This is Woody Harrelson’s moment. The actor, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as an incendiary army officer in 2009’s THE MESSENGER, reteams with director Israeli-born director Oren Moverman on an even more explosive drama that is tailored to his particular talent for playing characters with a short fuse. World premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, RAMPART, set in a neo-noir Los Angeles in the late 1990s, alludes to the Ramp...
You can be excused if you believe that new starlet Jessica Chastain is in every movie opening this season. The busy actress can currently be seen on the big screen in three major summer movies, including Terrence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE, the best seller adaptation THE HELP and the espionage actioner THE DEBT. At the recent Venice Film Festival, she regally walked the red carpet along with co-star and director Al Pacino for WILDE SALOME, his meta-textual adaptation of the Oscar Wilde ...
WHERE DO WE GO NOW?
The 36th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) came to a climactic close on Sunday with the announcement of its award recipients at a reception at the Four Seasons Hotel With the Festival further solidifying its status as one of the Top Four in the world (with only Cannes, Berlin and Sundance in the running), it remains distinguished by not having a juried competition, with the exception for awards given to native Canadian films. So while th...
DRIVE (2011) held its North American premier this week at 2011 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Below is the press conference for the film in competition DRIVE (2011) at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. On panel were: Director Nicolas Winding Refn, Actor Ryan Gosling, Writer Hossein Amini, Editor Mat Newman, Producer Marc Platt and Producer Adam Siegel.Nicolas Winding Refn is a former student of Von Trier so naturally, there was a thick tension in the DRIVE pressroom with ever...
THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD (2011) by American director Joshua Marston held its World Premier at 2011 Berlinale in February and its North American premier at 2011 TIFF in Toronto. The very much talked about and gripping film, The Forgiveness of Blood, by American director and pioneering arthouse/foreign film advocate Joshua Marston (director of Maria Full of Grace, 2004), opened at the 2011 Berlinale Film Festival. FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD is wowing audiences everywhere and showing the world a gl...
Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest film ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (2011) premiered in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival where the film won Grand Prix. A Turkish and Bosnian co-production, the film screened to audiences at the 17th Sarajevo Film Festival in the Open Air Theater on July 25th, 2011. The cast and crew attended a press conference at SFF on July 26th to answer questions in detail about their much beloved new film.OUATIA held its North American premier at...
’Melancholia’ premiered in May 2011 at the Cannes Film Festival. The press conference for the film received international attention when Lars von Trier made questionable comments about Hitler sympathizing with the Nazis and he was later named ‘persona non grata’ by the festival. Actress Kirsten Dunst won a Best Actress award for her stellar performance as Justine.This week it held its North American premier at 2011 Toronto Film Festival (TIFF). ‘Melancholia’, dictionary descript...
WE HAVE A POPE (HABEMUS PAPAM, Italy, 2011)This year at Cannes Nanni Moretti’s latest film, HEBEMUS PAPAM, screened in competition. It later went to screen at the Sarajevo Film Festival in July and now this week it makes its North American premier at TIFF 2011. The film is about a new pope (played by Michel Piccoli) who decides he cannot take the colossal responsibility of his new public role and ends up seeking psychological help to come to terms with his private past. In the morning b...
Destined to be one of the most talked about American indies of the year, PARIAH is the dramatic and intimate story of a teenage girl in Brooklyn who juggles conflicting identities and risks family and friendships in a search for sexual expression. The film is the feature debut of Dee Rees, a Nashville-born writer/director, who has obviously drawn on her own personal experience as a black lesbian to find the kernel of truth of the mix of exhilaration and sheer terror of a young girl’s...
One need not look up at the skies in the Canadian metropolis of Toronto to see stars. There will be as many stars at street level (make that red carpet level) as there will be in the heavens as the 2011 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival continues through this Sunday.
Brad Pitt, George Clooney, James Franco, Rachel Weisz, Salma Hayek and Viggo Mortensen will be backing a flurry of Hollywood and indie movie bows in Toronto, as will Keira Knightley, Clive Owen, Ge...
While it is rather foolish to try to find a connecting threat amidst the hundreds of films being showcased this week at the Toronto International Film Festival, one cannot help but notice that films about sex and titillation are pervasive in the schedule and generating strong distributor interest. The first big sale of the Festival was for the drama SHAME by British artist-turned-director Steve McQueen. The film, about a sex addict, features full-frontal nudity and graphic depictions o...
The Quebec director Jean-Marc Vallee first made significant waves in 2005 with his rock-infused coming-of-age film C.R.A.Z.Y., which won major prizes on the international film festival circuit and was sold to almost 50 international territories (a strong statement for a French language Canadian film). Unfortunately, its success was not matched in the United States, where it played at the New Directors/New Films festival and other prestigious events, but never got theatrically released....
Ryan Gosling, the nova hot actor, is a native Canadian and the biggest film festival in his country is indulging in a bit of Gosling-fever. The actor, who grew up in southern Ontario, appears in two high profile films at the Toronto International Film Festival, which opens on September 8. THE IDES OF MARCH, a behind-the-scenes political thriller directed by George Clooney, gives its biggest role to Gosling’s young press secretary, who does all things legal and illegal to protect the...
A DANGEROUS METHOD (David Cronenberg, Canada)
The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) enters its middle stretch this week, offering attending buyers, critics and film lovers a dizzying feast of film treats. Planning what to see is a definite must, since even at 5 films per day (my personal max), there are many that are missed. While here, one must adapt a strategy and raison d’etre……do you attend the highly buzzed titles in the largest cinemas (the ones by name dire...
HEARTBEATS (Xavier Dolan, Canada)
The hard truth is that even if one devotes oneself to seeing as many as 3 or 4 films per day (my usual average), that one is still only seeing less than 10% of the titles on offer at the Toronto International Film Festival, which concluded this past Sunday. Inevitably, there are those gems that one could not get to and the buzzed titles that conflicted with that Icelandic or Slovakian film that you convinced yourself that you cannot liv...
The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is unique among A-list film festivals because it still is a non-competitive event. Unlike its other stellar festival cohorts, including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, San Sebastian and Sundance, TIFF does not bother with the formality of competition juries and all the drama that surrounds their sometimes dubious choices. Instead, the audience determnes the winners, especially of the Cadillac People's Choice Awards, which were announced on Sunday...
Julian Schnabel strides two different worlds like a modern-day colossus. As a painter, sculptor and photographer, he has been in the A list of fine arts culture for more than 30 years. For the past decade, he has added "filmmaker extraordinaire" to his resume, becoming one of the most talked-about and lauded film artists of his generation. Painters making films is not completely new (Leger, Kandinsky, Dali and other early modernists did make film expressions, but they wer...
The Toronto International Film Festival has become one of the prime meeting places for film professionals from all over the map. So, not only are films seen, bought and sold, but the Festival is also an important place to make important new announcements about upcoming productions and initiatives.
Therefore, it was completely appropriate that the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF), the largest and most ambitious film event in the Middle East, use the Toronto setting to m...
When a filmmaker draws on his own experience to the extent that Icelandic director Fridrik Thor Fridriksson has done in his wonderful memory film MAMMA GOGO, the intimacy of the revelations is almost disarmingly intimate. The prolific director, probably the best known from his native country and one of the most consistent in Scandinavia cinema, takes his audience on a personal journey as the film’s protagonist, a filmmaker himself, becomes immersed in the downward spiral of his mothe...
I'M STILL HERE, the not-very-flattering documentary by actor-turned-director Casey Affleck of his brother-in-law and best friend Joaquin Phoenix has been provoking controversy since it world premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Is the film, which had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this week, a true portrait of the actor's rejection of movie stardom or is it a cleverly planned hoax?
The "documentary" of the tumultuous y...
French filmmakers, film stars and business professionals are everywhere here at the Toronto International Film Festival, giving this year's a definite French accent. This is a long-running love story, with this city's film buffs in l'amour fou with French cinema, during TIFF and throughout the year.
The Gala Presentations at the Festival, arguably the most prestigious section, boasts four French titles: LAST NIGHT, a US/French co-production by debut helmer Massy Tadjedin, with a st...
Nicole KidmanEllen Page
Catherine KeenerMarion CotillardUma ThurmanHelen MirrenHilary SwankNatalie Portman
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It has been a difficult few months for the British film industry. Not only has the economic recession made the film business even more challenging, but the controversy surrounding the shuttering of the UK Film Council has been acriminious, amidst charges of economic abuse and political favoritism. Even the venerable London Film Festival, which unspools next month, losts its main corporate sponsors and had to scramble to find replacements.
However, based on the bounty of British film...
Andrew GarfieldAnthony HopkinsBen AffleckCarey MulliganClint EastwoodClive OwenColin FirthDanny BoyleDavid SchwimmerDev PatelEdward NortonEllen Page
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Manoel De Oliveira (Portugal)
The Toronto International Film Festival has always had a love affair with European cinema and this year, in its 35th anniversary year, is no different. Nearly half of the films presented here this week are European or have European co-production partners. The European Film Promotion organization is assisting nearly 50 European sales companies with their presence here in order to assist the films in finding North American distribution here.
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