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.
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.
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
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.
Writer/director Beth de Araújo’s Josephine (A) is an absolutely astonishing exploration of childhood trauma, parental fear and the dangers both rational and imagined that invade a family’s life. Eight-year-old Josephine witnesses a brutal assault while walking through Golden Gate Park with her father, and the crime’s reverberations gradually reshape her behavior, her sense of safety and her parents’ already contrasting approaches to raising her. Mason Reeves is an absolute revelation, conveying hypervigilance, confusion and simmering defiance with a naturalism far beyond her years. De Araújo’s tremendous commitment to Josephine’s point of view makes us question the parents’ choices while forcing us to consider how we as viewers might respond to the same impossible situation. Channing Tatum is effortlessly authentic as her father, while Gemma Chan delivers a quieter, more understated performance as her mother. Through a series of small but increasingly alarming escalations, the film captures how one heinous act can make danger feel omnipresent and turn ordinary childhood anxieties into consuming dread. Josephine’s journey is simultaneously disturbing and empowering as she struggles with defining and overcoming fears while discovering her own capacity for self-defense. Absorbing and sometimes devastating, the film finds flawed human beings searching for a way forward when innocence can no longer lead the way.
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.
Writer/director Siân Heder’s Being Heumann (A) delivers the absolute joy of seeing the too-often-invisible disability community brought to vibrant, exuberant life. Ruth Madeley is a sensation as Judith Heumann, the formidable Brooklynite badass disability-rights activist who helped lead the longest occupation of a federal building in American history back in the ‘70s. Heder honors the importance of that protest without reducing its participants to symbols, making room for partying, sexuality, laughter, liberation and the gloriously messy business of being human. Andrew Pilkington is a standout as Hale Zukas, who spells out his words one letter at a time but repeatedly lands some of the film’s funniest and most unexpected turns of phrase. Roberta Colindrez is equally memorable, bringing warmth and a crackling vitality to the ensemble. Familiar faces Mark Ruffalo and Dylan O’Brien also do fine work as a bract and reporter, respectively, while leaving the film’s disabled actors and their characters at its center. The result is both a rousing account of a movement that changed America and an irresistible celebration of the people who refused to remain unseen. The pace loses a touch of momentum toward the final act with a few plot threads getting short shrift, but oh the thrill of ultimate victories. Heder and her collaborators don’t merely reclaim an essential chapter of history; they throw open the doors and invite everyone to a party that still requires a bevy of believers.
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.
