For her first outing as a director, Volcano (premiering at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival in Short Cuts), veteran television writer Karen Moore wanted to keep things as personal and simple as possible every step of the way, from the actors she cast to setting her short in a location she knew very well.
Although Israeli-born filmmaker Nadav Lapid hasn’t made a ton of movies across his sixteen year career, his latest, Synonyms, should’ve been placed into the Masters section at TIFF this year.
American Woman, the first feature from writer-director Semi Chellas, has a lot of things going for it and one huge problem working against it.
For her fifty-third film overall and the seventh entry in a series about the rights and struggles of indigenous children and young adults, veteran documentarian Alanis Obomsawin turns her critical eye to the Canadian health care system with Jordan River Anderson, The Messenger, a film that’s both incendiary and somewhat hopeful for the future.
An autobiographical epitaph and one of the best cinema studies lessons viewers are ever likely to receive, Varda by Agnès finds one of the best filmmakers who ever lived leaving behind an in-depth reflection on their legacy.
An eerie, gross, and frequently hilarious tale of madness and misery, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse – the follow-up to his break-out indie horror success The Witch – is too weird for words but highly entertaining for anyone willing to get on side with its nasty, misanthropic wavelength.
Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy’s coastal and crusty noir Blow the Man Down isn’t just a strong feature debut for the filmmaking tandem, but also a wildly entertaining cult classic in the making.
Easy Land, the first feature from Serbian-Canadian filmmaker Sanja Zivkovic, is a balanced, reserved, but emotionally resonant look at the modern immigrant experience, mental illness, and mother-daughter bonds.
Parasite is a brilliant, biting, chilling, and darkly hilarious bit of social commentary from Korean master filmmaker Bong Joon-ho that’s as entertaining as it is unsettling.
Veteran Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio’s epic gangster drama The Traitor takes a conventional mobster narrative, but tells it with a great deal of technical and procedural complexity.
