Female Film Critics 24/375
Jewish-German artist Charlotte Salomon lived through Hitler’s rise to power, and was captured and sent to Auschwitz, where she died the day she arrived. This chronicle of her life, which is comprised of 769 paintings created between 1941 and 1943, is one of the most important bodies of work in the 20th century, but much like the art of so many other female artists, it has been all but erased from history.
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Apocalyptic stories are no strangers at the Toronto International Film Festival, my favorite of all time (granted one that predates my time at the festival) being Don McKellar’s TIFF award-winning Last Night, in which the Toronto native imagines how a group of city residents count down humanity’s final hours and emerges with a drama that is captivating and oddly, beautifully romantic. This year, the festival chose writer/director Camille Griffin’s Silent Night, another end-of-the-world story that like McKellar’s film tries to strike a tone beyond pure horror, but one doesn’t quite work with pieces that don’t quite fit. Griffin deserves credit for taking the risk, but it is one in which pay off proves elusive.
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Can you remember the first time you really knew you were going to die? You know, when you learned that every human and living being on the planet has an expiration date, including you? What if that date was Christmas, and everyone else was going to die, too? That’s the premise for writer/director Camille Griffin’s film Silent Night. The film is terrifying and as dark as a starless sky, not because of the premise itself, but because of how the story unfolds. Absolutely not for children, and not even for adults who avoid movies with children in peril, this is decidedly not a Christmas movie.
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In 2003, while the American media batted around the possibility of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and some outlets even helped to advance the Bush administration’s march to war, Britain faced its own press-related crisis that didn’t receive much coverage outside the United Kingdom.
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“I was sort of fascinated that either I’d forgotten, or I’d never known about Katharine Gun and I’d never known about this memo. So, I felt like, you know, just as far as kind of a historical piece in sort of shedding light on that, the lead up to that conflict, I thought it was a very important story to tell,” says Keira Knightley.
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In 1946, Rachael Morgan (period drama whiz Keira Knightley) arrives in the bombed-out wreckage of Hamburg, Germany, to join her husband, Lewis (Jason Clarke), a British colonel tasked with rebuilding the city.
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Like recent Disney live-action adventures like 2013’s Oz the Great and Powerful and this year’s A Wrinkle in Time, The Nutcracker is visually gorgeous and entertaining enough, with some interesting approaches to adapting familiar material, but the results don’t quite cook up as well as you’d like, especially considering the first-rate ingredients.
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