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Destroyer, Blind Spot, Birds of Passage, A Star is Born, Roma, and Hotel Mumbai were some of TIFF's best |
That’s a wrap for another year at the Toronto International
Film Festival! TIFF had its best and arguably most exhausting year yet in 2018.
There were some great movies and moments of TIFF, but the highlight might have
been the Saturday of the first weekend when I came home and stress ate an
entire bag of Kettle Chips with a bottle of prosecco. After spending nearly the
entire day on email coordinating or conducting interviews that consumed the
first few days of TIFF, it was a great way to unwind after missing several
movies. Check out more coverage at POV
and stay tuned to BeatRoute for the
work fuelled by greasy chips and bubbly.
Maybe the audiences did. The movies were very strong this
year even if the line-up veered away from spotlighting fresh discoveries and
more towards promoting studio fare and giving exposure to films with
distribution deals and release dates in place. Even while recommending my festival
favourites to friends, endorsements often lacked a sense of urgency for people
to see the film at the festival, rather than to watch for it in the weeks to
come. But for every A Star is Born or
Roma there was a Blind Spot and a Heartbound.
TIFF’s willingness to level the playing field for films regardless of the life
they will enjoy after the festival inevitably highlighted a robust range of
innovative voices pushing the boundaries of studio and independent filmmaking
alike.
Surprise Hits
The best discoveries of the festival came in notable debut
features from talents to watch. Swedish actress Tuva Novotny announced herself
as a bold and visionary director with her riveting one-take wonder Blind Spot that presented a family in
real time with gripping urgency. Especially powerful was Anthony Maras’s real
life survival drama Hotel Mumbai
about the courageous employees of Mumbai’s Taj Hotel who protected their guests
when terrorists put the hotel under siege during a string of attacks that
plagued the city in 2008. Hotel Mumbai
provided one of the most emotionally intense experiences of the festival as its
all-star ensemble cast delivered a gripping testament to courage under fire.
The film has the intensity of Argo
and the emotional power of Hotel Rwanda
and is very much a contender to watch in the months to come. Stay tuned for
interviews with Maras and actors Armie Hammer, Nazanin Boniadi, Anupam Kher,
and Jason Isaacs! (Other interviews coming include Life Itself director Dan Fogelman, If Beale Street Could Talk star KiKi Layne, Kingsway director Bruce Sweeney, and Through Black Spruce breakout Tanaya
Beatty.)
Disappointing Duds
TIFF had very few turkeys this year, which is pretty good
out of 57 movies. The only flat-out terrible movie was the pathetically no
frills sci-fi head-scratcher JessicaForever, which was the low-point of the festival’s otherwise strong Platform
competition. Also delivering plenty of gobbledygook was The Great Darkened Days from Felix
and Meira director Maxime Giroux. This movie made no sense whatsoever as it
followed a draft dodger through the highways of America circa 1940-ish replete
with sloppy anachronisms like REM blasting over the car radio. I still have no
idea what the point of it all was.
There were three major disappointments at the festival,
however, from filmmakers I really admire. For one, Werner Herzog mailed it in
with his latest documentary Meeting Gorbachev, which provided little more than a jovial chat and Herzog’s
ruminative voiceover. Paolo Sorrentino, who directed this blog’s pick for the
best of 2015 with Youth, delivered a
brain fart with the Silvio Berlusconi satire Loro. While stylish and quirky, Loro
was a tits-and-ass bacchanal that felt completely tone deaf in a festival that
made great efforts to afford agency to women in film. Literally every female
character in Loro is topless or naked
as Sorrentino lampoons Berlusconi’s piggish misogyny through an uncomfortable
male gaze viewpoint that doesn’t treat women with respect.
The roaring dumpster fire of TIFF ’18 was Xavier Dolan’s
long awaited and much tinkered with The Death and Life of John F. Donovan. While neither great nor terrible, Donovan is just a mess of fits and
starts. Too many ideas and characters appear and disappear at random. It has
moments of greatness though and still merits a look from Dolan fans eager to
see the director try new things with some big league actors.
Best of the Fest
Without harping on the negative, there were some major films
at the festival this year. Two films that rode into TIFF with heavy
expectations were Bradley Cooper’s sensationally good remake of A Star is Born starring Lady Gaga and
Alfonso Cuarón’s deeply personal Netflix offering Roma. Both films delivered on expectations, if not surpassed them.
Lady Gaga’s performance in A Star is Born
is destined to be a serious awards player and establishes her as a truly
great, electrifying screen presence. In my upcoming review of Roma for BeatRoute, moreover, I note how
seeing Roma at the festival made me
feel much as I imagine audiences felt when they were discovering Bicycle Thieves and L’Avventura for the first time. It is boldly realized cinema.
Expect Bradley Cooper to be a big player in the awards conversation as both
actor and director, while I think A Star
is Born is the film to beat for Best Picture at this early stage in the
race. Cuarón, on the other hand, might be a formidable frontrunner for both
Best Director and Best Cinematography, while Mexico’s smart choice to submit Roma in the Best Foreign Language Film
category puts another win in the bag if the film can avoid anti-Netflix bias in
the consistently controversial shortlisting round.
The strongest film of the festival, like last year’s Sweet Country and 2016’s Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig
Their Own Graves, came in TIFF’s daring competitive sidebar Platform. That
film was Karyn Kusama’s brutally badass spin on the cop flick Destroyer, which featured Nicole Kidman
at the top of her game. Everything about Destroyer
was on fire as Kusama’s unflinching direction wades Kidman’s dirty cop Erin
Bell into a heart of darkness as she pursues a violent vendetta. Destroyer marked Kidman’s Training Day and King Kong had nuthin’
on her when it came to eclipsing every performer at the festival. The film was
the biggest surprise and a heart-pounding punch to the face. What an
exhilarating rush!
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Nicole Kidman in Destroyer Courtesy of TIFF |
My picks for the top films of TIFF ’18 are, in alphabetical order:
Gloria Bell
Hotel Mumbai
Kingsway
Roma
A Star is Born
Best Actress: Nicole
Kidman, Destroyer
Runners-up: Lady Gaga, A
Star is Born; Julianne Moore, Gloria
Bell
Best Actor: Bradley
Cooper, A Star is Born
Runner-up: Alexandre Landry, The Fall of the American Empire; Zain Al Rafeea, Capernaum
Best Supporting
Actress: Carmiña Martínez, Birds of
Passage
Runners-up: Nicole Kidman, Boy Erased; Ning Ding, Cities of Last Things
Best Supporting
Actor: Dev Patel, Hotel Mumbai
Runners-up: Anupam Kher, Hotel
Mumbai; Sam Elliot, A Star is Born
Best Ensemble: Hotel Mumbai
Runners-up: If Beale
Street Could Talk; Kingsway
Best Cinematography: Roma
Runners-up: Climax,
Cold War
Best Documentary: Heartbound
Best Canadian Film: Kingsway
Runners-up: The Fall
of the American Empire, Carmine
Street Guitars
Best Nicole Kidman: Destroyer
Runner-up: Boy Erased
Best Nicole Kidman
Wig: Boy Erased
Runner-up: Destroyer
Best Q&A: Julianne
Moore, John Turturro, and Sebastian Lelio, Gloria
Bell
Runner-up: The cast of Her
Smell; that guy who asked Nicole Kidman about wigs at Destroyer