Sunday, March 10, 2024 at 11:00AM 
People are never quite as far apart as they seem. While a parent surely changes as a result of having to now put someone else first, a part of their old self still remains, even if it’s hidden. An unexpected death prompts an unusual connection for one young woman and her mother in the insightful, entertaining, and creative The Queen of My Dreams, screening at SXSW…
Sunday, September 10, 2023 at 5:16PM 
There’s a reason that there are so many films about the Holocaust. The attempted conquest of Europe and the whole world by the Nazis resulted in millions of innocent lives lost and countless others irreversibly altered. Fortunately, there were more than a few people who made the brave decision to stand up for those who couldn’t advocate or fight for themselves. These stories typically make for poignant cinematic tales. The latest is Irena’s Vow, which stars Sophie Nélisse as a Polish nurse who risked her life to safeguard a group of Jews…
Like La Rafle, The Zookeeper’s Wife, and A Hidden Life, this film centers on someone who was not Jewish but who found herself significantly disenfranchised when the Nazis invaded her country...
Canada, Dougray Scott, Irena's Vow, Reviews, Sophie Nelisse, TIFF, WW II, film festivals Saturday, September 9, 2023 at 8:00PM 
You first notice sounds – the gurgle of running water, then the chirps of distant birds. It’s symphony-like, played by an orchestra with no maestro, though it’s through such a person we come to experience it. She’s Emma, a promising young conductor whose life is on the precipice of unraveling and to whose subjectivity Chloé Robichaud ties her new film. While the character’s vocation, sensitive ear, and relationship with a female cellist will inevitably draw comparisons to TÁR, Days of Happiness differs significantly from Todd Field’s Volpi Cup champion—the biggest distinction residing in the pictures’ narrative trajectory. One is about a public downfall, the other a private ascent…
Friday, September 8, 2023 at 5:45PM 
Down the Pacific coast, there’s a place that looks like heaven but is no safe haven. You reach it by boat, sailing over turquoise waves, the wind carrying hopes of healing and promises of solutions to problems that have none. First-time feature director Meredith Hama-Brown and cinematographer Norm Li capture the environment’s full spectrum of color in their new 1990s-set film Seagrass, rendering bleak material beautiful. Skin tones are sun-kissed, while the deepest shadows are cobalt blue. It’s like we’re seeing the shoreline through a painter’s eyes. We’re not.
Rather than the artist’s gaze, we experience a family’s troubled perspective. They’re two girls and their parents, bound to a couple’s retreat where they hope their marriage will find salvation…
Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 8:00PM ;)
Submitting a documentary is a risky strategy in the Best International Film race. Since Waltz with Bashir in 2008, only four other non-fiction features have been able to score nominations in the category – Cambodia's The Missing Picture, North Macedonia's Honeyland, Romania's Collective, and Denmark's Flee. None of them won. Still, hope is everlasting, and one often finds that some of the year's most fascinating submissions happen to be documentaries. The same is true for our current season, with two titles going as far as incorporating animation, like Waltz with Bashir and Flee. Mayhap they can repeat their antecessors' success at getting nominated. It's unlikely but not impossible…
