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Tag: toronto film festival

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

    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.

    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

    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.

    Michael Rechtshaffen

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  • Oct. 7 Film ‘The Road Between Us’ Nabs People’s Choice Documentary Prize in Toronto

    The controversial and zig-zagging journey for the Oct. 7 rescue movie The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue had another twist on Sunday when it picked up the People’s Choice award for best documentary at the Toronto Film Festival.

    Director Barry Avrich’s documentary is about a retired Tel Aviv general driving through great danger to save his son’s family at a kibbutz near Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023.

    “To win this award is thrilling for Mark and I. The audience voted and I appreciate that. And we look forward to the rest of this journey,” Avrich said while accepting the doc audience award trophy at the Lightbox theater alongside producer Mark Selby. The Canadian documentary centers on retired Israeli general Noam Tibon rescuing his family, including his son, from Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023 when they invaded kibbutz Nahal Oz. 

    The Road Between Us generated buzz at TIFF with a world premiere that sparked pre-festival programming intrigue, cheers during a single Roy Thomson Hall screening on Sept. 10 and a tense protest amid the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict involving supporters from both sides outside the high profile Toronto festival venue.

    TIFF organizers first invited Avrich’s film for its 2025 edition, and then disinvited the title, only to then reinstated the film after an outcry from the Canadian Jewish community and politicians and influencers in Israel. Eventually, Avrich and TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey settled their differences over “safety, legal and programming concerns” to allow the world premiere for the documentary to go ahead during the 50th edition.

    Fest organizers raised early flags that clearances for footage of terrorist attacks taken by Hamas cameras and included in the documentary had not been obtained. It’s understood that security concerns over a possible protest against the Israel Oct. 7 film also were in play.

    “And Cameron, thank you. I appreciate everything that TIFF has done for us,” a magnanimous Avrich said Sunday morning as he turned to Bailey on the Lightbox stage after accepting the award. For his part, producer Selby added in his own acceptance remarks: “I hope that all the filmmakers of this festival feel as supported as Barry and I did during this whole process.”  

    The Road Between Us will be mostly self-released on around 125 screens in more than 20 cities throughout North America beginning Oct. 3.

    Etan Vlessing

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

    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. 

    Etan Vlessing

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

    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

    Damon Wise

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  • ‘Easy’s Waltz’ Review: Vince Vaughn Reveals a Hidden Talent for Singing in Nic Pizzolatto’s Low-Key Debut

    Who knew Vince Vaughn could carry a tune? Turns out, the actor’s been singing right under our noses for years, from the ironic Alanis Morissette cover he delivered in “The Internship” to his cringy rendition of “All the Gold in California” in the movie “Arkansas,” but it wasn’t until “Easy’s Waltz” that it became clear Vaughn could’ve been a crooner in another life.

    “Easy’s Waltz” is like a window into that life, and maybe a sigh of relief that the “Swingers” star took a different path — since he’s certainly had it easier than his character does trying to sustain his career as a cabaret act. Vaughn plays Lew Evans, whose friends call him “Easy.” He’s like a laidback Dean Martin who never got discovered, despite regular appearances at one of Las Vegas’ decaying older venues, where he sexily saunters his way through unconventional ’80s standards like “Against All Odds” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” before blowing the roof off with his take on Ultravox’s “Vienna.”

    There’s a version of this guy who could easily support another one of Vaughn’s brash bro comedies. Instead, as “True Detective” creator Nic Pizzolatto sees Easy in his beautifully written feature directing debut, he serves as more of a tragic figure: Grounded, loyal and honorable to a fault, the man’s got talent, as well as a tendency to self-sabotage. How else to describe the way he’s been dragging along his no-good younger sibling Sam (Simon Rex), who pawns Easy’s prized ring behind his back and siphons off his brother’s success?

    A low-key cousin to ’80s movies like “Tender Mercies” and “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” in which pathetic middle-aged musicians circle the drain of their own existence, “Easy’s Waltz” is a character-driven indie drama of the kind that launched Vaughn’s acting career. Watching Vaughn embody Easy during a precarious late-career moment of opportunity, I was also reminded of “Bob le Flambeur,” in which the incorrigible French gambler stumbles home from the backroom poker games at dawn and drops a coin into the slot machine behind the door of his own apartment. In Easy’s case, he never risks enough to win big — but that also protects him from losing everything.

    Movies like this don’t exactly light up the box office, but they stick with the folks fortunate enough to see them. Years earlier, Easy made that kind of impression on Al Pacino’s Mickey Albano, a louche local personality who books talent for the Wynn casino. Mickey has power, but more importantly, he has taste, and when he happens to catch one of Easy’s performances at a moment when the singer is pouring just a little too much of his soul into the show, he calls Easy over and offers his a chance the singer never thought would come: How would he like to play the Wynn?

    By this point, we’ve already seen what bad news his brother Sam can be, via one of those smart Pizzolatto-classic scenes — this one set at a seedy pawn shop off the Strip — that reveal volumes about his characters’ personality and past relationships. Now Sam steps in as Easy’s manager, jeopardizing the deal even before it’s signed (in a weird coincidence, Sam had hit it off a few nights earlier with Lucy, the same young woman Mickey brought to his brother’s show, played by Kate Mara). Easy has secrets of his own, as when he runs the contract by an old acquaintance (Cobie Smulders), a lawyer who might have been his life partner had things turned out differently — though most of those details are nestled between the lines.

    The arrangement between Mickey and Easy suits them both, and we sense that the older man is living out some kind of vicarious thrill opening doors for his grateful new act. Easy belongs to an earlier time (just don’t call him a Boomer) and honestly doesn’t realize what a viral moment he’s having when someone records his version of Mike and the Mechanics’ “Silent Running” and posts it online. Suddenly, Mickey is offering him a chance to play the main stage, which sets Sam’s greedier instincts into overdrive. Not only is he playing with fire by seeing Lucy behind Mickey’s back, but he hatches a scheme to steal and resell the QR codes off casino vouchers.

    The pieces of Pizzolatto’s script don’t quite fit together, but the overall shape is clear. He has mapped a Faustian dilemma on top of a modern-day Greek tragedy, in which Easy must choose between the two things he wants most: a singing career and saving his brother, the latter being a responsibility no one ever asked him to shoulder. Pizzolatto turns out to be strong with actors, getting great performances from everybody, even Rex, a loose cannon whose role in “Red Rocket” created opportunities far beyond his abilities. Pacino hasn’t been this good since “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

    As the film winds down, Pizzolatto reveals some tough existential insights personal enough to cut past the hard-boiled shorthand such movies so often serve up. It feels like an indulgence to give Easy a climactic concert in which nearly every significant person in his life is present — all but his mother, who makes an earlier appearance in a devastating single-scene cameo by Mary Steenburgen. Still, there’s something touching in the man’s belief that music can bring people together.

    Peter Debruge

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  • Hockey Drama ‘Pink Light’ Tackles Transgender Athlete Debate for “Villainizing the Community”  

    Harrison Browne, the first-ever publicly transgender pro hockey player, now has the challenge of boosting trans representation as he brings his directorial debut Pink Light for a world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival this weekend.

    “It’s really important to show trans athletes as people, because that’s the best way to humanize this community and create those pathways for empathy,” Browne told The Hollywood Reporter on Friday.

    Pink Light takes the inspiring sports drama genre, where athletes have to overcome obstacles in their sport and personal lives, in a new direction as Browne tackles the worsening debate around trans athletes in the media and political spaces.

    “This is not an issue of trans people taking over sports. This is an issue being magnified and being disproportionately used for a moral panic,” the director argued as he pointed to the number of trans athletes in school and pro sports, including the Olympics, being vanishingly small, compared to the total number of athletes in sports.

    Pink Light

    Toronto Film Festival

    “Society is villainizing the community. And its really easy to use that community as a scapegoat when you don’t know anybody, when you don’t have a face for that term,” Browne added. Pink Light centers on Scott, a trans man and an ex-pro hockey player who is left disoriented after being hit while playing in a beer league hockey game.

    His head injury seemingly sparks flashbacks in the film to his 18 year-old self, Scotty, at a college frat party as he talks with a fellow party-goer for the first time about possibly leaving women’s hockey to transition to becoming a man.

    The dramatic tension in Pink Light comes from Scotty feeling stuck being a young woman to remain in hockey and the only comfortable space he had ever known in life, but also being unable to feel openly comfortable as a man after he completes a transition. “I really see this film as my goodbye to hockey. It feels like it’s a closure for me in a way I wasn’t expecting when making this film as a love letter to my younger self,” Browne explained.

    Pink Light

    Toronto Film Festival

    The gender-blending short has a dazed and confused Scott, as he time travels to his pre-transition past as Scotty, discovering his earlier self as he waited for his life as a man to begin had already become the person Scott longed to be. “We wanted to highlight some of the struggles that transgender people go through. Scott feels lost. And as he gives up his identity as an athlete, he’s kind of floating and doesn’t know he fits in,” Harrison insisted.

    Browne plays Scott in Pink Light, while CJ Jackson, a first-time actor and the first non-binary professional hockey player to come out in real life, plays Scotty. Donald MacLean Jr., Nicolette Pearse, Max Amani and Shaun Benson also feature in the ensemble cast.

    Browne is also developing a feature length version of Pink Light to be set in a college athletic space and to expand on Scotty’s story line against the backdrop of locker room, athlete-coach and dating dynamics.

    Pink Light is produced by Macaulee Cassaday and Nicolette Pearse, with David Palumbo and Rachel Browne executive producing, and Emily Zhang serving as the cinematographer. Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, owners of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Toronto Raptors pro teams, helped finance the short film.

    Etan Vlessing

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  • Broadway Star Corey Hawkins Finds New Depth in The Man in My Basement

    Corey Hawkins is known for films like Straight Outta Compton, In the Heights, and The Color Purple, along with his Tony-nominated work in plays like Six Degrees of Separation and Topdog/Underdog. But Hawkins says his new film, The Man in My Basement, made him go deeper than he ever had before—and not just because he’s in almost every frame of the film.

    The thriller, directed by Nadia Latif in her feature debut, is an adaptation of Walter Mosley’s novel, following a man (Hawkins) living in Sag Harbor who is put in a tricky situation when a white stranger (Willem Dafoe) asks to rent his basement for the summer. Hawkins plays Charles Blakey, who is grappling with the loss of his mother and fighting to keep their ancestral home.

    Hawkins and Latif, an accomplished theater director, brought the film to the Toronto International Film Festival for its world premiere ahead of its release to select theaters on September 12 (and to Hulu later this fall). There, they talked to Vanity Fair about how it felt to see the film with an audience, what it was like to work with Dafoe, and why Hawkins decided to train for a marathon while also filming this marathon of a movie.

    Vanity Fair: How did it feel to watch this film with an audience?

    Nadia Latif: I’m a theater director by trade, and in my first ever professional show, I watched the opening night. The first sound cue fired three seconds late, and I sat through the whole show kind of weeping. I have never watched one of my opening nights since. That’s partly because in that moment, you realize you have to relinquish control of it, and you have to accept a certain level of chaos into your life. Loads of people asked me if I was nervous about the premiere, and I was like, “I have watched my work die on its ass in front of an audience too many times.”

    The film is a finished thing; it’s now going to begin a conversation. I enjoyed it. I also sat between my family and the drunkest man who ever existed. He was there guzzling beers and eating popcorn.

    That’s a pretty trippy movie to see drunk.

    Latif: I think by the end he was really like, “This is not what I fucking signed up for.”

    Corey Hawkins: My first opening night on Broadway, someone went to the hospital because they were on the wrong side of the stage, and we had to finish the show. [Laughs] I also just feel sometimes, like you said, once the film is finished, if I’ve seen it and I’ve been able to enjoy everybody’s work already, sometimes it’s a bit of torture to sit through. So I just listened to it last night.

    This seems like a film where you can feel the audience members tensing up as they watch.

    Rebecca Ford

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

    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.

    Etan Vlessing

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  • Paul Shaffer to Get Feature Doc Treatment (Exclusive)

    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.

    Etan Vlessing

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  • ‘Good Fortune’ Review: Keanu Reeves’ Brainless Angel Runs Away With Aziz Ansari’s Clever Directing Debut

    It wasn’t meant as a joke when a Hollywood studio cast Nicolas Cage as an emo angel who risks his wings to save Meg Ryan, a mortal with dark thoughts and great hair. But Aziz Ansari must have been smiling when he chose Keanu Reeves to play a similar character, an angel named Gabriel who oversteps his duties with a “lost soul,” in his feature directing debut, “Good Fortune.” It’s a fun idea, whether or not Gen-Z audiences know “City of Angels,” the late-’90s remake of “Wings of Desire,” or the even earlier John Landis classic “Trading Places.”

    In what amounts to a slightly ironic but mostly sincere homage to late-20th-century high-concept studio movies (the body-swap comedy in particular), Ansari plays Arj, a gig economy worker with an understandably exasperated view of life in Los Angeles. Running errands for rich people on Taskrabbit, he barely earns enough to eat, and lacks the self-confidence to flirt with Elena (Keke Palmer), a formidably idealistic co-worker at his Home Depot-style second job.

    Arj wonders why he went to college as he spends most nights sleeping in his beat-up car, which eventually gets towed for too many unpaid parking tickets. For Gabriel, Arj’s many humiliations add up to someone badly in need of his help. And besides, Gabriel’s bored of his low-ranking angel duties, which amount to stopping Angelenos from texting and driving (he doesn’t realize just how many lives he’s saving).

    Coaching the L.A. angels, Gabriel’s boss (Sandra Oh) warns him that he has no business intervening, but Gabriel’s not so bright — Reeves plays the character with much the same blank stare he brought to “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” all those years back — and appears to Arj anyway. (No one else can see him.) When Arj doesn’t seem thrilled by brief visions of what his life has in store, Gabriel lets him temporarily trade places with Jeff (Seth Rogen), a rich tech bro he’d met a few days earlier.

    There’s just one problem: Arj doesn’t want to go back. Would you, if offered the choice between scraping by (as so many barely can these days) and planning parties from the private sauna of your Hollywood Hills mansion?

    It’s funny that Gabriel didn’t anticipate this problem — that Arj might not agree “how superficial a life of wealth and success really is” — and funnier still when you see Gabriel’s incredulous expression. No question that Reeves, who has made self-aware cameos in everything from “Toy Story 4” to “Always Be My Maybe” of late, is this movie’s MVP. The surest sign of the good-sport star’s intelligence is his willingness ow endearingly he can play a “dum-dum.”

    Ansari understands that the whole angel thing was corny back when Warren Beatty and John Travolta tried it (in “Heaven Can Wait” and “Michael,” respectively), but uses it the way an “SNL” sketch might, as shorthand for the point he really wants to make: Beneath the jokes, “Good Fortune” serves as a working-class critique of contemporary capitalism, as seen from the perspective of those juggling various side hustles just to make ends meet. The comedian might not be this generation’s Frank Capra, but it’s still nice to see a celebrity who recognizes what normal folks are going through and uses his platform to address it (à la Cheech Marin’s newly relevant “Born in East L.A.”).

    The rules of how Arj and Jeff change places, and what it’ll take to switch back, are sort of a moving target in “Good Fortune,” which gives Rogen’s character an Ebenezer Scrooge-like crash course in how to be a better billionaire by forcing him to work for his own food-delivery app. But after making the joke that Arj kinda likes being rich, Ansari’s screenplay never really presents a convincing reason why this selfish guy would return to how things were before — unless you count Palmer’s union-organizing love interest, whose texting-and-driving mishap Gabriel was somehow supposed to prevent (one of several plot holes).

    The movie features a weird mix of acting styles, from Rogen’s appropriately showboaty performance (his character is privilege personified, at first, then later made relatable as he’s forced to break into his own home) to Ansari’s weirdly self-conscious character, who looks uncomfortable on camera, whether Arj is rich or poor. And then there’s Reeves’ amusingly stiff take on Gabriel, who starts to relax once he’s fired from angel duty and forced to get a dishwashing job on earth.

    Gabriel discovers the little things other people take for granted — namely, cigarettes, dancing and “chicken nuggies” — but it’s street tacos he’ll miss most if he ever gets his wings back. Even though it’s fairly obvious where “Good Fortune” is headed, Ansari manages to surprise in how he gets there. Like his character, the writer-director-producer-star seems to be juggling one too many jobs here, and yet, it’s that very connection to overworked, undercompensated Americans that makes his movie so right for this moment.

    Peter Debruge

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  • See Emile Hirsch in Horror-Comedy ‘Lice’ (Exclusive First Look)

    High school can really get under your skin, as Emile Hirsch is discovering in this exclusive first look image from the horror-comedy Lice.

    Hirsch stars in the film, which is in post-production, as a burned-out science teacher, Mr. Shanker, whose school is thrown into chaos when a parasite begins infecting the student body, turning the teenagers into maniacs. The uninfected students and staff are left to reign in the chaos and get to the bottom of the illness — a possible government experiment gone wrong. And, in a first look at the film, Hirsch’s Mr. Shanker is clearly not having a good time.

    Elsewhere in the movie, from director Jonathan Bensimon, are the overwhelmed and over-imbibing Principal Van (Justin Long) and Detective Sikorski (Kevin Connolly), who is working outside the school grounds to contain the outbreak before it consumes the entire town.

    Connelly is pulling double duty, producing under Connolly’s ActionPark Productions banner, with Jeremy Alter and Gary Goldman also acting as producers.

    Anthony Musella and Lizze Gordo wrote the screenplay for Lice, which is for sale out of the Toronto Film Festival with Highland Film Group handling international sales.

    Kevin Cassidy

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  • Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst on Falling in Love and the One that Got Away

    How well did the two of you know each other before this?

    Dunst: Not at all.

    Tatum: She doesn’t remember it, but I had met her at a screening at a producer’s house the one time, and that was for three seconds. That was it. It was Melancholia or something, and we had a conversation.

    Dunst: We didn’t have a conversation! You said three seconds!

    What did you learn from your real-life counterparts that surprised you?

    Tatum: The biggest surprise for me with Jeff was just how unbelievably warm he was. He was warm and charismatic. I have friends that have been in jail and convicts, and you go in and there’s this heaviness and the sadness. I felt very little of that on the phone. He just felt so optimistic—he didn’t feel like he’s been in jail for years and years and years. That takes a mind that is so strong. And he has so many dreams. He has so many wants for himself still. He took care of me on the phone, in a way, rather than me trying to give him something from the outside.

    Dunst: I was surprised that there was zero resentment, but that was how she felt: “I fell in love. He took us on this journey and I’m grateful for it.” And I think there’s so much grace.

    Tatum: You could feel that if Jeff hadn’t messed up, she would’ve loved him. She still loves him.

    Dunst: It’s still there. You can’t erase that. Also she’s a very Christian woman, and there’s a lot of grace in that.

    How are your acting styles the same?

    Dunst: What you want is honesty, being open, trust. I don’t like when people want to talk about things for a very long time. I’m like, “let’s just do it.” And he’s the same. And we know when it’s not feeling right instinctually, and what we can try. So we are quick communicators.

    Tatum: We just met each other really quickly. Wherever the person wants to go, you just try.

    Dunst: And if I was like, “why isn’t this working?” You just give each other what they need. And honestly, because we didn’t have a lot of time, there has to be so much infused into these scenes. Sometimes I would say totally different things to Channing than in the scene—not to manipulate or get a reaction, but to just to shake it up, and also just get different feelings. Derek is interested in the minutiae of humans, that blink or that little crook of the lips. He wants human beings – not acting.

    Tatum: Because making a movie is so artificial, obviously, but you’re trying to make it feel like real life. Something like feeding your kids and making them go to bed can look like so many different things, depending on the character you’re playing. And what’s exciting about Derek he’ll be like, “now try it like this.”

    Rebecca Ford

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  • ‘Couture’ Review: Angelina Jolie in a Paris Fashion Week Drama That’s as Low-Key as the Fashion World Isn’t

    “Couture” is a drama set during Paris Fashion Week, starring Angelina Jolie as a character who is fashion world-adjacent — a goth-glam director of hip indie horror films named Maxine Walker, who has come to Paris to shoot a lavish short (it features a forest fire and wolves and a model playing a fang-bearing vampire) that’s set to accompany one noteworthy fashion house’s runway show. (The house is never named, but the suggestion is that it’s Chanel.) All of which makes “Couture” sound like a backstage movie that’s shiny and glossy and combustible and hot.

    Actually, though, the film is extremely neutral and low-key in that French not-a-documentary-but-it-feels-like-one style. Jolie is at the center of an ensemble piece that’s structured as a loose neorealist ramble, built around characters like an 18-year-old model from Sudan (Anyier Anei) who’s being launched as the new “exotic” face of fashion; a makeup artist (Fella Rumpf) who’s writing a memoir she’s told has no commercial viability; Maxine’s sexy cinematographer (Louis Garrel); a seamstress (Garance Marillier) we see sewing tiny trinkets onto the white mesh dress that Anei’s character will wear; and the physician (Vincent Lindon) Maxine has to check in with when it looks like there may be a complication to her breast-cancer biopsy.

    You envision Paris Fashion Week as a glitzy thicket of drama, and it certainly has the potential to be. Watching “Couture,” we may think: Where’s the editor-of-Vogue character? The international media blitzkrieg? That’s the kind of hot-mess action that Robert Altman tapped into 30 years ago when he made his grandiose fashion-world satire “Prêt-à-Porter.” But Alice Winocour, the French writer-director of “Couture,” is having none of that. She works in a way that’s deliberately defused of drama. If the Dardenne brothers were to make a film set in the French fashion world (a good idea, now that I think of it), it would likely have more going on it than “Couture” does.

    As Ada, the newly recruited model who is just finding her footing (literally, when it comes to learning how to strut on the catwalk) and has none of the hard-partying worldliness of the European models she’s thrown in with, Anyier Anei is captivatingly beautiful, like the young Shelley Duvall — we see why she’s been chosen to open the show — and also quiet and grounded in her sane caution. When she enters the apartment where the other models are staying (there’s no bedroom for her), she gets some lip from one of them, but for the rest of the movie the other models help her out, and they all make a point of supporting one another. We see no drugs, no eating disorders, no pageantry of dysfunction. Winocour’s intent seems to be to take the fashion world, in its slightly unreal glamour and money and power, and bring it gently down to earth and humanize it.

    That feels like an honorable agenda, but it’s not an exciting one. “Couture” does throw us one dramatic curveball. Maxine, who’s in the middle of a divorce, with a teenage daughter and a career that’s buzzing (she’s about to start shooting a new horror film), treats her biopsy report with a blah lack of concern. She’s convinced everything will be fine. But it’s not that simple. After slipping away from her film set to visit the doctor (which causes a bit of a kerfuffle, since she won’t tell anyone where she went), then getting an MRI, she learns that she does indeed have breast cancer. This is not necessarily the film we were expecting. And though a health crisis is a valid subject for drama, the effect of this one is to make the fashion-world ephemera that fills up the rest of the movie seem even more inconsequential.

    Jolie, drawing on a family history of cancer for which she herself underwent preventative surgeries, gives a vivid performance, endowing Maxine with cool-director verve and then a fear and sorrow we can’t help but respond to. Yet it never feels like the health-crisis movie and the portrait-of-the-fashion-world movie entirely go together. That’s supposed to be the point — that a crisis like this one can happen when we least expect it. But if “Couture” were more intricately about couture, it might have been more distinctive and more memorable. It shows us the surfaces of a fashion world that we often think of as all surface. Ironically, the effect of that is to make us yearn to see it more deeply.

    Owen Gleiberman

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  • Guillermo del Toro’s Next Act: “I’m in the Regret Decade”

    Regrets, he has a few, Guillermo del Toro told the Toronto Film Festival on Sunday night. The good thing, though, those regrets are creative fodder for the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s next movies. “I’m 60 now. So I’ve gone from asking who I am as a father and son to regret. I’m in the regret decade. Expect a lot of regret,” the horrormeister said during a Q&A after a North American premiere of Frankenstein at the Royal Alexandra Theater in Toronto.

    Speaking specifically about adapting Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus — with Dr. Frankenstein played by Oscar Isaac in the adaptation and Jacob Elordi the creature he gives birth to — del Toro said he aimed to craft a story about father and son issues. Then he eventually realized his narrative included his own experiences as both a son and a father.

    “I had to realize that, in the course of being a son, I became a father.  And then it became about me as a father too,” del Toro told the TIFF premiere audience about the movie he directed from his own screenplay.

    Guillermo del Toro and Oscar Isaac on the set of Frankenstein

    Ken Woroner/Netflix

    Wider themes the director also discussed included “what does it mean to be human in a time of inhumanity, war and in a moment of doubt as a race. That was true back then, and it’s true right now,” he added about the contrast between Shelley in her Romantic-era novel questioning scientific ethics and alienation after the Enlightenment, and our own tumultuous time of rapid economic and climate change.

    “The Romantics were reacting with emotion after the Age of Enlightenment. They were basically punks, they were iconoclastic and broke the rules of society,” he argued. “We are there again. Emotion is the new punk. Emotion, we’re afraid of showing it. We’re afraid of seeing it. We’re in such a state of separation within ourselves. That’s the only thing that will save us, to have empathy and emotion,” del Toro added.

    Having completed his latest gothic epic, del Toro teased his next projects. “This sort of closes a huge episode in my life,” he said of completing Frankenstein, a passion project that had been virtually a lifetime in the making.

    Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein in “Frankenstein” directed by Guillermo del Toro.

    Ken Woroner/Netflix

    His creative slate includes Fury, an upcoming feature reuniting him with Isaac that appears to center on a murderous dinner where guests get popped off between courses. “It’s going back to the thriller aspects of Nightmare Alley. It’s very cruel, very violent,” del Toro warned. The veteran of creature features is also at work on an “epic” stop-motion movie.

    After its tour of the festival circuit, Frankenstein is headed for a limited theatrical release on Oct. 17. The feature, which also stars Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen, David Bradley, Christian Convery, Charles Dance and Christoph Waltz, will then head to streaming, getting a global bow by Netflix on Nov. 7.

    The Toronto Film Festival continues through to Sept. 14.

    Etan Vlessing

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

    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

    Pete Hammond

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  • György Pálfi Talks Logistical Challenges of Working With Eight Chicken Protagonists in Toronto Platform Title ‘Hen’

    György Pálfi’s “Hen” makes a movie star of an unlikely figure: the chicken. Having its world premiere in Toronto’s competitive Platform section, “Hen” sees the Hungarian director enlist a stellar cast of eight real-life chickens all taking turns as the titular character to build a moving, melancholic musing on life in a seaside village against the backdrop of Greece’s migrant crisis. 

    Speaking with Variety ahead of the film’s premiere, the “Taxidermia” filmmaker — whose work has played in Cannes and won major awards internationally — says the idea for the unusual film first came to him in 2019 as he was undergoing a “difficult period.” “For political reasons, I had been unable to make films in Hungary for quite some time and still am. I wanted to get away from everything and everyone. I didn’t want to give up filmmaking, I was looking for something that could be done on a small budget and explored a universal theme, and I have had a connection to chickens since childhood.”

    “Hen” is almost entirely shot from the point of view of its aviary protagonist, which presented a series of logistical challenges when it came to shooting. Luckily for the director, his friend and animal trainer Árpád Halász had extensive experience with chickens, which are the first animals trainers need to deal with during their learning. Anyone who fails at handling chickens will fail their animal trainer education. 

    “Perhaps the most difficult part was deciding on the breed,” adds the director. “Since it was important for our story that the chickens be industrial chickens, we chose one of the most common breeds, the Leghorn. Their training began months before filming, based on the written scenes. We had to buy them even before the film got the green light. We agreed with Árpád that I would provide the chickens and he would train them.”

    Logistically, the most difficult challenge in dealing with the animals was that they were not legally allowed to leave the European Union. “So instead of taking the shortest route through Serbia, they had to travel to Greece via Italy, taking a ferry,” the director explains. There was also the fact that roosters, of course, do not work after sunset, so there was a limitation in how many hours a day they could shoot. 

    Courtesy of TIFF

    As for opting out of using CGI, AI, or any special effects to help with the chicken POV, Pálfi says it is “important to have a live connection between actors, whether they are animals or humans. The relationship with a real, living being is noticeably different; that’s what gives it credibility. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in AI. My creative curiosity is at work, and I want to try it out. I’m in the middle of an experiment right now, and it’s very exciting to work with something so new that is evolving day by day.” 

    Commenting on the particular cinematography for such a film, the Hungarian director praises collaborator Jogos Karvelas, who he calls “one of the most sensitive and talented Greek cinematographers.”

    “We wanted to work with the chickens in the same way that actors were filmed in classic American films, somewhere below eye level,” he says. “We couldn’t dig the camera into the ground, so we used special periscope optics. It didn’t make the work any easier…”

    And has Pálfi learned anything from the chickens he can employ in his filmmaking in the future? “A lot!” he says. “When tension arose on set, the hens always reacted very sensitively, and it was impossible to work with them. But when the energy flowed well, they did everything perfectly. I have never experienced so tangibly how powerful it is when a team can really work as a team, putting aside personal differences for a common goal.”

    But “Hen” is, at its core, about much more than the life of a singular chicken, with Pálfi observing the intricate politics of not only the family living around the hen but also how great sociopolitical changes have affected their lives — most noticeably since some of the family members have begun smuggling immigrants through the sea. “Beyond the unquenchable inner necessity of creation, this film is also about individual responsibility and whether our own lives can be separated from the events around us,” says the director.

    “If the viewer is willing to come with me, then in this film we play with allowing ourselves to see the world from a different perspective for the sake of a thought experiment,” he adds. “And the next step is to ask the question: what if we only see as much of the whole picture as this chicken sees of the human world? Are we more than a chicken in the box?” 

    “Hen” is produced by Pallas Film, View Master Films and Twenty Twenty Vision in co-production with Focusfox and ZDF/ARTE. Lucky Number handles world sales.

    Rafa Sales Ross

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  • Vanity Fair and Four Seasons Celebrate TIFF’s 50th Anniversary

    “It was a very emotional screening for us,” she continued. “It’s as if the film is suddenly born and it’s not yours anymore. It doesn’t belong to you anymore. It’s the end of something, and the beginning of something else.” Many of Winocour’s previous features, including 2012’s Augustine, 2015’s Mustang, and 2022’s Paris Memories, played at the festival as well. “It’s a bit surreal, but Toronto is really a place that is really special to my heart,” she said.

    Toronto always proves to be one of the busiest festivals of the season, and this year’s party provided a space for filmmakers to mingle and relax with one another at the Four Seasons before what was sure to be another busy day. This event was part of an ongoing partnership between the Four Seasons and Vanity Fair that includes exclusive industry dinners, cast toasts, and conversations in New York, Paris, London, and at other festivals. Other guests at the party included Jeremy O. Harris, Kerry Condon, Lee Byung-hun, Aziz Ansari, Diego Boneta, Sam Richardson, Edward Berger, Ben Foster, Angourie Rice, Park Chan-Wook, William H. Macy, and Hikari.

    Maude Apatow, Kerry Condon and guestsVivien Killilea/Getty Images for Vanity Fair.

    John Ross

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  • Stars Push for Empathy and Hope at Toronto Film Festival Tribute Awards

    The biggest stars at the 2025 Toronto Film Festival hoped to bring light to tumultuous times at the seventh annual TIFF Tribute Awards on Saturday night. Nearly every honoree mentioned the state of the world during their acceptance speeches, while also emphasizing that in times of strife, art is more necessary than ever.

    “Even though we don’t really want to talk about it at this celebration of our industry, it is important to acknowledge the pain the world is feeling,” said Idris Elba while accepting the Impact Media Award. The star of Kathryn Bigelow’s upcoming film A House of Dynamite was being honored for cofounding the Elba Hope Foundation, which focuses on advancing equity through youth advocacy.

    “I’m taking this award for us to remind ourselves to make an impact—make an impact on our world by feeling something, no matter where you stand on whatever conflict is going on in the world, feel something,” he added. “Our children, our children’s children, they need to know that we felt something.”

    The fundraising gala, in partnership with Rolex, is held annually during the first weekend of the festival at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel. This year’s crop of nominees included Rental Family’s director Hikari, filmmaker Jafar Panahi, actor Lee Byung Hun, filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk, artist Kazu Hiro, and Emmy winner Catherine O’Hara. The festival, which is celebrating its 50th year, always gives a special spotlight to Canadian talent like O’Hara and the honorary chair, who this year, is Brendan Fraser. Frankenstein director Guillermo del Toro received a standing ovation when he accepted the Director Award, in part because he has made many of his movies in Toronto—including Oscar-winning The Shape of Water.

    Dwayne Johnson attended the awards in support of honoree Kazu Hiro (right), who helped in transform for Benny Safdie’s film The Smashing Machine.

    Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

    Rebecca Ford

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  • Wagner Moura on Oscar Buzz and Returning to Brazil With ‘The Secret Agent’: ‘It Was Liberating to Act in Portuguese Again’

    Wagner Moura is no stranger to intense roles, but his latest performance in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent” may be the one that defines his career, at least to U.S. audiences.

    The Brazilian actor, known to American audiences from Netflix’s “Narcos,” won the best actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his portrayal of Marcelo, a technology expert swept up in the political turmoil of Brazil’s waning dictatorship in 1977. Since then, the film has been on the festival circuit, making stops at the Telluride Film Festival, and now TIFF, building more buzz and launching Moura into serious contention for best actor.

    Set during Recife’s carnival, the historical political thriller follows Marcelo as he attempts to flee persecution while reconnecting with his estranged son. For Moura, the role was both a homecoming and a reckoning.

    “It was liberating to do something in Portuguese again,” Moura tells Variety. “The last time I acted in my language was more than a decade ago. To return to my home, to Recife, to work with Kleber — it was like going back to the roots of why I became an actor.”

    Moura and Mendonça Filho’s connection dates back nearly two decades, when the actor first encountered the director’s shorts and, later, his breakthrough “Neighboring Sounds.” Moura recalls meeting him at Cannes in 2005, when Mendonça Filho was still a critic.

    “He’s my cinematic soulmate,” Moura shares. “He’s deeply political, but also deeply Brazilian. He can take influences from American films of the 1970s — the lenses, the structure — and make it something that belongs only to Brazil. That’s rare.”

    That creative fusion paid off at Cannes. “The Secret Agent” was one of the festival’s most celebrated titles, winning best director, the FIPRESCI Prize and the Art House Cinema Award, alongside Moura’s own acting honor. It would be picked up by Neon, and is now getting a full-court Oscar campaign, seeking noms for international feature and even, best picture.

    Though Marcelo is the central character, the film’s emotional heart lies in his fractured relationship with his son Fernando. Moura admits he approached the roles in stages, first inhabiting Marcelo fully before considering Fernando.

    “I wanted people to feel like they were watching two different people,” he says. “For me, it was about imagining what it meant for a child to grow up not knowing his father. I have three sons myself. My father passed away. That father-and-son theme — that’s what moves me the most as an actor.”
    He compares the emotional intensity to playing Hamlet in his early 30s. “That was the greatest acting experience of my life. And this film touched the same part of me.”

    If Moura’s performance in “The Secret Agent” translates into an Oscar nomination, it would mark a historic milestone. In nearly a century of the Academy Awards, only five Latino men have ever been nominated for best actor — including José Ferrer, Anthony Quinn, Edward James Olmos, Demián Bichir and Colman Domingo. Moura would not only join their ranks as the sixth, but he would also be the first Brazilian ever recognized in the category, coming one year after Fernanda Torres from “I’m Still Here” became the second in best actress, following her mother Fernanda Montenegro 30 years earlier. “I’m Still Here” also picked up a surprise (and earned) best picture nomination, and went on to win international feature, the first for the country of Brazil.

    Since “Narcos,” Moura has been selective about his roles in the United States. “Can you imagine the amount of offers I got to play drug dealers after that?” he says, shaking his head. “I felt a responsibility as a Latino actor not to reinforce stereotypes. I want the same kinds of roles any white American actor would be offered. That’s the real fight.”

    He recalls constantly pushing for his characters to be Brazilian rather than generically “Latino.” “It’s strange — people rarely think of Brazilians when they say Latino. But I insist on it. Why not Brazilian?”
    Beyond acting, Moura is stepping behind the camera again. His 2017 feature “Marighella” tackled dictatorship head-on. Next up is “Last Night at the Lobster,” an English-language adaptation of Stewart O’Nan’s novel, produced by Peter Saraf (“Little Miss Sunshine”). The film, which he describes as an “anti-capitalist Christmas movie,” will star Elisabeth Moss, Brian Tyree Henry and Sofia Carson. Set in a Red Lobster franchise about to close during a snowstorm a week before Christmas, the story blends American holiday traditions with European realism.

    “It’s about empathy and generosity. There’s no magic from Santa Claus. The magic comes from people,” Moura says.

    The themes of “The Secret Agent” — memory, truth and resilience — resonate beyond Brazil. Moura sees echoes between his country’s recent struggles and the United States’ own democratic challenges.
    “Brazilians know what dictatorship is. Americans don’t,” he says bluntly. “That’s why we were efficient in defending democracy when our institutions were attacked. Here in the U.S., people sometimes take democracy for granted. That scares me.”

    He worries about truth itself becoming malleable. “Facts don’t exist anymore. There are only versions, narratives. That’s dangerous.”

    With “The Secret Agent” opening in Brazil this November through Vitrine Filmes, Moura stands at a new crossroads in his international career. Still, he remains grounded. “It’s about sticking to your values in tough times,” he shares. “That’s what this film is about. That’s what I want my sons to remember.”

    Clayton Davis

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