SCREEN | Touring the 'Islands' – A Sunshine Noir

"I'm not running away from anything."

Greenwich Entertainment / Vortex Media

Brit actors, Sam Riley and Stacy Martin, star in German director Jan-Ole Gerster's seductively sun-soaked, Hitchcockian tennis noir thriller, the appropriately titled Islands. Set on the eponymous Canary Islands, Riley's burned-out hotel resort tennis pro, Tom, gets entangled with a troubled English tourist couple's unhappy marriage to uneasy consequences.

REEL | Amanda Seyfried Shakes 'The Testament of Ann Lee' x TIFF 2025

"All will be clear on the crystal glass of morrow."

Toronto International Film Festival

Norwegian independent filmmaker Mona Fastvold, alongside her The Brutalist director husband Brady Corbet as co-writer/producer, directs another ambitious period biographical drama in The Testament of Ann Lee. Starring Amanda Seyfried as the eponymous pious founding leader of the Shakers religious movement (itself an offshoot of Shaking Quakerism) in the eighteenth-century, the film uses quasi-musical elements and choreography employed in the utopian Christian faith's worshiping practices to tell its historical origins.

SCREEN | Kristen Stewart Swims Past 'The Chronology of Water'

"We will publish or perish together!"

The Forge

Talented actress turned first-time feature filmmaker Kristen Stewart directs Imogen Poots in her riveting portrayal of Oregon-based, bestselling author Lidia Yuknavitch in a hazy film adaptation of the latter's 2011 cult memoir, The Chronology of Water. Framed around a tumultuous family life centred on parental abuse leading to both substance and sex addiction before a promising competitive swimming career, the film is a narratively ambitious portrait of personal salvation.

REEL | Gus Van Sant Takes 'Dead Man's Wire' Hostage x TIFF 2025

"I'm a man that's fighting for everything he owns, sir."

Toronto International Film Festival

Dead Man's Wire, directed by veteran filmmaker Gus Van Sant, depicts the actual 1977 kidnapping by an otherwise mild-mannered Indianapolis man, Tony Kiritsis, played convincingly by a haggard Bill Skarsgård, of his bank mortgage officer (Dacre Montgomery). What follows is a detailed dramatization of the 63-hour hostage crisis standoff and subsequent media circus that would later echo through modern American media and culture.

SCREEN | Falling for the 'People We Meet on Vacation' on Netflix

"How about we die alone together?"

3000 Pictures / Temple Hill Entertainment

People We Meet on Vacation, Netflix's new romantic comedy adapted from best-selling contemporary romance author Emily Henry's 2021 novel of the same name, stars the good-looking duo of Emily Bader and Tom Blyth as best friends who get together to travel somewhere in the world for one week every summer. Director Brett Haley mines the whole When Harry Met Sally inspired best friends turned couple angle, but for contemporary audiences, while set against attractive international locations in a flashback format.

SCREEN | Smuggling 'Little Lorraine' x WFF 2024

"I think what they miss the most is showering together."

Whistler Film Festival

Based on crimes committed in 1986, Little Lorraine dramatizes the real-life international offshore cocaine smuggling operation that engulfed the titular Cape Breton seaside fishing village in Nova Scotia. Singer-songwriter (and co-screenwriter) Adam Baldwin previously wrote about the true-crime story in his 2022 single "Lighthouse in Little Lorraine," with its music video successfully serving as a proof-of-concept for the subsequent film.

GENRE | Daisy Ridley Survives 'We Bury the Dead'

"Why do only some of them come back?"

Vertical Entertainment / Game Theory Films

English actress Daisy Ridley stars in Australian writer/director Zak Hilditch's haunting yet unconventional zombie horror drama, We Bury the Dead. Set in Tasmania in the aftermath of a catastrophic nuclear experiment gone wrong, her Ava joins a "body retrieval unit," desperate to find her husband. She gets derailed when some of the corpses her team is tasked to bury awaken and become the living undead.

REEL | Top 10 Films of 2025

"No fear. Just like Tom f*cking Cruise!"

Warner Bros. Pictures / Ghoulardi Film Company

Click on each film title to read its corresponding review:

1) One Battle After Another ¹ (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

2) Sentimental Value ² * (Affeksjonsverdi, dir. Joachim Trier)

3) Sinners ³ (dir. Ryan Coogler)

4) Marty Supreme (dir. Josh Safdie)

5) Train Dreams * (dir. Clint Bentley)

VIFF 2025 | Bi Gan Dreams A Cinematic 'Resurrection'

"The secret to eternal life is to no longer dream!"

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2025—Resurrection (狂野时代 aka Wild Times), visionary Chinese artist turned filmmaker Bi Gan's ambitious dreamscape odyssey of surrealist sci-fi slow cinema, is structured into six disparate but interconnected chapters, each revolving around one of the Buddhist senses, including the "mind." Set in a far future where most people no longer dream and, as a result, can live forever, things start off in a German expressionist style before transitioning into distinct twentieth-century cinematic eras in China.