There are worse places to be contained than a designer home where a gorgeous pair of acclaimed actors rhapsodizes about the complexities of contemporary life. Florian Zeller’s Bunker (B) pairs Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem in a topical allegory about whether we as a society are engaging with an unsettling world or simply retreating from it. Bardem plays an increasingly paranoid star architect contemplating a lucrative assignment to construct a survival bunker for a tech billionaire, a morally compromised project that strains his marriage and exposes anxieties about wealth, power and isolation. Some of Zeller’s symbolism feels strikingly prescient; just as often, it lands squarely on the nose. Yet there’s an added layer of intrigue in watching a real-life couple navigate the film’s marital power struggles, much as there was with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut. Cruz and Bardem know exactly how to push and pull against each other, turning domestic arguments into intellectual and emotional sparring. When Bunker threatens to bury itself beneath its own metaphors, its stars keep digging out something compelling. It’s an awesome power play by a genuine power
It’s hard to argue Director Werner Herzog isn’t being true to the themes defining his peculiar brand of cinema: obsessive characters chasing impossible dreams, hostile natural landscapes and a persistent blurring of truth and fiction. Herzog’s Bucking Fastard (C+) checks all three boxes and still qualifies as a double head-scratcher. Real-life sisters Kate Mara and Rooney Mara, both extremely game for an unusual assignment, play twins who speak, move and even dream in unison while pursuing their eccentric conception of love and belonging. Their extraordinary bond inspires fascination as their shared obsessions range from an unrequited love affair with Orlando Bloom to the seemingly impossible task of digging a tunnel through a countryside mountain. Herzog finds strange beauty and flashes of humor in their singular existence, and the Maras commit so completely that the sisters never become mere caricatures. Yet for all the film’s intriguing eccentricity, it remains frustratingly opaque about what motivates these women, why their obsessions consume them or what Herzog ultimately wants us to understand about their extraordinary bond. Bucking Fastard is unquestionably an original curiosity, but being fascinated by its characters isn’t quite the same as being invested in them.
Leah Nelson’s black-and-white hand-drawn animated feature Tangles (A-), adapted from Sarah Leavitt’s graphic-novel memoir, is as funny and dramatically affecting as a traditional narrative film, while cleverly using illustration in motion to make memories bend, disappear and spring playfully to life. A young queer San Francisco artist and magazine staffer in the 1990s returns to her East Coast family as her mother’s Alzheimer’s progresses, forcing everyone to reckon with a woman gradually losing pieces of herself. Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Abbi Jacobson are excellent as mother and daughter, with especially tender moments paralleling childhood scenes with their echoes years later. The mother who once dressed, comforted and cared for her little girl increasingly needs tending herself, creating a poignant reversal as familiar gestures of maternal love pass from one generation to the other. Nelson never lets Alzheimer’s reduce this heroic mom to her disease, preserving her humor and personality even as memory slips away. The movie finds abundant fun in its protagonist’s burgeoning love life and cross-country juggling of romance, work and family, while airplane announcements provide hilarious interludes like a sassy Greek chorus for a life perpetually in transit. With Bryan Cranston, Beanie Feldstein and Seth Rogen rounding out the voice cast, Tangles transforms the pathos of Alzheimer’s and caregiving into something inventive, funny and deeply moving: a stunning tribute to a mother and the daughter learning how to mother her in return.
They don’t make ’em like this anymore and perhaps for good reason, but there are fun, fetishistic thrills in Anna Biller’s The Face of Horror (B-), a silly beauty premiering as part of TIFF’s Midnight Madness series. Jonah Hauer-King is credible and frequently funny as a charismatic medieval bloke behaving very badly, and Kristine Froseth is fierce and amusing as the vengeful ghost of the wife he betrayed. This Kabuki-inspired tale of female revenge transposes a classic Japanese ghost story to medieval England, centering on a beautiful farmer’s daughter whose performatively chivalrous knight husband is actually a toxic serial killer. Biller’s Technicolor-style palette is a wonder to behold, particularly the painterly red blood splashed across its brightly illuminated imagery. Deep-focus 35mm photography, beautiful gowns and storybook compositions make nearly every frame look both lavish and knowingly artificial. The often ridiculous plot plays like Robin Hood: Men in Tights trapped inside a Dario Argento nightmare, with retrograde humor mischievously reframed for modern audiences. Campy eyeball atrocities, decomposing corpses and other gross-out delights should keep a midnight crowd well fed. The colors are so vibrant you can almost smell them, which, given what is onscreen, may not entirely be a compliment.
Louis Clichy’s French animated film Le Corset (The Iron Boy) (B) turns an anxiety-ridden farm boy’s physical and emotional confinement into a simple, sentimental fantasy. Featuring the voices of Gary Clichy, Rod Paradot, Brune Moulin, Alexandre Astier and Jean-Pascal Zadi, the story follows a child who begins collapsing without warning, must wear a rigid iron brace and discovers music, friendship and new possibilities beyond his farmland origins. The lively, hand-drawn watercolor animation is at once artistic and accessible, with whimsical flights of fancy rendered in blue and yellow hues that invite viewers to flex their imaginations and fill in the details. It is heartfelt, engaging and relatable enough to enchant both children and adults. The limited facial detail, however, creates a slight emotional distance from characters whose feelings should land with even greater force. French-speaking viewers may also find it easier to let the delicate imagery wash over them than audiences dividing their attention between pale sketches and lightly colored subtitles. Even with those barriers, Le Corset wears its tenderness proudly and proves there is considerable strength beneath its steely exterior.
Despite its vital message about the systemic bias confronting women who report sexual assault, director Susanna White’s adaptation of Prima Facie (D) is misbegotten in nearly every dramatic respect. Cynthia Erivo plays a formidable London defense barrister forced to confront the very tactics she once employed after a colleague played by Daniel Ings assaults her, but the typically commanding performer rarely materializes into a persuasive central presence. White establishes neither the workplace, courtroom nor domestic worlds with enough specificity or realism to make the protagonist’s ordeal feel fully lived-in. The underwritten supporting characters register primarily as devices to advance the thesis, while the absence of authentic relationships or convincing chemistry leaves even the most consequential encounters dramatically inert. A story built around the collision between intellectual certainty and devastating personal experience should crackle with tension, yet the film repeatedly states its ideas without finding compelling ways to dramatize them. Even its courtroom passages rarely muster more intrigue than a routine weekly television procedural.
It’s telling Chris Rock took his blistering Hollywood indictment “out of town,” world-premiering it before festival audiences in Toronto. Unfortunately, his bleak portrait of the dream factory proves too unfocused to fully satisfy critics, insiders or general audiences wherever it plays. Writer/director Rock’s Misty Green (C-) peaks during its opening credits, pairing Hollywood imagery with “If My Friends Could See Me Now” before revealing how badly show business has failed its title character. Rosalind Eleazar is captivating and game for every demand of an oddly written role, playing a once-promising actress battling drugs, humiliating auditions and poor choices exacerbated by bad influences embodied by ensemble mates Anna Kendrick, Adam Driver and Daniel Kaluuya. Rock plays the man who keeps giving Misty another chance, delivering wry commentary that sometimes feels more like stand-up being workshopped than a character’s depths being plumbed. Topher Grace and Tracie Thoms add texture as industry figures, while two diegetic numbers featuring songs from Radiohead and Dreamgirls let Eleazar flex even more of her formidable talents. Yet the film forgets its own eviction countdown, never clarifies whether it means to excuse, expose or skewer L.A. life and fails to assemble its intriguing pieces into a cogent portrait. Eleazar keeps Misty Green eminently watchable, but far more of the film lands like “Creep” than sustaining the “One Night Only” glory.
A fierce subject gets a fairly tame close-up in director Sue Kim’s Always Lalisa (B-), a documentary whose star power outshines its powers of observation. Following BLACKPINK performer Lisa (the “rapper” in a K-POP girl group) during a relatively brief stretch of her burgeoning solo career, the film offers a snapshot when its compelling subject and the nuances of her cultural background and work ethic warrant a fuller portrait. Lisa’s formidable presence supplies the spark, but the filmmaking rarely turns that electricity into illumination. The narrow timeframe needn’t limit the insight, yet Kim struggles to make this chapter reveal much beyond its immediate circumstances. There’s enough charisma to hold attention but less discovery than one might hope from such proximity to a global phenomenon. It also needed more music. It’s Always Lalisa, occasionally revealing.
Writer/director Alexandra Pechman’s Magazine is essentially The Devil Wears Prada without the devil, crossed with the loose, hangout camaraderie of Everybody Wants Some!! or Almost Famous as an aspiring poet protagonist joyously embodied by Lily McInerny enters the intoxicating orbit of a prestigious New York literary journal. Joshuah Melnick makes a strong impression as an assistant editor who catches her eye, while Iris Apatow operates on an entirely different comic plane, sublime as a daffy socialite. Pechman’s crisp direction and buoyant visuals keep the pages turning even when her writing feels less original; frankly, spending this much time with writers made me expect them to be a little more interesting. There’s plenty in the margins to enjoy, including terrific curated music and fashion that make the entire production feel like a lovingly preserved cultural artifact. There’s a warm nostalgia to hanging around these people, and the ensemble’s easygoing chemistry frequently makes the movie feel less like a plotted comedy than an invitation to join an unusually well-dressed writers’ room. It’s fun, affectionate and consistently pleasurable, even as the absence of meaningful conflict leaves the narrative without much editorial urgency. Even at 105 minutes, it could have benefited from a ruthless copy editor and a few pages left on the cutting-room floor. Still, even when the story isn’t quite cover-worthy, this is one issue that’s awfully enjoyable to flip through.
Theo Rhys expands his short film Stuffed (B-) by asking a time-honored romantic question: If you truly love someone, would you let them preserve your corpse? Harry Melling plays a lonely sad sack terrified death will erase him. His solution leads to Jodie Comer’s equally isolated taxidermist, whom he offers his body after he dies. Their macabre arrangement soon blossoms into an increasingly complicated situationship. The film stitches together musical, romance and body-horror comedy with considerable imagination and surprising tenderness. That combination should collapse beneath its eccentricity, but Comer and Melling give these strange characters recognizable hearts. Comer finds vulnerability beneath morbid confidence, while Melling makes the need to be remembered funny, sad and painfully human. Their twee chemistry gives this melodic menagerie its pulse, even as the feature-length story begins to feel fluffed. Beneath the preserved animals and grotesque flourishes lies a sincere story about embracing a loved one’s peculiar passions. The enjoyable songs leave only a little lasting imprint, but the movie’s beautifully bizarre heart is preserved in exactly the right place.
More than 50 years after shocking audiences with this 1971 cult film, Ken Russell’s The Devils (A-) has lost none of its power to provoke, disturb and astonish. This restored version feels frighteningly relevant in an age when leaders weaponize religion, fear and public outrage. Oliver Reed delivers one of his finest performances as a charismatic 17th-century priest whose considerable appetites and resistance to authoritarian rule make him dangerous. Vanessa Redgrave is unforgettable as the sexually repressed nun whose obsession ignites an inferno of accusations, exorcisms and state-sanctioned cruelty. Her disciplined performance anchors material that frequently erupts into camp. Russell stages the film as a blasphemous fever dream. Derek Jarman’s dazzling white sets resemble an antiseptic cathedral from another universe, while every costume, gesture and grotesque image pushes the story toward delirium. Russell isn’t merely depicting hysteria; he places us inside it. The spectacle occasionally threatens to overwhelm the ideas, but Russell’s excess ultimately serves his message. The greatest obscenity here is neither sex nor sacrilege; it’s how easily powerful institutions manufacture guilt and call persecution holy. Russell’s film remains exhausting, audacious and impossible to forget.
After decades of explosions, collapses and malfunctioning rocket skates, Looney Tune Wile E. Coyote hires a struggling personal injury lawyer played by Will Forte to sue the Acme Corporation, an inspired premise since no consumer has suffered more from a corporation’s dangerously defective wares. The resultant courtroom comedy adventure is thankfully more Roger Rabbit than Cool World on the live-action/animation hybrid quality continuum. Dave Green’s Coyote vs Acme (B-) captures the classic cartoons’ comic rhythm, from Wile E.’s determined preparations to the inevitable moment when gravity takes hold. Forte is well cast as the Coyote’s human counterpart, another sad-sack schemer whose elaborate plans rarely produce the desired result. John Cena supplies cartoon-villain energy as the Acme attorney, although his performance remains stuck at its loudest setting, while Lana Condor is underused as the levelheaded legal intern. Appearances by cartoon characters such as Foghorn Leghorn and the Tasmanian Devil provide welcome bursts of personality, even when they feel more like cameos than essential parts of the story. The screenplay keeps complicating its wonderfully simple courtroom concept with a conventional redemption arc, an expanding corporate conspiracy and an oversized action finale. Still, Wile E. proves surprisingly capable of carrying a feature, and his indestructible insistence gives the movie more heart than expected. The film contains a few defective parts, but its inspired slapstick and affectionate character work keep the overall package from blowing up in the audience’s face.
