MIFF - Frontier of Dawn
When even a MIFF audience leaves the cinema muttering that a film is "too French", you know it must be very French indeed. A tortured romance by post-New Wave director Philippe Garrel - and starring his dreamy son, Louis - Frontier of Dawn's languid predictability didn't fare so well at Cannes.
MIFF Random Play
With seventeen days of films on offer, some of your choices will come down to guesswork - even if you fine-tooth through the program with IMDB bookmarks and a magnifying glass. We roll the dice with some random, synopsis-selected, will-they-or-won't-they picks.
Why not embrace the proud ThreeThousand tradition of choosing a flick based solely on its title? This year it's debut feature with French New Wave tendencies The Pleasure of Being Robbed.
Reel Anime
The onslaught of anime in the '90s brought us tentacle sex, exploding heads, ninjas drowning in molten gold and psychic children who might be god. There's been so much of it since that it's easy to ignore, so Reel Anime 2008 is throwing four new titles up on the big screen to catch your eye.
Lars and the Real Girl
The Real Doll phenomenon turns the squick-factor of the Uncanny Valley into something that could be produced by Mattel's "Sexy Nightmare" division. (You can read more about Doll Love here, but maybe wait until you get home.)
Lars and the Real Girl takes this premise, drops it into a small town, and leaves poor Ryan Gosling to generate chemistry with his silicone love interest.
Juno
Ellen Page's role as 16-year-old mother-to-be Juno MacGuff guarantees that every vaguely alternative boy in the western world is now in love with her, and critics everywhere seem equally powerless to resist Juno's quirky assault.
(Her frankly terrifying charisma is also helped by the fact her romantic interest is played by Arrested Development's Michael Cera.
The Darjeeling Limited
The house in The Royal Tenenbaums is a model of Wes Anderson’s films: obsessively packed with minutia, showing the internal worlds of his characters, all spilling out. Tenenbaums is grimly funny and – from Elliott Smith onwards – shattering. Rushmore? Rushmore is pretty much perfect in every way.
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