The low key drama Raymond & Ray is a simple, often predictable film told with plenty of unforced emotion and a handful of strong ideas.
Ethan Hawke
Cut Throat City, the latest directorial effort from Wu-Tang magnate and multi-hyphenate talent RZA, is a film that knows exactly what it wants to say but never decides on how to convey the message.
A playfully and creatively confounding upending of biopic conventions, writer-director Michael Almereyda’s Tesla is a keen reflection on the life of the misunderstood and historically underrated luminary it seeks to cheekily document.
A quietly mournful and gently celebratory look at a boisterous, but underrated personality, Ethan Hawke’s biopic Blaze is a humane approach to creating iconography organically and empathetically.
Juliet, Naked, the latest big screen adaptation of a novel from prolific British author Nick Hornby, is one of those character studies that works better on the page than it does blown up to a grander scale.
After toiling thanklessly for the past fifteen years in the cinematic margins, writer-director Paul Schrader has produced a monumental work of passion, grace, and anger in the form of First Reformed.
During the Toronto International Film Festival I talked to writer and director Robert Budreau about his film Born to be Blue, which stars Ethan Hawke as Blues legend Chet Baker.
- Toronto International Film Festival
‘Ville-Marie’, ‘Into The Forest’ & ‘Born to Be Blue’ highlight Canadian films at 40th TIFF
Throughout the forty years of the Toronto International Film Festival, the developing and fostering and incubating of Canadian films and Canadian cinematic talent has always been an important priority, and because of that this year’s terrific line-up of Canadian films can be seen as a direct pay off of all those past efforts and the need to keep TIFF a Canadian film festival–one that celebrates international films and film culture probably better than just about any other festival in the world, while remaining still a Canadian film festival.
Arriving on DVD and Blu-ray this week: Noomi Rapace stars with Michael Nyqvist in the Scandinavian thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Richard Gere fights crime in Brooklyn’s Finest; and Colin Firth deals with loss and love in A Single Man.
New arrivals this week include the thriller Edge of Darkness, starring Mel Gibson; the debut of Doctor Zhivago on Blu-ray; the action-horror hybrid, Daybreakers; plus a look at the amusing horror-comedy mashup, Lesbian Vampire Killers.