Cannes’s Palme d’Or winner played to adoring crowds here at Toronto, and what a rollicking, electric delight Sean Baker’s new movie is. It’s the story of a New York stripper and sex worker, Ani (Mikey Madison, in what is surely the most exciting performance of the year), who falls for an oligarch’s playboy son, Ivan (Mark Eidelstein). Ivan is sweet and callow and irredeemably in the moment, and he has some powerful family interests that don’t want Ani in his life. Baker, who is the filmmaker behind Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, has not made a bad movie in his career, nor has he made one as purely enjoyable as this. My only reservation was its length—the movie stretches needlessly beyond two hours—but it lands in an unexpectedly intimate moment that takes your breath away.
Opens on October 18.
All We Imagine as Light
This patient and absorbingly beautiful Indian film, about the lives of two women—roommates and coworkers at a local hospital in contemporary Mumbai—won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and it’s a marvel of friendship and lovelorn struggle. The feature debut of Payal Kapadia, Light has a clarity about working-class existence that draws you in. Longing is its subject—Prabha’s husband is far away in Germany, and her roommate, Anu, is swept up in an love affair with a young Muslim man. The film has the grace to spirit its characters away to a seaside village in its latter half where a dream logic descends and sadness and fantasy mix. Gorgeous.
