"Anonymous" Surprises at Toronto

The biggest surprise of the festival season so far has got to be that Roland Emmerich's "Anonymous," his Shakespeare-was-a-hoax historical thriller, is getting good remarks out of Toronto. 
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InContention's Kris Tapley was the first to chime in with his endearing thoughts, but the twitter-verse soon followed suit, one surprised viewer after another.
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While "Anonymous" certainly doesn't perfectly fit into the Emmerich template (for one, the Earth isn't in peril), it does represent another case of the director's penchant for skeptical theorizing ("2012" , "The Day After Tomorrow") and historical reenactment ("The Patriot", "10,000 B.C.").
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Nevertheless, a Shakespearean thriller, if done right, does sound like an intriguing prospect. "Anonymous" opens October 28th.