TIFF 2015

OK my last post probably for the year, just wanted to direct everybody to the massive (gotta think the biggest) TIFF15 review list, including my input (Mike Rot) over at Row Three.  

ROOM: What a cathartic experience as the entire Princess of Wales theatre collectively sobs (the hardest gut-punch for me is the Beasts of Southern Wild-like internalization in the boy’s narration, particularly what Room means to him). Performances of Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay make the movie, which on its own can feel at times a little too Canadian precious and visually flat in the second half.  The script and the actors raise the ante.  

ANOMALISA: The greatest films are often hardest to process because they cease to be surveyable, but rather seep in beneath the veneer of understanding and rewire our assumptions.  Anomalisa feels like that.  Too truthful, some remnant of ego wants to quantify the experience safely, but deeper it goes.  Not enough that it's a depiction of existential dread, it's *my* existential dread, and probably yours, in some other impenetrable way.  The unshakable truth of Anomalisa took a while to disperse through me, but when I finally let go of the safe confines of the analytical I could finally appreciate more fully the power of this film.  This is full-on sorrow triggering with a dash of Cyndi Lauper to let the medicine go down.  Kaufman's bleakest yet, and yeah, that's saying something.  

HIGH-RISE: a vertical, laissez-faire Snowpiercer. An interesting mess, sometimes funny, sometimes clever, but still an uneven mess.