TIFF: Sean Baker's Wondrous "The Florida Project"

by Chris Feil

With Sean Baker’s compassionate ingenuity, The Florida Project is a heartbreaking (and heart-renewing) fable of American poverty seen through the resilient eyes of children. Set in a slum motel just a stone’s through away from Disney World, the film follows a boisterous toddler names Moonee and her mother Halley as they struggle to get by. But like Baker’s other tales of people on the fringes, Project lives more in their joy than their pain.

Click to read more ...

TIFF: The Greek Theatre of "Sacred Deer"

by Chris Feil

Is it better to have good friends or a large number of friends? It’s a question asked casually in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer that hosts some of its more loaded themes: social connection, the difference between acquiring and appreciating, the futile pursuit of a nuclear unit. As discussed between odd teenager Martin and adult Steven, played by Barry Keoghan and Colin Farrell, it carries even more terrifying subtext for their unsettling relationship.

Click to read more ...

The Greatest Party Photo of Our Time

Dame Helen, Divine Emma, Irresistible KST, and Queen Kidman at TIFF 2017.

P.S. I would like to thank whichever publicist did not invite me to this party thereby saving me from spontaneous combustion; I will live to see another movie.

TIFF: Iannucci Goes to Russia for "The Death of Stalin"

by Chris Feil

Armando Iannucci has another high farce with The Death of Stalin, an almost operatic comedy of power struggles and masculine posturing. Based on the comic books by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, the film is a gleefully anachronistic satire that will feel all too uncomfortably close to our current reality. This makes for a more charged tone than Iannucci’s previous contemporary political skewering. But fear not: his comic mind has stayed unpretentious. As ever, it’s his subjects that take themselves all too seriously.

Click to read more ...

"I'm Armie"

our ongoing adventures at TIFF 2017

Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer, and Luca Guadagnino at the after party for CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

Armie Hammer is very tall (6'5" according to IMDb) but less intimidating than that heighth and his big screen beauty would suggest in real life. Let's set the scene.

It's the after party for the TIFF premiere of Call Me By Your Name  at a swank Toronto steakhouse called STK. I arrive slightly underdressed -- you can always spot the writers by their more casual attire than the stars/industry/scenesters -- and quickly down my "director's cut."...

Click to read more ...