TIFF Dailies // Day 11

The Toronto International Film Festival wraps up today, so we’ve rounded up 10 films that peaked our interest, for better or for worse, to sum up our festival experience.

Moonlight

Just the second feature film from director Barry Jenkins, Moonlight is a deeply moving portrait of a young boy named Chiron growing up in inner-city Miami. The film is told in three chapters named for the labels given to Chiron at the different times of his life. As Little, he’s a young boy struggling with a drug addicted mother (Naomie Harris), who is taken under the wing of local drug-dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali) and his wife Teresa (Janelle Monáe). As Chiron he’s a high school kid dealing with confusing feelings for his best friend Kevin (Jharrel Jerome). As Black, he’s a hardened man suddenly pulled back to the life he’s tried to leave behind. A beautifully rendered study of identity, masculinity and belonging, any one chapter of the film could stand on its own, but together they tell a story that feels entirely universal, yet untold until now. – EA

Free Fire

Ben Wheatley delivers his most audience-friendly flick yet with this kinetic shoot ‘em up featuring fantastic comic turns from a deep cast of actors able to straddle the film’s blurry line between goofy fun and serious violence. A group of IRA soldiers meet with a gang of gun runners for a friendly exchange of weaponry at an abandoned warehouse. Predictably, things go off the rails and what follows is the wildest shoot-out put to film in years. Brilliant sound design ensures every gunshot is felt – whether it wings off concrete or thuds into flesh – and the claustrophobic setting imbues a simple thing like a telephone with desperate importance. Armie Hammer and Sharlto Copley give stand out performances in a cast deep with talented character actors. A brilliantly fun palette cleanser in a festival filled with heavy dramas, Free Fire leaves us guessing until the very last shot. – EA

Paterson

Jim Jarmusch’s call for a simpler, more observant life, Paterson may have been the least showy film at the festival, and may also have been my favourite. Adam Driver stars as a full time bus driver and part time poet living a regimented life in Paterson, New Jersey with his dilettante wife (Golshifteh Farahani) and impish bulldog Marvin. Based on the famous poem by William Carlos Williams the films follows Paterson (who shares his name with the city), as he goes through seven days, driving his bus, scratching down a poem on his lunch break, then stopping at the bar for a post-work beer. The fact that the film is absolutely engrossing speaks to Jarmusch’s masterful attention to the subtleties of human interaction, and his ability to coax beautifully understated performances from his lead actors. It’s hard to describe, but you’ll walk out of the theatre seeing the world anew, and that’s the highest compliment I can give. – EA

Christine

The true story of Sarasota television reporter Christine Chubbuck who famously committed suicide while live on the air, Christine is an absolutely engrossing character study from director Antonio Campos (Simon Killer). Rebecca Hall turns in the best performance of her career as the socially awkward and emotionally immature Christine who pines after golden-boy news anchor George (Michael C. Hall), spars with the ratings obsessed station manager Michael (Tracy Letts) and struggles to communicate with her hippy mother/roommate Peg (J. Smith-Cameron). Though knowledge of the inevitable conclusion casts a certain gloom over the film, it’s still a deft and empathetic portrait of the troubled, self-absorbed, occasionally goofy Chubbuck, as well as the hectic, seat-of-the-pants chaos of a local news station. – EA

The Salesman

It’s almost like cheating adding an Asghar Farhadi film to this list. The Oscar winning Iranian director had never directed a dud, and this year is no exception. In The Salesman a married pair of stage actors Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) are forced out of their crumbling high rise and take a recently-vacated apartment in a building owned by a friend. The apartment, however, holds a history, one that leads to a shocking act of violence against Rana. Husband and wife react to the attack in very different ways, while at the same time their nightly performances of Death of a Salesman mirror their increasingly troubled relationship. Farhadi is a cinematic puppet-master, manipulating his characters in ways that are never predictable yet always disturbingly plausible. Though it may not reach the intensity of his best work (A Separation), the director’s newest still displays his unmatched ability to create soaring, shocking drama in the everyday settings of domestic life. – EA

The Handmaiden

Korean master Chan-wook Park keeps finding new ways to shock and disturb. The director of Oldboy and Stoker delivers his usual mix of sex, violence and weirdness in the newest film, which follows a pair of con-artists in Japanese occupied Korea who attempt to defraud a Japanese heiress living at a vast country estate. For the first half-hour the film feels like a fairly linear thriller, but then Park leaps backwards in the story, showing us everything we’ve already seen but from a brand new perspective. Suddenly everything we believed is in doubt, and as the film jumps back and forth through time a fascinating tale of love and revenge takes shape. Thanks to the cinematography of Chung-hoon Chung and the Production Design of Seong-hie Ryu, the film is so beautiful that even if you can’t follow the story, you can still sit back and enjoy the scenery. Erotic, depraved and oddly heartwarming, you won’t be able to look away. – EA

Arrival

When twelve alien ships appear across the globe, governments scramble to understand the visitors and discover their intentions. Linguist Dr. Louis Banks (Adams) is recruited by the military to attempt to communicate with the alien visitors, however as she makes progress with their strange, circular language, the visit threatens to push the world into an international arms race. A slow-build sci-fi drama with an emotional wallop, Denis Villaneuve’s first-contact feature boasts haunting visuals, an outstanding score from Jóhann Jóhannsson (Sicario) and a refreshingly new spin on some familiar science fiction themes. Though a supporting cast of Forest Whittaker, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jeremy Renner deliver solid performances this is the Amy Adams show, and it should put her firmly in the Oscar conversation. A sister film to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, Arrival will become an instant classic for audiences who love to piece together a mystery when all the clues are up there on the screen. – EA

Jackie

Chilean director Pablo Larrain turns his lens on American politics and pageantry with Jackie, where the events leading up to and following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are seen through the eyes of his wife, Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman). Not quite a bio-pic, the film is inspired by Theodore H. White’s interview with the former first lady a week after her husband’s funeral that was originally published in LIFE. Jackie’s last act as First Lady is to plan an extravagant state funeral for her husband in hopes that his short lived tenure as President isn’t forgotten by history due to a lack of true accomplishment. The dynamic character piece is explored via her relationships with the journalist White (Billy Curdup), her brother-in-law Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard), her personal aide (Greta Gerwig) and the catholic priest who buried JFK in Arlington National Cemetery (John Hurt). Natalie Portman shines as the soft spoken, albeit somewhat unlikable, main character who cunningly turns JFK’s death into the Camelot legacy. – VM

American Pastoral

A screen adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral was touted as impossible, but the burning desire to play the lead character Seymour “Swede” Levov led to the ambitious directorial debut of Ewan McGregor. Unfortunately, the film proves what fans of the novel have been saying for years. The film gets lost in the themes of the novel, not only failing to bring the literary gravitas of the original text the big screen but also neglecting to bring a coherent story to audiences. – VM

La La Land

Heartbreaking yet utterly enjoyable, La La Land is the dazzling new musical from Whiplash director Damien Chazelle. Set in modern day, with a clear nod to the films of Hollywood’s golden age, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone star as two wannabe artists trying to find fortune, fame and love in the City of Dreams. Mia (Stone) is a struggling actress who falls for the always smooth Sebastian, a jazz pianist still brooding over past mistakes. When opportunities come their way, the pair struggle to cling to the love that helped them through their roughest days. Stone and Gosling are a formidable pair, as we witnessed in Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011). Their chemistry and raw performances make this film a joy to watch despite the tender melancholy of the subject matter. – VM

Films reviewed by Evan Arppe & Vithiya Murugadas.