venezuela/Argentina)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Blake Williams In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Yakuza Apocalypse (Miike Takashi, Japan)—Midnight Madness

    By Boris Nelepo In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Boris Nelepo Yakuza, martial arts, vampires, romance, and a devious villain dressed up as a frog. This cursory summary might just be the most accurate one, seeing that in Yakuza Apocalypse, Miike Takashi reaches new heights of disregard for narrative coherence, even for him. Changing its course throughout, this ebullient mess of a movie [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Man Down (Dito Montiel, US)—Gala Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Adam Nayman Dito Montiel’s Man Down is a visionary work of abstract cinema—a haptic masterpiece that overwhelms the viewer through the sheer scale of its imagery. Then again, I was sitting in the front row of a press screening held in an IMAX cinema, so your mileage may vary. Chances are that those audience [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Trumbo (Jay Roach, US)—Special Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Adam Nayman All Dalton Trumbo ever wanted was his name on an Academy Award, and the same goes for the people who’ve been entrusted with telling his life story. This is not to impugn Bryan Cranston or the other crackerjack actors cast as (in)famous faces from Hollywood’s past—chances are that Otto Preminger would have [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Endless River (Oliver Hermanus, South Africa/France)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Diana Dabrowska In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Diana Dabrowska After the radical, frigid and well-received Beauty (2011), young director Oliver Hermanus creates another study of obsession, this time about the fine line between victimhood and blame in the midst of a vendetta. Once again set in present-day South Africa, where racial tensions have hardly receded since the time of apartheid, The [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Wait (Piero Messina, Italy)—Discovery

    By Diana Dabrowska In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Diana Dabrowska A despairing mother, Anna (Juliette Binoche), mourns the death of her beloved son, Giuseppe; a Sicilian community is drowning in a black haze of grief and sorrow. But suddenly the beautiful Jeanne (Lou de Laâge), Giuseppe’s French ex-girlfriend, arrives in the countryside. She doesn’t know about the tragedy and wants to meet [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Martian (Ridley Scott, US)—Gala Presentations

    By Jose Teodoro In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By José Teodoro Don’t say Twentieth Century Fox has no taste for the meta: concerned as it is with the thorny ethics of expending unimaginable resources and risking multiple lives for the slim possibility of saving a single lost foot soldier in the colonization of the angry red planet, The Martian not only revisits the [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Sparrows (Rúnar Rúnarsson, Iceland/ Denmark/ Croatia)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Max Goldberg In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Max Goldberg A shoegazer’s kitchen-sink drama, Sparrows trails a sensitive Reykjavik teenager to his father’s home in the hardscrabble north. The land of the midnight sun lends this coming-of-age story a nice bleary texture, and second-time director Rúnarsson is every bit as attentive to the interiors of the fishing village—crappy wood-panelled homes strewn with [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Endorphine (André Turpin, Canada)—Vanguard

    By Adam Nayman In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Adam Nayman Freed from the constraints of shooting Instagram-style for Xavier Dolan, André Turpin amply fills the wide screen in this, just his third feature in 20 years. Hopefully, he didn’t spend too much of the time since Un crabe dans la tête (2001) fretting about the substance of this ostensible subconscious odyssey, which [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Sector IX B (Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, France/ Senegal)—Wavelengths

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski Based on the work of Surrealist anthropologist Michel Leiris (in particular his controversial volume L’Afrique fantôme), this featurette by post-colonial artist Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc begins in the theoretical realm and soon veers into the dense thicket of fantasy. Sector IX B centres on an academic researcher (Betty Tchomanga) who travels to the [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Cinema Scope 64 Preview | The Mask (Eyes of Hell) (Julian Roffman, Canada)—TIFF Cinematheque

    By Samuel La France In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    Put the Mask on Now! By Samuel La France Originally published in Cinema Scope 64 (Fall 2015). When it premiered in North American cinemas in 1961, Julian Roffman’s The Mask—released in the USA as Eyes of Hell, and returning to theatres this fall in a new digital restoration produced by TIFF and the 3-D Film [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | The Waiting Room (Igor Drljaca, Canada)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Adam Nayman In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | A Young Patriot (Du Haibin, China/US)—TIFF Docs

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Michael Sicinski Hey, look! A film from the New Chinese Documentary Movement! Usually when this happens, it’s because a Wavelengths slot has been given to the latest from Wang Bing. But this somewhat rare appearance in TIFF Docs by a Chinese doc makes a bit more sense once you discover that it’s co-produced by [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | We Monsters (Sebastian Ko, Germany)—Discovery

    By Mallory Andrews In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Mallory Andrews Don’t have kids—that may be the only valuable takeaway from Sebastian Ko’s first feature, in which two awful people reckon with the awful acts committed by their awful daughter. Paul (Mehdi Nebbou) and Christine (Ulrike C. Tscharre) have separated and moved on to new partners, which has been understandably hard on their [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Spear (Stephen Page, Australia)—Discovery

    By Mallory Andrews In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Mallory Andrews Australian choreographer Stephen Page has made his name as the director of the Bangarra Dance Theatre, reinvigorating Aboriginal dance for a modern audience. His feature-film debut Spear plays out like a minimalist musical, loosely following Djali (Hunter Page-Lochard) as he navigates the fluid and complex space between his indigenous heritage and a [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Eva Doesn’t Sleep (Pablo Agüero, France/ Argentina/ Spain)—Wavelengths

    By Angelo Muredda In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2015
    By Angelo Muredda Evita Perón’s luminous corpse gets exhumed for dubious ends in Pablo Agüero’s intermittently engaging Eva Doesn’t Sleep, a mixed-media survey of Argentinean history since the fall of the Perónist government in the mid-1950s. Agüero’s method is to explore the persistence of Perón’s iconography for the disenfranchised by tracking it across a series [...]
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    TIFF 2015 | Mekko (Sterlin Harljo, USA)—Contemporary World Cinema

    By Jordan Cronk In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Elephant Song (Charles Binamé, Canada) — Special Presentations

    By Jose Teodoro In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Villa Touma (Suha Arraf, no national origin) — Discovery

    By Michael Sicinski In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | A Dream of Iron (Kelvin Kyung Kun Park, US/South Korea) — City to City

    By Michael Sicinski In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Confession (Lee Do-yun, South Korea) — City to City

    By Michael Sicinski In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Songs from the North (Soon-Mi Yoo, US/South Korea) — Wavelengths

    By Michael Sicinski In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | The Theory of Everything (James Marsh, US) — Special Presentations

    By Angelo Muredda In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | I Am Not Lorena (Isidora Marras, Chile/Argentina) — Discovery

    By Michael Sicinski In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Le beau danger (René Frölke, Germany) — Wavelengths

    By Michael Sicinski In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Wild (Jean-Marc Vallée, US) — Gala

    By Toronto Film Review In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Foreign Body (Krzysztof Zanussi, Poland/Italy/Russia) — Masters

    By Michael Sicinski In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | The Little Death (Josh Lawson, Australia) — Discovery

    By Ian Barr In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, UK) — Vanguard

    By Adam Nayman In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Adult Beginners (Ross Katz, US) — Discovery

    By Sean Rogers In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | The Editor (Adam Brooks & Matthew Kennedy, Canada) — Midnight Madness)

    By Adam Nayman In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Roy Andersson, Sweden/Norway/France/Germany) — Masters

    By Celluloid Liberation Front In 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, [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Gemma Bovery (Anne Fontaine, France) — Special Presentations

    By Sean Rogers In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Revenge of the Green Dragons (Andrew Lau & Andrew Loo, US) — Special Presentations

    By Bart Testa In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Pasolini (Abel Ferrara, France/Italy/Belgium) — Special Presentations

    By Celluloid Liberation Front In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | The Sound and the Fury (James Franco, US) — Special Presentations

    By Celluloid Liberation Front In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Seymour: An Introduction (Ethan Hawke, US) — TIFF Docs

    By Michael Sicinski In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Goodnight Mommy (Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala, Austria) — Vanguard

    By Christoph Huber In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Rosewater (Jon Stewart, US) — Special Presentations

    By Jay Kuehner In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Red Amnesia (Wang Xiaoshuai, China) — Special Presentations

    By Celluloid Liberation Front In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Return to Ithaca (Laurent Cantet, France) — Special Presentations

    By Celluloid Liberation Front In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Gyeongju (Zhang Lu, South Korea) — City to City

    By Michael Sicinski In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Phoenix (Christian Petzold, Germany) — Special Presentations

    By Mark Peranson In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | The Equalizer (Antoine Fuqua, US) — Gala

    By Michael Sicinski In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Hill of Freedom (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea) — Masters

    By Michael Sicinski In 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.) [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Teen Lust (Blaine Thurier, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Adam Nayman In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Li’l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont, France) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Adam Nayman In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Heartbeat (Andrea Dorfman, Canada) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Adam Nayman In 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, [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Bird People (Pascale Ferran, France) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Adam Nayman In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | [REC] 4: Apocalypse (Jaume Balaguero, Spain) — Midnight Madness

    By Adam Nayman In 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, [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Merchants of Doubt (Robert Kenner, US) — TIFF Docs

    By Jason Anderson In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Men, Women & Children (Jason Reitman, US) — Special Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In 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, [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Eden (Mia Hansen-Løve, France) — Special Presentations

    By Kiva Reardon In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Coming Home (Zhang Yimou, China) — Special Presentations

    By Shelly Kraicer In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Los Hongos (Oscar Ruiz Nava, Colombia) — Discovery

    By Alexandra Zawia In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | The Guest (Adam Wingard, US) — Midnight Madness

    By Jose Teodoro In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Cut Snake (Tony Ayres, Australia) — Contemporary World Cinema

    By Jason Anderson In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Backcountry (Adam McDonald, Canada) — Discovery

    By Adam Nayman In 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 [...]
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    TIFF 2014 | Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, US) — Special Presentations

    By Adam Nayman In 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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    TIFF 2014 | A Hard Day (Kim Seong-hun, South Korea) — City to City

    By Michael Sicinski In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2014
      By Michael Sicinski Part of the difficulty of City to City is uneven programming sensibility. It’s a difficult task, and an unenviable one, to try to represent any city or nation’s cinematic output with an eight-film snapshot, and diversity of approaches has to be a watchword. You can’t program a slate composed entirely of [...]
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