For all our coverage of Toronto International Film Festival 2017, click here.
Well, it was my first Toronto International Film Festival this year as Vanyaland film editor, and it was a tremendously crazy six days while I was up there. I saw a total of 22 movies, including some that I'll be writing about later, but what we've got for you today, to wrap up our coverage of the TIFF, is a collection of capsule reviews -- what we've dubbed "the rest of the fest." Some are notable and award-winning, others are absolutely miserable and worth running away from. We have new works from Joseph Kahn, John Woo, Brie Larson, Scott Cooper, and many others telling tales from all ends of the genre spectrum. Hey, this list even includes one of the best films I've seen all year, so check it out.
Hostiles
This revisionist western, competently directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Black Mass) but utterly boring and lifeless, might be one of the greatest disappointments of the festival if Dan Gilroy hadn’t decided to throw his hat into the ring at the last minute. It’s got your standard evils-of-racism plot that countless other directors have worked with and spun entertaining and provocative gold with; at the tail end of the Indian wars, a prejudiced soldier (Christian Bale) is tasked by his superiors with transporting a dying chief that he fought against back to his homeland in Montana so that he may die in peace. You, being a person with breath in your lungs and intelligence in your head, probably can guess where this is going, and Cooper makes few attempts to complicate or transform its legacy.
His typically-excellent cast is largely pushed to the margins (Jesse Plemons, Timothee Chalamet, Ben Foster) or forced to overact well past the point of believability (Rosamund Pike). Wes Studi, playing the Chief in question, is lovely as always, but it’s a shame that he’s trapped in a movie this staid. Bale’s fine, and manages to do excellent work in the once scene that might have transformed the legacy of its lead- his effecting friendship with a black soldier stands in vast contrast to the legion of miserable cowboys that have come before him- but he, like Studi, is trapped in a movie that has a few ideas and not a clue how to use them. Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi’s landscapes are, of course, quite pretty, but it’s nothing you haven’t seen before in other, better, films. Stick with those.