Toronto Film Festival Sept. 5- Sept 15, 2019

[Chris Knipp]

Yesterday at Toronto with the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, who finds three pretty good ones.


NORTON IN MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

Motherless Brooklyn (Edward Norton) 3/5 stars, "respectable if heavy going" - Peter Bradshaw. This " adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s bestselling novel about a New York private detective with Tourette syndrome" which is "as loving as it is laborious, maybe" writes Bradshaw: Norton produced, wrote the adaptation, directs, and stars. At the coming New York Film Festival (Sept. 27-Oct. 13) it will be the Closing Night Film. shown Oct. 11. Metascore 62%. It's got Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin and Willem Dafoe and period New York and looks like it might be fun.

The Two Popes (Fernando Meirelles) 3/5 stars (Bradshaw) "nthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce find some tremendous actorly form in this humorous, indulgent, lop-sidedly sentimental “Pope-off” which becomes a Pontiff bromance written by Anthony McCarten and directed by Fernando Meirelles." Sounds very complicated to me, you might need to be a bureaucracy-conscious Catholic to like it.

Lucy in the Sky (Noah Hawley) again 3/5 stars from Bradshaw. " Noah Hawley’s intriguing film, based on a true story, is about the effects on those who go to space of coming back to Earth’s quotidian reality" focused on a woman of NASA played by Natalie Portman. Bradshaw liked it, but not many other critics did. The Metascore of 37 makes it look like a clinker.