A lavish period piece set in early 18th century Britain, The Favourite brims with intrigue, personality clashes, power struggles and secret sexual liaisons. At the center of it all are Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), the last Stuart monarch; Sarah, the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), her childhood friend and closest advisor, and Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), […]
A low-key but vibrant film about quiet desperation and survival, Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? is never less than absorbing. The chief protagonist, New York-based author Lee Israel, finds herself in dire straits in the early 1990s. Israel’s last book about cosmetics mogul Estee Lauder has bombed and, cruelly enough, publishers are shunning her. Unable to earn […]
Bjorn Runge’s film, The Wife, is a complex, compelling and nuanced portrait of Joe and Joan Castleman, an elderly couple whose marriage is sorely tested by an unexpected telephone call in the dead of night and a glittering awards ceremony thousands of kilometres away from their home. It’s 1992 and Joe (Jonathan Pryce), an acclaimed […]
Morris (Moe) Berg has acquired a reputation as the most educated and brainiest player in the history of American major league baseball. Born in New York City in 1902, he studied modern languages at Princeton University and law at Columbia University. Despite his bent for academia, he devoted himself to baseball. For 15 years, he […]
We live in an era of rising racism, antisemitism and tacit acceptance of racial and ethnic hatred by right-wing populist politicians. Case in point: A year and a half ago, at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, neo-Nazi louts chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” In a profoundly disappointing response, U.S. President Donald Trump […]
Twenty five years have elapsed since I watched Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, his riveting and powerful 195-minute film set during the Holocaust in Poland. Having left an indelible impression on me the first time around, I was eager to see it again at a Spielberg retrospective at the Toronto International Film Festival. In the re-release […]
Alfonso Cuaron’s stark and absorbing black-and-white neo-realistic Mexican movie, Roma, unfolds as languidly as a steamy night in the tropics. Semi-autobiographical and filmed in quasi-documentary style, it’s set in the upscale but slightly scruffy Roma district of Mexico City in the early 1970s and focuses on the tribulations of a middle-class family and one of its […]
For the first time ever, the Toronto International Film Festival is paying tribute to one of Hollywood’s greatest directors, Steven Spielberg. From December 21 to January 10, TIFF will host Close Encounters: The Cinema of Steven Spielberg, a retrospective of 28 films he has written, directed or produced. These range from Schindler’s List to Raiders […]
John Andersen’s Norwegian feature film, The Quake, revels in intimations of an imminent natural disaster. Exuding an expectant atmosphere, it leaves a viewer wondering when all hell will break loose. The sequel to The Wave, which was released in 2015, The Quake opens in Canadian theatres on December 14. It unfolds in and around Norway’s capital, […]
Roger Ailes would not have been pleased with Divide and Conquer: The Story of Rogers Ailes, Alexis Bloom’s critical biopic of the late Republican Party strategist which opens in Toronto on December 7. Bloom, a liberal filmmaker, portrays the conservative media consultant and Fox News chairman as a divisive force in American politics and as a […]