One theme that connects many films at this year’s festival is that of internal journeys that force external ones. In writer Durga Chew-Bose’s directorial debut, she adapts Françoise Sagan’s coming-of-age novel Bonjour Tristesse to explore how emotional maturat... More »
The premieres continued on Friday and Saturday at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, highlighted by deeply personal projects, including another Stephen King adaptation from the man who may be the master of such things, further evidence that Marie... More »
TIFF is such a massive festival that it’s remarkably difficult even with a staff as large as ours (five people here with varying assignments) to even get to half of it. And the truth is that with major films like “Nutcrackers,” “The Life of Chuck,” “The Wild R... More »
One of the benefits of coming to TIFF every year is that the first day of press screenings is almost entirely made up of films that premiered at other fests earlier in the year. For example, last year my first two films in Canada were “Anatomy of a Fall” and “... More »
Patterns emerge at film festivals, and the opening night of Toronto 2024 might suggest there’s something wrong with the men of America. Whether it’s a boxer brutally abusing his body, a game show contestant trying to save his family, or a real estate mogul lea... More »
Just like Vegas, Telluride Film Festival has an unspoken ethos: “What happens in — stays in —.” While part of me wants to keep all of its secrets to myself, I can’t help but become an open book when it comes to talking about Telluride and its infamously exclus... More »
The last time I went to the Telluride Film Festival it was under vastly different circumstances. Back in 2021, the film world (along with the rest of the planet) was still grappling with the effects of the pandemic’s worst stretches. To attend that year, you n... More »
We all enjoy a good heist flick, but stretching one into a limited television series is a gamble that is as risky as the heist our characters try to pull off. The eight-part Peacock miniseries “Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist” from showrunner Shaye Ogbon... More »
I don’t want to say that this Telluride Film Festival has been more “political” this year than in the past, if only because political is such a broad term, but there have been more pictures aware of the effect we have on each other and on the world at this 51s... More »
Telluride Film Festival historically incorporates a fair number of documentary features and shorts alongside the main attraction, narrative features. This year, the documentary programming was thoughtfully political, and the selections thematically aligned wel... More »
I have a shocker for you: the titular pair in Netflix’s “The Perfect Couple” is not, in fact, perfect. I’m sure your mind is blown. Just like it will be when you come across the show’s radical organizing principle that money does not buy happiness.Retreadi... More »
The incredibly clever platformer “Astro Bot” is designed with one intention: To make you smile. In an era in which even the best games can seem addictively cruel (“Elden Ring”) or thematically brutal (“The Last of Us”), there’s something so satisfying about a ... More »