TIFF Opens with an Overhead Smash
Movies: #TIFF17
Festival's opening movie, Borg/McEnroe captures, an epic battle at Wimbledon and the two contrasting personalities — the emotional American and the cool Swede — who fought it out
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — A magazine called Screen has a special edition at the Toronto film festival, and it runs capsule reviews of some of the movies showing that day. Wednesday’s edition included a review of Miracle, a Lithuania/Bulgaria/Poland co-production, in which “the owner of a struggling post-Soviet pig farm finds a surprising benefactor in a visiting American investor, whose ‘good’ intentions upend the gentle rhythms of small-town life.” And that’s the film festival for you: it might be a warm and wonderful comedy, or it could be what you might later describe as the best Lithuania/Bulgaria/Poland co-production of the month. You can’t tell without actually going to watch it, and who has time for that? As it happens, I was reading this while seated next to ...
Jay Stone’s Top TIFF Picks for 2017
Movies: #TIFF17
The Toronto International Film Festival hits middle-age with an entourage of famous faces and a long history of cinematic conquests that seems destined to continue with a slate of intriguing titles from the world's best filmmakers
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — The Toronto film festival turns 42 this year, which is a dangerous age: if it was a man, it would probably buy a fancy red sports car that was entirely unsuitable to Canada’s roads or its climate and leave its perfectly serviceable wife for a doctoral student — studying something impractical, one imagines, having to do with postmodern cultural analysis — young enough to be its daughter. The festival hasn’t exactly done that, although one notes that it has lost some of its older friends — 81-year-old auteur Woody Allen, for instance, is taking his new film Wonder Wheel to the New York festival, bypassing Toronto — in favour of younger, more with-it voices. And while festival director Piers Handling ...
Movie review: A Ghost Story is haunting
Movie Review: A Ghost Story
This meditation on grief, loss and time is told in a simple but effective story in which the dead spirit is represented by a sheet with two eye holes
The Hero celebrates Sam Elliott
Movie Review: The Hero
An aging cowboy actor looks for a final big role — and a chance to redeem his personal failures — in a drama that has many parallels with its memorable star
Paris Can Wait can wait
Movie Review: Paris Can Wait
A French roue takes his friend's wife on a flirtatious motor trip in this love letter to food, charming villages and other, wiser films about the same subject
The Lovers finds passion in abandonment
Movie Review: The Lovers
In this bleak and tender view of relationships, a married couple carrying on affairs with other people find a renewed interest in one another
Olli Maki answers the bell
Movie Review: The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki
Part boxing movie and part love story, this Finnish film tells the story of a true Scandinavian hero, a prizefighter who fought for a title he didn't really seem to want
Movie review: The horrifying Hounds of Love
In this terrifying Australian film, schoolgirls are abducted and murdered by a man and woman living out a sick fantasy. It's difficult to watch, but its themes are haunting
