Funny how tastes change. Grand Illusion was almost certainly the Renoir consensus pick for many years — it was a box office smash in France,…
A snakeskin tube top and cowboy hat. A belt worn on a bare midriff, above the belly button. And, of course, the famous white tutu.…
Among the boldest of the great Argentine films that emerged at the start of the 2000s was Lisandro Alonso’s 2001 debut La Libertad, a film…
Pepe Just barely after the advent of photography, the concept of putting a camera in a balloon was born. Taken long before commercial air travel,…
In his new film Being John Smith, premiering alongside Jean-Luc Godard’s for-real-this-time last two films in TIFF’s Wavelengths program, filmmaker John Smith starts with a…
The act of remaking such a recent film as Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil (2022), one more respectively recent than The Departed and Vanilla Sky’s…
Botox is everywhere, and Ozempic will follow. To voluntarily place a needle in one’s skin is no longer an image of deviancy, but one of…
Anora The title character of Sean Baker’s Anora notably does not go by that name for most of the film, and appears uncomfortable when male…
Until 2019, the Toronto International Film Festival had a section called Masters. As you might assume, it was a space for major filmmakers with significant…
Aberdeen offers unfortunate proof — not that any was really needed — of how hard it is for well-intentioned films addressing important subject matter to…
As he did in his directorial debut, the excellent Bones and Names (2023), Fabian Stumm mines the details of his own life and adapts them,…
2024 has been the most prolific year of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s career; last February he presented at the Berlinale Chime, his long-awaited comeback to the atmospheric…
The title card hovers over an image of trolley tracks rushing toward the camera. A lulling piano serenades the words Passing Strangers, both heralded and…
Babygirl Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is aware of the discourse. It’s read all the articles that have been passed around online, it knows what’s considered problematic…
Neorealist drama Bicycle Thieves said so much about our human condition and the struggle to rise above one’s dire circumstances that its main concept of…
Not very long ago, robots and AIs, automatons and droids — either as friendly or malignant entities — belonged to a far unknown future (remember…
It’s been almost 25 years since the infamous Esquire piece in which Andrew Sarris suggested that Kevin Smith might become “the next Scorsese.” One doesn’t…
Writer-director Sarah Elizabeth Mintz’s debut feature, Good Girl Jane, treads a well-worn path in its portrayal of an innocent teenage girl’s eventual corruption at the…
Asmae El Moudir plays with multiple perspectives in her hybrid documentary The Mother of All Lies. Shot over the course of 10 years in Morocco,…
At first glance, it wouldn’t be unfair to view My Old Ass, the new feature from Canadian actress-turned-director Megan Park, as a bit of a…