Toronto 2011

[Chris Knipp]

TFF intro piece in the NYTimes (Sept. 15) by Manohla Dargis:

TORONTO — Having muscled its way forward with ambition and mountains of money, the Toronto International Film Festival stands supreme as the leading cinema event after Cannes. . . They do things big here: more than 300 movies on 33 screens for admissions that, last year, topped a quarter-million.

A RANGE OF OFFERINGS AT TORONTO:

Brat Pitt dresses down to promote MONEYBALL (US release Sept 23)


Glenn Close as a British cross-dresser in ALBERT NOBBS


A TURIN HORSE (a NYFF title) is "a slow, atmospheric,
challenging, inaccessible film by Bela Tarr"

The 36th Toronto Film Festival runs September 8 - 18 2011.

The list of films in competition at Toronto Film Festival provides further context alongside Cannes and Venice for the much more carefully limited selections in the NYFF that comes right after -- and also introduces some of the more exciting US theatrical releases of the remainder of the year. IndieWire provides three pages of titles and blurbs starting here.

Here's a partial list of titles from the Guardian of London that manages to miss some of the titles briefly characterized in Mike D'Angelo's comments on his own website. His choices show more what a cinephile would choose to see out of the 300, and he explains his choices before he views and reviews.


World premieres

11 Flowers, Dir: Wang Xiaoshuai
50/50, Dir: Jonathan Levine
360, Dir: Fernando Mier
Albert Nobbs, Dir: Rodrigo Garcia
Americano, Dir: Mathieu Demy
Anonymous, Dir: Roland Emmerich
The Awakening, Dir: Nick Murphy
A Better Life, Dir: Cédric Khan
The Boy Who Was King, Dir: Andrey Paounov
Burning Man, Dir: Jonathan Teplitzky
Butter, Dir: Jim Field Smith
Carré Blanc, Dir: Jean-Baptiste Leonetti
Comic-Con: Episode IV – A Fan's Hope, Dir: Morgan Spurlock
Countdown, Dir: Huh Jong-ho
Dark Girls, Dir: Bill Duke and D. Channsin Berry
The Deep Blue Sea, Dir: Terence Davies
The Descendants, Dir: Alexander Payne
Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell, Dir: Corinna Belz
Elles, Dir: Malgorzata Szumowska
Friends With Kids, Dir: Jennifer Westfeldt
From the Sky Down, Dir: Davis Guggenheim (Opening night film)
Girl Model, Dir: Ashley Sabin and David Redmon
A Happy Event, Dir: Remi Bezancon
Headshot, Dir: Pen-ek Ratanaruang
Hick, Dir: Derick Martini
The Hunter, Dir: Daniel Nettheim
Hysteria, Dir: Tanya Wexler
In My Mother's Arms, Dir: Atia Al Daradji and Mohamed Al Daradji
Into The Abyss, Dir: Werner Herzog
Jeff Who Lives at Home, Dir: Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass
Keyhole, Dir: Guy Maddin
The Lady, Dir: Luc Besson
Last Call at the Oasis, Dir: Jessica Yu
The Last Dogs of Winter, Dir: Costa Botes
The Last Gladiators, Dir: Alex Gibney
Machine Gun Preacher, Dir: Marc Forster
Moneyball, Dir: Bennett Miller
The Oranges, Dir: Julian Farino
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, Dir: Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky
Paul Williams Still Alive, Dir: Stephen Kessler
Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding, Dir: Bruce Beresford
Pearl Jam Twenty, Dir: Cameron Crowe
Rampart, Dir: Oren Moverman
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Dir: Lasse Hallström
Samsara, Dir: Ron Fricke
Sarah Palin – You Betcha!, Dir: Nick Broomfield
The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Dir: Mark Cousins
Take This Waltz, Dir: Sarah Polley
The Tall Man, Dir: Tony Krawitz
Ten Year, Dir: Jamie Linden
Trishna, Dir: Michael Winterbottom
Twixt, Dir: Francis Ford Coppola
Undefeated, Dir: Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin
Urbanized, Dir: Gary Hustwit
Winnie, Dir: Darell James Roodt
The Woman in the Fifth, Dir: Pawel Pawlikowski

North American premieres

Arirang, Dir: Kim Ki-Duk
Crazy Horse, Dir: Frederick Wiseman
A Dangerous Method, Dir: David Cronenberg
Dark Horse, Dir: Todd Solondz
Generation P, Dir: Victor Ginzburg
Habemus Papum, Dir: Nanni Moretti
The Ides of March, Dir: George Clooney
I'm Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad and the Beautiful, Dir: Jonathan Demme
Killer Joe, Dir: William Friedkin
Love and Bruises, Dir: Lou Ye
Oslo, August 31st, Dir: Joachim Trier
Poulet aux Prunes (Chicken With Plums), Dir: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud
Shame, Dir: Steve McQueen
Snowtown, Dir: Justin Kurzel
W.E., Dir: Madonna
Whores' Glory, Dir: Michael Glawogger
The Year of the Tiger, Dir: Sebastián Lelio

Other

The Artist, Dir: Michel Hazanavicius
Coriolanus, Dir: Ralph Fiennes
Drive, Dir: Nicholas Winding Refn
The Eye of the Storm, Dir: Fred Schepisi
Headhunters, Dir: Morten Tyldum
Like Crazy, Dir: Drake Doremus
Martha Marcy May Marlene, Dir: Sean Durkin
Melancholia, Dir: Lars von Trier
Pina, Dir: Wim Wenders
A Simple Life, Dir: Ann Hui
The Skin I Live In, Dir: Pedro Almodovar
Take Shelter, Dir: Jeff Nichols
This Is Not A Film, Dir: Jafar Panahi
Tyrannosaur, Dir: Paddy Considine
We Need to Talk About Kevin, Dir: Lynne Ramsay
Where Do We Go Now?, Dir: Nadine Labaki

[Johann]

TIFF: "Tiny Insignificant Funny Farce"

That's what it is to me.
An elite "industry" event.
They burned me bad and I won't be forgiving them anytime soon.

[Chris Knipp]

Again I refer you to Mike D'Angelo's short reviews of Toronto films on his website. His choices are interesting: he's committed to them and always so personal he sometimes writes his review as a direct letter to the director. This may seem self-indulgent meta-journalism, but it gives immediacy to his day-to-day reports. Let's hope he fills in his last five days.

Note: I first became aware of D'Angelo, a prolific and eloquent film critic whose whole career has been online, with his open letter to Lars von Trier in an AV Club bulletin from Cannes 2009. D'Angelo's distinctive and valid tweet-reviewing style was heralded by Kevin B. Lee in Fandor in a 2011 piece called "Essential Tweets: 34 Film Reviews From The Man Who TIFFed Too Much. . .Mike D’Angelo’s Twitter coverage of Toronto employs a new kind of film review aesthetic."

More mainstream choices are reviewed with revealing colloquial detail by two of the Onion's main movie critics, Noel Murray And Scott Tobias , on AV Club.