Friday, September 11, 2009

A few quick words from TIFF

Lightining struck twice for me today during back-to-back press screenings at the Toronto Film Festival. Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man is a low-key, pitch-perfect, straight-faced absurdist dark comedy with a surprisingly affecting impact. And, better still, an ending bound to piss off even more people than the ending of No Country for Old Men. I strongly suspect it will richly reward repeated viewings. The same can be said for Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, which may be… oh, to hell with equivocation. It is the best movie I have seen so far in 2009. If I see anything better by year’s end, I will be greatly astonished and immensely grateful. But I’ll still probably want to go back and take another look at Reitman’s film – and at George Clooney’s career-highlight performance – just to be absolutely certain the other movie really is better.

More to come...

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