TIFF 2019 Movie Review: Tom Hanks makes A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood a Place We’d All Like to Call Home

The fact that the biographical drama A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood exists shows just how hungry we are for what the man at its center represented. Fred Rogers, or Mr. Rogers, as the public knew him, radiated kindness and…

Movie Review: The Promise

Perhaps this demonstrates a lack of creative initiative, but one would believe that if a director was to tackle a subject as weighty as the Armenian genocide, they would not choose to use it as a backdrop to a schmaltzy…

Movie Review: Colossal

Certainly touting one of the most bizarre synopsis for films debuting this year, Colossal, written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo, is also one of the most surprising delights. A film which manages to blend monster movie madness with indie darling character exploration and…

Movie Review: A Monster Calls

Often times the harshest reality of growing up is the realization that we are, by nature, flawed human beings. The dawning understanding that our parents are not infallible superhumans, that we are not impervious to harm is something that can…

Movie Review: La La Land

Time melts away while watching Damien Chazelle’s latest, La La Land about the nature of being an artist, dating a fellow performer and how dreams and expectations are hard won and that perspective too is a difficultly earned gift in growing older. How…

Movie Review: Lion

  The first hour of Garth Davis’s Lion (based on the true story of Saroo Bierley) is one of the finest explorations of the human experience this year. We follow a young Saroo after he is devastatingly separated from his mother…

Movie Review: It’s Only the End of the World

Louis, suffering from an unspecified terminal illness, constantly checks his watch, only realizing for the first time in his life how precious time really is. Xavier Dolan adapted It’s Only the End of the World from the stage play Juste…