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TIFF 2025

2025-09-08T16:33:18Z

Another film fest, another year when I swear I'll keep up on the film reviews. I didn't manage any last year. (Last year sucked.) This year, I'm hoping to be better.

Going into day 5 of the fest, I've seen 8 films, all good, many great. Here's the roundup, in order seen.

( Modern Whore )

( Sirāt )

( Youngblood )

( Carolina Caroline )

( BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions )

( Ky Nam Inn )

( Rental Family )

( The Furious )

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The Way WAY Overdue TIFF 2023 Post

2024-01-13T04:49:28Z

Life rather got in the way of me doing posts for the films I saw at TIFF this year. (Most of my vacation was taken this year with getting my mom to medical appointments, and then spending a week with her when she was recovering, successfully!, from surgery. Which meant I didn't take any time off during the fest. Which means I saw 18 films whilst also working full time.)

It's so long ago, I didn't know if there was any point in putting up reviews. But then dorinda and msmoat recently encouraged me to do it anyway. So, here they are.

Of the 18 films I saw, 17 of them were good to great. A few were just utterly gorgeous.

( Best of the Fest )

( The Good )

( The Not-So-Good )

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TIFF 2022, Post the Last

2022-09-28T01:34:22Z

I've come to the back end of the fest, and through sheer luck this is where most of my favourite movies of the fest were.

( Sweet As )

( Aftersun )

( The Eternal Daughter )

( How to Blow Up a Pipeline )

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TIFF 2022, Post the Third

2022-09-27T03:17:18Z

I meant to finish my film fest posts far earlier than this, but was derailed by a four day migraine last week and then the Sweetie getting Covid. We've managed to stay Covid-free in our house until now. The Sweetie has been isolating in the bedroom since Thursday whilst I handle all of the day-to-day stuff around the house. I am freaking tired, and I'm not sure if it's because of getting slammed at work on top of doing all the house stuff, or because the migraine last week was a very mild case of Covid. Whee!

Anyway, here's the next batch of TIFF mini reviews. There'll probably be one more after this.

( Moonage Daydream )

( Black Ice )

( One Fine Morning )

( Chevalier )

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TIFF 2022, Post, the Second

2022-09-20T03:05:59Z

The fest is over for another year, and I saw lots of good films, and even a few great ones. So here's my next batch of mini reviews.

( War Sailor )

( What's Love Got to Do With It )

( We Are Still Here )

( Viking )

( Kacchey Limbu )

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TIFF 2022 - Post, the First

2022-09-16T03:06:05Z

TIFF is over halfway done, but I've just now had some time to write up a few reviews of what I've seen. (It's been a good year, if not an outstanding one. Everything I've seen has been good, but there haven't been a lot of standouts. Yet.)

( Weird: The Al Yankovic Story )

( Maya and the Wave )

( The Lost King )

( In Conversation with Viola Davis & Gina Prince-Blythwood )

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Gearing Up for TIFF

2022-08-25T03:53:46Z

It's two weeks until TIFF starts up, and four days until we have to submit our ticket picks, so I've spent the last few days figuring out what films I most want to see, and which ones I can fit in around work, getting the kid to her activities, and an OK Go concert in Niagara Falls we decided to go to on a whim.

This year I'm cutting down to 16 films, plus one talk by Viola Davis and Gina Prince-Blythewood, which should make for a relatively leisurely fest compared to the days when I'd see 35 films in the ten days.

I've been lousy at posting reviews the last few years, but am going to try to keep up with them this year.

In the meantime, here's my tentative schedule:

https://2022.tiffr.com/schedules/paulinezed

Fingers crossed we get all the tickets we want. Since I stay away from the high profile galas, the only one that might be tight is the Weird Al Yankovic bio-pic starring Daniel Radcliffe. It's the first Midnight Madness of the fest, with a high probability that Radcliffe and/or Yankovic might show up, and looks like it'll just be loony fun.

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The Much Belated TIFF Post

2019-10-20T21:03:51Z

I was originally planning to do a TIFF wrap up post as soon as the festival was over, but the whole breaking my wrist thing delayed that. It's five weeks today since I fetched up in the E.R., and it's only been the last week and a bit that I've been able to type with all the fingers on my left hand...for a little bit at a time, anyway. (It's taken me a week to finish writing this up!)

Anyway, here's what I saw.

( My Most Anticipated Film )

( Anthony Mackie x 2 )

( Women Astronauts )

( More Women in Film )

( Other Favourites )

( Not Quite My Thing )

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TIFF 2017 - The Docs

2017-09-22T03:09:46Z

The fest has been over for a few days, I saw 19 films, and I'm still feeling a bit on the loopy/exhausted side. But thought I'd put up short reviews of the two (excellent!) documentaries I saw, both by filmmakers in their 80s!

Ex Libris - The New York Public Library
Frederick Wiseman is one of the very best documentarians working today. For his films, he selects an organization or a place (the National Gallery, UC Berkeley and a boxing gym were some of his recent subjects), films in them for a few months and then spends a year editing his footage into a distillation of the organization and the people in it. And after so many years of doing this, he clearly knows what to look for when filming. This year his subject is the NYPL, and the result is utterly mesmerizing, really showing the breadth of what the library and all its branches does. There are budget and board meetings, readings/interviews by Elvis Costello and Ta-Nehisi Coates, parents discussing with librarians the need for books with accurate portrayal of African American history, NYPL staff answering client's questions, an ASL interpreter of Broadway plays explaining her working method, and so much else. The film is 3 1/2 hours long, but it's always fascinating. msmoat, I very much thought of you as I was watching.

Faces Places
Agnes Varda is just about the only woman director to come out of the French New Wave, and she alternates between fiction and documentary. For her latest doc, she teamed up with JR, a Bansky-like photographer who takes large-form photographs of people and pastes them onto buildings. The two of them set out on a road trip, taking pictures of people they find along the way and pasting them on buildings they find along the way. The premise sounds slight, and the tone is mostly playful, but it leads to some really lovely and profound moments. And the friendship that exists between the 80-something Varda and the 30-something JR is absolutely wonderful to watch in action. This film won the People's Choice documentary award at TIFF.

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TIFF 2017 - First Reviews.

2017-09-15T03:26:28Z

We're well past the halfway mark for this year's film festival, so I thought I'd put up a couple of mini reviews of stuff seen so far.

Call Me By Your Name
This had great buzz coming out of Sundance, and it was not misplaced. It's a story of summer love, with precocious 17-year-old falling for his dad's 23 year-old grad student. It's also a gay love story without any coming out panic or inevitable tragic ending. And it's utterly gorgeous, set in and around a villa in northern Italy. The cast is uniformly wonderful, especially Armie Hammer as the grad student and Timothée Chalumet as the teen, but also Michael Stuhlbaarg as the main character's father, who has a lovely scene at the end showing his empathy for his son and his first love. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

Borg/McEnroe
I became a tennis fan watching Borg play at Wimbledon every year, so I was very much looking forward to this movie, examining his rivalry on the court with bad boy John McEnroe. And it was honestly everything I was hoping it was. There are flashbacks to both men as kids, coming up in the game, and a look at how their rivalry developed, but it all comes down to the insane Wimbledon final they played in 1980. The actor playing Borg, Sverrir Gudnason, is a dead ringer for Borg, and Shia LeBeouf was unexpectedly good as McEnroe. I've heard people in festival lines say they found it a bit dull, but those people are WRONG.

I, Tonya
This was my one ridiculous indulgence for the fest. I paid to see the premium screening of this biopic of figure skater Tonya Harding solely because Sebastian Stan is in it and I wanted to see him in person. But it turns out, the movie is really good and is getting great word at the fest. I put up an incredibly long post about the screening and my thoughts on the film on Tumblr, along with a pic I took of Stan and his co-star, Margot Robbie, but the short version is it's dark and funny and will make you really feel for what Harding went through in her life.

The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales
We managed to talk Ros into seeing this film in the kids sidebar at the fest. It's a French animated film with a Looney Tunes feel, and it's really fun. The trailer gives a good sense of its inspired lunacy. And as a bonus for me, the first of the three stories has a baby called Pauline! (My name is only popular in France, it seems.)

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