Toronto International Film Festival

How I Won $10,000 in 6 Minutes: A Filmmaker's Account of Pitching His Film at TIFF

Ian Harnarine is a filmmaker who recently won the PITCH THIS! competition at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. He wrote a personal account of doing so exclusively for Indiewire.

IFC Films Captures U.S. Rights to Marisa Tomei Thriller 'Inescapable'

IFC Films has acquired U.S. distribution rights to writer-director Ruba Nadda’s “Inescapable,” which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last week. The company picked up U.S. rights to "Byzantium" and North American rights to the Mira Nair-di...

TIFF Capsule Review: 'Pusher'

Moving the action from Copenhagen to London, this remake of Nicolas Winding Refn’s 1996 thriller ditches some of the eccentricities of the original and delivers a well made, albeit run-of-the-mill gangster yarn. The first English language film from Madrid-born director Luis Prieto does a good enough job, but given the rich recent history of the British gangster movie, it feels like Prieto is happy enough robbing the local bank rather than going all out to nab the crown jewels. At no point does he try to gazump the original. Frank (Richard Coyle) borrows money from Milo (Zlatco Zurič, reprising the role he played in the original trilo...

TIFF Capsule Review: 'The Fitzgerald Family Christmas'

Ed Burns is back, with a comedy about an Irish-American family, this time set around the threat by a dead-beat dad (Ed Lauter) to return to spend the holiday with the wife and the seven children whom he abandoned. I won’t give the ending away, but "The Fitzgerald Family Christmas," starring Burns as usual, comes right out of the marketing department. Christmas is the top film-going time of the year in the US. And if Irish-American family life in this film is any indication, people in those families will be scrambling to do anything else but spend the holidays with each other. Maybe they’ll go see "The Fitzgerald ...

Toronto Wrap: Winners, Oscar Contenders and Also-Rans

I started out Toronto 2012 with my first Jason Reitman screenplay read-through--his first in Toronto--Alan Ball's Oscar-winning "American Beauty." I'd missed his series of live reads at LACMA, from "The Breakfast Club" to "The Apartment." In a way "American Beauty" was apt preparation for the festi...

TIFF Capsule Review: 'Road North'

Anna Kendrick Spills Deets on Joe Swanberg's All-Star 'Drinking Buddies': "Maybe there's an orgy that I'm not involved in."

When it was revealed earlier this year that divisive indie stalwart Joe Swanberg had cast Oscar-nominee Anna Kendrick as well as Olivia Wilde, Ron Livingston and Jake M. Johnson to star in his upcoming dramedy "Drinking Buddies," anyone familiar with his output probably did a double-take. "Something...

Jennifer Lawrence Talks 'Silver Linings Playbook,' Russell, 'Hunger Games' and Prepping for that Money Scene (EXCLUSIVE VIDEO)

As soon as "Silver Linings Playbook" played in Toronto it became the front runner for the Oscar. This is something its Oscar handlers were seeking to avoid, but the film then went on to win the coveted TIFF audience award nabbed by such past crowd-pleasers as Oscar-winner "Slumdog Millionaire." Yes,...

TIFF Documentary 'Venus and Serena' Debuted without Support from the Williams Sisters

Veteran broadcast journalists Maiken Baird and Michelle Major spent four years obtaining access to the private world of tennis superstars the Williams sisters for "Venus and Serena," which debuted last week at the Toronto Film Festival. But when the tennis documentary finally premiered, it did so wi...