‘American Fiction’ Review: Jeffrey Wright Takes on Narrow Ideas of Black Representation in Sharp Industry Satire

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic The creator of “The Creator,” Gareth Edwards, started his filmmaking career teaching himself VFX at home. He’s an innovator on that front, devising ways to generate creepy CG monsters for “Monsters” more than a dozen years ago, then overseeing deceptively massive blockbusters, like “Godzilla,” ever since (deceptive because much of that stunning scale comes from virtual detail added in post).

Michaela Zee After winning this year’s Toronto International Film Festival’s people’s choice award, “American Fiction” has pushed back its limited release to Dec. 15 and will expand in theaters on Dec. 22.

EXCLUSIVE: Cord Jefferson’s feature directorial debut, American Fiction, is changing up its release plan from Nov. 3rd limited opening to Dec. 15.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor “Poor Things” can win things. That’s a nugget of information we gleaned at the conclusion of Venice, Telluride and Toronto, the three major fall festivals. For starters, Yorgos Lanthimos’ sci-fi dramedy collected the Golden Lion at Venice.

TORONTO – “American Fiction,” the directorial debut from Cord Jefferson, is genuinely a very, very funny movie. And that’s hyperbole on our part.

Trends change and ebb and flow, but in years past, winning the Toronto International Film Festival audience award used to be a surefire way to mean you were getting an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and, and many instances, winning the big Academy Award prize. And while the winning element of that trend has somewhat waned in recent years, the power of the prize is still there.

The People’s Choice Award from the just-wrapped 2023 Toronto Film Festival has gone to American Fiction . First Runner Up is Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. Second Runner Up was Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy And The Heron . The Documentary Award went to Mr. Dressup: The Magic Of Make-Believe, ,and the Midnight Madness winner was Dicks: The Musical.

Brent Lang Executive Editor “American Fiction,” Cord Jefferson’s satire of race and media, captured the Toronto International Film Festival’s people’s choice award, bolstering its Oscars chances. TIFF’s people’s choice award is considered to be among the best predictors of eventual awards success, though the 2023 festival hosted a weaker lineup than most years due to the writers and actors strikes that saw some prominent contenders skip a Canadian premiere. In the past, winners of the prize such as “Green Book,” “12 Years a Slave” and “Nomadland” went on to be named best picture at the Academy Awards.

EXCLUSIVE: Filmmaker Cord Jefferson has, in recent years, made two life-changing decisions.

Brent Lang Executive Editor It’s been a Toronto Film Festival like few others. The writers and actors strikes meant that many A-listers opted not to touch down in Canada this year, depriving the gathering of film lovers of the star-studded red carpets and Q&As that make Toronto so memorable. Even if this year’s festival was starved for glamour, it was still a good opportunity to get a clearer picture of the awards race — and to check the pulse of Hollywood at a tumultuous time for the industry.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Does it count as a white savior movie if the white character is the one who needs saving? In “Next Goal Wins,” the world’s top-grossing indigenous director, Taika Waititi, retells the story of how American Samoa went from having the world’s worst soccer team to, well, not the worst. While a white man was involved, the movie — which suggests how a film like “Cool Runnings” might be made with 30 years’ more cultural enlightenment — is mostly about how their coach (Michael Fassbender) needs an attitude adjustment. Come to think of it, that’s essentially the formula for most white savior movies.

In Cord Jefferson cinematic adaptation of Percival Everett’s Erasure, American Fiction emerges as a hard-hitting commentary on identity, storytelling, and the microaggressive terrains of the publishing industry. With a powerhouse ensemble, led by Jeffrey Wright and supported by the likes of Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown, the film aims to deconstruct the publishing world as it relates to myriad facets of Black lives.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic “Finestkind,” the name of both Brian Helgeland’s new film and the high-line fishing boat Tommy Lee Jones captains within it, is one of those words that New Englanders find hard to define, but seem to have no trouble using in a sentence. It means quality — of fish, of people, of principles — and it sets the bar for the shaggy family portrait Helgeland crafts around two half-brothers wrestling with their place in the blue-collar New Bedford community. The movie, alas, is just so-so, tripping over its own feet for the first couple reels until such time as the siblings cross the Northern Line to (illegally) dredge for scallops in Canadian waters, and then it gets good.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor With “American Fiction,” Cord Jefferson, best known for penning television episodes of “Succession” and “Watchmen,” helms one of the finest directorial debuts seen since Sam Mendes’ “American Beauty.” In the style that feels like an audacious blend of the screenplays of Alexander Payne’s “Sideways” and Nicole Holofcener’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me,” he shepherds an audacious dramedy anchored by a career-best and Oscar-worthy performance from star Jeffrey Wright. After debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival, it’s a movie that could be a contender for the coveted TIFF Audience Award, and it would be deserved.

“Dicks: The Musical” has an extremely useful title. Your gut reaction to those three short words will help you decide whether you can stomach this loony A24 movie, which had its world premiere Thursday at the Toronto International Film Festival — or if it’ll make you retch.Trust your instincts, because the film itself, directed by Larry Charles (“Borat”), won’t change your mind. You go in either loving this sort of thing — or loathing it.This creature from the wacko lagoon has ample obscenities, constant profanity, razzmatazz songs and dances.

Flesh-eating sewer monsters, genitals with wings, grave robbing, two confused “identical twins” and 90 minutes of sexual innuendo is what you can expect from comedians Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp’s stage show-turned-movie. Directed by Larry Charles and written by and starring the duo, the film also features Nathan Lane, Megan Mullally, Megan Thee Stallion and Bowen Yang. As a viewer, I often wondered how the hell this got turned into the movie because it is so outrageous. Thankfully, it succeeds at being fun and funny because anything less would have amounted to torture. 

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic In December 2020, Cord Jefferson sat down with the novel “Erasure,” by Percival Everett, and saw his life reflected back at him. “It was like someone had written down a Christmas gift for Cord,” he says.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In “Origin,” Ava DuVernay weaves a centuries- and continents-spanning narrative feature around the ideas of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson, who rejects the word “racism.” It’s not that she doesn’t believe that racism exists; rather, she doesn’t think that racism alone can explain the inequity in human society — the way America’s founders could have written “all men are created equal” and meant something so different. As Isabel Wilkerson, the protagonist (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who is based on Isabel Wilkerson, the author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” puts it to her editor (Blair Underwood), “Racism as the primary language to understand everything is insufficient.” And later, to her sister (Niecy Nash-Betts): “We have to consider oppression in a way that does not centralize race.” The book “Caste” was Wilkerson’s answer to that challenge, drawing connections between discrimination in the United States and how Nazi Germany invented a social hierarchy to justify the Holocaust, which she links in turn to the rigid system of caste in India.

The artist died on Monday at his home in Palos Verdes Estates, California.

TMZ, the artist’s death follows a long battle with his health in recent years, which saw him struggle with both Parkinson’s disease and dementia. The news of his passing was broken by his son, Justin, who confirmed to the outlet that his father died in his home in Palos Verdes Estates, California.Although no cause of death has been officially announced, his son shared details on his father’s recent health battles.He stated that while Wright had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s nearly six years ago – and Lewy body dementia shortly after – it was only over the past 12 months that the symptoms began to rapidly progress.