News

Don’t Worry Darling was on everyone’s tongue at TIFF. The film which premiered at the Venice Film Festival was the target of much discussion and little of it had to do with the film itself.

Butcher’s Crossing had its first-ever public screening at TIFF and was met with a standing ovation for filmmaker Gabe Polsky and stars Nicolas Cage and co-star Fred Hechinger before they took the stage for a Q&A. The film is based on John Williams’ 1960 western novel set in the 1870s and stars Cage as Miller, a buffalo hunter who lures a naïve young man (Fred Hechinger) into an ambitious expedition in the Colorado Rockies that goes horribly wrong.

Viola Davis and her Agojie all-female warriors shook the box office out of its doldrums and reigned supreme. The Woman King predicted to earn from $16 million to $18 million, made $19 million instead, catapulting the action-drama-history to the top.

Paradise found. That sums up not only the brand-new number one movie but also – finally – some movement in the charts.

  A mere three weeks after her presence at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to publicly receive the apology over her treatment at the 1973 Oscars, Sacheen Littlefeather, actress and activist, has died. She was 75 years old and had been battling breast cancer.

The Toronto Film Festival has ended with a message to Hollywood: Steven Spielberg’s new drama, The Fabelmans, could be the film to beat going into awards season after taking home the TIFF People’s Choice Award. While Toronto is not a prize-driven festival and does not have an official jury like the Cannes and Venice festivals, its highly coveted People’s Choice Award – voted only by audiences – is almost always a harbinger of a best picture nominee, with films like Green Book, La La Land and Jojo Rabbit, all winners that went on to receive Oscar love.

Throughout a long and distinguished career, the most defining characteristic of Werner Herzog’s canon has been sheer variety, driven by an enormous sense of curiosity. In his prolific documentary work, the 80-year-old German filmmaker has shown an intense interest in people (Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Meeting Gorbachev), in addition to the natural world and its history, both culturally and scientifically (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds).

Russell Crowe won a Golden Globe as Best Actor in a drama in 2002 for his portrayal of mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind directed by Ron Howard.  During exclusive 2000 and 2001 interviews with the journalists of the Hollywood Foreign Press, he talked about schizophrenia and mental illness.

Expectations were high when packed theatres screened the much-hyped biopic, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, at the Toronto Film Festival. This was, after all, the story of the legendary parody songsmith who had hit records changing the lyrics to famous songs including Eat It (Michael Jackson’s Beat It), Another One Rides the Bus (Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust) and My Bologna (The Knack’s My Sharona).

An interesting heads-up from Sonny Bunch writing in the Washington Post on September 15 – Chinese businesses are increasingly buying up international video game companies. Why this is worrying is that the size of the international gaming market dwarfs that of the global box office, and all video games bought by the Chinese are subject to the same censorship that is applied by the ministry of culture to movies that are approved for the Chinese audience – no Tibetan references, no time travel, ghost stories, gambling, violence or nudity.