TIFF, 9/18.

The backward glances and Toronto International Film Festival wrap-ups roll on. The LA Weekly's Scott Foundas sees in Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth "a brave and nightmarishly beautiful achievement, in which marginalized people who so rarely have a voice in cinema are give one, unbound by the shackles of sanctimony or self-important 'social realism.' This is something close to the cinematic equivalent of blank verse, a new language of expression to which we must constantly readjust as the movie is playing across the screen."

That it screened at Toronto and probably won't at most other festivals on the continent is "a compelling reminder that, despite the easily gotten impression that it is little more than a glam press junket for some of the Hollywood's highest-profile fall releases, Toronto remains the largest and most important film festival in North America." He then turns his attention to Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter, "a horror movie with many inconvenient truths to tell about the ways in which we are willingly destroying our planet. Oh, and it's also scary as fuck."

"I can't tell you how many women in their 60s I saw taking sandwiches out of their purses and eating in line, because those were their only free minutes for the next 12 hours - if I'm doing that when I'm 65, my grandkids damn well better realize how kickass their grandma is." At Cinematical, Martha Fischer looks back on her Toronto experience and revisits her five favorites. As you'll see, she's kickass now.

Like Martha, Tom Hall kept hearing that this was an "off-year"; but it certainly wasn't for either of them. Tom looks back at seven films.

"Modest" and "sedate" are among the first words to hit you in Jason Clark's Toronto roundup for Slant, but then, he doesn't seem to have caught the films winning raves at sites like Twitch or from the likes of Doug Cummings, Darren Hughes et al. But he has seen a few "weirdo pics, none stranger than Tony Gatlif's Transylvania, which pairs possibly the looniest actor and actress in current cinema, Head-On's Birol Ünel and Asia Argento, as a pair of self-destructive gypsies wandering the Romanian countryside finding adventures in the small details of life. A defiant wackjob of a movie, it's also one that you may find yourself referring back to at the most peculiar moments, which is better than letting it fade from memory."

The festival has the AV Club's Noel Murray thinking about "the characteristics that would allow anybody who knows my taste to say, 'This would be right up your alley.' I came up with a list of ten."

Movie City News points to wrap-ups from Peter Howell and Geoff Pevere in the Toronto Star.

Posted by dwhudson at September 18, 2006 2:44 PM