Unlike most major film festivals, Toronto puts its top award in the hands of the public rather than a jury of film professionals. Viewers at the festival’s public screenings are invited to vote for their favorite films on the TIFF website, with the film getting the highest percentage of votes from its viewers winning.

Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” finished second in People’s Choice voting, while Rian Johnson’s “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery” finished third.

The win makes Zhao the first director to have two films win the People’s Choice Award, which was first given out in 1978. She also won in 2020 for “Nomadland.”

While Zhao was not present to accept the award, she sent an acceptance speech on video, which screened upside down on the livestream of the ceremony. “Apologies for the error, but that is what this film does to your heart,” said TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey at the end of the video.

In recent years, the TIFF People’s Choice Award has been a reliable indicator of Oscar success, with 15 of the last 17 winners going on to receive a Best Picture nomination, and five of them winning (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “The King’s Speech,” “12 Years a Slave,” “Green Book” and “Nomadland”). Last year’s winner, “The Life of Chuck,” did not receive a theatrical release until 2025 and is a longshot to extend the streak to 13 years in a row.

If you include TIFF second-place and third-place winners, 25 of the last 39 films to receive People’s Choice recognition also earned Best Picture nominations. In seven of the last 13 years, the Oscar winner had previously won, placed or showed in Toronto.

The first-ever International People’s Choice Award went to Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice,” with Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” finishing second and Neeraj Ghaywan’s “Homebound” finishing third.

People’s Choice Awards were also given out in the Midnight Madness and TIFF Docs sections. “Nirvanna The Band the Show the Movie” won the Midnight Madness award, while “The Road Between Us” took the documentary prize.

The latter film, about an Israeli general who rescued his family from Hamas during the Oct. 7 attacks, was the festival’s most controversial film, with TIFF booking it, then withdrawing it from the lineup, then adding it back and admitting that the decision to withdraw it had been a mistake.

While the marquee awards were voted on by the public, the festival did put several other awards in the hands of juries. The Platform jury, which gave its top award to “To the Jury!,” consisted of Carlos Marqués-Marcet, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Chloé Robichaud. The Short Cuts jury was made up of Ashley Iris Gill, Marcel Jean and Connor Jessup, who gave awards to “The Girl Who Cried Pearls,” “To the Woods” and “Talk Me.”

The Short Cuts awards came with $10,000 CAD cash prizes, while the Vimeo Staff Pick Award, a new addition, went to “I Fear Blue Skies” and carried a $5,000 prize.

The Canadian Discovery and Best Canadian Feature Film Awards were given to and “Blue Heron” and “Wrong Husband,” respectively, by filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal, Sophie Jarvis and R.T. Thorne.

The FIPRESCI Prize for the festival’s best first feature, from the International Federation of Film Critics, was given to “Forastera” by critics Katharina Dockhorn, Francisco Ferreira, Jean-Philippe Guerand, Andy Hazel and Justine Smith. The NETPAC Award for films from the Asian and Pacific regions went to “In Search of the Sky” and was voted by filmmaker Helen Lee, journalist Keoprasith Souvannavong and author/professor Dina Iordanova.

Here is the complete list of awards announced at a brunch on Sunday morning. Many of the winners were also announced in a press release that was sent to TIFF members in advance of the ceremony, turning the comments section of the livestream into a mass of spoilers.

People’s Choice Award: “Hamnet,” Chloé Zhao
First Runner-up: “Frankenstein,” Guillermo del Toro
Second Runner-up: “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” Rian Johnson

International People’s Choice Award: “No Other Choice,” Park Chan-wook
First Runner-up: “Sentimental Value,” Joachim Trier
Second Runner-up: “Homebound,” Neeraj Ghaywan

People’s Choice Documentary Award: “The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue,” Barry Avrich
First Runner-up: “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” Baz Luhrmann
Second Runner-up: “You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (in a Canadian Kind of Way),” Nick Davis

People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award: “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” Matt Johnson
First Runner-up: “Obsession,” Curry Barker
Second Runner-up: “The Furious,” Kenji Tanigaki

Platform Jury Prize: “To the Victory!” Valentyn Vasanovych

Best Canadian Feature Film: “Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband),” Zacharias Kunuk
Honorable Mention: “There Are No Words,” Min Sook Lee
Best Canadian Discovery Award: “Blue Heron,” Sophie Romvari
Honorable Mention: “100 Sunset,” Kunsang Kyirong

Short Cuts Award for Best International Film: “Talk Me,” Joecar Hanna
Honorable Mention: “Agapito,” Arvin Belarmino and Kyla Danelle Romero
Short Cuts Award for Best Canadian Film: “The Girl Who Cried Pearls,” Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski
Honorable Mention: “A Soft Touch,” Heather Young
Short Cuts Award for Best Animated Short Film: “To the Woods,” Agnes Patron
Vimeo Staff Pick Award: “I Fear Blue Skies,” Sslar Pashtoonyar

NETPAC Award: “In Search of the Sky,” Jitand Singh Gurjar
FIPRESCI Prize: “Forestera,” Lucía Aleñar Iglesias

The post ‘Hamnet’ Wins Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award appeared first on TheWrap.

Should you have absolutely no idea what any of the above means, Lisa Rideout’s affectionate documentary will serve as a suitable gateway to what remains the longest-running teen television franchise in history. It was also among the first to openly address — for starters — adolescent sexuality, domestic violence, abortion, self-harm, gender identity and representation.

Which is quite the feat for a Canadian public TV experiment, eh?

Sorry. But really: If all you know about “Degrassi” is that it launched Drake’s career — or even if his stint as a beloved child star is brand-new information you need time to process — Rideout’s memory trip may well pull you in.

There is, however, no doubt that this one was made for the fans. And they will be delighted to find lots of familiar faces looking back on the experience, from “The Kids of Degrassi Street” (spotlighting insane 1980s outfits) to “Degrassi: The Next Generation” (centered on Millennial angst) and “Degrassi: Next Class” (slightly racier, for “Generation Zed”).

The center of the film is, to some extent, the brilliant center of the Degrassi universe: co-creator, writer, producer and director Linda Schuyler. She also turns out to be the most complex character, as tales from various productions unfurl.

Rideout focuses foremost on the early years, and original cast members like Stacie Mistysyn, Amanda Stepto, Stefan Brogren and Dayo Ade candidly share often-startling stories. They tell of how they barely got paid, worked as both actors and crew on a non-union set and had little emotional support to deal with their intense storylines and unexpected fame.

Rideout doesn’t push Schuyler on these troubling revelations, preferring instead to leave them hanging in uncomfortable silence. This subtler approach can be impactful — it’s hard to miss the fact that Schuyler’s intermittently defensive recollections are filmed in her extravagantly decorated office, while the actors’ quietly pensive interviews are more often shot in modest bedrooms or a stark school building.

What’s more, there’s been some additional drama offscreen: Despite Rideout’s light tread, the film’s TIFF premiere was briefly in question when Schuyler filed legal action claiming the film includes “defamatory statements,” though she later withdrew it upon promise that future versions of the film will provide her perspective. This is, of course, highly unlikely to soften the implication that she wielded an iron fist as “Degrassi’s” producer.

Regardless, when Rideout moves ahead to “The Next Generation,” actors like Shane Kippel, Miriam McDonald, Jake Epstein and, yes, a strikingly humble Drake, bring new and equally honest perspectives. Once again, there are some bombs dropped in among the many happier memories, but they don’t receive extensive exploration. By the time we get to “Degrassi: Next Class,” which arrived on Netflix in 2016, the movie is almost over.

It would have been nice to see additional members of the cast (a great many fan faves are noticeably missing), hear about other iconic moments and dig deeper into the immense complexities of this broadly beloved and perpetually controversial project, but we can also understand the inevitable constraints; there’s only so much room for a chronological exploration of a 40-year franchise, and it’s undeniably tricky to balance the ethics and outlooks of different generations.

There is some irony to the fact that “Whatever It Takes” — which borrows its title from the show’s intrepid theme song — doesn’t always hit hard enough. “Degrassi,” after all, is famous for addressing tough subjects with unflinching defiance.

Nevertheless, Rideout has given us a heartfelt and long-overdue tribute to a groundbreaking show, and it’s fun to see the enthusiasm of unabashed admirers like director Kevin Smith. Most impactful of all are the interviews with the actors cthemselves, each of whom is thoughtful and candid in ways that leave us wanting to know more.

And, as it happens, there is more: Kippel and his “Next Generation” co-star, Mike Lobel, recently started a podcast called “DeGrads,” which has already gone into more behind-the-scenes depth than Rideout is able to capture in her decades-spanning doc. Fans will love it. Ask me how I know.

The post ‘Degrassi: Whatever It Takes’ Review: An Overdue, If Underdeveloped, Tribute to Canada’s Groundbreaking Teen Franchise appeared first on TheWrap.

It’s not that “Driver’s Ed” has any ambitions to be another “Green Book.” In keeping with many of this year’s TIFF films, it’s an audience movie, not an awards movie. But it’s a pretty tepid audience movie, a coming-of-age high school comedy populated with characters who’ve been kicking around since before John Hughes: the kid who outsmarts the demanding but hapless principal, the super-smart but social awkward Asian student, the stoner who’s got more on the ball than you realize…

A veteran director isn’t necessarily disqualified from making an effective teen comedy, but “Driver’s Ed” is mildly amusing at best. It’s a good-natured and good-hearted film without much of the edge or hilarity the Farrelly brothers brought to “Dumb and Dumber” or “There’s Something About Mary” – serviceable, but there’s a reason it’s being dropped at the end of the festival, several days after much of the non-Toronto-based audience has gone home.

And it’s not exactly a great next step for Sam Nivola, who had a key role as the youngest son of Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey in “The White Lotus” but went from one of the year’s most provocative TV shows to a film whose provocations don’t go much beyond a few drug jokes, a raucous frat party and a fair amount of profanity in lines that include Molly Shannon’s school principal telling driver’s ed teacher Kumail Nanjiani that he’s good at talking to kids because “you like them a f–k of a lot more than I do.”

Shannon and Nanjiani are two of the most notable adults (and goofiest characters of any age) in the film, but the story focuses on the kids: Nivola as Jeremy, a talented but lovestruck high school senior who can’t seem to grasp that his girlfriend is not quite as committed to their relationship now that she’s off to college; Sophie Telegadis as Evie, a voice of reason and the love interest that Jeremy is too blind to see; Mohana Krishnan as Aparna, the would-be valedictorian who’s petrified that she’s risking her scholarship to M.I.T. by going off in a borrowed driver’s ed car with her classmates; and Aidan Laprete as Yoshi, the class drug dealer who used to be a brain before his mom died. “I’m still smart, by the way,” he tells Aparna at one point, “I just don’t give a f–k about anything.”  

The four are thrown together in a driver’s ed class taught by Nanjiani, a lackadaisical kind of guy who also has both arms in casts and gives a series of different but equally implausible explanations for how he broke them. But Jeremy decides he has to save his relationship by borrowing the school’s car and heading to his girlfriend’s college, and the others go with him because … well, because there wouldn’t be a movie if they didn’t.

It’s a road movie full of, y’know, wacky escapades: accidentally dropping their cell phones in a river, tangling with a guy who robbed a hot dog stand, evading the school security guard who figures catching them will be his ticket back on the police force that kicked him out and eventually crashing a wild fraternity party when they get to the campus.

Meanwhile, Shannon and Nanjiani do their best to provide some energy, but they’re stuck in a classroom getting updates on the phone, which puts a damper on what they can actually do. Plus, Shannon wants to keep the whole thing quiet for fear that a stolen driver’s ed car will look bad on her permanent record. “I’m not letting three dips–ts and the valedictorian f–k me out of tenure,” she declares.

Is it a spoiler to say that that everybody learns and everybody grows? Probably not. It’s also not a surprise, and neither is anything else in this by-the-numbers teen comedy that finds some fresh new faces but doesn’t give them anything very new to do. Nivola creates a pleasantly clueless character while Telegadis makes the strongest impression among the teens, but it’d be nice if the vet in charge of it all had something that could challenge his cast more than this.

The fact that “Driver’s Ed” is an R-rated teen comedy may make it something of an anomaly these days, but it’s a fairly gentle and mostly goofy one that’s essentially spinning its wheels.

The post ‘Driver’s Ed’ Review: Teenage Road Comedy Doesn’t Really Go Anywhere appeared first on TheWrap.

With his once-promising musical career over, Niki (Leo Woodall) travels alongside his mentor Harry Horowitz (Academy Award-winner Dustin Hoffman) tuning pianos while encountering a wide range of characters, including an aspiring composer Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu). When these two forge an unexpected connection, Niki’s safecracking side hustle threatens this budding romance pulling him into increasingly dangerous territory.

“Tuner” is a film about creative paralysis and that terrifying space between who you were and who you might become when your identity gets pulled out from under you. If someone’s value is predicated on their art, what happens if they can’t make art anymore? This question circled within the head of Oscar-winning director Daniel Roher (“Navalny”) when he met Peter White, a piano tuner in Los Angeles. Peter’s poetic and almost spiritual relationship to sound was fascinating and directly inspired the character of Niki.

With remnants of “CODA” meets “Good Will Hunting,” the audience is inadvertently reminded just how loud the world can be – especially for Niki, who suffers from acute hyperacusis, a disorder where everyday sounds become intolerably loud, uncomfortable or even painful. It’s a heightened sensitivity to normal sounds that can lead to physical discomfort and psychological distress. Yet, there is nothing distressful about this film or its message.

Leo Woodall and Havana Rose Liu’s chemistry makes audiences fall in love twice.  Once with the actors and secondly with the characters they inhabit with every fiber of their soul. Woodall’s flippant exterior masks the loneliness he heartbreaking loneliness he experiences. Liu is a revelation of range. Between her icy characterization of Ruthie to piano playing that transports the audience to another realm. Both Woodall and Liu are megawatt stars in the making.

Of course, with all this drama, welcomed comedic lifts from Hoffman (whose brief yet memorable presence is hardly enough) and (Tovah) Feldshuh counterbalance the heaviness, while spotlighting the realness of dementia, grieving and how life moves on whether we want it to or not.

From the start, the sonic environment is treated as its own character in innovative and immersive ways thanks to executive music producer Marius de Vries, who composed all music performed on-screen by Liu and Woodall (including the big orchestral piece, “Pearl Watch Rhapsody”).

The manner in which sound is utilized to draw parallels between the skillsets of piano tuning and safecracking (both tasks rooted in physicality and sound that require acute sensitivity to touch and acoustics) definitely assists the film in its narrative connections between plot and sonic language.

Scenes in which Niki can call out chords and notes without missing a beat, or moments where Liu and Woodall display more than adequate musical abilities performing technically difficult orchestral opuses, are breathtaking to watch and listen to.

Having had its world premiere at Telluride less than a week ago and seen as a potential acquisition for Black Bear’s new distribution arm, the film (which has now screened at the Toronto International Film Festival) is seen as a prime candidate for distributors going into awards season.

“Tuner” is a gorgeously executed tale and a reminder that it is never too late to tap into a dream, no matter what it may cost or how long it takes to manifest.  The wait is always worth the reward.

The post ‘Tuner’ Hits All The Right Notes With Breakout Stars Leo Woodall and Havana Rose Liu appeared first on TheWrap.

If you thought you had family problems, strap in, as your otherwise messy loved ones are all going to look like downright angels in comparison to this film that’s one part peak Coen brothers, one part an episode of the outstanding HBO series “Barry,” and one hundred percent Winter. Lovers of the director’s underappreciated film “Freaked” can rejoice as, even as it isn’t quite as joyously bizarre as that, it’s still got the same unhinged spirit.  

What exactly this mashup entails requires being a bit coy, as much of the joy of “Adulthood” comes in the way everything starts in an already troubling place and proceeds to spiral out of control from there. What can be said is that death is always waiting in the wings and Winter captures that with often gruesome flair. Still, it’s far from perfect, with some moments of humor not quite hitting as hard as you’d hope for.

Though whatever is lost in laughter, Winter and company make up for in just how fully they commit to the bit, ensuring it ends up being less about how one’s parents are bad people and more about how it is we too are at risk of becoming them. It’s way more grimly profound than you’d expect and can feel like it’s having a bit of an identity crisis. However, all its bigger tonal swings ultimately pay off in spades just as everything is at risk of coming apart for its characters. 

The ones at the center of this are siblings Meg (Kaya Scodelario) and Noah (Josh Gad) whose lives are about to be upended after their mother is hospitalized following a stroke. What is already a tough time full of painful emotions and then also complicated logistics they must deal with alone — their father died years prior — becomes an absolute nightmare when the duo discovers something hidden away in the wall of their parents’ basement. After initially panicking, they decide they’ll have to cover up their discovery out of concern about what people will think if they were to find out who their parents really were. 

There’s something deeply tragic about this driving force of the film as both Meg and Noah, despite having vastly different lives from each other, are also not children any longer. Quite early on, you wonder why it is that they care about what people think of their parents and why it is that they are putting themselves at risk just to protect their reputations. Even as the film remains largely light on its feet, it’s in moments like this where you feel a more queasy throughline starting to rear its head about how Meg and Noah are still trapped in feeling like they have to look out for their parents, even if they didn’t always look out for them. 

From there, the film becomes about how the siblings go to greater lengths to cover up the family secret, with both Scodelario and Gad serving as believable emotional grounding points. With that in mind, it’s when a captivating Anthony Carrigan (most known for his excellent work in the aforementioned “Barry”) enters the film as their cousin who, among many things, has a sword collection unlike just about any other sword collection you’ve ever seen in a movie.

Rather than just feeling like a bit part, Carrigan brings a uniquely chaotic energy to the entire affair where you aren’t sure if his character cares about helping his cousins or just wants to get something for himself. He’s consistently funny, sometimes frightening, and always making different choices in each moment that still ultimately serve the scene perfectly. A final confrontation rests heavily on his shoulders and he delivers on every big swing with ease.

There is much along the journey that isn’t always as compelling as the cast, but there are also some maddeningly clever misdirects that see Winter complicating things at critical junctures. The film is not merely just a farce, but also something that cuts into something a bit more thoughtful. When it then brings everything to a head and Winter lands one final blow via a killer closing monologue from Scodelario, it ends up with a great deal more bite when it needs to. There are adults in the room in Winter’s film, and that’s the problem. They’re exactly the ones you have to look out for. 

“Adulthood” opens in select theaters on September 19 and is available to stream on digital on September 23.  

Read all of our Toronto Film Festival coverage here.

The post ‘Adulthood’ Review: Alex Winter’s Darkly Fun Thriller Knows Where the Bodies Are Buried appeared first on TheWrap.

It’s a pressure-sealed disaster of a movie where nobody stepped in to avert the catastrophe, and you’re now trapped inside as it stumbles from one haphazard scene to the next, without even the slightest sense of vision or insight into its characters. It’s a fascinating watch in the abstract, but one that barely holds together on even a basic narrative level, and it feels almost as if it’s been made by an entirely different person than the one who worked on the acclaimed series “True Detective.”

You might expect an old school Vegas romp, but it’s more a derivative copy of countless other sin city-set movies you’ve seen before — including even last year’s infinitely superior “The Last Showgirl.” References are smashed together, and so little care given is given to its characters that you come away wondering who even any of these people were that you just spent all this time with.

That Vince Vaughn’s singing and the film’s dialogue ring equally hollow, despite the film’s insistence that all of this is actually great, would make great comedy if the entire experience wasn’t such a drag.

It’s like a tracing of what a movie like this should be, forcing the viewer to strain and squint to see what it was even going for before you realize the effort is futile. Even when there is the rare, serviceably charming line in isolation, it all gets lost in the one-note song that is the rest of the film.  

This all begins with Easy (Vaugmhn), a Vegas crooner who never made it despite his supposed talents (an already dubious assertion that the film treats as fact) and has fallen on some rather hard times after losing his job managing a restaurant after hitting a drunken jerk who harassed his staff. But he soon catches a lucky break: a nearby club needs someone to fill in for night to replace a comedian (fittingly played by Shane Gillis) who bombed left and right. 

When Easy steps up to the microphone and belts out some songs, he catches the attention of the former performer Mickey Albano (Al Pacino) who now runs entertainment for the Wynn resort. Mickey offers Easy a job performing at the resort, and he starts to make a name for himself as a must-see singer. Unfortunately, Easy’s troublemaker brother Sam (Simon Rex) arrives, threatening to upend this good thing he’s got going and rob him of his dream once more.

Alas, the film mostly just robs us of our time, and never makes a compelling case for its own existence. 

The singing scenes are awkwardly staged and with no real life behind them. And the dialogue, never natural-sounding, is a series of painfully stiff lines read like they should have done another take. And all of it overly reliant on clunky exposition, or on characters who telegraph so clearly that something significant is about to happen so clearly that its arrival merely elicits a shrug. Was it all a stylistic choice? Or just that what we’re seeing was the best they could get?  

Everything in “Easy’s Waltz” plays out with such tired and obligatory inevitability, it almost seems like Pizzolatto is attempting to pull one over on us. But instead of being funny or at least entertaining, it’s just exhausting. Subplots get picked up and dropped with little thought about any of them, leaving such a strange feeling of whiplash for a film where almost nothing actually happens.

When we get a quick series of time and location jumps near the end that it then backpedals from, “Easy’s Waltz” loses whatever possible potential it could have had to end on a high note. It’s like a bad cover of a song you’ve heard before, leaving you just wishing you could go back to the original and drive this one out of your mind. 

Read all of our Toronto Film Festival coverage here.

The post ‘Easy’s Waltz’ Review: Vince Vaughn Can’t Carry a Tune in Nic Pizzolatto’s Hollow Music Drama appeared first on TheWrap.

In Cox’s directorial debut “Glenrothan,” which centers on a less wealthy family that’s still frequently at each other’s throats over who will take control of their whisky distillery, there are no such devastating, well-written scenes. Instead, the only thing that’s fundamentally unserious is the film itself. 

This lack of seriousness is not for lack of trying. If anything, the film is constantly trying — too hard. Each scene feels overwritten to within an inch of its life and each development in the story so contrived that it lands with an agonizingly dull thud. Written by David Ashton and Jeff Murphy, it hits just about every saccharine note possible while never once achieving the bittersweet balance it is constantly reaching for. You never wonder what it is that you’re meant to be feeling or where it is all going, though it falls short at every turn. All that it leaves is a sense of grim resignation as you realize this is going to be the film you’re in for the next approximately 90 minutes that ends up feeling like an eternity. 

Right out of the gate, as we get several sweeping shots of the beautiful Scottish Highlands, “Glenrothan” begins to stumble. The opener and everything that follows is merely about setting up the story, not making us genuinely feel any earned emotion. As we get bombarded by clunky narration from Cox, who plays distillery owner Sandy, you can feel the strings of the superficial narrative already being pulled. 

We learn of how Sandy’s brother Donal (Alan Cumming) left their home behind to go make a go of it in the United States, where he’s been for the past 30 years. But when a crisis upends his life, he decides to return with his daughter (Alexandra Shipp) and granddaughter with what may be ulterior motives. As he explores his hometown, he begins to awkwardly reconnect not just with Sandy, but with his close childhood companion Jess (Shirley Henderson), whom he also hasn’t spoken to for decades. As the family’s painful past starts to come to the surface, both their future and that of the distillery hang in the balance. 

All of this is communicated through the most cloying flashbacks imaginable that play more like parodies of themselves than they do actual scenes. Everything is so broad and each line of dialogue so blunt that you feel as though you’re being hit over the head at every turn. Any deeper questions “Glenrothan” tries to raise about the tension between duty to family and personal fulfillment are never grappled with in any meaningful way. Subtlety is not a word it seems to know.

Even when Donal and Sandy literally grapple on the ground after an obligatory betrayal, it’s played more as a patronizing joke on the older brother than it is genuinely funny or revealing. It’s borderline insulting to its characters, with Shipp getting so little to do as the goodhearted daughter that you continually wonder if something was cut.   

It’s a shame, as Cox is a great actor. However, not all great actors make for great directors, especially when working with a story as superficial as this. There are plenty of more crowd-pleasing dramas to be made about family, but they need at least some emotional punch behind them. “Glenrothan” has no such heart behind it, proving to be less of a halfhearted swing and more of a sad shrug. All one can say by the time it wraps in an overly neat and forced finale is I love you Brian Cox, but this is not a serious movie. 

Read all of our Toronto Film Festival coverage here.

The post ‘Glenrothan’ Review: Brian Cox’s Dreadful Directorial Debut Is Not a Serious Movie appeared first on TheWrap.

However, for those who have seen her recent films, such as the haunting “High Life,” you’ll know that Denis has never let even the smallest of stories feel insignificant. If anything, the more she hones in on people and draws us into their worlds, the more it is that we can feel something quietly immense grabbing hold of us.  

The same is true with “The Fence” as it becomes clear that the acclaimed French director is returning to some of the ideas she has explored about colonization in films like the essential “Beau Travail” while almost ending up somewhere closer to a type of spiritual horror where the loss at the film’s core slowly consumes everything in its path.

It’s not her best work by any means (that remains the painfully transcendent “Trouble Every Day”), but it’s something that can’t be dismissed either. For all the ways it can feel like she’s working through some of the more agonizing elements boiling underneath the film, the entire framing is about intentionally holding us at a distance until the casual cruelty that set everything in motion makes that impossible. It’s cinema as a reckoning, but one that also shows how inefficient such reckonings can be when the wheels of violence just keep on turning. 

The one caught in the wheels of this violence is an African worker (Brian Begnan) who supposedly died in an accident while working at the construction site. His brother Alboury, played by the always excellent Isaach De Bankolé, then comes to retrieve his body and bring him back home. Despite the increasingly ridiculous excuses of the British construction supervisor, Horn (Matt Dillon), he stands and waits. And waits. And waits some more.

Soon, we see Horn’s underling Cal (Tom Blyth) is going to retrieve his wife, Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce) for him. Horn, desperately clinging to a false tranquility with the hope that all can be fixed when she arrives, does everything he can to try to get Alboury to leave. He doesn’t and things steadily grow more tense as Leonie gets closer to the construction site. 

This all seems quite simple on paper, but underneath every line of dialogue is a growing sense of unease that Denis contrasts with the ordinary rhythms of the site. Never once overplaying her hand, she lets us begin to understand the everyday cost of doing business that the site pays in money and the community in human lives. We see how Horn is familiar with paying off families after their loved ones die and doesn’t think this will be any different.

Yet as the night grows darker, the two increasingly go back and forth, neither seeming like they will move an inch. Then, you see how Horn’s excuses are becoming more cowardly rationalizations and eventual confessions that whither under the piercing stare of De Bankolé. Even as Dillon is the one with more to do and dialogue to speak, it’s an outstanding De Bankolé who holds the camera with such intensity that you don’t dare look away for even a second. 

As shot by the excellent cinematographer Eric Gautier, who previously collaborated with Denis on “Both Sides of the Blade” and “Stars at Noon,” everything about the site and the fence that separates the two men makes it feel as though we’re trapped in some sort of purgatory. One could reduce the film to a morality play with neat answers, but it’s more of a technically focused deconstruction of violence and desire than it is anything else. Just as Leonie’s arrival reveals how Cal is jealous of Horn, the violence that always remains just out of frame becomes something that those inside the fence try to keep buried. But there is no keeping such things buried, no matter how much the characters desperately try. 

When everything is then inevitably dug up and laid out in the open, there’s something almost intentionally unsatisfying about the moment. A flashback, a narrative device Denis has always tended to forcibly lean on in her films to spell out information, that should be shattering actually feels woefully inevitable when we already know that the “accident” at the beginning of the film was just the common story that Horn tells on behalf of his bosses.

In every camera move Denis makes and each restrained yet riveting line delivery from De Bankolé, this all eventually gets broken down. When “The Fence” proceeds to leave this site of violence behind, the lack of justice or catharsis is the point. Though a small film in many regards, it’s the quiet despair we arrive at and the death that gets shouldered where we feel the film’s weight crushing down on those still outside the fence all the same. 

Read all of our Toronto Film Festival coverage here.

The post ‘The Fence’ Review: Claire Denis’ Latest Film Is a Consuming Drama About Death appeared first on TheWrap.

If you were also hoping for a work that has something really interesting to say about the current state of technology, dating, and how the former influences the latter, you’ll have to keep looking. Though this film does gesture towards urgent issues, like misogyny being endemic to the modern tech industry, and is genuine in how it seeks to talk about them in a more crowd-pleasing package, it never amounts to being more than one note. Despite clearly wanting to be similar to David Fincher’s enduring “The Social Network,” Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s film merely has its heart in the right place and could use a significant upgrade in how it executes everything it puts forth. 

“Swiped” is a broad biopic more than it is an incisive, sociologically driven drama. Making matters worse is that the person being profiled, Whitney Wolfe Herd (Lily James), is someone the film seems reluctant to depict as flawed in a way that can’t be solved in a quick little speech. There’s still something engaging about seeing her go through the male-dominated tech world and deal with countless indignities to individually find success rather than pull people up with her, though this feels like only superficial lip service that is soon left by the wayside.

It then tries to lean hard into the idea of Bumble being about opening up a conversation about making dating not just better for women, but genuinely safer. The trouble is the conversation is always only with itself. Even when it throws in a conflict about standing by your values when it’s hard near the end, it’s resolved so quickly that it never feels earned. As we get taken through one flatly lit montage after another, with forced needle drops galore where we see how great everything ends up being, as if this app fixed all problems in the world, you start to feel like you’re watching a commercial rather than a genuine film. A commercial for what is a good question, but it certainly isn’t for this film. In fact, you mostly get the sense that Herd is always selling us something about herself. 

That’s again where you can almost see a version of “Swiped” that’s more morally complex and truthful in how it explores the way people, even those with initially good intentions, can give up their principles when it serves them. Where it loses steam is when it increasingly plays like an extended hagiography of Herd. The film decides she really is, ultimately, pretty great, rather than presenting a complicated, honest portrait of a flawed person trying to do her best. It’s flatly inspiring on the outside, but insipid on the inside, reducing the whole thing to feeling like a vanity project in disguise. For every moment it holds Herd’s feet to the fire, it puts out any greater spark that it could have desperately used to give the film some life. 

All of this is to say, “Swiped,” we need to talk. I’m afraid things are just not working out. It’s not you, it’s me. I’m just not feeling any sort of connection between us. I’m sure there is someone great out there that will be swept away by your charms, but I’m just not one of them. Whatever you’re selling, it’s just not something I’m buying. Still, I wish you the best of luck if you choose to get on the apps because, honestly, it’s still a nightmare out there. 

“Swiped” will be available to stream on Hulu on September 19 in the U.S.

Read all of our Toronto Film Festival coverage here.

The post ‘Swiped’ Review: Lily James Can’t Make This Shallow Dating App Saga Into ‘The Social Network’ appeared first on TheWrap.

The new documentary from Oscar-winning directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhely and Jimmy Chin (“Free Solo”), “Love+War,” opens with gunshots and explosions heard in the distance. It’s Feb. 19, 2022, in Novoluhanske in Eastern Ukraine, mere days before Russia invades the country. Lynsey Addario, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, is on the ground reporting from the area firsthand. 

Five days later, war would come to Ukraine. It still hasn’t left.

But the filmmakers, whose feature held its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, don’t take their cues from the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. Instead, their main subject is Addario herself, a veteran photojournalist who reported for The New York Times and published an image to prove Putin wrong about his claims that he was not targeting civilians. The photo gained worldwide attention — but to Addario, it’s just another day at the office. 

Addario’s life exists within two different spaces. The first is the obvious one, the war zone that she covers for her job. The second is her home life, where her husband, Paul de Bendern, a former Reuters journalist, and her two children give her hope that the separation of work and life is a possibility. Paul and Lynsey made an agreement years ago to prioritize her work so that their children wouldn’t have two journalists as parents working 24-hour days.

Her family doesn’t stop Lynsey Addario from continuing to risk her life to document the pain, sense of injustice, and abuse that exists outside of her comfortable London home.

Lynsey has a distinct ability to go to places where men are not welcome. She shows the reality of war-torn places like Sierra Leone, Iraq and Ukraine in heart-wrenching detail, often depicting women and children in harsh situations. Her dedication to photojournalism is admirable, and the film focuses a lot on her professional accomplishments and documentation of humanitarian crises throughout the world.

But what “Love+War” does really well is its eventual pivot to a more intimate and emotionally complex narrative. It is jarring at first to understand that Lynsey is the focus of what seems like a war documentary on its surface. Yet, the tension between her professional ambitions and her family life is intriguing. 

This is a woman who has been kidnapped and risked everything to tell a story through pictures. She is unapologetic about how that balance can be taken right up to an edge where boundaries are tested. Vasarhelyi and Chin are smart enough to expand those boundaries and let the audience in on the moments that encompass all of Lynsey’s life, including many sweet sequences of bathing her children at home and discussing her job with them and her husband.

The film’s title comes into focus more than halfway through its short 95-minute runtime, when it’s clear that Lynsey is a bit of an adrenaline junkie who keeps her eye on the prize. She is most present when she is working on the frontlines of a major global conflict, mostly because she understands her role in depicting history through a well-crafted lens. Vasarhelyi and Chin bring emotional weight through their storytelling of Lynsey’s wartime experiences and interviews with colleagues providing background for a person destined to be talked about in the same breath as famous photojournalists like Matthew Brady and Lee Miller.

It isn’t often that documentaries are made about women who choose their work over their family, but Lynsey Addario’s dedication to her job is anything but ordinary. “Love+War” ultimately feels like a confrontation with the cost of that dedication, rather than a celebration of one person’s achievements. The film contrasts harrowing war zone footage with quiet, fragile moments at home, creating a visceral portrait of a life split between two worlds.

It takes awhile to get to why Lynsey is so passionate about her work, but the film eventually becomes real, raw and deeply human. It’s more of an exploration of why women aren’t typically known for war photojournalism, but Lynsey Addario hopes to change that stereotype for future generations.

The post ‘Love+War’ Review: Harsh Realities of War and Family Center an Enlightening Documentary appeared first on TheWrap.