Every fall, right after Labor Day, one of the biggest events in the movie calendar gets underway: the Toronto International Film Festival, which most people call by its acronym, TIFF. Since it launched in 1976, the 10-day festival has become one of the largest and most prestigious in the world, propelling emerging filmmakers onto the international scene and awards hopefuls toward the big fall movie season.
The 10-day festival is the unofficial kick-off to the “prestige movie season” — which means keeping an eye on what’s buzzy at TIFF may tell you a lot about what performances and movies will be part of awards chatter later in the year. And the festival’s timing positions it as the de facto opening of awards season, a marathon of mostly serious dramas that lasts about six months, until the Oscars finally wrap it all up in late February.
If Beale Street Could Talk adapts James Baldwin’s novel into a haunting, gorgeous film
Kiki Layne and Stephan James co-star in If Beale Street Could Talk, the new film from Moonlight director Barry Jenkins. Courtesy of TIFFIt seems natural that Barry Jenkins settled on James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk for his first post-Moonlight film project. At Beale Street’s world premiere in Toronto, Jenkins was introduced as a filmmaker whose movies are not just about love, but are themselves love letters to the audience. And Beale Street is both a love story and one suffused by love for its characters, as well as the world in which they’re trying to get by.
That’s familiar territory for Jenkins, who tells unconventional stories of love and intimacy about black America. His 2008 debut Medicine for Melancholy is about a one-night stand between a social activist and a young, affluent professional that turns into a long day of talking about everything, including the differences that may keep them apart. His 2016 film Moonlight, which won the Best Picture Oscar, is a triptych spanning three stages of a young man’s life as he grasps for connection and comes to term with desire.
Read Article >The Hate U Give is equal parts coming-of-age drama and Black Lives Matter primer. It’s terrific.
Amandla Stenberg and Algee Smith in The Hate U Give Courtesy of TIFFAngie Thomas’s novel The Hate U Give, about a teenage girl named Starr who sees her childhood friend shot and killed by police in front of her, was an instant hit when it came out in February 2017, debuting at the top of the New York Times young adult best-seller list and staying there for 50 weeks.
Thomas’s novel is based on a short story she wrote following the 2009 police shooting of Oscar Grant. Narrated by Starr, it captures a whole range of concerns and events that have animated the Black Lives Matter movement as well as broader American conversations about race: police shootings of young, unarmed black men, double consciousness and code-switching, “colorblind” white people, an asymmetrical justice system, gang violence, and a lot more.
Read Article >Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper shine in the newest version of A Star Is Born
Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper star in A Star is Born, directed by Cooper. Warner Bros.The concept behind A Star Is Born is the stuff of scientific mythology: For one star to be born, another must flame out. The world has a ceiling on its potential star count.
Whether or not that’s true, Hollywood — located, after all, in the City of Stars — finds the metaphor alluring. The latest version of A Star Is Born, directed by and starring Bradley Cooper alongside Stefani Germanotta (a.k.a. Lady Gaga), is now the fourth movie to bear both the title and a plot arc about one star rising while another dims.
Read Article >
