Beyond its significance as a historic production, Hosam Abu Dan’s Thirteen in Gaza (B+) is an intensely moving one. A widower (the quietly wonderful Feras Al Masri) and his teenage daughter (a superb Mary Ziyara) struggle to maintain the rhythms of ordinary life inside a Gaza refugee camp, their relationship providing an intimate lens on adolescence, grief and moral choices under extraordinary circumstances. Ghassan Salem is also powerful as an industrious and morally dubious power broker who may hold the keys to lifting the surviving family out of poverty. Ziyara is pitch-perfect as the titular adolescent, fiercely trying to retain her dignity and discover who she is on the cusp of womanhood. Abu Dan and his Gaza-based crew focus their camera on humanity rather than destruction and survival rather than despair, as a father strives to protect his daughter amid the deprivations of prolonged conflict. Simple acts of securing food, water and basic supplies take on profound resonance when played out against the reality of a displacement camp. Most powerfully, the film refuses to define its characters by their suffering, finding pride, resourcefulness and familial love amid circumstances that threaten these values. In celebrating that humanity, the film becomes both a tribute to people enduring intolerable conditions and a haunting challenge to a world that has failed to adequately protect its most vulnerable.
Writer/director Martin McDonagh’s darkly comic political drama Wild Horse Nine (B+) gives John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell two meaty roles as CIA officers who retreat to Easter Island after helping orchestrate Chile’s 1973 coup. When Malkovich’s terminally ill operative begins divulging incendiary secrets, the island refuge becomes a reckoning with mortality, complicity and regret and the setup for an increasingly volatile shakedown. Malkovich, back in a showcase worthy of his singular talents, is operating at the top of his game, while Rockwell proves an ideal sparring partner. Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits and Parker Posey are among the formidable performers enriching McDonagh’s eccentric ensemble. The humor can be blunt and conspicuously boomerish, and the screenplay remains talky, smart and bursting with furtive flourishes. Part assassin hangout comedy, part political confessional, the film gives its thoroughbreds plenty of room to run and could carry Malkovich all the way into the Oscars race.
The extremely game comic actress Annie Murphy is cursed with a “schitty” screenplay and “creaky” craftsmanship in Andrew Rhymer and Scarlett Bermingham’s All That She Wants (C), a pedestrian romantic comedy that squanders an appealing premise. Murphy plays a newly single Toronto woman who rebounds with the considerably younger man she once babysat, played by Cooper Raiff. What begins as a college-dorm one-night stand evolves over several years into a messier, more realistic relationship, but precious little about their journey feels new, surprising or emotionally revealing. Murphy and Raiff generate scant chemistry, while the film’s conflicts arrive fleetingly and resolve too conveniently to create much dramatic tension. Even formidable comic talents including Zosia Mamet and Christine Baranski are stranded in supporting roles that give them little of consequence to do. Of all the films vying for attention at TIFF, this agreeable but thoroughly ordinary production feels among the least deserving of a festival spotlight.
To be an awards showcase or not to be satisfied until the whole cinema audience is sobbing? These are indeed the questions of Simon Stone’s Elsinore (B+), but it’s such a stirring celebration of the indomitable power of the human spirit and of theatre that any calculated designs quickly become inconsequential. Scott plays closeted Scottish actor Ian Charleson, best known to moviegoers for Chariots of Fire, who steps into the role of Hamlet at London’s National Theatre just as he is diagnosed with AIDS at the height of the epidemic. The film follows Charleson’s determination to deliver a defining performance during the final months of his life, even as his failing body threatens to betray him. Olivia Colman is a formidable foil as the doctor who warns him of the punishing demands Shakespeare’s great role will impose. Scott gives a magnetic, sensitive and occasionally very funny performance, lending the actor’s private struggle the same grandeur as Hamlet’s public anguish. Soaring soliloquies about life upon the stage are complemented by inspired flourishes, including a hospital-wing dance break set to techno-infused Ethel Merman. In Elsinore, show business becomes both refuge and rebellion in the face of tragedy. Fans of Shakespeare, Scott and unabashed sentimentality will want to seek out this film.
In Love of Your Life (B), Rachel Morrison sensitively directs Margaret Qualley as Maya, a Boston nurse whose sweeping romance with Charlie (Gabriel Basso) is shattered during the pandemic. Our protagonist’s grief carries her through Portugal, England and beyond as she attempts to rediscover a life and reconnect with herself after devastating loss. The story moves with purpose, buoyed by Qualley and Basso’s natural romantic chemistry and a fabulous music catalogue curated by Jack Antonoff. Qualley is particularly luminous against the film’s picturesque travelogue backdrop, while Basso brings an easy warmth and authenticity to their love story. Patrick Schwarzenegger, Aaron Pierre and Catherine Keener effectively round out the cast in supporting roles. Although the film follows a familiar emotional itinerary, it finds genuinely moving insights within its well-traveled formula. Ultimately, this is a stirring story of hope and healing elevated by relatable performances.
Get your juice boxes and YA books ready, because a social life typically sponsored by generous doses of G and K is about to become surprisingly kid-friendly. Jordan Firstman writes, directs and stars in Club Kid (B), a sharp contemporary dramedy about a New York nightclub promoter whose chaotic, self-absorbed existence is interrupted by the arrival of the 10-year-old son he never knew he had. In pristine 35 mm cinematography, Firstman captures the hedonism and hilarity of his after-hours Manhattan milieu while developing a genuinely affecting rapport with winning young actor Reggie Absolom. Diego Calva enjoys a plum role as both child therapist and potential adult love interest, while Miss Benny and a lively LGBTQIA+ ensemble keep the party buzzing. What distinguishes the movie most is its refusal to make its unconventional journey toward parenthood remotely saccharine. These lost souls may not resemble a traditional family, but they find a place to belong and create a prescient playlist when they do.
Peter Farrelly directs Anthony Ippolito as a young Sylvester Stallone, the impoverished, perpetually rejected actor who refuses to sell his Rocky screenplay unless he can play the title role himself. The aptly named behind-the-scenes drama I Play Rocky (B) offers a nostalgic, crowd-pleasing account of how Stallone’s real-life tenacity came to mirror Rocky Balboa’s. Ippolito delivers a magnetic performance that transcends his uncanny mimicry, while AnnaSophia Robb is quietly effective in the underwritten role of Stallone’s wife, Sasha Czack, and Stephan James brings confidence and charisma to co-star in the movie-within-the-movie Carl Weathers. Tracy Letts frequently steals the show with biting humor and cynicism as a representative of the studio brass. Though the film rarely strays from the familiar making-of formula, it remains a contender, fleet-footed and flying high through the final bell.
Anything worth doing with one’s life requires careful study followed by a lunging leap into the unknown, and so it is with starting a family. Lauren Miller Rogen’s Babies (B+) is a funny, tender and remarkably truthful examination of the practical and emotional chaos surrounding bringing children into the world. Anna Kendrick and Seth Rogen play a couple uncertain about parenthood who receive an unexpected trial run when a newly divorced friend (Kate Berlant) moves in with her young daughter in tow. Kendrick has rarely been better, locating both the humor and genuine anxiety in a woman confronting a choice for which no amount of preparation can fully suffice. Always a joy, Issa Rae is another standout as an artistic business partner and mother of a growing brood who is striving to juggle it all. Miller Rogen’s observations are consistently spot-on, even when delivered through interior monologues that should feel artificial but somehow work beautifully. Both uproarious and poignant, Babies understands becoming a parent means accepting the biggest decisions sometimes arrive long before certainty does.
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.
Danny Boyle’s Ink (B-) makes creating sensational journalism look a wee bit too sensational. Jack O’Connell stars as Larry Lamb, the editor recruited by Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) in 1969 to reinvent a struggling British newspaper, turning tabloid The Sun into a populist must-read and helping rewrite the rules of the news business. Boyle attacks the story with locomotive speed, tilted angles and razzle-dazzle flourishes that make the newsroom revolution great fun to watch, but Ink never delivers the Wolf of Wall Street or Boogie Nights-style reckoning its men behaving badly deserve. Viewers familiar with media history will recognize an origin story for many of the excesses that have come to define the modern news landscape, but the film could be considerably clearer about the consequences of what its characters unleash. The extremely charismatic O’Connell and always reliable Pearce are both compelling, yet the dramatic weight between Lamb and Murdoch is often sidelined, robbing their relationship of some potentially combustible central tension. Claire Foy is terrific as a composite character intended to provide another perspective, but even she isn’t given enough leverage to become the foil the story needs. Ink has great style and seemingly honorable intentions as both history lesson and cautionary tale, but in all that breathless headline-making, Boyle buries his own lead.
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.
