Toronto
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Toronto 2015: ‘Sunset Song’ review
★★★☆☆ Earth is the fundamental element of Terence Davis’ sumptuous Sunset Song (2015), a lyrical adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel. Like an elegant love letter to the Scottish soil and the endurance of the people it sired, it makes full use of its anamorphic 65mm format with Michael McDonough’s stunning landscape compositions. Within…
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Toronto 2015: ‘Eva Doesn’t Sleep’ review
★★★★☆ The fate of Eva Perón’s body will surely go down as one of the more bizarre footnotes in history. Having been displayed to the public for two years while a monument was being built, Juan Perón was overthrown before she could be buried and the body went missing for over sixteen years. Its whereabouts…
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Toronto 2015: ‘Bang Gang’ review
★★★☆☆ There are things both decidedly fresh and decidedly rote about Eva Husson’s hot-under-the-collar debut feature, Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) (2015). The premise and aesthetic offer nothing decidedly innovative, but this is an intimate and tactile take on the familiar sexual awakening of a group of white middle-class teens with too much time…
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Toronto 2015: ‘Yakuza Apocalypse’ review
★★☆☆☆ Where on Earth do you start with Takashi Miike’s latest offering Yakuza Apocalypse (2015)? Perhaps the best place is with two words that will immediately signal to many people whether or this a film that they might enjoy – with emphasis on the word ‘might’. Those words are ‘Yakuza Vampire’ and this symphony of…
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Toronto 2015: ‘High-Rise’ review
★★★☆☆ “It takes a lot of determination to row against the current,” our polished protagonist Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) is informed upon his arrival in the soaring setting of Ben Wheatley’s J.G. Ballard adaptation, High-Rise (2015). Having moved into an apartment on the 25th floor, he’s surveying the scene at a 40th floor party, realising…
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Toronto 2015: ‘Koza’ review
★★★☆☆ The distant memory of former glories fuels the tragicomedy of Ivan Ostrochovský’s fiction feature debut, Koza (2015). The title is the Slovak for ‘goat’ and was the nickname of protagonist Peter Baláž (himself), a boxer who represented his country at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. A pretty emotionally distant affair, Koza in some ways…
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Toronto 2015: ‘Hardcore’ review
★★☆☆☆ If there’s something that can be said of Russian director Ilya Naishuller’s Midnight Madness violence-fest Hardcore (2015) it’s that you’re unlikely to see anything else like it, which deserves to be celebrated in and of itself. On the downside, its central gimmick does wear thin – and begin to grate on the eyes –…
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Toronto 2015: ‘French Blood’ review
★★★★☆ As the name would suggest, Toronto’s Platform strand offers up-and-coming filmmakers a springboard from which to showcase their work on the world stage. The singularly named writer-director Diastème brings his devastating second feature French Blood (2015) to the festival from his native France, a country he considers overwhelmed by hatred and violence. A self-proclaimed…
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Toronto 2015: ‘The Event’ review
★★★★☆ With Maidan (2014), Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa made a stunning document of recent events, giving the sensation that history was being freshly minted and world-changing events taking place amidst the stink of burning tires and the febrile excitement of new hope. Although The Event (2015) is set in Russia and relates to a moment…
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Toronto 2015: ‘The Witch’ review
★★★★☆ Old hags, horned deceivers and scary forests have all been done to death and it’s easy to see why audiences might tire of revisiting the same old tropes in new horror. ‘Twould be best to banish such doubts where Robert Eggers’ brooding debut feature and Sundance hit The Witch (2015) is concerned, however. It…