Charged objects in movies — a lost ark, a Maltese falcon, a rock hammer in Shawshank Prison — can provide cinematic catalysts or consequences, and Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo’s La Bola Negra (A) uses a manuscript passed among men to reveal multitudes. Three gay lives unfold across different periods of Spanish history, with contemporary Carlos González and figures from the past connected by words that survive their authors and become an inheritance of courage. Inspired by Federico García Lorca, the film flows beautifully through time, capturing pain, shame, desire and persecution while asking what one generation can leave behind to help the next survive. Music star Guitarricadelafuente is a revelation as a young man with a military role discovering both sexual awakening and the courage to embrace it, playing beautifully opposite a winning Miguel Bernardeau, while Milo Quifes brings quieter but affecting power to his role. Familiar movie stars Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close shine in small appearances without distracting from the less familiar faces at the film’s heart. Ambrossi and Calvo mount the story on a sweeping scale, yet its grandest idea is remarkably intimate: passing stories forward can remind people who feel isolated that they were never truly alone. Poetry, art and cinema become more than cultural artifacts here; they are lifelines capable of crossing decades, preserving identity and even saving lives. La Bola Negra is a gorgeous love letter to all three — and a masterpiece revealed at fall festivals including TIFF and playing theatres before streaming on Netflix.
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.
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.
The majestic Norwegian landscape looms large in writer/director Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord (B), but the moral avalanche unfolding on its terrain proves even more imposing. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve play a Romanian-Norwegian couple who move their five children to a remote village where their conservative beliefs and disciplinary practices attract child-welfare authorities. Mungiu denies audiences an easy position from which to judge the stoic parents. Stan’s father can be controlling and deeply troubling, yet the authorities appear so convinced of their own moral superiority that compassion vanishes from the process. Each interaction shifts viewer sympathies without erasing the harm at the story’s center. Stan buries fear and humiliation beneath a rigid exterior, while Reinsve quietly devastates as a woman trapped between her husband, children and homeland. The long takes and clinical pacing effectively tighten the screws, although the film keeps underlining points it has already made clear. Cold, controlled and deliberately provocative, Mungiu’s film plays like a combustible discussion guide for the world’s most contentious talkback. Its argument lands: Empathy matters most when every side believes it has already won the moral debate.
