Pop the cork and celebrate Haley Bennett in Widow Clicquot, a fast-paced and sexy biopic of the woman known as Madame “Veuve” Clicquot, or by her actual full name, Barbe Nicole Ponsardin-Clicquot, who triumphed over all odds to become the force that created and brought to the world the leading …

Watching Mountains, which just made its international debut as part of the Toronto Film Festival’s Centerpiece program, I could not help but think of two other landmark films it seems to recall in its own way. One was 2019’s The Last Black Man In San Francisco, a remarkable story of …

When I was in college cinema courses I made a Super 8 film called Movie Girl. It was a Hollywood-set love letter to movies centered on a Musso & Franks waitress who put herself dreamily into the plots of classic films. It won an award there but was the highlight …

Netflix’s Pain Hustlers is a largely fictionalized tale of a very real world, and rather eye-opening, business: selling an easy fix for what ails us, even if it leads to addiction and death. Although the names have been changed, the characters invented although inspired for some by actual cases and …

In 2019, Australian documentary filmmaker Kitty Green made her first narrative movie, a piercing almost cinéma vérité-style movie focused on an office assistant in a Tribeca film company run by a not-so-thinly disguised Harvey Weinstein. The male culture there and the sexual acts of the boss made it almost a …

Michael Keaton, after making his directorial debut with 2008’s The Merry Gentleman, steps behind the camera for only the second time with his latest film, Knox Goes Away in which he also delivers one of his finest and most poignant performances as a man facing a rare form of fast …

Fall film festivals are usually where we look for the more serious awards bait pictures, but occasionally as with tonight’s rousing World Premiere of Taikia Waititi’s long-gestating American Somoan soccer comedy, Next Goal Wins, you get a real commercial crowd pleaser. That is exactly what Waititi has delivered in adapting …

Nicolas Cage, after more than 100 credits, finally has his dream role, at least as comedy fans are concerned. He knocks it out of the park as a schlubby, balding college professor who suddenly starts appearing in people’s dreams, first his daughter’s, then an old girlfriend’s, and soon millions of …

Take a bit of Kafka, throw in some Buñuelian realism, add a dose of John Cheever (circa The Swimmer) and then hand the recipe over to a first-time feature-making Swedish director with fond memories of a childhood spent in IKEA furniture stores, then put together an A-List cast, and you …

For her directorial debut Anna Kendrick chose a particularly daunting task in tackling the story of the notorious serial killer, Rodney Alcara. who staged a terrifying murder spree in the 70’s in which he is thought to have killed upwards of 130 people. The center of Kendrick’s movie, Woman Of …

It is only appropriate that Sony’s terrific new comedy Dumb Money starts with the Columbia Pictures logo. That was the studio that Frank Capra famously helped build with his movies where the little guy triumphs over the corporate bad guys. Dumb Money is positively Capra-esque in the way it tells …

It is never a normal “opening night” when it comes to the Toronto Film Festival, which is offering numerous films including the much anticipated Hayao Miyizaki film The Boy and the Heron, which is the key opening-night gala. But there are others including two exceptional directorial debuts from celebrated veteran …