Friday, November 29, 2019 at 9:00PM Chris here. Thank you to all of you wonderful readers that keep TFE alive and well, year in, year out! This year, I am especially thankful for...
- my new spiritual guru, Baby Yoda.
- the reunion of Salvador and Federico in Pain and Glory.
- the funny and furious female ensemble of Parasite: So-dam Park, Yeo-jeong Cho, Hye-Jin Jang, Jeong-eun Lee, and Ji-so Jung.
Friday, September 6, 2019 at 6:00PM by Chris Feil
As gloopy with various bodily fluids as it is with sea foam, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse lulls us into insanity from its first foggy frame. Diverging from the more straightforward horrors of his debut The Witch, Eggers thrusts us into the isolate hellscape that is the male mind with this Mellville-esque absurdist dark comedy. The bizarre quotient is high, both in the film’s psychosexual hysterics and crusty verbal dexterity, as the film devolves into an abstract battle of the wits and wills of two men meant to preserve the titular phallic monument. It’s genius and a complete hoot.
Set over a century ago on an offshore island, this tempestuous and physically taxing setting plays host to the two male egos of Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe’s lighthouse watchmen. Dafoe’s superstitious, more experienced Thomas immediately puts Pattinson’s Ephraim to back-breaking arduous work, dominating him further over candlelit dinnertime monologues...
Wednesday, October 3, 2018 at 9:31PM Jason Adams here reporting from the New York Film Festival...
We're all dying. That's the grand rule of everything that we do all we can to distract ourselves from. It might seem like some of us are dying faster than others from the position we're standing in at any precise moment, but time is, as the saying goes, relative. We're all of us on track to stardust, circling the drain of a black hole out here, hair stiff on end.
Leave it to Claire Denis to dream-weave a perverse space opera all about that stuff, then. Who else, really? High Life on its gorgeous scuffed up Rothko painting of a surface has all sorts of distractions from that central mission statement - Horny convicts in outer space! Juliette Binoche's infinite ponytail! Something called a "Fuck Box!" - that a smaller-minded filmmaker would've gotten caught up on...
Monday, September 10, 2018 at 6:55PM by Murtada Elfadl
The reviews and tweets are coming in fast and furious from Toronto. Let's take a break from all that and look at the many premieres from the weekend and the many beautiful people who walked the carpet.
If Beale Street Could Talk brought together (L-R) Brian Tyree Henry, Regina King, Colman Domingo, Kiki Layne, Stephan James, Barry Jenkins and Teyonah Parris.
Friday, September 7, 2018 at 5:27PM by Murtada Elfadl
TIFF is not only about the films that are playing there. It’s also about the deals for the films that we might see next year or the year after. Or maybe never hear of again if they don’t secure financing. We’ve already told you about the Matthias Schoenaerts-Margot Robbie starrer Ruin. Here are three other film - or packages if we were to use the vulgar industry term - that are at TIFF looking for financing:
Phyllis Nagy directing Gemma Arterton as Dusty Springfield
The film is titled So Much Love and Carol’s screenwriter is also writing it. Set in 1968, when at the peak of her popularity, Springfield travelled to Tennessee to record the album Dusty in Memphis. An official synopsis reads:
