Reviews include Emilia Pérez, Here, and Dahomey.
TFCA Friday: Week of October 6th, 2017
October 6, 2017
Welcome to TFCA Friday, a weekly round-up of film reviews and articles by TFCA critics.
Reviews and features by: Jim Slotek (JS), Liam Lacey (LL), Brian D. Johnson (BDJ), Peter Howell (PH), Gilbert Seah (GS), Chris Knight (CK), Eli Glasner (EG), Radheyan Simonpillai (RS), Norm Wilner (NW), and Kate Taylor (KT).
Opening this Week
Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve)
“Beautiful, disorienting and one of the year’s best movies” — PH, including an insightful interview with Denis Villeneuve
“An intelligent iteration, 35 years in the making” — EG
“Individual moments had me saying ‘wow’ but they didn’t add up to much” — RS, who has a must-read feature on why Quebecois filmmakers (like Mr. Villeneuve) are so successful
Great Great Great (dir. Adam Garnet Jones)
“A moody, occasionally piercing drama … a tour de force performance, played in a minor key” — NW
Loving Vincent (dirs. Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman)
Lucky (dir. John Carroll Lynch)
“What’s a five-letter word meaning “great performance”?” — PH
“A worthy swan song of an actor that has [repeatedly] surprised audiences” — GS
The Mountain Between Us (dir. Hany Abu-Assad)
“Spoiler alert: They don’t eat the dog. What kind of movie do you think this is?” — PH
“No one sets out to make a movie this bad” — NW
“The chemistry between the leads isn’t hot enough to melt an ice cube” — CK
My Little Pony: The Movie (dir. Jayson Thiessen)
Rebel in the Rye (dir. Danny Strong)
“A uniquely frustrating experience: a J.D. Salinger movie that’s phony as hell” — NW
Unarmed Verses (dir. Charles Officer)
“Their music doesn’t speak directly to the bulldozers at the gate or the politics stirred up by recent tragedies. Those anxieties hover in the air, and the kids may not yet have the words to grasp them” — RS, with a powerful cover story from Hot Docs this year
“A quietly insightful film that also serves as a coming-of-age drama of Francine Valentine” — GS
CineFranco 2017
Gilbert Seah with selected capsule reviews on the film festival that features the best in contemporary French film