‘Land’ new-style old-school musical – Best movies of the ’16 Toronto Film Fest

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Amanda Knox:

There were many fine documentaries at Toronto, but this one carries the force of revelation. It’s about the notorious case of the 20-year-old Seattle student who, in 2007, was tried and convicted of murdering one of her roommates in a hillside village in Italy. From minute one, she was so demonized that the name “Amanda Knox” came to symbolize a twisted mythology of guilt. Yet, as co-directors Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn demonstrate definitively, most of what we think we know about Amanda Knox emerged from the overheated imagination of Fleet Street tabloid newspapers (she was a … fiend! Who killed the roommate! And one look in her evil eye will show you that!), which fused with the prejudices of the prosecutor to create a lurid Italian Catholic psychodrama of sin and insanity.

Arrival:

Operating somewhere in the vast expanse between Christopher Nolan and Terrence Malick, Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (“Prisoners”) has managed to fashion an elaborate science-fiction procedural that hinges less on special effects and spectacle (though there’s plenty of both) than it does on intellect and a remarkably intimate life lesson. When confronted with an event far beyond the realm of human experience — the “arrival” of a dozen massive alien crafts — everyone’s first instinct is to assume they have all the answers.

Barry:

After “Southside with You,” you’d think the world might not need another drama about the young Barack Obama. Yet this one casts its own fascinating and touching spell. It’s set in 1981, when Obama wasn’t even Barack yet — he was just Barry (played by the remarkable Devon Terrell), a tall, friendly, not so professorial, slightly awkward 20-year-old college student who moves to New York City to transfer to Columbia University, where he whiles away his junior year shooting hoops, smoking dope, landing a girlfriend (Anya Taylor-Joy), and jostling between the black students and the white students as he tries to merge the conflicting panels of his identity.

Jackie:

Eleanor Roosevelt helped draft the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Hlilary Clinton led the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, and Michelle Obama crusaded against childhood obesity. But what exactly was Jacqueline Kennedy’s contribution to history? That’s the question behind Pablo Larrain’s “Jackie,” which might have been borderline tacky on paper (and still questionable in places onscreen, as when JFK’s head explodes in extreme closeup, splattering the camera, in an unnecessary reenactment), but redeems itself via an incredible performance by Natalie Portman, who embodies JFK’s widow at her strongest (immediately following her husband’s assassination) and most superficial.

Lady Macbeth:

Inspired not by Shakespeare’s play but the Russian novel “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” this dark gem about a bride with blood on her hands attempts to recreate the sort of marital prison in which women have found themselves trapped throughout the centuries. Anchored by a concealed-weapon performance from misleadingly compliant-looking newcomer Florence Pugh, the movie considers how a woman, married off to bear children for a man who refuses to touch her, learns to seize what limited power she can in her situation. Confining the action to Lady Katherine’s suffocating microcosm, director William Oldroyd brings admirable restraint to this lusty tale.

La La Land:

From the moment of its premiere in Venice, no film has dominated the festival circuit, the awards chatter, the sheer happy buzz of moviegoers like Damien Chazelle’s exhilarating bash of a new-style old-school musical. The reason for the excitement isn’t just the amazing novelty factor — i.e., the way Chazelle conceived and shot the movie in a 1950s-Hollywood-studio-set-meets-Jacques-Demy mode that’s as audacious as the postmodern pop rapture of “Moulin Rouge!” It’s also because Chazelle and his two leads, Ryan Gosling (as a moody jazz pianist) and Emma Stone (as an aspiring actress), plant a contemporary real-world fable of struggling dreamers right inside a confectionary world of dreams.

Moonlight:

The true breakout of Toronto (and Telluride, too, where the premiere was practically a homecoming for writer-director Barry Jenkins, a former festival intern) has been a modest little indie about a profoundly lonely young black man searching for connection in a community hard-wired to reject him. Perhaps “modest” is the wrong word since, while its protagonist may be soft-spoken, Jenkins ambitiously embraces the notion that this one portrait can reveal countless facets of the African-American experience seldom explored onscreen.

Nocturnal Animals:

Tom Ford’s first movie since “A Single Man” is a structurally daring romantic noir thriller, and it proves beyond a doubt that he’s a true filmmaker, with a seductive feel for surfaces and for the complex passions that beat just beneath them. Amy Adams is melancholy perfection as a Los Angeles art-gallery owner who may have made the wrong choices, and Jake Gyllenhaal is her ex-husband, who reappears as the protagonist of a novel — a scary redneck nightmare in which Gyllenhaal is like the hero of a revenge thriller, only he’s not Bronson or Liam Neeson. He’s just an ordinary man haunted by his own weakness.

Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer:

What is a “fixer” exactly? Going in to Joseph Cedar’s fascinating character study, I was expecting something minor — a shaggy portrait of a crash-and-burn bookie or two-bit hustler. After all, Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere, giving one of his all-time best performances) is the kind of small-time hustler we think of as harmless: a name-dropper with no oomph to follow through on his promises. So imagine my surprise to discover that Cedar (whose Oscar-nominated “Footnote” forecast his willingness to fry his audience’s brains) has cooked up a character whose minor cons threaten to bring down entire world governments.

Snowden:

We all know what Edward Snowden did: The former NSA contractor spilled a wealth of US secrets about surveillance. But what about the American surveillance state itself? Oliver Stone’s enthrallingly urgent whistleblower docudrama is the first Stone film in 20 years that really matters, because it gets deep into the nitty-gritty of what Snowden revealed, and in doing so it makes the supreme case for what he did. Tracing Snowden’s induction into the CIA and his rise through the Agency as a new breed of cyber-hacker, Stone captures from the inside how technology has revolutionized espionage, making it colder, creepier, deadlier. (RTRS)

By Owen Gleiberman

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