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Toronto International Film Festival 2007
• Saturday, September 08
 "Day One"
Whenever five different movies, selected more or less at random, suggest a common theme, then you have to wonder: Is it the viewer's undifferentiating eye that insists on similarities, or do the movies actually have something in common. Well, the five movies that make up your correspondent's first day at this year's Toronto International Film Festival turn out to share an abiding fascination with secrets or, at least, masquerade...
• Monday, September 10
"Day Two"
Nothing like a bit of light entertainment to start the day, though it turned out that the absence of light was what the Spanish-made (though English-dubbed) animated feature, Nocturna, was all about. The feature debut of Adrián Garcia and Victor Maldonado, the 83-minute movie is about the adventures of a little orphan boy named Tim, who can only assuage his fear of the night by gazing at one particular star. When that star flickers out - and the rest of them are extinguished one-by-one - Tim enters the magical world of the night's managers, oddball creature who, among other things, mess up your hair, steal single socks, and clip holes in your blanket, all while you sleep...
• Tuesday, September 11
"Day Three"
Nothing like a bit of light entertainment to start the day, though it turned out that the absence of light was what the Spanish-made (though English-dubbed) animated feature, Nocturna, was all about. The feature debut of Adrián Garcia and Victor Maldonado, the 83-minute movie is about the adventures of a little orphan boy named Tim, who can only assuage his fear of the night by gazing at one particular star. When that star flickers out - and the rest of them are extinguished one-by-one - Tim enters the magical world of the night's managers, oddball creature who, among other things, mess up your hair, steal single socks, and clip holes in your blanket, all while you sleep...
• Friday, September 14
"Day Four"
With only three screenings on your correspondent's personal schedule today, it was a good idea to start off with the movie version of an extra-caffeinated eye-opener. Hong Kong's Johnnie To has been popping eyes open for three decades now, so he certainly knows how to grab your attention. Mad Detective, his newest (as of this minute, anyway - the man works fast), opens with a detective squad leader hacking away at a pig carcass and then ordering his newest subordinate to zip him into a soft-sided suitcase and kick it down two flights of stairs. The detective, named Bun (Lau Ching-wan), not only emerges woozy but conscious, but he manages to spout, “The ice cream vendor did it!” And apparently, he's right...
• Saturday, September 15
"Day Five"
With my time at the Toronto International Film Festival - or TIFF, as we insiders refer to it - drawing to a close, it's time to ramp up my screening attendance. So the day starts off promptly at 9 am with a showing of Useless, the latest documentary from Jia Zhang-ke, the mainland Chinese director drawing the most intense interest these days. Jia works in high (very high) definition digital, which gives his film's surfaces a watery, almost glassy surface, though also providing, as if in emotional compensation, a technically unlimited deep focus. This worked remarkably well on the three-pronged drama Still Life (last year's grand prize winner at Venice)...
• Wednesday, September 19
"Day Six"
Getaway day usually means at least one movie before hot-footin' it to the airport, a rush from screening room to taxi stand that doesn't always pay off in artistic satisfaction. So it was first with apprehension, then relief, then considerable pleasure that I found myself watching Gregg Araki's new opus, the dope comedy Smiley Face. Araki's movies always have something funny in or about them; he tends to address the audience with the same effective lack of subtlety that Moe's hand used to address Curly's cheeks in the Three Stooges shorts. More specifically, Araki is afraid neither of violent slapstick (or slapstick violence) nor of the technical exertions needed to make today's soft film colors match up to the flaring brightness of 1950s Technicolor.
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 Toronto International Film Festival
• Saturday, September 10
"Surprises, Lovely and Otherwisee"
Your reporter’s first day at the 30th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival included a couple of shocks, including one very welcome one and another that, well, we’ll get to that...
• Sunday, September 11
"Asian Pleasures"
Your correspondent’s self-esteem got taken down a peg today (Sunday), which was when it became clear that Fox Searchlight was picking up Thank You for Smoking for U.S. distribution...
• Monday, September 12
"Good Buzz"
Following the buzz to a hot festival movie is always risky. More often than not, a film that’s the subject of sudden positive word-of-mouth doesn’t turn out nearly as fine a work as you hope...
• Tuesday, September 13
"A Masterpiece - No, Really"
One thing a critic has to look out for at a film festival is falling into the masterpiece game...
• Wednesday, September 14
"A Western, Two Easterns, &..."
The western hasn’t died out; it’s simply emigrated to Australia...
• Thursday, September 15
"Euopean Africa & African Africa"
Departure day for L.A. left time to view two final films, both, as it happened, set in Africa ...
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 • San Francisco International Film Festival 2005 - Part 2
Italian filmmaker Saverio Costanzo’s Private was one of the two or three best movies I caught at the 48th San Francisco International Film Festival. Set amidst the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it avoids the pitfall of subjecting character to political generalities while still maintaining a specific point of view. Costanzo is making his feature debut and the presence of some stylistic excesses in the opening scenes may make a viewer wary of overstatements to come. Happily the young director soon gets his technique under control while still sustaining the excited anxiety it evokes.
Private’s story is centered around a middle-class Palestinian family living in the Occupied Territories in a comfortable two-story house. The head of the household is Muhammad, a strict but classically liberal teacher or professor. Aside from his homemaker wife, Samia, the family consists of two little children, teenaged sons Jamal and Yousef, and the oldest, daughter Miriam. While the rest of the family tends to bend to father’s will, Miriam is steadfastly refusing his command to take up her acceptance at a German medical school. She’d rather stay close at home to resist the occupation. |
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• San Francisco International Film Festival 2005 - Part 1
Long known for its Asian and Latin American components, the San Francisco International Film Festival now boasts a French films section that, perforce, has limited to a degree its old standbys. But in its 48th edition, the festival is still a good place for U.S. viewers to draw some perspective on new Asian films and those from the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Western Hemisphere.
Leading the Spanish-language films so far is the seductively charming films is the Mexican Duck Season, from 35-year-old Fernando Eimbcke. When Americans think of teenage comedies they’re likely to imagine Hollywood productions featuring extravagant excesses of sexuality and slapstick. Eimbecke has come up with a more realistic, but still funny approach featuring one day in the lives of two close friends, Flama and Moko. The two boys have been left alone in an apartment for an afternoon they intend to while away playing video games. When an electricity black out stops their play, they call up a pizza delivery service that guarantees your pizza in half and hour; if not it’s free. The boys are confident that without the building’s elevator working, the deliveryman will be unable to climb the many flights of stairs in time. In the meantime, the next door neighbor, who fulfills every 14-year-old boys image of the good-looking 16-year-old girl, comes knocking, wanting to borrow use of the oven. When the girl turns out to be a terrible cook, but sexually curious in a mild sort of way, and the deliveryman turns out to be a sad sack who adamantly insists he beat the half-hour time limit, the movie enters a realm of steady smiles, giggles, and quiet laughs. |
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 • Berlin International Film Festival
The 54th Berlin International Film Festival is in full swing and we are updating the website daily to bring you the latest reviews from Henry Sheehan.
Go to the Berlin International Film Festival Live Coverage page for an index of all available articles. |
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 • American Film Institute Festival - 2003
Los Angeles has been mucking along with a series of unsatisfactory international film festivals for some years now. Held under the aegis of the American Film Institute and called, imaginatively enough, AFI Fest(s), they have suffered from a lack of adequate financial support from local businesses. This is a shocking state of affairs in a city that spends so much time boasting of its importance as a world trade center and as the world’s movie capital.
The big studios dismiss AFI Fest with an all-but-visible smirk, the music industry is mute, the transportation and shipping industries lumber away, aerospace and airlines fly away, and, well, I’m running out of puns but you get the idea. New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Houston and even Palm Springs each manage to put together festivals that leave Los Angeles in the dust (at various lengths, to be sure), a situation that embarrasses only the town’s small anti-Philistine contingent . more
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 • IFP Los Angeles Film Festival - 2003
The IFP Los Angeles Film Festival (once known as the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival until it was taken over by the Independent Feature Project) took place a little too close to an out-of-town trip for comprehensive or timely coverage in this quarter. But the event did feature three documentaries – Lost Boys of Sudan, Sunset Story, and The Game of Their Lives – so good that they deserve mentioning, even if belatedly.
Perhaps the best is Lost Boys of Sudan, from producer-directors Jon Shenk and Megan Mylan. Underneath an apparently artless surface, their film is a clear-eyed though sympathetic account of both a Sudanese boy’s struggle to claim a promised education in the U.S. and the culture of self-congratulatory false pledges that awaits him. more |
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 • 25th Moscow International Film Festival
The 25th Moscow International Film Festival puts itself into bind with its competition section, requiring that only world premieres (outside the films' native countries) be submitted for a festival that begins only a month after Cannes.
But as is the case with so many festivals outside the Big Four (Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto) or which don’t specialize in one species of film (a la Sundance), Moscow 2003 has to be judged in relative terms. For one thing, it has to serve two audiences: The local Russian viewers who wish to sample fare from abroad; plus foreigners who have traveled to the city in search of new vistas in Russian filmmaking. more |
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• Chicago International Film Festival - 2002
 Yours truly was at the Chicago International Film Festival for nine days (Oct. 4-13) early in October, serving on a five-member critics jury organized under the auspices of both the festival and FIPRESCI, the international critics organization. We sat in judgment of films made by directors working on their first or second features, a dicey category that inevitably includes the overworked and underdone.
The critics jury evidenced both its youth and social conscience, as well as some cinematic acuity, in bestowing its award on El Bonaerense, an Argentine film which is the second effort from 32-year-old Pable Trapero. There is no question that Trapero’s film is not only well-directed, but that the filmmaker himself is one of the most promising to emerge from a country that for too long has produced, on the one hand, strenuously overwrought art films and, on the other, flimsily disguised Hollywood counterfeits. more |
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• Cannes 2002 - Part 1 - The Competition
 The critical consensus was that the 2002 Cannes Film Festival was a terrific success, though that’s where the consensus seems to have come to an abrupt end. Particularly for American and French critics, for whom the consensus might be said to have ended at the water’s edge. It wasn’t that the respective critical communities retreated into shell-like chauvinism – not completely anyway. On the contrary, when it came to mounting cinematic satires of America, for example, the difference between the two camps was over how, not whether. For that matter, the two best movies at Cannes were an Italian movie, Marco Bellochcio’s L’Ora Di religione (Il Sorriso di Mia Madre), and the Finnish Mies Vailla Menneisyyttä (Man Without a Past) by Aki Kaurismäki. more |
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