Jesse Catherine Webber

Robin Wood begins the introduction to his 1965 book Hitchcock’s Films with a question: “Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?” It’s a deceptively simple query; as I glance at my book shelf, I see no less than 10 books on the filmmaker — Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films Revisited; Rohmer & Chabrol’s Hitchcock; A Hitchcock Reader, edited by Deutelbaum & Poague; Durgnat’s A Long, Hard Look at Psycho; the canonical long-form interview Hitchcock/Truffaut; Walker’s Hitchcock’s Motifs; Krohn’s Hitchcock...

In his new film Being John Smith, premiering alongside Jean-Luc Godard’s for-real-this-time last two films in TIFF’s Wavelengths program, filmmaker John Smith starts with a simple idea, the exceptional commonness of his name, and layers on contradiction after contradiction, accomplishing both deep vulnerability and unusual universality. He begins with a personal history, structured around the childhood nicknames that augmented his indistinct given name.

Over the course of three seasons, I Think You Should Leave has cemented Tim Robinson as a genuinely iconic comedic performer. With episodes under 20 minutes packed with sketches lending themselves to repeated viewing and intense memeability, Robinson’s distinct comedic and literal voices have pervaded culture.