The TIFF thread.

Saoirse Ronan is remarkable — and so is everything else — in this entrancing adaptation of Ian McEwan's novella about a young British couple on their honeymoon in 1962. (Variety review)

This is a story that begins in nervous bliss and ends in deep regret, and [the director] makes it an uneven but moving journey. (The Wrap)

Sensitive translation of Ian McEwan’s elegy to inhibited England. 3/5 (The Guardian)

A Breakout turn from Billy Howle can’t rescue this cold Ian McEwan adaptation. C+ (Indiewire)

Kristopher Tapley
Molly's Game: I kind of loved it. Assured transition from Sorkin. @jes_chastain is 🔥 🔥 🔥

Jeff Sneider‏
After doing Diet Sorkin with MISS SLOANE, @jes_Chastain does the real deal in MOLLY'S GAME & hits a home run, to put it in MONEYBALL terms.

Jeff Sneider‏
MEANWHILE, the fatal flaw of MOLLY'S GAME is Sorkin is too close to his subject. Makes her out to be a hero (Wheaties box?) but she's NOT.

david ehrlich
MOLLY'S GAME is *phenomenal,* an Erin Brockovich-level crowd destroyer. Also it's the first good poker movie ever. Wasn't sure we'd get one.

Scott Mantz‏
MOLLY'S GAME: Exhilarating directorial debut by #AaronSorkin! Tour-de-force performance by #JessicaChastain! It's a female Goodfellas! #TIFF

Richard Lawson
Wow, MOLLY'S GAME is an absolute blast. Chastain and Elba are terrific and Sorkin avoids most of his worst impulses. Fun!!

Let’s start with the biggest surprise of TIFF 2017 so far, Craig Gillespie’s razor-sharp “I, Tonya,” the dark comedy approach to the story of Tonya Harding that you had no idea you needed as badly as you do. Writer Steven Rogers and the director of “Lars and the Real Girl” approach a story you think you know as if it’s the fourth season of “Fargo,” finding black veins of hilarity, absurdity, and violence in the story of ice skating’s most controversial figure. It would be an understatement to say that Gillespie’s film does not take the typical biopic approach. It is not an “explainer film”—one of those movies that tries to recast a controversial figure in a new light. It is something altogether strange and original, and it’s a film people are going to be talking about.

From the beginning, the tone of “I, Tonya” is unexpected because there was enough darkness in Tonya Harding’s life for an entirely different approach. As captured here—and the film make it clear in clever ways that truth is fluid and even the interviews used to make this film were contradictory—Harding had to fight her entire life. Her mother, played here with horrific perfection by Allison Janney, one of cinema’s best hurlers of profanity, was just awful. She chain-smoked, physically abused Tonya, and convinced herself that it was her pushing of her daughter that made her a star. As she says late in the film, her own mother did nothing and she still hated her. At least Tonya was a star athlete.

Harding went from one abusive relationship to another, ending up with the unforgettably mustachioed Jeff Gillooly, played with a dangerous blend of idiocy and rage by Sebastian Stan. This take on Gillooly is as one of those people who are so blandly stupid that violence just becomes a part of their life because they can't think of any other way to fix their problems. Jeff and Tonya would scream and fight and hit and sometimes shoot, and she took that anger and channeled it into something at which she was undeniably great, ice skating. Gillespie and cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis do a phenomenal job of capturing the flow and excitement of the sport, but the whole film sparkles in terms of visual compositions with a camera that almost always feels like it’s moving, skating in and out of domestic scenes as well as ones on the ice, but never to a distracting degree.

The centerpiece of “I, Tonya,” and what people will really be talking about, is the stunning work from Robbie, the best of her career to date—yes, I know, she’s great in “Wolf of Wall Street,” but this is challenging on a different level. Her take on Harding is much more than just a physical transformation—she presents Harding not as a tabloid subject or a sob story but a completely three-dimensional person, someone who knew the world was unfair at a very early age and had to fight against that at every turn. Robbie is alternately defiant and hysterical, but she never takes the easy way out, which would have been to turn this take on Tonya into a parody or a tragedy. She contains elements of both. She's alternately defiant and miserable. It's a physically and emotionally demanding performance, and Robbie doesn't take a single false step. She does something even most traditional biopics fail to do—she tells us her side of the story in a way that feels heartfelt and genuine. Everyone here is great—I didn’t even mention the always-fantastic Julianne Nicholson and Bobby Cannavale—but it’s Robbie’s movie. And she nails the triple axel.