TIFF 2017: Reviews and reports from the Toronto International Film Festival

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally published after Manhunt’s debut at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. It is being reposted to coincide with the film’s premiere on Netflix.

It’s always possible that John Woo could have played the doves straight. The Hong Kong director behind action classics like Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow (and later American action movies including Face/Off and Broken Arrow) has turned the image of doves flying across the screen during a firefight into a signature trope, suggesting the end of innocence and the arrival of chaos. But his latest, Manhunt, which premieres on Netflix on May 4th, has a moment when a careening car approaches a dovecote filled with birds ready for their big moment. And that moment doesn’t read as portentous and tragic, like the dove sequences in Woo’s The Killer or Mission: Impossible II. Instead, it reads like a conscious in-joke for savvy audiences — especially when the car circles the cage teasingly before slamming into it and sending the doves across the screen.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally posted from the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, and has been updated to coincide with the film’s theatrical and streaming release.

In 2009, comics writer Joe Kelly and artist J.M. Ken Niimura produced one of the year’s best graphic novels: I Kill Giants, the action-packed story of a defiant, troubled 5th grader obsessed with her private war against giants. Throughout the book, Kelly is coy with his readers about the truth behind Barbara Thorson’s private war. Her classmates see her as weird and obnoxious, while school officials consider her imaginative and troubled at best, and dangerously disturbed at worst. No one considers the possibility that she’s actually facing down giants — because giants don’t exist.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review originally appeared on the site in September, in conjunction with the film’s opening at the Toronto International Film Festival. It has been updated for the film’s theatrical release.

Writer-director Guillermo del Toro has always been fascinated by ghosts. Sometimes those ghosts are literal — in his movies Crimson Peak and The Devil’s Backbone, they’re the shades of the dead, actively seeking vengeance against those who wronged them. In other films, like his Hellboy movies or Pacific Rim, the ghosts are more metaphorical: representations of unfinished business, traumas that haunt people, or family connections that won’t go away. In Pan’s Labyrinth, the past takes on multiple dangerous forms; in Cronos, it’s just one aging man. This is the theme that connects all of del Toro’s work: the way people carry the past around, and need to move past it to become complete people.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally posted from the Toronto International Film Festival, and has been reposted to coincide with the film’s broad theatrical release.

As a director, George Clooney has a track record of making films that are exceptionally crafted, even if they haven’t all ended up being great at the end of the day. Movies like Good Night, and Good Luck and The Ides of March demonstrate his impressive skills as a storyteller, while other efforts like Leatherheads and The Monuments Men have fumbled their attempts at comedy and action. But his latest film, Suburbicon, seems as close as you can get to a sure-fire cinematic success: a script that originated with Joel and Ethan Coen, a cast that includes Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, and Oscar Isaac, and a darkly comedic tone that seems right in line with Clooney’s own sensibilities.

For industry watchers, the annual Toronto International Film Festival is one of the year’s major cinema events. It’s closer to home and more accessible than the Venice International Film Festival (which runs around the same time and spotlights some of the same films), and because it comes so close to the year-end prestige season, many studios use it to kick off their Oscar campaigns for their major films — or get an early sense of whether to launch those campaigns at all.

But Toronto’s annual awards at the end of the festival are an oddball mixed bag. They don’t carry the prestige of the big awards at Cannes or Berlin, and they don’t cover a particularly wide range. There are no acting or directing awards, and most of the categories are specific and sponsored: the NETPAC Award for World or International Asian Film Premiere, for instance (which this year went to Huang Hsin-Yao’s The Great Buddha), or the Grolsch People’s Choice Award (which went to Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). Clearly what’s missing at Toronto are a few more awards categories, which is why our TIFF correspondents, Tasha Robinson and Bryan Bishop, decided to individually recognize some of the 50 movies they collectively saw at Toronto this year.

Tasha Robinson and Bryan Bishop just spent more than a week at the Toronto International Film Festival, mainlining as many movies as they could manage. Here’s one set of reactions, based on a miniature horror festival they programmed for themselves at TIFF.

Tasha: TIFF traditionally has a wide slate of programming. Some of the year’s biggest upcoming prestige pictures premiere there, but they play alongside indies looking for distribution, international releases looking for attention, and the Midnight Madness slate of would-be cult hits. TIFF is one of those film festivals where you and three friends can each program your own viewing experience: you can all see the same number of movies, and you can each have a radically different experience. This year, if I wanted to specialize, I could have stuck entirely to inspirationally minded would-be Oscar contenders, or quirky magical-realist romantic indies, or hyper-stylized, hyper-violent action films. Instead, this year I saw a lot of horror movies, though not as many as you did, Bryan. And even working together, we didn’t quite catch all the horror films on offer. Am I wrong in feeling like there was a wider horror slate at TIFF this year?

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the Toronto International Film Festival.

Film festivals are a great opportunity to spot trends, and at 2017’s edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, a wave of movies emerged tackling the issue of gender discrimination and the struggle for women to be heard in a world dominated by men. A gothic love story doesn’t necessarily seem like an obvious fit for that trend, but that’s exactly the case with Mary Shelley, a film tackling the life of the famed author of Frankenstein.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the Toronto International Film Festival. 

The greatest science fiction stories generally start with a single, significant change to the world, then consider what other changes would follow. Ambitious science fiction considers radical changes to culture and humanity, and possibly to the entire universe. The smaller-scale stuff might just consider how a hobby or an industry looks different with the advent of one new technology. Meanwhile, bad science fiction adds superficial changes to a familiar world, then loses track of those changes, and gets bogged down in familiar stories. There’s nothing more disappointing in the genre than a great idea that ends up buried under a mediocre story.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the Toronto International Film Festival.

I’ve never really considered The Room, the midnight cult favorite from writer-director-producer-star Tommy Wiseau, to be a movie as much as it is an immersive experience. It’s a film so bad, it actually can’t be enjoyed alone at home, even by viewers under the influence. It’s more like The Rocky Horror Picture Show: a pop culture curiosity where the real joy is interacting with other members of a live audience in a shared moment of How did this even happen? catharsis.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the Toronto International Film Festival.

The history of cinema is littered with movies that became infamous for pushing audiences beyond what they’re willing to accept. There’s an implied contract when someone buys tickets to a film — particularly one released by a major studio — that it’s going to fit within certain constraints in terms of intensity, imagery, or just general good taste. When films reach beyond that, the result can be pure outrage.