Writer and director Nicole Delaney’s latest short film, Thirsty, is a classical sort of romance with a modern twist and told from a perspective you’ve never seen and will likely never see again.
A limp, poorly executed excuse to share the teachings of one of the world’s most famous spiritual teachers and guides, the documentary Becoming Nobody is one of those films aimed squarely at superfans who’re already staunch followers, but it’s doubtful that they’ll find any further enlightenment from this heavily recycled material than they’ve already received.
Stunning, rigorous, and heart rending, Heimat is a Space in Time, the latest from veteran German filmmaker Thomas Heise, examines the director’s family across four generations, and uses that shared past as context for various themes and images that can best describe his homeland’s fraught and violent history.
For her latest short film, I Am in the World as Free and Slender as a Deer on a Plain (which makes its premiere at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival as part of Short Cuts Programme 3), writer and director Sofia Banzhaf wanted to look at dating, love, desire, and the pitfalls of being a young woman in the modern era from a perspective she hadn’t seen on screen before, and with it, she has yet another visually stunning and emotionally moving credit to add to her increasingly fascinating and well rounded young resume.
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.
