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

Netflix’s John Woo movie Manhunt plays like a joyous parody of his action classics

2018-05-06T16:09:08-04:00

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 …

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I Kill Giants preserves its source comic’s emotion and mystery

2018-03-22T16:05:40-04:00

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 …

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Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is the year’s most sentimental fish romance

2017-12-07T11:37:01-05:00

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 mor …

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George Clooney’s Suburbicon is an indictment of white privilege wrapped in a Coens crime comedy

2017-10-27T16:00:50-04:00

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 …

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The Verge’s TIFF 2017 Awards

2017-09-22T11:09:22-04:00

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 …

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What binge-watching bloody movies at TIFF taught us about the modern horror genre

2017-09-21T13:20:56-04:00

Revenge | Courtesy of TIFF

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 experi …

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Mary Shelley is a gothic romance that can’t be raised from the dead

2017-09-16T12:40:51-04:00

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.

Directed by …

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Downsizing takes the dullest path through a brilliant premise

2017-09-14T13:28:16-04:00

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 w …

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The Disaster Artist is so good, it actually makes me want to rewatch The Room

2017-09-13T09:14:16-04:00

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 …

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Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! will likely be 2017’s most hated movie

2017-09-12T11:25:13-04:00

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.

Darren Aronofsky's Mother! is the latest film t …

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