TIFF 2017: Toronto International Film Festival news and movie reviews

The central thesis of political satirist Armando Iannucci’s work can be summed up thusly: Politics is the bleakest kind of purgatory.

In shows like Veep and The Thick of It, and the 2009 film In the Loop, Iannucci populates his worlds with characters doomed to a kind of death by bureaucracy. They’re all Sisyphus, cursed for their hubris by a malevolent god to roll a rock up a hill. Then it rolls back. Repeat forever.

The opening shots of Guillermo del Toro’s gorgeous romance-fantasy The Shape of Water show Eliza (Sally Hawkins) going about her morning routine — boiling eggs, bathing, brushing her shoes, visiting her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins) before work — in her dingy but charming apartment above the Orpheum movie theater. The camera pans down and across the theater’s marquee. It is 1960, and the theater is playing The Story of Ruth, Henry Koster’s biblical epic.

That movie shows up several times in The Shape of Water, playing in the background of scenes and advertised on the Orpheum’s marquee, and though it doesn’t serve as del Toro’s primary symbolism, its story lurks around the edges of his film. The most famous passage from the Book of Ruth is when Ruth, who is a Moabite, entreats her Jewish mother-in-law, Naomi, to let her come to Israel with her, even after Ruth’s husband (Naomi’s son) has passed away. “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you,” Ruth says. “For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.”

“Aaron Sorkin does a poker movie” is a flat-out terrific idea, and so obvious a fit for his talents that it’s hard to believe he hasn’t done it before. And yet Sorkin — the only screenwriter on the planet who can open a film based solely on his name — has mostly stuck to newsrooms, technologists, and politics before now. He’s also stuck to screenwriting.

For Molly’s Game, though, he’s venturing out into new territory, on two fronts: He’s written a poker movie, and for the first time, he’s directed it too.

America has always been fascinated by the scandalous and sordid, and once the 24/7 cable news cycle became firmly entrenched in the mid-1990s, the country was ready to gorge itself.

We got what we asked for. In 1994, when former football star O.J. Simpson was pursued by police down a Los Angeles freeway in a white Ford Bronco, everyone in America tuned in, then stuck around for more than a year to watch his arrest, trial, and eventual acquittal in October 1995. The following year, a child beauty pageant queen named JonBenét Ramsey was found dead in her family’s house, enabling years of tabloid-style speculation about who really did it.

Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) walks into the office of the local billboard company, and the babyfaced man in charge, Red (Caleb Landry Jones), is reading A Good Man Is Hard to Find, the story collection by mid-century Southern writer Flannery O’Connor. Mildred is there to rent space on three billboards on an isolated back road on the end of Ebbing, Missouri, a tiny town with a welcome sign that proclaims it to be “worth stopping for.” Her intention: To shame the town’s police chief in 20-foot-high letters.

Unless I missed it, O’Connor doesn’t appear again in Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. But the book’s conspicuous placement in this scene is no accident: It works on several levels as a handy interpretive key. For one, “a good man is hard to find” could have been the film’s working title. For another, O’Connor’s story is about a family that encounters a violent murderer, which is at least thematically related to the movie.

If, as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then The Square’s Christian (Claes Bang) is headed straight to Hades. But then again, the movie would like to remind us, the rest of us are right behind him.

Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May for The Square, his high-concept takedown of our high-minded ideals and the myriad ways we flub them in execution. Burying self-referential allusions in the background and merrily poking viewers till they bruise, The Square at times feels more like longform performance art than a narrative film. It’s social satire by way of art-world comedy, and no woke participant is exempt from its barbs.

A movie about white, suburban America burning itself alive while blaming its self-immolation on the black neighbors down the street seems like it could be great. And the Coen brothers wrote the screenplay, you say? What could go wrong?

A lot, as it turns out. Suburbicon is recognizably Coenesque. It has an absurdist premise and a familiar-feeling Fargo variant of a plot: Nice family guy plots to off his wife for the insurance money, and then things go sideways.

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos honed his signature style in films like Dogtooth and The Lobster: His actors deliver stilted, formal lines with intentionally over-mannered delivery that belies their ludicrous situations, be it a family that’s kept its adult children from ever interacting with the world, or the residents of a hotel where everyone must find a mate within a few weeks or be turned into an animal. This weird formal style creates the illusion of a placid surface, which is invariably punctuated by grotesque, shocking violence.

The whole effect is calculated to both offend and make viewers sit up straighter, knowing that Lanthimos has some idea bubbling beneath the surface — usually a criticism of the norms that govern ostensibly polite societies.

The real-life “Battle of the Sexes” was a major media event in 1973 — a tennis match at the Houston Astrodome between Bobby Riggs, a 55-year-old former champ, and Billie Jean King, who was 29 at the time and at the height of her powers as a player. The New York Times called it “an atmosphere more suited for a circus than a sports event.”

Riggs, who according to the Times “had bolted to national prominence with his blunt putdowns of women’s tennis and the role of today’s female,” styled himself as a “male chauvinist pig” going into the match. King, who was famous for demanding that women tennis players receive equal pay to the men when they brought in equal crowds, served as a representative for feminist ideals and women more generally.

Darren Aronofsky’s film Mother! may not be commercially successful, but it’s certainly taken over movie discussions since its premiere two weeks ago at TIFF. There’s plenty to talk about — Aronofsky himself seems maybe a little too eager to explain it — but even those who have no intention of seeing the film can’t seem to escape one question: Why is its title styled that way?

We at Vox, like the Ringer’s copyeditors, elected to not use the all-lowercase letters format used in the film’s promotional material, purely for readability’s sake. But we (and most other outlets) have stuck with the exclamation point — and there’s good reason for that: While it’s still awkward, the punctuation also communicates something fundamental about the film.

This is the time of year when critics start to toss around the phrase “Oscar-worthy performance” — probably far too often. Not every great movie performance is really worthy of an Oscar, and there are only 20 nomination slots available for acting at Hollywood’s biggest awards.

But even if a performance is unlikely to take home a statuette when the Academy Awards finally cap off the grueling awards season, it can still set audiences and critics aflame. Great actors don’t just deliver lines; they make you doubt reality for a moment. They let you sink so deeply into a character that you forget you’re “just” watching a movie. And when the awards season first gets underway in September, you never really know who will eventually turn up on awards ballots, anyway.

The Toronto International Film Festival has concluded, having screened hundreds of films for hundreds of thousands of moviegoers and launched more than a few awards hopefuls onto the path to the Oscars.

Some of the best or buzziest movies from the festival are already available for the public to see. Two such films were widely available before the festival even finished — Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! in theaters and Angelina Jolie’s First They Killed My Father on Netflix — and Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris, a documentary about the New York Public Library, is playing in limited release as well. Several more, including the Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle Stronger and the tennis drama Battle of the Sexes, are due in theaters this weekend.