Distributors end up changing their strategies and focusing on better received films.
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“It’s the first time we have ever heard of a festival removing a movie from the festival due to it’s imagery being deemed too provocative”.
The city of Toronto has benefited greatly from the film scholarship and instruction that takes place here. Past year the Best Actress field was extremely criticized for its lack of contenders and, as a result, Jennifer Aniston was able to enter the race with her heavily criticized “Cake”. While not the only award, this recognition is the jumping off point for future Academy Award nominations and gains films significant attention. The sighs that greeted TIFF selections Legend, The Martian and I Saw the Light collided messily with raves coming from 2,900 kilometres away. Paramount Pictures bought it and will release it.
But while there may be progress on getting more LGBT films made, those in the community are campaigning for more LGBT actors – especially trans actors – to be cast in leading, rather than minor supporting roles. (Greta Gerwig and Ethan Hawke give classic Gerwig/Hawke performances with Hawke in particular still working his sexy slacker dad thing.) I’m glad I squeezed in a screening of Into The Foreston my last morning of the festival. This year is not turning out to be the same.
I spent many years as a film critic before starting this job. Naomi Watts and Susan Sarandon also signed on to be a part of the film.
David Gordon Green’s “Our Brand Is Crisis” also opened to mixed reception as it won Sandra Bullock plaudits but the film itself was met with reserved reaction.
Co-financed by DFI, the film tells the true story of Arab Idol victor Mohammed Assaf. The result was a critical and box office flop. It wants – needs, really – breakout hits, record sales and critical unanimity. However, he defied their order and went on to script the Oscar winning films The courageous One and Roman Holiday.
Kristen Stewart arrives at the Toronto global Film Festival premiere of “Equals” at the Princess of Wales theatre in Toronto, Canada on September 13, 2015. The fest wraps Sunday, with repeats of some of the fest’s best screening throughout the weekend. Maggie Smith calling out loud for an Oscar in the film “The Lady in the Van” where she plays an elderly woman who chooses to live on the streets and Atom Egoyan’s brooding “Remember” starring Christopher Plummer as a 90-year-old who escapes from his nursing home on a revenge mission that harks back to the Nazi regime. Drake Doremus (Like Crazy) once again proves his excellence at capturing on-screen infatuation in Equals, but the dystopian world inhabited by Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult felt like a more stylish version of the worlds we’ve seen in YA dystopias like The Giver.
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From Johnny Depp’s Whitey Bulger (“Black Mass”) to Robert Redford’s Dan Rather (“Truth“), an particularly giant variety of movies this fall are positive to stoke the ordinary accuracy debates that encompass dramatizations. My favorites were films I already had high hopes for: Spotlight and Room. Kiva Reardon [programming associate at TIFF and U of T alumna] has done that well – she started her own online journal, cléo, and attracted writers who look at film through a feminist lens.
