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Tiff 2017: Here’s the Winners and Losers of the Festival
15 September 2017 9:43 AM, PDT
At 255 titles, the Toronto International Film Festival’s smorgasbord is 20 percent smaller than last year — and still overwhelming. A number of filmmakers took creative risks that paid off with exuberant praise, from Darren Aronofsky’s outrageous “mother!” to Guillermo del Toro’s inimitable “The Shape of Water,” but many others found themselves in the doghouse, or worse, utterly ignored.
Buyers were unhappy that there wasn’t much to choose from at this sellers’ market, because many distributors cherry-picked the more promising titles ahead of time — which is its own risk, as when The Orchard’s La riot drama “Kings” didn’t meet high expectations.
Here’s how the festival shook out.
Best of the Fest
Top Tier Oscar Contenders
Guillermo del Toro’s gorgeously mounted fantasy thriller “The Shape of Water” (Fox Searchlight), shot in Toronto, was so popular that it’s vying for Tiff’s audience award (often an »
- Anne Thompson
With ‘Dunkirk’ and ‘Darkest Hour’ Showing Strong, Will Churchill-Heavy Britpics Storm the Oscars?
12 September 2017 1:11 PM, PDT
Two British movies; two endings that feature the same iconic Winston Churchill speech. Which one will dominate the Oscar conversation?
Not to be left out of the Oscar campaign opportunities at the Toronto International Film Festival, Christopher Nolan capitalized on a chance to project his summer blockbuster “Dunkirk” at the world’s original IMAX, Toronto’s restored Cinesphere. Afterward, he said the movie never looked so good — it was one of 35 70 mm IMAX prints. From my perspective, it was sublime, clear, crisp, and even more emotional than the first time I saw it at Universal CityWalk (one of Nolan’s favorite 70 mm IMAX venues, along with the Metreon in San Francisco and Lincoln Square in New York).
Over tea at an afterparty, Nolan asked: “And how is ‘Darkest Hour’?”
The films are complementary: one is an immersive, almost-silent action epic that brilliantly toys with three disjunctive time frames. (During the »
- Anne Thompson
‘mother!’ and ‘The Shape of Water’: 2 Strong, Strange Oscar Movies, But One Will Be a Harder Sell
11 September 2017 12:08 PM, PDT
Artists create worlds that are extreme visions of our own. This fall, several films accomplish this with varying degrees of success; Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” is the most accomplished. Del Toro builds, brick by brick, an immersive fantasy world (shot in Toronto around the venerable Elgin Theatre) inspired by the ’60s melodramas of Douglas Sirk and the horror classic “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” that could only come from his prodigious imagination.
Cinephiles will fall happily into this fairy-tale romance that matches lonely mute laboratory cleaning woman Eliza Esposito (incandescent Sally Hawkins, who will be nominated for her sensual, powerful performance) with a well-muscled captive merman (Doug Jones). They see beauty and sensuality in each other where others see abhorrent aberration.
You can argue that Michael Shannon is typecast as the heartless government villain who tortures the gorgeous aquatic creature he calls “the asset,” but »
- Anne Thompson
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