TORONTO – One of the best-received movies of the big International Film Festival here was “Sexy Beast,” a title that stars the unlikely Ben Kingsley.”People are very nice when they come up to me on the street,” the Oscar-winning star of “Gandhi” and “Schindler’s List” said the other day.
“But after this comes out, I’m afraid they might head-butt me or challenge me to a fight to see how tough I am.”
The 59-year-old Kingsley sheds his Gentle Ben image for a riveting turn in the comic thriller as a tough-as-nails English mob leader who travels to Spain to recruit a reluctant retired colleague (Ray Winstone) for a bank job.
And he won’t take no for an answer, at one point expressing his disdain by urinating on a bathroom rug.
Stylishly directed by music video veteran Jonathan Glazer, “Sexy Beast” will hit U.S. theaters next spring. It’s just one of several promising movies – and some clinkers – that bowed here during the festival’s 10-day run.
Another real winner is “The Widow of St. Pierre,” the fine new drama by French director Patrice Leconte (“The Girl on the Bridge”).
The Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica (“Underground”) commands the screen in his acting debut, as a murderer condemned to death in a small French colony off the coast of Canada in 1850.
In the months it takes for a guillotine to arrive from France to carry out the sentence, he wins over the populace, including the army commander and his wife, beautifully played by Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche.
On a much smaller scale, director David Gordon Green scores a bull’s-eye with his debut feature, “George Washington,” a quietly devastating portrait of teenagers in a poverty-ridden industrial town in North Carolina.
It will play at the New York Film Festival before beginning a theatrical run on Oct. 27.
Another one-of-a-kind movie here that’s been picked up for U.S. distribution is “The Price of Milk,” a beguiling romantic fable from New Zealand that defies easy description.
Let’s just say it involves a farmer, his girlfriend, their 117 cows, a quilt and a mysterious old woman.
Any festival that shows 252 features is going to have more than its share of losers – Julien Temple’s “Pandaemonium,” which depicts at length how poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was inspired by drug trips, is so spellbindingly awful I couldn’t walk out on it.
But surely the highest-profile dud here is the much-anticipated “The House of Mirth,” an interminable Edith Wharton adaptation featuring “X-Files” star Gillian Anderson.
No threat to Julianne Moore, Anderson is appallingly stiff and awkward as a financially pressed socialite in 1906 New York – and Eric Stoltz and Anthony LaPaglia aren’t much better as the men in her life.
This Showtime-sponsored, 145-minute snoozefest will show at the New York Film Festival before a theatrical run designed to cash in on Anderson’s TV following.
Another Lincoln Center-bound feature, “Before Night Falls,” is by no means a disaster, but is decidedly underwhelming.
The second feature by artist Julian Schnabel (“Basquiat”) arrived here days after being snapped up for U.S. distribution in a frenzied bidding war, just before winning the top prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Spanish actor Javier Bardem, who somehow won the acting prize in Venice, is less than magnetic as gay Cuban novelist and poet Reinaldo Arenas, whose persecution and imprisonment at the hands of the Castro regime are detailed in this beautifully shot and politically correct but rambling and dramatically inert film.
Johnny Depp walks off with the film in a brief appearance as a transvestite who smuggles an Arenas novel out of prison in a very intimate place.
Sean Penn, who makes a virtually unrecognizable cameo appearance in “Before Night Falls,” gives a rare misjudged performance as a boozing Pulitzer Prize-winning poet in “The Weight of Water,” an arty, deeply flawed cross between “The Blair Witch Project,” “The Perfect Storm” and “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.”
Director Kathryn Bigelow (“Blue Steel”) struggles without much success to mesh a story about century-old ax murders (starring Sarah Polley) with a present-day tale about yacht-going neurotics trying to get to the bottom of the mystery.
Suffice to say that the most memorable scene depicts a close encounter between topless sexpot Elizabeth Hurley and an ice cube.
