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“It would be better if I were dead,” the old lady laments to her even older husband in Gaspar Noé’s startling new film Vortex, and he makes no effort to disagree. Even though its title might have worked just fine for one of the perennially youth-obsessed director’s previous films, here it serves as an indicator of life swirling down the drain. This close-up look at a married couple on the brink of the inevitable introduces a surprising and demanding new chapter to the throbbingly flamboyant director’s career, which is normally preoccupied with sex, drugs and music.

Stylistically, the nearly 2½-hour film, which was shown as a “Cannes premiere” and not in competition, is notable in that the two main characters, a long-married couple knocking around in their cluttered Paris apartment, were shot with separate cameras and presented simultaneously next to one another on the screen; all the way through,...

Top Picksdaniel KASMAN1. 2008 (Blake Williams)2. State Funeral (Sergei Loznitsa)3. About Endlessness (Roy Andersson)4. Seven Years in May (Affonso Uchôa)5. Uncut Gems (Josh & Benny Safdie)6. Crazy World (Nabwana I.G.G.)7. Austrian Pavilion (Philipp Fleischmann)8. Transcript (Erica Sheu)9. Collective (Alexander Nanau)10. Book of Hours (Annie MacDonell)Fernando F. CROCE1. The Traitor (Marco Bellocchio)2. The Cordillera of Dreams (Patricio Guzmán)3. Uncut Gems (Josh & Benny Safdie)4. Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles)5. The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yinan)6. First Love (Takashi Miike)7. Anne at 13,000 ft (Kazik Radwanksi)8. The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão (Karim Aïnouz)9. Sound of Metal (Darius Marder)10. It Must Be Heaven (Elia Suleiman)Kelley DONG1. To the Ends of the Earth (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)2. Jordan River Anderson, the Messenger (Alanis Obomsawin)3. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn)4. Liberté (Albert Serra)5. How to Build a Girl (Coky Gieroyc), Saint Maud (Rose Glass)Correspondences#1 Daniel Kasman...

The Notebook is covering Tiff with an on-going correspondence between critics Fernando F. Croce Kelley Dong, and editor Daniel Kasman.The Wild Goose LakeDear Kelley and Danny,When this dispatch reaches you, I shall be back in my Californian abode, exhausted and slightly under the weather and elated to have been able to have spent the last ten days immersed in movies and friends. I’ll keep the sentiment short so we can get more quickly to my final viewings, but do know that I wait all year to be at Tiff with you, and that I happily carry your kindness and cinephiliac knowledge and passion with me home.I absolutely get what you mean about that much-needed jolt during the festival, Danny. For me, that came in the form of Diao Yinan's The Wild Goose Lake, an invigorating dive into the Chinese underworld that at times plays like Carol Reed...

Mexico’s Arturo Ripstein, who began his career as an A.D. on Luis Buñuel’s 1962 “The Exterminating Angel,” is back, bringing his latest collaboration with screenwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego, a black and white film that picks up on most all of the director’s hallmarks.

A weighty drama, “Devil Between the Legs” dives from the get-go into unsettling territory as it follows the strained relationship of a married couple in their old age that struggles between desire, jealousy, violence and love. Beatriz (skillfully portrayed by Sylvia Pasquel) endures the wrath of her husband (Alejandro Suárez) while playing along to fulfill his fantasies. This dark love relationship unspools in the confines of a shabby house under the gaze of a maid. The film, that plays with a 19th century Spanish and high high-contrast cinematography, eludes naturalism to deliver a reminder of the complexities of human relationships in a modern world...

If Bleak Street Could Talk: Ripstein’s Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf in Sordid Marital Melodrama

Arturo Ripstein, one of Mexico’s most enduring and influential auteurs, continues to repulse and disturb with his latest feature, the aptly titled Devil Between the Legs. Once an assistant to Buñuel and now in his fifth decade of filmmaking, Ripstein is as uncompromising as ever with his latest, a lurid marital melodrama about a crumbling long-term marriage between man and wife, whose passions and proclivities are at odds with what their decrepit bodies are currently capable of. Morose, macabre and even maudlin, it’s a portrait of people in a particular stage of life behaving in ways too off-putting for most to casually consume.…...

If the Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider characters from 1972's Last Tango in Paris had both lived and carried on with their sexual shenanigans into old age, the result might have been something like Devil Between the Legs. Running a great risk of slipping off the high wire into the ludicrous, the offensive or simply something you just don’t really want to be watching, veteran Mexican director Arturo Ripstein has instead pulled off something rather extraordinary: a startling, confident, complex and entirely bold dive into the compulsions behind senescent eroticism that’s nearly as explicit as the Bertolucci ...

If the Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider characters from 1972's Last Tango in Paris had both lived and carried on with their sexual shenanigans into old age, the result might have been something like Devil Between the Legs. Running a great risk of slipping off the high wire into the ludicrous, the offensive or simply something you just don’t really want to be watching, veteran Mexican director Arturo Ripstein has instead pulled off something rather extraordinary: a startling, confident, complex and entirely bold dive into the compulsions behind senescent eroticism that’s nearly as explicit as the Bertolucci ...

The Notebook is covering Tiff with an on-going correspondence between critics Fernando F. Croce, Kelley Dong, and editor Daniel Kasman.Color Out of SpaceDear Fernando and Kelley,The gang's all here! It is good to have you all back again for another Toronto International Film Festival. We have our work cut out for us, as usual: Tiff is giving no signs of slimming down its waistline. Often I wonder if, in a strange paradox, these mega festivals simply cannot afford to be smaller, that they need their size to justify their cost, and vice versa. Look back at our last eleven years of covering this festival and you will find, unabated, me and others grumbling about the sheer size of the enterprise, the unmanageably large slate of films. Apologies, then, for repeat readers. Covering Tiff would certainly be different if we were in less privileged, well-traveled position, as we could...