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The Assessment | 2024 Toronto Intl. Film Festival Review

The Assessment | 2024 Toronto Intl. Film Festival Review

The Parent Trap: Elizabeth Olsen Tries Not to Break In Fleur Fortuné’s Debut The Assessment

The one thing you can count as the world gets worse is a government bureaucracy aimed at making life even more difficult. That’s the general premise of The Assessment, a heady sci-fi dramedy in which even the upper echelon of the 1% don’t find sanctuary from the unseen hand around their necks. The feature debut by music video director Fleur Fortuné is, expectedly, not short on style, but there is only so much the filmmaker can do to hold back a script that is so overstuffed with ideas it eventually overwhelms the carefully calibrated timbre of the picture.… Read the rest

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2024 TIFF Exclusive: Poster One-Sheet for Ana Endara’s ‘Beloved Tropic’ (Querido Trópico)

2024 TIFF Exclusive: Poster One-Sheet for Ana Endara’s ‘Beloved Tropic’ (Querido Trópico)

This marks the world premiere week for Panama City-based Ana Endara‘s fiction feature debut at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival (Centerpiece programme selection) with it’s European premiere set for San Sebastian next week. After cutting her teeth in the docu format, Endara digs into themes of isolation, connection and companionship with Beloved Tropic (aka Querido Trópico). Paulina García and Jenny Navarrete share the top-billing in the drama.

Set in Panama City and starring acclaimed Chilean actress Paulina García (Gloria), Querido Trópico explores the evolving relationship between two dissimilar lonely souls who form a touching and unexpected bond. Ana María (played by Jenny Navarrete, The Other Son) is a Colombian immigrant facing status and financial challenges while harboring a secret.Read the rest

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Exclusive Clip: A Different Kind of Staycation in Elena Manrique’s ‘Fin De Fiesta’ (The Party’s Over) – TIFF 2024

Exclusive Clip: A Different Kind of Staycation in Elena Manrique’s ‘Fin De Fiesta’ (The Party’s Over) – TIFF 2024

After cutting her teeth for just under two decades with films such as The Orphanage (2007), Transsiberian (2008) and Cell 211 (2009), Spanish film producer Elena Manrique moved into the directors’ chair last year embarking on her directorial debut in Fin De Fiesta (The Party’s Over) — at 2024 Toronto Intl. Film Festival selection in the Discovery programme. Before concluding its three public screening showcase at the festival we are pleased to premiere an exclusive clip for the film produced by Sandra Hermida, Belén Atienza, Olmo Figueredo González-Quevedo, Hans Everaert and Carlos Rosado Sibón.

Having arrived illegally in Spain, young Senegalese immigrant Bilal is pursued by the police.Read the rest

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Bring Them Down | 2024 Toronto Intl. Film Festival Review

Bring Them Down | 2024 Toronto Intl. Film Festival Review

Everybody Hurts: All Pain and No Gain in Christopher Andrews’ Debut Bring Them Down

If misery loves company, then Bring Them Down is a party. The feature debut by Christopher Andrews is set in a dour and desolate vision of rural Ireland, and feels like the cinematic equivalent of walking through a foggy bog with mud up to your knees. Yet for all the atmosphere, captured by the sturdy cinematography of Nick Cooke, there’s very little of dramatic note to make this trek through the sins of fathers and sons worthwhile.

After a dramatic, backstory-establishing car crash opens the picture, the film settles into a loose Rashomon-like structure that pivots around the events that follow.… Read the rest

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Nightbitch | 2024 Toronto Intl. Film Festival Review

Nightbitch | 2024 Toronto Intl. Film Festival Review

All About My Mother: Amy Adams Goes to the Dogs In Marielle Heller’s Barking Mad Dramedy

Marielle Heller Nightbitch Review“Motherhood is fucking brutal,” Amy Adams’ unnamed Mother seethes in Nightbitch. Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yodel’s novel is a fiery challenge of society’s traditional, patriarchal notions of motherhood….until it isn’t. Not nearly as daring or outrageous as it aspires to be, the well balanced mix of drama, comedy, and fantasy doesn’t so much to upset the status quo as find a way to make sense of it. But if that very structure for raising a family makes you literally want to go to the dogs, if raising kids makes you feel erased as a person, why not create your own framework for happiness?… Read the rest

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Hard Truths | 2024 Toronto Intl. Film Festival Review

Hard Truths | 2024 Toronto Intl. Film Festival Review

Take A Chance On Love: Mike Leigh Delivers A Late Career Powerhouse

Mike Leigh Hard Truths ReviewYou can’t help but wonder if Mike Leigh is making a sly joke by naming Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s ferociously angry, deeply bitter, anxiety-ridden, and devastatingly depressed character Pansy Deacon. A priestly flower, she isn’t. But Hard Truths, a late career stunner from Leigh, plants Pansy and her impenetrable exterior in tough, rich soil, and patiently brings her into miraculous bloom.

A tortured tornado, Pansy spews acidic invective to anyone in her radius, family and strangers alike. Friends would endure the same if she had any. Everyone is wearing too much makeup, disgracing themselves by what they wear, acting shamefully, wasting energy, and most crucially, not living up to the expectations Pansy has for them.… Read the rest

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2024 TIFF Exclusive: Poster One-Sheet for César Augusto Acevedo’s ‘Horizonte’

2024 TIFF Exclusive: Poster One-Sheet for César Augusto Acevedo’s ‘Horizonte’

Today marks the world premiere of Colombian filmmaker César Augusto Acevedo’s sophomore feature at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival (Discovery section selection). Nearly a decade after making his debut with Land and Shade in 2015 — a film that won the prestigious Caméra d’Or at Cannes for Best First Feature—Acevedo returns with Horizonte. We have the poster exclusive.

Separated in life due to violence, Basilio and his mother Inés realize that their reunion is only possible because they are now dead. However, finding no trace of the missing father in this place, they decide to search for him, embarking on a physical and spiritual journey through a landscape completely ravaged by war: with destroyed towns, abandoned fields, rivers turned into cemeteries, and countless stories of desolation and death.Read the rest

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Bonjour Tristesse | 2024 Toronto Intl. Film Festival Review

Bonjour Tristesse | 2024 Toronto Intl. Film Festival Review

Lifestyles of the Rich, Conflicted & Coddled: Dull Vacation in the South of France for Debut

Ah, summer in the south of France. The cerulean waves of the Baie de Cassis, bowls overflowing with strawberries, and warm evening breezes swimming like an embrace as wine turns your lips red. It sounds like a dream, a perfect setting in one of the most beautiful places on Earth to unwind. Unless, you’re one of the wealthy, privileged people in the latest adaptation of Francois Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse. Committed to spending the season projecting curdled resentment and lashing out with passive-aggressive iciness, Durga Chew-Bose’s film is an unpleasant time spent with even more unpleasant people.… Read the rest

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Love (Kjærlighet) | 2024 Venice Film Festival Review

Love (Kjærlighet) | 2024 Venice Film Festival Review

Ain’t Nothin’ But Sex Misspelled: Haugerud Continues Quiet, Earnest Talking Cure Trilogy

Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud continues his sexuality-themed film trilogy (Sex/Dreams/Love) in Love, following the first installment, Sex, which premiered earlier this year at the Berlin International Film Festival. While the third segment, Dreams, has yet to be released, it’s clear the connective tissue is theme rather than character. Employing the same sense of endearing, blunt loquaciousness which defined the earlier chapter, there’s an even greater level of profundity with a second narrative paralleling and juxtaposing the sexual experiences and approaches of two main characters, a heterosexual female urologist and her colleague, a gay male nurse.… Read the rest

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Hoard | Review

Hoard | Review

M is for the Many Things You Gave Me: Grief Becomes the Remedy in Carmoon’s Debut

Luna Carmoon Hoard Movie Review“Time heals all old pain, while it creates new ones,” states a Hebrew proverb, implying the distance from grief may court closure while carving out its own rippling chasm of hurt in the inevitable process. The constricting power of grief is at the center of Hoard, the peculiar debut from director Luna Carmoon. In essence a tale about a dysfunctional mother-daughter bond defined by a parent’s hoarding disorder, Carmoon’s psychological portrait of how the past can suddenly overwhelm the present is familiar but often unpredictable with its trajectory toward unavoidable reckoning for its lead protagonist.… Read the rest

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