TIFF ’23: “Toll” tests the limits of a mother’s love

by Cláudio Alves

A mother’s love should be unconditional, but so often it isn’t. A mother knows best, except when she doesn’t. With some parents, preconceived notions of who their child should be crash against who their child actually is. Illusions and delusions take their toll and what one person calls love may feel like hatred to the person who endures it. It's easy to follow anger’s siren song, and rage against unfit mothers and ungrateful children, depending on where you fall. Broaching these fraught relationships is risky business for any artist, even those agile in avoiding cliché and melodrama. 

Watching Toll, Carolina Markowicz’s follow-up to the acclaimed Charcoal, one can’t help but give thanks that this particular artist took the risk…

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Venice 2023: Musica, Maestro!

by Elisa Giudici

Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in "Maestro"

In this entry of the Venice Diary, we delve into the world of music, exploring two titles that defy expectations by focusing on the personal lives of musicians rather than just their artistic endeavors.

MAESTRO by Bradley Cooper
Bradley Cooper, it's clear, isn't content with being just a good director. He aspires to be a legitimate auteur, a distinct voice in American cinema. Maestro boasts numerous scenes seemingly crafted to showcase his directorial prowess. However, what truly defines Cooper as an artist to date is his ability to captivate audiences, to touch their hearts and create a seamless cinematic experience...

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TIFF ’23: “The Human Surge 3” is cinema’s dream of itself

by Cláudio Alves

I don’t even know where we are and you keep asking where we’re going.

Where is cinema going? Does it know where or what’s ahead? Is it like us - lost in the dark, blindly navigating a road somewhere, maybe nowhere? Perhaps it’s just like us in other ways, too. Can it dream? It must. When it leaves the waking life to visit Morpheus’ realm, it may consider yesterday, today, and tomorrow, others and itself, the possible made impossible, and the other way around, too. Paths appear and disappear as the mind wanders, a string of consciousness twisting itself mad. I’m not sure if writer/director Eduardo Williams’ films know where they’re going, but they’re undoubtedly mad. They dream the future and themselves, infinite possibility.

So it was with 2016’s debut, Human Surge (2016), and so it is with its follow-up, The Human Surge 3, one of the most exciting films at this year’s TIFF…

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TIFF ’23: In “Seagrass,” marriage is a fragile ecosystem

by Cláudio Alves

Down the Pacific coast, there’s a place that looks like heaven but is no safe haven. You reach it by boat, sailing over turquoise waves, the wind carrying hopes of healing and promises of solutions to problems that have none. First-time feature director Meredith Hama-Brown and cinematographer Norm Li capture the environment’s full spectrum of color in their new 1990s-set film Seagrass, rendering bleak material beautiful. Skin tones are sun-kissed, while the deepest shadows are cobalt blue. It’s like we’re seeing the shoreline through a painter’s eyes. We’re not.

Rather than the artist’s gaze, we experience a family’s troubled perspective. They’re two girls and their parents, bound to a couple’s retreat where they hope their marriage will find salvation…

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TIFF '23: Take a trip down to hell with "The Zone of Interest"

by Cláudio Alves

Jonathan Glazer's "The Zone of Interest"

For my first day at TIFF, I planned on starting things off with a Sandra Hüller double feature, the Palme d'Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall followed by The Zone of Interest. The first half of that plan went kaput soon enough, so instead I caught Warwick Thornton's The New Boy. Expect more thoughts on that title next week – for now, it's Glazer time. In any case, what started as a morning predicated on Croisette honors and a German superstar morphed into an extended exercise in how cinema confronts historical atrocities, how parallel realities can coexist within the same landscape, and how sound can force you to see what your eyes do not… 

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