The 50 Buzziest Films of TIFF: We Cut Through the Hype So You Don’t Have To

The 50 Buzziest Films of TIFF: We Cut Through the Hype So You Don’t Have To

The 50 buzziest films of TIFF 2013

Single tickets for the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival go on sale this Sunday, September 1. The schedule, packed with hundreds of films, can make choosing what to see a rather daunting task. The solution: our guide to the 50 most talked-about movies at the festival this year, in which we scrutinize the advance hype (and the buzz from Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and Venice) to separate the must-sees from the flicks that only a mother could love.

5 = A sure thing
4 = A safe bet
3 = Even odds
2 = Highly dubious
1 = Totally sketchy

OSCAR BAIT »

August: Osage County

The cast—Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Sam Shepard, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliette Lewis—positively screams Oscar, but if the film is to be any good it needs to eschew the usual Oscar uplift. The original Pulitzer-winning play by Tracy Letts (who wrote last year’s disreputable Killer Joe) is a pitch-black comedy of familial dysfunction, and it’s hard to imagine veteran TV director John Wells (ER, The West Wing) going for the jugular with it. Still, Letts did the adaptation himself, and the casting is beyond reproach.
Score: 3

Dallas Buyers Club

Canada’s own Jean-Marc Vallée (C.R.A.Z.Y., The Young Victoria) directs this true-life tale about a hard-partying, womanizing Texan man (Matthew McConaughey, natch) who contracted AIDS in the early days of the epidemic, then established a black-market trade in experimental treatments for it. This could be another drippy heart-tugger like Philadelphia, but our guess is that Vallée’s intelligence and the ornery nature of McConaughey’s character will keep it from getting too sticky.
Score: 4

The Fifth Estate

Casting Benedict Cumberbatch in a biopic about dapper, white-maned Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was a stroke of genius, but will director Bill Condon be able to maintain the needed balance between celebration and condemnation? We’d be more optimistic if Condon was coming off of his sharp biopic Gods and Monsters, but that was 15 years ago. His most recent pictures: the queasy Dreamgirls and two installments of the Twilight saga.
Score: 2

Labor Day

TIFF golden boy Jason Reitman returns with this adaptation of Joyce Maynard’s 2009 novel about a mother (Kate Winslet) and son (Gattlin Griffith) held hostage in their own home by an escaped convict (Josh Brolin). It sounds like quite the change of pace for Reitman, and after the masochistically sour Young Adult, that’s probably a good thing. This could go any which way, but Winslet and Brolin strike us as a good pairing, and the fact that Paramount is willing to screen it so far in advance (it’s slated for a Christmas release) suggests confidence.
Score: 3

Philomena

British director Stephen Frears is capable of great things when he has the material (The Grifters, the hugely underrated Dirty Pretty Things, The Queen), and the buzz surrounding this picture about an elderly Irish-Catholic woman (Judi Dench) searching for the son she was forced to abandon 50 years ago, is very strong indeed. Steve Coogan, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jeff Pope, co-stars as a cynical BBC reporter accompanying Dench on her travels. The trailer is full of great lines, any one of which could find a place in the leading lady’s inevitable Oscar reel.
Score: 5

Prisoners

Another Canuck director, Denis Villeneuve, goes Hollywood with this thriller about two sets of parents (Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello, Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) whose daughters go missing over an otherwise happy Thanksgiving weekend. Villeneuve proved he could do nerve-wracking suspense with Incendies—that bus sequence!—and Aaron Guzikowski’s script is rumored to be a strong one. Plus, the cinematography is by the great Roger Deakins (Skyfall). Though the film gets a theatrical release right after the fest, you might want to catch it now: word is that the trailer gives too much away.
Score: 4

Rush

Based on the real-life rivalry between F1 racers James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl), this ’70s-set drama wouldn’t be considered awards fodder if it weren’t for the presence of director Ron Howard (the totally overrated A Beautiful Mind) and screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen). Their previous collaboration, Frost/Nixon, wasn’t bad, but Morgan’s last two films (360 and Hereafter) were awful, and Howard’s last two (The Dilemma and Angels & Demons) were worse. Brühl is said to give a memorable performance, but no word yet on Thor’s acting chops.
Score: 2

GENRE FILMS »

Blood Ties

The word from Cannes on this New York–set crime thriller by French director Guillaume Canet (Tell No One) is that it has orgasmically good ’70s period recreation. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the sprawling cast—which includes Clive Owen and Billy Crudup as brothers on opposite sides of the law, and Marion Cottillard as an aspiring brothel madam—are said to be all over the map. Is Canet too focussed on period-appropriate hubcaps to give them any direction? We’ll see.
Score: 2

Blue Ruin

This black-comic indie thriller won one of the critics’ prizes at Cannes, and is said to pack quite a wallop. It stars Macon Blair as a dumpster-diving vagrant who abandons his wayward existence and takes up a very specific goal: the murder of a mysterious rural Virginian man. The early reviews hint at many twists and turns, and suggest that writer-director Jeremy Saulnier (Murder Party) may be the next breakout genre stylist.
Score: 4

Felony

Rising Aussie actor Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom, Zero Dark Thirty) wrote the screenplay for this thriller about an upright cop who makes one horrible mistake, then tries to cover it up. Edgerton plays the cop, Tom Wilkinson plays his superior and Jai Courtney plays a meddling young recruit. Film buyers heading to TIFF have reportedly earmarked this one as a must-get, based on early buzz. We’ll soon see if they were right.
Score: 3

Gravity

Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón hasn’t made a movie since 2006’s excellent Children of Men because he’s been working on this hugely ambitious 3-D sci-fi saga. Sandy Bullock and George Clooney play astronauts who get cut off from their ship and end up drifting through the vastness of space. Expectations are so high for this one that nothing short of a new 2001 will fulfill them. Early word from the Venice Film Festival has been glowing, and we’re pretty confident Cuaron has something special—if not necessarily mind-altering—up his sleeve.
Score: 5

Horns

Danielle Radcliffe again in an adaptation of a cult novel by Joe Hill (aka. Stephen King Jr.) about a guy wrongly accused of his girlfriend’s murder. Shortly after the murder, the guy sprouts horns—horns that cause everyone around him to confess their awful, innermost secrets. French director Alexandre Aja showed a lot of promise in his debut Haute Tension, but he’s done little but crappy remakes ever since (The Hills Have Eyes, Piranha). If he doesn’t make good this time, Hollywood may have to send him back to France.
Score: 3

Life of Crime

As longtime TIFF-goers know, the closing night film is always a stinker, and this one doesn’t look set to change the pattern. It doesn’t appear too terrible on the surface: it’s a kidnapping caper adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel, and it stars John Hawkes, Tim Robbins, Mos Def, Jennifer Aniston and a bunch of other notables. Yet writer-director Daniel Schechter is suspiciously lacking in profile. Who is he? And why should we care?
Score: 2

The Sacrament

Has anyone coined the term “Hipster Horror” yet? That’s what Indie auteur Ti West specializes in: old-school terror scenarios experienced by highly self-aware, ironic types. That’s not meant as a dig: his last two pictures, The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, were pretty darn good. His latest, about a bunch of Vice correspondents investigating a Jim Jones–like cult, has potential in spades.
Score: 4

Under the Skin

Jonathan Glazer’s long-gestating follow-up to the memorably nutty Birth sounds like a remake of The Man Who Fell to Earth, only with Scarlett Johansson in David Bowie’s aloof-alien role. Of course, David Bowie didn’t go around seducing and killing people, so let’s call it a very, very loose remake. No one seems to know much else about this one (except those who’ve read Michel Faber’s source novel), which merely ups the curiosity factor.
Score: 4

FOREIGN-LANGUAGE »

Bastards

French director Claire Denis (Beau travail, White Material) offended a lot of people at Cannes with this fragmented film about an oil rig worker who quits his job to devote himself full-time to investigating the death of his rich brother-in-law. One of the first images in the film is of young actress Lola Creton walking bloodied and bruised through the streets of Paris wearing nothing but a pair of high heels. Later, something awful happens in a barn involving corncobs and trimmed pubic hair. So yes, this won’t be for everyone, but fans of Denis should start lining up now.
Score: 3

Blue is the Warmest Color

This coming-of-age French film from Abdellatif Kechiche (The Secret of the Grain), about a teenage girl falling in love with a twentysomething woman, earned raves at Cannes, then went on to win the Palme d’Or. But then came the backlash, instigated by the author of the graphic novel upon which it’s based. To her, the uncensored sex scenes felt too much like “the male gaze”: prurient, made to titillate. She seems to be in the minority, though, and based on Kechiche’s excellent previous works, we’re inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. The two lead actresses—Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux—are said to be extraordinary.
Score: 5

Like Father, Like Son

It sounds like a tear-jerking movie-of-the-week: two sets of parents—one rich, one poor—discover their six-year-old sons were switched at birth. Usually in this scenario, the parents learn that love is all that matters, and things stay just the way they were. Not in this film by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-Eda (After Life, Nobody Knows). Here, the parents actually switch kids. It’s a nice twist, and if the Cannes jury is anything to go by, it resulted in an excellent movie (it won the Jury Prize).
Score: 4

L’Intrepido

The great Gianni Amelio (L’America, The Keys to the House) specializes in simple narratives that overflow with feeling, much like the Italian neo-realists before him. This one is about an aging jack-of-all-trades dealing with both a divorce and the lack of employment in modern-day Milan. For some reason, Amelio’s dependably gorgeous made-for-the-big-screen films almost never get distribution in Canada, so check this one out while it’s here.
Score: 4

The Past

With his last film, the Academy Award-winning A Separation, Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi leapt to the front ranks of world cinema. His latest is about an Iranian man (Ali Mosaffa) who flies to Paris to finalize his divorce from his French wife (The Artist’s Bérénice Bejo, who won Best Actress at Cannes for this performance). Things get complicated when he learns she plans to remarry, and that their daughter doesn’t much like her soon-to-be-stepdad. Word is that the movie more than holds up to A Separation, and possibly even surpasses it. Miss it at your peril.
Score: 5

A Touch of Sin

Chinese art-house fave Jia Zhangke (The World, 24 City) is known for his slow, contemplative narratives (that’s the nice way of putting it), but here he takes a sharp turn into narrative overload and crazy ultra-violence. A Touch of Sin is divided into four chapters, each about a member of the country’s underclass forced into dire circumstances. Critics at Cannes didn’t seem to know what to make of it, but it ended up claiming the screenplay prize nevertheless. If you don’t want to gamble on it now, it’s slated for a theatrical run at the Bell Lightbox in October.
Score: 3

When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism

The filmmakers of the Romanian New Wave are all about long pauses and scenes of characters doing their taxes or ironing whole wardrobes. Or, as the TIFF programmers would have it, they “employ an acute sense of framing and an awareness of time.” This film, by the director of the acclaimed (but perversely tedious) Police, Adjective, is about a film director who interrupts the making of his film to spend more time rehearsing with his leading lady. Alone in her apartment, they “exhaustively rehearse her final scene in an attempt to draw out its dramatic authenticity.” Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Score: 1

HISTORY LESSONS »

12 Years a Slave

As if in response to Quentin Tarantino’s cartoonish slavery epic Django Unchained, U.K. director Steve McQueen (Hunger, Shame) returns with this deadly serious true story about a free northerner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who was kidnapped by southerners and sold into slavery in the mid-1800s. The cast—Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Alfre Woodard, Michael K. Williams—is excellent, but McQueen can be an excruciatingly self-serious director, and this subject matter could bring out the worst in him. Still, at least he’s tackling it head-on, without the protective armor of B-movie irony.
Score: 4

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

This one’s sure to be a snooze. For starters, when has anyone ever made a good movie about a near-saint? Richard Attenborough couldn’t do it with Gandhi, nor could Clint Eastwood do it with his own Nelson Mandela movie, Invictus. There’s also the fact that Idris Elba, an admittedly fine actor, looks nothing like Mandela. The final nail in the coffin is director Justin Chadwick, whose last picture, The First Grader, was a sticky heart-warmer about an elderly African man who enrolls in elementary school to learn how to read.
Score: 1

Parkland

In 2006, Emilio Estevez gave us one of the worst ensemble pictures ever in Bobby, a look at the assassination of Robert Kennedy from the perspective of Shia Labeouf, Demi Moore and Lindsay Lohan. Now, first-time director Peter Landesman attempts to go Estevez one better with Parkland, a look at the assassination of John F. Kennedy from the perspective of doctor Zac Efron, nurse Marcia Gay Harden and tortured FBI agent Ron Livingston. Remember when star-studded craptaculars used to be about capsized luxury liners and skyscraper fires? Those were the days.
Score: 1

The Railway Man

Colin Firth stars as Eric Lomax, a British soldier captured by the Japanese during WWII, then tortured repeatedly while working as a laborer on the Thailand–Burma railway. Nicole Kidman plays the younger woman who helps him learn to live again almost four decades later. That didn’t make sense to us either until we learned that Firth is playing the old Eric, Jeremy Irvine the young one. This looks to be another of those historical dramas in which the big stars act out the boring years-later parts, leaving the truly dramatic earlier stuff for flashbacks. Expect lots of far-away looks from Firth and lots of concerned glances from Kidman.
Score: 2

Tracks

Mia Wasikowska plays real-life Robyn Davidson, who in 1977 set out on foot from Alice Springs—smack dab in the middle of the Australian Outback—to the Indian Ocean, a journey of 2,700 km. The great thing about movies like this is that they don’t have to be great to be enjoyable; who doesn’t love even an average survival yarn? But with American director John Curran behind the camera, there’s a fairly good chance Tracks will prove better than average. His 2006 picture, the sorely under-appreciated The Painted Veil, was a marvelous adventure story featuring another strong female lead: Naomi Watts.
Score: 4

Walesa: Man of Hope

The great Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds, Man of Marble) is still going strong at age 87, and his latest could be his most ambitious work yet. It tells the story of Lech Walesa, a lowly shipyard worker who went on to lead the solidarity movement against Communism and ultimately became Poland’s president. At the time, Walesa was revered, but his reputation has been somewhat tarnished since. Expect Wajda to avoid the usual biopic trappings and present a legitimately complex portrait of the man.
Score: 5

CANADIAN »

Devil’s Knot

The true story of the so-called West Memphis Three has been the subject of four theatrical documentaries. Now, Canadian director Atom Egoyan (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) risks overkill with his dramatic version of the tale. Colin Firth stars as a private investigator intent on exonerating three teenage boys imprisoned for a gruesome crime. Reese Witherspoon co-stars as the mother of one of the boys. If you’re not familiar with the case, you’re in for a hell of a story. If you are, you may well find this redundant.
Score: 3

The F Word

Michael Dowse (Fubar, Goon) returns to TIFF with this Toronto-shot romantic comedy. One of the best parts of the rowdy Goon was the surprisingly sweet relationship between leads Sean William Scott and Alison Pill, and we’re betting lightning strikes again here with Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan. The two play friends (that’s the titular f-word) who love one another but can’t date, due to Kazan having a boyfriend. Radcliffe has proved a budding charmer in his post-Potter career, and Kazan did a great job of upsetting the manic-pixie-dream-girl convention in Ruby Sparks.
Score: 4

The Grand Seduction

Three Canadian cinema stalwarts—Don McKeller (Last Night), Ken Scott (Starbuck) and Michael Dowse (see above)—collaborate on this English-language remake of a 10-year-old Quebecois comedy hit. Hollywood pariah Taylor Kitsch (John Carter) stars as a young M.D. sent to a tiny community in Newfoundland. Overjoyed to finally have a doctor, the presumably quirky locals—who include Gordon Pinsent, Mary Walsh, and Irish actor Brendan Gleeson—attempt to keep him around by impressing him with their worldliness. Remake or not, we’ve seen this story before, and it’s not getting any fresher.
Score: 2

The Husband

Veteran director Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo, Pontypool) has never been one to shy away from a challenge, and here he asks us to share headspace with the world’s most put-upon man. Star and co-writer Maxwell McCabe-Lokos plays Henry, a stressed-out husband left to raise his child alone after his wife is incarcerated for having sex with a 14-year-old. Sounds like something out of a Todd Solondz movie, but trust McDonald to do something unexpected with it, for better or for worse.
Score: 3

Sarah Prefers to Run

Buzz has been swirling around this debut feature by young Quebecoise writer-director Chloé Robichaud ever since it got invited to screen at Cannes (in the Un Certain Regard section) last May. It’s about a young woman (Sophie Desmarais) who marries a friend in order to be eligible for a university grant for competitive runners. The reviews out of Cannes proved mixed, but everybody seemed to agree that Desmarais is a real find.
Score: 3

Tom at the Farm

Quebecois enfant terrible Xavier Dolan won over many of his detractors with last year’s ambitious (if overlong) melodrama Lawrence Anyways. Now he sets out to woo a broader audience with this left-turn into thriller territory. Dolan himself plays Tom, a young man who goes to visit the rural family of his dead lover, only to find they’re not exactly wholesome salt-of-the-earth types. It’s a promising set-up, but Dolan the actor still has a long way to go before he catches up with Dolan the director.
Score: 3

INDIE AUTEURS »

At Berkeley

The documentarian Fred Wiseman (Hospital, Juvenile Court) has dedicated his life to chronicling America through its institutions, and now he tackles one very unique institution: the University of California, Berkeley. Wiseman’s style is un-intrusive in the extreme: he merely observes, records, and edits. There’s no voiceover, no onscreen titles, no talking heads. Oftentimes, this results in great, fascinating films. More recently, however, Wiseman’s been letting his films run long—really long. And at over four hours, At Berkeley could well be a bit of a slog.
Score: 3

Joe

After having fallen out of favor with a string of flop comedies (The Sitter, Your Highness), director David Gordon Green appears to be back on track. His Prince Avalanche, which is currently in theaters, is a small gem, and the word on Joe is that it’s one of his best. Actually, the buzz this time is focussed more on star Nicholas Cage, who needs a career comeback as badly as anyone ever has. Reportedly reining it in a bit this time, Cage plays a haunted ex-con who becomes the reluctant protector of a 15-year-old boy (Tye Sheridan.) Cage never stopped being a good actor, he just stopped making good movies; if this one is even halfway good, we will be elated.
Score: 4

Night Moves

Audiences weren’t all that interested in this year’s other eco-terrorist picture, The East, but there’s a good chance Night Moves will make a better impression. It’s by Kelly Reichardt, director of the much-admired Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff, and it already has a lot of good will worked up towards it. Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard play environmental activists plotting to blow up a dam somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. According to the TIFF programmers, the movie is much more story-focussed than Reichardt’s previous films—not necessarily a good thing if you’re a fan.
Score: 3

Only Lovers Left Alive

Sometimes great casting is all it takes to make a great movie, and casting Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), Tom Hiddleston (The Avengers) and Mia Wasikowska (Jane Eyre) as ageless, dissipated rock star vampires is pretty much genius. The movie’s said to be highly enjoyable, but also surprisingly resonant; indie vet Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man) employs the vampirism thing not for cheesy thrills, but for the seen-it-all ennui factor: these bloodsuckers are terribly tired of the 21st-century and yearn only for the days of Byron and Shelley. And nobody does languor better than Swinton.
Score: 5

The Unknown Known

If anybody but Errol Morris had made this feature-length interview with former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, nobody but raging, capital-C conservatives would be able to stomach it. But who doesn’t want to see Rumsfeld sweat it in Morris’s patented Interrotron? Not that Morris is going to be grilling him, exactly; as in his Robert S. McNamara doc, The Fog of War, he’ll essentially be collaborating with Rumsfeld in order to get at some higher truths about the nature of modern warfare.
Score: 4

OUTLIERS »

Gloria

Actress Paulina Garcia won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for her performance here as a woman pushing sixty and looking for love on the dance floors of Chile. Everything we’ve heard about this picture, directed and co-written by Sebastián Lelio, makes it sound totally charming. It’s also said to be much more than a Chilean version of boomer panderfests Something’s Gotta Give or It’s Complicated. It’s a funny yet sincere look at late-life decision-making, and leaves the protagonist (and the actress playing her) with her dignity intact.
Score: 5

Child of God and Palo Alto

Will someone please take James Franco aside and explain to him the concept of overexposure? Child of God is Franco’s second feature-length directorial effort (his first, As I Lay Dying, hasn’t even been released yet), and it’s adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel about a necrophiliac weirdo. Franco acts in it, too, and co-wrote the screenplay. Meanwhile, Palo Alto is an adaptation of Franco’s 2010 short story collection, and it stars Franco as a compromised football coach. Amazingly, it is not directed by Franco, or even catered by him. It’s by one of the Coppola kids, Gia, who is sure to catch all of his nuances.
Score: 1 and 1

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him and Her

This is actually two films screened together; both tell the same story, but from different perspectives. James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain play a married couple that endures a horrible tragedy. According to the TIFF notes, Him is the story “of a befuddled man longing to reconnect with his estranged wife,” while Her is “a character study about a woman trying to reinvent herself.” Definitely an interesting concept, but if we have to see the same story twice, it better be freaking good.
Score: 3

The Double and Enemy

Jesse Eisenberg and Jake Gyllenhaal might as well be the official mascots of TIFF 2013, because they seem to have roles in everything this year—sometimes even two roles in the same movie. Not only does Eisenberg star in Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves (above), he stars in Richard Ayoade’s Dostoevsky adaptation, The Double, about a painfully awkward young man competing against his supremely confident doppelgänger. Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal not only stars in Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners, he stars in Villeneuve’s other TIFF entry (yet more doubling!) Enemy, which is based on a novel by José Saramago and is about a man who spots his doppelgänger in a movie and sets out to track him down. Perhaps as an encore, Eisenberg and Gyllenhaal will co-star in a remake of The Parent Trap.
Score: Double or nothing.

Ilo Ilo

This film by Singaporean director Anthony Chen reportedly got a 15-minute standing ovation at its first public screening at Cannes. Let’s assume that’s an exaggeration—is it even possible to applaud for fifteen minutes? But don’t be surprised if it ends up winning the TIFF People’s Choice Award. It’s about a misbehaving 10-year-old boy whose life changes forever when his family hires a tough-minded Filipina nanny to take care of him. Major schmaltz potential, but still worth a shot.
Score: 3

Omar

It’s been eight years since Palestinian director Hany Abu Assad’s out-of-nowhere triumph (and Academy Award-nominee) Paradise Now, about the training of a wannabe suicide bomber. His latest, about a lovelorn West Bank youth caught up in a politically sensitive murder investigation, won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes and is said to be every bit as smart and suspenseful as Paradise Now. This is exactly the kind of movie you can point to when friends say foreign films are boring.
Score: 5

Stranger by the Lake

There are reportedly quite a few naughty bits on display in French director Alain Guiraudie’s gay cruising drama/thriller/whatsit. Go for those, but stay for the Hitchcockian story of a young man drawn, over the course of a languorous summer holiday, into the orbit of an overpoweringly attractive older man—one who has just drowned his previous sexual conquest. The cinematography is said to be the main star here, conveying the semi-delirium of mid-summer heat, as well as the heady allure of carnal activity in the great outdoors. Plan on a cold shower afterwards.
Score: 4

Words and Pictures

Australian director Fred Schepisi can be hit (Six Degrees of Separation) or miss (I.Q.), and there are conflicting clues as to where his latest will go. Positive: star Juliette Binoche (Museum Hours, Certified Copy) has shown pretty discerning taste in material in recent years. Negative: co-star Clive Owen (Intruders, Killer Elite) has not. Positive: Schepisi’s last film, the barely released Eye of the Storm, was one of his best. Negative: screenwriter Gerald DiPego’s entire CV is made-up of stuff like Phenomenon and Message in a Bottle. Owen plays an alcoholic English literature prof who makes a friendly wager with Binoche’s art teacher: that words can beat pictures when it comes to conveying the human condition. For the sake of this picture, let’s hope he’s wrong.
Score: 3