“A virtuoso feat of indiscriminate gunplay from director Ben Wheatley — who is, without a doubt, the most exciting thing to hit British genre cinema since Guy Ritchie, minus the latter’s eagerness to sell out — the cartoonishly over-the-top Free Fire crosses the irreverent cheekiness of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs with the ruthless spirit of 1970s B-movies, in which audiences hoped for a few minutes of what Free Fire sustains for the better part of 90 minutes.” — from Peter Debruge’s 9.9 Variety review.

After High Rise, anything from Wheatley is a must-see. But many of the hot TIFF movies are slotted right against each other over the first couple of days, and so you naturally miss a good portion of them. Free Fire had its first showing at the Ryerson on Thursday midnight (no way) followed by two press screenings yesterday morning (my Nocturnal Animals viewing prevented me from attending both). I’ll catch it next Wednesday at 12:15 pm.

Boilerplate: “Twelve angry men and one tough ‘bird’ walk into a dilapidated Boston warehouse and proceed to blast the building and one another to smithereens in Free Fire, a dizzyingly choreographed — and unexpectedly comedic — shoot-’em-up in which the body count hits double digits, while the bullet count proves downright impossible to fathom.”