‘All My Puny Sorrows’: A Familiar But Well-Acted Indie Family Trauma Drama [TIFF Review]

Netflix’s big global event, TUDUM, has launched today giving us fresh looks at their upcoming streaming goodies. Jason Bateman and showrunner Chris Mundy have created one of Netflix’s most dependable hits with the drama “Ozark.” The series has engrossed fans and critics alike thus far.

During my first year of film school, my teacher would assign a great task to all her students during a post-production and sound course. The assignment was a unique redubbing exercise, stripping the audio and initial sound mix from pre-existing film scenes.

Mounia Akl’s feature debut, “Costa Brava, Lebanon” comfortably occupies a space between “Beasts of the Southern Wild” from “Honeyland”: Each movie deals with environmental dilemmas, ranging from climate change to the loss of biodiversity, but in their own ways and their own approaches. “Honeyland” takes the narrative nonfiction tack, chronicling the travails of a Macedonian beekeeper; “Beasts of the Southern Wild” grieves Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath with magical realism.

Guns, gold bars, drug lords, military coups, folk heroes, tall tales, and ghost stories. Is there a 2021 film that gives more bang for the buck than Jean Luc Herbulot’s superb “Saloum”? This is not a case of “too much” movie, where the director and screenwriter thoughtlessly stuff as many ingredients into the pot as they can and hope the concoction doesn’t boil over.

We casually throw the word “icon” around with such abandon these days that it almost feels like we need a new, more potent idiom to describe those who actually fit the bill. But until we get that term, let’s say that Sigourney Weaver is an absolute icon and leave it at that — a brilliant actor equally adept at drama, action, and comedy, a three-time Academy Award nominee (two of them in the same year), the kind of screen presence who lifts just about anything she’s in.

Writer-director Camille Griffin’s debut feature film “Silent Night” effectively blends two seemingly disparate genres — holiday films and impending apocalyptic cinema. Both high-pressure situations that get you thinking about what really matters, Griffin’s film navigates difficult family and friend dynamics with mordant humor as they face the end of the world together on Christmas Eve.

Comfortable in his newly found friendship, Hatzín (Hatzín Navarrete), a teenager from Mexico City who traveled to Chihuahua’s northern state to reclaim his father’s remains, pretends to be upset and explains he’s decided to return home. He laughs several seconds later, tricking Mario (Hernán Mendoza), his boss and impromptu life mentor.

Justine Bateman is on a quest to explore the fears and to openly address the toxic, self-destructive voices in our heads that tell us we’re no good and unworthy of love and success. The actor’s directorial debut and new drama, “Violet,” debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, highlights the ideas she’s thought about and faced head-on in her own life: self-made insecurity, fear, and crippling self-doubt.

Cult classics generally don’t happen on purpose and they usually don’t happen in just 10 days, either.

What a strange career Barry Levinson has had. The Baltimore-born filmmaker burst onto the scene in 1982 with “Diner” and embarked on a winning streak that’s still somewhat astonishing — his hits from the period included “Tin Men,” “Good Morning, Vietnam,” “Rain Man,” and “Bugsy.” And then came 1992’s “Toys,” and after it, a steady cascade of real clunkers: “Jimmy Hollywood,” “Disclosure,” “Sphere,” “Envy,” “Man of the Year,” “Rock the Kasbah,” and so on.

Writer-director Camille Griffin’s debut feature film “Silent Night” effectively blends two seemingly disparate genres — holiday films and impending apocalyptic cinema. Both high-pressure situations that get you thinking about what really matters, Griffin’s film navigates difficult family and friend dynamics with mordant humor as they face the end of the world together on Christmas Eve.

TORONTO – There’s something intoxicating when an established filmmaker unexpectedly challenges themselves creatively with a new project. Acclaimed writer and director Terence Davies does just that with his latest endeavor, “Benediction,” a biopic about the life of the celebrated poet Sigfried Sassoon that debuted at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival this past weekend.

Carole Horst Filmmaker Michael McGowan brings “All My Puny Sorrows,” his adaptation of beloved writer Miriam Toews’ novel, to the Toronto International Film Festival. The book, which McGowan adapted for the screen, tackles family bonds, religion, grief and suicide.

For generations, women who pushed against their expected roles in life were written off as mad, and in extreme cases, locked away. For equally as long, these women were fodder for art that depicted their madness as evil.

Reuniting with “St. Vincent,” director Theodore Melfi, Melissa McCarthy, and Chris O’Dowd play a married couple on the rocks after the unexpected loss of their baby tears them apart.

In writer-director Stephen Karam’s feature debut, the dark horror-comedy “The Humans,” it’s not so much a bump in the night or the creak in the door that can rupture an untapped fear. Those are merely the externalized notes that grant music to the ever-present existential dread.

According to the basic tenets of Christian scripture, all god’s creatures are worthy of judgment-free love. And while the hypocrisy of those words is rarely interrogated in “The Eyes Of Tammy Faye” — the bible belt preachers and communities presented in the film often fail to practice what they preach and are never forced to examine their own accumulation of wealth — these parts of the bible are really not the film’s concern.

In writer-director Stephen Karam’s feature debut, the dark horror-comedy “The Humans,” it’s not so much a bump in the night or the creak in the door that can rupture an untapped fear. Those are merely the externalized notes that grant music to the ever-present existential dread.

Everyone knows someone like Rebeca Huntt. A born-and-bred New Yorker, she came of age in a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, her family’s pride and joy.

I’m not entirely convinced everything needs to be a movie. In this case, I don’t know that there is any way to make a film about the journey of a parent as they hear their child’s school has an active shooter without it feeling exploitative of our nation’s current epidemic of violence.