- THE TIFF CONNECTION Episode 11
Don't TIFF it's over
- THE PAPERBOY Early Review / Κριτική
Here’s comes the Cannes kinky shocker of a hot ‘n’ swampy Louisiana movie, by Precious director Lee Daniels. This sophomore effort is a spiced up adaptation of Peter Dexter’s (Deadwood) homonym 1995 novel, for Daniels, an openly gay black director, has put forth both plot points, offering a different angle of the book, toning up the vibrations of an already thickened script as it pertains to protagonists’ hardships.
- ARGO Early Review / Κριτική
Are you superstitious? It has so happened twice in the last couple of years here at TIFF, that a film which premieres on the first Friday of the festival goes all the way to win oscar gold. The King’s Speech was first and then came The Artist.
- MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Early Review / Κριτική
If I was a big studio exec I might have very much called 2012 Josh Whedon’s year. The formerly known as the Buffy, the Vampire Slayer helmer, gave multiple nerdgasms this year with both hugely successful The Avengers and (as a writer of) The Cabin in the Woods.
- TO THE WONDER Early Review / Κριτική
This is North America. The brand name Terrence Malick is beyond criticism. It’s been six films in 40 years. It’s to wonder really how this one is out just one year after the beautiful, esoteric and widely divisive oscar nominee/winner (won best cinematography for Terry’s permanent collaborator Emmanuel Lubezky) The Tree of Life.
- CLOUD ATLAS Early Review / Κριτική
I am severely torn about this one. The good news about me is that I could feel much worse, considering that Cloud Atlas is a minced, botched patchwork of a total number of 7 films into one (lost count in the meanwhile), falling hard from the grace of its own preposterous ambition.
- THE TIFF CONNECTION Episode 10
Love Marilyn with Passion
- THE TIFF CONNECTION Episode 9
Much Ado About The Paperboy
- THE TIFF CONNECTION Episode 8
AR-GOing for Oscar gold
- THE TIFF CONNECTION Episode 7
From Scylla to Charybdis
- GREAT EXPECTATIONS Early Review / Κριτική
Adapting the monumental coming of age Dickensian novel has always been a rock of Sisyphus project; After the definitive version by grandmaster David Lean (back in 1947 – remember the opening graveyard scene?), there have been numerous efforts, amongst those the modernistic 1998 version by Alfonso Cuaron with little success.
- HYDE PARK ON HUDSON Early Review / Κριτική
A BBC and BFI production. Thinking “masterpiece theater”. Roger Michel directing. Guessing “Notting Hill”? Franklin Delano Roosvelt, the polio sufferer american president and his (most of them) "distant cousins” harem. Giggling, “Bill Clinton”? King George VI the famous stutterer, for a royal visit to FDR’s pavilion at Hyde Park on Hudson, exclaiming “THE KING’S SPEECH”?
- THE COMPANY YOU KEEP Early Review / Κριτική
The classic ancient greek tragedy poet Euripides (480-406 BC) has left us the maxim “A man can be judged by the company he keeps”. Robert Redford, by his 9th directorial effort, is up to prove that one man may be tantalized by the company he used to know 30 years later.
- THE TIFF CONNECTION Episode 6
Moderate Expectations
- SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK Early Review / Κριτική
The progress, the eccentrically talented David O. Russell keeps making film after film really impresses me. With The Fighter he proved awfully a lot in regard to deep characterization, physicality and thoughtfulness, pushing his story to rigorously happy endings through dire straits. The Fighter was a sports drama, a mistreated genre which he restored in our eyes, avoiding clichés for the vast majority of its running time (this argument is a keeper for this present review).
- THE TIFF CONNECTION Episode 5
Pure...Silver!
- THE TIFF CONNECTION Episode 4
The Master of TIFF2012 is here
- THE SESSIONS Early Review / Κριτική
The perfect Sundance2012 hit, purchased by Fox Searchlight for $6M, for one thing, had a fame preceding today’s press screening. A packed theater, every pundit came to check this oddly optimistic, autobiographic take on the 38 year old Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes) polio story and his basic human right to…finally enjoy sexual intercourse.
- THE WE AND THE I Early Review / Κριτική
Who isn’t really a big aficionado for Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Even fascinated by the big ideas nesting on The Science of Sleep, several years before Looper’s recent time travel novelties.
- GOD LOVES CAVIAR Early Review / Κριτική
In times of economic turmoil for my country, Greece, Yiannis Smaragdis (Kavafis, El Greco) continues ostensibly to think big, in terms of production values. I guess the russian funding should have played a decisive role to that daring project.
- THE TIFF CONNECTION Episode 3
Episode 3 - The Sessions Continue
- AMOUR Early Review / Κριτική
This has been the most negative experience so for in TIFF12, owed partly to the inherently huge expectations from the Austrian grandmaster Michael Haneke. Amour is Cannes2012 winner of Palme d’Or and the frontrunner in this year’s Oscar race for best foreign language film.
- RUST AND BONE Early Review / Κριτική
After his lofty success in Cannes three years ago with (the winner of Grand Jury Prize) A Prophet, Jacques Audiard strikes back with another tour de force storytelling.
- ANNA KARENINA Early Review / Κριτική
So, let’s reunite the apostle of period pieces, the iconoclast Joe Wright for a third (thus far, after Pride & Prejudice and the admittedly enchanting Atonement), or even a fourth, fifth time with the chin-up Keira Knightley until kingdom (of absolute bordom?) come!
- LOOPER Early Review / Κριτική
It was almost a decade ago (finally released in 2006) when Brick became a star vehicle for Joseph-Gordon-Levitt, crafted by the hands of first-timer Rian Johnson, whose sophomore highly anticipated effort (Brothers Bloom, 2009) tanked both artistically and commercially.
- THE TIFF CONNECTION Episode 2 - In The Loop(er)
Toronto is the friendliest breed of big north american cities, prominent and then again private, inviting cheer when it provides with enough opportunity to dive oneself into its quite alleys, for peaceful reflection. When it profoundly states “yours to discover”, it really resonates with me all the above.
- THE TIFF CONNECTION Episode 1 - Breakfast At TIFFany's
It’s been a seditiously cruel end of summer. Today is my first Fall. I am abandoning my mother tongue, yearning to adjure my contrived narrative style. All the information you need is out there. Originality? Virtually a lost cause. So is cinema of nowadays.
