I’m currently piecing together what I hope will be my final schedule for the 2013 Toronto Film Festival, but who are we kidding? Just today I learned the early screening of The Fifth Estate has been moved to late evening, which actually opens up room for me to see Don Jon, but is also a sign the schedule is hardly set in stone. Nevertheless, by tomorrow I’ll have my list of most anticipated films I’ll be seeing at the fest along with my proposed schedule.
Speaking of which, on that schedule you’ll probably see Kelly Reichardt‘s Night Moves, a thriller starring Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, Peter Sarsgaard and Alia Shawkat and today I have a clip from the film to show you, but first the synopsis:
When do legitimate convictions demand illegal behaviors? What happens to a person’s idealism when they find their back against the wall? Night Moves is the story of three radical environmentalists coming together to execute the most intense protest of their lives: the explosion of a hydroelectric dam.
Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy was decent and I loathed Meek’s Cutoff, but some early buzz surrounding this one has piqued my interest. Here’s the clip.
One film that won’t be playing the Toronto Film Festival, but did recently premiere at the Venice Film Festival is Locke starring Tom Hardy and written and directed by Eastern Promises scribe Steven Knight. As for the plot and the buzz, I’ll let the opening paragraph of Leslie Felperin’s Variety review fill you in:
Writer-director Steven Knight’s sophomore feature, Locke, is basically just Tom Hardy driving a car while making a bunch of phone calls, and yet this ingeniously executed study in cinematic minimalism has depth, beauty and poise. A finely tuned showcase for Hardy’s exceptional acting skills, Bluetooth-enabled dashboard displays and the dynamic range of the Red Epic camera, the pic tracks a dark night of the soul for a construction-site manager en route from Birmingham to London. But if the disappointing performance of pics like Buried is any indication, one-handers are a tough sell theatrically, and Locke will need fine marketing calibration to click with audiences.
The clip for this one is hardly interesting and, in fact, quite boring as you’ll need to try and imagine what may or may not happen surrounding this brief 46-second look. Knight described the film for The Playlist saying:
Shot in real time, Locke breaks new ground in movie making with Hardy holding the screen alone while the camera never blinks. The night time highway is part back drop, part art installation, as a stellar cast play the people Ivan loves and hates and who witness his extraordinary journey to despair and ultimately to redemption. A man’s life transformed in a half a tank of gas. I believe the journey of Ivan Locke is deeply moving and utterly compulsive.
Intrigued?
