Alternative Film Guide

More on the Toronto Film Festival:

In the [Toronto] Globe and Mail, Alexandra Glick discusses her experiences at this year’s festival.

A brief quote: "In recent years, the final Friday night of the festival was a dead zone. That wasn’t the case last night, when hot-ticket premieres and parties for Bollywood’s Kabul Express, Ron Mann’s Tales of the Rat Fink and Peter Mettler’s live-cinema rave extravaganza kept Toronto hopping until the sun came up."

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Also in the Globe and Mail, Leah McLaren talks about Sarah Polley’s feature-film directorial début (co-executive-produced by Atom Egoyan), Away From Her.

A brief quote: "In addition to a distribution bidding war, lengthy list of foreign sales and near-unanimous critical acclaim, the film is now garnering advance Oscar buzz for Julie Christie’s star turn as a woman coping with Alzheimer’s disease."

See also Julie Christie Observed

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Via Reuters / CNN: "’Death of a President does not have the requisite brains to take on its conservative targets, much less exploit the potential or implications of its own gimmick,’ wrote New York Times critic Manohla Dargis.

"Marred by unpersuasive performances and sloppy errors, the film is all setup and no payoff. It also manages to be another presumably political film without any actual politics."

(Death of a President was the controversial winner of the Toronto Festival’s FIPRESCI prize.)

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And Harlan Jacobson in USA Today: "But this may be a year when the pictures trying to position themselves for Oscar attention had lackluster receptions, including All the King’s Men, opening Friday and starring Sean Penn; Bobby, about the night of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination; Infamous, another film about Truman Capote; director Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering; and A Good Year, Ridley Scott’s Brit-in-Provence film with Russell Crowe.

"Instead, it was Borat, from comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, best known as the star of HBO’s Da Ali G Show, that comes out of Toronto as a must-see picture for fall. The comedy coming Nov. 3 was at the top of the critics’ polls published daily from Toronto in Screen International."

(All of the above despite a projection issue that all but ruined the first Toronto screening of the film, which is actually called Borat Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.)

The "unofficial" Borat site (WARNING: Sexy pic on home page)

Some in Hollywood Welcome Censorship

DVD Review: Michelangelo Antonioni’s BLOWUP (1966)

Toronto Film Festival 2006 Winners

50th Times/bfi London Film Festival Film Line-Up

Israel Academy of Film and Television’s 2006 Ophir Award Winners

Alternative Film Guide

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