Our sixth dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first, our second, our third, our fourth, our fifth) offers an eclectic mix…
Gael Garcia Bernal’s Chicuarotes tries to defy expectations for a film in which the actor-director himself plays a performer, committing itself to an exploration of…
With Ana, Mon Amour, director Calin Peter Netzer is desperately trying to align himself with the great figures of doomed romantic cinema, from Rivette and Cassavettes…
Our fifth dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first, our second, our third, our fourth) tackles some of the fall’s bigger…
Paula Hernandez’s The Sleepwalkers begins with the sounds of a ticking clock and running water over a black screen. The noises increase in intensity until…
Our fourth dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first, our second, and our third) skews heavily Canadian: Atom Egoyan’s latest, lurid…
There was no way that we were going to escape the first four years of the Trump presidency without Alex Gibney making a documentary about…
Calvin Thomas and Lev Lewis have been at the heart of the burgeoning Canadian independent film scene over the past few years, with their 2018…
The Last Porno Show opens with shots of both hardcore pornography and an aerial view of a man graphically masturbating in a movie theater. It…
Our third dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first, and here’s our second) includes more TIFF world premieres than any of…
Depiction of extreme pain is not the most distressing thing about Finnish BDSM comedy Dogs Don’t Wear Pants. Frequent scenes of a dominatrix strangling a…
With Resin, director Daniel Borgman explores the beauty and the terror of escaping a dysfunctional society and returning to something more simplistic. The film is…
With the distinct air of an artist desperate to cobble together a personal story out of some old rusty parts, III is a film absolutely…
Elia Suleiman: actor, director, “citizen of the world.” It Must Be Heaven follows Suleiman as he journeys from his native Palestine to Paris, and then to New…
Our second dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first) includes several more competition titles from this year’s Cannes that we’ve been…
Much like its titular character, Pablo Larain’s Ema is a bit of an enigma: a seemingly complex character study that offers little in the way…
Nina Hoss is an absolute treasure, one of the great actresses of contemporary cinema; her collaborations with Christian Petzold produced some of the decade’s best…
Our first dispatch from the 2019 Toronto Film Festival (which runs from Sept. 5 – 15) finds us finally catching up with a lot of…
Dividing Stephen King’s sprawling novel of repressed childhood trauma and inter-dimensional evil clowns into two parts not only made it easier to streamline It’s narrative,…
The Satanists in Hail Satan? don’t actually worship the devil, but it’d be a lot cooler if they did. Instead of ritualistic blood sacrifices and black magick,…