I’ve been swamped with screenings at the London Film Festival, so between watching the films, maintaining some semblance of a day job and occasionally remembering to sleep and eat, my review updates have got a bit behind track.
Hopefully, I can make up some of the distance tomorrow, when I have a lighter screening schedule, so expect a compilation of capsule reviews shortly, as well as some more in-depth evaluations of titles like Steve McQueen’s fascinating “Hunger.” In the meantime, here are some thoughts on three notable (if not necessarily successful) titles that made their London bow on the weekend:
INCENDIARY (**)
Steadily, and with very little fuss, Michelle Williams is growing into a remarkable young actress, as this, the first of three films she has in the festival, makes clear. It’s one thing to shine in a film as immaculately crafted as “Brokeback Mountain,” but it’s quite another to shoulder a project as problematic as Sharon Maguire’s “Incendiary.”
A wildly confused, schizophrenic film based on a controversial novel, it stars Williams as a working-class London mother whose life is thrown into turmoil when her husband (a bomb disposal officer) and young son are killed in a (fictitious) terrorist attack on Arsenal football stadium. A low-key study of grieving ramps up into convoluted thriller territory when a journalist (Ewan McGregor), with whom the woman is having an affair, senses a cover-up and brings her into the investigation.
Every Oscar season is about managing expectations. Studios, of course, want to keep the murmurs to a minimum whether they have the goods or not because the peril of peaking too early is just as bad as the sting of negative word-of-mouth. Similarly, being “the one to beat” sets a film up to rise to an unfair occasion rather than coming to the table fresh.
Sony Pictures Classics is the first studio to send out Academy screeners this season. “Frozen River,” which garnered 
We’ve been 
This year’s Toronto International Film Festival just didn’t cut it for some people. The talk of Oscar taking a break from the annual September showcase had become tired before films even began screening, and certainly before every major news outlet had chosen the angle as the only story worth telling.
And with a whimper it ended. With many press headed home by Wednesday of this week, the screenings were a little less crowded, there was much grumbling about the lack of strong films, and very little buying action. The festival wound down slowly, like something in the throes of a long, drawn-out death.