TIFF: Elle Fanning is "Mary Shelley"

Our ongoing adventures at TIFF

In the summer of 1816 legendary Romantic literary figures Mary Shelley (and stepsister Claire Clairmont), Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori were holed up in a Swiss estate and challenged each other to write scary ghost stories. From that fateful contest two famous works of horror emerged ("Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus" in 1818 and "The Vampyre" in 1819 -- neither of them actual ghost stories!). Ken Russell attacked this collision of authors with his trademark sexual abandon and visual insanity in Gothic (1986) and his wasn't the first or last film to stare with fascination at that morbid contest 201 years ago. We return to that summer for a good chunk of Haifaa al-Mansour's Mary Shelley but with far different intent.

Haifaa al-Mansour, the first Saudi female film director (she previously directed Wadjda) is more interested in the trailblazing of Mary Shelley (née Godwin) as a female author -- and the unique challenges that came with her gender in the literary world of 1818 -- than in the creation of Frankenstein...

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TIFF: Sean Baker's Wondrous "The Florida Project"

by Chris Feil

With Sean Baker’s compassionate ingenuity, The Florida Project is a heartbreaking (and heart-renewing) fable of American poverty seen through the resilient eyes of children. Set in a slum motel just a stone’s through away from Disney World, the film follows a boisterous toddler names Moonee and her mother Halley as they struggle to get by. But like Baker’s other tales of people on the fringes, Project lives more in their joy than their pain.

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TIFF: The Greek Theatre of "Sacred Deer"

by Chris Feil

Is it better to have good friends or a large number of friends? It’s a question asked casually in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer that hosts some of its more loaded themes: social connection, the difference between acquiring and appreciating, the futile pursuit of a nuclear unit. As discussed between odd teenager Martin and adult Steven, played by Barry Keoghan and Colin Farrell, it carries even more terrifying subtext for their unsettling relationship.

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The Greatest Party Photo of Our Time

Dame Helen, Divine Emma, Irresistible KST, and Queen Kidman at TIFF 2017.

P.S. I would like to thank whichever publicist did not invite me to this party thereby saving me from spontaneous combustion; I will live to see another movie.

TIFF: Iannucci Goes to Russia for "The Death of Stalin"

by Chris Feil

Armando Iannucci has another high farce with The Death of Stalin, an almost operatic comedy of power struggles and masculine posturing. Based on the comic books by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, the film is a gleefully anachronistic satire that will feel all too uncomfortably close to our current reality. This makes for a more charged tone than Iannucci’s previous contemporary political skewering. But fear not: his comic mind has stayed unpretentious. As ever, it’s his subjects that take themselves all too seriously.

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