Film clips

Love Crime, a new film starring Kristin Scott Thomas was to have opened this Friday at The Main in Royal Oak but has been rescheduled for Oct. 28. Watch for the review closer to opening from yours truly. Given the general offerings of films released this fall it’s a bit of a standout.....Otherwise opening over the next two weeks at Landmark's Detroit properties are: The Hedgehog at the Main, and Life, Above All at Landmark's Maple in West Bloomfield, and the following weekend Dirty Girl at the Main and Toast (watch for the review here) at the Maple.

Let there be...well, fewer kinks in the Toronto International Film Festival and its Bell Lightbox, the spectacular new theatre complex (above pic from the TIFF website) in TO’s entertainment district, which features several screening rooms, a museum, library, swanky restaurants and bar, in a modernistic – yes – box of a building where those in it at night appear as shadows to people outside. All so film noirish, right? The building, which admittedly is exceptional (I'm still dying to see it), had its first full try out at this month’s TIFF and the reviews were not all rosy. The complaints? Apparently no one thought of constructing more than two slow and rather small elevators to go among six floors, many of which can be jammed with people at festival time. “This building was designed for the festival, by the festival, and it doesn’t work,” a photographer who has long covered TIFF told the National Post. One filmgoer said she was surprised there were obstructed views “for a theatre that’s” so devoted to film. Not to despair. Fest co-director Cameron Bailey put his spin on it. “It creates the conditions for these happy accidents, collisions between people … which is really what this festival should be all about.” But he acknowledged kinks will be worked out. “We’re still figuring [the Lightbox] out," he told the Post. "It’s kind of like a musical instrument.  We’re just learning how to play it.”

Von Trier, Wenders – new films from these vanguard European directors will be featured next month at Montreal’s Festival of New Cinema, which I usually attend but won’t this fall. Also, Pedro Almodóvar will have a new flic in this true cinephile fest, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary! (Even the Montreal and Toronto world festivals aren’t that old.) Von Trier’s Melancholia has Kirsten Dunst, Kiefer Sutherland and Charlotte Gainsbourg (who was in his 2009 Antichrist), a film about the end of the world. Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In has his favourite Antonio Banderas as a depraved plastic surgeon. But, yes, cheeriness is apparently on the horizon with Wenders’s Pina, a film in 3-D dedicated to the late German choreographer Pina Bausch. Despite this festival’s rarefied films and audiences it will screen almost 300 movies including 11 world premieres.