Hello, Gorgeous: Best Actress of 2014

A returning series by Juan Carlos Ojano

Nice to be back doing this series after last year's Oscars.

One fascinating thing about this group of nominees is how, in medias res, they provide a lot of context as to what their respective arcs will be: a depressed worker being awakened, a mother on the verge of isolation, a mysterious wife to be cracked open, and an injured traveler hitting a roadblock. Only one of the nominees gets a traditional introductione, and even that is already in establishing her dynamic with her male co-star. It’s a fun lineup of first moments with key details sprinkled in from the get-go.

Are you ready? The year is 2014...

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Review: The Midnight Sky

by Tony Ruggio

The Midnight Sky is a mild return to form for director George Cloonney. It’s simultaneously a greatest-hits album of science fiction filmmaking of the last ten years and a beautiful, melancholic story about regret. In the midst of a global pandemic, with more proof arriving every year of what danger might await us in our planet’s future (or even right now), we’re all more aware than ever of what terrible things are possible in this world. Somehow, decades of apocalyptic cinema did not prepare us.

Clooney is Augustine Lofthouse, a scientist who has spent his life finding habitable planets at the expense of his personal life, pushing away those closest to him to devote his life to saving our future...

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Review: The Aeronauts

by Chris Feil

There’s an eyesore on the horizon with The Aeronauts, a cynically observed aerial adventure fatally encumbered by too many pixels. Reuniting the Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne after The Theory of Everything first welcomed both into the Oscar fold, this film is a strange amalgam of influences it fails to live up to. It’s part survival actioner, part vibrant costume drama, and part uplifting women-in-science empowerment tale. But the film’s blending of the three, and its attempts to infuse some modernity to the storytelling, is too clumsy to satisfy any of its points of entry.

The film stars Jones as Amelia Wren, a mid-19th century balloon pilot grieving an unexpected personal cost of her professional on top of patriarchal limitations. Her expertise makes her a fitting partner to Redmayne’s scientist James Glaisher, aiming to prove the science of early meteorology against highly skeptical widespread thought. But Wren and Glaisher have their own clashing of methods and degree of determination. In their flight mission, Glaisher pushes for them to ascend higher than any balloon in history, turning their quest for information into a brief but dangerous fight for survival.

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TIFF Derring-Do Double: "The Aeronauts" and "Ford v Ferrari"

by Nathaniel R

Those magnificent men (and women) and their flying machines. What prompts people to build aerodymanic death traps in which to race at incredible never before accomplished speeds or go up up up to never before seen heights?  Today's double feature centers on just this type of man and their creations.  

FORD V FERRARI (James Mangold)
This very handsomely made film centers around a famous late 60s battle between the massive Ford Motor Company and the Italian boutique manufacturer Ferrari. How did Detroit's Henry Ford II come to battle Enzo Ferrarri in the European playground of Le Mans anyway? And how does the film get you to root for the Goliath rather than the David in this battle? That's the magic of this old fashioned well-paced movie. Older audiences might be familiar with this story but we weren't so it all played out like a fleet-footed and hot wheeled corporate drama mixed with inspirational sports movie...

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Double Feature: On the Basis of Sex & RBG

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

It’s not uncommon for documentaries and narrative features about the same subject to be released around the same time. In some cases, the impetus for a narrative film comes from the success of a documentary, as with recent Robert Zemeckis' movies the The Walk and Welcome to Marwen, which told the same stories as the hit docs Man on Wire  and Marwencol, respectively. 2010 saw concurrent releases of documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money and the feature Casino Jack.

This season's double feature is undeniably inspired by the need to champion strong women in the face of divisive times. Who better than civil rights icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second female justice appointed to the Supreme Court, to serve as the figurehead for two very different movies in 2018?

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