Get the latest gossip
The Penguin Lessons Is the Perfect Film Festival Chill-Down Movie
As essential as any gala premiere or awards-buzz breakthrough, the chill-down movie is the cure for film-festival burnout.
My first TIFF, in 2014, I bypassed some prime (UB)FFCDMs — including Maggie Smith in a movie called My Old Lady and the Patricia Clarkson dramedy Learning to Drive — and instead made a series of very bad decisions predicated on the idea that I should be taking in Serious Films, which is how I ended up watching Octavia Spencer and Kevin Costner fight for custody of their shared grandchild in Black or White and all 130 minutes of Jessica Chastain and Colin Farrell being uncharacteristically awful in Liv Ullman’s Miss Julie. In 2017, I played myself by opting for Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle in On Cheshil Beach(in my defense, I hadn’t read the book), instead of the clearly superior (if American) choice of Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland traversing the country in an RV in The Leisure Seeker. Here, Cattaneo sets his feel-good story about a grumbly teacher who finds his spark with the help of an adorable animal against the backdrop of a South American fascist coup — which included the kidnapping and indefinite detention of many citizens suspected of being left wing — in a way that never feels cheap or jarring.
Or read this on VULTURE