Toronto Film Festival XXL

Sep 10: I'll update this post with my tweeted responses to these films, hopefully once a day.

Sep 8: Completed my final ticket selections this morning during my assigned window for the Back Half Pass (which gives you a slightly discounted rate for movies playing in the last five days of the festival). That's 45 features, two programs of 15 shorts, and 14 tickets I got for other people, and I got my first choices across the board. Clearly the other shoe will drop somehow, but for now I'm all blissed out.  I'll try to post some updates here during the fest, but my Twitter account will be the place to catch more immediate responses.  Please follow!  And track these other friends who always provide great TIFF impressions, too: Alex, Amir, Angelo, Bill, Calvin & Yonah, Catherine, Joe (also @decider), Katey, Lev, Nathaniel, Tim, and Yaseen.  If you see a movie you like, I'd love to hear about.  As, I'm sure, would any filmmakers on Twitter, especially those who aren't in the Gala divisions.  I've had great experiences cold-tweeting (?) directors whose work I just saw, and I heartily recommend it.  And if there's no way you can be at TIFF but spot a film you desperately wish you could access, tweet a filmmaker about that, too.  See if there's a college, cinema, library, or other institution near you that might be willing to host a screening, with or without the director's involvement.  Tschüss!

Sep 6: Could things be better? I logged on precisely at 8am Chicago time to buy single tickets this morning and was #143 in line. Others who did the same were 600 spots behind me; by the time I completed checkout at 8:30, there were more than 2600 people waiting. I got into all 13 showings I was hoping to add, too. With the total currently standing at 41 films and from 30 different countries, I have another half-dozen titles to add on Tuesday, when my Back Half pass goes into effect.  And then, just four days from now, the games begin!  Amy and Bradley are still dancing, girl. Channing, keep spinning, keep burning it up. Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Sep 1: I'm updating my listings below to reflect some of the Middle Eastern and African programming that I will be catching in Toronto, in cahoots with my favorite TIFF programmer, Rasha Salti. I didn't know Rasha at all or much about her cinematic beat until 2013, when Ladder to Damascus, Rags and Tatters, and Noye's Fludde (Unogumbe) all ranked among my favorites of the whole festival.  Last year, Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait and Iraqi Odyssey were my absolute peaks of TIFF, with Timbuktu not far behind, and Rasha and I got to talking.  This year, I'm collaborating with her to see and promote her programming, all grouped here, because it's so dependably excellent, yet few of the films ever achieve a DVD release, much less a commercial distribution. So let's get behind these phenomenal movie-makers and under-heralded cinematic traditions.

Sep 1: Toronto International Film Festival season has begun, baby, and we at Nick's Flick Picks (read: I) could not be happier.  I'll be there longer than I ever have before, and seeing an even greater number of movies.  Logged in this morning at my TIFF-appointed time to make my first 30 ticket selections, 20 of which were for me, 10 for friends who wanted to see movies we worried would sell out.  I'll keep updating this entry over the next week or so as my itinerary expands, when individual tickets go on sale, and when my Back Half discount kicks in.  So, keep checking this page, and click the links if you want to learn more about the movies.  I don't, really: I'm picking based on affinity for the filmmakers, general buzz, and the dimmest notion of premise (and in some cases, I don't even know that).  I like going in as cold as possible, so I'm going to keep it that way.

The list is bound to get more esoteric, since I prioritized films that seemed likely to draw big crowds and/or I hoped to see in the first few days.  And if you're like, "These already look pretty esoteric," then that's Nick's Flick Picks for you.

MY TIFF ITINERARY (Updated 9/20)

3000 Nights (Palestine, dir. Mai Masri)
B+  Stirring drama inside Israeli women's prison, with mostly Palestinian inmates. Gutsy takes on solidarity, maternalism.

Anomalisa (USA, dirs. Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman)
C+  Could summon no enthusiasm. The self-pity of Kaufman's men is usually ballasted by much more creative detail or insight.

Arabian Nights, Vol. 1: The Restless One (Portugal, dir. Miguel Gomes)
A  A+? So many good films here but this inhabits a whole other level as piebald art and political intervention.

Arabian Nights, Vol. 2: The Desolate One (Portugal, dir. Miguel Gomes)
A–  Less obviously intricate than Vol 1, and more frontal in stating themes—I thought. Then I grew less sure.

Arabian Nights, Vol. 3: The Enchanted One (Portugal, dir. Miguel Gomes)
A  What Obama said about guns and religion, but about chaffinches. Heavy histories shrink to bearable fetishes.

As I Open My Eyes (Tunisia/France, dir. Leyla Bouzid)
B+  Sonorous, trenchant portrait of an artist as a young woman, riding sharp lines between petulance and dissidence.

The Assassin (Taiwan, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)
B+  A royal marriage of many lines, sumptuous, as much Unforgiven as Scarlet Empress. Hou's hand still unsteady on story.

Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) (France, dir. Eva Husson)
B+  Remarkably assured, richly executed debut. Not all story beats fresh but layered, meticulous study.

Beasts of No Nation (USA, dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga)
B–  Value, impact hard to deny but formal and narrative storytelling are a little crude. Young Attah is a find.

Blood of My Blood (Italy, dir. Marco Bellocchio)
C+  My astigmatism around high-theatrical Italian melodrama persists. Less crude than Vincere but ideas seem simple?

Cemetery of Splendour (Thailand, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
B  Reader, I must confess I'm starting to find Weerasethakul tedious, as much as I admire his directorial craft.

Chevalier (Greece, dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari)
B  Greek surrealist, quasi-Apatovian remake of American Psycho business-card scene. Finds its berth fast, hangs out a while.

Dégradé (Palestine, dirs. Arab Nasser and Tarzan Nasser)
B–  Entrapment, suffocation are topics, occasionally effects of one-set suspenser in Gaza salon. Bold vision. Hang in there.

Dheepan (France, dir. Jacques Audiard)
A–  Sleek, observant, steadily winching synthesis of prior Audiard themes. Psychology deftly externalized. Actors keep it hot.

The Endless River (South Africa, dir. Oliver Hermanus)
B  Strikingly shot. Taps a rich seam of region-specific tensions and story traditions. Maybe exploits them a bit.

Eva Doesn't Sleep (Argentina, dir. Pablo Agüero)
B  Eva Perón as Addie Bundren. Caryl Churchill-esque. Brute embodiments and symbolic afterlives in unwinnable duels.

Evolution (France, dir. Lucile Hadžihalilovic)
B  What if Matthew Barney and Jacques Cousteau co-directed a YA dystopia? I couldn't imagine, but Lucile Hadžihalilović did.

Fire Song (Canada, dir. Adam Garnet Jones)
C–  Noble intents, rare focus, and solid production values lose out to stiff writing and editing, erratic hold on character.

Francofonia (France/Germany/Netherlands, dir. Aleksandr Sokurov)
A  Louvre, the End of History. Witty, moving essay on doomed objects surviving, enemies collaborating, time as tight knot.

Frenzy (Turkey, dir. Emin Alper)
B+  Formally stunning mitosis of one suspense thriller into two, enigmatically related. Two parts Audiard, one Don't Look Now.

Girls Lost (Sweden, dir. Alexandra-Therese Keining)
C+  A century after Florida Enchantment, we're still using magic-beans device for transgender tale. Shaky on its own themes.

Green Room (USA, dir. Jeremy Saulnier)

F  Blue Ruin had assets in all areas; this has zero in any. What happened? Quoth its own eviduh, "This is taking too long."

High-Rise (UK, dir. Ben Wheatley)
TIFF canceled my screening.

The Idol (UK/Palestine, dir. Hany Abu-Assad)
Couldn't access the screening.

In Jackson Heights (USA, dir. Frederick Wiseman)
A–  Most democratic US community abounds with sidewalk pedagogy and filibusters. Everyone tries to save everyone.

In the Shadow of Women (France, dir. Philippe Garrel)
B+  Tiny ficelle of a film takes witty stock of knotted infidelities. Neither one-sided nor free of judgment.

Ixcanul (Guatemala/France, dir. Jayro Bustamante)
A  Guatemalan drama quietly, sturdily makes expert choices scene after scene, culminating in my biggest jaw-drop of the fest.

Let Them Come (Algeria/France, dir. Salem Brahimi)
Couldn't access the screening.

Minotaur (Mexico/Canada, dir. Nicolas Peréda)
A–  Totally bewitching miniature about profound indolence. Possibly class critique of a new, Lynch-meets-Pina Bausch type.

Mountains May Depart (China/France/Japan, dir. Jia Zhangke)
B–  Hi, I'd like a Hong Sang-soo, a Stella Dallas, a Notes on a Scandal (iced), and a small side of Drrrainage?!

Much Loved (France/Morocco, dir. Nabil Ayouch)
A–  Bracing, gutsy, humane drama of Moroccan prostitutes. Moving and nuanced images, sounds, and characters. Pass it on!

No Men Beyond This Point (Canada, dir. Mark Sawers)
Wound up skipping for Ixcanul

The Other Side (France/Italy, dir. Roberto Minervini)
B+  Beasts of one nation, arguably under God, arguably indivisible. An upsetting revelation no matter how "true" it is.

The Pearl Button (Chile/France/Spain, dir. Patricio Guzmán)
B+  Empathic, poetic speculation from a filmmaker whose equanimity is a miracle. Not quite Nostalgia but much-needed.

Price of Love (Ethiopia, dir. Harmon Hailay)
B  Some story beats are sadly familiar, but this streetside Ethiopian drama conveys them with nuance and piquant detail.

The Promised Land (China, dir. He Ping)
D  Way too airy-fairy Chinese romance between ballerina and hockey coach. Barely a premise, endlessly pre-rehearsed.

Return of the Atom (Finland, dirs. Mika Taanila & Jussi Eerola)
B–  Vividly mounted and persuasive on its basic grounds, but several editing and sound choices baldly manipulate.

Right Now, Wrong Then (South Korea, dir. Hong Sang-soo)
A–  Lovely. Iridesces with sadness. Hong's Purple Rose of Cairo? Well, that's not exactly true. Nothing ever is.

Schneider vs. Bax (The Netherlands, dir. Alex van Warmerdam)
B  Another 18th-century comedy about 21st-century mercenaries. Merrily morbid, somewhat for its own sake. Thin look.

Short Cuts Program #5 (Canada/France/Germany/Iraq/Spain/UK, dir. Misc.)
B–  No clinkers, few coups. My faves were the angry Society and the compactly suggestive New Eyes and El Adíos.

The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (UK, dir. Ben Rivers)
B  As elaborate and idiosyncratic as it is, the postcolonial metaphors become a bit flat and static.

Son of Saul (Hungary, dir. László Nemes)
A  So formally brilliant you can't help noticing, even as you expend all emotional and moral energy. The sound! The story.

Starve Your Dog (Morocco, dir. Hisham Lasri)
B  Boldest shredding I've seen here of cinematic form, story flow. Death and the Maiden as punk Moroccan cherry bomb.

Story of Judas (France, dir. Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche)
B+  Daring rewrite of 2000-year-old treachery, passing for a long time as classical, almost POV-less account. Gorgeous.

Sunset Song (UK/Luxembourg, dir. Terence Davies)
C–  First hour a stilted slog. Middle fights its way to poignancy but last act falters. Barely ten oxygen molecules in it.

Taxi (Iran, dir. Jafar Panahi)
B  Feels less ambitious than Panahi's two previous house-arrest movies but it's funny and wise and has good tricks up its sleeve.

Te prometo anarquía (Mexico, dir. Julio Hernández Cordón)
B+  Rare bird. Rewards patience and trust as it builds from vaguely illicit skater/dealer pic to humbling tragedy.

The Treasure (Romania, dir. Corneliu Porumboiu)
A–  Comic gold, with an impressively ferrous structure of ironies and nuances that hold it together and expand its scope.

Victoria (Germany, dir. Sebastian Schipper)
A–  Morvern Callar rebuilt as pulse-pounding thriller, astonishingly executed in a continuous, 132-minute take. Overwhelming.

Wavelengths #4: Psychic Driving (Austria/Brazil/Canada/France/Spain/USA, dir. Misc)
A–  Links radical activism to African diaspora, occult folklore to synaesthetic abstraction. Dazzling.

The White Knights (Belgium/France, dir Joachim Lafosse)
Wound up skipping for Beasts of No Nation

The Witch (Canada/USA, dir. Robert Eggers)
C  Antichrist meets The Village. Spooky surface meets crossover dreams. Old tropes about faith meet some about the colonies.

Cannes 1995: Day 7: May 23

Nasty Love, Italy, dir. Mario Martone

It is on to-day, honey. The hits keep getting bigger!  Four of the Competition titles from the last 48 hours have handily eclipsed the rest of the field, but today's discoveries are invigorating in a different way than yesterday's because they were so much less heralded. Mario Martone, highly regarded in Italy but barely known outside of it—he's competed for the Golden Lion four times, and swept the Donatello awards a few years back with his prestige literary adaptation We Believed—wowed me more or less from out of nowhere with the directorial verve of Nasty Love, simultaneously steely and luscious, sexy and sad. Many of the most conspicuous directorial signatures of Cannes '95 have been high-handed or humorless; Martone figures out how to impress and entertain at once. No slight on sobriety, though, when it's done with the odd, immaculate mannerism of Terence Davies's The Neon Bible, though I'm suspicious I may have responded better to this one than at least a couple of my peers. All that, plus L'enfant noir is an uncommonly beautiful West African coming-of-age tale, and Safe is one of the definitive movies of the decade. Hard to swing a better day at a festival than this.

Read more »

Catch as Catch Cannes: Class of 1995!

Ed Wood and gang take a closer look at Ulysses' Gaze.

Today, powerful people in the south of France will announce the Main Competition line-up for the 68th Cannes Film Festival.  This occasion has become almost as exciting to me as Oscar Nomination Day, and I'm pretty diligent in seeking out as many Cannes titles as I can in the months that follow, including from the so-called "sidebars," which easily outclass the center rings of so many world festivals (sometimes including Cannes itself). I don't see a prayer on the horizon of me ever actually attending Cannes, and all the stories about color-coded badges and pushy queues and huffy guards and ubiquitous industry chatter suggest I might not want to.  Instead, for each of the past few years, I have mounted my own Croisette Staycation here in Chicago, acquiring as many films as possible that showed at some past festival and watching them in the order they screened.  One year I covered 1986 and even churned out a bunch of new reviews.  After that I revisited 1973, though I petered out just before I finally got around to finally seeing The Mother and the Whore and Mean Streets. So, as delicious as a lot of my discoveries were, especially A Bigger Splash and Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave, I think we can agree I sort of did it wrong.

This year, I'm horning in on Cannes' big announcement day to unveil my own plan to revive Cannes 1995. Beyond the 20th-anniversary angle, this is an especially resonant year for me.  1995 is when I finished high school, moved to a big city, and started seeing many, many more movies in theaters, archive titles and new releases alike, including much more challenging fare than the suburbs of Virginia could host. It's a really special time capsule to me, and some of the non-Competition programming at Cannes, especially Todd Haynes's Safe and Ulu Grosbard's Georgia, nearly broke my personal Richter scale as I fell into all-new levels of love with the movies.

Curiously, though, of the seven movies I've seen among the 24 that competed for the Palme—a low tally for me, against an unusually huge roster for Cannes—I don't have many passions, or even many opinions that I myself would trust. As you can see here, the group includes two films I haven't seen in two decades, three I saw in grad school to hazy or ambivalent effect, one I love but can barely remember, and one turkey I recall fairly clearly. Every one of them is keenly worth revisiting, even Jefferson in Paris, which is up to something important even if it fails in most areas of execution.

Meanwhile, though three Competition titles have eluded all my best attempts to locate subtitled copies (Romania's The Senator of Snails, Spain's Stories from the Kronen, and, most disappointingly, Mali's Waati), I've got a lot of tantalizing titles before me. They include work I've long wanted to catch by Terence Davies (The Neon Bible), Zhang Yimou (Shanghai Triad), Emir Kusturica (Underground, which took the Palme), Theo Angelopoulos (Ulysses' Gaze), Ken Loach (Land and Freedom), Larry Clark (Kids), Masahiro Shinoda (Sharaku), Jean-Pierre Jeunet (The City of Lost Children), Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Good Men, Good Women), and Manoel de Oliveira, who died just two days after my new DVD of The Convent arrived in the mail.  I'll be posting thoughts on each movie on whatever date the film originally unspooled for Jeanne Moreau's jury. Having learned the virtues of an early start, I'm already through 10 of these 21 pictures, and the kickoff isn't until May 17, so the schedule is looking good.

But that's not all. It's not even the best part!


Me, spreading the word about my big plans.

In the grand tradition of superhero sequels, except this one won't suck, I've added a lot more characters... meaning, I have lured more than a half-dozen other film writers to play along with me, some of whose names you see a lot on this site and some never before.  They'll be posting their thoughts about these movies on the same timetable I am, and at the end of the ten days, we'll deliberate and release our own jury awards, which may or may not coincide with Jeanne's.  We're already in full swing, swapping Google docs and sharing rare copies of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and Don't Forget You're Going to Die, and making dates to see the Hou Hsiao-Hsien when it fortuitously passes through the Siskel in two weeks. I'm so excited to be working in league with other fanatics who also happen to be cinephiles I deeply admire.  Plus, we all know I can flag with solo voyages (the rest of the Top Ten of 2014 will come, I promise...), but group projects with internal deadlines keep me honest.  I'll release the names of my co-conspirators when Joel and Ethan Coen release their fellow jurors. It's a season of cliffhangers.

As one more treat—my own version of a good Cannes press-conference—I'll publish a few conversations along the way with some fellow academics and noted movie-people who have particular expertise on the specific films, real-world stories, or broader movements reflected in the 1995 mix.  I've already found a Victorian literature professor to talk to me about Angels & Insects, a Bloomsbury aficionado to discuss Carrington, an expert in Japanese culture to illuminate parts of Sharaku, a well-known Terence Davies enthusiast to illuminate The Neon Bible, and an eminent critical race scholar prepped to chat up Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. As I'm redesigning, updating, and reanimating the website after two especially dormant years, I'm hoping to mobilize it more effectively to introduce you to other voices in the academy, especially some of my favorite colleagues.  I see this as an ideological gesture of distributing scholarly discourse and specialized knowledge to people who can't easily access the institutions where these folks work, but also as a general blow against the idea that academic exchanges are esoteric or impenetrable.

Updated: The major, putative "sidebars" won't go uninvestigated in this feature, though Competition films are taking priority. I'll still be looking at 1995's entries in Directors' Fortnight (which included Safe, Le Confessionnal, a Katrin Cartlidge thriller, a Hugh Grant drama, and The White Balloon) and Un Certain Regard (which opened with my beloved Georgia and also exhibited the Burkinabe milestone Haramuya and exhibited a major Makhmalbaf film, despite being seen as having a slow-ish year). Critics' Week welcomed a pulpy thriller with an odd backstory, an Afro-Canadian drama, and an American indie that got good press at the time but has largely disappeared now.  Some of the best-remembered films held down Out of Competition and even midnight slots: To Die For, The Usual Suspects, the Caruso-Cage Kiss of Death, the Banderas-Hayek Desperado, and Sam Raimi's festival closer The Quick and the Dead, which sadly was only one of those things.  Area specialists in Iranian and West African cinema have already agreed to help us unpack The White Balloon and Haramuya, so I'm hoping you'll offer eager ears for them, too.

So, bookmark this page for Cannes '95 updates, follow me on Twitter for news and posts, especially from May 17-28, and by all means leave your comments below if you, too, lack the money for an Air France flight and have no claims to any dossiers de presse but still want to savor a Cannes experience.  You've got a month to do some strategic renting before we smash a bottle on the hull of this mega-feature.  Thanks in advance to all the friends who are either indulging me or allowing me to enable their own obsessive compulsion (or both), and to all of you for reading.

And what, may I ask, is your favorite movie from this cohort, and what are you most excited to hear me report on, or to see for yourself?


Me, holding court with my fellow jurors.