TIFF 51: Best Actress Watch – “Being Heumann” and “Onwards and Sideways”

by Eurocheese

Ruth Madeley might be a new Best Actress contender for her work in BEING HEUMANN.

Coming into the fall festivals, no category has been a larger question mark in the Oscar race than The Film Experience’s highest honor – Best Actress. Aside from a couple of clear frontrunners (see my comments on The Debut), there appears to be room for a number of new challengers to find their way into the race. How likely are some of the pictures debuting at Toronto to factor in? If these two world premieres are any indication, the race is heating up. There’s Being Heumann, starring a heroic Ruth Madeley, and Onwards and Sideways, with the lovely Laura Linney…

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TIFF 51: Stephanie Ahn’s “Bedford Park” is an unrelenting actors’ showcase

by Cláudio Alves

Social realism is a preferred style for many directors in the American indie scene. However, one must be careful when indulging in its rawness, or else accusations of making misery porn may come about. There’s also the way such projects can devolve into something more akin to an acting exercise than a story proper, built upon and uniquely sustained by performers willing to portray degradation for the camera, breaking apart for our viewing pleasure if not our elucidation. Despite putative good intentions, Stephanie Ahn’s debut feature, Bedford Park, is a good example of these pitfalls, exploring the attrition cum companionship cum romance of two thirtysomething second-generation Korean-Americans played by Moon Choi and Son Sukku.

Her Audrey and his Eli go through it and then some in a diasporic bit of melodrama that, at times, feels like it’s aimlessly piling on misfortunes so that it can gawk at how its leads will articulate them through committed performances. Is there more to it? Hard to say…

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In conversation with "Sound of Falling"'s Evelyn Rack

Voting for the Oscar shortlists is ongoing, including in the Best International Film category. Here's Eurocheese talking with Evelyn Rack, the extraordinary editor of Germany's Sound of Falling...

SOUND OF FALLING (2025) Mascha Schilinski | © MUBI

(Please note - this interview contains SPOILERS in you haven't seen the film.)

EUROCHEESE: Congratulations on Sound of Falling. I was able to catch it at AFI fest this year – it was my favorite film at the festival. It such a unique viewing experience – so different from anything that I've seen in a long time, and I'm really excited to get to talk to you about it today. First of all, I just wanted to find out a little bit about how the project came to you. 

EVELYN RACK: The producer Maren Schmitt approached me – we had worked on other projects before and she told me listen Eva, I have this amazing script from this awesome director; you have to come on board, I know you're the right one. So she sent me the script, I opened it, and on the first page before anything else there was a quote from Bresson: “I'd rather have people feel a film before understanding it.” My heart skipped a beat because I feel like it's exactly my editing approach on every film that I edit, that I seek to really feel a film rather than understanding it...

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Gotham Awards Revue: "Blue Sun Palace"

by Nick Taylor

The variations of melancholy on display in Blue Sun Palace, ranging from everyday stressors to self-recriminating shame, to the profoundly dull ache of existing in the shadow of life-shattering upheavals, are an exquisite feat. Director Constance Tsang’s penchant for choreographing scenes in one shot allows her to parse the emotional gradations and inflections with a fine-toothed comb. Sometimes, she distills her character’s moods in a single static shot. At others, she has her camera pan back and forth across a conversation, as if it’s a silent but active participant. Her directorial choices always feel deliberate without being show-offy, even when teeing up another self-consciously beautiful image or logistically challenging camera movement...

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In defense of "A House of Dynamite"

by Lynn Lee

A House of Dynamite is…dynamite!  Why do I feel like the only one who still thinks this, and is still excited about a movie that’s fallen completely off the awards buzz radar? 

I saw a screening of Kathryn Bigelow’s nuclear doomsday procedural – really, that’s what it is – at this year’s Middleburg Film Festival, right around the time it was getting its bare-minimum Netflix theatrical release.  As the credits rolled, I had two simultaneous reactions:

Wow, that was some damn good filmmaking.

Wow, we are so utterly fucked...

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