TIFF Review: Joost van Ginkel's Dutch Oscar Contender 'The Paradise Suite'

Sometimes I wish short films had more market value in world cinema so filmmakers who come up with story ideas for a bunch of shorts instead of one idea for a feature, or that they didn’t have to cram those shorts into an anthology film (like the recent “Wild Tales”), or a fates-collide movie like “Magnolia” or “Short Cuts.”

Writer/director Joost van Ginkel’s “The Paradise Suite”, Netherland’s entry for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, falls into the latter category, boldly attempting to squeeze in multiple serious and complex themes into a two-hour feature using the “fates collide” approach, only to completely crumble under its own ambition. Many of the shorts don’t gel with the other stories, thematically and in a narrative sense, which makes them feel more like a bunch of filler in order to reach a feature runtime.

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The stories themselves are not executed with much originality. Only two of the five work, but they still lack the depth...