Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Hyun Bin in Harbin South Korean filmmaker Woo Min-ho has a knack for thrillers, having previously made the spy thriller The Man Standing Next, Inside Men, and The Spies, though that film takes a more comedic approach to the genre. His latest film is another spy thriller, Harbin, which fictionalizes the 1909 assassination of By Sarah • Sep 13, 2024 03:17 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Andrea Arnold’s Bird Andrea Arnold’s work is often concerned with animals, whether it’s the horse of Fish Tank, the turtle of American Honey, or the titular cow in Cow. In Bird, there are, yes, birds. But there are also horses, dogs, foxes, fish, and a patch of green thriving on the By Sarah • Sep 13, 2024 12:07 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Pamela Anderson is The Last Showgirl The Coppola filmmaking dynasty is full of notable directors, writers, and actors, and with The Last Showgirl, director Gia Coppola announces herself as the latest Francis-spawn (he’s her grandfather) that must be taken seriously. Nine years after her feature directorial debut, Palo Alto, Coppola delivers a film that feels By Sarah • Sep 12, 2024 02:36 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck Mike Flanagan made his name directing horror films and television series like Oculus, Hush, Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and The Fall of the House of Usher. Besides being one of the best genre directors working today, he’s the preeminent cinematic By Sarah • Sep 11, 2024 02:11 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Luca Guadagnino’s Queer Beat writers are notoriously difficult to adapt into cinema, probably something to do with the intense interiority of their narratives (some might even say, solipsistic). Luca Guadagnino, though, manages to turn William S. Burroughs’ early, semi-autobiographical novel Queer into an interesting piece of cinema unto itself, though this is a By Sarah • Sep 11, 2024 12:02 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Angelina Jolie’s Without Blood Angelina Jolie is something of a frustrating filmmaker. She has no lack of technical skill, her eye is good, and she has a deft touch with actors, but her films never seem to add up to much. That is especially prevalent in her latest film, Without Blood, an adaptation of By Sarah • Sep 10, 2024 02:32 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch Sometimes in my reviews I will cheekily dub a character “Lady Mom”, such as in my review of Unstoppable, in which Jennifer Lopez stars as a stereotypically underwritten mother character. “Lady Mom” is a derogatory shorthand for characters definable only by being female and mothers, with no real individual narrative By Sarah • Sep 10, 2024 10:16 am
Baby and Bump Obsession Angelina Jolie, the Movie Star at TIFF George Pimentel is the most well-known celebrity and special events photographer based in Toronto. He’s a fixture at TIFF, and works directly at and for the festival, given special access to roam the red carpet and go backstage at the screenings and premieres, to photograph the biggest stars. His By Lainey • Sep 09, 2024 02:29 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Unstoppable Here I am being a grump about a well-intentioned film again. But as with We Live in Time, the issue with Unstoppable is how extremely well-trod the genre is, and how the film does not find a way to inject new life into it. Unstoppable is an underdog sports drama By Sarah • Sep 09, 2024 01:48 pm
Break Ups JLo comes back to Toronto The last time Jennifer Lopez was at TIFF it was for Hustlers and on the strength of the strong reaction to the film in Toronto, she was, for a time, in conversation during award season as she was nominated for a Golden Globe. So she has good memories here, and By Lainey • Sep 09, 2024 12:15 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: We Live In Time It seems like every few years, we get a good old-fashioned weepy, usually about a romance doomed by disease, often cancer, that sunders a lovely couple, often when they are still young, and their fate feels all the more deeply unfair. The most recent entry into this very specific yet By Sarah • Sep 09, 2024 11:04 am
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Kaniehtiio Horn’s Seeds On the heels of appearing in television series like Letterkenny and Reservation Dogs—where she plays the inimitable Deer Lady—and films like Alice, Darling, Kaniehtiio Horn is now making her feature directorial debut with Seeds, a thriller she also writes and in which she stars. Seeds is equal parts By Sarah • Sep 06, 2024 02:04 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews JLo: Not About The House Jennifer Lopez is expected in Toronto tonight for the world premiere of Unstoppable. Sarah’s review of this film is coming on Monday and even though JLo is involved, and we all know the noise that accompanies her, especially lately, we should definitely also be talking about Jharrel Jerome. He’ By Lainey • Sep 06, 2024 11:03 am
