When you arrive at the third movie in a franchise you don’t expect it to be the best, but this might be the case with Rian Johnson’s delightful mystery series. Wake Up Dead Man is quite a departure from the big and brassy Glass Onion, and certainly not as cozy as the original Knives Out. At the screening Johnson suggested this one has a bit of Edgar Allan Poe in its DNA. It is a bit slow to get going, but the payoff at the end makes it entirely worth it.
Josh O’Connor is the lead for the first 45 minutes as a priest assigned to a new parish where he will be mentored by an older, more combative man of the cloth (Josh Brolin), and getting to know the congregation — including Glenn Close, Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, Mila Kunis, and Jeremy Renner. Of course, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) shows up on the scene to investigate a classic tiny room dead body case, and that’s when it gets really going. We get multiple characters who all have the motivation to murder the victim, naturally. The movie takes a number of shots at the hypocrisy of organized religion, especially the Catholic Church, while being entirely feminist and progressive. It is an unalloyed blast and will make for a terrific pre-Christmas treat when it arrives in cinemas and on Netflix. I was also tickled pink with how Blanc lifts a line directly from Elaine May’s Ishtar — “Telling the truth can be a bitter herb.”
The cast and director of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery at TIFF
It was Sarah Polley’s name as co-writer that attracted me to Pablo Trapero’s & Sons. The Women Talking writer-director was just given the key to the city by Toronto’s mayor, Olivia Chow, which might explain why Polley wasn’t at the screening today. This is the story of a wealthy, curmudgeonly novelist (Bill Nighy) who hasn’t written anything in years. He lives with a housekeeper and his teenage son (Noah Jupe) while estranged from his adult sons (Johnny Flynn and George MacKay) and ex-wife (Imelda Staunton). In poor health, he invites his two adult sons to his home for the first time in decades and tells them something about their half-brother, the teenager, that changes everyone who hears the news.
At first this wasn’t working for me, I wasn’t on board with Daddy Issues: The Movie. But as it goes along, especially once this key information is conveyed, it gets a lot funnier, and a lot more engaging. Overall, & Sons is a dramatic oddity that could be even considered science fiction, and something with maybe a bit too much family melodrama to be plausible for a bunch of posh Brits, but certainly worthwhile, especially Nighy whose character achieves a kind of peak narcissism.
Pablo Trapero, director of & Sons, at TIFF
It might not have been a good idea to go from one movie about a self-obsessed elderly artistic type with a fraught relationship with his adult children to another with a very similar dynamic — the latter can’t help but suffer in comparison. But then the latter also has Ian McKellan.
In The Christophers, director Steven Soderbergh and writer Ed Solomon tell the story of a once-famed British painter who lives in a sprawling London house overstuffed with decades of his work. His two adult children (Jessica Gunning and James Corden) want to get their hands on an incomplete third series of his most famous paintings, portraits of a former lover, and hire a forger (Michaela Coel), to substitute copies and steal the originals. It turns out the forger might have her own reasons to want a bit of payback on this wildly egotistical but hilarious painter. Soderbergh, working as his own cinematographer and editor, as usual, defers to handheld camera in this picture, some of which is a little off-putting in the jerky-cam stakes, but a movie like this sinks or swims on the strength of its script and performances. Coel and especially McKellan really shine with some stellar chemistry — expect McKellan to get attention come awards time.
Steven Soderbergh, Michaela Coel, Jessica Gunning, and Ed Solomon at TIFF
