Finally, our last two reviews from the Toronto International Film Festival (other than movies we'll be reviewing with their theatrical release). We'll end things with two movies from New York City auteurs, one of them who is trying to reclaim the glory of his 1995 debut, the other who hasn't had a movie released since 1998. Todd Solontz has made a lot of movies in recent years I found to be unwatchable, so his latest Dark Horse is a surprisingly pleasurable experience, while Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress is an extremely clever twist on college comedy stereotypes.
While lots of major studios regularly bring their movies to TIFF, Paramount has taken a different approach with their two festival offerings, as they're both movies with links to the Sundance Film Festival and produced by Steven Rales' production company Indian Paintbrush.
Probably one of our bigger general regrets from this year's TIFF is that we haven't been able to see as many of the "Midnight Madness" movies as we would have liked. Programmed by the jovial Colin Geddes, one of the programmers at TIFF who really gets how genre works as well as appreciates the support of online journalists attending the fest, "Midnight Madness" premieres some of the best genre films in the world mostly to the rabid crowd of fans who have decided to stay up late with like-minded individuals at the Ryerson University theater. Since we tend to do early morning screenings, we can't stay up that late, which is why we hadn't seen a single "Midnight Madness" movie at this year's TIFF.
Our latest reviews from TIFF have absolutely nothing in common as one is a crime drama, a genre that’s been explored quite frequently in film, the other is a British romantic comedy set in an odd foreign environment. Rampart stars Woody Harrelson and it's Oren Moverman’s second movie as a director while Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (CBS Films), starring Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt, feels like Lasse Halström’s hundredth movie. One of them works infinitely better than the other.
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