REEL | Top 10 Films of 2025

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

Warner Bros. Pictures

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)

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 sect (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.

REEL | Timothée Chalamet Challenges 'Marty Supreme'

"I'm the ultimate product of Hitler's defeat."

A24 / Elevation Pictures

Marty Supreme, the eldest Safdie brother, Josh Safdie's second solo directorial film—after the younger Benny's solo debut in The Smashing Machine, also an unconventional sports drama from A24, earlier this year—starring Timothée Chalamet (also a producer), is set in the world of championship table tennis in 1950s New York City. Chalamet portrays a fictional hotshot star player, Marty Mauser, on the rise that's based on real-life Jewish-American ping-pong hustler, Marty Reisman.

CABLE | Wong Kar-wai Colours 'Blossoms Shanghai'

"Neon signs glowed like a sea of flowers."

Jet Tone Films / Tencent Pictures

Blossoms Shanghai, Chinese auteur Wong Kar-wai's first television drama series, broadly romanticizes 1990s Shanghai in the lushly complementary vein of what his cinematic masterpiece, In the Mood for Love, did for 1960s Hong Kong but only on the small screen. Created and directed by Wong, scripted by Qin Wen, and based on author Jin Yucheng's award-winning 2013 novel, Blossoms, it tells a vaguley historical yarn of late twentieth-century Eastern capitalism wrapped in melodramatic intrigue.

SCENE | 'West Van Story' Sweeps the Spirit of 'East Van Panto'

"You're just jealous, because I was an early developer."

Dawn Petten, Tresha Thamilchelvan, Izel de Lara & Ivy Charlies / Photo credit | Emily Cooper

Commercial Drive—One of my favourite annual traditions of leftist satirical musical propaganda (complimentary), East Van Panto, is back for another year of shared theatrical joy. Theatre Replacement's latest holiday stage production, presented by The Cultch, returned to the York Theatre for its lucky thirteenth edition of love, laughter, and low-income housing.

VIFF 2025 | Leo Woodall Cracks the Right 'Tuner'

"It's not about hearing. It's about feeling."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2025—Oscar-winning Canadian documentary filmmaker Daniel Roher makes his narrative feature debut in the entertaining, piano-themed heist drama, Tuner. It stars English actor Leo Woodall as the titular piano tuner with a sensitive hearing condition that both makes him an unusually talented safe cracker while rendering him incapable of playing his instrument of choice.

REEL | Grieving the Shakespearean Tragedy of 'Hamnet' x TIFF 2025

"Will you be brave?"

Toronto International Film Festival

Hamnet, Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao's period film adaptation of Irish novelist and co-screenwriter Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 fictional literary account exploring the lingering trauma of the tragic childhood death of William Shakespeare's eponymous young son, stars Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal as the famed playwright's grieving wife (Agnes) and the young Bard himself. As a real tearjerker, the occasionally metaphysical film balances the inspiration of sadness and grief and its effect on the artistic process.

REEL | 'Eternity' Chooses A Bittersweet Afterlife x TIFF 2025

"There's nothing more powerful than emotional blackmail."

Toronto International Film Festival

Eternity, director David Freyne's high-concept romantic comedy fantasy, stars Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen as a long-married, elderly couple who meet up in the afterlife to spend the titular rest of their time together, that is, until the latter's first husband, the comically handsome Callum Turner, suddenly reappears after waiting sixty-seven years in limbo after his own death in the Korean War. It's an amusing premise that sets up a killer love triangle to ultimately mine a bittersweet romance about how and who we choose to spend the rest of our lives with.

REEL | Changing 'Wicked: For Good' – A Grand Musical Finale

"The wand really sells it."

Universal Pictures

Wicked: For Good, the second half of blockbuster director Jon M. Chu's two-part film adaptation of the massive Broadway stage musical sensation, adapted from both author Gregory Maguire's titular book series in parallel to its reinterpretation of L. Frank Baum's original 1900 children's fantasy novel, finishes off its cinematic reimagining right where Wicked: Part I left off. For the most part, the Wicked Witch of the West-led sequel lives up to the already lofty expectations of the acclaimed first film as a defiantly fitting yet slavish conclusion.