Posts Tagged ‘October Gale’

RICHARD’S WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS FROM CP24! FRIDAY MARCH 27, 2015.

Screen Shot 2015-03-27 at 3.17.55 PMRichard’s CP24 reviews for “Get Hard,” “Home” “Boychoir” and “October Gale.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

RICHARD’S “CANADA AM” REVIEWS FOR MARCH 27 WITH BEVERLY THOMSON.

Screen Shot 2015-03-27 at 10.08.30 AMRichard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “Get Hard,” “Home” “Boychoir” and “October Gale.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

Metro Canada: Patricia Clarkson, So many men, so much talent

Screen Shot 2015-03-27 at 10.23.13 AMBy Richard Crouse – Metro Canada

Patricia Clarkson’s new thriller, October Gale, sees her working with frequent collaborator Ruba Nadda and starring opposite Callum Keith Rennie, Tim Roth and Scott Speedman.

“Can you imagine I got to be in a film with those men?” she says. “I arrived on the set and said, ‘Oh my God Ruba I have died and gone to heaven.’ Not only are they beautiful men, physically, but if you threw all their handsomeness out the window, they’re gorgeous actors. First class, top of their game, singular actors.”

The New Orleans native, an Academy Award nominee for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Pieces of April, plays a doctor mourning the loss of her husband. For solace she retreats to a remote cottage in Georgian Bay. Her time of quiet reflection and healing is disrupted, however, by the appearance of a mysterious and seriously injured young man, played by Speedman.

October Gale is the second collaboration between Clarkson and director Ruba Nadda.

“Ruba and I are very similar gals,” Clarkson says. “We like our hair and our lipstick and our high heels. I have four older sisters and Rubba is truly like the little sister I never had. We are like family. We have a second language now. It’s kismet. I think I’m just the luckiest gal to know her and to have her so deeply in my life; in my professional life, in my personal life. I know her family now. I know her sisters. I know her parents. She knows all my friends in New York City and Los Angeles. We’re just family and yet we are able to separate all of that when we enter the workplace. We’re both workhorses. We’re very high energy, we don’t take no for an answer, we’ll fight to the death. She’s Syrian-Palestinian and I’m Southern, so watch out.”

Their first film together, Cairo Time, was the Best Reviewed Romance on Rotten Tomatoes for 2010 and soon they will begin work on a series for HBO. Clarkson says her on-set relationship with Nadda is based on respect and the director’s unique vision.

“Ruba has the courage to make films that people want to make,” she says, “the kind of movies auteurs think they’re making but she actually has the courage to do it.”

October Gale, for instance, Clarkson says, doesn’t have “a traditional thriller pace. It’s Ruba Nada pace.”

OCTOBER GALE: 3 STARS. “Ruba Nadda’s thriller follows her heart.”

Screen Shot 2015-03-21 at 2.18.03 PM“October Gale,” a new film from “Cairo Time” director Ruba Nadda, is a hybrid of romance and thriller that cares about it’s characters more than it does about moving the audience to the edge of their collective seats.

Patricia Clarkson is Helen Matthews, a Toronto doctor grieving the loss of her husband (Callum Keith Rennie). For solace she retreats to a remote, picturesque cottage in Georgian Bay. Her time of quiet reflection and healing is disrupted, however, by the appearance of Will, a mysterious and seriously injured young man, played by Scott Speedman. She plays nurse, they talk and flirt and soon Helen finds herself drawn to the stranger. Trouble is, Tom (Tim Roth), the man who wounded Will to begin with, has every intention of dropping by to finish the job.

“October Gale” has all the elements of a thriller—people with mysterious pasts meet in a remote location on a dark and stormy night—but Nadda subverts the conventions of the genre by taking her time getting to the thrills. Instead she builds the tension carefully, walking through Helen’s grief in a beautifully played first act. Clarkson is at her best here, subtly and beautifully showing not only her loss but also her resiliency in the face of sorrow. Once we get to know Helen, William appears adding another layer to the story. By the time we get to the thriller aspect of “October Gale” Nadda makes sure we care for and are invested in the characters.

“October Gale” isn’t a typical thriller. It’s a thriller without many thrills, but lots of soul. Nadda does not slavishly try and ape Hitchcock or the other masters of the genre, but follows her heart instead.

TIFF 2014: That’s a wrap for Reel Guys at The Toronto International Film Festival

What-We-Do-In-The-Shadows-900x563By Richard Crouse & Mark Breslin – Metro Reel Guys

The Reel Guys, Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin, wrap up their coverage of TIFF with a look at Midnight Madness and the lonely characters of Foxcatcher

Richard: Mark, we’re at the tail end of the festival, a time for reflection and sleep. Every year when it winds down like this — from full throttle to a trickle almost overnight — I always think of the last line in The Usual Suspects. I’m paraphrasing, but it’s been echoing in my head today: “And like that, poof. It’s gone.” Of course it’s not quite over, but the pace is manageable for the first time since Day 1. I look back fondly on movies like The Theory of EverythingThe Imitation Game and Whiplash, but they seem like a long time ago now. Latter-half festival movies I really liked were 71 and a thriller from director Ruba Nadda called October Gale that suggests Patricia Clarkson might be up for a Liam Neeson-style action hero makeover.

Mark: I usually spend the second half of the festival watching foreign films I should have watched during the first half of the festival, having been distracted by all the stars and glitter. So let me say some great things about Labyrinth of Lies, a German film set in 1957 that tells the true story of the prosecutor who brought Germans working at Auschwitz to justice. It’s hard to fathom that the German people were in the dark about what happened there, but you can feel the horror rise in the prosecutor’s mind as he slowly realizes how many people were involved and that the rot went right to the top. Movies like this usually don’t look very good, but every shot is artfully done. The movie is gripping and important.

RC: Courtesy of the Midnight Madness program comes The Editor a giallo-comedy tribute to the films of Mario Bava and Dario Argento about a one-handed film editor who becomes the prime suspect in a brutal series of murders. It’s an odd film, but one that perfectly pays homage to the Italian horror films that inspired it. And there’s one that I’ve missed but am going to try to catch on the weekend. What We Do In The Shadows is a comedic mockumentary. Flight of the Conchords star Jemaine Clement plays one-third of a trio of vampires trying to adjust to life in a New Zealand suburb.

MB: Ahh. Midnight Madness, where the audience can be scarier than the movies. My favourite late night was spent in It Follows, about zombie-ism as a form of STD. There’s almost no gore in the film, just an overwhelming sense of dread brought on by moody atmospherics. It’s also shot with the detail of a magic realism canvas and supported by the most disturbing soundscape I’ve heard since John Carpenter’s work in the Seventies.

RC: You want disturbing? How about Channing Tatum with an under-bite and Steve Carell with a fake nose and dead eyes? Foxcatcher is a quiet, restrained film, one that demands the viewer to lean forward to appreciate, so when three loud gunshots ring out they shatter the quiet in a jarringly effective depiction of violence.

MB: What’s really scary about that movie is how horribly sad and lonely the characters are. Same thing is true for the characters in Maps to the Stars and Jason Reitman’s Men Women and Children. Affluent misery seems to be a big theme at this year’s festival.