Couldn’t make it to Toronto International Film Festival this year? Don’t worry, our own Artistic Director of Film, Jason Wood, was there to report back on the films that you can’t afford to miss in the coming months. Read part one of his review round-up below…
TIFF 2016 delivered a very strong line up of titles previously garlanded at Venice (La La Land) as well as a few lovely surprises. Moonlight, Jackie and The Net were certainly stand outs, but for me Mendoza’s Ma’ Rosa is the film to most powerfully linger in the memory. Virtuoso, essential cinema. Sadly, the film at the time of writing has no UK distributor.
The Limehouse Golem
In Victorian-era London, an intrepid police inspector (Bill Nighy) investigates a series of brutal killings that seem to be linked to a fearsome creature of Jewish legend. Based on Peter Ackroyd’s Victorian London–set novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, this attempt to put a spin on the serial killer by taking a female perspective (I won’t say more so as to not give the twist away) is an enjoyable enough misfire with a strong cast including Eddie Marsan and Daniel Mays. Nighy is fine in the central role and obviously feels liberated from Exotic Marigold Hotel territory but truth be told I found this an unoriginal and uninspired retread of Murder by Decree via Ripper Street. 19th century London is vividly realized and it’s certainly somewhere I wouldn’t have wanted to live.
Nocturnal Animals
Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal and Armie Hammer headline the second feature from director Tom Ford (A Single Man), about a woman who is forced to confront the demons of her past as she is drawn into the world of a thriller novel written by her ex-husband. Adapted from Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan, Ford’s look at the inner life of a complex woman whose life is about to be turned upside down left me cold. Critics however have been unanimous in their praise. It is well performed – Michael Shannon is a stand out and I feel a Shannon season coming on, but this is a chilly, somewhat preposterous film that is over designed and far too convinced of its own brilliance. Aaron Taylor Johnson continues his quest to be Britain’s worst and yet most consistently employed actor (Jude Law is in second). For me, neither successful as a thriller nor as a piece of psychological. It’s all surface and very shallow depth and very much a film by a fashion designer.
Dog Eat Dog
Troy (Nicolas Cage), Mad Dog (Willem Dafoe), and Diesel (Christopher Matthew Cook) are three ex-cons looking for a payday, a final big score that will be their ticket to an early retirement. Luckily, Mafioso “The Greek” (director Paul Schrader) has just the job for them: kidnapping a mobster’s baby. Deep down, they know this is a bad idea, but does that stop them? Of course not. Pitch-black hilarity ensues. Based on a 1995 novel by writer and ex-convict Edward Bunker (who co-wrote the scripts for Straight Time, Animal Factory, and Runaway Train), Paul Schrader’s potty-mouthed potboiler has Dafoe as its ace in the pack. It’s a scintillating, bat-shit crazy performance and you simply can’t take your eyes off him. Cage is better than he has been since Bad Lieutenant (that’s not saying much) and the film has a suitably scuzzy feel. Schrader directs with flair, though I felt his part to be a miss-step.
Jackie
Chilean director Pablo Larraín (Tony Manero, No) depicts the events leading up to and following the assassination of JFK through the eyes of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (Natalie Portman). The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 was one of those moments that defined a generation. That this handsome, charismatic leader with a beautiful wife and two young children could have his life ended so brutally defied comprehension. Told solely through the eyes of Jackie Kennedy, I found this film to be near perfect. Portman is sensational in the lead role and there is strong support from Greta Gerwig, John Hurt and Peter Sarsgaard as Bobby Kennedy. Hell, Richard E. Grant is in it, and even he is good. It’s meticulously structured and a poignant and cogent meditation on grief, power and mythology. A film filled with profound and profoundly intimate moments, I found it near perfect. I was reminded of Münch’s The Hours and the Times in its intelligent analysis of a public figure. Mica Levi’s score is superb.
Neruda
The second film from Pablo Larraín weaves an engrossing metafictional fable around the 1948 manhunt for celebrated poet and politician Pablo Neruda, who goes underground when Chile outlaws communism and Neruda finds himself pursued by an ambitious police inspector (Gael García Bernal, playing a fictitious character) hoping to make a name for himself by capturing the famous fugitive. A million miles from Il Postino, Neruda shows how the words and actions of one man can rouse a nation and give a voice to the voiceless. Bernal is superb, emanating Trintingnant in The Conformist, and Luis Gnecco and Mercedes Morán also both excel as Neruda and his wife Delia. Considering his past achievements and the recent Jackie, it’s hard to think of a director currently working today who is as accomplished and prolific as Larraín who here fully explores and tests the limits of the filmic biography.
Una
Rooney Mara (Carol) and Ben Mendelsohn (Mississippi Grind) star in this adaptation of David Harrower’s play Blackbird, about a young woman who arrives in the workplace of an older man from her past, seeking answers for the long-ago events that have fatefully shaped both of their lives. Described as a psychological thriller with elements of a revenge plot, Una paddles in murky moral waters as it looks at grooming, abuse and paedophilia, but despite committed performances this felt like a very theatrical endeavor and failed to convince. The Kent coast makes a suitably grim backdrop.
The Net
In the new film from provocative Korean auteur Kim Ki-duk (Pieta), a poor North Korean fisherman finds himself an accidental defector, and is groomed to be a spy by an ambitious South Korean military officer. A highly original rumination on the question of what it means to be a Korean national today, and on the suffering caused by the political division of the peninsula, The Net features an extraordinarily riveting central performance from Ryoo Seung-bum. The director is known for his tendency towards shock but his latest is disquieting for all together different reasons. It’s a harrowing and extremely cogent portrait of how individuals are exploited and abused for political gain.
Brimstone
Liz (Dakota Fanning) has a quiet country life on a farm with her kind-hearted husband and children, but we immediately sense that things are too good to be true. One Sunday, a mysterious new reverend (a heavily scarred Guy Pearce) gives his inaugural sermon, and Liz fills with terror; her past has come back to haunt her. Following the service, a local woman goes into labour on the church floor. Through no fault of Liz’s, the birth goes woefully wrong. When the woman’s husband seeks revenge, the reverend comes to the rescue of Liz and her family — though he warns that punishment will soon befall her. The next day, the family’s sheep are found slaughtered, Liz is sequestered, and her daughter is kidnapped. Thus begins a nigh-biblical sequence of events involving blood, fire, and an epic years-long odyssey spanning states and territories. Establishing the stakes early on, and aided by Rogier Stoffers’ lush images, Koolhoven suffuses Brimstone with tension that never lets up. Fanning snares our sympathies with her character’s devotion to protect those she loves, while Pearce is chilling as an unrelenting force. Despite their opposition, both Liz and the reverend seek redemption. Only one shall apprehend it. Imagine Night of the Hunter meets Deadwood. Way too long though…
Manchester By the Sea
With only his third feature in 16 years, writer-director Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count on Me, Margaret) takes us through a familiar milieu in Manchester by the Sea, but does so in wholly unfamiliar ways. Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) is the resident handyman for a small apartment complex in a Boston suburb. He spends his days shovelling snow, fixing leaks, and doing his best to ignore the tenants’ small talk. He spends his evenings either alone in his basement apartment or nursing a beer at his local, where he’ll pick a fight with anyone who throws a glance his way. Yet somehow we know that buried beneath this sadness is another life.
When he receives the news that his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) has died of a congenital heart condition and that, to his unpleasant surprise, he’s been appointed legal guardian of Joe’s teenage son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges), Lee returns to his nearby seaside hometown, a place of both cherished and painful memories. As this mismatched pair stumbles through the mundane details of estate planning and the awkward strain of adolescence, Lee is forced to confront his past, revealed seamlessly through flashbacks, and the realities of his present. Reminiscent of the character driven American cinema of the 1970s (Ashby, Ritchie, Rafelson), Manchester by the Sea offers an extraordinary and harrowing portrait of lost souls. Like Margaret this is a flawed and sometimes messy film and yet it is these very flaws that lend the film its life and natural ability to replicate the human experience. Certain to garner exceptional reviews, this will be heralded as a major work and quite rightly so. The performances are first rate and the film is incredibly attuned to the failings and foibles of human nature. Despite moments of brevity this is a dark work unafraid to shine a light on the darker recesses of the human soul but it is all the richer for it. A film for lost souls, it is explicit on the subject of trauma and depression, Affleck’s ‘I can’t beat this. I just can’t’ delivering a dagger to the hardest heart.
Lady Macbeth
Acclaimed theatre director William Oldroyd relocates Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District to 19th-century North Eastern England, in this Gothic tale about a young woman (Florence Pugh) trapped in a marriage of convenience whose passionate affair unleashes a maelstrom of murder and mayhem on a country estate. With formal overtones of Ordet, this incredibly primal work plays out like an early century film noir with increased racial and class overtones. Pugh is fantastic in the central role, a little ball of evil bending the universe and its subjects to her own decree, Oldroyd beautifully balances the dichotomy between the wilds of nature and the chilly symbolism of the patriarchal manor, conjuring a gothic tale of repeated betrayal that is as enthralling as it is disturbing.
Free Fire
It’s 1978, and Justine (Brie Larson) has brokered a gun deal in an abandoned warehouse between IRA men Chris (Cillian Murphy) and Frank (Wheatley regular Michael Smiley), and gun dealers Vernon (Sharlto Copley) and Ord (Armie Hammer). Everything seems to be going smoothly — until shots are fired during the handover and pandemonium ensues, the warehouse erupting in a barrage of gunfire worthy of John Woo. The explosive and chaotic battle escalates to a manic standoff, a bloody game of survival where everyone left alive is either trying to escape with a bag of money, or make sure that nobody else does. Executive produced by Marin Scorsese, I must admit that I anticipated an orgy of wise cracks and violence. But this is much better than that. Shot entirely on location in Brighton, this has the authentic look and film of a 1970s movie. Incredibly atmospheric, it’s also a lot of fun, due mainly to the sharp as a tack script by Amy Jump. Think Reservoir Dogs, minus the bullshit machismo.
Filled your film diary already? Well hold on, because part two of Jason’s TIFF 2016 report will be published later this week.
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