Why are filmmakers today so afraid of melodrama? Many’s a recent feature, from the acclaimed (Celine Song’s Past Lives) to the less so (Luca Guadagnino’s…
Having decided myself to migrate from a Toronto suburb to Montreal in my young adulthood shortly after hearing Visions for the first time, I am…
In the new Apple TV original film Outcome, Keanu Reeves stars as Reef Hawk, a hugely successful actor emerging from a five-year hiatus that found…
Corpses are sliced open during an autopsy. Cult members devour fresh human organs before engaging in an orgy while still smeared with blood. A group…
Few people are immune to the power of a tale thrillingly told. So says Buffalo Bill Cody, narrator of Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo…
Liminal spaces are all the rage these days. You can’t scroll for five minutes on any given social media app without seeing an image or…
The most frustrating thing about Igor Bezinović’s Fiume o Morte! is how quickly the novelty of re-creation wears off. The sight of three soldiers staring…
“You sound cool talking out your ass,” Bruce (Anthony Oberbeck) quips to his best friend and roommate, Simon (newcomer Tristan Turner), a struggling filmmaker. In…
While easy to forget given its catastrophic success, fascism came into the world a mess. The writer and public intellectual Umberto Eco wrote in a…
In the age of virality, who will remember the snuff film? 1978’s Faces of Death, a documentary-style gorefest, is the stuff of dorm-room legend. “They…
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There are two — or if someone is feeling incredibly ambitious, 101 — films to review in Thierry Frémaux’s Lumière, Le Cinéma, a cine-documentary exclusively…
Kazuya Shiraishi’s Bushido is a fascinating clash of visual styles and familiar genre tropes rendered fresh via a strange, languid dramaturgy. Kakunoshin Yanagida (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi) is a…
Against the notion of cinematic auteurism, it has sometimes been thought enough to respond that, after all, cinema is a collaborative medium to which certain…
Chaos reigns in Yasuhiro Aoki’s anarchic, wildly imaginative feature directorial debut ChaO, a whirlwind exploration of the breadth of storytelling potential in animated film. Almost…
Why 2025 was a year rich in films with purgatorial motifs — everything from Oliver Laxe’s Sirât to Alex Ullom’s It Ends — is a…
In just a few short years, the resonance of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a film already laced with devastating history and complications,…
From above and behind, we watch a man running through a wintry Central Park, his dark clothing marking him as a silhouette against the snow-frosted…
When is the ideal time to learn your significant other’s most shameful secret? The new comedy The Drama argues the best time is “never” and…
Living in Brazil in a post-Bolsonaro world clearly feels dystopian to director Gabriel Mascaro, who has now made two consecutive films about a near-future where…
I watched two films from IFFR’s 2025 festival: one was The Last Dance, the smash hit Hong Kong family melodrama set in the world of…