December 24, 2024

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

Reminder: Applications close soon for the Telefilm Canada Emerging Critic Award!

In Release this Week

Babygirl (dir. Halina Reijn)

At The Globe and Mail, Johanna Schneller speaks with Babygirl director Halina Reijn about crafting her provocative drama with Nicole Kidman. “Being a woman now feels impossible,” she says. “I find motherhood very extreme. Whether you have children or not, you can never do it right. And the pressure of being a perfect mother and having a perfect career is insane. We think we have to be perfect mothers, spouses, workers, daughters, sisters. We forget to ask, ‘What do we want?’ We completely forget that. And we wonder, ‘Is it possible for me to love and accept all parts of myself, not just the ones I present to the world?’ And the movie is not answering any questions.”

“Babygirl appears to take a turn toward thriller turf when Samuel shows up unannounced at Romy’s country house, where she spends her weekends with her husband and daughters. There’s a moment when you wonder if the movie is going to veer into Fatal Attraction territory, but no such storytelling luck. Romy scolds Samuel for coming to the country house and says, ‘My family is everything to me, please don’t ever do that again,’” says Liz Braun at Original Cin. “It’s been made obvious that risk and danger are an essential part of her kink, but apparently she draws the line somewhere … except that in what follows she appears ready to jettison her marriage, her children and her career. It’s stupid, it’s insulting and it’s infuriating.”

“Babygirl has all the trappings of a stylish throwback thriller, but the passion of a romance and flashes of black comedy, shifting tones without ever seeming messy or aimless. Like many films of this ilk, some of the moral handwringing over the relationship and the near misses of the couple being discovered become repetitive, but Reijn has carefully considered these characters without ever fully spelling out what makes them tick to the audience,” says Andrew Parker at The Gate. “Romy and Samuel appear like obvious people to understand, and both have an obsession with power and control, but Babygirl crafts a poignant character study about two people coming into their own sexually for the first time in their lives.”

“Writer Director Halina Reijn pulls no punches in sex scenes that seem real, as Kidman’s character tries to keep the affair secret and protect her seniority. Her daughter tells her she “looks like a fish’, artificial, mocking her need to hold back time,” adds Anne Brodie at What She Said. “Because inside she feels inadequate and is jealous when he dates her daughter while keeping her on a leash. He humiliates her and she obeys, so the woman with all the power and wealth and family still doesn’t feel worthy and craves punishment.  I dunno, doesn’t seem Christmas movie but there it is.”

Calling it “best Christmas movie since Eyes Wide Shut,” Pat Mullen at That Shelf speaks with Babygirl star Nicole Kidman about her brave performance. “The journey of Romy is that she’s performed her whole life. She performs being the perfect mother, the perfect wife, the CEO—all of the aspects of her,” says Kidman. “That push-pull is what was exciting…The self-sabotaging and the anger at herself, and the humiliation and then the thrill, the excitement— I think that’s what made it such a roller coaster.”

Better Man (dir. Michael Gracey)

“Nothing too out of the ordinary about that, as the script for Better Man sticks to the basics. But the key difference here is in the way Williams and Gracey choose to depict the singer on screen. Williams sees himself as a trained monkey, full of unbridled id, hedonism, and hubris, and as such, the character has a talking, singing, and dancing ape as his avatar,” notes Andrew Parker at The Gate. “It’s a tandem effort between Williams, who provides the voice and singing chops, and actor Jonno Davies, who brings the physicality. It’s an odd and sometimes surreal choice to watch every human actor around Williams ignoring the fact that they’re interacting with an ape, but instead of distancing the viewer, the impact of this choice is oddly humanizing.”

The Brutalist (dir. Brady Corbet)

***TFCA Awards Nominee: Best Picture, Best Actor***

“The Brutalist is an epic film, with a lot of ideas to ponder.  But at its core, the film is about a man with PTSD, damaged physically, mentally and emotionally, and yet quietly aiming to get back to being a normal human being,” writes Karen Gordon at Original Cin. “When Erzsébet and László are reunited, it’s been a decade apart. A decade of suppressed longing, of surviving day to day is the easy part. Finding their way to each other again in intimacy is a different matter.  Surviving broken bodies, broken spirits isn’t at the center of the narrative, but it may be the spiritual core of The Brutalist.”

“The film demands a lot from its audience as it delves head first into the immigrant experience, antisemitism, racism, addiction, sexual exploitation, marital discord, cultural identity, class snobbery and art vs. commerce. Not all of it makes dramatic or narrative sense, particularly during the unsteady second half when Erzsébet and Zsófia return to the story. There’s also at least one WTF moment that should have been reconsidered. But enough registers to make this one of the year’s must-see films,” writes Peter Howell at the Toronto Star. “What do we ultimately make of Tóth’s epic struggles? An answer comes in the epilogue, set at the 1980 Venice Biennale, the first to salute architects, where this uncompromising man’s raison d’être is meaningfully stated: ‘It is the destination, not the journey.’”

“A film made with the loftiest of intentions, The Brutalist is a rarity these days: a big budget art house epic made with great visuals, a superb cast, and a dramatic score. It deals with the grandest of contemporary themes—the creation of meaningful art in the era after the Holocaust,” says Marc Glassman at Classical FM. “The Brutalist is an intense film, which is modernist in its conception and philosophy. László Tóth was a student at the Bauhaus school and a renowned success in Hungary before the War intervened. Without talking about it, László attempts to deal with the tragedies in his life—the deaths of many relatives, the illnesses of his wife and niece—through the creation of clean, brilliant, apparently affectless, buildings that reject the past and embrace an uncluttered future.”

“The Brutalist is a movie of big ideas constructed inside the transformative majesty of epic-scaled cinema. You can try to describe it, but nothing can match the power of simply opening your eyes,” says Barry Hertz at The Globe and Mail. “With composer Daniel Blumberg’s thunderous score swelling and cinematographer Lol Crawley’s camera tilting and swirling, Corbet gets to play the unabashedly proud maximalist, sweeping his audience out of the dark and into the bright, blistering, blinding light. Welcome to the West.” Hertz also speaks with Corbet about crafting this “monumental” film: “The characters were written to their circumstance. It was predominantly Central and Eastern European Jews that studied at the Bauhaus, so these characters were always Jewish because it was historically accurate,” says Corbet. “I feel a responsibility to getting all of my characters right.”

“Just like a biopic. The film traces the rise and fall and rise again of an individual,” says Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “The film also shows that the American Dream is almost always distorted by the efforts to achieve it. Though long, The Brutalist is eloquent storytelling, the over 3-hour running time unfelt for the most time.”

At That Shelf, Pat Mullen chats with Adrien Brody about his epic performance and imbuing László Tóth with his relationship to materials and physicals spaces. “The actual construction of this institute, this brutalist structure that László creates, is representative of his own self and past traumas and how that post-war psychology has affected post-war architecture and how they’re interrelated,” says Brody. “This walled shell and fortress-like structure with this hollow expansive interior very much speaks to where he ends up in a lot of ways, yet with this spiritual high ceilings and the ability to commune with a higher power and hope,” says Brody. “I think it’s quite beautiful and the relationship is very intimate. I think the journey of an architect to pour everything into it—the foundation of his own struggles and what he’s overcome—is the foundation to build such unique monuments like that. It’s one and the same. He’s part of all the creation of it from the ground up.”

A Complete Unknown (dir. James Mangold)

“Chalamet, who used the pandemic years to prepare for this performance, achieves something close to magic with the sound. Doing all his own singing and guitar- and harmonica-playing — the film’s other actors are also adept — he hits all the right notes, enhancing musical memories rather than trampling them,” notes Peter Howell at the Toronto Star. “The picture, with its slightly desaturated colours, looks true to the 1960s, with credit due to cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, production designer François Audouy and costume designer Arianne Phillips. Chalamet’s transformation into the legendary musician is conveyed mainly through sunglasses, a leather jacket and bird’s nest hair; a prosthetic nose also subtly assists.”

“As Dylan was famously private, I’m not sure if the film is factual, but it is certainly a showcase for his important legacy of songs,” writes Anne Brodie at What She Said. “Attention is paid to the news and crises of the day, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and set him in a time of great change.  The drama ramps up in the final chapters when Dylan brings out his electric guitar. You know the rest but this portion of the film is pretty darned riveting.”

“Given Mangold’s recent efforts in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, there’s reason to assume the lack of depth is simply due to missed opportunity. But beneath the formula-heavy structure, A Complete Unknown manages to sidestep many of the stereotypes that hamstring the genre, exactly by keeping its Dylan shallow,” says Jackson Weaver at CBC. “From August Rush to this year’s Bob Marley: One Love, movies about modern musicians tend to descend into hero worship. The primary reason A Complete Unknown avoids this is the irreverence it displays toward the character at its centre. Dylan is depicted as something of a narcissist — instead of the martyred Jesus-like depiction so often seen in the genre, he devolves from a mysterious, gifted troubadour into a self-obsessed adolescent.”

“Timothée Chalamet who also produced the film is nothing short of marvellous in the role of Bob Dylan,” notes Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “He eases in the role of the singer-songwriter with the greatest of ease.  Hi acting does not look false or forced unlike performances like Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein or the more recent Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in Maria.”

“Depending on what you want from A Complete Unknown, director Mangold’s film will only get things half right, despite the fact that the film works well as a whole,” notes Andrew Parker at The Gate. “The first half speaks to Dylan’s ethereal, mysterious nature rather well. The second half is a more standard hagiographic biography about everyone’s attempts to demystify Dylan’s sticky personality. It’s uneven, and at points a bit obvious, but such is the difficulty of weaving a story around such a bristly and prickly figurehead.”

“James Mangold has made a film that lovingly recreates the atmosphere of 1960s Greenwich Village: the crowded streets filled with vendors and shops, the black and white TVs in tiny apartments set to watch terrifying events of the Cold War, the folk clubs with their checkerboard table cloth covers, wine bottles, espresso coffees and candle lights,” notes Marc Glassman at Classical FM. “It’s there that Dylan created his legendary career and where this film beautifully memorializes him.”

“The film doesn’t attempt to delve into his creative process. But it does look at the forces around him,” says Karen Gordon at Original Cin. “It stands back and looks at him from a bit of a distance, as an artist who is at a transition point in American history. He pulls on the history of folk music, and responds to the times, morphing the music and the approach to lyrics and creating a new style of music, in spite of opposition.  This was a changing America, from the Cold War to the Kennedy assassination, the folk music era, a new generation and the things that it embraced: peace movement, civil rights, environmentalism, the beginnings of the women’s movement.”

“Making a Dylan movie like A Complete Unknown sounds as daunting and foolhardy a task as re-imagining Rashômon with a linear narrative from one perspective. But it works just beautifully,” says Pat Mullen at That Shelf. “It’s a solid slice of classical Hollywood cinema with a truly transformative performance by Timothée Chalamet that just might convince anyone feeling cynical towards these award season staples.”

The Fire Inside (dir. Rachel Morrison)

“Destiny gives a star-making turn as the fierce boxer, displaying the mixture of toughness and vulnerability that makes the athlete so endearing,” writes Courtney Small at That Shelf. “Conveying the challenges and expectations laid on the teenager, the actress brings a sense of gravitas to the role while always keeping the boxer’s humanity at the forefront. Destiny’s natural charisma matches perfectly with the subtle, but effective, turn by Tyree Henry. What makes his work as Crutchfield so engaging is that the coach’s passion and optimism are always present even when the character is jumping without a parachute.”

“The Fire Inside starts off as a run-of-the-mill inspirational tale before morphing into something a lot more satisfyingly dramatic and pointed,” says Andrew Parker at The Gate. “The first feature directorial effort from Rachel Morrison (the first female cinematographer to ever be nominated for an Oscar in such a male dominated category), The Fire Inside gives the audience what they traditionally want in a sports movie before forcing them to question what all of it could mean in the long term and the price of continued success. It’s a crafty approach that uses worn out tropes to lure the viewer into a project with a lot more on its mind than making the viewer feel inspired. In fact, Morrison kinda wants the viewer to feel bad by the time it has wrapped up.”

Nosferatu (dir. Robert Eggers)

“Nosferatu is at its best in the early scenes where Thomas encounters Orlock’s castle, and the dread is palpable. Eggers began his career as a production designer; he conveys Orlock’s evil in the decaying castle. Skarsgård’s vampire is a deeply horrifying presence. This is most effective when seen on the big screen,” observes Karen Gordon at Original Cin. “The film’s weaknesses happen in the latter part of the film, back in Ellen and Thomas’s hometown, where things get repetitive, and momentum is lost. As Ellen goes from fit to fit, and the movie seems to slow down, it feels static. Dafoe’s professor becomes more eccentric and sometimes seems a little too at odds with the tone of the film. It drains the film of its horror at some points, instead of enhancing it.”

“Director Eggers proves himself in total control of his movie,” adds Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “Seeing the scares taut and the characters believable and important enough for the audience to care for.”

“A brilliantly subversive take on Bram Stoker’s horror vampire classic and crowd pleaser Dracula, Nosferatu will scare the bejaysus out of you.  Master of eerie Robert Eggers has taken the tale to new heights of eroticism, despair and terror while exploring the reality of a woman obsessed with her captor. Eggers, fuelled by his disciplined and intricate reconstruction of historic primitivism has crafted a work of art, in this well constructed, intense and monumental experience,” writes Anne Brodie at What She Said. “The ultiimate jaw dropping anti-Christmas movie experience.”

“In a nod to his own Murnau connection, the 2000 horror homage Shadow of the Vampire, Willem Dafoe swaggers onto the scene as Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz, vampire hunter extraordinaire. In a film titled Dracula, this character would surely be called Van Helsing,” says Peter Howell at the Toronto Star. “With a pipe long enough to double as a walking stick and a penchant for understatement that would make a mortician proud, Von Franz proves that sometimes the best way to fight the undead is with deadpan humour: ‘The night demon has supped of your good wife’s blood,’ he calmly tells Thomas, although no chuckle is forthcoming.”

Talk of the Town

On the TFCA blog, Marriska Fernandes speaks with TFCA Award winner RaMell Ross about adapting Nickel Boys and keeping the violence offscreen. “There’s something about the relationship between the camera and people in which it fundamentally intensifies objectification,” says Ross. “I’m always unsure of the violence that’s on screen, specifically, if it’s a drama and it’s supposed to be getting at something real, like, ‘Who exactly is it for?’ Is it for the audience to see? Can you be overexposed to it? Can it be too much? Can it be too little? What happens when you don’t see a plethora of images and experiences for a certain population, but you see the violence that cultures and other cultures have levied on them? What are those consequences? It is a question I ask myself. And so in this film, Joslyn Barnes, who’s the co-writer, and I decided with the other producers to not show violence because of the way it’s almost integrated in Black skin. You look at Black people and it’s a narrative that’s held.”

At That Shelf, Pat Mullen chats with Alice Rohrwacher and JR about their MUBI short An Urban Allegory, which reimagines Plato’s myth of the cave. “Maybe it’s everywhere where humans can’t move their heads,” says Rohrwacher. “In the allegory of the cave, [Plato] imagined humanity stuck in a cave with chains that made it impossible for them to move their heads, so they just look in front of themselves. They see shadows and they think this is reality. But the cave of Plato can be everywhere where there is a man who thinks, ‘I’m right: this is the only possibility. This is the reality. It’s just in front of me.’”