'Monday': Film Review | TIFF 2020

Machetes, myths and murky storytelling all find their way into Tragic Jungle (Selva Trágica), the lushly made, if highly enigmatic, fifth feature from Mexican writer-director Yulene Olaizola (Fogo), which screened in the main slate of the New York Film Festival after premiering in the Horizons section in Venice.

It's become unfashionable to express fondness for vintage Woody Allen films, but think back to how pleasurable they could be before all the off-camera baggage muddied those memories and you have some idea of the warmly satisfying experience of On the Rocks.

Not since Jeff Goldblum stocked his penis in a jar or Bryan Cranston tore apart his meth lab has a fly played such a pivotal role on screen as in Mandibles (Mandibules), the latest comic whatchamacallit from French one-man-band Quentin Dupieux.

When his girlfriend can’t get pregnant, a trans man decides to carry the child in her stead in the French drama A Good Man. This is the latest feature from writer-director Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar.

A coming-of-age drama set against true events that roiled Quebec in 1990, Beans is a story of awakening and identity for its title character. She's a smart and high-spirited resident of the Mohawk reserve Kahnawà:ke, and her single-syllable nickname comes in especially handy in the opening scene: The principal of the private high school she wants to attend stumbles repeatedly, and unapologetically, over the girl's given name, Tekahentahkhwa.

Until his death in 1989 at the age of 74, not even his wife or adoptive children knew that jazz pianist Billy Tipton had been anything other than a cisgender man. According to No Ordinary Man — a new documentary about Tipton’s legacy as a transmasculine icon — the musician became fodder for daytime talk shows and supermarket tabloids shortly after his death, with Oprah Winfrey and her also-rans prying into the marriage between Tipton and his common-law widow Kitty Kelly.

Two sisters from a Northern Irish town close to the border with Eire, played by Nika McGuigan and Nora-Jane Noone, feel the long shadow of both the Troubles and their own troubled past when they're reunited after a long estrangement in British-Irish co-production Wildfire.

Are all relationships between older men and younger women abusive ones? Do the young women who take part in such relationships hold any level of responsibility? Is it "OK" to be attracted to somebody more than twice your age, and, if so, can you act on that desire? Is it too French to be asking such questions, especially in a movie? These are some of the many thoughts evoked by Spring Blossom (Seize Printemps), a provocative first feature from writer-director-actress Suzanne Lindon that depicts

Veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui, one of Venice’s two Career Golden Lion recipients this year alongside Tilda Swinton, brings prewar Hong Kong to exquisite if restrained life in her latest historical drama, Love After Love (Di Yu Lu Xiang).

Facing his mother's worsening leukemia, a boy turns his curious mind from detective stories to supernatural lore in David Oyelowo's The Water Man, a family adventure set against a lush Pacific Northwest backdrop. Doing double-duty behind and in front of the camera (playing the boy's father) Oyelowo is sure-footed in his feature directing debut, delivering a smart and wholesome picture with about as little sentimentality as such a tale can have.

The sprawling plains of Idaho and Utah, their tufted prairies dappled by cloud-filtered light and edged by craggy mountains, provide a spiritual setting for bruising personal reflection in Good Joe Bell.

In a time of dramatic political unrest, film has a unique opportunity to look toward the past for insight on our present. Sam Pollard’s searing documentary MLK/FBI retells the story of the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of the government, showing how FBI founder J.

The first word heard in 76 Days is an anguished cry — "Papa!" — as a group of hazmat-suited medical workers race through the corridors of a hospital and the film plunges straight into the turmoil and agony of the coronavirus. The grief-stricken daughter is one of those workers, arriving at her father's room too late to bid him goodbye.

Given its pedigree, expectations were undeniably lofty for Wolfwalkers, the final installment in Tomm Moore’s gorgeously animated Irish folklore trilogy, following Oscar nominations for 2009’s The Secret of Kells and 2014’s Song of the Sea. The beautifully rendered result proves to be even more than one had hoped for: a visually dazzling, richly imaginative, emotionally resonant production that taps into contemporary concerns while being true to its distant origins.

"Horses ain't the only thing that needs breaking around here," says one of the Fletcher Street Stables riders in Concrete Cowboy. She's referring to the wayward teenager who's been exiled for the summer to acquire some discipline from his estranged father.

Amid all the COVID-compromises and missed opportunities of this year's TIFF, one of the most unfortunate is that the fest's midnight-movie audience, always composed of more Regular Joe and Jane film-geeks than showbiz interlopers, won't be able to cram cheek-by-jowl into a theater and watch Roseanne Liang's Shadow in the Cloud.

Seldom has a film's title been more thoroughly doused in darkest irony than J. Blakeson's breathtakingly vicious thriller I Care a Lot.

Eight years after making the Oscar-nominated The Hunt together, Mads Mikkelsen and writer-director Thomas Vinterberg have reunited for Another Round, a tragicomic portrait of midlife crisis and alcohol abuse. Since their previous collaboration, both director and star have mostly worked on bigger international features, but they are back on comfortable home ground here with a modestly scaled Danish-language production full of familiar faces.

Fifteen years ago, Saul Williams was a heavy metal-sampling hip-hop poet whose fiercely political live shows called for reparations at a time when that was not very fashionable. He now projects a much more subdued urgency in the title role of Charles Officer's Akilla's Escape, playing a man raised up amid violence who has never stopped trying to avoid it.

No man is an island in Limbo, a glumly comic drama about a group of misfit refugees stranded in surreal exile in a remote Scottish backwater town. Building on the promise of his festival prize-winning debut feature Pikadero (2016), Scottish writer-director Ben Sharrock displays a winning flair for small observational detail and minor-key mirth in his warm-hearted second feature, whose deadpan ironic tone invites comparison to Aki Kaurismaki or Jim Jarmusch.