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    The Oscar Awards Columnist Shares What His Job Is Like

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    Last month, Kyle Buchanan was seated at a table at the Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, Calif., when, midway through the ceremony, a chant erupted outside.Mr. Buchanan could hear the chant — “Free Palestine” — humming in the background of acceptance speeches. He exited the tent to find two protesters behind a barricade, playing the recorded chant over a bullhorn, and began filming them with his phone. Security guards soon yelled at him for filming and threatened to oust him from the premises.Such is a day in the life of Mr. Buchanan, a pop culture reporter for The New York Times. As The Projectionist columnist, he covers Hollywood awards shows and the cultural moments unfolding both onstage and off.Since joining The Times in 2018, Mr. Buchanan has reported from film festivals at Cannes, France, and Venice; profiled buzzy actors like Emma Stone and Da’Vine Joy Randolph; and covered more than 50 awards ceremonies.His love of awards shows developed out of a childhood fascination. “Growing up, I was a kid with parents who had no particular affinity for indie films, foreign films or documentaries,” he said in a recent interview. “The Oscars felt like a portal into works of art that I didn’t know anything about. I was entranced.”Ahead of the 96th Academy Awards this Sunday, Mr. Buchanan, who will be in attendance, shared his hopes for this year’s ceremony and the secret to interviewing media-trained celebrities. This interview has been edited and condensed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Actors Seeking Stability Turn to Directing at the Toronto Festival

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      Movies directed by actors were prominent at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Could the reasons they’re striking also underlie the career move?By my count, there are 10 movies by actor-turned-directors at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Ten. The majority, including Chris Pine’s “Poolman” and Anna Kendrick’s “Woman of the Hour,” are debuts.I don’t know how many actors choose to be filmmakers at any given moment; “what I really want to do is direct” is a cliché for a reason. But that still seems like a lot. And it is particularly noteworthy right now in Hollywood, when the strikes by the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, and the Writers Guild of America have revealed how much disparity there can be in pay and in the ownership of one’s work. Not to mention the willingness of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to make a deal with the Directors Guild of America but not the other creatives.“Actors directing films isn’t unusual,” said Cameron Bailey, the chief executive of the Toronto festival, “but we saw a larger number this year and invited several, before we got news of the strike.” Besides the Kendrick and Pine movies, actors making directorial debuts included Patricia Arquette (“Gonzo Girl”), Kristin Scott Thomas (“North Star”), Kasia Smutniak (“Walls”) and Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk (“Hell of a Summer”).Directing confers control, which confers power, which confers stability, right? At the very least, if you’re directing, you’re not left hanging around.“Everyone is hanging around,” Stacey Sher, one of the “Poolman” producers, told me. “You’re hanging around to get financing. You’re hanging around to get distribution. You’re hanging around to hope that you get a date that connects. You’re hanging around to hope that you get lucky and your campaign clicks and that you’re in the zeitgeist. You’re hanging around hoping that the press likes your movie.” Sher has been producing films for more than 30 years, among them actor-director feature debuts like “Reality Bites” (Ben Stiller) and “Garden State” (Zach Braff).In “Poolman,” for which he also served as a producer and co-screenwriter, Pine plays a Lebowski-style free spirit who ministers a decrepit apartment-complex pool by day and disrupts local council meetings by night. As a director, Pine, who has been acting for two decades, suddenly found himself answering questions about everything around the clock. Sher recalled him telling her, “‘I understand how easy I had it before, just being able to go back and study my lines and prepare and stay in character.’”Though Pine had planned to publicize “Poolman” at Toronto, his support of the strike precluded his attendance because SAG-AFTRA forbids promotions during the labor action. On opening night, Sher presented the film solo, stating: “It is a different premiere and Q. and A. then we had hoped for, but there was never a second where Chris was going to do anything but stand with SAG and the W.G.A.”Pine was returning the favor. He “knew what he wanted and what he wanted was to build a team that could support him in achieving what his goals were cinematically,” Sher said. Patty Jenkins, who had directed the actor in the “Wonder Woman” franchise, was a “Poolman” producer from the start (Ian Gotler was also a producer). Jenkins acted as “directing doula,” available for technical checks and gut checks, Sher said. Pine also worked with the “Wonder Woman” films’ cinematographer, Matthew Jensen. Directing granted him the power to surround himself with people — the kind who are currently striking — who could make his new job easier.“Poolman” was a low-budget film in which almost half of the 22 days was spent shooting in a motel where beds were removed to make way for makeshift offices and dressing rooms, adding to the camaraderie. “I think if you just want the job for control, you’re not going to do a very good job,” Sher said of directing. “The best filmmakers I’ve ever worked with are the most collaborative.”Chris Pine starred in as well as directed “Poolman,” featuring Annette Bening, left, and Danny DeVito.Darren Michaels/ABC Studios“Woman of the Hour” was an exercise in combining the right people in what Miri Yoon — one of several producers on the project along with Kendrick — likened to a kind of “math” problem. Kendrick, who was initially attached only to star, “really drove us over the line,” said Yoon, who recently worked on another major actor-director feature, “Don’t Worry Darling” from Olivia Wilde. It was the way Kendrick interpreted the Black List script by Ian McDonald — a quasi-biopic about the 1970s serial killer Rodney Alcala told through the eyes of women who crossed his path, including a “Dating Game” contestant (Kendrick) — that convinced everyone she should helm.“We’re like, well, what are we doing?” Yoon said. “Why do we even bother going through this whole dog-and-pony show trying to figure out who else can do this movie? Let’s just go.” From that moment, it went fast — about six weeks after Kendrick was tapped to direct, the crew was in prep for a 24-day shoot — and it went hard, with a Vancouver winter standing in for a Los Angeles summer. Despite all of this, the first-time filmmaker was very deliberate, Yoon said: “There’s nothing arbitrary about Anna Kendrick.”I suggested that Kendrick’s preparation might be due to the fact that she’s a woman in the director’s chair, with all the prejudices that entails. Yoon gestured that I had hit it on the nose. While almost half the actor-director films at Toronto are by women, everyone knows by now the challenges female filmmakers face behind the camera. As actress Eva Longoria recently told Variety upon the release of “Flamin’ Hot,” her feature directing debut, “I get one at-bat, one chance, work twice as hard, twice as fast, twice as cheap.”No doubt aware of this calculus, Kendrick herself announced she was “heartbroken” at not being able to attend the Toronto festival for the premiere because of SAG-AFTRA rules. While some independent films have secured interim agreements if they agree to union demands, this year’s festival has seen few American filmmakers and actors doing promotion. Despite that, “Woman of the Hour” still landed the first major sale of the festival in a reported $11 million deal with Netflix.Considering that the stability of Hollywood itself is in question, it is hard to determine whether directing confers more security than having to hang around waiting for an acting job. Neither of the producers I spoke to were able to give a definitive answer, with Yoon saying the industry was still finding its footing in “a landscape that is going through a seismic change.”Bailey, the Toronto festival chief, surmised that the lack of work around the Covid lockdowns led to an abundance of actors directing, an attempt to claim agency over their careers. “I suspect some of these actors used the opportunity of the pandemic disruption to get more personal projects made.” Indeed both Pine and Kendrick have said separately that the pandemic led them to change the way they thought about their work.Yoon did, however, agree that while producing seems to be more about business ownership, directing seems to be more about artistic ownership. She elaborated, “The film’s end result is the sum of many, many, many parts, and the fact that you get to participate in all of those parts, which, as an actor, you don’t necessarily do.”Still, Sher said she thought the reason anyone, including an actor, directs is incredibly personal. “I remember a filmmaker friend of mine said every filmmaker directs for a different value,” Sher explained. “For some people, it’s reality; for some people, it’s about precision, some people performance, some people it’s technical, some aesthetic pleasure. And the more people that are doing it, the more people also realize that it’s an option that they may never have thought that they had.” More

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      Talking Heads Reunite for Restored ‘Stop Making Sense’

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      Appearing together for the first time since 2002, the band celebrated the film in a Q. and A. with Spike Lee at the Toronto International Film Festival.The hottest ticket at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival was not for the new auteur film from Hayao Miyazaki or Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the latest vehicle for Kate Winslet or Sean Penn, or grand prizewinners at Cannes and Venice. No, the most feverishly in-demand screening was for a 39-year-old movie that everyone in its sold-out audience could have watched at home, at the push of a button.But this isn’t just any 39-year-old movie. “Stop Making Sense,” directed by Jonathan Demme, is widely considered to be one of the finest examples of the form, a joyful documentation (and celebration) of Talking Heads’ 1983 tour supporting their album “Speaking in Tongues.” The Toronto festival screening marked the debut of A24’s new restoration of the film ahead of its theatrical and IMAX rerelease later this month.But the real draw in Toronto was the band’s reunion for a Q. and A. conducted by Spike Lee after the screening (and simulcast to IMAX theaters across the globe). “This is the greatest concert film ever!” he enthused with the musicians sitting next to him. “I can say that! You might not want to, but for me, I’m going on record, around the world: this is the greatest concert film ever.”The 25-minute chat was the first time the band members had appeared together since they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. That reunion was an event in itself, following what the frontman David Byrne recently described, with characteristic understatement, as an “ugly” breakup in 1991. His former bandmates haven’t been quite so delicate. In 2020, the drummer Chris Frantz published a memoir in which he accused Byrne of frequently diminishing the contributions of his fellow musicians, while the bassist Tina Weymouth referred to him as, among many other slurs, “a vampire.” (Byrne has since granted that he was “more of a little tyrant” in those early years.)But in Toronto, it was all good vibes for Byrne, Frantz and Weymouth (who are married) and the keyboardist and guitarist Jerry Harrison. “I’m very grateful to be here tonight, and to be able to watch this and to enjoy it so much,” Frantz said warmly at the beginning of the conversation. Byrne concurred: “When I was watching this just now, I was thinking, this is why we come to the movie theaters. This is different than watching it on my laptop!”And indeed it was. From the opening image — of Byrne’s scuffed-up white sneakers striding onto the stage, as he sets down a boombox and announces, “Hi, I got a tape I wanna play” — seeing “Stop Making Sense” in IMAX was like seeing it anew. The image, blown up from the original 35-millimeter negatives, was crisp and rich; the sound, an early digital audio recording, felt like it had been laid down last night. The restless, roving, participatory nature of Demme’s cameras make it much more than a standard concert documentary. It’s an exhilarating record of a group of talented people, at the peak of their considerable powers, having a great time making groundbreaking music that you can still dance to.A scene from “Stop Making Sense,” which was restored from the original negatives and shown in IMAX on Monday in Toronto.via A24Demme, who died at 73 in 2017, was attracted to the material, Byrne recalled, because the show they’d assembled told a story, with a beginning, middle and end. The picture starts, quite literally, with the forming of the band, as Byrne is joined by each additional member, one by one, and their show is built out from the bare stage on which it begins. By the midpoint, this odd little man and his friends have become a family, and when Byrne sings the kind and welcoming lyrics of “This Must Be the Place” (“Home/is where I want to be/but I guess I’m already there”), it’s as heartfelt and moving an emotional beat as you’ll find in any narrative film.Byrne recalled realizing that Demme, working with the editor Lisa Day, was actually making an ensemble film. “Like, you would have a bunch of actors in a location and you get to know each character, one by one,” Byrne explained, adding, “You get familiar with them, and then you watch how they all interact with one another. And I thought, I’m in my own world. But he saw that, he saw what was going on there.”The sheer visceral impact of the filmmaking, when shown at IMAX proportions, was staggering as well. Demme’s striking, out-of-the-box lighting choices and close-up compositions are jaw-dropping on the big screen, and Byrne comes across as even more like a (seemingly impossible) movie star, from his first reveal in the iconic Big Suit (“It was really big tonight,” Frantz quipped) to his serpentine slithering during “Life During Wartime.” He’s aware of the camera and plays to it savvily — not just singing the band’s songs, but performing them (and understanding the difference).But he’s far from the only attraction, and the detail of the IMAX restoration (coupled with Demme’s preference for long takes and wide shots) provides the viewer with plenty of opportunities to observe the dynamics, throughout the frame, between the group, additional musicians like the keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and the crew. The cameras capture their nonverbal communication, the little cues and asides and flashes of encouragement they’re throwing at one another through the entire show.“There’s all these moments that he caught, where one of us looks at the other, looks over at Bernie or Bernie looks at us, all those little quick interactions,” Byrne marveled. “And I thought, that stuff is amazing.”From left, Frantz, Weymouth, Harrison and Byrne reunited on the red carpet at the Toronto International Film Festival.Shawn Goldberg/Getty ImagesHarrison said that “one of the reasons for the lasting power of the film is you see that we are having so much fun onstage,” adding that “the audience is brought right into it. We say, you’re part of this too. And I think that every time anybody watches it, it brings back that wonderful emotion.”That was certainly the case in Toronto. The rowdy crowd applauded every number, cheered for the band’s introductions and clapped along with the breakdown in “Take Me to the River.” One guy hollered, “Encore!” when the movie ended.Both “Once in a Lifetime” and “Burning Down the House” brought audience members to their feet, just like their onscreen counterparts, to dance in the aisles. To be fair, they’re very hard songs to not dance to. In the seventh row, at his aisle seat, David Byrne was on his feet with them, bobbing his head and rocking back and forth, once more, for old times’ sake. More

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      Talking Heads on the Return of ‘Stop Making Sense’

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      The 40th-anniversary restoration of a great concert film is a funk spectacle. It has also united the band, which split in 1991, to discuss a landmark achievement.Four decades after it was filmed, “Stop Making Sense,” the Talking Heads concert documentary, is still ecstatic and strange. “It stays kind of relevant, even though it doesn’t make literal sense,” David Byrne, the band’s leader and singer, said in a recent interview.The film, which was directed by Jonathan Demme, has been restored from its long-lost original negatives and this new version will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday, then play in regular and IMAX theaters later this month. An expanded audio album, out Sept. 15, now includes the entire concert set, with two tracks omitted from the movie: “Cities” and a medley of “Big Business” and “I Zimbra.” Refreshing its peak performance, the band hopes to draw one more generation of fans to its irresistible funk grooves and youthful ambitions.“Stop Making Sense” is both a definitive 1980s period piece and a prophecy. Its staging helped reshape pop concerts in its wake. The music hot-wired rock, funk and African rhythms, while the fractured, non sequitur lyrics glanced at, among many other things, disinformation (“Crosseyed and Painless”), evangelicalism (“Once in a Lifetime”), authoritarianism (“Making Flippy Floppy”) and environmental disaster (“Burning Down the House”).“Sometimes we write things and we don’t know what they’re about until afterwards,” Byrne said. “There’s a sense of a premonition. I’ve looked at things I’ve written and I go, ‘Oh. That’s about something that happened in my life after I wrote the song.’”There had been choreographed soul revues and big-stage concert spectacles long before Talking Heads mounted their 1983 tour supporting the album “Speaking in Tongues.” But Byrne envisioned something different: a performance influenced by the stylized gestures of Asian theater and the anti-naturalistic, avant-garde stage tableaus of Robert Wilson. (Talking Heads hired Wilson’s lighting designer, Beverly Emmons.)Talking Heads and the “Stop Making Sense” live band. From left: Steve Scales, Bernie Worrell, Jerry Harrison, Ednah Holt, David Byrne, Lynn Mabry, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz and Alex Weir.Sire Records/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesByrne storyboarded each song. The first part of the show demystified the production, with backstage equipment visible and a stage crew wheeling in instruments and risers as the band expanded with each song. Then, with everyone in place, the concert turned into a surreal dance party, capped by Byrne’s appearance in an oversized, squared-off, very floppy suit — an everyday American variation on the geometric costumes of Japanese Noh theater.Demme’s cameras were poised to catch every goofy move and appreciative glance between musicians. Now that most big concerts are video-ready extravaganzas, that might seem normal. In 1983, it was startling.Only a few years earlier, Talking Heads were unlikely candidates to mount a tautly plotted rock spectacle. When the band made its reputation playing the Bowery club CBGB, its members dressed like preppies and looked self-conscious and nervous.Formed in the art-school atmosphere of the Rhode Island School of Design, Talking Heads always had conceptual intentions. In a video interview from his studio, the keyboardist and guitarist Jerry Harrison said, “When I joined the band, I knew that we were going to be an important band, and that we would be artistically successful. I had no idea what kind of commercial success we’d have. All of us were pretty familiar with the art world, where there are painters who never in their lifetime were financially secure. And that was our goal at that point.”Byrne was purposely stiff and twitchy onstage. “When the band started, I was not going to try and use the movement vocabulary from rock stars or R&B stars,” he said. “I thought, ‘I can’t do that. They’re better at it. They’ve established it. I have to come up with my own thing that expresses who I am: a slightly angsty white guy.’”“Looking at my younger self is a really strange experience,” Byrne said. “He’s doing things that are profoundly odd, but kind of inventive.”via RhinoBut in the fast-forward downtown New York culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s — punk! disco! minimalism! hip-hop! art! theater! world music! — Talking Heads rapidly evolved from a thumping, yelping, skeletal pop-rock band into something more rhythmic, funky and far-reaching.Byrne and the band equally appreciated the Southern roots and deep eccentricity of the Memphis soul singer Al Green — who wrote the band’s first radio hit, “Take Me to the River” — and the calibrated repetitions of James Brown, Philip Glass and Fela Anikulapo Kuti. The band enlisted the equally open-eared Brian Eno as a producer and collaborator to extend its sonic palette and songwriting strategies — which, in turn, led Talking Heads to add musicians onstage.If there’s a narrative to “Stop Making Sense,” it’s of a freaked-out loner who eventually finds joy in community. The concert starts with Byrne singing “Psycho Killer” alone, to a drum-machine track, with a sociopathic stare. By the end of the show, he’s surrounded by singing, dancing, smiling musicians and singers, carried by one groove after another.“In a culture that’s so much about the individual, and the self, and my rights,” Byrne said, “to find a parallel thing that is really about giving, losing yourself and surrendering to something bigger than yourself is kind of extraordinary. And you realize, ‘Oh, this is what a lot of the world is about — surrendering to something spiritual, or community or music or dance, and letting go of yourself as an individual. You get a real reward when that happens. It’s a real ecstatic, transcendent feeling.”The band filmed a rehearsal and three live concerts at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Then they chose the best audio and video takes.via Rhino“Stop Making Sense” has been released on multiple iterations of home video technology — VHS, DVD, Blu-ray — but their sound and video were often lacking. For the new restoration, the production and distribution company A24 employed a forensic film expert to track down the film’s original negatives. They were stored, inexplicably, at an Oklahoma warehouse owned by MGM, a company that never had business dealings with Talking Heads. The images have gained clarity, contrast and depth.“I noticed you can see things that you couldn’t see even in the original version,” said Chris Frantz, the band’s drummer, in a video interview from his home studio. “Now you can see every little detail of the back of the stage.”When “Stop Making Sense” was first released, in 1984, audiences treated it like a concert, applauding between songs and getting up to dance. The band and Demme chose to dispense with the concert-film convention of cutting to interviews or backstage interactions or, especially, to happy, well-lighted audience members; they only show up in the last few minutes. Demme avoided that, Byrne said, because “it’s telling the film viewer what they’re supposed to be feeling.”The band and Demme filmed a rehearsal and three live concerts at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Then they chose the best audio and video takes. They weren’t always the same ones, but the timing each night was almost exact. “Chris was very consistent, even though he never played to a click track,” said Tina Weymouth, the band’s bassist, in an interview from the home she shares with Frantz, her husband.“The sync is not perfect,” Harrison said. “We could go digitally now and make this perfect. But would we want to disturb the historical quality to update it with what technology can do now? And we, of course, decided not to.”via RhinoThe tour’s technology was primitive by modern standards. The rear-screen visuals came from slide projectors; the lights were unfiltered. The show didn’t have a choreographer; Byrne and the backup singers, Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt, had worked out some moves while dancing around his loft before the tour, while others emerged as it progressed. The show didn’t have a costume designer, either; the musicians were instructed to find clothes in neutral tones, mostly grays. But according to Weymouth, Frantz’s laundry hadn’t come back in time for the first show at the Pantages, and he ended up wearing a blue shirt all three nights for continuity.Yet the band had the foresight to record the music on digital equipment, then in its early stages. Digital recording meant the sound quality could stay intact through the multiple generations involved in mixing for film, and it’s one reason the movie has aged so well.But the main reason “Stop Making Sense” has maintained its reputation as one of the greatest concert movies is the nutty jubilation of the performances. The musicians in the expanded band — Alex Weir on guitar, Steve Scales on percussion and Bernie Worrell on keyboards — are anything but self-effacing sidemen; they’re gleeful co-conspirators. And the sheer physicality of the concert, the performers’ sweat and stamina, comes through onscreen; in “Life During Wartime,” Byrne runs laps around the 40-by-60-foot stage at full speed.“Looking at my younger self is a really strange experience,” Byrne said. “He’s doing things that are profoundly odd, but kind of inventive. But also, he’s very serious and intent on what he’s doing.” He pointed out that until the last third of the movie, he doesn’t smile much. “The joy is not visibly apparent, but it’s there,” he said. “I mean, I have enough memory to remember that.”Jerry Harrison said that Talking Heads “had the ability to become one of the biggest bands in the world at that point, touring bands.”via RhinoFor all its artistic importance, the tour was not profitable. “We made zero,” Weymouth said. There was a large crew and three semi trucks full of equipment; some tour proceeds cofinanced the movie. It also turned out to be the final Talking Heads tour. “I also think that we had the ability to become one of the biggest bands in the world at that point, touring bands,” Harrison said. “I think there was a lost opportunity that would have been fun for all of us.”He added, “There also might be the element that once ‘Stop Making Sense’ came out so great, it was like, ‘How do we top this? Is the next thing going to seem like a disappointment?’ I don’t know if that was what was going through anybody’s minds, but I know that we ended up not touring ever again.”Talking Heads made three more albums, the Americana-flavored “Little Creatures” and “True Stories” and the Afro-Parisian-tinged “Naked.” After Byrne dissolved the band in 1991 — “an ugly breakup,” he told People magazine — the other three members made an album, “No Talking Just Head,” billed as the Heads. Byrne sued over the name, though the suit was eventually dropped.The band did regroup to perform in 2002 when they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and the 40th anniversary of “Stop Making Sense” has helped further mend fences; the band members will appear together to discuss the movie in Toronto on Monday.“Divorces are never easy,” Byrne said. “We get along OK. It’s all very cordial and whatever. It’s not like we’re all best friends. But everybody’s very happy to see this film coming back out. We’re all united in the fact that we really love what we did here. So that kind of helps us talk to one another and get along.” More

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      In Toronto, Films by Women About Women, but That’s Where the Similarities End

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      The Toronto International Film Festival returns to business mostly as usual with throngs of excited attendees and some of the year’s most anticipated new movies.Each year, filmgoers of all persuasions, casual viewers and true believers both, descend on the Toronto International Film Festival to sample and to gorge. Cannes has the red carpet, Telluride has Oscar contenders and Sundance has the next big thing, maybe. Toronto has bulk. It’s stuffed with movies of every type, size, style and ambition. Some are destined for immortality and others will enter the Oscar marathon that has already begun. Still other titles will languish on streaming platforms; some of these will deserve better fates.The festival, which ends Sunday, returned to full capacity this month after two years of severely limited in-person screenings. With mask mandates and other restrictions lifted, the crowds in theaters felt close to prepandemic levels, though not at their crushing worst. The throngs outside its main locations were marginally thinner, too, though they surged like tidal waves for the flashiest guests, notably Taylor Swift (accompanying her suitably titled 10-minute “All Too Well: The Short Film”) and Harry Styles (one of the stars of the gay period romance “My Policeman”).“Harry, Harry, Harry!” I heard one afternoon, as I rushed to a screening, past men and women racing toward a scrum of security personnel and parked black S.U.V.s. If Swift and Styles start making more movies and in-person appearances, theatrical distribution might have a chance to recover. Toronto may not do glamour all that well, but over the years it has transformed into an essential industry destination partly by “eventizing” itself, creating an 11-day spectacle for attendees and gawkers alike while serving as a launchpad for new movies like “The Woman King,” which opens Friday.Viola Davis in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “The Woman King.”Ilze Kitshoff/Sony PicturesToronto skims a lot of cream from other festivals, giving audiences early peeks at the major titles that will be much discussed in coming months. And while journalists can often preview these offerings back home, it’s a singular experience seeing new movies with packed audiences, witnessing how jokes land and surprises shock. One movie that’s guaranteed to play extremely well is Laura Poitras’s elegantly structured documentary about the photographer Nan Goldin, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” which just won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. A personal-meets-the-political portrait that goes deep on Goldin’s opium-epidemic activism, it left the audience audibly moved; the distributor should hand out tissues with every ticket.Spotify should ready itself for an uptick in streaming of Louis Armstrong’s music. One highlight of my festival week was the documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues,” which was directed by Sacha Jenkins, son of the filmmaker Horace B. Jenkins. (Apple has the documentary, but Sacha Jenkins said before one screening that it would also open in theaters.) Drawing on Armstrong’s vast personal archive — including reels of his taped musings — the movie builds beautifully into a portrait of a genius as well as the country that he graced and that didn’t give him the love he deserved. The music is of course brilliant, though some critics wanted more musicology to go with it.The audience I saw “Louis Armstrong” with seemed thrilled. The hothouse environment of festivals can be wildly misleading simply because people are so pumped to be in attendance, which can make widely reported metrics like the duration of standing ovations meaningless (boos are far more instructive). But watching a movie with other festivalgoers invariably heats up and enlivens a room, creates an electric vibe, though it helps when directors introduce their work. Steven Spielberg did just that for the premiere of “The Fabelmans,” a wistful coming-of-age story about a young film lover who grows up to become, well, you know.Paul Dano, left, Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord and Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans,” about Steven Spielberg’s coming-of-age.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin EntertainmentWritten by Spielberg and his frequent collaborator, Tony Kushner, the story tracks the awakening, cinematic and otherwise, of the young Sammy (played as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle). The kid is the least interesting part of the movie, which perhaps sounds funny and even insulting but makes sense given that it’s about someone who grows up to make larger-than-life (Spielbergian!) fantasies. The father is played by Paul Dano, who seems to have borrowed Michael Stuhlbarg’s voice for the role, but the movie is anchored by Michelle Williams’s sensitive performance as the mother, Mitzi. Williams’s affecting intensity gives the movie regular shocking jolts of passion, attenuating its otherwise overly easy, overly familiar flow.“The Fabelmans” didn’t set the festival on fire; its restraint and lightly elegiac mood are unlikely to get most pulses racing, even if these qualities serve it extremely well. As he did in his version of “West Side Story,” which was also written by Kushner, Spielberg embraces a kind of poetic realism in “The Fabelmans” that I’m still getting a handle on. He’s looking at his own life through the mist, as you would expect. And while he shows the tears, if not necessarily the snot, Spielberg is also, in his singular way, engaging with some of the corrosive truths about his childhood, particularly with respect to Mitzi. It’s an interesting movie that I look forward to revisiting.Mitzi Fabelman is just one of the many women characters who made this year’s Toronto memorable. Another is Lib Wright, the brisk British nurse played by a strong Florence Pugh in the period drama “The Wonder.” Directed by Sebastián Lelio from Emma Donoghue’s novel, it follows Lib as she journeys to an isolated village in 19th-century rural Ireland, where she’s been employed by some stern local men to observe a girl, Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy), who’s said not to have eaten in months. Is her fast a miracle, a scam, or something else? Not all of Lelio’s choices work, specifically his decision to call attention to the movie’s artifice (it opens and closes on a soundstage), but its horror and righteous fury are undeniable.Florence Pugh in “The Wonder,” set in 19th-century Ireland.NetflixPart of what made the bounty of all these women characters so pleasurable is that a fair number appear in movies directed by women. In the not-distant past, women often felt boxed in by their subjects, though especially by their modest resources. That’s less the case now, and day after day at Toronto, you could watch all manner of female-driven pictures, from spectacles to chamber pieces. Some women were as recognizable as your own life (if generally more interesting) and others were entirely, engagingly different. For someone who makes a living primarily writing about movies made by men with men and for men, it was especially gratifying.That was the case even when the movies didn’t entirely work or felt off the mark. I can’t vouch for the historical accuracy of “Emily,” a moving, sexually charged drama about Emily Brontë directed by the actress Frances O’Connor. Certainly I never heard about some of the wilder things that this Emily (an excellent Emma Mackey) does throughout her tumultuous, tragically abbreviated, dramatically inflected life. Even so, with its performances, its unabashed romanticism and visual choices — landscapes, textures, gleaming light and bodies — the movie persuasively opens up an artistic consciousness, showing how Brontë became the writer that she did. However fanciful its portrait of the artist as a young woman, it’s very effective.Alice Diop’s electric contemporary drama “Saint Omer” turns on a very different question of truth. Set partly in a French courtroom, it centers on a young writer, Rama (Kayije Kagame), sitting in on the trial of another woman, Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), who’s admitted to drowning her baby. Intellectually galvanizing and emotionally harrowing, the story explores motherhood, race and postcolonial France with control, lucidity and compassion. It’s an extraordinary work that’s all the more impressive because it’s the first fiction feature from Diop, who’s an established documentarian.“Saint Omer” will be on the slate in the forthcoming New York Film Festival and so will “The Eternal Daughter,” from the British filmmaker Joanna Hogg. It too concerns motherhood, though in a different register and to dissimilar ends. It focuses on a relationship between a mother-and-daughter duo, similar characters who are both played with distinct nuance by Tilda Swinton. The story largely takes place at a grand hotel where the two have come for an intimate, progressively more fraught getaway. Over the course of the story, the time frame subtly, at times comically, shifts, as does the relationship, which — like Swinton’s twinned performances — proves devastating. More

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      To Deal With Film Festival Pressure, Sarah Polley Heads for the Hills

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      Hiking helped the actress-turned-auteur as she premiered her buzzy drama “Women Talking” in Telluride and Toronto.TORONTO — The scene inside the restaurant Lapinou was loud and hectic on Tuesday night as a crowd of Hollywood power players, including Rooney Mara and Claire Foy, navigated narrow hallways, passed plates of beignets and an endless stream of well-wishers with declarations of Oscar buzz.It was the Toronto International Film Festival after-party for the new drama “Women Talking,” though to do any real talking (as opposed to shouting), you had to escape outside, as I did midway through the night with the film’s director, Sarah Polley. Clad in a sharp suit and tie, Polley appeared unruffled by both the noisy soirée and the high-stakes premiere she had just come from.“I feel really happy and calm,” Polley told me with a serene smile. She thought about it, then amended her statement: “Kind of happy — not in a jacked-up, nutty way.”Higher levels of happiness would have been perfectly warranted after the two weeks Polley has just had: Following a successful launch of the film at the Telluride Film Festival, she and her cast flew to Toronto for another warm reception that ensured “Women Talking,” due in theaters this December, will be one of the season’s most-discussed movies.Based on the novel by Miriam Toews, “Women Talking” follows the female members of a Mennonite colony as they decide whether to stay or go. Their cloistered lives have been ruptured by a series of sexual attacks committed by the men of their community, and to stay would preserve the status quo, for better and for worse: While it would keep their families together, the women and their daughters would be in danger of continued assault.But for these Mennonite women, who have never seen a map nor been taught to read or write, leaving the only world they’ve ever known is a tall order, too. So a council is appointed: A group of women, including characters played by Mara, Foy and Frances McDormand, will gather in a hayloft and debate the decision that could change the rest of their lives.Though “Women Talking” has sparked Oscar talk for Polley and her cast after the film’s Telluride premiere two weekends ago, anxieties initially ran high in advance of that first screening. So Polley proposed a hike.“The operating principle was that we should just have a great morning so that if the film goes terribly, we’ll at least have had a great day,” she said. “I think it’s smart to start with something good that can’t be taken away from you.”That mountain trek with her cast went so well that even after the premiere, the actress Jessie Buckley decided to lead them on a second hike the next day. “But Jessie’s actually, like, a really serious hiker,” Polley said, “and I almost passed out, so l turned back.”Hiking was less necessary before the Toronto premiere, since the city is Polley’s hometown, the place where she acted in films like “The Sweet Hereafter” before her segue to directing. In fact, she was so convinced the Toronto audience couldn’t be topped that though “Women Talking” has a busy slate of festival appearances and premieres ahead, from now on, Polley plans to politely excuse herself each time the movie unspools.“I decided that the first time it played in Toronto would be the last time I watched the movie,” she said. “There was a sense of completion around it tonight: You’re saying goodbye to all the scenes and every frame of the film.”But if there’s one thing she’ll miss now that she’s no longer watching her film with an audience, it’s the occasional moment in this weighty drama when something light happens and the moviegoers around her realize they’ve got permission to laugh.“That’s when you feel the audience coalescing and having some kind of a collective response,” Polley said. “It’s thrilling to have laughter happen when you’re watching a film like this.” More

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      In ‘The Fabelmans,’ Steven Spielberg Himself Is the Star

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      But it’s Michelle Williams who burns brightest in this film based on Spielberg’s childhood, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans” is the movie every fall film festival was dying to have, but only Toronto got it. And at the Saturday-night premiere, the collective excitement was making people lose their minds.It wasn’t just the enthusiastic audience, many of whom had come straight from the well-received premiere of the “Knives Out” sequel “Glass Onion.” And it wasn’t just the giddiness of Cameron Bailey, who runs the Toronto International Film Festival, as he introduced the filmmaker for the first time. Even Spielberg himself got carried away in the madness.“I’m so glad I came to Toronto,” he said. Thank you, Steven. Same. #TIFF22 pic.twitter.com/wLAwQW58IW— Cameron Bailey (@cameron_tiff) September 11, 2022
      “I’m really glad we came to Toronto!” exclaimed the 75-year-old director, noting that this would be the first time a film of his had played at a film festival. That claim would appear to sweep away the New York Film Festival showings of “Bridge of Spies” and “Lincoln,” the Cannes premieres of “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “The BFG,” and the South by Southwest bow of “Ready Player One,” but hey, sometimes you’ve got to clear the table before you can set it.And at least his lie felt emotionally true, since the stakes were so significant: By landing “The Fabelmans,” Toronto could fortify itself after two pandemic-diminished years, while Spielberg could claim the friendliest possible audience for his most personal film yet.Written by the director and his frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, “The Fabelmans” is an only slightly fictionalized retelling of Spielberg’s own coming-of-age. Sammy Fabelman (played as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle) is a movie-mad kid who stages increasingly elaborate short films that star his sisters, classmates and semi-supportive parents. His dad, Burt (Paul Dano), is too swept up in his computer-programming job to understand Sammy’s artistic inclinations, but his mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), is a free spirit who never got to realize her dreams of working as a pianist and encourages Sammy to follow his bliss.Their mother-son bond is strong, and when Sammy films her dancing on a family trip and later shows her the edited footage, Mitzi beams. “You see me,” she says. But Sammy sometimes sees too much: As he gets older, he notices that Mitzi’s strong bond with her husband’s best friend (Seth Rogen) borders on an emotional affair. And as the family moves from New Jersey to Arizona and then finally to California, the ties that bind begin to fray.I found “The Fabelmans” to be only secondarily Spielberg’s origin story; primarily, it’s a look-at-what-she-can-do Michelle Williams vehicle, and the actress really goes for it, attacking this part like someone who knows she’s been handed her signature role. Based on Spielberg’s late mother, Leah, Mitzi is a dramatic personality, prone to flights of fancy and intense mood swings, and at any given moment, she’ll laugh, cry, sing or pack the kids into the car for an impromptu tornado chase. You love her, but she’s a lot — on this, the viewer and Sammy both agree — and Williams finds exactly the right moments to dial back the bigness and remind you that there is something private and vulnerable at the core of this very outgoing woman.Spielberg told the Toronto crowd that he’d had Williams in mind to play his mom ever since he saw her work in “Blue Valentine” (2010), which earned Williams the second of her four Oscar nominations; if she is campaigned as a supporting actress for “The Fabelmans” (as I suspect she will be, despite her ample screen time), this could very well propel the well-respected 42-year-old to her first win, just a year after Spielberg’s “West Side Story” actress Ariana DeBose topped that same race.Spielberg films always have plenty of Oscar upside, and “The Fabelmans” will be a strong contender in the picture and directing categories (and could even score a nod for Judd Hirsch, who puts in a scene-stealing cameo as Mitzi’s uncle), but the film is gentler, shaggier and more intimate than some of his other awards-season juggernauts, and there’s no need to oversell it at this early date. Even Spielberg, sensing all the hype in the room, sought to downplay speculation that “The Fabelmans” served as any sort of magnum-opus finale.“This is not because I’m going to retire and this is my swan song,” he told Toronto. “Don’t believe any of that!” More

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      An Eerie, Thrilling Trip to the Toronto International Film Festival

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      With theaters at 50 percent capacity, our critic found herself somewhat isolated as she took in highlights like “The Tsugua Diaries” and “Hold Your Fire.”“Would you like to move to the orchestra?” a voice from the dark whispered.I was at the Toronto International Film Festival and, moments earlier, had just realized that I was the only festivalgoer in the very capacious, very empty balcony. In normal years, this 2,000-seat theater, a festival mainstay, is packed with excitedly buzzing attendees. But normal is so very 2019 as are crowds. It felt awfully lonely up there with just me and some ushers, so I said Sure! and ran down to the orchestra, settling amid other attendees who, perhaps like me, were trying to feign a sense of togetherness — at a Covid-safe distance, of course.One of the largest film happenings in the world, the Toronto festival celebrated its 46th anniversary this year and, more gloomily, its second year of putting on a show during the pandemic. On a number of levels, it was a success: Although scaled down from its preplague era, the festival, which ends Saturday, presented some 200 movies, in person and digitally, from across the world. There were premieres, panels and lots of mask-muffled “Have a great day!” from the staff. Benedict Cumberbatch — the star of Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” and Will Sharpe’s “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” — popped in via satellite for a chat.It was much the same while being profoundly different. More than anything, as I attended movies in the festival’s eerily depopulated theaters — sitting in rooms that, per Canadian safety rules, couldn’t exceed 50 percent capacity — I was reminded that a film festival isn’t simply a series of back-to-back new movies. It’s also people, joined together, and ordinarily jammed together, as one under the cinematic groove. There is always vulgarity, of course, the red-carpet posing, the Oscar-race hustling, and I’ve watched plenty of profane monstrosities at Toronto, Sundance, et al. But even when the movies disappoint, I am always happy at a festival, watching alongside people as crazy about movies as I am.Benedict Cumberbatch, left, and Jesse Plemons in “The Power of the Dog.”Kirsty Griffin/NetflixThere weren’t many people, but there was still a lot to like and to love in Toronto, including Cumberbatch flexing his muscles in the nude as a 1920s Montana cowboy in Campion’s magnificent “The Power of the Dog” and playing a rather more buttoned-up cat fancier in “Louis Wain.” A charming, poignant biographical account, that film portrays the life of a British artist who, starting in the late 19th century — with pen, vibrant ink and a fantastically wild imagination — helped teach the joys of cat worship to a dog-besotted Britain. The movie may make some gag, but I dug its tenderness and Wain’s work, which grew trippier the older and more mentally unstable he became.For higher-profile selections like these, the fall festivals — Telluride and Venice recently ended — serve as a legitimizing launchpad for the fall season, a way to distinguish themselves from the hundreds of movies also vying for attention. Disney can scoop up spectators by the millions. Titles like “The Power of the Dog,” which falls under the fuzzy heading of art film yet is entirely accessible to those actually paying attention, need to seduce a smaller viewership, even if Campion has long been a revered auteur. They need festival audiences, critics included, on the front lines, particularly if a movie is headed toward next year’s Academy Awards. (“Dog” is more likely to go the Oscar distance than Wain’s cats.)And, after months and months of streaming new movies in my living room, I was exceptionally happy to be at Toronto. I’ve attended the festival for years, largely because of the variegated bounty of its offerings, from the commercial to the avant-garde. When it was founded in 1976, it was called the Festival of Festivals, partly because it screened films that had played elsewhere. It was intended for the general public (Cannes is invitation-only), a mandate that helped give Toronto a democratic vibe. In the words of one of its founders, Bill Marshall, “There’s something for everyone, but not everything for everyone, but something.”A scene from “Hold Your Fire,” about hostage negotiations.InterPositive Media, via Toronto International Film FestivalIn the decades that followed, Toronto rebranded itself as the Toronto International Film Festival and opened a handsome complex called the Lightbox in a soulless area called the entertainment district, where construction crews always seem to be building glass-and-steel apartment complexes for young professionals with dogs. Even so, the event’s populist ethos continues, as does its hodgepodge programming. Here, as usual, you could catch movies that had played in Berlin, Cannes and Telluride and would soon make their way to New York and beyond. One of the best things about Toronto, though, is that it isn’t an auteur-driven festival or an Oscar-baiting one: It’s just a flood of movies — good, bad and indifferent.There were teary melodramas, cryptic whatsits and period dramas like Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” which is as watchable as it is predictable. A story in black-and-white — visually and in its beats — the movie takes place in the title city in the 1960s, just as partisan violence descends on a cozy street where Catholic and Protestant families live alongside one another in dewy harmony. Centered on a cute tyke nestled in the bosom of a loving family whose members are mostly known commodities (Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds play the grandparents), the movie is in the vein of John Boorman’s “Hope and Glory,” a far finer coming-of-age story set during World War II.Among the other offerings were movies that belong to familiar subgenres that I call the Sad Single Women With Dying Plants Movie (“True Things”) and the ever-popular Damaged Woman Film, some more outré (this year’s risible Cannes Palmes d’Or winner, “Titane”) than others (“The Mad Women’s Ball”). And then there was Edgar Wright’s frenetic “Last Night in Soho,” which is a female-friendship movie of a kind and putative empowerment story about another sad woman (Thomasin McKenzie) and her glamorous sad doppelgänger (Anya Taylor-Joy). The two meet across time in a London crawling with mean girls and unspeakably predatory men.Jacques Cousteau’s life is examined in a new documentary.Story Syndicate, via Toronto International Film FestivalAs usual, the documentaries were often a sure bet. Although “Becoming Cousteau,” about the underwater French explorer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau, is a fairly standard biographical portrait, the director Liz Garbus manages to push the movie into deeper depths. Filled with beautiful archival images of pristine waters, the movie opens as a fairly straight great-man story only to evolve into a thoughtful examination of what Cousteau’s early adventures wrought, including his lucrative work-for-hire helping to find oil in the Persian Gulf. As development progressively destroyed the undersea world that he helped illuminate, Cousteau became a fervent environmentalist — too late but still laudable.More formally audacious were two of my festival highlights: “Flee,” a Danish movie about an Afghan refugee, and “Hold Your Fire,” a jaw-dropper about a decades-old American hostage crisis. Directed by Stefan Forbes, “Hold Your Fire” looks back on a 1973 robbery in Brooklyn that went catastrophically wrong when its painfully young perpetrators were discovered midcrime. (Forbes also edited the wealth of archival material and shot the recent interviews with survivors and witnesses, like the psychologist Harvey Schlossberg, the definition of a mensch.) The incident quickly mushroomed into a televised spectacle and became a turning point in hostage negotiating; more than anything, it exhumes an instructive, bleakly relevant chapter in the city’s long racially fractious history.“Flee” is focused on an Afghan refugee, a friend of the documentary’s director. Final Cut for Real, via Toronto International Film Festival“Flee,” directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen, is a beautifully, at times expressionistically animated documentary — punctuated with shocks of unanimated newsreel-style imagery — about the filmmaker’s longtime friend, Amin (a pseudonym), a refugee from Afghanistan. The two met in high school and remained in touch, but it was only when Rasmussen started making this movie that he actually learned the real difficulties and intricacies of Amin’s story. “Flee” unwinds piecemeal as Amin — often lying on a couch, as if in a shrink’s office — recounts his harrowing travels, with a brother or alone, in a journey that, in some painful ways, is ongoing.My favorite movie of this year’s festival, “The Tsugua Diaries,” doesn’t easily fit into any obvious genre category, which is one of its attractions. Like some other titles in this year’s festival, the movie was shot during the pandemic, but it is also very much about the pandemic. Or, rather, it’s about time and its passage as well as friendship and the deep, life-sustaining pleasures of being with other people. It was directed by Maureen Fazendeiro (she’s French) and Miguel Gomes (he’s Portuguese) who are a couple, and is both formally playful — its divided in chapters, each of which take the movie back in time — and unexpectedly moving. I wept buckets, and I can’t wait to see it again. More