January 3, 2025

Welcome to TFCA Friday, a weekly round-up of film reviews and articles by TFCA members. 

In Release this Week!

Avicii: I’m Tim (dir. Henrik Burman)

“Avicii: I’m Tim is an earnest enough biopic of the Swede wonder boy, showcasing his enormous talent as a musician DJ, and remixer, bringing in unbelievably large crowds but ultimately sadly culminating with his suicide – indeed a journey that is unforgettable and sad,” says Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto.

Cunk on Life (dir. Al  Campbell)

“Cunk on Life is often hilarious and plays more on her comedy than anything else,” observes Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “It works and Cunk on Life is funny. Diane Morgan is already a well-known celebrity, thanks to social media.”

Lady Like (dir. Luke Willis)

“The [RuPaul’s Drag Race] cinematic universe is quickly becoming as expansive as the hit series itself. Which queen doesn’t have a doc?” asks Pat Mullen at POV Magazine. “But Lady Like arguably offers the best Drag Race competitor portrait so far. It’s a polished and personable look at a queen who proved the slow burn of her season. It’s a shrewd bit of branding for a performer who often struggled to define herself in the competition. Lady Like lets Lady Camden acknowledge the shortcomings that allowed a comparatively weaker performer with a distinct personality win the competition. It seems Lady Camden needed to lose Drag Race to find herself.”

NR 24 (dir. John Andreas Andersen)

“The question of the price to be paid for freedom is the one that torments Gunnar,” writes Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “Freedom at what cost?  NR 24 examines the casualties of war even on the side of the winners while telling a story that needs to be told of Norway’s most decorated war hero.  Indeed NR 24, a decent war suspense thriller that hits all the right notes probably marks one of the best films of the upcoming 2025.”

Shepherds (dir. Sophie Deraspe)

***TFCA Awards Nominee: Rogers Best Canadian Film***

***TFCA Awards Winner: Best Performance in a Canadian Film – Félix-Antoine Duval***

“Deraspe finds poetry in the realities and hardships of rural life. Shepherds harnesses tropes of the pastoral—the genre that fuels Mathyas’s romantic urges—while firmly rejecting his idealisation of the trade. The film benefits from the retrospective voice of its author, as Lefebure imbues the films with the philosophical inklings that drive his memoir, but the awakening that happens is not one of a romantic poet, but one of the down-to-earth pragmatist,” says Pat Mullen at That Shelf. “Mathyas learns that shepherds know not any division between work and play. They eat only the scraps and earn their laurels by familiarising themselves with every inch of the bucolic landscape to ensure their herd’s survival. The poetry here is the authentic and respectful portrait of rural labour.”

Umjolo: My Beginning, My End! (dir. Zuko Nodada)

“South Africa has saturated the film industry with their romantic comedies, that include the HAPPINESS IS and UNJOLO franchises.  Unfortunately, these are mediocre films at best, and the latest entry MY BEGINNING, MY END! that open this week on Netflix fails to impress,” sighs Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto.

Vermiglio (dir. Maura Delpero)

“The authoritarian Cesare spends scarce family funds buying record albums of classical greats Vivaldi, Schubert and Chopin, whose music enriches the soundtrack. When Adele tells him they can barely afford to feed their children (she counts their potatoes), let alone purchase records, he chides her, saying music is ‘food for the soul,’” writes Peter Howell at the Toronto Star. “Vermiglio, nominated for a Golden Globe and shortlisted for best international feature at the upcoming Academy Awards, also nourishes the soul, although it’s far more generous than Cesare. Delpero’s focus may stray from certain details, but her characters’ faces speak volumes, their expressions as eloquent as any of Cesare’s cherished composers.”

“A re-imagined autobiography, Delpero’s Vermiglio mixes a love of family with a clear-eyed view of how small town life functioned in the beloved Italy of the past. One knew one’s place; deviation wasn’t possible especially for women. But if you embraced your life in the village, it was lovely. Delpero’s film invokes the land of her grandparents with affection and respect,” says Marc Glassman at Classical FM. “Beautifully made, this is a film of poetry and clear-eyed nostalgia. It is a film that should be seen and embraced.”

“This seemingly simple pairing of two young hearts sets off a sweeping series of events that shakes the village and a small town in Sicily, uncapping age-old misogyny, intolerance, and narrowness with tragic results,” notes Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “Besides the romantic story, which has a twist after the couple is married with a child, it is the surroundings that make the highlight of the film, stunningly photographed looking something like an Italian Switzerland [combination].”

Looking Back at 2024 and Ahead to 2025

On Facebook, Brian D. Johnson lists the best films of 2024, including his #1, Emilia Pérez: “Like nothing I’d ever seen before,” writes Johnson. “A musical and a thriller that doesn’t operate like a musical or a thriller. Songs that materialize imperceptibly out of dialogue. Expanses of flat-out narrative where I forgot I was watching a musical. A drama about a Mexican drug lord transitioning to a woman that’s not about drugs, crime or gender. That something so audacious and revolutionary can also be a crowd pleaser is uncanny. It’s as if French director Jacques Audiard has split some kind of cinematic atom and blown open the arthouse.”

At That Shelf, Jason Gorber, Pat Mullen, Courtney Small, and Rachel West share their top 10 lists for 2024. For Gorber, it’s Anora, while Mullen says that Challengers served hardest. Small has Nickel Boys in the top slot, while West casts her vote for Conclave.

At Afro Toronto, Gilbert Seah highlights 10 movies from 2024 that went unreleased and are worth keeping an eye out for, including Misericorde: “Misericorde has the feel of a Claude Chabrol murder film in which the cat-and-mouse tale is mainly the mouse outwitting the cat with the aid of his cohorts.  The film is a prized twisted macabre tale with bouts of unexpected humour from the director of the 2014 gay hit L’inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake), this one with the fabulous Catherine Frot as a widow. who takes in Jérémie as a lodger whose sensual presence is immediately and progressively destabilizing to all around him.”

At the Toronto Star, Peter Howell lists 10 films to look forward to in 2025, including, er, 2024 TFCA Award winner Nickel Boys: “RaMell Ross first attracted major acclaim with his Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which examined southern Black lives with empathy and poetry. He exceeds that brilliance with his formally daring narrative feature debut, Nickel Boys, based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and winner of 2024’s best picture, director and adapted screenplay prizes from the Toronto Film Critics Association,” notes Howell. “It’s the story of teenage friends Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), told from their POV as they endure life at the racist Nickel Academy reform school in the Jim Crow-era Florida of the 1960s. It’s as astounding to watch as it is to contemplate.”

On Metro Morning, Jason Gorber looks ahead to the big films of 2025, including Paddington in Peru, TIFF People’s Choice Award winner Life of Chuck, and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, plus the 30^th anniversary of Seven.

At The Globe & Mail, Barry Hertz picks a lot of under-the-radar films to put on your radar in 2025, including a very exciting project penned by Don McKellar, No Other Choice: “Years before they collaborated on the wonderfully layered and loopy 2024 HBO miniseries The Sympathizer, Korean director Park Chan-wook and Canadian Renaissance man Don McKellar tried to get an adaptation of Donald Westlake’s novel The Ax into development,” writes Hertz. “And now, they’ve chopped down enough roadblocks to make it to the screen, with this Korean-language adaptation following a man (played by Lee Byung-hun) who goes to violent extremes after he gets fired from his job.”