theTFS

Hollywood has always been pretty good at stereotyping. In some cases, this kind of works for them, because grand stories with overarching universal themes sometimes need characters who are kind of "general", so that they can be easy to like or dislik...

"In classical narrative cinema, to see is to desire." Linda Williams Back in the 1930s, the Hollywood studio system standardized the way movies were produced. Film workers, including actors and directors, were all employees of a particular film studi...

Hopefully you read this month's TFS List concerning movie characters who are more than just their LGBT status. Writing great, well-rounded people to populate your film is always a challenge for a screenwriter, no matter how they identify, let alone c...

Ellis and Neckbone are two 14-year-old best friends, looking for adventure and purpose in their small Southern town. They find it in a man named Mud, an outlaw on the run from bounty hunters and police, as they befriend him and agree to help him reun...

The untimely death of an actor, artist or, in this case, musician, always seems to add a layer of mysticism to the legacy of the work that's left behind. But that layer gets even deeper in the case of Tim and Jeff Buckley. A father and his son, both ...

Robbie (Paul Brannigan) has barely avoided a prison sentence from an assault charge, helped by the fact that he's about to become a father. His girlfriend's family hates him, and after years of being an unemployed thug, Robbie wants nothing more than...

Michel Gondry, unleashed from the commercial shackles of oh, say The Green Hornet, returns a bit more to form with The We and the I. Basically plotless, the film takes a bus ride through the Bronx with a group of teenagers, on the way home after the ...

In 1994, General Roméo Dallaire was the UN Force Commander during the Rwandan genocide. Now retired, Dallaire is haunted by memories of child soldiers, recruited by various groups to fight their wars. In an attempt to put an end to the use of childre...

For decades New York department store Bergdorf Goodman has been a destination for discerning shoppers from all across the globe, both those of means and those who only aspire to own the high end, and often fashion-forward, merchandise that they stock...

This follow-up to the 2009 film picks up shortly after its predecessor left off: Kirk (Chris Pine) is still at the helm of the Enterprise, Spock (Zachary Quinto) is his first officer, and they're in the midst of a mission to spare a primitive civiliz...

The romantic comedy has been dead for a long time. Numerous autopsies - most recently, Christopher Orr's much discussed piece in The Atlantic - have provided a range of theories speculating the cause of the rom-com's creative rigor mortis. Blame is a...

April 26 marked the opening of Chris Marker: Memory of a Certain Time, an exhibition of the legendary French filmmaker's photographs. To accompany the exhibition, TIFF Bell Lightbox is throwing Remembrance of Things to Come, a mini retrospective of M...

Remember the Canadian band Rusty? You probably need a little bit of a memory jog, but they had a music video about 1995 or 1996 called Misogyny, it was on heavy rotation on MuchMusic for a while (back when they played music videos more than shitty TV...

Spring is a time of rebirth and renewal. And spring in Toronto, as it turns out, is also the time for film festivals. Commonly referred to as Inside Out, it is also known as the Toronto LGBT Film Festival. The festival runs from Thursday, May 23 to S...

When we go to the movies, we see complex characters carefully crafted by screenwriters, studio executives, producers, directors and actors, but what makes it to the screen, and what it says about that person and their traits can have meaning beyond w...

Ambitious young Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) moves to New York and into a bungalow in West Egg at the height of the '20s stock market boom. His neighbor in the nouveau-riche section of Long Island is the mysterious Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) who...

Have you ever found yourself watching The Shining and wondering what's up with all of the Native American imagery? Have you ever wanted to watch it frame-by-frame to deconstruct its hidden meaning or plot out a perfect map of the ominous Overlook Hot...