Showbuzz Daily


 
Author Archive
Recent
Most Commented
Random
 

 
Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “Queer” & “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life”

  QUEER (A24 – TBD):  Luca Guadagnino has unearthed glamour in the blood-soaked dance troupe/witches’ coven of Suspiria and the cannibal romance of Bones and All, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that his s...
by Mitch Salem
 
Full Story »

 
 
Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “Heretic” & “Emilia Perez”

  HERETIC (A24 – Nov. 15):  A nifty piece of philosophical horror from Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the writers of the original A Quiet Place.  The set-up is almost fairy tale in its simplicity.  A pair of young wo...
by Mitch Salem
 
Full Story »

 

 
Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “The Wild Robot” & “Disclaimer”

THE WILD ROBOT (DreamWorks Animation/Universal – Sept. 27):  Chris Sanders’s movie is a fairly captivating if unsurprising family entertainment.  In the future, when a plane with a cargo of robots crashes off the ...
by Mitch Salem
 
Full Story »

 
 
Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “The Assessment” & “Road Diary”

  THE ASSESSMENT (no distrib);  It seems initially as though Fleur Fortune’s feature directing debut The Assessment will be easy to peg.  The script, by John Donnelly and the duo credited as “Mrs and Mr Thoma...
by Mitch Salem
 
Full Story »

 

 
Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “Nightbitch” & “The Order”

  NIGHTBITCH (Searchlight/Disney – Dec. 6):  Writer/director Marielle Heller tries to move outside her comfort zone with Nightbitch, following the small-scale character studies Diary Of A Teenage Girl, Can You Ever ...
by Mitch Salem
 
Full Story »

 
 
Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “The Room Next Door” & “Eden”

  THE ROOM NEXT DOOR (Sony Classics – Dec. 20):  Pedro Almodovar’s first English-language feature is in keeping with his recent, more contemplative films (Pain and Glory, Parallel Mothers), but it’s eve...
by Mitch Salem
 
Full Story »

 

 
Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “On Swift Horses” & “Hard Truths”

  ON SWIFT HORSES (no distrib):  In the years after World War II, Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) marries Lee (Will Poulter), who’s hardworking and in love with her but not exciting, and they move into the Kansas house ...
by Mitch Salem
 
Full Story »

 
 
Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “The Life of Chuck” & “We Live In Time”

  THE LIFE OF CHUCK (no distrib):  Although Mike Flanagan first gained attention as a director of low-budget feature films, he may be the first horror filmmaker to become an acknowledged master of the genre largely throu...
by Mitch Salem
 
Full Story »

 

 
Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “Anora” & “All Of You”

ANORA (Neon – Oct. 17):  Sean Baker has been making quirky, captivating character studies for some time now, starting with Starlet in 2012 and following it with Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket.  The ro...
by Mitch Salem
 
Full Story »

 
 
Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “William Tell” & “The Cut”

  WILLIAM TELL (Goldwyn – 2025):  If it requires a certain amount of audacity to take a short children’s story and expand it into a violent adult action epic, that gall has to rise by several orders of magnit...
by Mitch Salem
 
Full Story »

 

 
Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “The Brutalist” & “The Last Showgirl”

  THE BRUTALIST (A24 – TBD):  The most remarkable thing about Brady Corbet’s epic may be that it’s so enjoyable to watch.  The notion of a 197-minute saga (not including intermission) about Holocaust s...
by Mitch Salem
 
Full Story »

 
 
Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “The Substance” & “Nutcrackers”

THE SUBSTANCE (MUBI – Sept. 20):  It’s quite a feat to take the body horror crown at a film festival that also features a contribution from David Cronenberg, but Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance uses its revo...
by Mitch Salem
 
Full Story »

 

 
Film Festival

Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “The Shrouds” & “Bird”

  THE SHROUDS (no distrib):  At age 81, David Cronenberg’s fascination with the malignant possibilities of the human body, and with the fiendish manipulation of same, still knows no bounds.  The Shrouds begins wi...
by Mitch Salem
 
Full Story »

 
 
Articles

Behind the US/Worldwide Weekend Box Office – 9.1.2024

  OPENINGS:  A variety of studios threw product at the Labor Day weekend wall.  None of them broke through, but REAGAN (ShowbizDirect) zeroed in on its target audience–reportedly nearly 2/3 of the audience was over...
by Mitch Salem
 
Full Story »

 

 
Articles

Behind the US/Worldwide Weekend Box Office – 8.25.2024

  OPENINGS:  None of the weekend’s wide arrivals found much of an audience.  BLINK TWICE (MGM/Amazon) led the weak group with $7.3M, and given its relatively low $20M+ production costs, it might hit breakeven, depe...
by Mitch Salem
 
Full Story »

 

 
 

 

Search

 

 

Archive

 

 

Newsletter Sign-up