TIFF Review: “The Lost King”

Toronto International Film Festival 2022 World Premiere, Special Presentations Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins) is adrift. Recently denied a big assignment at work—she’s good at what she’s already doing, her boss says— and suffering from ME, a chronic fatigue illness that especially flares up in times of stress, she’s in need of something to rejuvenate her. […]

TIFF Review: “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”

Toronto International Film Festival 2022 Midnight Madness World Premiere Weird Al Yankovic is no typical music artist. The shaggy-haired, Hawaiian shirt connoisseur musician/comedian built a career out of a niche area of the industry: parodies of existing songs and polka covers. So it shouldn’t be surprising that a movie about his life would be no […]

TIFF Review: “El Agua”

Toronto International Film Festival 2022 North American Premiere In a small river-side town in Spain, legend holds that every few decades when the river overflows, female residents disappear, an effect of the water’s desire to claim a woman who has recently fallen in love. Filming in her hometown and drawing on its own local legends, […]

Review: “Three Thousand Years of Longing”

Dr. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) inhabits the perfect role in a movie that’s a story about telling stories. She works in the equally fictional-sounding position of narratologist, specializing in myths and legends, and while she resides and teaches in London, at the start of “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” she’s arriving in Istanbul for a […]

Review: “Bodies Bodies Bodies”

“Bodies Bodies Bodies,” director Halina Reijn’s Gen-Z satire clothed in trappings of a whodunnit from a story by Kristen Roupenian and screenplay by Sarah DeLappe, opens on a tender note. The camera caresses young couple Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) and their girlfriend Bee (Maria Bakalova) as they caress each other, Sophie even going so far as […]

Review: “Bullet Train”

The Shinkansen, or bullet train, is a network of railway lines in Japan that connect areas across the country to Tokyo, and can reach operating speeds of up to 200 miles per hour. The pacing of the movie “Bullet Train,” set on one of these commuter trains, is about as fast, but far less focused. […]

Review: “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On”

It’s often beneficial to step back and observe life from a different perspective. In the case of Marcel, we get a shell’s eye view, but the outlook of this tiny, one-eyed shell creature wearing little shoes is remarkably incisive. “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” evolved from a series of three short films created by […]

Review: “Resurrection”

Many of us have one thing, one traumatic incident, of which the slightest reminder will immediately cause any semblance of control or sanity we had to fly out the window. For Margaret (Rebecca Hall), that trauma takes the form of a person: David (Tim Roth). When she glimpses him from across the room during a […]

Review: “Nope”

I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle. Writer and director Jordan Peele opens his third feature film, “Nope,” with that verse from the Bible’s Book of Nahum, effectively laying out the movie we are about to see. For spectacle is what “Nope” is all about, although not […]

Review: “Skies of Lebanon”

He was an astrophysicist who dreamed of sending the first Lebanese man into space. She was a Swiss artist who moved to Beirut to work as a nanny. For this seemingly unusual pair, it was love at first sight, but even the most idyllic romance struggles to withstand the hardships of war. Director and cowriter […]