While there are already loads of great and award winning films to add to your must see list, as well as a bunch that didn't hit their mark, there were so many great movies this year that didn't sneak into my festival favourites worthy of celebration.
Here are ten more TIFF 2018 selections definitely worth your time.
Mouthpiece
Patricia Rozema's adaptation of Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava's play was one of the best of the fest, an emotionally rich and sophisticated work that takes the best of the theatrical project and merges them with Rozema's well honed filmmaking sensibilities to craft a fabulous film.
Heartbound
The longer I'm away from this film the more it's sticking with me. Another non-fiction home run from the Danish Film Institute, Janus Metz and Sine Plambech's decades long journey to tell this tale of love and sacrifice makes for one of the year's best.
Carmine Street Guitars
Perhaps the most accomplished of the Canadian films that played TIFF - it debuted to great success at Venice, is off to New York for NYFF and then heads off on a long festival journey - this short, sweet journey to a Greenwich Village guitar is highly musical and a warm, welcome respite from some of the more dour films that litter the fest.
Cold War
I adore this film so much, and even sneaked in during a busy schedule to watch the opening for a second time. A beautiful love story told against a political backdrop by an ace filmmaker, it was a shoe-in for Best Foreign Oscar contention before Roma showed up. It's OK, we can love and worship both black and white masterworks without any compromise.
Dogman
This is another film I loved at Cannes and is well deserving of many more fans than it has. Matteo Garrone's latest is a twisted allegory on the Italian fascination with alpha males, a rumination on fascism that's cunning in its canine construction.
Halloween
I was excited to see David Gordon Green taking on this franchise, and thanks to co-writers Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley, as well as an exquisite turn by the franchise's queen Jamie Lee Curtis, it makes for a funny, gory, entertaining film that may well be considered the best of the entire series, including the esteemed original.
Mid90s
While it doesn't stick the landing, Jonah Hill's directorial debut, a coming-of-age skate story, has so much to admire. The cast is great, it's shot extremely well, and it takes a narrative that easily could have suffered from over-familiarity and made something that feels fresh and exciting.
American Dharma
Errol Morris' doc does extremely well what it sets out to do - illustrate the sociopathy of Steve Bannon and make explicit the rhetorical and hermeneutic gymnastics that lay the intellectual foundation for Trump's rise to power in America.
Climax
I dig this film a lot, and would have loved this to play as part of the dearly departed Vanguard selection, but having Gaspar Noé's fever dream play out during the witching hour isn't a bad compromise. A trippy, purient, cacophonous film that is unlike anything you'll see this year.
Ash is Purest White
I celebrated it in our best foreign films list, but Jia Zhang-ke's crime drama deserves all the attention it can get. Thanks to a terrific turn by his muse Zhao Tao, this story manages to simultaneously be a tale of one woman's rise to power and an allegory for decades of Chinese political turmoil.
by Jason Gorber via blogTO
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