In Certified Copy, Abbas Kiarostami explored two people casually discussing their lives, revealing a surprising amount of information about themselves. The same format is taken here as Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a working girl who’s studying in Japan, is sent on an engagement with Watanabe (Tadashi Okuno), a former professor. The film begins in a bar with Akiko off screen on the phone talking to her boyfriend Noriaki (Ryo Kase), who’s concerned and curious about what’s going on with her. Slowly we see Hikoshi step into the picture, her booker, who spends the next ten minutes talking her into taking the engagement.

In his vitriolic review of Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard’s self-indulgent mess that screened at Cannes in 2010), renowned critic Mark Kermode said: “the movie is incredibly boring and incomprehensible, but so boring and incomprehensible that critics concluded it must be quite profound.” With that quote in mind, I carefully read every single glowing review I could find of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s new film The Master (including one already on this site) after watching it at the Toronto Film Festival. Before the love fest, I walked out of the theater feeling confident that everyone else in attendance hated it as much as I did. Instead, it seems as if everyone has found a safe place for their beloved director’s latest to hide by looking for praise anywhere they could. The film follows the life and tribulations of former sailor Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) whose rather random but instant bond with Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) turns into a lasting friendship that puzzles everyone around them. Quell is a deeply damaged soul who appears to be guided by his basic human needs of sex and violence but also hides greater emotional devotion to a long lost love – one he tries to retrieve years too late. Lancaster Dodd is an equally insane but significantly more eloquent oddball thanks to his natural ability to influence others around him. While his ego knows no bounds and his methods reveal no logic whatsoever, he displays such a sense of self-assurance and persuasion that he can

We all love Monty Python (if you don’t, just pretend you know what I’m talking about and keep going). And by that standard, anything with the name in the title must be gloriously brilliant. It’s going to break comedic ground by its ability to comment on the highest level of societal discussion. At the same time, it’s going to be the silliest piece of nonsense you’ve ever found yourself gut-splitting, on the floor, laughing at — while crying, as well. A Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman, however, is not a Monty Python film. It is an act of self-indulgent nostalgia by a group of men who love their colleague. In 1986, three years before his death from cancer, Graham Chapman decided to conduct an experiment by taping an audio book that would serve as a fictional telling of his life. It seems that filmmakers Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson and Ben Timlett got ahold of these tapes and thought it would be a grand idea to rally a few of the Python gang together to fill in some gaps and turn it into this odd animated feature.

A film begins with its script. So when a screenwriter is poised with creating a script for a film entitled Seven Psychopaths and is unable to get past page one (for various reasons), it’s obvious we have a conundrum on our hands. Marty (Colin Farrell) has found himself, drunk more times than not, staring at a blank notepad still trying to figure out who the seven psychopaths are. As the story goes on, he encounters a series of psychopaths all surrounding a dog kidnapping scheme that Hans (Christopher Walken) and Billy (Sam Rockwell) are running. Billy has picked up a Shih Tzu dog that happens to belong to Charlie (Woody Harrelson), who happens to be a raving psychopath who heads up some sort of mob or something. While this film sets itself up (marketing-wise) as a crazy comedy about this slew of characters, it really isn’t. It’s more about the process of writing, with a lot of blood and guts involved. The film enjoys the use of shocking comedic violence in a way that allows its characters to get a laugh through their situations and reactions more than just through their catchy one-liners. There are some jokes in this movie that are so deeply embedded in character reveals that it’s made for multiple viewings.

All evening I was prepared for the snarkily apathetic responses to a certain film holding its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival Saturday night. Sadly, there was no Tweet expressing, “Cloud Atlas … shrug.” But there were indeed some claims of “meh” and “okay,” though perhaps not as many as there were declaring the ambitious effort either a monumental masterpiece or an epic failure. The film, which is based on the David Mitchell novel and adapted and directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, seems to be this year’s Inception or Tree of Life, as it parts the waves of criticism more distinctly than even the current American political divide. And, hey, Cloud Atlas actually sounds rather relevant to the presidential election with its apparent themes of history repeating itself and debate over change. The funny thing about a movie like Cloud Atlas is that the negative reviews seem to be more marketable than the positive. Those who say it’s a narrative mess still tell us to see the film for ourselves, if only because it’s still a marvel of cinema. And critics with the highest praise cut their own exaltations down by stating that a lot of moviegoers are going to hate it, whether because they won’t have the patience or they just won’t get it.

Rust and Bone follows the character of Alain (Matthias Schoenaerts) as he tries to make his way through life as best he can. We first see him with his son, Sam (Armand Verdure), on a train, collecting scrap food from receptacles. They’re heading towards his sister, Anna (Corinne Masiero), who he’s planning to stay with for a while. He ends up getting a job with a security company and has a chance encounter with a woman, Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), who trains whales at a water park. There is an accident at the park, and Stephanie ends up losing her legs. The film takes us through Alain’s experiences as he sees all of these relationships through. Alain is a character of much contrivance. He comes off mostly as a drifter with little to his name. His inability to pity Stephanie is what benefits her as we watch her recovery, but at the same time we see him have the same approach to how he handles his relationship with his sister and his five-year-old son. His response to anything he can’t quite control is to lash out at it, with scenes of him shouting and punishing his child. In one moment we see him throw his son across the room, and the child ends up hitting his head on a table. We see so many moments in which he’s being loving and compassionate, but in times when things aren’t good he almost can’t manage to keep being loving.

Michel Gondry has given us The Green Hornet, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep, Be Kind Rewind, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party and Human Nature. His films, while at times having trouble with their narrative, have always been able to produce a visual flair that rivals that of the old silent Buster Keaton films. Here, however, while offering hints of that visual flair, is a film with almost no narrative and little flair to be had. The We and the I is set on the last day of school and shows us the long bus ride that a group of students takes on their way home from school. We are a fly on the wall in this bus as we see relationships strengthen and disappear over the film’s runtime. The thing about high school, and more importantly about high school students, is that they’re all children. Films such as The Breakfast Club and Election have painted a particular picture of high school by creating relatable characters. They deal with their own problems, which are also very self-centered and childish, in a way that audiences are able to associate with. In The We and the I, the problems of the characters at no point feel truly relatable in the same way as the aforementioned films. They immediately have a negative relation to your memory, almost saying, “How precious,” in the worst way possible.

Tomi Ungerer is a French artist who’s won multiple awards for his work in children’s illustrated books. He’s been an influence to many others including (but not limited to) Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are). Documentaries about a specific person, or group of people, are easily faulted for the asinine reasoning that if their subject lacks the charisma and interest then any discovery that their work managed to create will immediately be negated because the film was unable to capture your attention. Far Out Isn’t Far Enough’s fault is not with its subject at all – a man whom no one would refuse to have over for dinner no matter the topic of conversation. While Tomi Ungerer may be known to some as only an illustrator and writer of children’s books, he happens to have so many layers to his darkened tone. The film takes us through his foray into political commentary, racial and social commentary as well as erotic expressionism. With Ungerer being born in an area in France so close to the German border (so close it even became part of Germany for a while) in 1931 he’s lived a life in which he’s witnessed first-hand wars of races, genders and nations; which are all things that he’s managed to utilize to feed into his art.

With his third feature film Looper, writer/director Rian Johnson marks the official return of the smart science-fiction film that works to stimulate audiences while making them think. Such a double-layer genre of “style equals substance” sci-fi has been elusive but more than often successful in Hollywood as studios took a leap of faith on projects like Blade Runner, The Matrix, Dark City, Minority Report, and most recently Inception. I can only assume that the film industry insiders who attended the premiere of Looper at the Toronto International Film Festival also leaned towards that same exercise and brought up comparisons of years past to properly qualify their impressions of the film. In doing so, none could be more accurate than Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys, the 1995 mind-bending remake of the French cinema classic La Jetée (which also featured Bruce Willis…). Johnson may have been inspired by the closing scene of Gilliam’s opus, where an innocent child watches an older man fall on his knees after being shot by airport security. Other worthy comparisons include some of Brian De Palma’s earlier works (especially The Fury) and the Back to the Future trilogy. Worry not, there is no correlation in tone between Doc Brown’s DeLorean adventures and the central plot elements of Looper. But like Robert Zemeckis, Johnson approaches time travel from the viewpoint of subjective consequence, which remains the most fascinating aspect of this very popular concept. Similarly to the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance where Marty’s parents must fall in love,

Editor’s Note: We’ve asked a Jamaican to go to Canada to cover the movies of TIFF 2012. Andrew Robinson, whose work you can check out over at his blog, has obliged and will be filling us all in on the antics in the Great White North. Here’s his first missive. Any day now I’ll be on a plane heading to Toronto for the very first time in order to attend a film festival for the very first time. I’ve been excited to attend the Toronto International Film Festival (affectionately known as TIFF) for the past three years, and now it’s finally happening. Before we dive into this list, which honestly cannot do the festival’s amazing looking lineup any justice, I will give a couple caveats. It’s based on my confirmed schedule, and therefore two films which I’m genuinely excited for but will not be able to see (Rian Johnson’s Looper and Michael Haneke’s Amour) are not on it; it’s also in no sort of ordered preference. So with that out of the way and with all the excitement being thrown around, let’s take a quick look at the films that I’m most excited for:

The lineup for this year’s Toronto International Film Festival is essentially an embarrassment of riches (we’re still fanning ourselves over the sheer magnitude and quality of their first wave of programming announcement), and it’s only gotten better today with the news that the fest has added no less than sixty new films to their slate. These picks round out their Documentary, Midnight Madness, Vanguard, Kids, Cinematheque, and City to City programs, and if you weren’t drooling before, get ready to positively salivate. Stand-out picks include Matthew Cooke‘s How to Make Money Selling Drugs, Alex Gibney‘s Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, Janet Tobias‘ No Place on Earth, Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out, Benjamin Renner, Vincent Patar, and Stéphane Aubier‘s Ernest & Célestine, the world premiere of The ABCs of Death, Nicolás López‘s Aftershock, Martin McDonagh‘s Seven Psychopaths, and so, so, so many more. Check out full synopses for each newly announced film after the break, thanks to both TIFF and The Playlist. As ever, our top picks will appear in italics.

When we Rejects get let out of the cage (and it’s a literal cage, a big one under Dear Leader Miller’s desk, with a hamster wheel and everything) to journey to festivals far and wide, we tend to turn in some pretty comprehensive coverage. Along the way, we often cover some films that pop up along the festival circuit for months on end, titles that show up at Sundance and then journey west to SXSW, that premiere at Cannes before going American at LAFF, and those that parlay good buzz at one fest into showings across the globe. We’ve already drooled over today’s announcement of the Toronto International Film Festival‘s first wave of programming, but buried within those 62 just-announced films are five we’ve already checked out at other festivals (including Sundance and Cannes). Want to get a taste of what TIFF will offer (hint: tastes like poutine and makes your mouth water just as much)? Hit the break to get reacquainted with 5 TIFF-bound films that we’ve already seen (and, in many cases, already loved).

The Toronto International Film Festival has today announced (via Cinema Blend) their (assumed full, but clearly still ripe for additions) line-up of both their Galas and Special Presentations sections. Just two sections? Sounds slim, right? Wrong. Today’s announcement includes a stunning sixty-two total films, including some of the year’s most anticipated, along with a bevy of “oh, hey, that’s ready to go already?” titles sure to stir up just as much excitement as the other heavy hitters. Toronto will play host to such films as Rian Johnson‘s Looper (which will serve as the Opening Night film), Ben Affleck‘s Argo, Robert Redford‘s The Company You Keep, Mike Newell‘s Great Expectations, David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina, Neil Jordan‘s Byzantium, Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Twyker‘s Cloud Atlas, Sally Potter‘s Ginger and Rosa, Thomas Vinterberg‘s The Hunt, J.A. Bayona‘s The Impossible, Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing, Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond the Pines, Jacques Audiard‘s Rust and Bone, and – no big deal – Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder. It’s okay to be out of breath – this is easily the best festival line-up of the year. After the break, check out the full list of TIFF’s just-announced Galas and Special Presentations titles, with our own most anticipated films singled out, all the better to help plan your own TIFF-going (or TIFF-coverage-reading).