Toronto film festival 2017

[Chris Knipp]

Still more D'Angelo tweet ratings and comments.


Still from The Death of Stalin

These are rearranged in descending order of rating rather than viewing order.

mother! (Aronofsky): 85. Here's the thing: Metaphors are inherently kinda dumb. If you're making one, GO FOR MOTHERFUCKING BROKE. Comme ça.

PROTOTYPE (Williams): 69. Astonishing 3-D images—and I *despise* 3-D as a rule—make for a singularly hallucinatory post-disaster journey.
(Blake is a friend, but other friends of mine will tell you that I don't praise friends' work indiscriminately. This is worth seeking out.)

Let the Corpses Tan (Cattet & Forzani): 68. More of a concrete narrative than I prefer from them, but the genre changeup compensates.
Pretty sure I've heard more creaking leather in Cattet & Forzani's three features than in all of the other 8000+ films I've seen combined.

Molly's Game (Sorkin): 64. Will fulfill all Sorkin-based expectations, good and bad. Bonus for poker players: great scene of monkey tilt.
(I also got weepy at the end because what happens to Bloom in court happened to me almost identically, right down to my dad being there.)

The Death of Stalin (Iannucci): 63. Tricky juggling of tones, mostly pulled off. Never got used to the collection of Brit/American accents.

Outside In (L. Shelton): 56. Earnest, performance-driven relationship drama, better than her last two but not a patch on her improv work.

Brad's Status (White): 55. Suspect I'd have actively liked this w/o the wall-to-wall expository voiceover. That Abrams kid is a real find.

Downsizing (Payne): 45. That is quite a bait and switch. Damon apparently learned nothing from ELYSIUM. I do sort of admire the perversity.

The Motive (Martín Cuenca): 43. These art-imitates-life quasi-thrillers (see also Ozon's IN THE HOUSE) virtually always leave me cold.
Saw this primarily because this director's previous film, CANNIBAL, was quite remarkable formally. But you'd never guess it's the same guy.

The Ritual (Bruckner): 38. Familiar BLAIR WITCH-y horror with a Nordic twist. Hero's clichéd personal demons seem almost irrelevant.

Note: Aronofsky's mother! (the title has no caps officially, it seems) debuted at Venice and I posted about Peter Bradshaw's 5 OUT OF 5 STARS Guardian review last Wednesday. D'Angelo's fairly low rating of Downsizing differs from Jordan Hoffman's Guardian 5 OUT OF 5 STARS and its Metacritic Generally Favorable 77%. PROTOTYPE is a highly abstract 65-minute-long art piece described as a "featurette" and categorized on IMDb as a "documentary." See CriticsRoundup. Armando Iannucci is the writer of In the Loop and the TV comedy series "The Thick of It" and "Veep." Peter Bradshaw gives The Death of Stalin a 5 OUT OF 5 STARS rating.

What does Mike mean by "Damon apparently learned nothing from ELYSIUM"? That makes two of us because I didn't either. Finding out what the more cryptic remarks mean unfortunately will be harder without D'Angelo's former excellent roundup reviews of festivals he covered for The Dissolve or AV Club.

mother! opens in US cinemas this Friday Sept. 15.

The Florida Project is coming to uS theaters Oct. 6.