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The Toronto International Film Festival, known by the acronym TIFF, is a cornucopia of movies (there are hundreds) and megastars (you want Ryan Gosling and Keira Knightley? Politeness. Here, the hits are unveiled, Oscar campaigns are launched and reputations are made – and no, I'm not referring to Chris Pine's much-publicized frontal scene in the opening night movie, King outlaw. In fact, during the first day and a half of the festival, I have already found five great reasons to be happy.
1. A star is born
Yes, it has an exciting trailer and, yes, its mythical story – of the romantic relationship between a burgeoning star and an endangered male star – has already been a success in three different cinematographic eras. Still, who knew if rookie director Bradley Cooper could or could not release the new version, especially with a co-star, Lady Gaga, who had never played such a demanding role. Now we know. Not only will A star is born to be a hit again, it deserves to be. And there will be many Oscar nominations because it's the kind of classic Hollywood movie that the Academy likes to honor, especially since the rise and fall of stars is a phenomenon of which the industrialists witness every day.
Cooper plays Jackson Maine, a rock country singer-songwriter who spends most of his life under the bottle. One night he comes across a desperate drag bar for a drink and hears a dazzling young singer-songwriter, Ally (Lady Gaga), who has not had a chance. You can guess the rest. But not really, because what makes the movie so enjoyable is that Cooper and Lady Gaga perform a remarkable feat in their opening hours: they do not just believe that the characters fall in love (the most novels do not come close to doing so), but, perhaps even more difficult, they make you believe that these two are actually music stars. Of course, the second part of the movie is sadder, and I would like it to be a little shorter. But that always has an impact. Cooper has clearly paid particular attention to all these film sets. He knows how to stage a scene to capture his emotions and, because he is intelligent, he refers to earlier versions of A star is born (nodding at Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand) without getting out of his version. He gives a terrific performance, but he is likely to be overshadowed because we expect him to be good, so the attention will go to the surprisingly strong performance he has received from Lady Gaga, much better than his work on American horror story. She has never been so charming or touching. At the beginning of the film, Jackson has to incite Ally to go on stage at one of his concerts and, in doing so, he tells him to trust him. Cooper obviously did the same thing with Lady Gaga making her appear naked, in every way, than ever before. As Rich Asian boobies showed that there is still life in the romantic comedy, A star is born brings us back to the time when Hollywood movies were about big dreams and heartbreaking emotions.
2. Nicole Kidman in Destructive
If you ever asked me to name the bravest actress in Hollywood, I would instantly name this intrepid Australian. There is no better proof of this than his performance in Karyn Kusama's extreme and highly conflict-ridden film, which even makes Kidman look good. Not to mention too much, she plays Erin Bell, a Los Angeles police officer who has become a cruel, cheeky and raging breakage that looks so ravaged, so skinny and so rough, that she could get the usual roles of Harry. Dean Stanton. The film falls between its current state of ferocity and its return to the events that caused it, twenty years ago, when the charming young Erin and her partner (Sebastian Stan, good) went for a charismatic gang leader. (Toby Kebbell), who is the kind of guy who will quote you from Nietzsche, and we all know that there is no more bad guy than pretentious. Now, there are loads of movies on the mad, ass, uncontrollable male heroes, but very little about women, partly because the public tends to indulge in a DeNiro or Nic Cage. Kidman and Kusama do not care. Heck, they are just pushing things to such a point that the film sometimes borders on comedy: I never thought I had ever seen Kidman bang someone! And that's only part of what she's doing in this movie. Amazingly intense and immersive, Kidman realizes here what Charlize Theron accomplished in MonsterShe is re-imagining herself as a nightmare, which is another way of saying that any discussion of the best actress's awards should count with her.
3. Timothée Chalamet to Handsome boy
Last year, this wonderful young actor should have won every major interpretation award for his dazzling work Call me by your name. But he was too young to beat an extremely admired veteran like Gary Oldman, who was giving a classic performance of "famous person". This year, he is back as the main character in this true story (based on best-selling books) about a divorced father, David Sheff (Steve Carell), who has to deal with the drug problems of his hot, intelligent son. and self-destructive, Nic. Now, the inescapable problem of addiction movies is that they are completely redundant – addicts keep falling out of the cart – and this is the case here. To be honest, director Felix Van Groningen tackles this issue with a sweet touch, creating a classic scene between David and Nic in a restaurant, and Carell is solid as a father trying to help solve a problem that's a problem. ;he does not understand. But the only undeniable reason to see Handsome boy is Chalamet, who brings the same emotional transparency that he brought to Elio Call me by your namebut playing an extremely different character. The only question is whether he'll be back for Best Actor (again) or Best Supporting Actor, and it's not a bad place where you're only 22 years old.
4. Transit
In addition to the hopes of the Oscars, Toronto is also full of North American premieres of successful art films. Whether it is Olivier Assayas Non-fiction, a funny portrait of Parisian literary circles dealing with the digital era – the French comic Nora Hamzawi – or Mike Leigh's film Peterloo, which concerns a massacre of 1819 workers and their families in Manchester, England. Yet the film of this group that moved me the most was Transit, Christian Petzold's Bold Adaptation of Anna Seghers' 1944 Novel Transit visa. His hero, Georg (Franz Rogowski, Joaquin Phoenix's double) is a German exile who, desperate to escape France after the Nazi invasion, goes to the port city of Marseille, where he takes the identity of a writer died. Of course, Marseille is full of other exiles also dying in Europe, and things get complicated when he meets a woman (the great and young actress Paula Beer) in search of her missing husband to travel to America .
Combining a world where everyone will do their best to escape a catastrophe, the main characters are all in transit between different countries and identities – Petzold adds another disorienting twist by staging this action that took place in 1942 France day, with its modern cars and shops. Oddly enough, this stylistic strategy works wonders, highlighting the troubling unreality of Georg's life on the run and suggesting that this World War II story about immigrants fleeing oppression is relevant to the immigrant experience right now. .
5. Hugh Jackman in The front runner
Is there anything that guy can not do? In the last 18 months, his Wolverine in the last installment of this series, Logan, and his song P.T. Barnum, titled the musical success totally unexpected The biggest showman. Now he's doing a crackerjack trick as a political figure in Jason Reitman's life. The front runner, which recounts the three-week fall of Colorado senator Gary Hart, the leading Democratic candidate in the 1988 presidential election. It was Hart's affair to pretend, not morally, that he was the candidate of "ideas". And he was. The problem is that this married man was also the candidate of "zipper problems". The film follows the collapse of his campaign after the Miami Herald dominated his house and broke his story with Donna Rice (Sara Paxton), a young woman he met on a boat named, ironically, Monkey Business.
In telling this story, Reitman aspires to a sort of Altmanian sweep, placing Hart and his wife, Lee (Vera Farmiga, extremely gifted), at the center of a circus including consultants, staff, journalists and paparazzi. at a turning point in the media coverage of the candidates. Hart became the first big presidential candidate to smash his campaign with journalists searching and exposing his personal schemes, a problem compounded by his arrogance, coldness and insistence on invading his private life. in his life created a terrible precedent for how politics would be covered in the future. Hart often seemed as cold as a lizard, but on this point he was not wrong. And Jackman shows us that.
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