REVIEW: Nathalie … [2003]

“I think you’d appeal to my husband” If you found out your spouse was cheating on you and realized how numb you were to the fact so that instead of being angry or vengeful you ask what it is the other lover does to make your husband/wife happy, how would you react when they reply with silence? In Nathalie …, Bernard is confronted by his wife Catherine after she listens to a voicemail on his phone from a girl thanking him for the sex they had the night before, a…

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TIFF09 RECAP: Connecting to Your World … and mine

Every year at the Toronto International Film Festival seems to get better and better. Is that due to the increase in films from six to eleven to fifteen? It very well might be. And I’ll just say now, watching fifteen films in less than four days may not be the healthiest thing in the world. Between the vendor sausage/chicken dogs/nitrates on a bun being easily accessible and a standard meal when going from one film to the next with barely enough time to catch your breath and the sheer fact…

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TIFF09 REVIEW: Visage [Face] [2009]

“You, you, you, you are so pretty!” Sometimes an image can get you excited to see a film. When looking to fill a hole in a five film day at TIFF, my friend and I saw an image that looked both fantastical and intriguing, so much so that we blindly said yes, we are going to watch Visage [Face]. I’m the first person to say that a movie can be loved for visual style alone as I always hold the image as more powerful than the word. Oftentimes I can…

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REVIEW: Roman de gare [Crossed Tracks] [2007]

“The Magician and the Moth” Roman de gare is a very complex film that begins almost too convoluted, but ends on a perfect note of closure. A story about a man on a journey for research on his next book becomes a visualization of the same suspense aspects he is manifesting in his head for the novel. We as an audience are hard-pressed to decide whether this man is truly a writer, a teacher who has left his school and family behind, an escaped serial killer magician, or, yes, God…

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