Thread by @alisonwillmore

I am in Canada at the ol’ Toronto International Film Festival for the next few days, and for the sake of the tl am going to try to keep all my movie reactions in this thread — read through it or mute it as you prefer #tiff

(I am also going to tweet about things that I saw earlier but am pretending for the sake of embargoes/film critic kayfabe that I am just now seeing)

THE LIGHTHOUSE: What makes this enjoyable is that beneath the claustrophobic setting, increasing unreliability of the main POV, beautifully murky nighttimes, madness mermaids, and baroque attempts to call Triton down upon someone's head, it's such a dark roommate dramedy #tiff

THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD: Is an intensely whimsical take on the Dickens novel/Dickens himself, but not 😬 an especially interesting one? Felt odd not to be won over by the cast alone (the cast!) but, a few charming bits aside, never really clicked for me. #tiff

CLIFTON HILL: A Niagara Falls-set amateur detective story that has a neat sense of place but otherwise felt like the pilot for a TV series I'd half-watch. Does feature David Cronenberg in a small role demanding to know if the heroine listened to his podcast — a plus! #tiff

ATLANTICS: Pretty damn masterful, the way this film weaves together a love story, a detective story, and a ghost story while exploring migration to Europe from the perspective of young women who've been left behind by family and by lovers. Deserves a big screen. #tiff

WAVES: Half brilliant, half frustrating! Trey Edward Shults sure can fling a camera around (even a little too much at first). The acting's across the board excellent. But it often felt to me more guided by its themes of wounded masculinity than by the characters themselves. #tiff

PAIN AND GLORY: Gorgeous, melancholy, and, in the best possible way, minor in how unapologetically inward-looking it feels, bent on conveying a particular convergence of depression, pain, and reminiscence in Almodóvar's life, w/ Antonio Banderas as his silver foxy stand-in #tiff

JUST MERCY: Criticizing a film this earnest about work this important is like kicking a puppy, but while the cases and vast injustices will make your blood boil, the characterization of the main subjects is so flat it's like the film feels apologetic about dramatizing them #tiff

SOUND OF METAL: The way this movie uses its soundscape to evoke an experience of hearing loss is ingenious, and more compelling than the character study it's all in service to, though Riz Ahmed's nervily convincing as a guy in recovery who swapped one addiction for another #tiff

Kelvin Harrison Jr. Riz Ahmed
in WAVES in SOUND OF METAL

🤝
Bleaching your hair and also being in denial
about damage you're doing to your body #tiff

PARASITE: What makes Bong Joon-ho's latest so goddamn great is that you realize just how angry a movie it actually is right around the time the characters do #tiff

A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: I'm leery of stories about famous figures framed by someone else's encounter with them, but in Heller's charming film it makes perfect sense — Tom Hanks' Fred Rogers is very human, but the distance lets him be a little magic as well. #tiff

Team HUSTLERS. Lorene Scafaria: “This film is dedicated to strippers and sex workers everywhere”

HUSTLERS: Holy shit does this rule. #tiff

SEA FEVER: Creature feature about a fishing trawler's run-in with an unknown oceanic entity. It's a modest and mostly subdued affair, but it's also appealingly thoughtful about human responsibility and how its characters react to their increasingly dire situation. #tiff

COLOR OUT OF SPACE: Look, all you really need to know about this Lovecraft modernization is that Nicolas Cage's family owns alpacas and that at one point he milks the alpacas, and at another point the alpacas def get mutated by a nightmarish force from space #tiff