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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TCM Film Festival: Day Two - "Cool Hand Luke" and "The Killers"

Christopher James continues his coverage of the 2023 TCM Film Festival. Check in for daily diary entries.

Day two of TCM includes more of the same. More Burt Lancaster, more sweaty and handsome outlaws and plenty of indelible moments. The sun came out, but the stars of yesteryear shined bright on the silver screen. Wanting to feel old today? As part of the Warner Brothers at 100 series, Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 remake Ocean’s Eleven was screened at the festival, with Soderbergh and George Clooney in attendance. Yes, the 2001 remake played at a classic film festival!

There were plenty of high profile screenings today, plus exhibits that took attendees on a journey through WB’s history, Looney Toons at the Oscars and films banned in the South. Once again, we were able to catch a couple of very different stone cold classics...

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TCM Film Festival: Day One - "Airport" and "The Wild One"

by Christopher James

The only thing more disasterous than a gang of bikers or a bomb threat on a plane is light rain in Los Angeles. All joking aside, it's always great to return to the Hollywood and Highland center for another year of the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival.

The festival was kicked off with a red carpet screening of a freshly restored Rio Bravo, with Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson and Angie Dickinson as special guests. The opening night film is part of WB's 100 year anniversary, which will be a theme of the weekend with many of the celebrations. Rather than watch Howard Hawks' epic western, I opted to fill a couple other blind spots...

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Doc Corner: 'The Territory' at EarthX Festival in Dallas

By Glenn Dunks

The 2022 EarthX Film Festival is four days of film, music and interactive environmental programs and events set in the heart of Dallas Arts District, May 12-15. We were able to watch a couple of the titles including big ticket Sundance winner The Territory as well as Tigre Gente.

The first thing to notice in The Territory (tickets here) is its beauty. Filming within the Amazon rainforest will do that, of course. As will having a cinematographer for a director. But Alex Pritz’s first feature documentary as a director very quickly transcends whatever lush imagery is immediately front and center, bursting quite early with rage at the situation its Indigenous subjects are being forced to endure. New images emerge, those of burning and destruction and greed as those who live independently defiantly take protection of their block of land into their own hands.

This is an environmental film set within an increasingly small patch that—as the film begins—is the land of the Uru-eu-wau-wau people, provided under rights agreements with the Brazilian government. But the impending election threatens this life of serenity when anti-environmental rhetoric from Jair Bolsonaro threatens to bring chainsaws, bulldozers and forest burning to this idyllic slice of paradise.

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Doc Corner: Andrea Arnold's 'Cow' and more at Hot Spring Documentary Film Festival

By Glenn Dunks

I recently ‘visited’ Arkansas of all places (virtually, of course) to sit on a jury for America’s longest-running documentary film festival. I got to judge on the 2021 Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival’s international jury with Andria Wilson Mirza and Jesse Knight and the three of us awarded the International Documentary Feature Grand Jury Prize (phew!) to Andrea Arnold’s Cow with an honourable mention to Ali El Arabi’s Captains of Zataari. The U.S. Documentary Feature Grand Jury Prize went to Angelo Madsen Minax's excellent North by Current, which we looked at earlier in the year.

So for this week’s column I wanted to look at a selection of the titles from songstresses in Cuba, professional wrestlers in Mexico and, yup, that damn cow.

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