Critics are divided over Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, but Natalie Portman has been winning raves for her role in the ballet thriller.
The Toronto International Film Festival has officially landed at its new headquarters.
Bye-bye Sutton Place, hello Hyatt Regency.
The King St. location is certainly a tad more upbeat and with its proximity to the swanky bars and clubs; celeb watchers won’t have to go far to spot their favourite stars.
The actual TIFF Bell LightBox is still under construction, but it will be open for screenings and two restaurants – Luma and O&B Canteen – promise to keep film fans energized during the 10-day fest.
It’s a beautiful-looking building; I can’t wait to see more. (Tim Burton will have an exhibition there in November.)
Now, what can film fans expect at TIFF 2010?
The festival has been a pretty good indicator for who will dance with Oscar come Academy Award time. Last year, fest favourite The Hurt Locker stopped James Cameron’s Avatar behemoth dead in its tracks; in 2008, Slumdog Millionaire hit the sweet spot with Toronto film fans before conquering the rest of North America; 2007, it was the Coen brothers’ dark No Country For Old Men. And the list goes on.
So this year, everyone’s vying to be on the tip of TIFF talk.
And from what I’ve seen so far, performances and…death will rule this year’s fest.
It’s really something to watch John Curran (The Painted Veil) guide Robert DeNiro, Edward Norton and Milla Jovovich through his grim thriller, Stone.
Likewise, Jay Baruchel stretches his geek prowess with his darkly comic turn in Jacob Tierney’s Good Neighbours.
Even when he misses (cough, The Fountain), director Darren Aronofsky manages to generate buzz at TIFF. Two years ago it was The Wrestler and now he’s back with his supernatural thriller Black Swan, which is already hogging Oscar talk for star Natalie Portman.
And in what might prove to be one of TIFF’s hottest tickets, Clint Eastwood explores the afterlife in Hereafter. It’s only screening once and there is no advance press screening. Even the press conference is shrouded in mystery.
The one I’m most excited about, though, is Never Let Me Go. It’s adapted from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, who has written some of the most devastating books in the past 20 years. I’m interested to see how Alex Garland (The Beach, Coma, The Tesseract) deals with the book’s nasty plot twist, but in an interview with USA Today, director Mark Romanek offered a nice teaser: “The film is about: How do we not come to the end of our lives and regret how we lived it?”
Weighty stuff, but at TIFF these questions seem right at home.
