Nocturnes speaks to the lepidopterist in all of us. Through remarkable patience, keen observation, and beautiful compositions, directors Anupama Srinivasan and Anirban Dutta conjure a transportive, deeply immersive sensorial experience. Nocturnes’ is a celebration of meticulous, rigorous observation, imploring us to look closer at the hidden interconnectedness of the natural world. Following a research team […]

Mamifera is both a lovely, well-observed character study and a thoroughly relatable portrait of a quarter-life crisis in slow-motion. The film focuses on Lola—a fabulous Maria Rodriguez Soto—a woman who has always been certain that being a mother is not for her. Of course, this being a movie, you can guess what happens next: Just […]

As revolutionary now as when it was released in 1983, Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames is a Molotov cocktail of feminist futurism that’s both an essential document of its time and radically ahead of it.  Set in a fictional America 10 years after a social-democratic revolution, things are still pretty miserable for women. So when […]

North American premiere A wildly clever and frequently hilarious film in which an actress plays a film director named Narges Shahid Kalhor (whom we often see in conversation with the director Narges Kalhor), and directs her in a film…which we watch. It’s called Shahid. Basically, Kalhor has decided that she no longer wants the “Shahid” […]

Like the other rock biopic in this year’s festival (Eno), Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements subverts the traditional format and comes up with something that far more accurately reflects the famed alt-rock band, which came to prominence in the ’90s. The poster children for ironic detachment, the band clearly doesn’t take the process too seriously, but […]

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris (“as influential a doc maker as the industry has” – Variety) incisively probes the darkest chapters in recent American history: family separations. Merging narrative vignettes of one migrant family’s plight with hard-hitting interviews with government officials, Morris paints a jaw-dropping picture of the state-sponsored crisis of cruelty, as hundreds of families […]

Toronto librarian Miriam is reserved, almost to a fault. She seems to enjoy her job at the library—except for those weird letters she keeps finding, apparently addressed to the world at large, though somehow connecting with her personally—but she seems to be at a remove from life. That changes when she meets a cab driver […]

In Lizzie Borden’s second great film of the ’80s, she looks at sex work through the lens of labor, free of judgement and full of compassion—it’s a viewpoint we still don’t see in a society that stigmatizes the profession and its workers, and an entertainment industry that uses their experience in the name of cheap […]

Matthias Glasner’s epic thanatopsis, his first cinematic effort since 2012’s Mercy, is sweeping in its scope but finely textured in its telling. Dying was this year’s Best Picture at the 2024 German Film Awards and was awarded the Silver Bear for best screenplay at the Berlin International Film Festival. Lars Eidinger (Everyone Else, White Noise) […]

How do we quantify happiness? In Bhutan, the self-proclaimed happiest country in the world, they have a mathematical formula for it. In the lovely and fascinating Agent of Happiness, directors Arun Bhattari and Dorottya Zurbo follow two government Happiness Agents as they trek through the Himalayas, assessing people’s contentment, even as their own could use […]

Set in a strict, well-to-do boarding school in India in the ’90s, Girls Will Be Girls has all the hallmarks of your standard coming-of-age gauntlet: hormonal teens crushing hard; dirty tricks from clashing cliques; overachievers and ne’er do wells; and a self-contained setting where uniforms are mandatory, decorum is unimpeachable, and tradition is sacrosanct. But, […]

SOLD OUT. WAIT LIST STARTS 1 HOUR IN PERSON AT THE BOX OFFICE. Amal, the latest from Moroccan-Belgian director Jawad Rhalib, works as both an urgent philosophical dilemma and a tightly-wound thriller. It drops us in the middle of a secondary school class body that is starkly divided and introduces a catalyst that inflames this […]

A new cult classic indie sports movie in the making, EEPHUS is an elegy for America’s pastime and an affectionate depiction of beer league camaraderie. It’s also just flat-out funny, with a hell of a comedic batting average and a lovable Massachusetts-brand of brininess. It’s the end of an era for a recreational baseball league […]

In 2019, 1,000 Palestinian homes were selected for demolition in the village of Masafer Yatta, the largest mass expulsion order in the West Bank since the Israeli occupation began. Local resident Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham document this destruction house by house over four years in No Other Land, winner of this year’s […]

Not for the faint of heart. Director Magnus van Horn describes his gothic horror film as a “fairy tale for adults,” which makes you wonder what kind of fairy tales they read in Denmark. Harrowing and utterly compelling, The Girl With The Needle is a stark study of the lack of choices for women in […]

Mysterious and elusive, Aliyar Rasti’s excellent two-hander conceals a great reservoir of emotional and spiritual turmoil under a patient, placid surface. Recruited for a cryptic treasure hunt, damaged young agnostic Shoja accompanies Beitollah on a journey to Northern Iran in search of a cave that may or may not exist with a cache of gold […]

Tommaso Santambrogio’s debut feature is a stunningly photographed black-and-white portrait of Cuba. A tryptic of gently intersecting stories, set in San Antonio de los Baños, the film follows the romance of a young artistic couple as their creative passions pull them in different directions, an elderly woman reliving her past through letters from a long […]

Canadian experimental filmmaker Matthew Rankin’s sophomore feature film, which has already been chosen as Canada’s Oscar contender, is set “somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg.” That should give you some idea of the absurdist satirical tone that Rankin is aiming for in this adventurous work inspired as much by Mohsen Makhmalbaf as hometown hero Guy Maddin. […]

“Who will survive and what will be left of them.” Fifty years on, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is arguably the greatest horror movie of all time, a grisly piece of American nastiness and a key film of ’70s New Hollywood. Remembered for being bloodier than it actually is, the grittiness of the movie is […]

Something has happened between six-year-old Armand and his schoolmate Jon. The parents are called to the school for a meeting—including a chilly Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World) as Armand’s mother, a famous actress. But what actually happened? Was it just a children’s game or something much more serious? Who should we believe? […]