TIFF Quickies: Animated Bollywood, Mother/Daughter Science, and Annette Bening

by Nathaniel R

HOPE GAP (UK, William Nicholson)
Have you ever wanted to see Annette Bening play a retired British poet attempting to create her own 'Martha & George'  dynamic with her unwilling elderly husband (Bill Nighy)? That was a rhetorical question. Of course you want to see The Bening do that as you'd want to see her do all things onscreen if you have any taste. Hope Gap, the second directorial effort from long time screenwriter William Nicholson (Gladiator, Shadowlands, Nell, etcetera...), is about a married couple of 29 years whose marriage has died. The wife just doesn't know it yet and continually "has a go" at her husband, eager to see him fight back or express anything at all. Their loving but avoidant son (Josh O'Connor, doing a 180 from his breakout role in In God's Country) is completely out of his depth as he is forced into the role of shoulder-to-cry on, referee, and messenger boy all at once. Though Bening struggles a bit with the accent, she's on typical fire when it comes to blending a well of complex emotion with crackling comic timing...

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TIFF: Eating the Rich with "Knives Out"

by Chris Feil

When Rian Johnson announced a star-studded murder mystery in the vein of Agatha Christie, you didn’t think it would just be a straightforward genre exercise, did you? As he has shown in films such as Looper (and to an extent Star Wars: The Last Jedi in its brilliant eschewing of franchise dogma), Johnson delights in subverting our expectations of genre ever so slightly. Knives Out film is no exception, not only turning the ensemble comedy into a rollicking eat-the-rich satire, but also taking the standard whodunit plotting and repositioning it with exciting reinvention. Even if your tastes consider the book mold stodginess of Christie to remain delicious, Johnson’s modern narrative take should satisfy even purists.

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TIFF: Lorene Scafaria Ascends with "Hustlers"

by Chris Feil

After Hustlers, give Lorene Scafaria the keys to the kingdom. After writing and directing the character-based comedies The Meddler and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, she steps into crime comedy territory with all of her generous character detail unsacrificed as she steps into a new genre. Here she’s made something that feels like kicked-in doors and popped champagne bottles. It’s women behaving badly as a natural extension to an ecosystem led by men who burn the world down to serve their own interests, and it’s as entertaining as it is because of Scafaria’s balance between the affectionate and the defiant.

But while the film will immediately cause comparisons to ubermale crime sagas likes of The Wolf of Wall Street or examinations of the final crisis like The Big Short, Hustlers is less of a familiar retread of those films than it is two middle fingers blazing in their direction...

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TIFF: Nina Hoss in "Pelican Blood" and "The Audition"

Chris Feil takes a look at two performances by one of the greatest German actresses...

Katrin Gebbe follows her relentlessly grim Nothing Bad Can Happen with another slow-building horror-adjacent character study with Pelican Blood, a portrait of motherly conviction that love isn’t enough and hope is toxic. Nina Hoss is Wiebke, a skilled horse trainer and mother bringing a second adoptive daughter Raya (Katerina Lipovska) to her ranch. Shy at first, Raya quickly establishes herself as deeply troubled and a threat to her older daughter Nicolina (Adelia-Constance Giovanni Ocleppo). Misbehaving turns ominous, with Wiebke determined to show Raya the love she has been denied even as something evil within destroys Wiebke’s life...

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TIFF: Thrilling Trio "Dogs Don't Wear Pants", "Sea Fever", and "Resin"

Chris Feil takes a quick look at three under-the-radar films at TIFF for genre fans and thrill seekers...

J-P Valkeapää’s Dogs Don’t Wear Pants is a giddy shocker about grief and domination, an imposing Scandinavian delight that could make John Waters proud. The film follows Juha (Pekka Strang), a heart surgeon still grieving the death of his wife a decade prior as he raises his teenage daughter. Almost comically by chance, he stumbles into the dungeon of dominatrix Mona (a suberb Krista Kosonen) whose asphyxiation routines become an addiction for Juha that bring him in hallucinatory communion with his dead wife. The film shocks with its spiritual and biological intimacy (get ready for some seriously squirm-inducing gore), but moreso in its wicked sense of humor. We’ve got a weird one here, and it’s kind of spectacular...

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