Popular reviews

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★ 14

  So when's the shitty Paul Feig remake with like Pacino and Rose Byrne?

  [puts in goofy dentures]

  Don't you dare steal my idea.

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½ 9

  it's true.

  all of it.

  (i have some major misgivings about the last 15 minutes, which feel — at least on first viewing — that they blunt out what could have been one of the great movie endings in recent memory, but everything you heard from Cannes about Maren Ade's shaggy epic is right on the money. the shortest 160 minutes you'll spend at the movies this year).

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 12

  Almost everyone in my theater was laughing for about three hours straight. I think that speaks for itself; I've never quite had a movie-going experience like seeing this film with an audience.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½

  “He was on old dog”.
  That the humanist ideal of reconstruction Europe and the current European community can’t be reconciled is old news, but it takes an Andy Kaufmanesque prankster in a very old fashioned sentimental mission to, if not exactly exhume the corpse at least bring it into sharp relief. You'll laugh, you'll cry and things will just pass away. And it is really very very funny. Experimental human behavior played with broad Cassavetian exuberance at its best. Also, in the age of bloated festival film, it is always joy to get a 160 minutes one that needs every second of it to count.

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  Review by Jonathan White ★★★★ 21

  TIFF16 Film #1

  Reason for Pick – Eli’s Hayes’ review out of Cannes

  Toni Erdmann is a complex dance that paints the outline of the relationship between a lonely father and his career occupied daughter, who's living abroad.

  I went in with the impression that this was going to be two hours and forty minutes of non-stop laughter. It isn’t. While there are frequent laugh-out-loud moments, and two scenes that sends the audience into fits, the remainder ranges from poignant to painful to awkward. Writer / Director Maren Ade isn’t afraid to linger on a shot, often cutting a few seconds after the natural beat, which gives a feeling of reality over scripted drama. She also isn’t afraid to use…

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  Review by Marcy Webb ★★★½ 7

  I never want to see a man wanking over a cake ever again

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  Review by Jim Cummings 5

  So sad and true.

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  Review by CinemaCl🎃wn ★★ 21

  Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the upcoming Academy Awards, and supposedly the favourite to win the Oscar statuette although I fail to see what's so great about it, Toni Erdmann is a bland, overlong & tediously paced cinema that's amusing in bits n pieces but those moments are few n far between.

  The story follows an old-age hippie with a penchant for weird pranks who tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter by paying her a surprise visit but only ends up messing her lifestyle. Things do take an interesting turn when he reappears in a different persona and claims to be her CEO's life coach.

  Written, co-produced & directed by Maren Ade, the film opens on a promising note…

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  Review by Michael Sicinski ★★★★ 1

  [8]

  Well, Christian Petzold broke the ice, but it looks like Maren Ade's going to bring it home: the "Berlin School" has broken beyond the rarefied festival circuit to produce bona fide hits. What's particularly shocking about this turn of events is that, unlike other segments of the austere art-film universe, the Berlin School appears to have crossed over into the mainstream almost by accident. Apart from slightly more direct plotting, there's nothing about Petzold's Phoenix that made it inherently more accessible than his earlier films. And now, Ade gives us Toni Erdmann, a generational comedy that, at its core, is about the inappropriate character and unavoidable embarrassment that accompanies "humor" between the generations.

  Ade has long been the stealth…

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  Review by Aaron Michael ★★★★ 8

  TAG YOURSELF! I'm the part where she cries in the club while techno music plays!

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 3

  It's no original observation to note that we wear masks to protect ourselves from others, nor to suggest that our sum total is in part defined by our portfolio of masks. I don't exactly ascribe to that idea, but it seems to dwell here in this film in a potent way. It's not so much that Winifred is trying to shock Ines into revealing the self beneath the mask so much as he is trying to be part of her life in a way that reveals more masks to him, inserting himself into various situations--work, social outings, and so on--intentionally or not altering the masks she wears in each. Notice how Ines attempts to micromanage her image, controlling every stray…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½

  85

  A particularly confounding experience of joy and pain, made up of a variety of screwball antics and realist put-downs let loose within involved spaces. Location is key here - how the modern influences the old and casts it aside, how humor dissipates in an laborious environment, how nakedness is even more of a shock against a transnational world. That its comedy extends so far is a testament to Maren Ade's observational tale being doused in sadness. "Never lose the humor." Winfried says, but the truth rises in cathartic bursts and still lingers hand-in-hand with laughter, culminating in one hell of a hug (one of the greatest in any movie, in fact) and a shaggy, poignant snapshot of a father/daughter dynamic. Fearless, drifting cinema.