TIFF 2018: 43nd Toronto International Film Festival

  • If The Old Man & the Gun truly represents veteran actor Robert Redford’s cinematic swan song, then writer-director David Lowery has gifted the performer with charming send off that makes the most of his trademarked …

  • A unique, beguiling, and subtly humorous take on the western genre, French filmmaker Jacques Audiard’s adaptation of Canadian novelist Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers breathes ingenious new life into a cinematic artform that always feels …

  • Actor Bradley Cooper’s feature directorial debut A Star is Born, a retelling of the well worn tale about a relationship between a washed-up performer and an up-and-coming talent, is an assured, electrifying, and expertly crafted …

  • Canadian documentarians Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, and Edward Burtynsky continue their examinations into the various ways mankind has irreparably damaged the environment with Anthropocne: The Human Epoch, a nod to a new and current …

  • Review: Colette

    More of an insightful, nuanced, and comprehensive character drama than a detail oriented period piece, director and co-writer Wash Westmoreland’s Colette takes a historically significant literary figurehead and builds upon them a great amount of …

  • Review: Quincy

    Quincy Jones has lived a life so rich, complicated, and noteworthy that one could fill a yearlong television series with his exploits, so the single two-hour documentary Quincy can only do so much to contain …

  • Review: Life Itself

    Dan Fogelman’s almost admirably insane Life Itself serves as a deep dive into the psyche of the creator of television’s hit series This is Us.

  • Fahrenheit 11/9, the latest long-form polemic from documentarian and pundit Michael Moore, definitely earns its sequel insinuating title, but not in ways that most viewers will be expecting.

  • While some could read The Land of Stead Habits, the latest feature from writer-director Nicole Holofcener as a tale of one man’s mid-life crisis, it’s more a pointed, poignant, and frequently funny indictment of privilege …

  • The 1980s set gangster flick White Boy Rick gets off to a fast paced, but rocky start before eventually settling into a predictable, but more assured groove.

  • Writer-director Paul Greengrass is very familiar with mounting reality based stories of everyday people suffering through physical and emotional tortures (Captain Philips, United 93, Bloody Sunday), but his latest effort 22 July mines real life …

  • The rare example of a perfect film, Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk considerably bests the filmmaker’s already strong work on the award winning Moonlight. If Moonlight was one of …

  • Bradley Cooper’s first feature A Star is Born is as great as the pre-release hype suggests. The time honoured story of a washed up musician taking an up and coming superstar under their romantic wing …

  • Eclectic director and co-writer David Gordon Green proves to be a great fit to reignite the Halloween franchise with this sufficiently spooky, admirably gory, and exceptionally polished chapter in the ongoing battle between an unstoppable …

  • Review: Wild Rose

    Irish actress Jessie Buckley delivers the biggest star making performance of the year in director Tom Harper’s electrifying crowd pleaser Wild Rose. As budding 23 year old country singer Rose-Lynn Harlan, Buckley establishes a commanding …

  • Filmmaker, writer, and stage veteran Zack Russell didn’t exactly know that he was creating a dystopian film when he set out to make his latest short, 7A, which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival …

  • Nandita Das’ biopic of renowned and controversial Indian and Pakistani author Saadat Manto is a fairly straightforward, but well made look at a creative man whose career and personal life suffered greatly following the subcontinent’s …

  • An uncompromised and visceral tale of a soldier’s quest for forgiveness, the Australian drama Jirga is a bit of a modern marvel when one thinks about how the film was even able to get made …

  • Canadian documentarians Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, and Edward Burtynsky continue their examinations into the various ways mankind has irreparably damaged the environment with Anthropocne: The Human Epoch, a nod to a new and current …

  • Review: Dogman

    Equally grim and manipulative, Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone’s true crime inspired morality tale Dogman is a frustratingly obvious, paper thin, and wholly indulgent entry into the Gomorrah and Reality director’s cinema of misery.

  • Loosely based on the life of one of Argentina’s most notorious serial killers, filmmaker Luis Ortega’s El Angel doesn’t boast a lot of narrative depth or character, but it certainly succeeds through forceful storytelling form …

  • Inspired by the true life recollections of addicts and their families, Icelandic filmmaker Baldvin Z’s harrowing and overwhelmingly emotional drama Let Me Fall eschews cheap clichés surrounding drug dependency in favour of a more delicately …

  • A bristling, timely, and highly entertaining return to form for Quebecois filmmaker Denys Arcand, The Fall of the American Empire stands nicely alongside The Barbarian Invasions and The Decline of the American Empire as some …

  • Clocking in at over eight hours and cut down from over 600 hours of footage, Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing’s Dead Souls is a daunting cinematic achievement worth wrestling with. A work of pure, undiluted empathy …

  • Completed posthumously following filmmaker and activist Rob Stewart’s tragic and sudden death during a diving accident last year, Sharkwater: Extinction once again finds the director trying to espouse the evils of illegal shark fin poaching …

  • Made by an almost exclusively female cast and crew, Carolina Hellsgård’s German-Swedish post-apocalyptic thriller Endzeit – Ever After combines subtle social commentary with stunning cinematography for a nifty and restrained riff on zombie movie tropes. …

  • The animated Brazilian parable and fantasy Tito and the Birds crafts dazzling images through a combination of line drawings, painterly brush work, and computer animation in service of a story that blends childlike imagination with …

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Accept Read More