Friday, During the Festival

Huebel Garant Lennon Hell BabyQuiet out there this weekend, huh? Everyone’s so focused on the Oscar campaigns launching left and right at TIFF that no one’s put much thought into the rest of the cinematic landscape. All the more reason to go see Hell Baby, really.

Adore: Naomi Watts and Robin Wright Penn play lifelong besties who bang each other’s adult sons out of despair, or boredom, or something, in Anne Fontaine’s adaptation of a Doris Lessing story. Susan‘s review reminds me that I’ve never actually enjoyed an Anne Fontaine film.

Drinking Buddies: Joe Swanberg goes semi-mainstream with this improvised dramedy about people making bad life choices. Olivia Wilde kills it, Jake Johnson is pretty great himself, and Ron Livingston and Anna Kendrick are also quite good at the whole being-in-a-Joe-Swanberg-movie thing.

Hell Baby: Having written crappy comedies for other people for way too long, Tom Lennon and Robert Ben Garant spend a little of that Herbie Fully Loaded money on themselves and come up with a very silly, very funny horror spoof in which Leslie Bibb goes all Satanic on Rob Corddry. Also, there are crucifixions — well, one, anyway — and sandwiches.

Riddick: Vin Diesel straps on the goggles for a third go-round as David Twohy’s hulking space warrior, and while the Dune-scale silliness of The Chronicles of Riddick makes me awfully wary, I do love me some Twohy … and John offers a qualified endorsement that sounds awfully similar to my nod to Getaway.

And there you go. Time to get back down to the festival; keep an eye on my Twitter feed over on the right for those real-time updates everyone says they like so much.

Oh, wait, here’s one more thing: A chat with Denis Villeneuve, whose all-star Hollywood debut Prisoners is one of tonight’s premieres. Nice guy. Thoughtful.

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