Movie Review

Former soldier-turned-farmer Hailey Freeman (Danielle Deadwyler) is tough on her children because she knows how much more dangerous the world has become after pandemics, famine, and a second civil war in the US.

People would kill for their fertile plot of land up in Canada where precious produce still grows. And when gangs of hungry cannibals start popping up, the Freemans have no choice but to take up arms and stand their ground.

Equal parts post-apocalyptic thriller, family drama, and ode to Octavia Butler, the film is a brutal and beautiful debut from director R. T. Thorne.

An ol’ fashioned tear-jerker about Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield), who quickly fall in love after the former hits the latter with her car. The film does a great job of balancing its heart-rending story with hilarious jokes, but the most notable thing is the way it deftly jumps around in time.

Its non-linear story seems sporadic initially, yet I was never lost or confused, because it moves around in a way that lets you follow the highs and lows of their relationship in a completely natural way. Just don’t forget Kleenex.

What if Uncut Gems was a comedy? That’s how this film from Juno director Jason Reitman feels.

It covers a very specific moment in Saturday Night Live history: the 90 minutes before the first episode in 1975. Series creator Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) desperately tries to keep everything together despite not really knowing what he’s doing. Also, the lighting director quit, they have too much material, and Chevy Chase and John Belushi won’t stop fighting.

It’s a stressful race to the finish line, but eases the tension with lots of jokes.

OK, maybe not all of them, but Charles and I are covering TIFF again this year and filling this stream with our many, many thoughts. Highlights so far include The Substance and The Life of Chuck. But you can check out plenty more right here.

The nods to Iron Giant and Castle in the Sky are pretty obvious, but even still Wild Robot carves out its own distinct vibe. It’s centered on a helper bot (Lupita Nyong’o) that washes up on an island filled with wildlife but no humans. Quickly it finds a mission: preparing an orphaned gosling for migration.

What follows may be a fairly straightforward story about finding yourself, but there’s so much heart that it doesn’t really matter. The all-star cast — which also includes Pedro Pascal, Matt Berry, and Catherine O’Hara — only makes things better.

Super assassin 13 (Aurora Ribero) has one problem: she actually has feelings. That’s how she ends up pulled into Jakarta’s underworld searching for a young boy. The film is full of derivative moments you’ve probably seen in other revenge-fueled action flicks — blood on the snow in Japan, a neon-lit shootout in a club, drug deal gone horribly wrong — but makes up for it with some inventive fight choreography and an escalating level of cartoonish ultraviolence.

If there was an award for best use of a frying pan, this movie would win hands down.

An amazing name for a horror satire that can’t really decide what it wants to be. Its story of a high school science teacher (Brandon Routh) saving a small town from an infestation of violent plants is meant to be a send-up of ‘90s-era horror like The Faculty. It looks and sounds the part, but leaves itself stranded in the middle: not funny enough to be a spoof, and not scary enough to work as horror.

In the future, a test makes it possible to scientifically determine your ideal soulmate. (It’s a premise very similar to last year’s Fingernails, only less gross.) Initially, it seems that the film is going to do the typical romcom thing when best friends Laura (Imogen Poots) and Simon (Brett Goldstein) have a clear connection despite their opposing views on the value of the test.

But instead of being obvious, All of You skillfully explores the mess, chaos, and pain inherent in love. I wish its sci-fi elements were more developed, but the rest hits hard.

Before N.E.R.D, The Neptunes, and becoming one of the more convincing arguments for the existence of vampires, Pharrell Williams was a kid from Virginia Beach who didn’t know that most people don’t see sounds as colors. He had no way of knowing that his love for music would transform him into one of the most influential artists of the 21st century. But those who knew him could always see that he was destined for greatness.

The doc is gorgeous, but far from revelatory, and features too much Robin Thicke and Justin Timberlake for its own good.

Though mother (Amy Adams) loves her husband and son, she can’t deny feeling trapped in her life of suburban domesticity. She would never admit to feeling like a caged animal — a dog, specifically — being driven mad. And yet when she starts sprouting hair from strange places all over her body and craving red meat, her feelings seem to be transforming her in ways that shouldn’t be possible.

The film skews more comedic than the book, and eases up on the body horror to its detriment. Adams is great, but this could have been so much meatier.

For broke cinephiles like Nasir Shaikh (Adarsh Gourav), piracy is the ultimate form of flattery. It’s the only way he can bring the world’s films to his hometown where his families expect him to be responsible and get a humdrum job.

It’s hard for Nasir to explain why he can’t get over his dream of making films. But when he starts creating experimental parodies, his peers can’t deny his talent or their desire to join in. As biopics go, the film’s a stunner that starts wobbly but sticks the landing.

An oil tycoon (Michael Shannon), art curator (Tilda Swinton), and their son (George MacKay) are separated from the apocalyptic horrors outside, spending their time in a bunker writing books, arranging flowers, and eating lots of cake. But the facade steadily slips away after a young survivor (Moses Ingram) enters their home.

Filled with dark humor and even darker revelations, the film also happens to be an uplifting musical, but those two sides never gel in a satisfying way. Instead, it ends up feeling bloated and, even worse, doesn’t have memorable songs.

Nobody shines quite like TV aerobics star Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), but when her sexist boss fires her on her 50th birthday, she spirals into an existential darkness that feels like death.

All she wants is for the world to see how powerful she still feels inside, which is why she doesn’t think twice about injecting a mysterious cosmetic drug known simply as “The Substance.” And while The Substance gives her exactly what she wants, it comes with some deliciously nightmarish, Cronenbergian side effects that will speak to the Malignant lovers out there.

An attempt to turn the story of the Swiss folk hero into a historical epic, which ends up quite bland. There’s a lot of build-up to the moment — you know the one, where Tell (Claes Bang) shoots an apple off his son’s head — but once that’s over so, too, is the film’s momentum. Despite being a movie filled with blood and dirt, it’s all too clean, adhering to a strict formula of daring heroes, cartoonish villains, rousing speeches, and battles that, like the arrow hitting the apple, are never in doubt.

It’s nice to think the G7’s septet of world leaders would be able to commit to a plan of action in response to a mysterious global crisis.

But in Bleecker Street’s surreal black comedy Rumours, German Chancellor Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett) and her fellow heads of state are too busy losing their minds to get anything done as their summit is besieged by... horny monsters. The ghouls might actually just be protesters — you’re never meant to know for certain.

But you are meant to spot the kernels of reality baked into this batshit story.

Space trucker Andriy (Volodymyr Kravchuk) spends his days hauling nuclear waste from Earth to Jupiter’s moon Callisto, enjoying the solitude by listening to records and playing chess with a joke-obsessed robot. But a disaster, possibly a world war, destroys the Earth while he’s flying — making that solitude a lot more permanent.

So when Andriy hears a voice message from somewhere near Saturn, he clings to it with a ferocious intensity. The film laughs its way through tragedy with plenty of dry humor, but ultimately ends on a beautiful and hopeful moment.

In an afterlife where ghosts have to work their asses off to survive by becoming urban legends, all Rookie (Gingle Wang) wants is to haunt her little corner of Taiwan in peace.

But when she starts to fade into nothingness due to being forgotten, she realizes it might be time to get her license and become a proper myth so terrifying that she’s sustained by mortals’ fear. Professional ghosting is a cutthroat industry, though — one Rookie isn’t cut out for.

Think Monsters, Inc. meets All About Eve — it sounds wild, but it absolutely works.