Movie Reviews and Previews Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson have entered the race Whew, this awards season is so crowded. On the heels of Nightmare Alley, Belfast, and The Tragedy of Macbeth comes the trailer for Passing, Rebecca Hall’s feature directorial debut starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga. Passing was one of the Sundance stand-outs this year, based on Nella Larsen’ By Sarah • Sep 22, 2021 02:55 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Macbeth Needs No Introduction One of the surefire heavy hitters of awards season is The Tragedy of Macbeth, a new adaptation of the Scottish play from Joel Coen (working for the first time in his career without his brother, Ethan). Starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, we now have our first, brief, look at By Sarah • Sep 22, 2021 01:07 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Kate Dolan’s You Are Not My Mother In the tradition of The Babadook, Irish horror film You Are Not My Mother uses genre tropes to pry into domestic spaces and the world of mother and child. The feature directorial debut of Kate Dolan, Mother is set in the days leading up to Halloween, or Samhain on the By Sarah • Sep 17, 2021 01:25 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Maren Eggert and Dan Stevens in I’m Your Man Did you know that Dan Stevens can speak German? Well, he can. In fact, he speaks German so fluently he can act in a German-language film and give exactly as good a performance as he would in an English-language film. It’s the kind of lingual flexibility we’ By Sarah • Sep 17, 2021 10:48 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Bradley Cooper is a monstrous man in Nightmare Alley Yesterday we saw the first look for Guillermo Del Toro’s new film, Nightmare Alley, and now we have a teaser by which to get a taste of Del Toro’s latest dark fantasia. It looks creepy all right! Old timey carnivals are always creepy, that’s a given. The By Sarah • Sep 17, 2021 09:21 am
TIFF 2021 Coverage TIFF Review: Benedict Cumberbatch in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain Benedict Cumberbatch’s other TIFF film, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, could not be more different from The Power of the Dog. Far from the calculated cruelty of his performance in Dog playing a 1920s Montana rancher, in Life Cumberbatch plays English artist Louis Wain, whose illustrations and paintings By Sarah • Sep 16, 2021 02:51 pm
Award Season Campaigning Del Toro, Coop, and Cate enter the race One of the big question marks of the 2021 awards season was Guillermo Del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, a new adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel (there is also a 1947 film starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell) of the same name. Del Toro literally JUST finished the film, By Sarah • Sep 16, 2021 01:00 pm
TIFF 2021 Coverage Jessica Chastain: Also Here to Play As Sarah just posted, Kristen Stewart is building on the momentum generated out of Venice after the world premiere of Spencer and chasing her growing award season buzz at TIFF. I’ve been covering TIFF the last few days and most industry people I’ve spoken to agree that it’ By Lainey • Sep 16, 2021 12:33 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Kristen Stewart: Here to play Pablo Larraín’s Spencer, starring Kristen Stewart as the late Diana, Princess of Wales, screened at TIFF this week. In support of the film’s inclusion at the festival, Stewart appeared as part of the “In Conversation With” series (other actors featured in the series include Benedict Cumberbatch and Steven By Sarah • Sep 16, 2021 11:52 am
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Jake Gyllenhaal in The Guilty Southpaw collaborators Antoine Fuqua and Jake Gyllenhaal reteam for The Guilty, an English-language remake of a Danish thriller about a cop who sucks at his job spending a shift at work, sucking at his job. The fact that the film was shot during the pandemic in 2020 is fairly By Sarah • Sep 15, 2021 04:05 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Olivia Munn in Violet Justine Bateman makes her feature directorial debut with Violet, a psychological pressure cooker of a character study centered on the titular Violet (Olivia Munn). A successful film executive, Violet tolerates the disrespect of her colleagues, harassment of her boss, and abusive guilt trips of her estranged family. When she is By Sarah • Sep 15, 2021 01:31 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Tom Hardy and Blue Well this feels like a throwback – this used to be a site favourite: photos of Tom Hardy with dogs. I couldn’t get enough of it and readers couldn’t get enough of it. And now it’s 2021 and Tom Hardy is starting to promote Venom: Let There Be By Lainey • Sep 15, 2021 12:57 pm
TIFF 2021 Coverage TIFF Review: Jessica Chastain & Andrew Garfield in The Eyes of Tammy Faye The Eyes of Tammy Faye wants to be a sympathetic portrait of Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, wife of disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker, but it succeeds more in cementing Tammy Faye’s place in the 20th century camp canon than it does reframing her as a victim of her husband’s By Sarah • Sep 15, 2021 10:47 am
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman Celine Sciamma follows her 2019 breakout arthouse hit, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, with Petite Maman, a contemporary tale of parents and children, mothers and daughters. Written and directed by Sciamma, Petite Maman fits the recent fad for time travel/loop films as a young girl, Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) By Sarah • Sep 13, 2021 03:07 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Benedict Cumberbatch in The Power of the Dog That Benedict Cumberbatch is capable of great performances is not a surprise at this point, but still there is something astonishing about his performance in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog. Adapted by Campion from Thomas Savage’s novel of the same name, Cumberbatch plays Phil Burbank, an By Sarah • Sep 13, 2021 11:25 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Ben and JLo Premiere Themselves I hope you were watching the livestream. Not that these pictures aren’t dynamite – they’re really, really, really f-cking amazing. But the livestream …well… seeing it in motion is something else. This is what Bennifer Summer has been building towards: at the Venice Film Festival premiere of The By Lainey • Sep 10, 2021 04:21 pm
