After ten days, at least 55 films and an obscene amount of poutine and Tim Horton’s breakfast sandwiches, Team Playlist is done with the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival. TIFF is probably the world’s biggest film festival, and if there were any worries about the “death of cinema” spurred by thinkpieces written as the fest was getting underway, they were swiftly dispelled by a line-up that showed the medium to be in fine health, from expensive true-life disaster movies and starry biopics to weird world cinema and tiny microbudget indies.

Continue reading The 15 Best Films Of The 2016 Toronto International Film Festival at The Playlist.

Growing up Canadian, one learns to be wary of the often imitative homegrown films, that fill content quotas and occasionally creeps into cinemas. There are exceptions, most notably the world-famous directors who find berths at prestigious competitive festivals, but Canadian cinema — Anglophone more so than Francophone — struggles to escape the “CanCon” stigma. That conditioned skepticism inevitably rears its head when surveying the Toronto International Film Festival program which, justifiably enough, must also serve as a global stage for Canuck cinema.

Continue reading Zacharius Kunuk’s ‘Searchers’ Is An Impressive Inuit Take On John Ford’s Classic Western [TIFF Review] at The Playlist.