Toronto 2006
..Festival News
..Festival Reviews

..Thursday Films

 

All The King's Men Review by David Poland: The lead of this film, more than in the original, is Jude Law’s Jack Burden. And Law is excellent here. But the film runs off the rails by becoming Burden’s story even more than Stark’s, while in the original, Burden provided the point-of-view and was party to many of the story points. Here, it all seems to end up rotating around him, while Willie Stark just becomes a greedier version of what he was to start, believing his rhetoric to the end. 2:37 Review by David Poland: 2:37 a.k.a. Elephant Crash High, an impressive first film from 22-year-old Aussie Murali K. Thalluri, but only as impressive as his absolute lift from Gus van Sant combined with vain, failed efforts to improve on Van Sant’s Elephant ideas with the banal coincident scam of Paul Haggis’ Crash can be. Volver Review by David Poland: The only thing the filmmakers clearly know how to do well is to write large checks with which they can entice top flight actors to spend a few days on a horrible film with a horrible script that is the feature equivalent of doing a commercial in the Far East since no one will ever see the whole movie. Deliver Us From Evil Review by David Poland: Pedophile priest documentaries, like the current wave of Iraq documentaries, begin to seem ubiquitous after a while. It is said that more than 100,000 American children have been molested by these broken souls. The church chooses to cover up endlessly. And so it makes for an obvious source of inspiration. Deliver Us From Evil - A Profile of the Director by Leonard Klady: "The subject had become like mother's milk to me. It's just so complex and despite this wall of silence, or at least lack of cooperation from the church, the leaks continue to reveal details that are shocking and alarming." The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair Review by David Poland: As in Gunner Palace, Tucker & Epperlein make it clear that regular life, and even joy, continues in the midst of all that is going on in the streets of Iraq. They also understand the paranoia of those streets and bring it to life succinctly and without overdramatizing.