TIFF '23: Jodie Comer astounds in "The End We Start From"

by Matt St Clair

The first glance of the title The End We Start From, immediately brough the past few years to mind. Once the COVID pandemic turned the world upside down, we all lived in physical and mental isolation, fearing what the coming days would bring. While the virus hasn’t disappeared, we have found ways to move forward and start anew during uncertain times. This film's nameless protagonist (a sublime Jodie Comer) experiences a cataclysmic crisis and does the same thing.

Just as the heroine has given birth to a newborn, a catastrophic flood strikes England...

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Sundance: "The World To Come" review

by Jason Adams

As a writer it must be said (or written even!) that I love words. Perhaps on occasion, it has been said and written, more than I ought to. It's the romance of my life. You can spend hours staring in the eyes of one -- erasing it, putting it back, looking for it the absolute best of partners. It's in words where I find meaning, too much and too often -- the experience of a thing is here and gone but once you've dug it back up and defined it, encased it into the tombs of steely-sided capital letters, well then it's a thing, right and proper. Understanding one's life, the un-understandable, becomes a matter of word puzzles.

It's this same tension, between word and feeling, that fuels Mona Fastvold's same-sex romance The World To Come, and like its heroine its that tension that very nearly undoes it...

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Review: "Alien: Covenant"

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

If the famed director Ridley Scott were in art school, his professor would be yanking the paintbrush out of his hand — “it’s perfect, stop adding brush strokes!” His wife probably has to pull spices from his hands as he cooks. If you’ve been playing along with this Hollywood giant’s career you know that he can never leave well enough alone. I’ve lost count of how many “versions” there now are of his early sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner (1982) and, after years of threats, that film will have a sequel this October, Blade Runner 2049, though Scott opted to pass the directorial reigns over to Denis Villeneuve (Arrival).

Having exhausted returning to that particular sci-fi well, Ridley has moved back even earlier in his career to the film that made him famous, Alien (1979). He’s now directed two prequels to it (Prometheus and now Alien: Covenant) and more films are promised. (Perhaps the controversial ending of 1991’s Thelma & Louise is the only thing that’s kept that film, the third member of his holy trinity of masterworks, free of his tinkering!).

So how’s the new film?

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It's Electrifying. It's Electrifying.

Jason from MNPP here -- isn't it strange, the stories that suddenly catch fire with the movie-makers and ignite dueling projects that race towards the finish line to beat the other to the eyes of the public? You've got your Volcano and Dante's Peak, you've got Deep Impact and Armageddon, and for those of you who don't see Disaster Movies as the be-all end-all of the cinematic form you've got Capote and Infamous... in which that southern writer was tossed at New York Society like a killer meteorite from outer space.

Today comes new news of another bizarre example - the the 1880s a battle over who would best monetize the invention of electricity was waged between George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison, and all of sudden, some one-hundred-and-thirty odd years later, it's all Hollywood wants to talk about.

I've been following the momentum of the movie called The Current War semi-regularly over at MNPP because a cast of handsome dudes have been attaching and un-attaching themselves from it for a few months -- as of right now the film will star Nicholas Hoult, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Shannon, and just today Spider-man himself Tom Holland has joined the cast. Oh and Katherine Waterston too, because I guess there needs to be a token wife character who frets at the sidelines of all the men's manly business. The Current War will be directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, who made Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and it's set to start filming next month.

Meanwhile everybody's favorite Oscar nominee Morten Tyldum is making a film called The Last Days of Night, based on a book by the same title, which tells the story from the point of view of Westinghouse's lawyer, who will be played by Eddie Redmayne. That movie is supposed to start filming in February. Do you think Benedict Cumberbatch and Morten both had their light-bulb moments (as it were) on the set of The Imitation Game, and this is some kind of secret spiteful race between the two of them? That's how I'm making entertainment out of the story for myself anyway.

Fantastic Beasts Behind the Scenes

Manuel here. We talked briefly a while ago about Eddie Redmayne's dapper outfit as Newt Scamander in JK Rowling's upcoming Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. We got a teaser shortly thereafter and now, we've gotten some behind the scenes footage of the Harry Potter spinoff that fleshes out a bit more about what we can expect from this franchise prequel.

The film follows Scamandar, a famed British Magizoologist who arrives in New York City in the 1920s with a suitcase full of fantastic beasts some of whom escape, putting the necessary plot into motion. Joining him are a pair of wizarding sisters (played by Katherine Waterstone and Alison Sudol) as well as a muggle (Dan Fogler, perhaps the most curious casting of them all) — together they must... well, it's unclear still. I'm guessing they'll have to wrangle the beasts back into the suitcase? We're still in teaser territory so maybe we shouldn't worry about that yet.

You can watch the entire video below but I've isolated four moments that caught my attention.

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