TIFF, 9/8.

Dave Kehr is in Toronto. And blogging. Nothing against the trades - after all, we can be glad there's still a branch of movie journalism that gets reviewers to festivals outside of Cannes and Sundance - but spend a while deciphering Variety-speak and slogging through the prospects of any given film in ancillary markets, and Dave Kehr's diamond-sharp takes, along with the wide range of just plain human voices you'll see sampled below, come as exquisite relief.

So he's got two entries from Toronto so far, the first an approving note on After the Wedding: "They make an odd but effective couple: [Anders Thomas] Jensen is a specialist in concocting outrageous conicidences and shamelessly sentimental situations; [Susanne] Bier is a bone-dry realist, who favors a shaky-cam documentary approach and scrupulously tamps down her performances." More on that one from Todd at Twitch.

The second: "Manoel de Oliveira's supposed 'sequel' to Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour turns out to be another of the great Portuguese director's memory films, perhaps the most beautiful since his undervalued Porto of My Childhood of 2001." More from Venice and Vitor Pinto at Cineuropa, who notes that Oliveira, too, insists that Belle toujours is not a sequel, but an homage.

"Day one. The madness has begun," announces the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy. "As far as I was concerned, the main event of the day was Korean director Bang Joon-ho's The Host, which anyone who's talked movies with me lately knows I can't shut up about, even before I saw the thing. Well, it's about to get a lot worse, folks - I was so not disappointed."

Jim Emerson caught it, too: "Director Bong Joon-ho shifts tones with quicksilver dexterity, cannily keeping the audience (and the film) just on the edge of losing its balance and splashing into the Han. Humor turns to horror and back again in a flash, while generic requirements are both fulfilled and cleverly overturned. Even the pathos works, because it's a little bit cock-eyed." Also, 2:37.

Opus at Twitch: "Hirokazu Kore-eda's latest film, HANA, may have all of the usual trappings that one associates with the samurai genre, and yet it thoroughly, and enjoyably, subverts them time and again." More from Michael Guillén, who also offers his take on Ten Canoes, "visually stunning as it shifts between real time and dream time through strategic shifts between color cinematography and black and white cinematography."

Also at Twitch, Todd: "Make no mistake about it, Syndromes and a Century is purely an arthouse film with no concessions made to mainstream sensibilities but it is also a film that demonstrates once again that Apichatpong Weerasethakul is one of the world's most distinctive and talented voices, gifted with a light and playful touch, an incredible eye, and a true gift for observation." And, "Jens Lien's The Bothersome Man is a clever, darkly humorous, deeply absurd critique of Scandanavian social engineering. Sure, we've made our society nice Lien wants to argue, but we've also made it terminally bland."

Asger Leth, whose Ghosts of Cité Soleil was widely lauded when it screened at Telluride, has an entry at the Doc Blog on the work he's put into it.

David Poland's got no-holds-barred first impressions of 2:37 and London to Brighton.

Jeffrey Wells: "The Lives of Others is a political thriller with compassion - a movie about spying and paranoia and the worst aspects of Socialist bloc rigidity and bureacratic thug- gery, and yet one that delivers a metaphor that says even the worst of us can move towards openness and a lessening of hate and suspicion." Also: Stranger Than Fiction is dead."

For Cinematical, Scott Weinberg talks with JT Petty, director of the "nearly indefinable horror documentary," S&MAN. James Rocchi reviews the film.

Also, the broken projector at the late night screening of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is practically legend already. Kim Voynar tells the full tale.

Posted by dwhudson at September 8, 2006 3:38 PM