Siegfried Sassoon’s Shadow Life Chronicled In Terence Davies’ ‘Benediction’ [TIFF Review]

Joe Biden got a Covid-19 booster show live on camera on Monday, a move to promote a third shot for those 65 an older.

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.

Terence Davies’ lyrical, gorgeous and elegant film “Benediction” is an unusual biopic about British war poet Siegfried Sassoon in that it jumps around in time and finds Sassoon as both a young and old man. Scholars may be left hunting for the film’s specific timeline, but the film no doubt packs an emotional wallop.

Guy Lodge Film CriticIn multiple interviews over the years, British filmmaker Terence Davies has baldly stated that being gay has ruined his life: “I hate it, I’ll go to my grave hating it … it has killed part of my soul,” he said in 2011, adding that his sexuality is the reason he remains single and celibate.

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.

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

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.

Filmmaker Terrence Davies chose “Mary Queen of Scots” star Jack Lowden to play World War One poet Siegfried Sassoon in his TIFF biopic “Benediction” and he says the actor’s transformation into the real life soldier and poet was “an absolute joy to witness.”

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.

Co-created by Ava DuVernay and former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick — who silently took a knee during the US national anthem in 2016 in protest of the racial inequality and indiscriminate killing of Black Americans by police — “Colin in Black and White,” the limited docudrama series from Netflix, follows its subject as he looks back on his formative years as an adopted, biracial high school and college athlete with his eyes set on becoming a professional quarterback.

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.