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…
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…
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…
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…
Until 2019, the Toronto International Film Festival had a section called Masters. As you might assume, it was a space for major filmmakers with…
Like his 2012 masterpiece Tabu, Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour uses the transition from the silent to the sound era to explore the passage into…
Aberdeen offers unfortunate proof — not that any was really needed — of how hard it is for well-intentioned films addressing important subject matter…
As he did in his directorial debut, the excellent Bones and Names (2023), Fabian Stumm mines the details of his own life and adapts…
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…
The title card hovers over an image of trolley tracks rushing toward the camera. A lulling piano serenades the words Passing Strangers, both heralded…
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…
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…
Sylvia Chang has been one of the more under-appreciated forces in international film for almost 50 years now. Beginning her career as an actress…
There’s an innate novelty to Ron Howard directing a film like Eden, and it’s disingenuous not to mention it. The filmmaker has by all…
Not very long ago, robots and AIs, automatons and droids — either as friendly or malignant entities — belonged to a far unknown future…
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…
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…
Asmae El Moudir plays with multiple perspectives in her hybrid documentary The Mother of All Lies. Shot over the course of 10 years in…