November 1, 2024

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

In Release this Week

Absolution (dir. Hans Petter Moland)

“Absolution is a slow, sad, somewhat suspenseful drama. Memory and identity are inextricably bound, so as Thug forgets he is increasingly a haunted character, slipping into his own world and prone to worrying nightmares,” notes Liz Braun at Original Cin. “The film’s various elements do not quite meld, and despite a few strong performances, none of the characters feel fully three-dimensional. There isn’t enough going on to call this one an action movie, and not enough delving into the human condition to call it a character study, either. Maybe file Absolution under noble failure.”

“Though Absolution never reaches the heights reached in In Order of Appearance, Absolution is still a gripping thriller as director Moland knows how to grab attention from his audience,” adds Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto.

Dahomey (dir. Mati Diop)

“The doc also emphasizes the importance of history and the loss of the people’s native language due to colonization,” says Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “The debaters in the doc all speak French filmed at a University among students and are unable to communicate or speak in their native tongue.”

“Film buffs may appreciate Diop’s Dahomey as a response to Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s 1953 film, Statues Also Die, part of which was banned in France until the 1960s because of its criticism of French colonialism,” notes Liam Lacey at Original Cin. “A ‘dead statue’ in that film was a statue that had lost its original meaning and had been reduced to a museum object. Diop’s film opens a window to some of the possible lives a reborn statue may live when returned to its homeland.”

Calling the film an “artfully provocative conversation starter,” Pat Mullen at POV Magazine speaks with director Mati Diop about observing the repatriation of Beninese artifacts from France. “‘I felt immediately an identification with the statues because the stigma of colonization is something that, in my own way, I have experienced and I’m still experiencing,’ says Diop. Diop explains that Dahomey evolved from an idea for a fiction film she was considering when news of the artifacts’ repatriation caught her eye. ‘The main character was going to be an African mask who was going to tell his own story of capture, exile, and return,’ says Diop. ‘When the urgency of shooting Dahomey arrived, this idea of the voice of artifacts telling their own story was already there. It’s a restitution gesture to give them back their voices, their history, and their ability to become subjects and not only objects.’”

Emilia Pérez (dir. Jacques Audiard)

“Can a sex change alter a person’s true nature? This crime musical by Jacques Audiard, whose Dheepan won the Palme d’Or in 2015, answers the question with Audiard’s usual urgency. It adds another twist beyond the film’s novel show tunes: a Mexican drug kingpin wants to swap genders while also going straight. Crime boss Manitas del Monte will become social activist Emilia Pérez, with both roles played by trans star Karla Sofia Gascón. Manitas hires change-seeking lawyer Rita Moro Castro, played to perfection by Zoë Saldaña, to arrange for the sex-swap surgery and also to relocate [her] wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their kids to Switzerland,” writes Peter Howell at the Toronto Star. “Nobody will likely buy the bizarro soundtrack album, but stellar performances make this quirky tale work.”

“If Emilia and Gascón’s performance is the heart of the film, Saldaña is easily the soul,” says Rachel Ho at Exclaim!. “Without question, Saldaña’s musical numbers are the most rousing. Singing, rapping and dancing, Saldaña’s presence in this film captivates and recalls her own introduction to Hollywood in 2000’s Center Stage. Combining this musicality with an unwavering dramatic performance that speaks to the film’s themes related to class and culture, Saldaña continues her quiet campaign as one of the most reliable actors working today.”

“An audacious and absurdly entertaining genre-hopping musical thriller set in Mexico, Emilia Pérez tells the tale of a drug cartel boss who enlists the talents of a junior lawyer, played by a Zoë Saldaña, to help him undergo gender-affirming surgery, then entangles her in his quest for redemption,” writes Liam Lacey at Original Cin. “Emilia Pérez has the quality of elevated pulp fiction, a chain of improbable and sensational events, serving as a moral allegory about violence and the hope of second chances. The elevation comes from Audiard’s confidently fluid direction and the assertive performance of its cast. In May, the Cannes jury led by its president, Barbie director Greta Gerwig, gave an ensemble acting award to the women in the film.”

“Emilia Pérez is a high flying act of filmmaking, which works best when operating at top speed,” says Marc Glassman at Classical FM. “For the first third of its more than two hour length, the film concentrates on the brilliant lawyer Rita Mora Castro, played stylishly by Zoe Saldana, whose humdrum existence is magically—if terrifyingly—changed when gang leader Manitas (Karla Sofia Gascón) chooses her to engineer his transformation from a ruthless macho killer to the woman he’s always wanted to become. Saldana’s warm performance brings us into her dilemma as an expert attorney and beautiful woman who just isn’t recognized until she’s offered the Faustian choice of helping a gangster out of his problem even though what he’s done to become immensely wealthy is morally reprehensible.”

“What’s unfortunate is Emilia Pérez fell to the same live-recording allure since virtually every movie musical Les Misérables — the gimmicky headline-bait of recording the actors’ songs live instead of pre-recording them in a studio,” says Jackson Weaver at CBC. “Like in Dear Evan Hansen, Cats, Joker: Folie à Deux and the upcoming Wicked, it’s a braggadocios choice that does literally nothing to improve the quality — while often harming the final orchestration, timing and sense of immersion the movie musical has to offer.”

“As Emilia, though, Gascón carries herself with similar authority as the former kingpin draws upon her past life to inform her present one. This performance is groundbreaking and you can feel it,” writes Pat Mullen at That Shelf. “It’s also simply a lively, vivacious, and fully lived-in performance that ranks atop the best turns by any actor this year. Emilia Pérez demands its actors to go all in and they deliver. The songs of Emilia Pérez, much like the tunes of fellow TIFF operetta The End, might not be showtunes that audiences can carry on the way home. But in fusing dazzling elements of camp with poetic tragedy, Audiard stages some truly thrilling sequences as characters enact and explore their inner desires through song.”

Hanky Panky (dir. Nick Roth and Lindsay Haun)

“While Hanky Panky revels in its absurdity, it doesn’t always hit the mark. Some snippets of performances stumble when taxed with performing exaggerated accents meant to be evil but that feel at odds with the film’s tone. But the movie’s strengths — Woody’s quick wit and the sheer oddity of the setup — carry it through these rough spots,” says Thom Ernst at Original Cin. “Helping over those rough spots is a damn fine comedic performance from Ashley Holliday Tavares who plays the quirky, pleasantly optimistic Diane. Tavares is a find and owns every moment she is on screen.”

Here (dir. Robert Zemeckis)

“Sadly, Here is yet another film that fits into Zemeckis’s long decline as a storyteller. As always, there are amazing visual effects, a trademark for the director…This time, he uses advanced AI techniques to face-swap and de-age Hanks and Wright, so they look as if they haven’t aged since making Forrest Gump. But technique isn’t enough to make the film work,” sighs Marc Glassman at Classical FM. There are two major problems with Here. The first is with the script…The second problem—and it’s serious—involves the attempt to replicate McGuire’s style in the film. What makes Here extraordinary as a graphic novel is that we see various eras in nearly every drawing, emphasizing how much can change in any location over time. Zemeckis often sets up scenes with a graphic indicating that we’re in a space that has been occupied before and will be again, but he can’t commit to the avant-garde style of McGuire.”

“Watching the movie Here is a bit like eating a Big Mac — it’s all fine and inoffensive in the moment, but you don’t want to look too closely or think about it too much afterward,” advises Liz Braun at Original Cin. “The film, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire, focuses on the same vista as time marches on. Here are dinosaurs on the land, and now there’s an Ice Age happening, then greenery slowly creeps back, foliage returns, birds turn up, Indigenous people appear and eventually, we see men building a house. Didn’t Tree of Life do this better? Never mind.”

“Voyeuristic. It stays grounded in the reality of everyday life, so nothing truly extraordinary happens, except for its original style /concept,” observes Anne Brodie at What She Said. “War, economic change, job loss, education gained, birth, death, and emotional flux indicate that we change and things aren’t all that dramatic. Its sweetly sad and easy viewing, i.e. not much drama except the primordial segments, a slide show in soft focus, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire. The ageing and de-aging FX are darned impressive.”

“For all its time hopping, effects laden scenarios; the visuals and production design in Here is really first rate and actually does offer a solid decent entry into this narrative experience trying to give us some optimism about the idea.  Sadly after that is where the film falls off the cliff,” says Dave Voigt at In the Seats. “Keeping the film in the same place would have worked for twenty or thirty minutes and would have allowed us to overlook the digital smoothing of our two leads in Tom Hanks and Robin Wright but it all came off as very repetitive and tedious.”

“The de-aging effects are impressive, a vast improvement over the unnerving fakery of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman a scant five years ago. But they still feel a little strange and suggest a perceptual breakthrough is still to come. The fixed camera conceit, meanwhile, quickly gets old, while the dinos-to-indoors historical sweep was more artistically depicted in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life,” says Peter Howell at the Toronto Star. Howell also speaks with stars Hanks and Wright to learn how there’s no place like home: “[E]very now and again I might go back to the same town I lived in, but it’s street corners and hills that mean more than the individual place,” Hanks tells Howell. “The thing that a house represents is very different for me. … I feel fortunate that I’m not burdened with that long, ongoing anchor with walls and dimensions and neighbourhoods. To me, it’s like a series of postcards.”

“Here also demonstrates the worst of Zemeckis, sentimentality made worse with lots of segments set during the Christmas yuletide season,” groans Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto.

“Zemeckis is less successful in some of the film’s smaller moments. That hummingbird looked particularly fake, and there are a couple of scenes in which digital creations were used in place of stunt people or practical effects, to unfortunate ends. Also the First Nations scenes, where the wardrobe looked a little too Hollywood for my liking,” writes Chris Knight at the National Post. “Quibbles aside, it’s a lively romp through the decades, and while an unmoving point of view might sound deadly dull, it’s actually enlivened by a technique borrowed from the graphic novel on which the film is loosely based.”

“Here often loses the thread when it leaves Richard and Margaret to, say, check in on the Indigenous people who previously inhabited their land and barely get speaking parts. The wholesome portrait of settler families on Indian land inadvertently makes Here a rosy celebration of colonialism,” writes Pat Mullen at That Shelf. “If there’s one thing Here proves with its Forrest Gump reunion, it’s that the all-American cheese of Zemeckis and Hanks is timeless.”

Juror #2 (dir. Clint Eastwood)

“After his last flop Cry Macho (made $16 million at a cost of $32 million), director Clint Eastwood at the age of 94 proves that he still has what it takes in a meticulously assembled part-courtroom drama that debates the balance of truth vs justice in a cautionary tale where a husband and father’s personal principle is at stake,” writes Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto.

“Juror #2 is intelligent entertainment. If it prompts you to think about the current political situation and issues of disinformation, manipulation or self-interest, well, that would be a bonus,” says Liz Braun at Original Cin. “Earlier this week, trade publications asked if Warner Bros. was burying Juror #2, as the studio is releasing the film in very few theatres. And they asked whether Juror #2 would be 94-year-old Clint Eastwood’s last movie. ‘Let’s hope not,’ is the answer to both questions.”

“Directed with Eastwood’s customary briskness and narrative drive, it’s a solid courtroom saga that speaks to an era where truth is increasingly up for debate and a flawed justice system seems more interested in politics than doing the right thing,” says Peter Howell at the Toronto Star, while raising concerns about the bizarre one-theatre release by Warner Bros. “If this is indeed Eastwood’s directorial swan song, and he hasn’t confirmed that it is, he can feel good about a job well done. He may be heading toward the century mark, but he’s still capable of making a movie worth watching.”

Let Go (dir. Josephine Bornebusch)

“Though Let Go will not make the top 10 list of the year, Let Go is still an entertaining insightful little film that should have the audience rooting for the female protagonist trying to keep her family as one,” observes Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto.

Levels (dir. Adam Stern 🇨🇦)

“It’s fine as far as it goes, but Levels sometimes seems to be trying for Matrix levels of action without that film’s budget. There’s an almost comical scene, for instance, in which Joe manipulates a touch screen to request weapons, opening a small cupboard and reminding us of Neo’s access to an infinite gun rack in the Wachowskis’ film,” writes Chris Knight at Original Cin. “I wanted to like Levels. It’s slick, and well-acted, and it features the likeable and underrated Canadian actor David Hewlett in a pivotal role. But there’s not enough under the hood.”

“It’s a great entry into a very thoughtful off shoot of the genre as we get roped into it all via some excellent execution in storytelling and some great performances,” says Dave Voigt at In the Seats with… as part of a conversation with star David Hewlett.

Martha (dir. R.J. Cutler)

“In her 100 books or so, numerous television series and specials, she shared her secrets, showing exactly how to make a cassoulet, a bed, a garden. God forbid you make a mistake, then noise of her temperament landed in the tabloids. When she was arrested and jailed for insider trading and lying to the FBI, they pounced,” writes Anne Brodie at What She Said. “Stewart had it all and lost it all, including Board positions on big corporate boards. Would she be able to bounce back?  R.J. Cutler’s spellbinding documentary simply called Martha tells the whole story, mostly via her own words.”

“Martha is an interesting documentary that is detailed enough to show the life and rise and fall of a celebrity while keeping up the entertaining values,” writes Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto.

Music by John Williams (dir. Laurent Bouzereau)

“[M]anages to sidestep becoming a hagiography,” observes Anne Brodie at What She Said. “The man deserves all the kudos. He revolutionised, and kept alive, orchestral scores for film. He still writes music with a pencil, doesn’t know how to use the computer to make it faster, maybe that important. Subjects talk about certain passages and the deep effects they have, their reflections on William’s unique place in cinema history and his massive contribution to the art of film.”

“With Bouzereau’s film, we are welcomed to share in the massively consequential works of this maestro, embracing in unapologetic ways the joy felt while Williams has managed time after time to craft melodies likely to be as immortal as cinema itself,” says Jason Gorber at POV Magazine. “Given how much he has contributed to the soundtrack of just about all of our lives, from the deeply moving to the rousing or simply stunningly beautiful, it’s a wonderful thing indeed, through the celebration of Music by John Williams, to be engaged in such uninterrupted fashion with an unabashed celebration of the man and his art.”

Our Dad, Danielle (dir. S.E. King)

“At best, the doc shows, as do many previous docs on the subject of trans, that a trans cannot live otherwise and that transitioning is the only option.  Danielle is shown as a success, but not without many trials and tribulations,” says Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto.

Spirit in the Blood (dir. Carly May Borgstrom 🇨🇦)

“Director Carly May Borgstrom’s film is unfortunately all over the place, touching but never going deeper into the many issues it brings up like growing up pains, teen isolation, bullying, religious cults, and family relationships,” writes Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto.

Time Cut (dir. Hannah Macpherson)

“Time Cut is clearly a teen film, much like Back to the Future, entertaining enough with a successful blend of two different genres the horror slasher and sci-fi time travel genres,” says Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “It keeps the violence of the horror portions at bay, concentrating instead on the fascination and wonder of time travel.”

File Under Miscellaneous

On In the Seats with…, Dave Voigt revisits the 25^th anniversary of Breakfast of Champions with writer/director Alan Rudolph: “25 years later, we as movie going audiences have evolved quite a bit and are now able to see the unhinged hilarity in this observational underbelly of American life that has been projected through the fun house mirror.  Right now, Breakfast of Champions is relevant as ever because back then this story was over the top and gonzo, but now it actually feels like a slice of Americana that many desperate and misunderstood people can relate too.”

At CBR, Victor Stiff revisits The Babadook on its tenth anniversary: “The Babadook holds up to repeat viewings better than many other films (especially in the horror genre) because it takes on greater meaning with additional viewings,” writes Stiff. “The film works as a nerve-wracking thriller, but what makes it special are the clever ways Kent weaves supernatural elements into the all-too-real horrors of a depleted mother battling against her inner demons. Kent forgoes the type of “cheap thrills” that don’t hold up to repeat viewings in favor of a nuanced character study with many thematic layers to peel back. While no one has ever confronted a Babadook in the real world, most people can relate to Amelia’s desperate attempts to retake control of her life.”

At That Shelf, Rachel West and Pat Mullen join other writers to offer some scary double bills for Halloween. West picks the classic The Tingler, followed by Matinee: “It is the perfect pairing. John Goodman stars as a Castle-like impresario who brings gimmicks to a screening of the fictional kitschy horror Mant! during the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Mullen, meanwhile, completely misunderstood the question and picked Silence of the Lambs and Rocky Horror: “The best monsters for Halloween night aren’t zombies, witches, or werewolves—they’re the ones who look like everyone else,” he says on Lambs.

A Festival of Festival Coverage

At Afro Toronto, Gilbert Seah previews Cinéfranco. Highlights include Léa Pool’s new film Hôtel Silence: “Slow but never dull, and beautifully shot in the war-torn country and stark wintry Canadian landscape, Pool’s film is matched by an extraordinary performance by Sébastien Ricard as the troubled man, Jean. The only complaint is that in the unknown country, everyone speaks perfect French.”

On the TFCA blog, Marriska Fernandes, Rachel Ho, Chris Knight, and Pat Mullen report from the Windsor International Film Festival. Highlights include easygoing vibes, Universal Language, and cheddar pickle popcorn. Meanwhile, Fernandes shares highlights from the WIFF Prize in Canadian Film competition on the TFCA blog and Pat Mullen does the same at That Shelf.