By David Fear. Even if the Toronto International Film Festival was simply the unofficial beginning of the prestige-movieβdropping, Oscar-obsessing, A-listing awards season β the tail end of a three-fest starting gate along with Venice and Telluride β it would still be considered an autumn hot spot for movie lovers. You can catch up on Cannes favorites and other foreign-film delights.
A TV sidebar, you say? Yup, it has one of those too. Is it a lot, or even occasionally, way too much? Of course. But the ability to sample so much different moviegoing in one place β to survey the state of the art form, as much as one can these days β is why so many of us keep tracking up to the Canadian city year after year. Go north, young men and women. Things apparently get inappropriate ASAP, and viewers get not only an edgy, racially tinged satire but the only festival movie featuring both Anthony Michael Hall and Charlamagne Tha God we think.
Unless you count lying down in the middle of the street in the name of disruptive protests. Having been thrown in the clink after hooking up with mobsters to make ends meet, his bald, bulked-up ex-boxer finds himself becoming a pawn in various cell-block turf wars.
Her brother Mark Stanley , who had been the caretaker up until then, is none too pleased. Sure, it sounds like your run-of-the-mill rural British miserablism on paper.
But filmmaker Clio Barnard is the one calling the shots here β and if she can do the same thing for family dramas that she did for literary documentaries The Arbor and boy-meets-horse social realism The Selfish Giant , we may be in for a genuine cinematic gem. Gary Oldman plays Winston Churchill β so should we just hand him the Oscar now, orβ¦. The British satirist behind The Thick of It and In the Loop β and the creator of Veep β returns with a tale revolving around the Russian dictator suddenly going the way of all flesh.
