f the sub-genre Maori Hip Hop Musical isn’t enough of a hook to get you to see “Born to Dance,” let me add that it’s heaps of fun. Like a cross between “Bring it On” and “Billy Elliot,” there’s plenty of dance talent on display in this film.
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Granny’s Dancing On The Table is a great debut
Easily the winner of the “most evocative title of the festival” award, “Granny’s Dancing on the Table” tells two stories: the present-day struggles of thirteen-year-old Eini (Bianca Engström) who lives alone with her abusive and religious father in rural Sweden, and Eini’s accounts of her grandmother’s (Karin Bertling) colorful adventures in decades past.
Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) ends with a whimper
Éva Husson’s Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) finds a sweet romance in a tale of teenagers these days and their orgies. The film opens on a pubescents-gone-wild party in a small-town mansion in France. The camera pans around the room to reveal that couples are having sex in the open, people are sitting around naked, […]
TIFF15: Jennifer Peedom discusses her Everest doc Sherpa
Jennifer Peedom discusses the making of her terrific Everest doc, Sherpa, the first documentary to be told from the Sherpa’s perspective.
Victoria is a trying tale of an endless night of excitement
In the last act of Victoria, the male protagonist Sonne (Frederick Lau) asks a quivering man, who has obeyed his orders made at gunpoint, “Just how stupid are you?” I burst out laughing. It’s a tense moment, but the entire film has been an exercise in finding out just how stupid Sonne, and his infatuated […]
TIFF15: Manal Issa is an exquisite discovery in Parisienne
When Parisienne begins, we meet the beautiful Lina (Manal Issa), an eighteen-year-old freshman from Beirut, studying abroad in Paris. She’s eating dinner at her uncle’s house in the suburbs, the only connection to home she has in this strange country, when he attempts to rape her. She stops him, violently, before running out into the night […]