Jennifer Westfeldt's sort-of romantic comedy Friends with Kids is on to something, even if in the end it suffers from a failure of nerve. This is actor and screenwriter Westfeldt's directorial debut (she co-wrote and starred in the 2001 feature Kissing Jessica Stein), and it's polished to the point of shallow glossiness -- it could benefit from being a little rougher, a little messier.
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A tribute to vibrators and the women who love them, Tanya Wexler's Hysteria is a jaunty little entertainment that's almost plowed under by its early-suffragette arguments for women's equality. But like the little motorized whatsit that is its subject, the movie's charms are ultimately irresistible.
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Francis Ford Coppola's Twixt is kind of stupid and kind of amazing, a horror movie-fairytale hybrid with an inscrutable plot, some gorgeous images and two brief sections shot in 3-D. This isn't the great film Coppola's devotees have been waiting for him to make. But it's infused with more of Coppola's spirit, as we know it, than Youth Without Youth and Tetro, both of which were sluggish and self-serious. Twixt is a bit of a mess, but it's also joyful and wicked, with a great, roly-poly sense of humor about itself. In its imaginative WTF-ness, it reminds me of Bob Dylan's gloriously whacked-out Masked and Anonymous, just the sort of thing you'd expect a crackpot genius left to his own devices to make.
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Occasionally, a movie is more interesting for where it doesn't go than for where it does. Oren Moverman's Rampart, starring Woody Harrelson as a disgraced (and obviously dirty) LAPD cop, is one of those pictures. It's more of a character study than a conventionally shaped drama -- I was taken aback when the end credits started rolling, momentarily left with that "Is that all there is?" feeling. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that the movie ended in just the right place, taking us as far as we can go with this loose-cannon cop before he's left to face his own isolation. Once we, the audience, part ways with him, he's truly on his own.
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Alexander Payne's The Descendants has just about everything you need for a male midlife-crisis movie, and more: A big plot of unspoiled family land about to be sold off to developers, sullen teenagers, a wife in a coma. Payne, in his first full-length feature since the 2004 Sideways, pulls out all the stops, including casting George Clooney, an actor who's aging beautifully but who nonetheless, thankfully, has allowed himself to look his age.
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Get out your scoresheets and see how they compare with those of Venice Film Festival jury boss Darren Aronofsky, whose group today awarded the fest's top prize, the Golden Lion, to Aleksandr Sokurov's film Faust. The heavily favored Michael Fassbender won the fest's Best Actor award for Shame, while Deanie Ip earned Best Actress for the Stephanie Zacharek-endorsed Hong Kong effort A Simple LIfe. Other big winners included People Mountain People Sea and Terraferma; congrats to all! [AP]
As presumed, word from the first day of the Toronto International Film Festival has Shame finding a distribution deal. But not quite as presumed, Steve McQueen's acclaimed drama is at Fox Searchlight -- which will almost certainly face an NC-17 rating for the movie's frank sexuality and graphic nudity.
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The Toronto Film Festival is a world away from Venice, and the difference is especially acute when you hop from one to the other: Toronto is big and glossy, while Venice is intimate and glowing -- it's like the difference between lacquer and gold leaf. But each has its own appeal, and the scale of Toronto is appealing by itself. It's a little overwhelming but exhilarating, too.
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Hurray! Today begins the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. We've already predicted the five films most likely to ignite a bidding war up north, but what about the titles that will really get the red carpet TIFF treatment this week? Ahead, Movieline briefs you on the nineteen films that will be spotlighted with special premiere events as well as addresses from the directors and cast.
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It's that time again -- time for actors and filmmakers to cross their fingers, for studios and distributors to get out their checkbooks, for bleary-eyed audiences to get their running shoes on, and for all of them to meet up north for the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. As always, their confluence will yield a handful of big-screen surprises, some bitter disappointments, and the usual all-night wheeling and dealing for the best of the fall crop premiering in the week ahead.* Per annual TIFF custom, let's have a browse through the catalog (and a listen to the buzz) at five particular titles you should expect to hear about early and often.
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Venice is a city of lions. There's the ubiquitous winged lion, the symbol of Saint Mark, seen everywhere in statuary and on banners. Last night, outside the Casino, one of the main buildings of the festival complex, I saw a winged lion statue, about 12 feet off the ground, with a single wine glass perched delicately if a bit precariously atop one of his meaty paws, left behind by some meticulous reveler. Other lions have no wings but appear not to mind much, standing guard at church entrances, outside restaurants or at the center of neighborhood squares. And everywhere you look, there are smaller lion faces gazing back at you: Some have important and obvious jobs to do, holding door-knockers or doorbells in their mouths. Others are free to simply be themselves, but all seem intent on keeping an eye on things.
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If last year's opening night was a favorite festival memory for AFI Fest director Jacqueline Lyanga, one can only imagine the blast she's going to have on Nov. 3: The 25th annual incarnation of the festival has announced the world premiere of Clint Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio's hugely anticipated biopic J. Edgar as this year's opener.
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Two hours after seeing Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights, screening here in competition, I'm still fighting my way across this rugged moor of a movie, a vast, wild place where Arnold's vision and Emily Brontë's meet eye to eye and claw to claw. Arnold's reading of Bronte's weird, unabashedly sick novel is daring for sure: This is a film filled with interesting choices that, in the end, may not be all that interesting -- it's more self-conscious than Arnold's other films, Red Road and Fish Tank, perhaps partly because, unlike those movies, it's based on familiar source material.
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I'm not sure about the other European critics, but so far the U.K. critics here seem to love one picture above all others: Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, an adaptation of John Le Carré's 1974 novel, stars Gary Oldman as George Smiley, the deposed British spy who must find the mole who's compromising MI6 -- or "the circus" -- in order to put the organization, and his life, back together. In addition to being based on an enormously popular book, Alfredson's picture is also haunted by a ghost: The 1979 TV mini-series, which featured Alec Guinness in the George Smiley role. Who'd want to try to top that?
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When Steve McQueen's Hunger debuted at Cannes in 2008, Michael Fassbender -- playing Irish hunger-strike activist Bobby Sands -- was a revelation. Now he's ubiquitous, potentially to the point of overexposure, appearing in comic-book blockbusters (X-Men: First Class) and tony literary adaptations (Jane Eyre) alike. Yet each performance, and each project, is so different from the last that it's still a joy to watch him. He has one of the gifts that great actors need, the ability to be focused and unselfconscious at the same time. He knows when to surrender and when to call every muscle and brain cell to attention. I fear someday he'll win an Oscar and risk losing it all.
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