Atom Egoyan’s latest is a self-serious dud that finds the director trying and failing to recall his once impressive weighty themes. There’s a certain level of absurdness that is only manifested in an auteur’s twilight years, reaching for that kind of ephemerality that once…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words,…
Toronto International Film Festival 2019 | Dispatch 4: Sound of Metal, Citizen K, The Twentieth Century
Our fourth dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first, our second, and our third) skews heavily Canadian: Atom Egoyan’s latest, lurid work, Guest of Honour; Matthew Rankin’s Midnight Madness entry and Guy Maddin riff, The Twentieth Century; Calvin Thomas and…
No stranger to treating lurid and uninviting subjects in a chilly fashion, Atom Egoyan’s glacial style of filmmaking has always been both a blessing and a curse. While his distant rendering of melancholy in The Sweet Hereafter— regarded by many as his masterpiece — allowed for a…