TIFF 2018: 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 comes from the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. It has been updated for the film’s Netflix release.

One of the upsides of our wired world is that it’s easy to get information. Anyone with a smartphone who wants to know how to gap a spark plug, make 12 different kinds of quiche, avoid traffic on the way to a destination, or charge up a phone can readily find that information in seconds. But there are complementary downsides: personal information about us is similarly easy to find and exploit, and it can be hard to avoid accessing an endless wave of demoralizing news that in aggregate, makes the world look and feel worse than it is.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally posted in September, in conjunction with the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. It has been updated for the film’s November 9th Netflix release.

Netflix is currently fighting a battle on at least three fronts. Even in the wake of a huge number of freshly launched competitors, the streaming giant has a serious advantage in the war to carve out and retain a sizable paying audience. Its owners got into the streaming business early, achieved a high rate of public awareness, and built a strong user base. Its second front — producing and owning its own memorable, original content to secure its success, irrespective of the whims of studio licensing departments — has also been ambitious and largely successful. Today, Netflix is investing billions of dollars in buying and making titles and then marketing them into name recognition.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. It has been revised for the film’s wide theatrical release.

Warning: mild spoilers for the Halloween franchise below.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. It has been updated and reposted for the film’s October 12th wide theatrical release.

Over the course of a short but already notable career, director Damien Chazelle has shown a penchant for stripping away romanticized idealism to expose the more honest, human truths hidden underneath. Whiplash is the story of an incredibly talented musician who realizes his potential, not due to feel-good monologues or platitudes about trying his best, but because he’s under the tutelage of a sociopathic teacher. La La Land, which earned Chazelle an Academy Award for Best Director, told the tale of two star-crossed lovers in the style of a nostalgic, classic Hollywood musical — only to deny the characters the storybook happy ending that both the characters and the audience were expecting. Chazelle likes to tackle genres and scenarios that we often view through rose-colored glasses, then smash those glasses to pieces.

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.

Director Jeremy Saulnier specializes in dragging his characters out of their worlds and leaving them out of their depths. Over the course of his three previous films — Murder Party, Blue Ruin, and Green Room — he’s developed a reputation for intense stories punctuated with startling violence, but none of the intensity would be possible and none of the violence would be meaningful if he weren’t so focused on stories about people who are ill-equipped to handle either. In Murder Party, a lonely man follows up on a Halloween party invitation and discovers he’s literally there to be killed for kicks. In Blue Ruin, a trauma victim attempts to avenge his parents, even though he’s supremely unprepared for the level of planning and ruthlessness that will be necessary. And in Green Room, a punk band witnesses a murder at a skinhead bar, and a neo-Nazi leader (played by Patrick Stewart) attempts to kill them all to cover up the event.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival.

Tackling the leap from directing low-budget indies to tentpole features is no easy feat, and Hollywood has a history of being particularly unforgiving when the filmmakers are women. Case in point: director Karyn Kusama, who burst onto the filmmaking scene in 2000 with her debut feature, Girlfight. Five years later, she took on the feature-film adaptation of Aeon Flux, but the movie ended in disaster. After a studio regime change, Paramount Pictures balked at Kusama’s original vision, taking the movie away from her in order to hack it into the confusing mess that eventually arrived in theaters.

This year, the Toronto International Film Festival ran from September 6th through the 16th — 10 days of public screenings, industry events, symposiums and lectures, red carpets, and nighttime parties. That may not sound like much, but over the course of those 10 days, TIFF hosted more than 200 films from around the world, from major upcoming awards contenders like Damien Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic First Man to weird little horror indies looking for a probable home on a streaming service somewhere. It’s impossible for anyone to come close to seeing everything at TIFF, even with screenings taking over a dozen venues, typically starting at 8:30AM and running past midnight. So our film team can’t rationally claim we saw the best TIFF had to offer. But we can tell you what we learned this year and how it’s relevant to the year of cinema ahead.

One of the earliest bits of breakout news from this year’s TIFF concerned a few brief seconds of full-frontal nudity: in Netflix’s awards-bait historical drama Outlaw King, Star Trek’s Chris Pine briefly bares his bod as he bathes in a river after a traumatic near-death experience. It’s truly remarkable that in an age of naked selfies, celebrity phone leaks, a gross fad for paparazzi upskirt shots on the red carpet, and endless online porn, that the media can still get this hyper-focused and overheated about a moment of nude flesh. But there were an awful lot of leering articles about the shot from outlets that should know better, and it became the focus of interviews where Pine was clearly struggling to stay polite. “There’s so much beheading in this, and yet people want to talk about my penis,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “And I think that says something about our society, where people can get disemboweled, but it’s the man’s junk that is of interest.” He’s not wrong.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival.

It’s easy to lament Hollywood’s love of reboots, remakes, and sequels as a sign of modern-day creative stagnation, but the truth is that the entertainment industry has always loved retelling the same stories. Whether filmmakers are recycling familiar genre archetypes or giving an old classic a modern update, revivals have been a movie staple since the beginning of the industry — and sometimes, those remakes can become classics in their own right. (Just ask fans of John Carpenter’s The Thing or David Cronenberg’s The Fly.)

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. Warning: mild spoilers ahead.

Movie series often take strange twists and turns over their lifetimes, but the Predator franchise has always been its own uniquely bizarre case. John McTiernan’s 1987 original was an Arnold Schwarzenegger action vehicle that pitted a group of military commandos against an interstellar hunter that picked them off one by one. It brought with it all the one-liners, alpha-male posturing, and explosions that the decade demanded, and was enough of a hit to warrant a sequel. But three years later, Predator 2 failed at the box office, and the property lay dormant for 14 years. It eventually resurfaced as part of Alien vs. Predator, and while mash-up films are usually a creative death knell, the movie was enough of a sucess to warrant its own sequel. Robert Rodriguez and director Nimród Antal tried to bring the whole thing back to life with 2010’s Predators — and then once again, things got quiet.