NOW_BUZZ_TIFF_2013-08-29 by NOW Magazine

F I L M F E S T I VA L

PREVIEW ISSUE

NOW Magazine Bonus Section

2013 IVAL FILM FEST

SPECIAL

25 ESSENTIAL REVIEWS

CARA GEE AND TIFF’s NEXT BIG THINGS

WHERE THE STARS CHOW DOWN

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contents EXPERIENCE TORONTO TRANSFORMED

BY ARTISTS OCTOBER 5 SUNSET TO SUNRISE

4 TIFF HITS AND MISSES

The Animal Project, The Great Beauty, Siddharth – just a few of the must-sees we tip among 25-plus TIFF reviews PLUS The Midnight Madness program turns 25 and has a dynamite slate to celebrate the occasion

8 RISING STAR

Cara Gee shifts from stage to screen with stunning ease in Empire Of Dirt

20 RED CARPET RED’Y Red is the go-to colour for stars these days, and you too can own some glitzy red garb

24 STARS EAT HERE

If you’re deep into starwatching, we’ve got tips on the restos where they like to hang out

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* Cover photo of Keira Knightley by KATHRYN GAITENS at TIFF 2012 MICHAEL HOLLETT EDITOR/PUBLISHER ALICE KLEIN EDITOR/CEO PAM STEPHEN GENERAL MANAGER PUBLISHED BY NOW COMMUNICATIONS INC 189 CHURCH STREET, TORONTO, ON., M5B 1Y7 TELEPHONE 416-364-1300 E-MAIL advertising@nowtoronto.com ONLINE nowtoronto.com NOW is Toronto’s weekly news and entertainment voice, published every Thursday. Entire contents are © 2013 by NOW Communications Inc. NOW and NOW Magazine and the NOW design are protected through trademark registration.

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The eSSeNTIAL

ReVIeWS

Ticket and venue info Toronto International Film Festival September 5-15 416-599-TIFF tiff.net FESTIVAL THEATRES BLOOR HOT DOCS CINEMA (506 Bloor West) GLENN GOULD STUDIO (250 Front West) ISABEL BADER (93 Charles West) JACKMAN HALL (AGO, 317 Dundas West) PRINCESS OF WALES THEATRE (300 King West) ROY THOMSON HALL (60 Simcoe) RYERSON THEATRE (43 Gerrard East) SCOTIABANK THEATRE (259 Richmond West) TIFF BELL LIGHTBOX (350 King West) VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN) (189 Yonge) WINTER GARDEN (189 Yonge)

HOW TO BUY TICKETS Packages sold out. Single tickets $23.50, premium tickets $45 (under 25 $17$28.25, seniors $20.25$37.50). Go online for details.

TICKETS Only lovers left alive

TIFF must-sees and must-misses

SAME-DAY TICKETS

There’s still a week before TIFF 2013 begins, but here’s a sneak peek at some of the big-buzz flicks, awardsbound entries, quiet sleepers... and a few you should probably skip. Plus, NOW’s critics reveal what’s on their personal gotta-see lists. And check out tons more in next week’s issue along with news, reviews and tweets at nowtoronto.com/tiff. By NORMAN WILNER, SUSAN G. COLE, GLENN SUMI, JOHN SEMLEY, RADHEYAN SIMONPILLAI and PAUL ENNIS

Thu, Sep 5 A STORY OF ChILDReN AND FILM DOC D: Mark Cousins. United Kingdom. 101 min. Sep 5, 6 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 2; Sep 6, 9 am Jackman Hall (AGO); Sep 15, 2:45 pm Scotiabank 11 Rating: NNN

Cousins follows his epic documentary The Story Of Film: An Odyssey with a smaller, more intimate project exploring the depiction of children in motion pictures from the silent era to the present day. Using home-video

footage of his young niece and nephew at play as a contrast, Cousins flips through dozens of clips from a century of cinema to show how filmmakers have shaped the purer, less filtered performances of child actors for the screen. It’s an intellectual exercise more than an emotional one, and Cousins’s enthusiasm for squeezing in just one more example of a given reaction means he winds up repeating his points more than once. But those points are pretty compelling, and, if

nothing else, you’ll be introduced to two or three movies you’d otherwise NW never have discovered.

ONLY LOVeRS LeFT ALIVe SP D: Jim Jarmusch w/ Tom Hiddleston, Tilda Swinton. U.S. 123 min. Sep 5, 9 pm Ryerson; Sep 7, 12:15 pm Bloor Hot Docs Cinema Rating: NNNN

Powered by droning guitars and a heroin-chic cinematic palette, Jarmusch’s tale of a vampire couple (Swinton, Hiddleston) meeting up in decaying Detroit has the texture and vibe of every Velvet Underground

Stay connected to TIFF all festival long

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song ever recorded – but of course that’s also its central metaphor. Hiddleston’s Adam lives like a recluse in a shabby Motown manse, making music he swears he’ll never release; Swinton’s Eve is his fashion plate partner, just back from hanging out in Tangiers with a guy she calls Kit Marlowe (John Hurt). They pick up deliveries of “the good stuff” and swan around in elegant decadence until Eve’s wild-child sister (Mia Wasikowska) gets in from L.A. and fucks up their perfect ennui. continued on page 6

MORE ONLINE For day-by-day TIFF coverage, with new reviews, interviews, photos, video and complete schedule, go to nowtoronto.com/tiff.

Single tickets go on sale Saturday (September 1) online, by phone or at the festival box office (Reitman Square, 350 King West, and Metro Centre, concourse level, 225 King West). Limit of four tickets per screening per account.

If available, these can be purchased on the day of the screening online, by phone or at the festival box office (from 7 am). Theatre box offices open one hour before the first screening of the day.

RUSH TICKETS When available, they go on sale 10 minutes before the screening starts, for the first non-ticket-holders in line.

CODe BReAKeR CTC City To City CWC Contemporary World Cinema DISC Discovery DOC TIFF Docs GALA Gala Presentation KID TIFF Kids MAST Masters MAV Mavericks MM Midnight Madness SP Special Presentations VAN Vanguard

= Critic’s Pick nnnnn = Best of the fest nnnn = Excellent nnn = Entertaining nn = Snore n = Who programs this crap?

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5 FILMS I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE

SUSAN G. COLE

this year’s tiFF features some filmmakers guaranteed to blow me away – Claude lanzmann, Nicole Holofcener – as well as some cool girl-powered pics. But there are two words that have me breathless with anticipation: meryl streep.

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Rcontinued from page 4 The bone-dry wit and languid pacing recall the Jarmusch of Mystery Train and Dead Man, and the entire cast is having a ball. Adam’s music is NW pretty good, too.

1 AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY It’s not just the cast – Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor – that’s got me salivating. It’s the superb material based on Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a family in crisis gathering around its dysfunctional mom that makes this entry so thrilling. Letts wrote the screenplay, too. September 9, 6:30 pm, Roy Thomson Hall; September 10, 11 am, Elgin

THE PAST (le passé) SP D: Asghar Farhadi w/ Ali Mosaffa, Bérénice Bejo. France/Italy. 130 min. Sep 5, 9:30 pm Visa Screening Room (Elgin); Sep 7, 10:30 am TIFF Bell Lightbox 2 Rating: NN

3 ENOUGH SAID There are many reasons to love a film written and directed by Nicole Holofcener. For starters, it always has a quirky premise. In Please Give, a Manhattan couple can’t wait for the woman next door to die so they can snap up her apartment. Enough Said tracks a woman who falls for her new friend’s ex-husband. A Holofcener flick always features edgy, hyper-realistic dialogue. And she loves to work with the great Catherine Keener, who’s in the cast here with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late James Gandolfini (as a character who’s nothing like Tony Soprano). September 7, 2:30 pm, Elgin; September 8, 10 am, Isabel Bader; September 15, 9 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 1

2 THE LAST OF THE UNJUST Documentarian Claude Lanzmann (Shoah) continues his Holocaust series with this study of a Viennese rabbi who worked alongside Adolf Eichmann to arrange the deportation of 120,000 Jews. This is the kind of relationship uncovered by Hannah Arendt in her iconic work The Banality Of Evil, which distressed so many Jews in the diaspora. Lanzmann mines an interview he undertook in the 70s to draw a portrait of a vary complex collaborator. September 8, noon, Jackman Hall; September 15, 5 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 4

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR The story of a lesbian couple’s (Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos) connection, from the first flush of sexual bliss – graphically depicted – through their moving in together and beyond is fascinating enough. But can a male director (Abdellatif Kechiche, also the co-writer) make this relationship saga credible? The jury at Cannes thought so – it gave Blue the Palme d’Or, its top prize. September 5, 7 pm, Winter Garden; September 7, 2 pm, Scotiabank 4

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The Past sees the pleasant soapiness that greased A Separation, Farhadi’s Oscar winner, reach full froth. The Iranian director’s mastery of melodrama feels suffocating here, tragedy teetering into schmaltz. Mosaffa plays Ahmad, an Iranian who returns to a Parisian suburb to finalize a divorce with his wife (Bejo) so she can marry another man (Tahar Rahim). Ahmad’s desire to fix things – upon arrival he immediately repairs a child’s bicycle – ends up fissuring his ex’s family dynamic, exposing lies on top of lies. Ahmad’s role as noble Mr. Fixit is never undermined, his low-key vanity offered as the solution to, never the cause of, the problems of everyone around him. Farhadi may be heavy-handedly rooting for the cathartic power of The Truth, but his melodrama is tripped up by its own falseness – overwrought and shot through with some nasty JS misogyny.

FRI, SEP 6 WATERMARK

5 WE ARE THE BEST! In Swedish auteur Lukas Moodysson’s paean to girl punks, three outcasts reinvent themselves as a punk band to confront the haters; the adults in the pic are just as insensitive as the girls’ peers. Note that this isn’t about teen angst – it’s about preteen alienation. September 9, 7 pm, Scotiabank 4; September 10, 5:15 pm, and September 14, 1:15 pm, Bloor Hot Docs Cinema

SP D: Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky. Canada. 92 min. Sep 6, 7 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 1; Sep 8, 9 am Scotiabank 13 Rating: NNNN

The new documentary by Manufactured Landscapes collaborators Baichwal and Burtynsky feels very much like a continuation of their previous work, once again exploring the effects of human industry on the natural world. Here they look at our oceans and rivers. Baichwal’s contemplative approach meshes nicely with Burtynsky’s fondness for finding geometric patterns in gargantuan constructions – in this case, dams and aquifers. And

producer/cinematographer Nicholas de Pencier captures some splendid high-definition images. (Watermark may set a record for the most helicopter shots in a Canadian production.) Baichwal and Burtynsky cushion their potentially grim ecological message with philosophical digressions and moments of unexpected whimsy… which seems like an awfully NW good idea right about now.

PALESTINE STEREO (falastine stereo) CWC D: Rashid Masharawi w/ Mahmoud Abu Jazi, Salah Hannoun. Palestine/Tunisia/France/Norway/United Arab Emirates/Italy/Switzerland. 90 min. Sep 6, 9:30 pm Scotiabank 14; Sep 7, 2:15 pm Scotiabank 14; Sep 15, 6 pm Scotiabank 14 Rating: NNNN

In this sly, ultimately moving Palestine entry, Abu Jazi and Hannoun play Gaza brothers left homeless by an Israeli air strike, which also took Stereo’s wife and Sami’s hearing. They decide to immigrate to Canada, and in order to raise the $10,000 their application requires, undertake a series of sound gigs, tapping Sami’s electrician skills and the equipment Stereo used as a working musician. The script is laced with irony – the guys rent a bullet-ridden ambulance to move their gear, and most of the gigs that garner their personal profits are collective protests against injustice. This is by no means a one-note indictment of Israel. The Palestinian politicians are blowhards, and the conversations between Stereo and his friends, often excoriating Palestine’s ineffectual leadership, show complexity. Better still, the pic was made for a paltry $1.5 million. Just shows that good storytelling doesn’t require a big SGC budget.

EMPIRE OF DIRT CWC D: Peter Stebbings w/ Cara Gee, Jennifer Podemski. Canada. 99 min. Sep 6, 9:45 pm Scotiabank 2; Sep 8, 9:15 am Scotiabank 14 Rating: NNN

See the Cara Gee cover story and review of the film, page 8. continued on page 13

= Critic’s Pick nnnnn = Best of the fest nnnn = Excellent nnn = Entertaining nn = Snore n = Who programs this crap?

C A R R E R AW O R L D . C O M

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y l l o g

e e g U MI By GLENN S watIEr by MIchaEL Photo

stage star cara gee burns bright in big-screen debut

he’s one of the brightest and hardest-working theatre actors in the city, but Cara Gee’s life is about to get a whole lot busier – and more glamorous. Every year TIFF picks a handful of “rising stars,” and this year she’s one of them, chosen for her breakthrough performance in Empire Of Dirt, the slow-burning sophomore film by Defendor director Peter Stebbings. Gee plays Lena, a 30-year-old First Nations woman who’s losing touch with her teenage daughter, Peeka (talented newcomer Shay Eyre), just as her estranged mother (Jennifer Podemski) did with her at the same age. It’s a can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her, gripping performance – Gee’s in practically every frame – and all the more impressive considering it’s her feature film debut. Right now, sitting on the Drake patio and sipping a big glass of Pinot Grigio, Gee seems ready for all the attention. Before the TIFF Canadian film presser a couple of weeks earlier, she got a crash course in how to present yourself to the media. “There were cameras in my face, and I kept remembering, ‘Stand up straight, relate things back to the movie, and if your feet are killing, don’t show it,’” she says, letting out a guttural, lusty laugh that shows she’s not taking herself too seriously. The film is serious enough. Lena’s backstory involves losing Peeka to child services and then kicking drugs, cleaning up and getting her back. In the early scenes of the film, shot a few blocks from where we’re sitting, Peeka experiments with drugs and a near-tragedy ensues. That difficult mother-daughter dynamic broke Gee’s heart when she first read the script. “Lena’s fought so hard to have Peeka back in her life, and she’s a rock star with these kids in the community centre” – she works

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as a counsellor to Native youth – “but she can’t break through and connect with her own daughter because she’s repeating the same mistakes her mother made.” Gee’s relationship with her own mom – who’s Ojibway – couldn’t be more different. In fact, she stayed with her parents, who live in Aurora, during the filming of the scenes in Keswick, Ontario, and ran lines with her mom every night. “She’s my best friend,” says Gee. “I can’t imagine not having that support and guidance. She’s a sounding board when it comes to all my work. Where do you even start if you don’t have that? How can you learn to be a good mom if you don’t have one yourself?” One of the richest themes in the film is First Nations pride. When I quote a particularly moving line that comes near the end, Gee’s eyes moisten. “I wish my granny were here so she could see this,” she says, pointing out that the idea of loss – of children, land, culture – hits home powerfully for First Nations people. “Part of the struggle of being First Nations is that so much has been taken from us,” she says. “My granny was the last person in our family to speak Ojibway. She had babies in the 50s, and she didn’t teach them the language because they’d get beaten by their teachers for speaking it. It was easier not to know it.” This is a woman, she continues, who had Jean Chrétien over for dinner when he was minister of Indian Affairs. She fought for the right to vote – which didn’t come until 1960 – and protested the “archaic, sexist, bullshit law” that had aboriginal women lose their native status if they married non-native men. Gee’s obviously inherited her grandmother’s fierce spirit. You can see it in her stage work like her breakthrough performance in Stitch, in which she played a tough former porn star, and Arigato, Tokyo, in which she was a Japanese woman with reserves of

strength and passion hidden beneath a placid surface. Strong women have had a continuing presence in her professional life. Many actors have taken her under their wing, including Jean Yoon – who has a small role in Empire Of Dirt – and Jani Lauzon, both of whom shared the stage with her in a colourblind remount of Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters. Gee’s been in several all-female powerhouse ensembles, like Tout Comme Elle and The Penelopiad. And she first emerged on the festival circuit in the show 36 Little Plays About Hopeless Girls, by the experimental company Birdtown and Swanville, which produced the recent SummerWorks hit Family Story and, earlier, the biting satire The Physical Ramifications Of Attempted Global Domination, in which Gee played a chilling Chairman Mao. Onstage Gee’s an honest, intuitive performer, and she found she missed the audience feedback while filming Empire Of Dirt. “In the theatre, if you make a joke and people laugh, you know it works. You don’t have that in film. Your audience is the camera.” In addition, she had to adjust to the rhythms of filmmaking: shooting scenes out of sequence and not having the usual three weeks of rehearsal beforehand. “On day one of shooting you’re making final decisions, doing something that can’t be done over,” she says. “It was like showing up off-book the first day of a play’s rehearsal. You have to know the whole arc. You make discoveries, but you can’t go back and apply them to scenes you’ve already shot.” The day after we talk, TIFF is flying her and the other rising stars to New York City to promote their films and themselves. And next week she’ll be walking the red carpet, decked out in some complimentary clothes that also come with the honour. Expect her family to be in the crowd, along with her fiancé, the talented actor Kaleb Alexander. continued on page 10

tO Watch The Toronto Film Festival has its Rising Stars program to promote emerging Canadian talent, but we like to cast a wider net. Of all filmmakers and performers in all the world, here are five TIFF attendees from whom we expect great things.

clio Barnard Director, The Selfish Giant Barnard defined herself as a major talent out of the gate with her fascinating experimental documentary The Arbor, which explored the short life of English playwright Andrea Dunbar by having actors lipsync audio interviews with the subject’s real family and friends. Now she’s coming to TIFF with a contemporary reworking of Oscar Wilde’s 1888 fable, which wowed the Directors’ Fortnight audiences at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Sophie Desmarais

2013 FILM FESTIVAL

SPECIAL

Actor, Sarah Prefers To Run and The Dismantling She’s been knocking around the Quebec film circuit for years – appearing in Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique, Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats and Denis Côté’s Curling – but Desmarais is poised to break out in two TIFF films this year. In The Dismantling, she brings layers of history and compassion to a small role as the daughter of an aging sheep farmer (Gabriel Arcand), and in Sarah Prefers To Run she plays the title role, a driven young track star who marries a friend so they can get scholarships to McGill. You don’t know her yet, but you will; she’s going to be around for a while. continued on page 10

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5 FILMS I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE

MORE ONLINE For day-by-day TIFF coverage, with new reviews, interviews, photos, video and complete schedule, go to nowtoronto.com/tiff.

Rcontinued from page 8

NORMAN WILNER

REVIEW

I’m looking forward to a lot more than these five films – like, for example, Hateship Loveship, Hotell, Intruders, Oculus, Real, The Sacrament and The Selfish Giant – but the following titles are the ones I’m prepared to climb over other ticket-holders to see.

Karen Gillan

EMPIRE OF DIRT CWC D: Peter Stebbings w/ Cara Gee, Jennifer Podemski. Canada. 99 min. Sep 6, 9:45 pm Scotiabank 2; Sep 8, 9:15 am Scotiabank 14 Rating: NNN

1 GRAVITY Alfonso Cuarón’s last feature, the dystopian drama Children Of Men, was one of the best pictures of the last decade. Seven years later, he’s following it with this high-altitude thriller about astronauts (Sandra Bullock, George Clooney) lost in space after a disaster in orbit. And it’s in 3D, so those of you prone to vertigo should probably go see something else. September 8, 6:30 pm, and September 9, 3 pm, Princess of Wales; September 11, 9 pm, Scotiabank 12; September 15, noon, Ryerson

2 THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ELEANOR RIGBY: HIM AND HER James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain are two actors I’ll watch in anything. So the prospect of seeing them play out a relationship from two different perspectives – in two separate but apparently complementary features, both co-starring Viola Davis, Bill Hader, Ciarán Hinds, Archie Panjabi and William Hurt – is something for which I’ll happily carve three and a quarter hours out of my crammed schedule. September 9, 2 pm, Elgin; September 10, 12:30 pm, Winter Garden; September 14, 9 am, Bloor Hot Docs Cinema

3 IDA After the masterful My Summer Of Love and the complex but frustrating drama of The Woman In The Fifth, I’m dying to see where writer/director Pawel Pawlikowski goes next. He’s back with a black-and-white drama about a Polish novitiate (Agata Kulesza) forced to confront her family’s history before she can take her vows. September 7, 7:30 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 2; September 9, noon, Scotiabank 14; September 15, 9 am, Bloor Hot Docs Cinema

4 NIGHT MOVES It’s been a pleasure to watch the evolution of Kelly Reichardt and her regular collaborator Jonathan Raymond through the years, from the lyrical Old Joy to the urgent Wendy And Lucy and the despairing Meek’s Cutoff. In Night Moves, they tackle their biggest canvas yet with a drama – or is it a thriller? – starring Peter Sarsgaard, Dakota Fanning and Jesse Eisenberg as activists plotting to blow up a dam. September 8, 9 pm, Ryerson; September 9, 11:45 am, TIFF Bell Lightbox 1; September 15, 9 pm, Bloor Hot Docs Cinema

THE UNKNOWN KNOWN This long-form interview with Donald Rumsfeld completes Errol Morris’s unofficial military trilogy, begun with The Fog Of War and Standard Operating Procedure. Rumsfeld went from Dick Cheney’s boss in the Nixon administration to running the Iraq War under him in the disastrous Dubya years. Given that I can’t stand to look at him for more than 30 seconds at a time, this may prove the most difficult movie I see at the festival. The things you do for art, right? September 8, 6:45 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 1; September 10, 9 am, Bloor Hot Docs Cinema

Stebbings’s follow-up to his quirky psychological superhero movie Defendor is a quiet, absorbing look at the cycle of abuse and abandonment among three generations of First Nations women. Lena (Gee), a 30-year-old single mom, has been drug-free for eight years but is gradually losing touch with her teenage daughter, Peeka (Shay Eyre). When near-tragedy strikes, Lena and Peeka hitchhike north from Toronto to stay with her mother (Podemski), a gambling addict who kicked her daughter out years earlier. Also still in town is Lena’s ex (Luke Kirby), who may or may not be Peeka’s dad. Stebbings never finds a consistent tone for the film, which wobbles between earnest understatement and something grittier and more exciting. But it’s beautifully shot, newcomers Gee and Eyre are revelations, and the central theme of cultural pride is GS stirring and urgent.

In fact, intead of talking about the festival’s glitz and glamour, Gee would rather tell me the adorable story of how Alexander proposed to her. Or how much she and Alexander want to catch up on certain TV series before the festival begins. In other words, she seems pretty grounded. Appropriate, since one of her favourite acting techniques is the Suzuki method. “It’s this rigorous form of theatre training that connects your centre of gravity to the floor,” she explains. “At every moment you’re aware where your feet are and what they’re doing. Some people think it’s weird, but I know exactly where my feet are the whole time I’m in a show.” I don’t have to look beneath our table. I can tell Gee’s feet are firmly planted on the ground, ready for what’s coming. 3 glenns@nowtoronto.com | @glennsumi

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Actor, Oculus After two seasons opposite Matt Smith on Doctor Who, Scots actor Gillan left the beloved cult show – and the fan-favourite role of Amy Pond – to pursue a career in movies. This year’s Midnight Madness entry Oculus, which casts her as a young woman convinced that her family’s misery is the result of a supernatural curse, is the first to reach our shores… but don’t worry, it ain’t the last. She’s playing Nebula, the bald-pated villain of next summer’s Marvel team-up, Guardians Of The Galaxy. So, y’know, pay attention.

Aaron Poole Actor, The Animal Project A fixture on Canadian screens for a few years, Poole – who should have broken out opposite Kristin Booth in This Beautiful City – has had a great year, starring in the summer thriller The Conspiracy and getting some exposure in a recurring role on the historical procedural Copper. Next year you’ll see him in Atom Egoyan’s Queen Of The Night and opposite Richard Dreyfuss and Tatiana Maslany in Cas & Dylan, but right now you can catch him as an acting teacher trying to get his students to make radical choices in Ingrid Veninger’s The Animal Project.

Marine Vacth Actor, Young & Beautiful You’d never know that the star of François Ozon’s film about a highschool-age prostitute had never played a major film role. You can’t take your eyes off her – though you sorta have no choice, since she’s in almost every frame. But she carries the load, sometimes silently, sometimes explosively conveying a teen’s growing sense of her own sexual power. It’s not only because of the subject matter (remember Belle De Jour?) that she’s been called the new Catherine Deneuve. NW/SGC

Interview clips at nowtoronto.com

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= Critic’s Pick NNNNN = Best of the fest NNNN = Excellent NNN = Entertaining NN = Snore N = Who programs this crap?

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Sheer Madness tiFF celebrates 25 years of Midnight Madness, the genre-festival-within-the-festival By JOHN SEMLEY

The DRCC is currrently holding royalties for the following directors. Whether it is $5 or $5000 it is important to become a member of the DRCC to ensure that you are receiving royalties owed to you from foreign broadcasts. Please contact DRCC Manager Hans Engel at 416-482-6640 or hengel@dgc.ca. Agala, Jeff Abecassis, Tally Aitken, Sally Alk, Howard Allen, Richard Allen, Ron Allen, Steve Amar, Georges Amber Tang, Christine Andersen, Jon Andrews, Austin Anker, Steven Antier, Paul Arthaud, Sophie Bahari, Maziar Baillargeon, Paule Baird, Tab Barker, Jordan Barnard, Mark Barry, Martin Barto, David Battle, Murray Baumander, Lewis Baxter, Greg Beecroft, Stu Behrman, Keith Belateche, Irving Bell, Linda Benner, Richard (Estate) Bennett, Davlin Bennett, Rick Bergman, Robert Bergthorson, Barry Berquist, Douglas Berry, Michael Berz, Michael Blaquiere, Denis Bobbio, Gianni Boivin, Denis Bouchard, Patrick Bouvier, Francois Boyd, Robert Britton, George Britton, George Brockoff, Gene Brown, Tim Browne, Colin Budgell, Jack Bunce, Alan Burdett, Richard Burke, Martyn Burley, Ray Burroughs, Jackie (Estate) Caine, Rick Callan-Jones, Christie Campbell, Nicholas Carle, Gilles (Estate) Carpenter, Phil Carroll, Patrick Carvalho, Paul Cemalovic, Faruk Cerminara, Donovan Cernetig, Miro Chabrol, Claude Chang, Yung Chehak, Tom Chouinard, Marie Cisterna, Sean Cizek, Katerina Clark, Dan Clark, Lawrence Gordon Clattenburg, Mike Cloutier, Claude Cobban, William Cohen, Sheldon Coldewey, Michael Cole, Frank (Estate) Collins, Jesse Condie, Richard Cooper, Stephen Coppola, Sandra Corsi, Gio Costa, Italo Cote, Zabelle Cottam, Kevin Cournoyer, Michele Cowan, Paul Crandall, Susan Cristiani, Gabriella Cummins, Kathleen Cutting, Michael Daalder, Rene Daddo, Cameron D’Aix, Alain Dalpe, Pierre Dane, Lawrence Day, Dennis

Delaney, Chris D’Entremont, Peter Desclez, Henri DeSerrano, Michael Diaz, Jamie Dipelino, Karl Donnelly, Eddie Donovan, Richard D’Ornellas, Gian Dowding, Michael Dowding, Michael Drew, Les Ducharme, Carole Duchemin, Remy Duffield, Benjamin Dufour-Laperriere, Felix Duke, William Dumont, Bernard Ellis, Stephen Escanilla, Claudia Morgado Fan, Lixin Fazio, Jeff Fedorenko, Eugene Feiss, David Flacks, Diane Forbis, Amanda Forcier, Andre Forestier, Frederic Forward, Bob Foss, Eric Foster, Janet Foster, John Fountain, John Franchi, Alexandre Francis, David Frank, Robert Freedman, Ian Fried, Myra Friedenberg, Richard Fromm, Christel Gadziola, Stan Gantillon, Bruno Garneau, Kathy Garrity, Sean Gaug, John R. (Estate) Gaylor, Brett Gedda, Francisco Georgiades, Evan Gerretsen, Peter Gladu, Andre Goldberg, Harris Goldberg, Sid Gorinstein, Emmanuel Granofsky, Anais Grant, Michael Greco, Tony Green, Laurence Gregg, Andrew Grimshaw, Mike Gruner, Marion Grunstra, Sebastian Gudino, Rodrigo Guerard, Andre Guzman, Patricio Habros, Bob Haggis, Paul Halpern, Eliott Hansen, William Harper, Scott Harris, Harold Harris, Jonathan Harrison, John Kent Hart, Robbie Hayes, Lisa Head, Martin Hebb, Brian Hebert, Bernar Helliker, John Henault, Stephanie Henricks, Nelson Henriquez, Patricio Heroux, Denys Hobbes, H.P. Holden, Pat Hoss, Gabriel Howald, Brian Hunka, Ryszard Hutton, Lori Hylands, Scott Inch, Kevin Ingham, Keith Issermann, Aline Itier, Emmanuel Ivanova, Julia James, Sheila Jarvis, Michael Jasny, Vojta

Jenkins, Walt Jerrett, Shereen Jobin, P. Kaczender, George Kalina, Jon Karvonen, Albert Kastner, John Kaufmann, Gisela Kelly, Greg Kent, Larry Kernochan, Sarah Kerr, Ian Khurana, Kireet Klein, Judith Koenig, Wolf Konowal, Charles Koster, Andrew Kove, Torill Kroitor, Roman Kuchmij, Halya Kuzmickas, Nijole Lamb, Derek Lambart, Evelyn Lamsweerde, Pino Van Landesman, Francois Landreth, Christopher Landry, Jean-Yves Langan, Gary Laros, John Laure, Carole Lavis, Chris Lawrence, Greg Lea, Ron Leaf, Caroline LeBlanc, Lorette Leblanc, Norman Leduc, Jacques Lee, Allan Lee, Brian Leichliter, Larry Lente, Miklos (Estate) Leong, Po-Chih Lester, Mark Lewis, Mary Lickley, David Lightfoot, Norm Linaae, Karethe Lishman, Eda Loakman, Jeanette Lock, Edouard Lom, Petr Lorenzi, Jean-Louis Lundy, Thomas Lunn, Johanna Mabbot, Michael MacIvor, Daniel Mackay, Clarke Magny, Pierre Majoury, Steve Maladrewicz, Chris Malakian, Patrick Mannix, Veronica Alice Manske, Andrew Manzor, Rene Marjanovic, Davor Markiw, Gabriel Markiw, Jancarlo Martin, Susan Martishius, Walter Martyn, Richard Mason, Jamie Mason, Michelle Maxwell, Claire Mayer, Gerald McKay, Jeff McKenna, Brian McKenna, Terence McLaglen, Josh McLaren, Norman (Estate) McLeod, David Allen McLeod, Ian McLuhan, Teri McMahon, Kevin McNamara, Michael Medekova-Klein, Luba Melnyk, Debbie Meraska, Ron Mhyrstad, Stein Micale, Maryvonne Mirman, Brad Misserey, Herve Mitchell, Monika Mitchell, Peter Mitchell, Phil Molina, Claudia Momani, Firas Monfrey, Dominique

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Moosmann, Daniel Morris, Maryl Morrison, Jim Morrison, Richard Mozer, Richard Muller, Dieter Murphy, Brian Murray, Andrew Murray, David Muspratt, Victoria Myhrstad, Stein Nadler, Eric Naim, Omar Newlove, Rose Niles, Ben Nisker, Andrew Novaro, Maria O’Grady, Laura Older, John Olsen, Stan Paperny, David Papp, Susan Pappas, Alexander (1978) Parent, Karl Patel, Ishu Pearson, Ian Peill, Edward Pelletier, Vic Peperny, David Pepin, Richard Perrault, Pierre (Estate) Peters, Scott Peterson, Todd Petrie, Dorothea Pettigrew, Damian Phillips, Robin Piantanida, Thjierry Pilon, Victor Pilote, Sebastien Pincus, Henry Plaxton, Gary Podorieszach, Stephane Poon, Bruce Portman, Beth Prevost, Tali Pronovost, Michel Proulx-Cloutier, Emile Prowse, Joan Puchniak, Tom Puerta, Ramiro (Estate) Purdy, Jim Pustil, Jeff Puttkamer, Peter von Radclyffe, Curtis Radford, Tom Rahme, John Ranowicz, Stefan Raouf, Maoud Rashid, Ian Iqbal Ratner, Benjamin Redford, Ryan Reeves, Richard Reid, Ernest Richey, Christine Riesenfeld, Daniel Ritchie, John Roberts, Cynthia Rodman, Howard Rogobert, Thierry Ronowicz, Stefan Rose, Les Rose, Richard Rosensweet, Jesse Rosenthal, Rick Rowe, Tom Rowley, Christopher Roy, Pierre Ruggi, Steve Ruth, Billy Safran, Henri Salfati, Pierre Henry Salvador, Paula Salzman, Glen Sarault, Jean (Estate) Sarwer-Foner, Henry Sauve, Patrick Sawa, Timothy Schliesler, Martin Schorr, Daniel Schroeder, Tyler Schuster, Aaron Schwartz, Nadine Schwartz, Roslyn Sehr, Kai Seitz, David Sekulich, Daniel Shah, Sebastien

Shandel, Tom Sharp, Peter Sherman, Gary Shock, Michael Shuster, Aaron Simmonds, Garner Simmons, Blair Simpson, Alan Simpson, Brock Sims, Patricia Singer, Gail Sisam, Patrick Smets, Christopher Smith, Bob Smith, Bruce Sobel, Mark Spangler, Bruce Spry, Robin (Estate) Stacey, Bruce Steinberg, David Sterk, Ela Stevenson, Angela Stewart, Barney Stewart, Rob Thomas Stoller, Bryan Michael Stoneman, John Strange, Marc Sullivan, Gregory Surnow, Joel Swan, James Swan, Stan Sweeney, Bruce Sylvain, Guy Sylvester, Glenn Szczerbowski, Maciek Taler, Laura Tali Taylor, Alan Terlesky, John Terry, Christopher Teskey, Susan Thiessen, Jayson Thompson, Jack Lee Tilby, Wendy Torossian, Garine Travis, Jamie Treibicz, Dawna Trent, John (Estate) Trevor, Richard Triffo, Chris Troake, Anne Trudeau, Alexandre Trudeau, Pierre M. Tucker, Paul R. Turner, Robert Uloth, Geoffrey Ushev, Theodore Vaillot, Bernard Vandelac, Louise Vaucher, Philippe Vendrell, Michael M. Veron, Nathalie Vesak, A.J. Vidal, Philippe Vidal, Philippe Vigne, Daniel Vogler, Peter Wahid, Wahida Walsh, Bradley Warwicker, John Wasyk, Darrell Watson, Wendy Weber, Ross Wehrfritz, Curtis Weldon, John Whyman, J.H. Wiener, Charles Wild, Nettie Williams, Steve Williams, Stuart Williamson, Neil Winkler, David Wintonick, Peter Withrow, Stephen Wolfond, Henry Wong, Gordon Wood, Adam Wurlitzer, Rudy Wyatt, Andy Wyles, David Wyman, J.H. Yates, Rebecca (Estate) Young, Robert Zabranska, Michaela

www.dgc.ca 13-08-13 1:29 PM

OLIN GEDDES has been with Midnight Madness from the beginning. Before he was brought on to quarterback TIFF’s latenight genre movie mini-festival, he was just another fan waiting in line to see Hellbound: Hellraiser II at TIFF in 1988. In 1997, MM programmer Noah Cowan asked Geddes to come on as co-programmer – after seeing him run crowd control on legendary giallo director Dario Argento following a particularly hectic screening. “He was kind of swarmed in the lobby of the Bloor,” says Geddes. “I jumped into it and held

people back, like, ‘Let him through! Let him through!’” No longer Midnight Madness’s volunteer bouncer, Geddes has become its guiding intelligence, making TIFF’s late-night slate perhaps the film event for horror/sci-fi/action aficionados. “What I do is glorified show-and-tell,” he says. “I find a cool movie, and then I try to share it with something more than just the four people who could fit on my couch.” I talked to Geddes about some of the breakout hits (in chronological order) that have helped define Midnight Madness over its 25year history.

BRAINDEAD (1992) Before Peter Jackson helmed The Lord Of The Rings and Hobbit franchises, effectively becoming the King of Movies, he was just a schlocky Kiwi genre filmmaker. Jackson’s third feature, Braindead (released in North America as Dead Alive), found its foothold at Midnight Madness. “I’ve got an autograph in one of my old program books from Peter Jackson,” Geddes recalls, “signed in the lobby of the Bloor.”

duced audiences to a whole new kind of martial arts film and a whole new kind of action star. “Look: Thai cinema has been around for 100 years. And overnight we introduced the first major Thai film star to the world. Nobody could even name a Thai film star at that point. Then, overnight, we birthed Tony Jaa.”

CABIN FEVER (2002) For better or worse, Midnight Madness is responsible for breaking Eli Roth’s career. “Nobody knew who Eli Roth was,” says Geddes. “Roth talks a lot about how Midnight Madness made him and discovered him.” Because of that success, says Geddes, many filmmakers now try to make the types of films they think will land them a spot in the series, in hopes of securing the same breakout success. ONG-BAK: MUAY THAI WARRIOR (2003) Beyond splatter films, Midnight Madness also casts its net to other corners of the globe. (Geddes has a particular interest in Asian genre cinema.) With the premiere of Ong-Bak, he intro-

BIG MAN JAPAN (2007) Hitoshi Matsumoto’s Japanese pop culture send-up as capital critique packed in the crowds in at Midnight Madness despite his relative anonymity. “I like to put curveballs in there” says Geddes. “It’s about taking smaller films and helping them get discovered. Nobody had heard of [Matsumoto]. Just based on the way we pitched it, we sold out the Ryerson. A few years later he did Symbol. Now, this year, three movies later, he’s finally coming to the festival with his latest film, R100.” THE RAID (2011) Gareth Evans’s locomotive martial arts actioner played Midnight Madness in 2011 and went on to win the coveted People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award. “That was our opening-night film. I take pride in saying I assembled the largest group of people in North America in one room to watch a film from Indonesia. I’m pretty confident no one else had done that.”

MORE ONLINE For day-by-day TIFF coverage, with new reviews, interviews, photos, video and complete schedule, go to nowtoronto.com/tiff.

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YOUNG & BeaUtIFUL (Jeune & Jolie) SP D: François Ozon w/ Marine Vacth, Géraldine Pailhas. France/Belgium. 94 min. Sep 7, 6 pm Visa Screening Room (Elgin); Sep 15, 6 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 2 Rating: NNNN

Ozon’s story of a 17-year-old high school girl who leads a double life as a prostitute – a junior Belle De Jour – is a baffling work, but that’s its strength. As Isabelle’s (a brilliant Vacth) hormones surge, she dispenses with her virginity on vacation like she’s shedding a coat. Ozon films the scene as if Isabelle can watch herself in action (inaction, actually – she’s plainly not into it), suggesting the disassociation many have linked to sex work. But it’s never clear why Isabelle returns home and starts piling up cash by turning tricks after school. Is it because her dad is absent, or to separate from her caring mom (a superb Pailhas)? Does she relish her sexual power? Told over the course of a year in four parts, each representing a season, the movie has some charming grace notes: the loving relationship between Isabelle and her younger brother, a winning sequence in which Isabelle’s class discusses Rimbeau, and a superb final scene featuring the great Charlotte Rampling. But it’s Vacth who owns this movie. SGC

tHe SeLFISH GIaNt CWC D: Clio Barnard w/ Conner Chapman, Shaun Thomas. United Kingdom. 91 min. Sep 8, 9:15 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 2; Sep 9, 2:15 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 3 Rating: NNNN

Tossed out of school, 13-year-old Arbor (Chapman) and his best friend, Swifty (Thomas), earn money stealing metal for Kitten (Sean Gilder), who owns a scrapyard. Arbor is clever, enterprising and possessed of considerable charm and a gift of gab – perhaps symptomatic of ADHD. His ambition triggers a heart-tugging sequence of events that need never have happened. We’re in Ken Loach social realist country. Director Barnard finds beauty in the wintry industrial wasteland of Bradford in northern England and gets naturalistic performance from the actors. Her spunky, working-class/broken-home characters are all the more touching because their schemes are unlikely to PE bear fruit.

RUSH GALA D: Ron Howard w/ Chris Hemsworth, Daniel Brühl. United Kingdom/Germany. 123 min. Sep 8, 9:30 pm Roy Thomson Hall; Sep 9, noon Ryerson Rating: NNNN

As in Apollo 13, Howard revisits history, making his material exciting

and suspenseful even though the outcome is a matter of public record. Throughout 1976, the world of Formula One auto racing was dominated by two men: the cold, cerebral Austrian Niki Lauda (Brühl) and the wildly charismatic English playboy James Hunt (Hemsworth). Howard and superb screenwriter Peter Morgan contrast their stories effectively, culminating in a series of races that – even for non-fans like me – will have your heart pounding in time with Hans Zimmer’s propulsive score. The camerawork makes you feel like you’re on the track, but it’s Morgan’s script and the convincing, lived-in performances by the two actors that drive home the themes about competition and the best way to GS live one’s life.

MON, Sep 9 GaBRIeLLe SP D: Louise Archambault w/ Gabrielle Marion-Rivard, Alexandre Landry. Canada. 104 min. Sep 9, 5 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 1; Sep 11, 9 am Bloor Hot Docs Cinema Rating: NNN

Quebec writer/director Archambault isn’t aiming to push buttons in this gentle, charming romance about a mentally challenged 22-year-old exploring love and sex for the first time. She handles slightly provocative subject matter with a touch so sensitive that at times the film borders on timid.

Marion-Rivard (who actually has Williams syndrome) delivers a winning performance as the title character, a choir singer whose romance with a similarly handicapped young man (Landry) is stifled by the practical concerns of everyone around them. While offering an emotionally sincere (if slight) portrait of life with disability, Archambault gets caught up in rousing, overtly metaphorical choir numbers. They culminate in a grand appearance by Quebecois legend Robert Charlebois, who ushers in a resolution to satisfy an audience’s RS sweet tooth.

tHe INVISIBLe WOMaN SP D: Ralph Fiennes w/ Fiennes, Felicity Jones. United Kingdom. 111 min. Sep 9, 6 pm Visa Screening Room (Elgin); Sep 10, 11:45 am TIFF Bell Lightbox 1 Rating: NNNN

On its face, The Invisible Woman seems like a safe project for Fiennes’s directorial follow-up to 2011’s Coriolanus. It’s a conventional drama about the relationship between Charles Dickens (Fiennes) and Nellie Ternan (Jones), the young woman who became his mistress. But while all the trappings of the proper British period piece are in place, this is a much more experimental treatment of the story than one might expect, with a complex consideration of all the characters – including Dickens’s wife, Catherine (Joanna Scanlan) – and an editorial

style that lingers on uncomfortable silences and repressed impulses. Fiennes and Jones are terrific, but the actor/director gets excellent work out of pretty much everyone, including his English Patient co-star NW Kristin Scott Thomas.

FOR NO GOOD ReaSON MAV D: Charlie Paul. United Kingdom. 89 min. Sep 9, 7:15 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 3 Rating: NNN

For No Good Reason positions itself as a documentary about Ralph Steadman, the British illustrator whose instantly recognizable style was the perfect accompaniment to Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism in the glory days of Rolling Stone magazine. But director Paul and ostensible host Johnny Depp spend far too much time pumping the genial artist for stories of Thompson’s demented crusades – illustrated by animated versions of Steadman’s drawings, often narrated by Depp-as-Thompson – and pay not nearly enough attention to the man in front of them. A sequence in which Steadman makes a lovely painting of his dog – defining musculature through splotches of paint, creating personality in sharp little lines – is a fascinating window into his process. The film could have done with more of that and fewer video clips of Thompson acting NW out. continued on page 16

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5 fILMS I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE

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GLENN SUMI

A list of must-sees can turn into a curse. Sometimes your expectations are so high, the film can’t help but be disappointing. And other times a movie just turns out to be bad. Witness the top film on my 2012 must-see list: Cloud Atlas, an ambitious but woefully misguided adaptation of David Mitchell’s brilliant novel. I hope these five fare better.

METALLICA THROUGH THE NEVER SP D: Nimród Antal. Canada/U.S. 92 min. Sep 9, 7:30 pm Scotiabank 12 Rating: NNN

Coming nearly a decade after the growing pains that formed the crux of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s superb behind-the-scenes doc Some Kind Of Monster, Metallica Through The Never feels like a palate cleanser. It shows the band in peak form, working through hits like Fade To Black, Master Of Puppets and Fuel. Like Bruce McDonald’s This Movie Is Broken, this film uncomfortably sutures a fictional narrative onto its concert footage, following a Metallica roadie (Dane DeHaan) dispatched on a fetch quest during the concert. The side plot’s ostensible tension between protesters and riot police is totally bogus. It’s also distracting, especially when Antal’s concert footage is so crisply choreographed. (Even the 3D works.) Similarly offputting: the consistent focus on James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich, the certifiable egomaniacs at the centre of the band. Why cut away from Kirk Hammett during a solo to focus on Hetfield’s strained, taking-adump facial expression? As in all things Metallica, it feels like the band’s JS unlikeable founders had final cut.

1 TRIPTYCH Robert Lepage’s nine-hour opus Lipsynch was one of the major theatre events of the decade: a time-travelling, continent-hopping epic. Considering that the running time of this version is a mere 90 minutes, and the fact that so much of the power of the play had to do with the economy of the stagecraft (and the actors playing multiple roles), I don’t know how he’s going to adapt it to the more realistic medium of film. But I’ll be there. September 6, 9 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 2; September 9, 3:45 pm, Scotiabank 11

3 UNDER THE SKIN TIFF 2013 could belong to Scarlett Johansson, who also plays the überdemanding love interest in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon. In Jonathan Glazer’s sci-fi thriller, she plays an alien who prowls England’s back roads looking for male victims to do… what, exactly? Dying to find out. Expect lots of atmosphere and psychological complexity from Glazer, the man behind the cult films Sexy Beast and Birth. September 9, 10 pm, Princess of Wales; September 10, 2:30 pm, Visa Screening Room (Elgin); September 15, 3 pm, Ryerson

2 ONE CHANCE Okay, file this one under “expected guilty pleasure.” Paul Potts is the ordinary bloke whose unremarkable life changed overnight after he displayed his operatic skills to the world on the reality show Britain’s Got Talent. This biopic of him is directed by David Frankel, who made The Devil Wears Prada lots of fun, and the lead is played by James Corden, whose athletic, farcical turn in the stage comedy One Man, Two Guvnors was so good it beat out Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Willy Loman for the Tony Award (as well as getting him noticed for this project and a plum role in the film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods.) September 9, 8 pm, Winter Garden; September 10, 5 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 1

4 LABOR DAY After Thank You For Smoking, Juno and Up In The Air, Jason Reitman is batting 1,000. This film, about how the lives of a troubled teenager (newcomer Gattlin Griffith) and his disturbed mom (Kate Winslet) intersect with that of a desperate man (Josh Brolin) over a very symbolic long weekend sounds like another winner. It’s based on a novel by Joyce Maynard, whose earlier work inspired the cult classic To Die For. September 7, 6 pm, Ryerson; September 8, 9 am, TIFF Bell Lightbox 1; September 14, 6 pm, Ryerson

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DALLAS BUYERS CLUB After recent awards-worthy work in films as diverse as Magic Mike, Mud and Killer Joe, one question remains about Matthew McConaughey. Will he finally get his Oscar nomination? This could be the film that does it. He plays the real-life Ron Woodruff, a womanizing, boozing heterosexual man who contracts HIV, is told he has a month to live and becomes an AIDS activist, smuggling unapproved treatments across the border from Mexico to help himself and others (including Jared Leto as a drag queen). With Quebec’s Jean-Marc Vallée (C.R.A.Z.Y., Café De Flore) at the helm, expect mesmerizing period imagery, solid performances and a sensitive portrayal of the marginalized. September 7, 10 pm, Princess of Wales; September 8, 11 am, Visa Screening Room (Elgin)

SP D: Sebastián Lelio w/ Paulina García, Sergio Hernandez. Chile/ Spain. 109 min. Sep 9, 7:45 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 1; Sep 10, 5 pm Scotiabank 2 Rating: NNNN

García is superb in this portrait of a smart 50-something woman, divorced for over 12 years and yearning for sexual connection. When she meets Alberto (Hernandez) at a club for middle-aged singles and begins a relationship, she learns she’s not willing to settle for half-measures. García won – and richly deserved – the best-actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival as a woman coping with frustration. But as essential as her performance is the film’s unflinching portrayal of sex between aging partners. It’s such a rare thing in movies, it takes your breath away. SGC

THE GREAT BEAUTY (la Grande bellezza) SP D: Paolo Sorrentino w/ Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone. Italy. 142 min. Sep 9, 9:45 pm Scotiabank 1; Sep 11, 12:15 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 2 Rating: NNNNN

Sure, this gorgeous, sweeping indictment of contemporary Roman

society under Berlusconi is self-indulgent, but Sorrentino is the kind of director you want to indulge. Servillo stars as a 60-something journalist who wrote a bestselling novel when he was in his 20s but hasn’t written a thing that matters since. Instead, he’s immersed himself in all things shallow: the party circuit, pseudo-intellectual confabs with the rich and famous, meaningless sex. Now he’s reflecting on his empty life in a series of spectacular vignettes that come tumbling out of cinematographer Luca Bigazzi and Sorrentino’s vivid imagination – over-the-top parties, an artist performing beside Roman ruins, a money-grubbing doctor injecting Botox in public, and a ton more. Garish party sequences collide with serene images of Rome’s ancient art; beautiful, inspirational music meets club bangers. Just let the damn thing wash over you. This movie is what film festivals are SGC for.

GERONTOPHILIA VAN D: Bruce LaBruce w/ Pier-Gabriel Lajole, Walter Borden. Canada. 90 min. Sep 9, 10:30 pm Bloor Hot Docs Cinema; Sep 11, 9:30 pm Scotiabank 11; Sep 13, 12:15 pm Scotiabank 3 Rating: NNN

A young man named Lake (Lajoie) has a poster of Gandhi hanging on his bedroom wall, not just to inspire idealism but also a hard-on. This may not be so shocking for those familiar with Canadian filmmaker LaBruce. The queer provocateur tackles a new taboo in this coming-of-ager that revolves around Lake’s thing for seniors. If his romance with 81-year-old Mr. Peabody (Borden) initially seems like an attempt to needle conservatives, LaBruce surprises with a warmth and tenderness – and quite a bit of humour – that carries the central relationship RS beyond fetishism.

TUE, SEP 10 SIDDHARTH CWC D: Richie Mehta w/ Rajesh Tailang, Tannishtha Chatterjee. Canada. 96 min. Sep 10, 5 pm Winter Garden; Sep 12, noon TIFF Bell Lightbox 1 Rating: NNNN

Richie Mehta is quickly becoming a premier voice in Indian cinema despite the fact that he’s from Canada. His sophomore feature about a man’s desperate search for his missing son is an assured and harrowing look at the poverty and desperation in India’s slums that makes tragedy so common. In a performance both discreet and wrenching, Tailang plays Mahendra, a chain-wallah (he fixes zippers) who sends 12-year-old Siddarth to work out of town to help support the family. When Siddarth fails to return home, matters both trivial and critical frustrate Mahendra’s scrupulous pursuit. He has barely enough money for the trip and doesn’t even have a photo of his son to aid his investigation. A sociopolitical critique that

= Critic’s Pick nnnnn = Best of the fest nnnn = Excellent nnn = Entertaining nn = Snore n = Who programs this crap?

MORE ONLINE For day-by-day TIFF coverage, with new reviews, interviews, photos, video and complete schedule, go to nowtoronto.com/tiff.

doesn’t interfere with the intimate story being told, Siddarth could be Canada’s next foreign-language Oscar RS nominee.

AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’ (un voyageur) DOC D: Marcel Ophüls w/ Elliott Erwitt, Jeanne Moreau. France. 106 min. Sep 10, 7:15 pm Scotiabank 10; Sep 12, 12:30 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 3; Sep 15, 7:15 pm Jackman Hall (AGO) Rating: NNN

DON JON SP D: Joseph Gordon-Levitt w/ Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Scarlet Johansson. U.S. 90 min. Sep 10, 6:30 pm Princess of Wales; Sep 11, 3 pm Ryerson Rating: NNN

Writer/director Gordon-Levitt won’t be making any friends among those who – unlike me – think pornography isn’ toxic. He stars as Jon, a porn-addicted stud who can attract hot women but thinks porn is more exciting than the real thing – including Barbara (Johansson, who’s terrific), his latest gorgeous but demanding conquest. Julianne Moore turns up as a grieving woman who could turn him around. The script is sometimes super-savvy – especially when it makes the connections between hardcore porn and everyday advertising and when it

WHEN JEWS WERE FUNNY

touches on family influences, like Jon’s crude dad (Tony Danza). But it’s just a little too on the nose, and it contains a ton of porn, which raises the question: should an anti-porn film be reproducing so much SGC of this toxic material?

Like an entertaining dinner guest who feels he owes you for the invitation, acclaimed documentarian Ophüls (The Sorrow And The Pity) breezily recalls his life as the son of the legendary Max (Lola Montès) before touching on his own career. Memories of a childhood spent playing on the sets of some of Germany’s most famous films morph into visions of his father as seducer in expensive sports cars, then turn to the son’s insider insights on a privileged life among figures like Preston Sturges, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, Bertolt Brecht and Jeanne Moreau, among others. His recollections of a long friendship with François Truffaut and a brief interlude with Marlene Dietrich provide PE some top-notch dish.

DOC D: Alan Zweig. Canada. 90 min. Sep 10, 9:15 pm Scotiabank 13; Sep 12, 9:15 pm Bloor Hot Docs Cinema; Sep 15, 4:45 pm Scotiabank 9 Rating: NNN

OMAR SP D: Hany Abu-Assad w/ Adam Bakri, Leem Lubany. Palestine. 98 min. Sep 10, 7:30 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 1; Sep 11, noon Bloor Hot Docs Cinema; Sep 15, 9:30 pm Scotiabank 4 Rating: NNNN

On the outskirts of a Palestinian village divided by Israel’s concrete security wall, three friends attack an Israeli garrison and kill a soldier. Omar (a sensitive Bakri) is arrested and, because he misses his girlfriend (Lubany) who lives on the other side of the wall, agrees to collaborate with a manipulative Israeli agent (a superb Waleed F Zuaiter). Abu-Assad’s film, about informants and duplicity in the Palestinian territory, is a must-see for those who value the cinema of commitment. Siting its conflict within a recognizable social context puts a human face on a remarkably candid depiction of both sides of the ongoing cat-and-mouse game that is life in the occupied West PE Bank.

T.O. filmmaker Zweig isn’t sure of his themes in this survey of Jewish comics. Is it about whether Jews define American humour, what makes Jews funny or where Zweig himself fits in now that he’s married a non-Jew? And it’s mainly a film about male Jewish comics. Of his scores of subjects, only two are women, and Judy Gold hammers away at that sexist chestnut, her horrible Jewish mother. Where’s Sarah Silverman, Sandra Bernhard, Fran Drescher? If you can dredge up archival stuff on Jackie Mason, you can find footage of Joan Rivers. Still, it’s is a very entertaining survey of guys who know funny. Howie Mandel, Mark Breslin and David Brenner are especially smart, and almost all of them get laughs. Especially fascinating are the interviews with the older pros, Norm Crosby, Jack Carter, Shelley Berman, all of whom deny their humour is Jewish. Then Berman sings an old Yiddish song that’ll make you SGC verklempt.

CHRIS BOTTI WED OCT 2 MH

JUSTIN RUTLEDGE FRI OCT 18 WGT

DAVID MYLES WED SEP 25 ET

SKYDIGGERS SAT OCT 19 WGT

RANDY BACHMAN SAT MAR 15 MH

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THE ONCE TUE DEC 17 ET

DALA THU DEC 5 WGT

ROYAL WOOD SAT MAY 17 WGT

LEIF VOLLEBEKK TUE OCT 15 RIV

COWBOY JUNKIES FRI NOV 22 WGT

EMM GRYNER WED OCT 23 ET

and many more

DANIEL ROMANO FRI SEP 27 ET

IAN TYSON AND CORB LUND FRI NOV 29 WGT

RTH = Roy Thomson Hall MH = Massey Hall WGT = Winter Garden Theatre ET = Enwave Theatre RIV = Rivoli

This uneasy masterpiece of genre mashing combines homosexual desire with homicide (not to mention some full-on hardcore man-on-man sex). At a male nude beach on the edge of a French forest, Franck (Deladonchamps) falls in love with Michel (Paou) even though he’s just seen him drown a previous lover. Beautifully shot in natural light, taking full advantage of the location’s intrinsic beauty (and using only ambient sound), the film walks a fine line between sex, death and passion in a gay microcosm. On one level a suspenseful thriller, ultimately this PE complex film is about lust itself. continued on page 18

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CWC D: Alain Guiraudie w/ Pierre Deladonchamps, Christophe Paou. France. 97 min. Sep 10, 9:45 pm Scotiabank 4; Sep 11, 3:45 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 2; Sep 15, 3:15 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 2 Rating: NNNN

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5 FILms I cAN’T WAIT TO sEE

Rcontinued from page 17

JOHN sEmLEY

I probably won’t see as many films at TIFF this year as I have in the past, which just means I’ll have to be extra-judicious. Part of the pleasure of TIFF is keeping your ear to the ground for surprises that were off your radar. Remember in 2011 when nobody had heard of Kill List, and then – BLAMMO! – it emerged as one of the best films of the year?

A FIELD IN ENGLAND Speaking of Kill List, that film’s director returns with a film set in 17th-century England. Ben Wheatley’s latest tracks a group of deserting soldiers on a search for buried treasure. It’s apparently his most experimental film yet (which explains why it’s in the Wavelengths program), and I expect it’ll have the wit, satire, spiked violence and masterful, near-Kubrickian control that have made Wheatley probably my favourite contemporary filmmaker. September 13, 9 pm, Ryerson; September 14, 9 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 3

2 THE F WORD For my money, Michael Dowse is one of the best comic filmmakers working, and certainly the best in Canada. Films like Fubar and Goon have real heart besides all their dick and fart jokes, and that tenderness seems ready to bubble to the fore here. Daniel Radcliffe plays a hopeless romantic who falls in love with an already attached friend (Zoe Kazan). But unlike crap like (500) Days Of Summer, The F Word is supposed to chart the actual flow of one-directional affections, where the guy’s yearning is left totally unreciprocated. Sounds like a necessary intervention in the whole underdog rom-com canon. September 7, 9 pm, Ryerson; September 8, 11:30 am, Bloor

cLOsED cuRTAIN In 2010, Iran banned Jafar Panahi from making films for 20 years, accusing him of manufacturing “propaganda” against the state. Yet he keeps making movies. His last (not) film, 2011’s This Is Not A Film, was a lowkey masterpiece expressing the necessity of art through Panahi’s predicament. Closed Curtain, promises TIFF’s program guide, “finds Panahi in a much darker mood,” in a secluded beach house where he blacks out the windows and again begins imagining all the films he’ll never get to make. If it’s half as good as This Is Not A Film or any of Panahi’s earlier, unsuppressed releases, it’ll be one of the festival’s best. September 5, 9:15 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 4; September 6, 3:30 pm, and September 15, 9:45 pm, Jackman Hall

3 5

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4 BLuE RuIN I didn’t love Jeremy Saulnier’s Murder Party when I saw it on DVD around 2008. All its dorky humour felt a bit arch. But what lingered was Saulnier’s skill at dispensing legitimate scares in what was ostensibly a horrorcomedy. His follow-up, scoresettling revenge thriller Blue Ruin, won praise for playing things straighter, bending genre conventions while retaining edge-of-your-seat suspense, when it won the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes. Can’t wait. September 9, 8 pm, Bloor Hot Docs Cienma; September 11, noon, TIFF Bell Lightbox 1

A spELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNEss What a team-up: artist/filmmakers Ben Rivers and Ben Russell and actor/musician Robert A.A. Lowe? From 90 Day Men? And Singer? And Lichens? And OM?! You better believe it. Lowe plays (“with Bressonian restraint,” per the TIFF program note) a nameless wanderer who hooks up with an Estonian commune, visits northern Finland and fronts a Norwegian black metal band. Mixing experimental cinema with ethnography, A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness sounds like one of several must-see titles in the Wavelengths program. September 7, 10:30 pm, Jackman Hall; September 9, 4:30 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 4; September 15, 6:30 pm, Scotiabank 8

WED, sEp 11 THE ANImAL pROJEcT CWC D: Ingrid Veninger w/ Aaron Poole, Joey Klein. Canada. 90 min. Sep 11, 7:30 pm Isabel Bader; Sep 12, 5 pm Scotiabank 13; Sep 14, 7:45 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 4 Rating: NNNN

The Animal Project feels like a transitional project for Veninger – and I mean that in a good way. The reigning queen of lo-fi Canadian cinema has upped her game without abandoning any of her characteristic whimsy. Her tale of an acting teacher (Poole) who dresses his students in animal costumes and sends them out into Toronto to jump around and hug people has a narrative structure with solid story beats rather than the gentle drift of Only, Modra and i am a good person / i am a bad person. It also further distinguishes itself with a more formal visual style than she’s attempted before. Veninger’s still doing what she does best – finding moving moments of emotional connection between awkward, confused people. It’s just that this time one of them’s wearing a NW squirrel suit.

mANuscRIpTs DON’T BuRN (Dast-neveshtehaa nemisoozanD) CWC D: Mohammad Rasoulof. Iran. 127 min. Sep 11, 9:15 pm Scotiabank 14; Sep 13, 9:30 am Scotiabank 10; Sep 15, 1:45 pm Jackman Hall (AGO) Rating: NNNN

In this compulsively watchable piece of humanistic agitprop, two employees of the Iranian security apparatus use clinical, matter-of-fact thuggery to silence freedom of speech. Inspired by the attempted murder of 21 writers and journalists in 1995 and filmed clandestinely in Iran and Germany, the film shines a giant light on Iranian government intimidation and repression. It’s an audacious act of courage on the part of Rasoulof, who was sentenced to a year in prison (the sentence has yet to be carried out) and forbidden to make a film for 20 years. (He’s now outside Iran.) He’s a confident storyteller and a man of great courage. For their own protection, the names of the cast members are deliberately missing PE from the credits.

THu, sEp 12 THE sTRANGE LITTLE cAT (Das merkwürDige kätzchen) WL D: Ramon Zürcher w/ Jenny Schily, Mia Kasalo. Germany. 72 min. Sep 12, 7:45 pm Jackman Hall (AGO); Sep 13, 9:45 am TIFF Bell Lightbox 2 Rating: NNNN

Set entirely within a Berlin apartment, Zürcher’s minimalist debut charts the interactions of half a dozen members of a family as they bustle around the smallish space in anticipation of an elderly relative’s arrival. An incredibly obnoxious little girl (Kasalo) bothers everyone, while her mother (Schily) spends her time staring into the middle distance, gripped by a melancholy that’s never explained. Two of the menfolk get their shirts dirty and have to change. Occasionally the family pets wander through the action. (The cat is not that strange.) It’s up to us to suss out what each interaction means or doesn’t mean. This isn’t a conventional domestic tale; it’s a stylized, elliptical study of unspoken affection and buried NW tensions.

FRI, sEp 13 A FIELD IN ENGLAND WL D: Ben Wheatley w/ Reece Shearsmith, Michael Smiley. United Kingdom. 90 min. Sep 13, 9 pm Ryerson; Sep 14, 9 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 3 Rating: NNNN

After Kill List in 2011 and Sightseers and The ABCs Of Death last year, British maverick Wheatley returns to the festival with his oddest work to date, which is really saying something. It’s 1648, and a cowardly servant (Shearsmith) finds himself among a ragged group of English Civil War deserters commanded by a maniac (Smiley) bent on finding the treasure he’s convinced is hidden somewhere in the eponymous location. Digging ensues, and also madness, divination, social disease and shovels to the face. Shot in widescreen black-and-white by Laurie Rose and edited by Wheatley and screenwriter Amy Jump, it’s alternately beautiful to behold and utterly assaultive. But it would have been better placed in Midnight Madness, where the audience is ready to freak out right along with the movie. NW 3

= Critic’s Pick nnnnn = Best of the fest nnnn = Excellent nnn = Entertaining nn = Snore n = Who programs this crap?

MORE ONLINE For day-by-day TIFF coverage, with new reviews, interviews, photos, video and complete schedule, go to nowtoronto.com/tiff.

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Villeneuve’s doppelgänger theme a comment on what he perceives as the false schism between French- and English-language cinema in Canada? Dunno. But you could almost certainly write an upper-level cinema studies paper about that. Speaking of the much-lauded: Xavier Dolan successfully shed his obnoxious, overstated “wunderkind!” trappings with last year’s beautifully affecting Laurence Anyways. I’m not sure if I buy TIFF’s program-copy claim that he’s Canada’s “true cinematic poet of desire” (what is Fubar II about if not stymied homosocial bonding?), but I cautiously await his rural thriller, Tom At The Farm. English-language filmmakers are doing some trappings-shedding, too. Considering the way Toronto filmmaker Ingrid Veninger’s earlier films (2010’s Modra and 2011’s I Am A Good Person/I Am A Bad Person) successfully drew on her own family history for dramatic resonance, her latest, The Animal Project, seems like its own animal. Aaron Poole (Small Town Murder Songs) plays a theatre director who dresses his troupe in animal costumes and sends them into the world in hopes of inspiring them. It may not be the sort of hyper-personal near-meta-fiction Veninger defined her career with, but The Animal Project seems to similarly prod the relationship between interiority and outside world. Elsewhere, Jonathan Sobol’s The Art Of The Steal flips the standard success-story script of Canadian actors decamping to Hollywood to validate their success by bringing together American (Kurt Russell, Matt Dillon), Canadian (Jay Baruchel, Kenneth Welsh) and British (Terence Stamp) actors. Our history of attempts to pull off American-style genre films feels at times a bit like a botched heist. As Canadian crime movies go, it’ll almost certainly be better than Foolproof. But will it be as good The Silent Partner? Also: Robert Lepage is in the Masters program with his latest, Triptych (co-directed with Pedro Pires). Lepage has some Jutras under his belt, sure. But a “master”? Of the cinema? Canadian content, eh?

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e may take our homegrown cinema for granted, lost as it is in that weird black hole of seeming neither Hollywood enough nor foreign enough, and watch as most Canadian films (or EnglishCanadian films anyway) nobly flounder at the box office. But believe it or not, plenty of people come to TIFF to see Canadian films. Between the annual festival and its Canada’s Top Ten fete (usually an excuse to relaunch films that premiered at the festival), TIFF plays a crucial canon-forming role in defining the landscape of our national cinema. So if you don’t go see at least one Canadian film, you are a Bad Canadian and should not be allowed vote. (Just kidding. Nobody in Canada votes anyway.) Trend-spotting-wise, some interesting stuff is going on in CanCin that’s reflected in this year’s lineup. Most notably, the anglo industry seems keen to make good on the success of Quebecois films by, well, remaking Quebecois films in English. Don McKellar’s The Grand Seduction is a remake of the 2003 French-Canadian comedy. It’s co-written by Michael Dowse (whose The F Word is also premiering at TIFF; see my top 5 picks, page 18) and Ken Scott (who’s just remade his own French-language film, Starbuck, in Hollywood, starring Vince Vaughn). The English-language remake of La Grande Séduction may serve as a litmus test to see if stories can cross the language barrier. It certainly can’t be worse than Canadian filmmakers’ previous attempts to pander to anglo and franco audiences simultaneously. (See Bon Cop, Bad Cop. Actually, scratch that. Don’t see Bon Cop, Bad Cop.) Much-lauded Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve makes his major English-language debut (not counting the anglo version of 2009’s Polytechnique) with Enemy. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a history professor tracking down an actor who looks uncannily like him. Naturally, this being a film, their lives become inseparably twinned as the line between paranoia and reality blurs. Is

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anthony rose has a thing for rachel macadams, so much so that the one-time Drake toque has plans to build a fountain on his laid-back resto’s backyard patio in honour of the midnight in paris “it girl.” “i’ve been getting stone people to quote on a mermaid likeness of her, but so far they’re really expensive,” says rose. “maybe she’ll fund it if she hears about it.” macadams has yet to drop by, but Robert Pattison has. in town to shoot David Cronenberg’s upcoming maps to the stars, the moody twilight heartthrob nibbled on a “boring” chicken salad while co-star mia wasikowska pigged out on the Crow’s stellar ’cue, most famously chef’s $32 smoked ’n’ grilled rabbit in buttery buffalo-style hot sauce. Thursday to Sunday 11 am to close, Monday to Wednesday 5 pm to close. Closed some holidays. Reservations accepted. Licensed. Access: three steps at door, three steps to washroom.

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Cafe DiplomatiCo

Drake Hotel

there’s more to Jason Priestley’s Cv than beverly Hills 90210. He’s also appeared in a britney spears video, raced a lotus esprit in the very first Gumball 3000 rally and was cast as Jack in the recent production of David mamet’s race at our very own bluma appel theatre. that’s when you would have seen the bC-born thesp at this lumberjack locavorium laying waste to chef robert bragagnolo’s $57 seven-course tasting menu. He’s reported to have been particularly impressed with the first two courses, a ball of herbed chèvre made to look like a tomato, and a tortilla cone filled with guacamole, tequila and tuna ceviche. Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday 5 to 11 pm, Thursday to Saturday 5 pm to 1 am; bar tlll close. Closed Monday, holidays. Reservations accepted. Licensed. Access: seven steps at door, washrooms on same floor.

when local actor/writer/documentarian/activist Sarah Polley entertains the foreign press, she likes to do so at an unpretentious spot like the Dip, just as she did in June when she was grilled by the uK’s august Guardian. Course it helps that she lives up the street. the liberal broadsheet reported that the stories we tell director downed “two eggs over easy with bacon and Hp sauce” ($5.30/$6.30 after 11 am with toast, potato puffs and tea or coffee) during the interview. Given her liberal bent, we had polley down as the gluten-free vegan pizza type. Sunday to Thursday 8 am to 1 am, Friday and Saturday 8 am to 2 am. Licensed. Access: one step at door,

24 star Kiefer Sutherland’s no stranger to the t-dot. He spent a large chunk of his childhood here, after all. if he’s not raving about the fries ’n’ gravy at Harvey’s or swanning around the windsor arms (he swears by the mushroom soup), he’s falling out of a cab in Kensington market. You’d also have found him recently on happening boutique hotel the Drake’s curbside café patio tucking into executive chef teddy Corrado’s $33 naturally raised Cumbrae sirloin slathered in montpelier butter and sided with classically hand-cut frites before heading off to the aCC for a hockey game and the esplanade singles bar scotland Yard for afters. Dinner nightly 6 to 11 pm (latenight menu Friday and Saturday 11 pm to 1 am); brunch Saturday and Sunday 9 am to 4 pm. Café daily 7:30 am to 11 pm. Licensed. Access: barrier-free.

488 Wellington W, at Portland, 416-979-1990, marbenrestaurant.com, @MarbenResto

594 College, at Clinton, 416-534-4637, diplomatico.ca

1150 Queen W, at Beaconsfield, 416-531-5042, thedrakehotel.ca, @TheDrakeHotel

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