TIFF Quickies with Gael García Bernal, Paprika Steen and more...

Nathaniel R reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival

Herewith very quick notes on five new films from world cinema, some with stars you'll recognize, that deserve lengthier word counts. That said, we're a week behind with TIFF reviews so we have to crank them out somehow -- better short-takes than no takes at all! 

Museo
The ever prolific Gael García Bernal continues to be a gift to world cinema. He has a small role in The Kindergarten Teacher (which... more on later) but fully carries Museo, a restless gem from Mexico. The movie begins with a formative father and son memory and memorable newsreel footage of an ancient statue being hauled across Mexico as a prized museum acquisition. Years later in 1985, the son Juan Nunez (García Bernal), or "Shorty," as his often derisive family calls him, remains obsessed with the story and robs the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City of 140 more mobile pre-Hispanic pieces...

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Queer TIFF: "Climax"

by Chris Feil

The first third of Climax achieves the most gobsmacking of feats: it convinces you, and wholeheartedly, that provocateur Gaspar Noé might actually have gotten his shit together. After languorous attempts to shock like Love, overly lethargic flashes of innovation like Enter the Void, and burdensome levels of grimness like Irreversible, his new film emerges as something both audacious and (most importantly) succinct. But jokes on us because this is, after all, a Gaspar Noé experience. It also happens to be the best one yet.

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TIFF: Christian Petzold returns with "Transit"

Nathaniel R reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival

Fans of the haunting post-war German drama Phoenix (well loved right here), will want to check out the latest from one of Germany's greatest directors Christian Petzold. Like Phoenix, Transit is a story of lives tragically ruined by war and new identities emerging from the rubble. Transit isn't as much of an eery mystery as Phoenix, but it plays with similar themes. Our protagonist Georg played by the arresting, highly watchable Franz Rogowski (Happy End) initially appears to be an opportunist, doing two dangerous jobs for cash involving personal letters or actual transport for desperate people trying to escape attention in Germany on their way out of the country, and stealing another man's identity as his own ticket out. But our first impression is quickly complicated...

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TIFF Review: "Wildlife"

by Chris Feil

Paul Dano’s directorial debut Wildlife is a period domestic drama with a fire in its gut. It’s the kind of piercing portrait of a family that makes you want to marinate in all of its surprising details just as you desperately want to escape its breathlessly realized pain.

Picturing an emotionally desolate suburban America of shitty lawns and ranch style homes, Dano strikes a balance between toughness and compassion, cruelty and honesty. It's as if its family was built on the fault line of two massive tectonic plates and no matter how violent the inevitable eruption that is to come, it might be sadly better that they be ripped apart. For everyone.

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TIFF Review: "The Old Man and The Gun"

by Chris Feil

David Lowery has already proven a difficult director to pin down easily, giving us film’s as divergent as Aint The Bodies Saints, Pete’s Dragon, and A Ghost Story. His newest film, The Old Man and the Gun, fills some of the spaces between those, and a clearer directorial voice is beginning to take shape. Lowery’s films want to immerse us in a feeling, to mire over circumstances that have inevitable ends we fight against. And this time, his film also pointedly faces its own metafictional end by showcasing what is to be the final performance of Robert Redford as a con man refusing to give up the habitual ghost of robbing banks.

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