GENRE | Sophie Thatcher Finds Romantic 'Companion'–ship

"The days of you controlling me are over."

New Line Cinema / BoulderLight Pictures

Veteran television comedy writer Drew Hancock makes his impressive feature horror screenwriting and directing debut in the inventive romantic horror-comedy, Companion. It carefully employs the technology of our digital age as a contemporary metaphor for unhealthy romantic relationships.

SCREEN | Recollections of a Vietnamese Rebellion – 'New Wave' Culture

"I was chasing a story about a bunch of Vietnamese-American rebels."

Photo credit | Yudi Echevarria/Angel City Press

Chinese-Vietnamese-American director Elizabeth Ai explores the immigrant experience through music in her fun but meaningful documentary, New Wave. All about the influence of the titular genre of music and its effects on the pop culture of the Vietnamese diaspora emerging from 1980s Southern California, the film takes an interesting approach to dissecting the unspoken collective intergenerational trauma of these children of refugees after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

SCREEN | 'It's All Gonna Break' Collects A Broken Social Scene

"It's really difficult to put that much chaos on stage."

Blue Ice Docs / Fathom Film

Influential Toronto indie rock collective Broken Social Scene gets the documentary treatment in It's All Gonna Break, an intimate time capsule aiming to capture the youthful spirt of the underground explosion of musical creativity in the early 2000s thanks to cheap rent and a bunch of talented musicians living near each other.

REEL | 'Nickel Boys' Reforms A Sinful Historical Perspective

"We have to be like knights. Checkmate."

Orion Pictures / Warner Bros. Pictures

Photographer turned filmmaker RaMell Ross wondrously dramatizes historical institutional racial violence in Nickel Boys, based on the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead exploring Florida's highly abusive Dozier School, a barbaric reform school for young Black males, that operated in Florida for 111 years (until 2011) before being revealed to have essentially comitted child enslavement and other atrocities after the discovery of many unmarked graves.

REEL | Pamela Anderson Retires 'The Last Showgirl' x WFF 2024

"Las Vegas used to treat us like movie stars."

Whistler Film Festival

Vancouver Island native Pamela Anderson makes her on-screen starring role comeback (after her 2022 Broadway stage debut in Chicago) in third-generation filmmaker Gia Coppola's melodic, working-class Las Vegas indie drama. The Last Showgirl deromanticizes a past collective sense of "old Vegas" and its previously idealized facade of sexy glamour.

REEL | Adrien Brody Rebuilds 'The Brutalist' x TIFF 2024

"Go to America and I will follow you."

Toronto International Film Festival

Filmed in the glorious 1950s VistaVision sideways 35mm widescreen format, actor-turned-director Brady Corbet makes his great American cinematic opus in the three-and-a-half hour, decades-spanning (1947-1980) epic. The Brutalist is framed as a post-WWII immigrant tale of staggering architectural ambition and scope extolling both all the opportunities and cruelties European Jews faced coming to America.

SCREEN | André Holland Paints and Heals – 'Exhibiting Forgiveness'

"Some things can't be worked out on canvas."

Roadside Attractions / Vortex Media

Accomplished African-American contemporary painter Titus Kaphar makes his directing debut in a soulful but piercing Michigan family drama. Touching on issues of artistry, generational trauma, and parenthood through the lens of fractured fathers and sons, Exhibiting Forgiveness tells a tender semi-autobiographical story of forgiving yourself and your family.

CABLE | 'Skeleton Crew' Escapes A 'Star Wars' Adventure for Kids

"You have a lot to learn about pirates."

Lucasfilm

Skeleton Crew, the latest cutthroat Star Wars spin-off series, clearly channels Amblin's iconic 1980-90s era of children's adventure films in the mold of The Goonies meets Treasure Island—displaced to "a galaxy far, far away." There's plenty of well-needed coming-of-age discovery and wonder but some inconsistent elements and a slightly adrift tone never totally feel cohesive inside its greater shared universe.

GENRE | Jude Law Chases Down 'The Order' x TIFF 2024

"You preach racial economics. We live it."

Toronto International Film Festival

Australian director Justin Kurzel directs a weary Jude Law as a loner FBI agent hunting the eponymous white supremacist domestic terrorist group active in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. Based on the 1989 non-fiction book, The Silent Brotherhood, by Denver journalists Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, The Order dramatizes the atrocities committed by a real-life splinter group of organized racist separatists committed to the violent insurrection of the United States.