A DANGEROUS METHOD
Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Sarah Gadon, Vincent Cassel
Country: Germany / Canada

David Cronenberg’s latest is a chilly study of the creative and competitive triangle between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), and the lesser-known Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightly) in the early years of the 20th century. Christopher Hampton’s cunningly constructed script—he is the man behind Dangerous Liaisons and Atonement) paints the early history of psychoanalysis as a precarious moment, a time when brave innovators faced the collective disapproval of their peers for their forays to the edges of science. In many ways, this is a film about acceptance, about fitting in, and about the ways one muct repress one’s desires in order to do so.

THE DAY
Director: Doug Aarniokoski
Cast: Shawn Ashmore, Ashley Bell Cory Hardrict, Dominic Monaghan, Shannyn Sossamon
Country: USA

Can a cannibal ever truly be redeemed? For the answer to this Augustinian question I guess you could watch The Day, but it’s probably better to just let that be one of life’s unaswerables. This execrable film follows a group of survivors of some unnamed holocaust as they wander around and try not to get eaten by roving bands of cannibals. The plot is, basically, well, have you ever seen Night of the Living Dead? How about The Road? OK. So, add those together, and then subtract all the subtext, social commentary, scary bad guys, clever script, and character development.

MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE
Director: Sean Durkin
Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Christopher Abbott, Brady Corbet, Hugh Dancy, Maria Dizzia, Julia Garner, John Hawkes, Louisa Krause, Sarah Paulson
Country: USA

An exquisite, terrifying, and marvelously vertiginous film, Martha Marcy May Marlene is my favourite movie of the Festival, and may stand up as my favourite picture of the year. A meditative study of a young woman (a dazzling Elizabeth Olsen) during the first weeks after she escapes from a cult, the narrative moves back and forth in time, juxtaposing her struggle reconnecting with her relatives on the outside world with scenes demonstrating the relative ease she had connecting with the “family” at their farm.

ELLES
Director: Malgorzata Szumowska
Cast: Juliette Binoche, Joanna Kulig, Anaïs Demoustier
Country: France / Poland / Germany

Juliette Binoche plays a top-flight investigative reporter for Elle magazine who has been tasked with an article on students who turn to prostitution to pay their bills. To that end, she has interviewed a pair of young women (one a working class social climber and the other a Polish immigrant) and is now sitting at her desk reflecting on what they have told her, what they have been through, and the ways their stories conflict with her own feminist assumptions about sex work.

DARK HORSE
Director: Todd Solondz
Cast: Justin Bartha, Selma Blair, Mia Farrow, Jordan Gelber, Donna Murphy, Christopher Walken
Country: USA

Todd Solondz (Happiness, Life During Wartime) understands tackiness on a deeper level than just about everyone else in the business besides John Waters. Fascinated by the weirdos, geeks and screw-ups among us (and the weird geeky screw-up inside each of us), at his best Solondz can put his audience in a place where we are laughing at characters not just because they are ridiculous, but because we feel like we’ve been there too, somehow. At his worst, and he is at his worst a lot of the time in this picture, Solondz has us merely sneering at his characters, mocking them for their foibles, and cheering on their failures.