The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West) Thursday, February 9 to Friday, March 30, selected dates As we suggested in our preview of last night’s Lightbox screening of A Man Escaped, few legendary filmmakers are as daunting to the uninitiated as Robert Bresson. Among seasoned cinephiles, [...]

DISCUSSION: TIFF’s Cannes Critics Week celebrates 50 years of the festival’s special screening series, with films selected by eight local critics. Today you get a free opportunity to grill some of those opinion-makers, as Fabien Gaffez, Peter Howell, Liam Lacey, and Jonathan Rosenbaum will participate in “Higher Learning—Cannes Critics Week Panel: Film Criticism Today,” a [...]

Gary Hustwit’s Design Trilogy TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West) Urbanized January 13, 6:30 p.m. (Gary Hustwit in attendance); January 15, 8:30 p.m.; January 17, 6:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. Helvetica January 14, 12:30 p.m. (Gary Hustwit in attendance) Objectified January 15, 3 p.m. (Gary Hustwit in attendance) The films of Gary Hustwit’s Design [...]

Roman Polanski: God of Carnage TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West) Saturday December 17 to Sunday December 25, selected dates Upping the ante on Columbia Pictures’ claim that the forthcoming remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the “feel bad movie of Christmas,” TIFF’s programmers have readied a veritable advent calendar of [...]

At the 11th annual Canada’s Top Ten announcement last night, TIFF named 20 exceptional films, as selected by a panel of industry professionals. If you spent a good part of September lining up for festival tickets and combing through TIFF’s programme, many of the Top Ten titles will ring a bell. The Top Ten lists [...]

Hollywood Classics: The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West) Sunday, October 2, to Tuesday, December 13, selected dates In contrast to “Spectacular Obsessions,” “Masks and Faces,” or “And Justice for All,” TIFF’s latest directorial retrospective would seem, at a careless first glance, to feature a disappointingly bland title: “The Cinema [...]

There are lots of things you can do with 15 hours, like fly from Toronto to Hong Kong, gain a working knowledge of a foreign language, or make 900 one-minute eggs one at a time. But last week some of TIFF’s most motivated—or masochistic, depending on how you look at it—movie buffs chose to spend [...]

Shooting red-carpet galas is like being in a sardine can wondering why the hell you’re there. Oh right, shooting TIFF celebs. But in many ways, it’s like shooting fish in a too-large barrel: some days you might get a funny smirk or a silly moment; other times, depending on where you’re positioned, you might not [...]

For lovers of film who fundamentally believe in some way or another that the medium provides the chance to (paraphrasing TIFF’s manta here, if only because there’s some truth to it) change the way we see the world, red carpets always rankle a bit. Painters and jazz musicians never seem subjected to all the flashbulbs [...]

Sure, there’s the Cadillac People’s Choice Award or the FIPRESCI jury prize, but what really counts when it comes to honouring the films of this city’s largest festival is the Torontoist TIFF Awards. There may be no money and little glory associated with the prize, but when it comes to recognizing the under-appreciated categories in [...]

Turns out rushing to the TIFF awards brunch is about as pressing as zipping off to The Story of Film—it’s long, you’ll catch most of it. Besides elbowing for a mimosa and fresh pastries, the urgency of the awards starting took a back seat to ensuring everyone was sufficiently caffeinated to be glued to their [...]

That Led Zeppelin reference may be a bit of a stretch when it comes to the final day of TIFF. The festival is ending, and thus is proverbially going to heaven (though some might argue hell), but us, the stair climbers, are left in a limbo at the fest’s closure. In any event, the rhyming [...]