The screenwriter James Vanderbilt has made his directing debut with TRUTH, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival tonight, and at times it’s clear that this is a writer’s movie:  Vanderbilt gives no fewer than three of his characters the opportunity for a Rousing Final Speech, something another director might well have toned down.  […]

  THE BOY AND THE HERON (GKids – Dec. 8):  Hiyao Miyazaki, a legend of animation (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke), had announced his retirement as a feature film director a decade ago, upon the release of The Wind Rises.  But at the age of 82, he’s returned with The Boy and the […]

  There’s no cutesiness to be found in John Curran’s film TRACKS, a bracingly non-Disneyfied true-life nature tale.  In the mid-1970s, a young Australian woman named Robyn Davidson decided to walk across almost two thousand miles of desert to the Indian Ocean, accompanied for the most part by only a few camels and her faithful dog. […]

  It’s an unfortunate irony that TRUMBO, the story of one of Hollywood’s great blacklisted screenwriters, is undermined by an inadequate script.  It’s written by John McNamara, also the man behind NBC’s low-rated Aquarius, and viewers may find it difficult to figure out just what he and director Jay Roach had in mind, as they […]

  A week at the Toronto Film Festival added up to 24 screenings–a decent pace, but not an outstanding one.  Blame some vagaries of the festival’s scheduling, and a baseline decision that Midnight Madness was too much midnight and maybe even too much madness.  The potential awards contenders I wasn’t able to get to included […]

> In just her second feature film as a director (her first was 2006’s Oscar-nominated Away From Her), Sarah Polley demonstrates that she’s already a filmmaker with rare grace and sensuality in TAKE THIS WALTZ, which premiered tonight at the Toronto Film Festival.  Blessed with yet another superb lead performance by Michelle Williams, Polley’s film […]

  COLOSSAL (no distrib):  Well, you haven’t seen this take on sci-fi spectacles before.  In Nacho Vigalondo’s whatzit, party girl Gloria (Anne Hathaway) and her hometown friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) discover that they can cause their actions to be mirrored by a giant sea monster and robot terrorizing Seoul.  In other words, if one of […]

> Lynn Shelton’s Humpday in 2009 was one of the most engaging pictures to come out of the mumblecore movement (“mumblecore,” for the uninitiated = ultra-low-budget, small scale film with dialogue mostly improvised by the actors), and her new film YOUR SISTER’S SISTER, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last night, confirms that she’s […]