ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

Female Film Critics 24/375

TIFF 2024

Festivals Reviews 

ANORA (TIFF 2024) – Review by Liz Braun

Liz Braun , , , , , , ,

Anora is a terrific movie, but no surprise there — it’s been winning over audiences since it took the Palme D’Or at Cannes last spring. Writer/director Sean Baker once again mines the world o’ sex work to find a great story populated by a rag-tag crowd of the dispossessed and disenfranchised. In Anora, a young sex worker marries the son of a Russian oligarch; she then has to deal with the fallout when his powerful parents show up, demanding an annulment. It’s a Damon Runyon tale for the 21st century, a subversive Cinderella story that’s hugely energetic and often very funny.

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Festivals Reviews 

BABYGIRL (TIFF 2024) – Review by Liz Braun

Liz Braun , , , , ,

Babygirl opens and closes with scenes of Nicole Kidman having sex. As for that and everything else in between: Not buying it. Kidman stars in Babygirl as Romy, the tightly-wound CEO of a company that has something to do with robotics. The opening sex scene with her husband (Antonio Banderas, quietly impressive here) — orgasmic noises notwithstanding — winds up with Romy leaving the room to finish in private with the help of porn and her computer.

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Festivals Reviews 

BELOVED TROPIC (TIFF 2024) – Review by Nadine Whitney

Nadine Whitney , , , , , , , ,

In a lush tropical garden in Panama, two women find a connection that transcends age, nationality, and social status. Ana María (Jenny Navarrete) sits sipping tea with Mercedes (Paulina García). Ana is wearing a lilac dress laughing with Mercedes. They laugh together. In the garden the sounds of wood chimes and the sea swell in the background. It’s a soundscape director Ana Endara brings into Beloved Tropic (Querido Trópico) sparingly at poignant moments.

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Festivals Reviews 

BIRD (TIFF 2024) – Review by Liz Braun

Liz Braun , , , , , ,

Bailey, who is 12, is growing up in a squat outside London with zero adult supervision. She doesn’t lack for parents, but her father is not much more than a child himself and her mother is currently living with a violent and terrible man. That’s the world presented in Bird, a coming-of-age drama from writer/director Andrea Arnold starring newcomer Nykiya Adams as the observant Bailey.

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Festivals Reviews 

BLUE ROAD: THE EDNA O’BRIEN STORY (TIFF 2024)- Review by Leslie Combemale

Leslie Combemale , , , ,

Bio-docs can be so tiresome. They were born, they did this, they did that, blah blah blah. Then there are the ones that really capture not only the subject’s unique experience, but also pan out to frame it within the larger societal context. At their best, biographical documentaries not only inspire, but speak to just how much one person can make an impact on the world. One of these is Sinéad O’Shea’s Blue Road – The Edna O’Brien Story. Though straightforward, it does everything a great bio-doc sets out to do.

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Festivals Reviews 

CAN I GET A WITNESS? (TIFF 2024) – Review by Leslie Combemale

Leslie Combemale , , , ,

Given the speed with which we are destroying our environment, our future is bleak indeed, and that’s certainly true if Can I Get A Witness? is any indication. For the film, Canadian writer/director Ann Marie Fleming reunites with Sandra Oh, who voiced a character in her 2016 animated feature Window Horses. Oh plays Ellie, a mother on the brink of her 50th birthday, who is reflecting on her life and relationship with her daughter Kiah (Keira Jang). Time is running short for her. She’s expected to take her own life on her birthday.

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Festivals Reviews 

DAUGHTER’S DAUGHTER (TIFF 2024) – Review by Ulkar Alakbarova

Ulkar Alakbarova , , , ,

There is nothing more heartbreaking than losing a child. It’s a pain no parent can bear. Some can move on, while others give up, unable to cope with their grief. In most films, the mother often plays a pivotal role in the decisions she must make. However, what you will see in Xi Huang’s Daughter’s Daughter is a different and profoundly moving layer of what a mother can and cannot do when it comes to her child.

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Festivals Reviews 

DO I KNOW YOU FROM SOMEWHERE? (TIFF 2024) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

Valerie Kalfrin , , , , , , , ,

When faced with a tough choice, we all hope we’re making the right move. The bittersweet breakup story Do I Know You From Somewhere? puts its heart where its theme is, showing that all decisions lead us to who we are, even the ones off from our true path. This sci-fi romance is a tender, thoughtful, and occasionally comical journey through one couple’s liminal space, one that shifts moment to moment, incorporating memories of their life together with glimpses of another.

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Festivals Reviews 

ELSE (TIFF 2024) – Review by Rachel West

Rachel West , , , , , ,

More than a pandemic movie, Else is above all a body horror film. Watching people slowly and grotesquely merge with their surroundings – be it the sidewalk, a tree, or a bedsheet – is horrifying. But this change happens so gradually and mostly off-screen that the horror isn’t nearly exciting enough, especially for a Midnight Madness audience that kicked the program off with Coralie Fargeat’s excellent body horror The Substance.

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Festivals Reviews 

FLOW (TIFF 2024) – Review by Nadine Whitney

Nadine Whitney , , , , ,

Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’s impeccable fable Flow is again proof of Guillermo Del Toro’s maxim that animation is cinema – “It’s a medium for art, it’s a medium for film, and I think animation should stay in the conversation.” Del Toro argued that animation is not just for children and Flow, although family friendly, is a sophisticated metaphor for the effects for environmental crises, and for the experience of refugees trying to stay alive and learning to trust each other despite linguistic and cultural differences. Flow is a work of immense cinematic art. A film with no dialogue and no humans that speaks to both the human condition and considers the immensity of the natural world which is suffering because of our failures as a species. Flow is a profound, emphatic, and empathetic experience.

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