Search results for: Ivan Sen

With big names like Cronenberg and Polley already announced a couple of weeks ago, it came time this morning to announced the rest of the home team for the Toronto International Film Festival. This morning, they filled in some of the gaps in the Special Presentations, Vanguard, and Real to Reel sections, and at the same time presented the full line-ups for their Canada First! and Short Cuts programmes, the former highlighting feature debuts, and the latter comprised of a whopping 43 Canadian short films running anywhere from 4 to 28 minutes long.

"Offering a combination of fighting techniques in an attempt to differentiate itself from Hong Kong martial arts films, this directorial debut from Le Thanh So doesn’t ever rise above the trappings of the genre. Despite an impressive fight sequence, or two, the meager plot and cliché back story techniques have all the earmarks of a low budget buffet."

Today's announcement for the 2011 Venice Film Festival lineup basically crosses off plenty of sure bets we had been anticipating and makes us circle a bunch of titles we thought had a chance for a 2011 showing but now become hot items for the 2012 campaign. Films such as Juan Diego Solanas' Upside Down, Rodrigo Cortés' Red Lights, Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Headshot, Brillante Mendoza's Prey look more and more like Cannes 2012 items, while acquisition titles such as Antonio Campos' Simon Killer and Nick Cassavetes' Yellow wouldn't be out of place for a Sundance showing.

It'll be perfectly timed for miserable weather season of this upcoming winter, Nietzsche fans will be able to take the plunge into Bela Tarr's bleak treatment, and worth mentioning that this is historically a hypothetical one, into the celeb philosopher's ultimate demise. After weather-related production problems pushed the film past a 2010 Cannes due date, The Turin Horse, the winner of the Jury Grand Prix Silver Bear in Berlin has found a home with The Cinema Guild folks.

Both by design and by accident, The Misfits is a remarkably prescient farewell to an era. Huston’s intent was to chronicle the death rattles of the American cowboy tradition; the demise of rugged individualism in a modern world that rewarded conformity and commerce. The adventurous riders of the western plains were being corralled by the material pressures of consumerism; their free spirits permanently altered by the crushing need to draw steady paychecks in a new, commodity based, reality.