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Film Friday: Ben Affleck Apparently Not Useless After All
The After Dark Film Festival! Happening all week! The only film festival where Uwe bloody Boll could have his film accepted! We talked about it here! Check it out!
Another crowded week for festivals, though, and sometimes we have to wonder how even Toronto can support this many in a week. We’ve got the ImagiNATIVE Film Festival and Toronto Latin Film Festivals finishing up, the Student Shorts Film Festival and the Estonian Documentary Film Festival kicking off this weekend, and the Planet in Focus Film Festival starting next Wednesday.
If you genuinely can’t find something of interest there, you’re pretty hard to please or you’re still waiting for the Latvian Science Fiction Film Festival to come along. We find it hard to believe that you’ll find what you’re looking for in the multiplexes, but one of our top-rated films from TIFF (yes, we know you’re sick of hearing about that festival), My Kid Could Paint That (pictured above), is playing at the Carlton. Amanda Buckiewicz called it “insightful, controversial, and extraordinarily well done, and is a must-see for artists, journalists and their critics.”
We can’t remember which of this week’s other releases played at TIFF (and can’t be bothered to find out, really), but we think Reservation Road did, and Rendition probably did too. Pretty sure Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, didn’t, but it’s been very well received. Let’s be honest, that’s pretty surprising. That’s like saying “two-by-four plank of wood’s directorial debut well received.” But no! Eye’s Jason Anderson actually calls it a “superior American crime drama.”
What on earth!
Also on release this week: The Comebacks—we’ll happily bet you’ve already seen all of the good bits in the trailer; 30 Days of Night, which seems like a rip-off of Swedish vampire flick Frostbite, but is actually based on a graphic novel that predates that film; and Things We Lost in the Fire, which the Metro’s Norm Wilner calls “an expensively produced, utterly inert study of grief and loss.”
Be thankful, then, for Cinematheque Ontario, making a welcome return to the city with a Bruce McDonald retrospective (limited tickets available for the screening of the superb The Tracey Fragments with McDonald in attendance tonight at 9:30 p.m.) and an exclusive limited run of Peter Greenway classic The Draughtsman’s Contract (tonight at 7:30 p.m., making a brilliant possible double bill, and also on Saturday at 9:30 p.m. and Monday at 7:30 p.m.).