Adam Nayman Festivals

Sep 23, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Adam Nayman Festivals |Adam Nayman |Ginette Vincendeau |Saffron Maeve

Reviewed from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. The Canada on display in Paul Schrader’s latest feature is less a country than a state of mind – the verdant, magic-hour manifestation of an American’s subconscious yearning for the moral high ground. It‘s the ‘true North strong and free’ sentiment literalised and beautified to the strains of some angelic electric guitar.

Sep 22, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Adam Nayman Festivals |Adam Nayman |Sophia Satchell-Baeza |Kelli Weston

Reviewed from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Give Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ Heretic credit: it’s surely the first movie to thread the conceptual needle between our anxious, post-millennial epistemology and the enduring power-pop perfection of the English band the Hollies.

Sep 16, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Adam Nayman Festivals |Adam Nayman |Sophia Satchell-Baeza |Simran Hans

Reviewed from the 2024 Toronto International Film FestivalFor Torontonians of a certain vintage – let’s say late Gen-X-ish, and with at least one box worth of hand-crafted mixtapes in storage – Sook Yin-Lee’s new feature Paying For It may feel like a time machine.

Sep 13, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Adam Nayman |Sophia Satchell-Baeza |Simran Hans |Adam Nayman Festivals

Reviewed from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Hey, teacher: leave those kids alone. Happyend unfolds in a dystopian near-future where a title card informs us that systems are crumbling. It’s here, beneath a subtly Blade Runner-ish skyline and amidst intermittent earthquakes, that a group of teenagers including aspiring techno musicians Kou (Hidaki Yukito) and Yuta (Kurihara Hayao) try to live their best lives.

Sep 11, 2023 | bfi.org.uk | Adam Nayman Festivals |Adam Nayman |Samuel Thomas Davies |Neil Young

Reviewed from the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Don’t call it a comeback — or a swan song, as it turns out.