UNITED STATES
GQ

By Scott Tobias

In the 16 years I’ve been attending the Toronto International Film Festival, Tom McCarthy’s The Cobbler may be the single worst movie I’ve seen here. And during that time, I’m typically seeing four or five movies a day over seven to ten days, so conservatively speaking, I’ve seen somewhere around 500 movies. Many of them are terrible: Bloated awards-trawlers, impenetrable navel-gazers, “discoveries” by first-time/last-time directors, and those random slot-fillers that yield a masterpiece two percent of the time and a dud the other ninety-eight. But The Cobbler was a special kind of misfire, a magical realist comedy featuring unsettling racial overtones, Adam Sandler at his most clinically depressed, and a shocking series of third-act misjudgments.

As I wrote at the time, “The Cobbler is a paradox: A film that must be seen to be believe, but mustn’t be seen.” One year later, however,…