Our third dispatch from the Toronto International Film Festival (here’s the first and here’s the second) includes our takes on a few hold-overs from this year’s Cannes slate (Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II, Gaspar Noe’s Climax, Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun), a couple of mammoth documentaries (Wang Bing’s Dead Souls, Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana), high-concept films by two of international cinema’s most accomplished formalists (Zhang Yimou’s Shadow, Christian Petzold’s Transit), and a movie by that guy who got blasted with a shotgun by Naomi Watts (Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux).…
Evaluating performances is such a deeply subjective endeavor that finding a meaningful consensus can often feel like an impossibility. Truly extraordinary ones tend to work in lockstep with their respective films in ways that less impactful ones don’t, but in these cases sometimes that means our love of a given performance is inextricably linked to our love of a film. Other times, lesser films may deliver the surprise of a strong performance in isolation from everything around it, making its strength seem even more palpable.…
All one need do is look at the many and varied riches cinema had to offer in 2012 to disprove the crowing — yes, once again this year — from certain quarters about the “death of cinema.” Digital may be overtaking celluloid as the medium of choice for many filmmakers, but films like Ang Lee’s 3D spectacle Life of Pi demonstrate…