Jason Bailey
You can almost hear the industry sighing with relief at the beginning of each day of the Toronto International Film Festival, after last year’s rocky edition—at least in terms of festival norms, as the simultaneous writers’ and (especially) actors’ strikes kept TIFF, still rebounding from the COVID break, from being the traditional, star-studded starter-pistol to the fall film season. This year, there are big titles and big names a-plenty, and many of them (bonus!) are quite good to boot.
Amy Adams stars as a stay-at-home mom who’s…. going through some stuff in Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, which gets at the down-and-dirty of motherhood, the day-to-day trials and tribulations and outright panic, in a way few movies really have. (Tully did, and then there’s… yeah, I got nothin’.) Heller uses repetition of montage to convey the monotony of these early years, and details relatable struggles (god, the battle of bedtime) and outright exhaustion, counterbalanced with smatterings of occasional joy to convey the messy complexity of motherhood. But Heller’s style is never strictly realist; she gives us strange fantasies, nightmares, and memories, along with a few well-placed splashes of body horror, to put us into a bent-up headspace, and Adams is delightfully game; by the time she’s on all fours in the yard, growling and digging and howling at the moon, it’s clear that this simply would not land with a less committed actor. Grade: A-
Justin Kurzel’s The Order is based on a true story, though the hardest part to swallow is that there was once a time when our country investigated white supremacists, rather than welcoming them into our government. Rest assured, though, it was mostly because the eponymous supremacist sect was a group of common criminals, robbing banks and armored trucks, bombing porno theaters, and printing counterfeit money, their crime spree running up and down the West Coast in the mid-1980s. Nicholas Hoult is their leader, Jude Law is the FBI agent on his tail, and Ty Sheridan is the deputy sheriff who tags along; all three are quite good, and Kurzel’s direction is stylish but not overly imposing. And he thankfully doesn’t push too hard to connect the dots to now—although when we catch a glimpse of an illustration from The Turner Diaries of bodies hanging from the gallows in front of the U.S. Capital, he doesn’t really have to. Grade: A-
Daniel Minahan’s adaptation of Shannon Pufahl’s novel On Swift Horses has the lush, widescreen romanticism of studio pictures of its Eisenhower period, and Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi come off like old-fashioned movie stars of the era, sporting the same kind of jaw-dropping but lived in beauty that Natalie Wood and James Dean had in Rebel Without a Cause. That resemblance doesn’t seem accidental; it’s of that film’s ilk but it can say that things Kazan and company could not, explicitly telling a story of sexual fluidity and the secrets we all keep. There’s a kind of simmering sensuality throughout, particularly in Edgar-Jones’s work—hers is a nicely layered performance, carefully revealing the fire under the cool surface. There are some pat scenes in the home stretch, but this is a strong effort overall, with a big-swing ending that connects beautifully. Grade: A
Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’s screenplay for Heretic is as narratively efficient as you’d expect from the writers of A Quiet Place, hustling to the battle of wits and theological philosophies that sets things in motion, but with just enough character and relationship development to put us on solid ground as they go through that door. The filmmakers conform to the A24 house style without sacrificing a sense of pace or excitement; the picture moves like a shot, comes in as late as possible, and jumps out with similar brevity. It’s a sturdy and effective thriller, and serves as further confirmation that Hugh Grant, playing grippingly against type, is still capable of surprising (and even shocking) his audience. Grade: B+
Embeth Davidtz directs, wrote the screenplay, and co-produces in the film adaptation of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller’s memoir of growing up in the former Rhodesia, circa 1980, just before the election of Robert Mugabe. Davidtz’s parents were South African, and this feels like a story told from the inside, filled with recollections more than observations. Davidtz also co-stars in the less-than-heroic role of the mother to the eight-year-old protagonist Bobo (Lexi Venter), wife of a pro-Apartheid mercenary; she sleeps with a machine gun by her side, a spark plug who slowly succumbs to madness and instability. “She says she’ll fight for this farm with her bare hands,” Bobo tells us, in voice-over narration, adding with a whisper, “I believe her.” Davidtz adopts the little girl’s perspective and sticks with it, not only in the narration (which both sets the scene and shares her thoughts) but in the visual POV. By turns earthy, dreamy, and scary, this is an accomplished piece of work—it feels like neither a debut or a crossover, but an entry snug in the middle of a long and distinguished filmography. Grade: B+
Can music ruin a movie? This is the question posed by Conclave, the latest from director Edward Berger, who also helmed All Quiet on the Western Front and unfortunately brings back that film’s composer Volker Bertlemann for an even more bombastic and distracting score. The film it’s slathered over is a pretty good one, with the ever-reliable Ralph Fiennes (seriously, does any contemporary actor do weary, impatient intelligence better?) as the cardinal overseeing the conclave to pick a new pope, and Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow as the front-runners. What begins as a tale of religious ritual becomes a white-knuckle political thriller, detailing the behind-the-scenes machinations and intrigue, but countless good scenes are absolutely smothered by Bertlemann’s score, which starts at eleven, from scene one, and has nowhere to go but bigger, louder, and more obnoxious. It doesn’t ultimately ruin the movie, per se. But it certainly keeps a good film from being a great one. Grade: B-
Director Neo Sora (Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus) makes his fiction feature debut with Happyend, “a story about the near future” in which every daily interaction is observed by an increasingly bold surveillance state. (So, more “near” than “future,” really.) His protagonists are a group of disaffected, devil-may-care youth, a quintet of Tokyo high school students, and in its best moments, Happyend tunes in to their high-strung energy. It frankly works best as an old-fashioned story of rebellious students taking on their petty tyrant principal, the kind of bureaucratic schmuck who responds to a prank on his goofy sportscar by asking, “Is this terrorism?” Sora works in a quietly hypnotic style, with a dry, borderline absurdist sense of visual humor, though the picture’s hang-out vibe gets a little draggy in the home stretch—I was ready for this one to end a little sooner than the director was, apparently. Grade: B-
Thom Zimny’s Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band is basically a procedural, documenting the making and execution of the band’s 2023 world tour—their first in six years, thanks to that pesky global pandemic, which followed a planned (but briefer) hiatus. Zimny details it step by step, from set list creation to rehearsals to touring logistics, and if that sounds dull to you, a rock music fan, Road Diary might not be for you. If, on the other hand, it sounds like the kind of micro-focused, logistics-laden documentary that you love, you’re in for a treat. Zimny’s primary interest here is in the various moving parts of putting “a real rock show’ together, which is not magic or showmanship but work, hard work; he wants to explore the emotional, intellectual, and physical labor of being a musician, within a group where some of these guys have been playing together for literally half a century. Zimny’s proximity to the subject (with whom he’s made several films) gives it the slight air of a puff piece, but fans—of Springsteen, and of rock music in general—will find much to chew on here. Grade: B
