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Tag: TIFF

  • ‘Glenrothan’ Review: Brian Cox’s Scotland-Set Directorial Debut Combats Sibling-Drama Clichés With Good Acting

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    One of our very best actors, Brian Cox, makes a somewhat belated directorial debut with the Toronto world premiere Glenrothan, in which he also stars. Set in his native Scotland and lovingly photographed, the film tantalizes even without a terribly original story. Family conflicts ripple and get fairly predictably resolved. But the cast gallops right past the clichés.

    To tell the story of two estranged brothers, Cox turned to another Scottish-born actor, Alan Cumming, who gives the most surprising and resonant performance in the movie. The brothers have not communicated for many years. Cox’s Sandy runs a family distillery in the Scottish Highlands. Cummings’ Donal has been running a music club in Chicago. But when that is destroyed in a fire, he decides to return to Scotland, along with his daughter (Alexandra Shipp) and granddaughter (Alexandra Wilkie), to see if there is any chance to renew family ties.

    Glenrothan

    The Bottom Line

    The cast compensates for missteps.

    Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala Presentations)
    Cast: Brian Cox, Alan Cumming, Shirley Henderson, Alexandra Shipp
    Director: Brian Cox
    Screenwriter: David Ashton

    1 hour 37 minutes

    The outcome of that long-simmering family quarrel is never really in much doubt, but there are still a few neat surprises involving a couple of rare bottles of whiskey and the fate of two family businesses. Cox is now probably best known for playing Logan Roy in the multi-Emmy winning series, Succession, for several seasons. But he also has had many vivid film roles, including the first incarnation of Hannibal Lecter in Michael Mann’s movie Manhunter. He’s graced Hollywood epics Braveheart, Troy, The Bourne Identity, mixed in with smaller gems like Rushmore, Adaptation and L.I.E. It’s a pleasure to see him at home in the Highlands, and as a director he’s predictably generous with his fellow actors.

    Cox was wise to hand the co-star role to Cumming, who shatters his usual image by “butching up,” as the actor noted at the festival. (This film offers a good lesson in the rewards of refusing to typecast actors.) Cox helps Cumming to bring off one of the most rewarding performances of his long career. Shipp also scores as the daughter who knows just when to take charge of her father, and veteran British actress Shirley Henderson proves that she has the presence to make the most of a smaller role as a workhorse at the distillery, who earns a satisfying payday at the end.

    Even though the film runs just 97 minutes, it sometimes seems padded and plucks a bit too strenuously at the heartstrings. The overemphatic score by Tommy Reilly and Roddy Hart only exacerbates this tendency to overstate. Cox sometimes needs to place more trust in the actors and the central story without resorting to sentimental flourishes.

    Yet the superb cinematography by Jaime Ackroyd helps to ride over excesses in the direction. Cox’s love of the Scottish countryside is apparent, and the beauty of the landscapes works on Donal as he comes to appreciate the homestead that he abandoned. Even those who have an aversion to earnest tales of family reconciliations may give this likable picture a pass. In interviews he gave in Toronto, Cox has said he might direct again, and we look forward to the results.

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    Stephen Farber

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  • ‘Normal’ Review: Bob Odenkirk Fires on All Cylinders in Ben Wheatley’s Jaw-Droppingly Excessive Blast of a Crime Caper

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    If there was any lingering doubt regarding Bob Odenkirk‘s late-career reinvention as a legit everyman action star, Normal handily seals the deal. Having proved himself up to the task after Nobody and Nobody 2, he wildly ups the ante with an unapologetically over-the-top small-town crime thriller.

    Directed by genre-hopping Ben Wheatley and written by John Wick creator Derek Kolstad from a story hatched by Kolstad and Odenkirk, the subversive Western is a take-no-prisoners gore fest that peppers all the visceral carnage with an equal sprinkling of dry wit. Given that it shares so much of its DNA with those Nobody movies (also penned by Kolstad), it would be understandable if some might think it’s actually Nobody 3, which wouldn’t necessarily work against it. Given the energetic reception that greeted the movie’s world premiere as part of TIFF‘s genre-heavy Midnight Madness section, the indie production should be able to corral U.S. distribution with little difficulty. Amazon MGM Studios has the film for Canada.

    Normal

    The Bottom Line

    A bone-crunching good time.

    Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Midnight Madness)
    Cast: Bob Odenkirk, Henry Winkler, Lena Headey
    Director: Ben Wheatley
    Screenwriter: Derek Kolstad

    Rated R,
    1 hour 30 minutes

    As a recent arrival to the quaint town of Normal, Minnesota (population 1890, at least before the bloodbath begins), Odenkirk’s Sheriff Ulysses is more than okay with his temporary placement in the half-abandoned municipality, especially since he seems to be escaping some trauma from his recent past. “My goal is to leave this town just the way I found it,” he maintains, as he leaves yet another unanswered phone message for his estranged wife.

    But that proves more easily said than done when Ulysses starts to notice a few cracks in Normal’s genteel exterior. Maybe it’s that overabundance of firearms on display in all the local establishments, or the suspicious death of his predecessor, Sheriff Gunderson, or the town’s oddball Mayor Kibner (Henry Winkler). Or maybe it’s that spirit animal of a mysterious mammoth moose that keeps popping up.

    Those suspicions are confirmed when, responding to a botched bank heist in progress, Ulysses discovers everybody’s keen on shooting the sheriff, including his two deputies (Ryan Allen and Billy McLellan).

    Left with no one to ally himself with except the two failed robbers (Rena Jolly and Brendan Fletcher), Ulysses opts to fight back, whining, “I’m tired of running away from every goddamn thing!” In the middle of unleashing an insane amount of violence, they make the discovery that the bank vault is hiding a substantial stash of gold bars belonging to the incoming Japanese Yakuza, which had been using Normal to hide a portion of their illicit profits in return for a percentage divided among the struggling townspeople. What starts out as a geographic and comedically thematic companion piece to the Coen Brothers’ Fargo decisively shifts gears into Tarantino-worthy grindhouse excess and never looks back. There’s an inventive, Rube Goldberg precision to the barrage of violence that keeps things involving, especially when the Yakuza arrives on the scene.

    Handling it all with a detached, shrugging sense of doom, Odenkirk proves the right man for the job at hand in both of the film’s two tonally separate halves, and he’s supported by a colorful cast including Lena Headey as the town’s enigmatic barkeep and McLellan as one of those two deputies, whose squeaky stiff leather jacket keeps announcing his arrival.

    The wintry Winnipeg, Manitoba, backdrops provide some stark contrast for all the spilled bits of red, effectively captured by cinematographer Armando Salas (Ozark) in hues of blue and amber, while British director Wheatley marks a welcome return to his earlier works — in particular 2016’s Free Fire, which took home TIFF’s Midnight Madness People’s Choice Award that year.

    Even though Wheatley’s previous film was the considerably less enthusiastically received sequel Meg 2: The Trench, one can’t help wondering what tantalizing possibilities a Meg vs. Ulysses match-up might hold.

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    Michael Rechtshaffen

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  • Toronto: Chloé Zhao’s ‘Hamnet’ Wins Audience Award

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    Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet picked up the top People’s Choice honor Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival during a 50th edition that followed Venice, Telluride and Cannes.

    The Nomadland director’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, a fictionalized account of Shakespeare and his wife as they fall in love, stars Paul Mescal as the Bard. The Amblin Entertainment-produced drama bowed in Telluride, where it garnered critical praise, especially for leading lady Jessie Buckley, and had a Canadian premiere in Toronto. Nomadland also earned the People’s Choice award in Toronto in 2020.

    Zhao accepted the top audience prize at Toronto via a video link, and expressed gratitude and stressed the importance of making an audience connection with her work. “I’d like to share that I was very lonely when I was young. And I wrote stories and I drew manga, and I put them on the Internet so that I could read the comments and the reactions of strangers. Whether they liked them or not, I felt connected to them, and suddenly the world is a little less of a lonely place and life seems to have more meaning,” the director recalled in her acceptance speech.

    Angie Han, a film critic for The Hollywood Reporter, in her Telluride review of the Shakespeare-inspired drama wrote: “In Hamnet, the latest film from Oscar-winning Nomadland director Chloé Zhao, the two always go hand in hand: joy and fear, love and loss. One feeds into the other in a cycle as old as life itself, and unavoidable. But just as her William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) turns the pain of being caught between the two into the masterpiece that is Hamlet, Zhao harnesses those elements into something gorgeous and cathartic.”

    The first runner-up for the top audience prize was Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, an adaptation of the classic Mary Shelley novel that was shot mostly in and around Toronto, while the second runner-up was Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, which had a world premiere at TIFF.  

    The win for Hamnet came as Hollywood’s awards season kicks into gear. In 2024, Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck nabbed the top People’s Choice honor, with Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez and Sean Baker’s Anora in runner-up positions.

    The audience award for best Midnight Madness title at TIFF went to Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. The first runner-up is Obsession, directed by Curry Barker, and the second runner-up is The Furious, from director Kenji Tanigaki.

    Elsewhere, the People’s Choice award for best international film went to director Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, with Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, the Grand Prix winner in Cannes that stars Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve, as the first runner-up, followed by Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound as the second runner up.

    And the People’s Choice award for best documentary went to Barry Avrich’s The Road Between Us, the Oct. 7, 2023-themed film that ignited controversy at TIFF when it was invited and then disinvited and finally reinstated by TIFF programmers. The first runner-up in the category is EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert by Baz Luhrmann, and the second runner-up is You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, from director Nick Davis.

    The People’s Choice awards are voted on by TIFF attendees, and in all 14 audience and juried awards were handed out on Sunday morning in Toronto. To prevent festgoers voting more than once for the same film, TIFF matches email addresses to ticket-buyer information, and verifies vote origin against IP addresses.

    While not voting for the same film more than once, TIFF patrons can vote for as many different films as they want, but have to have bought a ticket to an individual film they vote.

    As in recent years, TIFF’s 2025 edition was overshadowed by Venice and Cannes, as Toronto hosted no official press conferences to help market films ahead of the awards season, and Toronto has no official film competition. As Hollywood contracts, celebrities made red carpet appearances in Toronto and took selfies with fans, but without the glitz and glamour as on the Croisette and the Lido.

    In juried prize-giving, To The Victory!, director Valentyn Vasyanovych’s dark comedy about Ukraine’s post-war future and who also plays the main character, won the Platform prize.

    The FIPRESCI prize went to Spanish filmmaker Lucía Aleñar Iglesias’ Forastera, a directorial debut that stars Zoe Stein and Martina García, and the NETPAC award for the best Asian film by a first- or second-time feature director at TIFF went to Jitank Singh Gurjar for his second feature In Search of the Sky.

    The Canadian Discovery Award for emerging filmmakers went to Sophy Romvari’s Locarno prize winner Blue Heron, about eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family relocating to a new home on Vancouver Island. 

    “This is very relevant to the society that we live in, and the world we live in, and to acknowledge the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” Romvari told a Lightbox audience when accepting her award on Sunday.

    And the best Canadian feature film prize picked by a TIFF jury went to Zacharias Kunuk’s Inuk historical drama Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband) after a North American premiere in Toronto.

    The Short Cuts award for best international short film went to Joecar Hanna’s Talk Me, executive produced by Spike Lee and which bowed in Cannes, while the best animated short was picked up by French director Agnes Patron for To The Woods, which had a North American premiere at TIFF.

    Patron dedicated her winning short to “all the children in this world who see the sky darkening above their heads, filling their eyes and hearts with rage and fear instead of love and poetry.”

    And the best Canadian short film went to The Girl Who Cried Pearls, a stop motion animated film from Oscar-nominated Canadian filmmakers Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, with backing from the National Film Board of Canada, while the Vimeo Staff-Pick trophy went to Afghan filmmaker Salar Pashtoonyar’s I Fear Blue Skies.

    On the film sales front, no major deals were unveiled in Toronto during the past 10 days as Toronto continues to be mostly a launchpad for movies, often feel-good and escapist fare destined for streaming platforms, and already with U.S. distribution.

    The muted informal sales market comes ahead of Toronto being set to launch an official content market, named The Market, in 2026. 

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    Etan Vlessing

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  • ‘Sacrifice’ Review: Romain Gavras’ Entertaining Eco-Satire Has A Surprisingly Emotional Impact – Toronto Film Festival

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    For a book that not many people know about or have read, James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) has had quite an impact on cult cinema, particularly in the ’70s. For reasons that would take too long to go into here — and thanks to its influence on Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces — it turns out that Frazer’s non-fiction investigation of religion, mythology, folk tales and the subsequent journey to science has since shaped films as seemingly far afield as The Wicker Man, the very first Star Wars, and Apocalypse Now. Well, you wouldn’t necessarily ever put those three films on a triple bill, but, once you see it, there is a certain overlap, mostly in the concept of the unwitting hero, a man chosen by fate, and not necessarily for the better.

    With that in mind, Greek-French director Romain Gavras’s Sacrifice, his English-language debut, comes at a very interesting time in the world’s history. Though outwardly a blunt comedy (of sorts), it’s a film that, through its central character, asks questions about seeking out actual heroism within the fog of tokenism.

    That character is Mike Tyler (Chris Evans), a Hollywood star recovering from a recent nervous breakdown and attending a garish eco-friendly charity party for the super-super-rich that’s being held in a fantastically austere Greek mine. Tyler, conflicted even about his own attendance, is sceptical about everyone else’s motives and says so, calling out the event’s star guest, environmental billionaire Ben Bracken (Vincent Cassel), on a live video stream for his hypocritical politics, condemning the mining of fossil fuels yet happy to exploit the sea for energy.

    To backtrack, Gavras’ film is an odd fish in that respect, because, despite the comedic veneer, its agenda is actually very real, and that’s how it starts. Before we meet Tyler, we see Joan (Anya Taylor-Joy) overseeing the fiery funeral of her own mother (who, worryingly, might not actually be dead yet). Joan is the leader of what looks like a teenage militia from The Village of the Damned (1960 or 1995, take your pick), and she’s on a mission. “The old way must burn to ash,” she says, under orders from a nearby volcano. Which is what guides her, and her two siblings, to storm the event and take its guests hostage — while Tyler is in the bathroom, licking his wounds after his mic drop moment goes horribly viral.

    The gala itself is a cringeworthy as you might expect, the imminent climate catastrophe spelled out to the private jet-ferried audience through — what else? — the medium of an interpretative dance battle and a neon sign saying “MAKE EARTH COOL AGAIN”. In fact, it’s so cheesy that it takes a while for the guests to realize that Joan and her army aren’t part of the entertainment too; it’s only when the blood starts to flow that they realize she’s serious. At which point Tyler re-enters the room and is given up by the terrified crowd (and, more importantly, anointed by Joan) as one of three people — including Bracken and one of the show’s dancers — who must make the film’s titular sacrifice to save the world from an imminent catastrophe.

    As a hostage, Tyler gets Stockholm Syndrome early on, taking all this to be student hijinks (“No justice, no peace,” he roars to the media), much to the annoyance of Bracken, who accuses him of promoting what he calls “Green Isis”. The ratio of laughs to drama changes quite sharply, however, as Joan takes her hostages off on their journey, leading to a bond with Tyler and a lot of unexpected revelations about Joan’s background.

    You might think you know where all this is going, and the script does cover a lot of those bases, most of them involving movie stars’ egos and their power and privilege in the real world. But Sacrifice is interesting, not just because it takes risks even within its own sui generis genre (note to self: is sci-fi folk horror a thing yet?) but because it’s actually quite clear in its thinking: What constitutes is a sacrifice in today’s world?

    As Tyler, Evans holds the film surprisingly well, given the twists and turns (in story as well as tone) that await him, and the poker-faced Taylor-Joy, never more serious (and quite convincingly playing way younger than she actually is), is a great foil to that. To make things even more entertaining, John Malkovich pops up as what seems, briefly, to be the voice of reason.

    In short, it’s nuts, and not for everyone. But Sacrifice does have a message, and it’s about the ouroboros — the perpetual self-eating snake — that is the world’s performative reaction to climate change. It goes further than where you might not think it will, and the emotional payoff from that may well outlast the jokes.

    Title: Sacrifice
    Festival: Toronto (Special Presentations)
    Director: Romain Gavras
    Screenwriter: Will Arbery, Romain Gavras
    Cast: Chris Evans, Anya Taylor-Joy, Vincent Cassel, Salma Hayek Pinault, John Malkovich, Ambika Mod, Charli xcx, and Jonatan “Yung Lean” Leandoer
    Sales agent: Rocket Science
    Running time: 1 hr 43 mins

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    Damon Wise

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  • ‘Driver’s Ed’ Review: Sam Nivola Stars in Bobby Farrelly’s Genial but Uninspired Road Trip Comedy

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    In introducing his new comedy just ahead of its TIFF world premiere, director Bobby Farrelly noted that Dumb and Dumber, the 1994 release that introduced him and brother Peter to jaded audiences hankering for something edgier or grosser, or, yes, dumber, was also a road movie. But while that 1994 Jim Carrey-Jeff Daniels hit firmly established the Farrelly Brothers brand, the latest solo effort is pretty benign stuff by comparison.

    In Driver’s Ed, an earnest but naive high school senior (Sam Nivola), worried that his college freshman girlfriend may have broken up with him, commandeers his driving instructor’s canary-yellow KIA and, joined by three classmates, embarks on a three-hour excursion to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to ensure his fears are unfounded. Those expecting more of a Farrelly-style joyride will have to settle for a casual Sunday drive that cruises along pleasantly but without inspiration, following safely within the established boundaries of Thomas Moffett’s formulaic script. Granted there’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach and, fueled by a charismatic young cast, the vehicle reaches its intended destination with few wrong turns on the way.

    Driver’s Ed

    The Bottom Line

    Sticks safely to the slow lane.

    Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala Presentations)
    Cast: Sam Nivola, Sophie Telegadis, Mohana Krishnan, Aidan Laprete, Molly Shannon, Kumail Nanjiani
    Director: Bobby Farrelly
    Screenwriter: Thomas Moffett

    1 hour 42 minutes

    Handed its gala premiere at the tail end of TIFF, the picture has yet to secure a U.S. distributor. Prime Video has it for Canada.

    Nivola, who recently made an impression as Jason Issacs’ and Parker Posey’s sensitive youngest kid in the third season of White Lotus, is well cast as lovelorn Jeremy, a Wes Anderson-obsessed budding filmmaker who fails to see what everyone around him knows all to well — that his girlfriend, Samantha (Lilah Pate), has moved on.

    Still unconvinced, he makes the decision to hear it from the source while in the middle of a driving lesson being given by Kumail Nanjiani’s Mr. Rivers, a card-carrying goofball of a substitute instructor with both of his arms in a cast. Opting to accompany Jeremy on his fact-finding mission are cynical Evie (Sophie Telegadis), overachieving valedictorian Apurna (Mohana Krishnan) and, most notably, the high school’s permanently stoned resident drug dealer Yoshi (Aidan Laprete, handily stealing every scene with his pitch-perfect deadpan line-readings).

    Meanwhile, harried Principal Fisher (the always reliable Molly Shannon) is doggedly determined to track down the motley crew, snarling “I’m not going to let three dipshits and the valedictorian f-ck me out of tenure!”

    Aside from encountering a few inevitable bumps in the road, including an empty gas gauge and almost running over a three-legged cat whom they name Tripod, the trip functions mainly as a journey of self-discovery. The compact KIA functions as a rolling confessional in which the young passengers share their deepest fears, darkest secrets and the realization that they’re all on the same anxiety and depression meds. It all culminates at a prolonged frat party that allows the characters to pair off predictably, arriving at the sort of conclusion that feels like peak John Hughes.

    Allowing everything to unfold at an unhurried pace, underscored by a gentle acoustic John Frizzell score, Farrelly hasn’t lost the knack he shared with his brother for mining promising young talent and giving them a platform to shine. Following in the career-boosting footsteps of the likes of Jim Carrey, Ben Stiller, Cameron Diaz and Anthony Anderson, Laprete makes a lasting, tragicomic impression here, which could be a jumping-off point for his film and television future, provided he’s able to sidestep inevitable typecasting.

    Maybe it was too much to have expected something fresher than the totally 80s feel-good vibe that Drivers’ Ed is content to deliver, but considering the source, the comedy can’t help but feel unmotivated. It’s what the kids today would call mid.

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    Michael Rechtshaffen

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  • ‘Adulthood’ Review: Alex Winter’s Dark Family Satire Is Not Exactly an Excellent Adventure

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    Taking the notion of skeletons in the family closet quite literally, Alex Winter‘s Adulthood sets out to expose something sinister lurking just beneath suburbia’s fake wood-paneled veneer of respectability. In the case of adult siblings, Megan and Noah, it’s the discovery of a seriously decomposed cadaver stuffed behind one of the basement walls of their childhood home that forces them to reassess their seemingly conventional upbringing.

    It’s certainly a tasty premise — one that holds considerable noir-tinged promise — and for at least the first half of the film, the quirky blend of increasingly grisly goings-on and wryly observed social commentary forms a cohesive whole before veering irretrievably out of sync.

    Adulthood

    The Bottom Line

    Suffers from arrested development.

    Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala Presentations)
    Cast: Josh Gad, Kaya Scodelario, Billie Lourd, Anthony Carrigan, Alex Winter
    Director: Alex Winter
    Screenwriter: Michael M.B. Galvin

    Rated R,
    1 hour 37 minutes

    While Kaya Scodelario, Josh Gad and a cast of colorful characters keep it all reasonably engaging, the film, which was handed its world premiere at TIFF and is scheduled to arrive in select theaters Sept. 19 ahead of a streaming bow four days later, falls short of reaching its full potential.

    Reuniting at their small-town family homestead when their invalid mom has been further incapacitated by a stroke, methodical Megan (Scodelario) and her melodramatic brother Noah (Gad) are reliving childhood memories in their musty basement when they make that fateful discovery behind some damp drywall. It doesn’t take long for them to make the connection that the rotting corpse is that of their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Metzger, who had gone missing back in the ’90s.

    Whispers at the time implicated her since-deceased husband as the culprit, but this recent development has Megan and Noah putting their mom and late dad on top of the list of likely suspects. Afraid to call the cops at the risk of losing their inheritance to a crime scene, Noah, an out-of-work L.A. screenwriter, contends he knows what’s best after having worked two seasons on Blue Bloods: They’ll bury Mrs. Metzger’s body in the swamp.

    Alas, she doesn’t stay submerged very long, and in short order the police pop up at the hospital where their recovering mother is still unable to speak. Meanwhile, her plotting caregiver (Billie Lourd) shows up at the house claiming Mom admitted to killing Mrs. Metzger and she will take that information to the authorities unless she’s paid $10,000.

    Now in full panic mode, Noah calls in back-up in the guise of their weird cousin Bodie (a terrific Anthony Carrigan), who’s something of an Uncle Fester-Freddy Krueger mash-up with a scary weapons collection. But the more he and Meg try to dig themselves out of the nightmare, the deeper they get pulled in, with a mounting body count to match.

    In his director’s statement, Winter, whose more recent behind-the-camera output includes documentaries profiling Frank Zappa, YouTube and showbiz kids, counts Alfred Hitchcock, Dashiell Hammett and Bong Joon-ho as key influences in his artistic vision for the script by Michael M.B. Galvin (Fat Kid Rules the World.). That may have been Winter’s intention — there’s also more than a whiff of the Coen brothers figuring into all the mordant mayhem — but the execution proves trickier to pull off for a sustained period. While Winter maintains an effective grip on the desired “noir-lite” tone early on in the proceedings, as Megan and Noah’s lives begin spiraling helplessly out of control unfortunately so does that crucial dark/light balance. By the time Megan seizes control of the reins at the film’s close, the abrupt denouement feels jarringly disconnected rather than organic to the storytelling.

    Winter’s cast is certainly up to the seriocomic challenge, with Gad playing a pitch-perfect man-child in an Alamo Drafthouse t-shirt who can’t help but notice that his life has turned into one of his unsold scripts. Meanwhile, Scodelario (Teresa in the Maze Runner film series) is convincing as a wife and mother already contending with a high-stress job and a diabetic child, who comes to rationalize that the apple might not fall far from the tree where her larcenous mama is concerned.

    The production also takes good visual advantage of its many scenic Ontario, Canada, locations, especially a sweeping pivotal sequence that’s shot on the SkyBridge, which holds the record as the longest pedestrian bridge in North America.

    If only Adulthood could have ended up making it to the other side.

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    Michael Rechtshaffen

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  • ‘California Schemin” Review: James McAvoy’s Assured Directorial Debut Makes for an Engaging if Familiar Underdog Story

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    Back in the early 2000s, a pair of blue-eyed Scottish lads with dreams of becoming the next Eminem — but dismissed as sounding like “the rapping Proclaimers” — proceeded to pass themselves off as Southern California hip-hoppers, remarkably managing to pull off a hoax that gets them signed by a major record label.

    It’s the stuff that episodes of VH1’s Behind the Music are made of, but in the talented hands of James McAvoy, making his directorial debut, those well-traveled, rise-and-fall tropes nevertheless make for an underdog dramatic comedy that proves hard to resist.

    California Schemin’

    The Bottom Line

    A thoughtful charmer.

    Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentations)
    Cast: Seamus McLean Ross, Samuel Bottomley, Lucy Halliday, Rebekah Murrell, James McAvoy
    Director: James McAvoy
    Screenwriters: Archie Thomson, Elaine Gracie

    1 hour 47 minutes

    With a charismatic cast headed by Seamus McLean Ross and Samuel Bottomley, California Schemin’ is a nimbly paced yarn that may not have set out to reinvent the wheel, but makes for a buoyant excursion nonetheless. It wouldn’t be surprising for the film to emerge from TIFF, where it was handed its world premiere, securing a U.S. theatrical distribution deal.

    Finding it tricky to establish hip-hop street cred when you’re two baby-faced kids from Dundee, rap duo Billy Boyd (Bottomley) and Gavin Bain (Ross), better known as Silibil N’ Brains, have been occupying their waking hours spitting bars with a decidedly Scottish brogue. Realizing they’re going to need to up their game if they have a shot of making it into the big leagues, they grab a map of California and proceed to create a fake backstory for themselves: They claim to hail from Hemet (!) after their first answer, “the projects of Beverly Hills,” fails to fool a record exec (James Corden) and they cobble together a semblance of an American accent studying movies like Jerry Maguire and The Usual Suspects.

    “You actually sound American,” remarks Billy’s girlfriend, Mary (Lucy Halliday). “You sound, like, entitled!”

    They take the rebooted Silibil N’ Brains for a test run at a club, where they capture the attention of a talent scout (Rebekah Murrell) for Neotone Records in England. A hotshot producer (McAvoy) agrees to sign the boys to a recording contract.

    Initially the scheme is to drop their facade during a scheduled appearance on a popular MTV show where they would decry the industry’s “racism.” But Gavin, finding himself swept up by the more excessive trappings of their new lifestyle and growing resentful of Mary’s emotional tug on Billy, reneges on the deal, driving a widening wedge between them.

    Taking its cues from Bain’s 2010 tell-all, Straight Outta Scotland, which in turn inspired the 2013 BBC Four documentary, The Great Hip Hop Hoax, their story held understandable attraction for McAvoy, himself no stranger to the concepts of authenticity and remaining true to oneself. Despite his hailing from Glasgow, over the course of his 30 years as a film actor there have only been a handful of times when he’s actually played Scottish characters.

    Sharing a tangible feel for the characters and their working-class milieu, McAvoy demonstrates an unfussy sincerity in his directing approach, one that, especially before things take a darker turn in the second half, evokes the sort of easy charm found in the films of fellow Scotsman Bill Forsyth.

    Given that the Silibil N’ Brains story played fast and loose with the truth, it should come as no surprise that the screenplay by Elaine Gracie and Archie Thomson obviously takes its own dramatic license. For example, their record deal was actually with Sony Music UK and their break-up happened years before the hoax was revealed; it was not the cause of the split, as depicted in the film.

    At the end of the day, Bain and Boyd may have duped the public, but they didn’t have to hang their heads in Milli Vanilli shame. Fake accents aside, it was still their own voices doing the rapping. And while that 15-minutes-of-fame schematic might be an all-too-familiar tune, California Schemin’s ultimate success is all in the delivery.

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    Michael Rechtshaffen

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  • Brian Cox Suffers Kilt Wardrobe Blunder at Toronto Premiere: “It’s Hard Not to Wear Underpants”  

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    Brian Cox, a proud Scotsman, left little to the imagination on Thursday night as he wore a kilt to the world premiere of Glenrothan, his Scotch whisky drama and directorial debut, at the Toronto Film Festival.

    “Is it that bad?” an immodest Cox asked after a film-goer in the Roy Thomson Hall audience during the post-screening Q&A put up his hand to warn the manspreading Succession actor he was showing on stage far more than sturdy calves as his traditional black tartan pleated skirt unceremoniously lifted.

    “Or that good?” a grinning Cox then asked the audience by now in raucous laughter. “You have to wear the kilt the proper way. The kilt is designed to make you cool and free. And it’s a fucking wonderful freedom,” Cox then insisted after finally putting his knees together.

    Cox turned his attention to Glenrothan, his Scottish family drama set in the rural highlands and centering on two estranged brothers who reunite in the land of their birth. Donal, played by Alan Cumming, has returned home from America to see his older and ailing brother Sandy (Cox), only to reopen old wounds and finally reconcile with their shared past to save the family whiskey distillery.

    While arguing he wanted with Glenrothan to tell the story he wanted to tell, unlike other filmmakers in Hollywood who just “cover their ass… or not,” a ruffled Cox then added with another below-the-belt jibe about his kilt fashion.

    “What an unfortunate phrase. I’m really sorry about this. I never thought I’d be in this position,” Cox told the TIFF audience apologetically. Still later, when calls of “Your legs! Your legs!” were heard again from the first few rows of the TIFF venue, Cox called out to Glenrothan producer Neil Zeiger in the audience for apparently urging him to dress to kilt for the world premiere.

    “Whose idea was it to wear these fucking kilts?” Cox cried out with faux outrage. “Certainly not my idea. It was the producer’s idea. They always try to fuck you up, at the end of the day. They can be so vengeful sometimes,” he added.

    “You’re probably wearing underpants,” Cox then questioned Zeiger, who was himself wearing a tartan kilt and who nodded in the affirmative. “The kilt is about being free and easy,” Cox then advised, before adding sheepishly: “It’s hard not to wear underpants.”  

    The Toronto Film Festival continues through to Sunday.

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    Etan Vlessing

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  • ‘Easy’s Waltz’ Review: Lounge Singer Vince Vaughn Gets A Break From Al Pacino In Fine Old School Vegas Movie – Toronto Film Festival

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    Looking like it was a script plucked straight out of the 70’s , maybe even the 50’s, the richly entertaining mid-range drama, Easy’s Waltz goes down easy indeed as an engrossing character study of the kind of Vegas lounge singer that ought to be in that museum on the strip that is full of salvaged signs of the Las Vegas that has been torn down and replaced by much glitzier new age models. That is probably an apt description of Easy (Vince Vaughn) himself, a guy just trying to make ends meet running a restaurant on the outskirts and performing nightly, a Vic Damone-ish style singer, really talented with the phrasing of a lyric and dedicated to delivering for the few faithfuls who actually come to see him perform.

    It is his night job, as he also has to look out for the staff, the waitresses, and make sure ends meet. Into his life comes mover and shaker Mickey Albano (Al Pacino) who sees something in Easy that he can exploit and so convinces him he belongs instead at the Wynn Hotel on the strip and he can make it happen. He becomes a mentor and soon Easy is getting the bigger break he never thought would happen. Easy is the kind of Vegas fixture who could see the big time happening just “over there” in the glitzy distance of the world’s most famous gambling town, but the Sinatra era is dead. This is now a place where stars do “residencies”, but there are still lounges and Easy fits right in.

    The complication for him is devotion to his younger, troubled brother Sam (Simon Rex) who acts as his “manager” but is generally a screw-up. It doesn’t change and Sam’s stupid moves affect his relationship with Mickey, landing him in increasing trouble. Mickey is a smooth old-style operator but don’t cross him or he will show up with his goon squad for some beating-up time. Easy also has to deal with his mother (Mary Steenburgen), a tough cookie he is paying to keep her above water. His visit to her is the kind of single scene where an Oscar winner like Steenburgen knocks it out of the park. We instantly know this woman, and it isn’t pretty.

    Easy’s Waltz, and that title is one that instantly suggests this is going to be the kind of character-based movie Hollywood studios used to thrive on but now barely touch. This independently made film which had it World Premiere as a Special Presentation at the Toronto Film Festival tonight, marks the feature writing/directing debut of Nic Pizzolatto who proved in the first season of True Detective he has the chops for this sort of thing, and proves it again here with a richly entertaining Vegas-y movie that feels decades older that the era of The Hangover and Leaving Las Vegas.

    It is an actors dream. Vaughn has one of his best roles here, a guy who can interpret everything from “Little Drummer Boy” to classics like “Edge Of Seventeen” to Darin and Anka in their prime, and get to the essence, but for is own good perhaps he shouldn’t drift from his longtime comfort zone by playing a game he doesn’t know so well. And it is nice to see Pacino get a decent part here. I have seen him in basically throwaway or smallish role in other films this Fall season including Julian Schnabel’s In The Hand Of Dante and Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, but here his Mickey Albano may be Michael Corleone-light, but nonetheless lethal when he has to turn on a dime. At 85 he still has it. However, in a sadly poignant role as the down-on-his-luck Sam, Simon Rex really shows he has the dramatic chops to nearly steal the picture from a couple of ol pros like Vaughn and Pacino. He is terrific.

    Most of the female parts, other than Steenburgen’s memorable if brief turn, including Kate Mara, Cobie Smulders, and Vegas veteran singer Shania Twain don’t have as much to do to make much of an impression, a distinctive problem the 1960 Ocean’s 11 also felt. This waltz is for the boys.

    Producers are : Christopher Lemole, Tim Zajaros, Margot Hand, and Pizzolatto. It is looking for distribution.

    Title: Easy’s Waltz

    Festival: Toronto Film Festival – Special Presentations

    Sales Agent: CAA

    Director/Screenplay: Nic Pizzolatto

    Cast: Vince Vaughn, Simon Rex, Kate Mara, Cobie Smulders, Shania Twain, Tim Simons, Fred
    Melamed, Sophia Ali, Mary Steenburgen, and Al Pacino.

    Running Time: 1 hour and 43 minutes

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    Pete Hammond

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  • Paul Shaffer to Get Feature Doc Treatment (Exclusive)

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    A feature documentary about Paul Shaffer, best known David Letterman’s longtime sidekick and Late Show bandleader, is in the works.

    The life rights to the story of the musician and TV personality from Thunder Bay, Ontario, who got his start as the musical director of a 1972 Toronto stage production of Godspell, have been acquired for a film to be titled Say Hello to Our Good Friend Paul Shaffer.

    The documentary will be produced by Ballinran Entertainment, Grace Street Media and White Pine Pictures, with a director still to be attached to the project. UTA Independent Film Group came on board to handle world sales after discussions this week at the Toronto Film Festival.

    Also at TIFF this week, Shaffer appeared for the world premiere of the Nick Davis documentary You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution …. That film recounts Shaffer’s first professional gig as part of the hippie musical Godspell alongside fellow breakout talent like Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Victor Garber, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas and Jayne Eastwood.

    That stage production with its improvisational comedy opened the way to classic TV series like SCTV and Saturday Night Live. Schaffer was hired as the musical director for Godspell after he made a positive impression on composer Stephen Schwartz when playing the piano for a girlfriend who was auditioning.

    Shaffer joined up with Letterman in 1982 for the launch of Late Night With David Letterman on NBC, leading the World’s Most Dangerous Band. In 1993, he made the move with Letterman to CBS for The Late Show to lead the CBS Orchestra after NBC passed Letterman over for the Tonight Show hosting job in favor of Jay Leno.

    Say Hello to Our Good Friend Paul Shaffer will also recall the musician’s rise with the original Saturday Night Live band (he played the piano when Bill Murray famously sang the Star Wars theme) and collaborations with musical icons like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Sly Stone and Ray Charles.

    “I’ve been the luckiest guy in showbiz. I’ve had a front-row seat to music history. This film isn’t just about me. It’s about the soundtrack of our lives, and how music connects, inspires and remembers us,” Shaffer said in a statement.

    The project will be executive produced by Vern Freedlander (Grace Street Media), Craig Thompson (Ballinran Entertainment) and Peter Raymont and Stephen Paniccia (White Pine Pictures). The same execs negotiated the life rights signing deal with Shaffer.

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    Etan Vlessing

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  • Actor James McAvoy punched in Toronto bar: reports | Globalnews.ca

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    Actor James McAvoy was reportedly punched at a Toronto bar on Monday evening.

    First reported by People magazine, the Scottish actor and director was apparently hit, unprovoked, by a patron at Charlotte’s Room, located on King Street West in the downtown area, mere blocks away from where the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) takes place.

    The Split star had attended the premiere of his directorial debut, California Schemin’, at TIFF with his wife Lisa Liberati on Saturday.


    James McAvoy and Lisa Liberati attend the premiere of ‘California Schemin” during the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival at TIFF Lightbox on Sept. 6, 2025 in Toronto.

    Olivia Wong / Getty Images

    McAvoy, 46, was reportedly having a couple of quiet drinks with his producers when the incident occurred.

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    Toronto police confirmed to Global News that no report was filed, and McAvoy just laughed off the incident, according to People.

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    Global News has reached out to TIFF and McAvoy’s talent agency for further comment.

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    Charlotte’s Room did not respond to Global News’ request for a comment.

    The actor has appeared in dozens of movies, including several X-Men franchise films as Prof. Charles Xavier, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Atonement.


    &copy 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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    Rachel Goodman

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  • Jeremy O. Harris Is the Greatest Showman

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    Except nothing came of it. In 2022, The Daily Beast reported that Harris had been let go from the show “after having trouble meeting script deadlines.” HBO said Harris was “not fired from The Vanishing Half,” citing creative differences that were “part of the normal development process,” and called Harris “a valued collaborator.” He’s since worked with the network on a documentary about Slave Play called Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play.

    Harris, who calls the The Daily Beast “a gossip rag,” stands by his work. He fondly remembers a staff research trip to New Orleans that he organized and blames the show’s fate on systemic issues at the network. (The Daily Beast did not respond to a request for comment.)

    “The reason the show didn’t happen is because the book was bought at a very specific time, in June of 2020,” Harris says. “HBO changed leadership within that time period. The Black woman who advocated for our show to be bought, and was our executive, left.” That woman, Kalia Booker King, departed to work for Sinners director Ryan Coogler’s production company, Proximity Media. But King’s departure wasn’t the only factor. “I don’t think that the pairing of our producers and me and Aziza as writers was necessarily fully a fit. I think that Issa Rae would’ve made an amazing version of the show in her own way. I don’t think she would’ve made the version that me and Aziza were making.” (Rae did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment. HBO and King declined to comment.)

    Harris has been accused of caring more about his public persona than his written work. Several people I’ve spoken to—including a film and television actor and theater professionals—suggest he has been known to be unreliable, a natural consequence of being overcommitted and overextended. Harris’s talent, they agree, is undeniable. But there are concerns about his follow-through, according to these sources, none of whom were willing to go on the record for fear of alienating Harris, who has a penchant for responding publicly and ferociously to his critics. (See: Jesse Green, Young Jean Lee.) Fear of retaliation notwithstanding, a question hangs over this gifted writer’s head: Is he self-obsessed, or are people just obsessed with him?

    “He loves to take on more than he should,” says his former CAA agent, Ross Weiner, reflecting on the roughly eight years he spent representing Harris before he left the industry. “But it was always a good thing.” As of this story’s publication, Harris has no less than six projects in various states of development on IMDb Pro, including The Wives and the seemingly abandoned The Vanishing Half.

    Some past collaborators praise him even when the project doesn’t work out. Sydney Baloue, a writer on The Vanishing Half, calls Harris “the creative genius of our time” and said he had an “incredible” experience working on the show. “Jeremy is a brilliant writer,” says Allain. “He and Aziza put together an incredible room of writers who delivered several knockout scripts. Sadly, not everything in development gets made.”

    On December 15, 2024, Barnes died by suicide. “I was the person that had to call everyone from the writers room and tell them,” Harris remembers. “The thing that got me through was thinking about the fact that there are so many parties Aziza just didn’t want to be at. No matter how social I tried to ask them to be….” He takes a beat. “Life is sort of a party that none of us asked to be invited to. I don’t know that it’s my place to demand that someone stay, while also having a lot of sadness that they’re gone.”

    You’re going to go to this play with me now,” Harris commands as we finish our meal at Dimes. It’s called Trophy Boys, an off-Broadway production directed by Tony winner Danya Taymor and starring The Gilded Age’s Louisa Jacobson—another close friend of Harris’s from his Yale days. Though this wasn’t the plan, one doesn’t say no to Harris. I get the check.

    On the way, he rolls calls—putting out more theatrical fires while texting Gerber. There’s a controversial big-time producer who wants to see Prince Faggot. “I’m going to get him in tomorrow,” Harris tells one of his agents over the phone. “I have reached out to the man many times. I’m telling you right now: If this man loved me, if he was obsessed with me, if he needed me, he would call me every hour on the hour till I answer.”

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    Chris Murphy

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  • ‘Normal’ Review: Bob Odenkirk Back In Action Again In Ben Wheatley’s Wild Violent Black Comedy Western – Toronto Film Festival

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    Not to be confused with Nobody or even Nobody II which just released a few weeks ago, Bob Odenkirk already has his next uber action movie on deck. In fact Normal premiered at midnight to a rowdy crowd at the Toronto Film Festival and if their reaction is any indication it’s another hit for this unlikely action star who is fast following in the footsteps of Charles Bronson, Steven Seagal, and Bruce Willis. Filling a big void in Hollywood who dreamed it would be Saul, but this acting is breaking bad guys with the best of them.

    Odenkirk plays the new substitue sheriff in the very small Minnesota town of Normal, a Fargoesqe location where the previous sheriff has passed away under mysterious circumstances, possibly involving a moose (a big symbol throughout the film) and he is only there until an election can be held, Meanwhile he patrols the street and makes sure peace is at hand. But before we get to Normal, the film opens a pre-credits sequence in Japan at a meeting of the criminal organization the Yakuza where, as is their custom, three members are asked to slice off a finger in order to show their loyalty. The first two do so, but the third has his finger caught dipping into the cookie jar so to speak. It doesn’t end well for him in what is a bloody good start to director Ben Wheatley‘s latest foray into extreme violence. Nothing action wise proceeds to happen for the first 40 minutes – sans the finger pointing in Osaka – and that is typical for Wheatley (Kill List, Sightseers, Meg 2, Free Fire) who likes to take it real slow and easy and then when you least expect it: POW.

    At any rate the fireworks begin and the whole place is being shot up- Yakuzas, locals, employees – you name it. Sheriff Ulysses looking at this as his first big crisis decides to walk in like Gary Cooper in High Noon and take them all on. He makes a memorable entrance into the bank crashing through the glass door, but with his own deputies Alex (Jess McLeod) and Blaine Anderson who is running for Sheriff (Ryan Allen) holding back, the only help he really gets is from Keith and Lori who shoot at anyone but him. In a case of strange bedfellows he notices that kindness under fire and they become allies as the siege continues.

    Crooked Mayor Henry Winkler makes him an offer. If he agrees to kill them on the spot, nothing will happen to him. He hangs up on him and the Mayor and his brood don’t know what they are in for. Basically the carnage is all non-stop from this point on, a festival of killing in all kinds of nifty ways. The stunt guys are busy.

    With a script by Nobody creator Derek Kolstad from his and Odenkirk’s story, this movie also looks to be channeling 50’s modern day classics like Bad Day At Black Rock and Violent Saturday. It is once again a fine showcase for the late blooming action star. The movie has some good actors to go with the scenery including Winkler, and Lena Headey as Moira from the town bar, a person who has more talents than you might imagine. Fletcher and Jolly win audience love here, and Allen’s naked ambitions to become sheriff is quite amusing. However Odenkirk rules this roost, just as he does in the Nobody movies, but with the firepower Wheatley keeps shooting Normal manages to exceed those action levels if you can believe it.

    Shout out to Cinematographer Armando Salles whose visual palette includes lots of snow and storms, giving this film a very unique and cool vibe for a modern western.

    Producers are Odenkirk, Kolstad, and another Nobody alum Marc Provissiero.

    Title: Normal

    Festival: Toronto Film Festival – Midnight Madness

    Sales Agent: WME

    Director: Ben Wheatley

    Screenplay: Derek Kolstad

    Cast: Bob Odenkirk, Henry Winkler, Lena Headey, Jess McLeod, Ryan Allen, Billy MacLellan, Brendan Fletcher, Reena Jolly

    Running Time: 1 hour and 30 minutes

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    Pete Hammond

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  • ‘Poetic License’ Review: Maude Apatow’s Directorial Debut Is a Bighearted but Frustratingly Aimless Campus Comedy

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    Maude Apatow’s directorial debut Poetic License is an intergenerational coming-of-age film about an aimless middle-aged wife and mother who comes into the lives of two college students with problems of their own. When her husband (Method Man) accepts a position as an economics professor at a prestigious university, Liz (Leslie Mann) decides to audit a poetry class to fill her time while their daughter Dora (Nico Parker) starts her last year of high school. In a new town full of people she doesn’t know, Liz is floundering while both her husband and daughter quickly adjust and make new friends. When Sam (Andrew Barth Feldman) and Ari (Cooper Hoffman) meet her in poetry class, Liz becomes a romantic fixation for both of them. But Liz is oblivious to their feelings and the growing rivalry between the two for her attention and affection — she’s too busy obsessing over Dora and the looming realization that her daughter doesn’t need her as much anymore. 

    As a former couples therapist, Liz immediately clocks the codependent relationship between Ari and Sam, spending time with them mainly because she’s intrigued by their dynamic. Ari is a rich kid who lives alone in a lavish apartment with no ambition beyond getting Sam to move in with him. But Sam would rather live in the dorms and be an RA, while working on his degree in economics. Sam also has a girlfriend (Maisy Stella) whose presence is a constant source of annoyance for Ari.

    Poetic License

    The Bottom Line

    Warm and well-acted but disappointingly generic.

    Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentations)
    Cast: Leslie Mann, Cooper Hoffman, Andrew Barth Feldman, Nico Parker, Cliff “Method Man” Smith, Martha Kelly, Maisy Stella, Will Price
    Director: Maude Apatow
    Writer: Raffi Donatich

    1 hour 57 minutes

    But both boys agree on Liz, asking for her advice and approval at every turn. She gives her time to them freely, simultaneously revisiting her youth while also acting as a parental figure. And despite her lack of confidence, Liz gives Sam and Ari some solid advice throughout their time together.

    Mann, Hoffman and Feldman are clearly having a good time, and their comedic chemistry carries the film. But for the most part, Poetic License feels just as aimless as Liz, wandering from scene to scene without much of a vision. Each scene seems to end too quickly, not giving the characters and their dialogue enough space to breathe. Even in the emotional moments, the audience is never given time to sit with the meaning behind what’s being said. The scenes in the poetry class feel perfunctory, suggesting no real interest in writing, form or meter. The professor (Martha Kelly) never actually teaches her students anything, instead rambling about her ongoing divorce and conflicts with her soon to be ex-wife. Kelly is funny in the role, but she never feels like a poetry professor and there’s a sense that if the film had centered on just a regular creative writing class everything would have played out in the exact same way.

    Nothing feels specific about Poetic License and all the details seem randomly chosen. “Poetry” and “economics” are portrayed like topics drawn out of a hat, with no real reasoning behind their inclusion in the narrative. We don’t know why Sam or Liz’s husband are into economics in the first place or what it means for both these characters to share an area of study. We also don’t know why Ari is taking the poetry class at all, or even what his major is.

    The film’s script, written by Raffi Donatich, works best as an exploration of the troubled bonds between Ari, Sam, Liz and Dora. But everything around them comes off as superficial, with interchangeable details that only serve to set the scene. This gives the movie a generic quality, most obvious in the scenes involving Liz’s husband. Method Man seems lost in Poetic License, woefully miscast as a no-nonsense academic with no real personality to speak of. His role in Liz’s life functions as a built-in barrier to ensure that the film’s love triangle has no real romantic stakes. Parker fares a bit better as Liz’s level-headed daughter, even though her personality is just as ill-defined as her father’s. 

    As a first-time director, Apatow shows some promise, especially in the tender scenes between Mann and Parker. Apatow shoots Mann with the eye of an adoring daughter, in awe of her mother’s seemingly effortless humor and warmth. The camera also loves Hoffman, who quietly steals the movie whenever he’s onscreen, giving dimension to a character who could so easily come off obnoxious.

    Despite its shortcomings, Poetic License is a film with a big heart populated by talented actors genuinely having fun with their characters. It’s a shame, then, that the story begins to fade from memory as soon as the credits roll.

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    Jon Frosch

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  • Vivaldi Drama ‘Primavera’ Unveils Fresh Deals As It Debuts At TIFF

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    EXCLUSIVE: A fresh round of sales have been unveiled for renowned Italian opera director Damiano Michieletto’s first feature Primavera, which world premiered as a Special Presentation at TIFF this weekend

    Paradise City Sales (formerly Memento International) has secured a slew of additional deals on the title following the sales launch at the Unifrance Rendez-Vous in Paris in January.

    The film has since sold to Scandinavia (Cinema Mondo), The Baltics (Adastra Cinema), Portugal (Pris Audiovisuais), Greece (Filmtrade & Tanweer), Turkey ( Filmarti Film), Bulgaria (Beta Films), Ex-Yugoslavia (Discovery Film), Hungary (Vertigo Media), Poland (M2 Films), Czech Republic (Film Europe), Latin America (Plus Films / Imagem Filmes), South Korea (Entermode Corp), Taiwan (Swallow Wings) and Australia & New Zealand (Rialto Distribution & Moving Story).

    It was previously announced as having been sold to Benelux (Cineart), Germany and Austria (X Verleih), Spain (A Contracorriente Films), Switzerland (Frenetic) and Poland (M2 Films).

    In Italy, Primavera will be released by Warner Bros. Italia, while Diaphana Distribution is handling the French release.

    The film is lead produced by The Great Beauty production house Indigo Film with Warner Bros. Entertainment Italia in co-production with Moana Films.

    Blending lyrical sensuality and emotional force, Primavera tells the story of Cecilia, a gifted young violinist raised in an orphanage in 18th-century Venice, whose world is turned upside down by her encounter with Antonio Vivaldi.

    The film expands on the novel Stabat Mater by Tiziano Scarpa, which in turn is based on the real life of Vivaldi who was a Roman Catholic priest and taught at the Ospedale della Pietà for almost 30 years.

    The screenplay is co-written by Ludovica Rampoldi and director Michieletto.

    Michele Riondino, who was seen recently in Bille August’s mini-series adaptation of the Count of Monte Cristo, plays Vivaldi opposite rising star Tecla Insolia as Cecilia. Isolia recently won the David di Donatello for Best Actress for her performance in The Art Of Joy.

    Paradise City Sales arrives in Toronto from Venice with a packed fall sales line-up which includes Lebanese Cyril Aris’ romance A Sad and Beautiful World, which has just premiered in Venice parallel section Giornate degli Autori (previously known as Venice  Days), winning the Audience Award.

    Further titles include Damien Hauser’s Memory of Princess Mumbi, which also played in GdA and screens in the Toronto Centrepiece.

    Further TIFF titles include Haifaa Al-Mansour’s crime thriller Unidentified (Toronto Centrepiece), and Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound (Toronto Gala Presentations & Cannes Un Certain Regard).

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    Melanie Goodfellow

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  • Toronto: Rian Johnson Takes Latest ‘Knives Out’ Mystery “Back to Church”

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    The world premiere for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery on Saturday night at the Toronto Film Festival kicked off more like a religious service than a glitzy, star-studded affair when director Rian Johnson came on stage to introduce his latest murder mystery for Netflix.

    “We’re going back to church. Can I get an Amen?” Johnson asked the capacity Princess of Wales Theatre audience with a dramatic call-back. “One more, give me an Amen!” he added.

    He got those amens and sustained applause when the final credits rolled after a two hour screening. And what emerged with the first look in Toronto was a third Knives Out mystery for Netflix with a darker tone and a commentary on the role of faith and logic in today’s divisive times.

    During the post-screening Q&A, Johnson, joined on stage by his A-list cast, talked about wrestling with his own religious faith when hammering out his third Knives Out mystery. “I grew up very religious. I’m not religious anymore. I have a lot of complicated feelings about it. And I wanted to kind of work into it and write about that. And you have a script at the end of it,” he explained.

    The latest Knives Out whodunnit will fit well in Trumpian times as it’s set in a small town church riven by an ecclesiastical power struggle between one priest, played by Josh Brolin, who is more of a rapacious cult leader, and a second priest (Josh O’Connor), who shows his church members human grace and fallibility.

    As to how audiences for Wake Up the Dead ultimately solve the latest crime mystery with their own viewing, Johnson insisted his Knives Out films remain above all else entertainment. “It’s a movie, and it needs to work as a roller coaster ride, not a crossword puzzle. If you’re focused on the audience trying to figure it out, then that’s going to get boring really quick. It’s all about the characters. It’s all about actual story,” the director said.

    Daniel Craig reprises his role as detective Benoit Blanc, only in the third installment his character is gentler and kinder as he solves his latest mystery, rather than looking to nail a killer.

    Craig during the Q&A praised Johnson for pulling off the latest ensemble Knives Out mystery with Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Glenn Close and Kerry Washington and other heavy-hitters among the cast. “Putting this many stars into one film is literally the definition of herding cats. It’s logistically a nightmare. And this is the man that put it together and led us,” Craig said.

    Wake Up Dead Man will be released on Dec. 12, in time for an awards run. Johnson has been Oscar-nominated nominated twice for his Knives Out films, one for original and another for adapted screenplay.

    The Toronto Film Festival runs through to Sept. 14.

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    Etan Vlessing

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  • ‘Fuze’ Review: Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Theo James Headline David Mackenzie’s Savvy, Hunk-Filled Heist Thriller

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    The opening credits of the heist thriller Fuze flicker and shake like action-movie credits used to do back in the good old Tony Scott days. That’s an early indication that the film, from director David Mackenzie and writer Ben Hopkins, has a clear sense of what tradition it wants to honor. The film prizes style, but has no higher ambition than to entertain, with an economy of means and no fussy pretension. That’s a noble mission, especially in this time of auteur worship, when so many genre movies seem determined to be something more.

    Mackenzie, the director behind sturdy films like Hell or High Water, keeps Fuze trotting along at a steady clip. It begins as a story of civic suspense: A London construction crew unwittingly digs up an unexploded bomb from the Blitz, similar to an event that really happened in Plymouth last year. It’s a compelling setup, connecting the sleek modernity of Fuze to a horror of the past. The clock ticks all too swiftly as the police and military work to clear the area and bring in a special team, led by an army major played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who will try to defuse the bomb.

    Fuze

    The Bottom Line

    Meat and potatoes, well-prepared.

    Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala Presentations)
    Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Theo James, Sam Worthington, Gugu Mbatha-Raw
    Director: David Mackenzie
    Writer: Ben Hopkins

    1 hour 38 minutes

    While they perform that bogglingly dangerous task, another series of events is unfolding beneath them. Theo James and Sam Worthington (this is a film admirably committed to the casting of hunks) are down in the basement of a suddenly abandoned building, surely up to no good. It soon becomes evident that they are using the distraction to stage a raid on a bank vault, up against their own ticking clock as they drill through brick and concrete. 

    The fun of this opening stretch is that we’re rooting for both groups to succeed, for London to be saved and for the thieves to get their hands on whatever they’re after. Mackenzie smoothly toggles between storylines, ratcheting up the tension and giving us quick but useful character sketches. 

    Fuze has a lively energy, a cool, daylit bravado that occasionally brings to mind Spike Lee’s Inside Man. Like that shrewd film, Fuze is more than first meets the eye. Before long, the two narratives have intertwined and the film rollicks away from its initial premise and into the realm of double-cross, job-gone-wrong crime caper. Some of the plot mechanics may strain credibility, but one does not come to a film like Fuze looking for docudrama. The internal logic of Hopkins’ busy script is sound enough to hold our attention as we try to suss out just who is zooming whom, and how. 

    Throughout, Giles Nuttgens’ cinematography is bright and crisp, holding the film in the glossy, liminal space between A-feature and B–movie. That’s a great place to be, one that used to be occupied by many studio films every year. Not so much in our streaming era, when there is a stark aesthetic divide between what makes it to theaters and the toss-off stuff that is designed to only ever exist in the digital bazaar of the internet. One hopes that an enterprising American distributor will give Fuze a go at multiplexes; it earns that distinction. 

    The actors are having fun, too. Taylor-Johnson is a convincingly intense and sweaty hotshot, while James gamely dons a South African accent to play a slimy operator who seems a step or two ahead of everyone else. Gugu Mbatha-Raw radiates steely competence as a policewoman overseeing things from a multi-screen control room—any movie of this ilk worth its salt needs that kind of omniscient observer. Worthington is perhaps a little underserved, but it’s always nice to see him outside the blue fugues of the Avatar films. 

    Mackenzie has now debuted two solid thrillers at Toronto in a row. So why not make that a new annual custom? Hampering the dream some is that Relay, which premiered here last year, didn’t do much business when it opened in the U.S. in late August. But maybe Fuze, with its more easily parsed and marketable premise, will break through. It’s not high art, but not everything ought to be. And anyway, riding the middle is its own tricky maneuver; it takes a lot of smarts to not overthink things. 

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    Richard Lawson

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  • ‘John Candy: I Like Me’ Review: Colin Hanks’ Doc Portrait Pays Poignant Tribute to a Comic Icon’s Life and Legacy

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    John Candy is having a bit of a moment. While it has been more than three decades since the beloved Canadian comic actor died tragically too soon, at the age of 43, of a heart attack, his legacy continues to burn brightly. Last year marked the 40th anniversary of Splash, the film that really jump-started Candy’s big screen career; next month sees the release of the biography, John Candy: A Life in Comedy, penned by Paul Myers (brother of Mike); and this week the Toronto International Film Festival kicked off its 50th anniversary edition with the premiere of John Candy: I Like Me, a big-hearted documentary that’s as embracing and generous of spirit as the man himself. It launches on Amazon Prime Video starting October 10.

    Directed by Colin Hanks, and featuring testimonials and reminiscences from those who knew him best — family, friends and colleagues including Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short, Steve Martin, Andrea Martin, Bill Murray and Hanks’ dad Tom, who played his brother in the aforementioned Splash — the assessment of Candy’s life and legacy provides ample cause for laughter while also provoking plenty of tears. Residing just beneath that easygoing, eager-to-please, everyman exterior was a chronic anxiety that reached a crippling peak during his final years.

    John Candy: I Like Me

    The Bottom Line

    The affection is infectious.

    Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala Presentations)
    Airdate: Friday, October 10 (Prime Video)
    Director: Colin Hanks

    1 hour 53 minutes

    As Hanks charts Candy’s career trajectory from the Second City stages in Chicago and Toronto to cult sketch series SCTV to serving as John Hughes’ muse in eight collaborations — including Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, from which the documentary derives its title, and Uncle Buck — he never loses sight of that nagging undercurrent of insecurity that would haunt the actor despite those successes. As O’Brien puts it, “This industry is very unhealthy for people-pleasers.”

    Toronto-raised John Franklin Candy was a shy, introverted big kid who was all of 5 years old when his own father died at age 35, also from heart disease. He’d gain confidence performing improv and sketch comedy, but it was his character work on SCTV, including his inspired takes on Pavarotti, Julia Child and Orson Welles, that made industry folk sit up and take notice.

    Spielberg would come calling with a part in 1941. Mel Brooks, on the high praise friend Carl Reiner had for Candy after directing him in Summer Rental, proceeded to cast him as the half-man, half-dog Barf in Spaceballs. “He stuck acting in his back pocket and behaved like a human being,” says Brooks of Candy’s professional ethic.

    Despite all that good stuff coming his way, there was still that stubborn undercurrent of melancholy. In response to news of John Belushi (who had tried to persuade his old Second City buddy to join him on Saturday Night Live) dying of a drug overdose in 1982, SCTV colleague Dave Thomas tearfully recalls a despondent Candy saying, “Oh God, it’s starting.” As Thomas elaborates, he carried the weight of his father’s passing every day.

    Ironically, eating and drinking would become Candy’s coping mechanism, even as he was aware of his family history. And while his wife Rose shares he would often work out with a trainer and go on extreme diets, she adds that “the industry wanted him big” and his representation wasn’t exactly thrilled when he once shed close to 100 pounds.

    By the early ’90s, when he was no longer picking the hits — as one interviewer not-so-gingerly puts it, “You’ve been in more turkeys than a stuffing mix” — Candy embarked on a second career as co-owner of the Canadian Football League’s Toronto Argonauts, along with Wayne Gretzky and Los Angeles Kings owner Bruce McNall.

    By then increasingly plagued by panic attacks, he’d die in his sleep on March 4, 1994, while on location in Durango, Mexico, filming the ill-fated comedy Wagons East.

    Hanks — who previously directed a pair of music-themed documentaries, including All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records — knows to give the assembled wealth of comedic talent, along with Candy’s widow and two adult children, all the space they need to share the many lively and affecting anecdotes. He accompanies those with a generous sampling of memorable movie and TV clips, archival interview and home movie footage, not to mention a stirring Cynthia Erivo cover of “Every Time You Go Away” by Daryl Hall & John Oates.

    What’s not to like?

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    Michael Rechtshaffen

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  • Ontario’s public broadcaster under fire for funding, then pulling Russian war doc | Globalnews.ca

    Ontario’s public broadcaster under fire for funding, then pulling Russian war doc | Globalnews.ca

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    Ongoing controversy over the documentary “Russians at War” has brought scrutiny to Ontario’s public broadcaster, which has said it will not air the film it helped fund.

    One media expert says TVO is getting “the worst of all worlds” by investing in a project that can no longer be shown or monetized.

    “TVO created a thing which their audience doesn’t get to see, other audiences will get to see and they’ve footed the bill and gotten no reward for it,” Chris Arsenault, chair of Western University’s master of media in journalism and communication program, said in an interview.

    “I can’t think of a worse outcome for a network than what’s happened.”

    “Russians at War,” a film rebuked by the Ukrainian community and some Canadian politicians, was part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s lineup until organizers suspended all screenings this week due to “significant threats” to festival operations. The film, which recently screened at the Venice Film Festival and is headed to the Windsor International Film Festival next month, shows the disillusionment of some Russian soldiers on the front lines of the war in Ukraine.

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    TVO had planned to air the documentary in the coming months, but the network’s board of directors withdrew support for the film on Tuesday, citing feedback it received. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Ukraine’s consul-general in Toronto and others have called the film Russian propaganda and a “whitewashing” of Russian military war crimes in Ukraine – claims the film’s producers and TIFF have rejected.

    The TVO board’s announcement came just days after the network defended the film as “antiwar” at its core. It was an about-face the Documentary Organization of Canada said “poses a serious threat” to media independence and raises questions about political interference.

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    TVO has not responded to requests for comment and board chair Chris Day declined to elaborate on the decision to pull the film.

    “Suffice it to say, we heard significant concerns and we responded,” Day wrote to The Canadian Press in an emailed response to an interview request.

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    Arsenault, who has not seen the documentary and could not comment on its content, said he’s nevertheless worried about the spectre of board intervention in independent editorial decisions, which he said “opens the doors” to further meddling in the production of documentaries and journalism.

    “Russians at War,” a Canada-France co-production, was funded in part by the Canada Media Fund, which provided $340,000 for the project through its broadcaster envelope program. A spokesperson for the fund said TVO independently chose to use that money to support the production of the documentary.

    One of the film’s producers, Cornelia Principe, said that TVO also had to pay a licensing fee to air the documentary. Such fees can range from $50,000 to $100,000, she said.


    Principe, who has defended the documentary and its Canadian-Russian director Anastasia Trofimova, said she was shocked by the TVO board’s decision.

    “Anastasia and I have been working with TVO on this for two and a half years.… I was a little bit out of it for hours. I just couldn’t believe it.”

    What happens next, she said, is “uncharted territory” for TVO.

    “This has, as far as I know, never happened before,” said Principe, who has worked with the broadcaster on various documentaries over the years.

    TVO’s board has said the network will be “reviewing the process by which this project was funded and our brand leveraged.”

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    Charlie Keil, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute, said the TVO board needs to explain why it took “kind of a sledgehammer” to a film that seems to have been adequately vetted on the editorial side.

    “It seems to me if they were being honest, what (the) TVO board would be saying is: “There’s a lot of pressure now. We don’t really like this … We’re just going to bail,” Keil said in an interview.

    Ontario’s Minister of Education Jill Dunlop said in a statement that the decision made by TVO’s board of directors “was the right thing to do,” but did not elaborate.

    As a non-profit government agency, TVO has a mandate to distribute educational materials and programs but the ministry is not involved with its broadcasting arm due to CRTC licensing rules.

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    Another public broadcaster, British Columbia’s Knowledge Network, has confirmed that it made a licence fee contribution of $15,000 for “Russians at War” so that it can be a “second window” broadcaster for the film.

    Asked whether the documentary will still air at some point in British Columbia, a spokesperson for the network said it’s “working on a public response.”

    Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland has denounced the use of public funds for “Russians at War,” saying she shares the “grave concerns” Ukrainian officials and community members in Canada have raised about the film.

    The Ukrainian Canadian Congress has said it will keep protesting “Russians at War” since TIFF has said it will still screen the doc at some point. A peaceful march and demonstration that wound its way to the TIFF Lightbox on Friday afternoon included people who laid sunflowers and photos of Ukrainians killed in the war on the sidewalk.

    “Russians at War” is scheduled to screen at the Windsor International Film Festival, running from Oct. 24 to Nov. 3. The festival announced Friday that the documentary is among 10 nominees for its WIFF Prize in Canadian Film, worth $25,000.

    “We hope that all our nominees – and all films at WIFF – generate meaningful, critical and intelligent discussion in an environment that is safe, respectful and civil,” festival organizers said in an emailed statement.

    &copy 2024 The Canadian Press

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  • TIFF suspends ‘Russians At War’ screenings due to ‘significant threats’ | Globalnews.ca

    TIFF suspends ‘Russians At War’ screenings due to ‘significant threats’ | Globalnews.ca

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    The Toronto International Film Festival said Thursday it is suspending upcoming screenings of the controversial documentary Russians At War due to “significant threats to festival operations and public safety.”

    The announcement came a day after TIFF stood by the film, which is helmed by a Russian-Canadian director and received Canadian public funding, amid growing backlash from the Ukrainian community and government officials for both Ukraine and Canada.

    A large protest was held outside Tuesday’s debut screening and another was planned for Friday.

    The protests were organized by Ukrainian-Canadian community leaders who have called the film “Russian propaganda” — a charge denied by the filmmaker and festival organizers — and called for government and criminal investigations and for TIFF to cancel screenings of the film.

    “As a cultural institution, we support civil discourse about and through films, including differences of opinion, and we fully support peaceful assembly,” the statement from the festival said Thursday. “However, we have received reports indicating potential activity in the coming days that pose significant risk; given the severity of these concerns, we cannot proceed as planned.

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    “This is an unprecedented move for TIFF.”

    The festival said it will pause screenings scheduled for Friday, Saturday and Sunday but is committed to showing the film “when it is safe to do so,” adding organizers “believe this film has earned a place in our festival’s lineup.”

    A spokesperson for the Toronto Police Service told Global News the decision to suspend the screenings were made by TIFF organizers “and was not based on any recommendation from Toronto Police,” who are not aware of any active threats.

    “We were aware of the potential for protests and had planned to have officers present to ensure public safety,” the spokesperson said.


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    The film’s director, Anastasia Trofimova, spent seven months embedded with a Russian army battalion in eastern Ukrainian territory occupied by Moscow’s forces to make the film, which she says was done without the Russian government’s knowledge. She and her financial backers have said the film shows the soldiers losing faith in the fight and seeks to humanize the ordinary men caught up in Russia’s invasion.

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    Ukrainian critics, as well as some Canadian MPs including Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, have denounced any attempts to portray the Russians in a sympathetic light and accused the filmmakers of “whitewashing” the Russian army’s crimes in Ukraine.

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    Two Canadian senators, Donna Dasko and Stan Kutcher, announced Thursday it had sent a letter to TIFF organizers calling for the film’s removal, suggesting TIFF “may not have known all the details related to how this film was made and the purpose for which it was made at the time of its selection.”

    None of the officials who have spoken out against the film have indicated whether they have seen it in full.


    The film’s producers, which includes Canadian Oscar nominee Cornelia Principe, called TIFF’s decision “heartbreaking” in a statement provided by the festival and condemned those who have spoken out publicly against Russians At War, including Freeland, Ukraine’s consul-general for Toronto Oleh Nikolenko and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.

    “Their irresponsible, dishonest, and inflammatory public statements have incited the violent hate that has led to TIFF’s painful decision,” the producers wrote. “This temporary suppression is shockingly un-Canadian.”

    Nikolenko said in a brief statement on Facebook that he welcomed TIFF’s decision but did not address the alleged threats that led to it.

    “This project has already done significant damage to the festival’s reputation and given Russia a chance to further undermine democracy,” he wrote.

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    Earlier Thursday, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress issued a statement calling for TIFF’s board of directors to resign, the suspension of government funding to the festival and for authorities to investigate if federal laws against advocating genocide were violated.

    The group also didn’t address the alleged threats, telling Global News in a statement it will “continue to voice our protest” over TIFF’s intentions to show the film in the future. The protest planned for Friday will go ahead, it added.


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    Ukraine’s culture minister on Wednesday said he raised the possibility of “legal actions to combat propaganda” in a call with TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey.

    TVO, Ontario’s public broadcaster, announced Tuesday it was pulling its support for the film amid growing scrutiny over the use of public funding and government grants in its production. It had stood by the film a day earlier, calling it “at its core an anti-war film” “made in the tradition of independent war correspondence.”

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    TVO used its funding allocation from the Canada Media Fund for the documentary. The Canada Media Fund receives money from both the federal government and Canadian broadcasters, which is then allocated back to those broadcasters for the creation of Canadian content.

    The Canada Media Fund has stressed broadcasters make their own decisions on which projects to fund, without any input from the Canada Media Fund or the government, but said this week it was investigating the matter.

    A spokesperson for Canadian Heritage declined to say if it would investigate the funding, instead stressing the CMF’s independence.

    Trofimova has claimed she is at risk of criminal prosecution in Russia after filming its troops in occupied Ukrainian territory without Moscow’s approval, making claims her film is Russian propaganda “ludicrous.”

    Ukraine has questioned those claims, citing her past work with the Russian state media company RT, and said she also violated Ukrainian law by entering Ukrainian territory.

    Trofimova has said her work for RT was separate from the RT News division that has been banned from Canadian airwaves and whose employees have been indicted in the U.S. for allegedly spreading Russian propaganda and attempting to disrupt the upcoming American election.

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    &copy 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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    Sean Boynton

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