Articles

Details

Written by: Gilbert Seah

Parent Category: Articles

Category: Movie Reviews

Published: 17 September 2025

FILM REVIEWS:

 

HIM (USA 2025) **
Directed by Justin Tipping

 

HIM arrives with the Jordan Peele tag.  Peele is a renowned director of horror hits, breaking into international horror cinema with GET OUT, his best film , followed by US nd NOPE.  It should be noted that HIM is not directed by Peele, so watch it. HIM is priced by Peeke under his Monkeypaw production company.

Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) was destined for football glory until an attack by an obsessed fan threatened to end his career before it began.  Just when hope fades, his idol, legendary quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), invites him to train at his private compound. But what starts as the opportunity of a lifetime soon twists into something far more dangerous, as Cam discovers the true cost of chasing greatness.

The film unfolds in chapters, from Day 1 to Day 6, according to the training schedule of the hopeful greatest player of all time, Cam (short for Camron).  Unfortunately, the film is all over the place, not making much sense, and with a let-down climax, which is a violent blood fest, that makes little sense.  Each chapter from Day 1 to 6 has a title like Leadership, Vision, Sacrifice, and so on.  Unfortunately, each title has nothing much to do with each title except for the last title sacrifice when Cam is confronted with the choice of sacrificing everything for fame or bearing the consequences, an offer he cannot refuse.  Actually, he can, but with dire consequences.

HIM is neither scary nor suspenseful, but bloody and violent.  The premise of sacrifice for the ultimate gain is simple enough and moves towards a climax with new characters, while not making much sense.

HIM opens in theatres on Friday, the 18th September.

Trailer: 

THE HISTORY OF SOUND (USA/UK 2025

Directed by 

(to be posted weekend)

 

JUST BREATHE (USA 2024) ***

Written and directed by Paul P. Pompa II

 

When the advice “Just breathe” is given to someone, that someone is either:

• suffering from some panic anxiety
• lost it and needs to cool his or her temper.

The title JUST BREATHE refers to the latter, as when the film begins, the protagonist Nick has just been fired from his job for punching up his supervisor (not seen on screen).  This causes problems with him and his girl, Mel. Nick intends to propose to her and sets up an expensive dinner date at a posh restaurant, only to overhear two servers laughing at their country bumpkin ways in the bathroom.  Nick beats one of them to a comatose state, resulting in his arrest and imprisonment.  In the meantime, Mel loses her apartment, and they break up.  But Nick pursues her and pursues her despite his angry temperament.

The above scenario is a perfect classic case study for anger management.  Nick knows better but cannot control himself.  So what can he do?

JUST BREATHE aims at being a tense crime thriller that combines raw intensity with profound emotional depth, resulting in a compelling narrative that lingers long after the credits roll.  The film follows Nick Bianco (Kyle Gallner), who plans to rebuild his life and win back the love of his life after a year spent in prison for assault. Upon his release, Nick learns that the target of his affections has another admirer, Chester (Shawn Ashmore), his no-nonsense parole officer. Nick soon finds himself caught in a gripping rivalry that threatens not only his second chance at love but also his chance to stay out of prison.

JUST BREATHE works during the first half of the film when the audience is unsure where the story leads and when the premises are set up.  Once done, the film falls into cliche territory (during the second half), so that what transpires is expected with little surprises after, though the ending is neatly closed.

The film covers issues like anger management, father and son relationship,  a couple’s relationship amidst insurmountable troubles, and a fate that does not good to anyone in the story.

Actor Kyle Gallner is sufficiently credible in the title role, playing a character that one both loves and hates.  The villain of the piece is Chester, Nick’s parole officer, who is also involved with shady activities in the clichéd storyline.  The casting of a clean-cut Ashmore aids in the storytelling.

There is hardly any action or suspense in what is basically a story of the redemption of a guy given the bad hand of fate, as well as a destructive personality.  It is a hard sell for a movie, and it is a surprise that the movie got the go-ahead.

JUST BREATHE is entertaining enough as a low-budget film for undemanding audiences.  The difficulty of rooting for such a choleric protagonist who is self-destructive and uncontrollable is another flaw in a film where it is generally the case that a protagonist is a likable one.

JUST BREATHE will hit on-demand & digital on September 16, 2025. 

SAME DAY WITH SOMEONE (Thailand 2025) **
Directed by Rangsima Aukkarawiwat and Yanyong Kuruangkura

  

Definitely a first in the time loop genre, SAME DAY WITH SOMEONE combines the romantic comedy genre with the time loop premise in this new Thai film opening on Netflix this week.

Mesa, when a child asks the Red Ribbon Goddess for wishes like happiness and romance.  The Goddess seems to accommodate her requests so that she is at present, grown up, totally happy with everything.  When questioned about her success, she says that there are good days followed by bad days, and that makes life what it is.  But for Mesa, there are no bad days.  Until…..

Same Day With Someone is a Thai romantic comedy / magical realism film (on Netflix) about a museum curator named Mesa who ends up stuck in a time loop.  Mesa is living what seems to be a perfect life—good job, relationship, social standing—but one day everything goes wrong.  On that disastrous day, a priceless artifact, the Sirir Stone she was supposed to protect in her new museum, is broken, and her fiancé breaks up with her.  After wishing to forget that terrible day, she finds herself reliving it over and over.   The stone is supposed to be a bridge between Chinlin and Thailand.

For information: Chinlin or Kim Lin ('golden/wealthy neighbour) was an ancient political entity in modern lower central Thailand that existed from the 9 CE to the 3rd century.   In the film, when the Sirisila stone is broken, the visiting Ambassador of Chinlin storms out of the museum’s opening day, causing a rift between Chinlin and Thailand.  Which Mesa needs to mend?  Also interesting to note is that he location of Chin Lin remains unclear.  It was first mentioned around 9 – 22 CE during the late Western Han period

As in all time loop movies, as the cycle repeats, Mesa must figure out how to break free of it.   Along the way there are romantic elements (notably with a character named Ben), comedic moments, and personal growth.  One slight variant is that Mesa tells her friend Ben about the time loop, and Ben manages somehow to be in Mesa’s time loop together with her.  A romance begins.

How does he time loop originate?  After Mesa experiences the worst day in her life, after her fiancée, Pue, broke up.

With her and the disaster at the museum opening, she wishes that the next day would never come.  Mesa is then stuck in a time loop of the same day.  This is before all the misfortunes happen, so Mesa tries to prevent them.

The film is not that interesting for a time loop film, unable to reach the heights of GROUNDHOG DAY or any of the other time loop films.  It does not help that the main character, Mesa, is totally annoying, getting what she wants half the time.. Giggling or sulking, Mesa is one spoilt child, to put it mildly.

SAME DAY WITH SOMEONE opens for streaming this week on Netflix.

Trailer: 

SHE SAID MAYBE (Germany 2025) **½

Directed by Buket Alakus and Ngo The Chau

 

A German-raised woman named Mavi learns of her Turkish noble heritage and enters a world of luxury, challenging her relationship as she navigates her newfound identity.

SHE SAID MAYBE is a romantic comedy.  As far as romantic comedies go, there is always an obstacle to a happy ending.  In the new Netflix German comedy, the obstacle is taken to extremes.

Mavi and Can appear at the film’s start to be a perfect couple.  Both are very good-looking. Can is a successful lawyer in his father’s firm, while she is a talented architect just gaining recognition in s top architecture magazine.  After two years, Can intends to propose to Mavi.

The first proposal goes haywire on a zip-lining mishap, so Can is tempted to propose to her in Istanbul.

There are family secrets that translate to obstacles in a romantic comedy.  This comes in the form of Mavi’s new wealthy family in Turkey, which she does not know about.  Yes, the problem of thrice and famous!

The rom com is light ok entertaining with lots of scenic sights of Istanbul.  This is a rich couple that spends time mostly on yachts and in expensive restaurants, where the reality of the ordinary folk is totally ignored.  Throw caution to the wind to enjoy this one.

Trailer: 

THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 2 (USA 2025) **

Directed by Renny Harlin

 

Horror movies are easy and cheaply produced, and usually make a good profit.  The evidence can be observed by franchises like FRIDAY THE 13th, HALLOWEEN, SCREAM, and the recent CONJURING, just to name a few.  At the bottom of the list is THE STRANGERS.  Studios shamefully milk the successes to the hilt.  But who can blame them?  The films all make a good buck.  The latest CONJURING movie is a prime example.  Lionsgate, the company that is now under the dumps, used to be the King of franchises like the TWILIGHT and DIVERGENT series, and is now hoping to get on the bandwagon with THE STRANGERS. (Personally, I hope they do well, as I do still hold their stock.)

THE STRANGERS film series consists of American psychological horror films. Based on an original story by Bryan Bertino, the plot centres around three masked psycho-sociopathic home invaders who prey on the innocent owners.  Though the first film was marketed as "based on a true story", this was a slight misdirect as the filmmaker stated that he wrote the concept from a series of break-in burglaries that took place in his neighbourhood when he was growing up, as well as borrowing elements from the Manson Family Tate murders.  Continuing this marketing technique, a "based on a true story" tag was also included at the beginning of the sequels.  Talk about abuse and misleading statements.

The only common element in all the franchises is the trio of 3 masked home invader killers.  The victims change.  The locations change.  All this makes one wonder about the connection among the different films.

If one is really fixed on THE STRANGERS series, then stay till the end of the closing credits.  There are clips of what is to come.  What can be seen is cheesy, but fans might be thrilled.

Renny Harlin is a well-known Hollywood director of hits such as Sylvester Stallone’s CLIFFHANGER.  He is desperate for a hit, despite his old age, and some of his zest can be observed  at several points in the film.

THE STRANGERS: Chapter 2 is the second installment in a new Strangers trilogy (after Chapter 1).   The protagonist, Maya, wakes up in a hospital after surviving the brutal attack at the end of Chapter 1. But she soon realizes the masked killers (the Strangers) are not done with her.

The killers, wearing masks (Dollface, pin-up girl, scarecrow), knowing Maya is still alive, begin to pursue her again to “finish what they started.  This film takes Maya outside the home setting, to the hospital, and about town.

Director Harlin hs Maya escaping and is rescued by car by other strangers, causing her to wonder if her rescuers are the masked killers.  This tactic is used twice in the film, but the film still fails to generate any surprises or wonder.  The magic question is whether audiences will say enough is enough after Chapter 2.

Lionsgate is hoping big for THE STRANGERS.  But judging from the competition of horror films out there and the ease of competition entry, Lionsgate should be prepared for contingency plans.

Trailer: 

Details

Written by: Gilbert Seah

Parent Category: Articles

Category: Movie Reviews

Published: 13 September 2025

Of the 75 films I have seen at TIFF 2025, these are the top standouts, in alphabetical order.

 

The following are the prize winners given out by TIFF,

Personal Best;

DIYA: Prix du Snag (Chad, France, Germany, Côte d’Ivoire 2025) ***½

Directed by Achille Ronaimou

 

Fast-paced with the urgency that the protagonist faces, DIYA is the local African term for the price of blood.  Dane (Ferdinand Mbaissané, winner of the Best Actor award at FESPACO 2025), a driver for an NGO in the capital, has the misfortune to run over a schoolboy.  His pregnant wife (Marina Ndormadjingar Solmem) runs to his aid to pay the hospital bills, but it’s too late: the child succumbs to his injuries, and his family summons Dane’s. He will be subjected to the diya, the blood debt, the payment of an exorbitant sum he doesn’t have.

Cleverly orchestrated, Diya puts us right at the heart of Dane’s torment: repaying the debt or languishing in prison far from his soon-to-be-born first child.   Dane is a good person depicted in the film as one who is sympathetic to the child’s mother.  It is a much scramble for funds as the director takes his audience through the colourful and informative journey of the villagers and people.  All ends well with a surprise ending in what can be described as a well-orchestrated and entertaining yet powerful movie.

THE LAST VIKING (Denmark 2025) ****
Directed by Anders Thomas Andersen

 

THE LAST VIKING teams director Anders Thomas Andersen with Mads Mikkelsen after MEN & CHICKEN and RIDERS OF JUSTICE in yet another weird, violent, and fucked-up (but in a good way) movie.  Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas play Anker and Manfred, brothers who are reunited after Anker’s years-long jail stint for a bank robbery. Since Manfred is the only one who knows where the loot is buried, Anker has no choice but to contend not only with his brother’s many psychological issues but the legacy of the traumas they suffered in their childhood.  Andersen assembles a highly memorable gallery of misfits, miscreants, and many other unique individuals with their own foibles and fixations, one of which may involve re-forming the most famous pop band ever.  Mikkelsen is simply marvellous as the mentally challenged John aka Manfred, who, if not jumping out of cars or windows, is trying to harm himself by stabbing his hand with fondue forks.  Likely the most fucked up but entertaining movie of the year.  And by the way, it is also ultra-violent.

 

NO OTHER CHOICE (South Korea 2025) ***½

Directed by Park Chan-wook

 

The film starts with a family group hug, and Man-soo has it all: a loving wife, two talented children, and two happy dogs.  He even bought the beautiful forest-enclosed house where he grew up.  Then, after 25 years of dedicated work for Solar Paper — where he was awarded Pulp Man of the Year in 2019 — Man-soo is suddenly given the axe.  Soon, he is falling behind on his mortgage payments, and his wife Mi-ri insists they put the house up for sale.  Man-soo is desperate to scoop a coveted position with Moon Paper, but he knows there are other job seekers who match his pedigree. So he hatches a plan: invent a phony paper company, reach out to each of his rivals, lure them into a meeting… and, one by one, dispatch the competition.  It is a wicked and occasionally hilarious satire based on the novel THE AX by Donald Werstlake. Director Chan’s film takes its time to establish the plot, but it is all worth it in this deliciously wicked thriller.

NOVELLE VAGUE (FRANCE 2025) ****
Directed by Richard Linklater

Having spent several years writing for Cahiers du cinéma, Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), not yet 30, declares, “The best way to criticize a film is to make one.” So off he goes, convincing George de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) to fund a low-budget independent feature and whipping up a treatment — there was never a proper script — with fellow New Waver François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard) based on a news item about a gangster and his girlfriend.  A meticulously and handsomely delivered black and white homage to the French New Wave aka NOUVELLE VAGUE, sees the homage paid through the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s A BOUT DE SOUFFLE, also known in English as BREATHLESS.  Cinephiles will definitely delight in all the film references as well as the depiction of New Wave greats like directors Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Agnes Varda and husband Jacques Demy.  The film also depicts the idiosyncrasies of Godard, who shot BREATHELESS sans script and sand continuity, much to the chagrin of his financial backers, makeup artist and collaborators.  Seberg wanted to quit many times, but Belmondo finds all this absolutely amusing.

 

 

OCA (Mexico/Argentina 2025) ***½

Directed by Karla Badillo

 

 

 

 

 

A young nun sets off on a poetic, mystical pilgrimage to save her dying congregation, encountering others whose own trials of faith, privilege, and contradiction mirror her haunting search for divine meaning in a fractured, material world.  The film is described as Bunuel-ish for the reasons that the events in the film feel surreal and also for the religious overtones.  The protagonist is a catholic nun who travels to San Vincente on a motorcycle.  She is full of faith and believes that God has a plan not only for herself but also for others, especially those she meets on the way to a sort of pilgrimage.  She encounters a variety of odd characters, including a wealthy femme fatale driven in her car by her trusty chauffeur, a pilgrimage of villagers hoping to meet the arch-bishop in San Vincente and also robbers who steal her motorcycle.  OCA , the film title is a Spanish game in which there are twists and turns to get to the winning pots, just as the nun has to manoeuvre her way out of tricky situations.  A very intriguing film with lots of intriguing characters and events.

OLMO (USA/Mexico 2025) ****
Directed by Fernando Eimbcke

14-year-old Olmo is going through adolescence..  The film begins mischievously with Olmo’s dream, and he steps inside a hot rod with his sexy teen neighbour.  The toilet roll beside his bed shows him ready to finish off the dream with a happy ending.  OLMO tells the story of his quest for sex with his neighbour, who needs a stereo for her party.  To be invited, he has to steal and repair the broken one that belongs to his parents.  His father is bedridden with MS, and his mother is stressed, overworking, and behind with 3 months' rent.  The film is beautifully shot with the setting of 1979, bearing the mischievousness of the early John Hughes teen comedies, but this one has a message.  Director Eimbcke balances his family drama and growing-up story with plenty of humour, while avoiding sentimentality and melodrama. Totally remarkable and delightful performances all round, especially from Aidan Uttapa as Olmo.  Family is everything, even at the end of the film, when the mother still does not have enough money to pay the rent, when one knows everything is going to be all right.

A POET (Un Poeta) (Colombia/Germany/Sweden 2025) ****
Directed by Simón Mesa Soto

 

Coming right from Cannes, where A POET, in the Un Certain Regard section, won the Jury Prize, the film revolves around Óscar Restrepo, an aging poet who once had hopes of literary success but whose life has since drifted into obscurity, melancholy, and self-destructive habits.  He lives with his mother, struggles with unemployment, and drowns some of his disappointments in alcohol.  While teaching in a secondary school, he mentors Yurlady, a teenage student who shows raw talent in writing.  But fate is not on his side, as things go south for the poor soul.  A POET is tragedy in its most gruesome form, with Oscar brilliantly played like a monstrous troll by Ubeimar Ríos.  Dream big but achieve chaos!  One of the best of the festival!

SAIPAN (UK/Ireland 2025) ****

Directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn

 

SAIPAN is the real-life drama behind star player Roy Keane’s rift with manager Mick McCarthy on the eve of the 2002 World Cup, Saipan is a story of ego, loyalty, and identity that resonates beyond the world of sports.  What began as a dispute over professionalism and pre-tournament training conditions on the remote Pacific Island of Saipan escalated into a national reckoning, dividing a country where football can be sacred. It was a moment that transcended sport, sparking pub debates, tabloid frenzy, political commentary, and even parliamentary mentions.  Steve Coogan delivers a riveting turn as McCarthy, opposite a formidable performance from Éanna Hardwicke as Keane.  This is a film not only for those who love the game of football.  What is most surprising is how the directors turn a story without a happy ending into an uplifting one.  There are a lot of solid quotes in the film as well, with a standout confrontation scene between the two men.

THE SECRET AGENT (O AGENT SCRETO) (Brazil/France/Germany 2025) ***** Top 10

Directed by  Kleber Mendonça Filho

 

Brazil, 1977. Marcelo, a technology expert in his early 40s, is on the run. He arrives in Recife ( seaside town in Brazil) during carnival week, hoping to reunite with his son, but soon realizes that the city is far from being the non-violent refuge he seeks.  Marcelo is told by the police chief that perhaps 100 people will die during the carnival, a joke that carries on throughout the movie.  Marcelo’s past is catching up with him, but he chooses to bring his life to a close with the satisfaction of spending the rest of his life with his son.  His son is presently staying with Marcelo’s parents, who care very much about the boy.

Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, who also wrote the script for the film, is a familiar name to many cinephiles and film critics, making his name in his 2012 multiple award-winning NEIGHBOURING SOUNDS, also set in his birthplace of Recife in North East Brazil, and also his recent 2023 documentary PORTRAITS OF GHOSTS.  THE SECRET AGENT is a film the director reportedly wanted to make for years and it is not only an excellent film but one of the best to hit screens at both TIFF and in theatres.

The film pays homage to several films of the 70s when the film is set (actually 1977).  Most noticeable is the 1975 Steven Spielberg’s JAWS.  Recife is also a seaside town.  Other films that can be noticed in Filho’s film include actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, most likely in Philippe De Broca’s 1964 film THAT MAN IN RIO.

The film suffers from a rather overlong epilogue, featuring a conversation between two individuals in a hospital, which is a bit of a letdown after a spy-like chase through the streets.

Actor Wagner Moura, who plays Marcelo in the film, also serves as one of the film’s producers.  Some humour is provided by a cameo by Udo Kier who plays a German showing off his bullet scars on his leg.  Some of the supporting cast provide terrific performances.

Director Filho keeps his audience guessing most of the time about what is happening.  There is always a sense of intrigue and mystery from the film’s start when the hero, Marcelo, is driving through a gas station in which a deadman has been shot and covered with a blanket just outside the vicinity of the station at the film’s start to two sudden thugs suddenly appear out of the blue in pursuit of Marcelo.

THE SECRET AGENT has won multiple awards at Cannes, where it premiered.  It runs a lengthy 160 minutes, but every minute is worth it.  A major surprise, THE SECRET AGENT proves intrigue, mystery, action, some biting humour while reflecting the urgency of one’s times, whether the past and present, and how one needs to come to terms with one’s past, despite the risks involved.

 

 

STEVE (UK/Ireland 2025) ****

Directed by Tim  Mielants

 

Reminiscent of the French classroom drama BETWEEN THE WALLS, done cinema-verite/doc style, or a more maverick styled TO SIR WITH LOVE, the film follows a head teacher STEVE (Cilian Murphy) working in troubled school of boys, somewhat before they become SCUM in a borstal  Steve (Murphy) is the passionate head of a crumbling “last chance” reform school for teenage boys. With meagre resources, overstretched staff, and a mounting sense of futility, Steve must navigate one pivotal and precarious day made more tense by the arrival of a documentary news crew profiling the school, and the result may prove to be more exposé than commendation. The school is part institution and part last-ditch social experiment conducted in a shoddy rural manor house run by tired adults who believe their students still have something to offer the world. The boys, meanwhile, navigate an uneasy border between volatility and vulnerability. Mielants' score top marks in his storytelling technique using a combo of flashbacks and forwards, added by Murphy’s and Emily Watson’s stunning performances.

 

TORONTO — TIFF is announcing 12 awards today, including the Platform Award, TIFF’s only juried competition, and the coveted People’s Choice Awards presented by Rogers. This year’s awards include two exciting new additions: the International People’s Choice Award and the Short Cuts Award for Best Animated Short Film. As TIFF’s 50th edition comes to a close, the Festival is proud to have welcomed over 700,000 guests, nearly 2,000 accredited media, 6,000 Industry delegates, 1,200 screenings, and a stellar lineup of talent who graced 110 red carpets.

 

Audiences can catch this year’s People’s Choice Award–winning films at TIFF Lightbox screenings starting at noon today, with free tickets available to the public (visit here for more information).

 

PEOPLE’S CHOICE AWARDS PRESENTED BY ROGERS

 

The 48th edition of TIFF’s People’s Choice Awards, presented by Rogers, presents the audience’s top titles at the Festival as voted by the viewing public. All feature films and Primetime series in TIFF’s Official Selection are eligible.

 

People’s Choice Award presented by Rogers: Hamnet, dir. Chloé Zhao

First runner-up: Frankenstein, dir. Guillermo del Toro

Second runner-up: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, dir. Rian Johnson

 

International People’s Choice Award presented by Rogers: No Other Choice, dir. Park Chan-wook

First runner-up: Sentimental Value, dir. Joachim Trier

Second runner-up: Homebound, dir. Neeraj Ghaywan

 

People’s Choice Documentary Award presented by Rogers: The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, dir. Barry Avrich

First runner-up: EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, dir. Baz Luhrmann

Second runner-up: You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution..., dir. Nick Davis

 

People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award presented by Rogers: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, dir. Matt Johnson  

First runner-up: Obsession, dir. Curry Barker

Second runner-up: The Furious, dir. Kenji Tanigaki

 

SHORT CUTS AWARDS

 

Short Cuts Awards are presented to the Best International Short Film, Best Canadian Short Film, and Best Animated Short Film, as awarded by the Short Cuts jury. Each of the three winning films will receive a bursary of $10,000 CAD. The 2025 jurors for the Short Cuts Awards are Ashley Iris Gill, Marcel Jean, and Connor Jessup.

 

Short Cuts Award for Best International Short Film:

Talk Me, dir. Joecar Hanna | Spain/USA

 

Short Cuts jury’s statement: “This film sparked one of the most interesting conversations around the jury table. Talk Me is bold in its portrayal of intimacy and the universal longing for connection. The characters fit so naturally into the film’s unique, evocative world that everything feels normal very quickly. Its cinematography is beautiful, delicate yet deliberate, each frame carefully crafted to draw us deeper into the story. By allowing the visuals to lead, the film creates an immersive experience of vulnerability and honesty. For its courage, craft, and sensitivity, the jury presents the Short Cuts Award for Best International Short Film to Joecar Hanna’s Talk Me.”

 

Honourable Mention:

Agapito, dirs. Arvin Belarmino & Kyla Danelle Romero | Philippines

 

Short Cuts jury’s statement: “For its formal precision, command of a delicate tone, poetic awareness of space and movement, and deeply personal reflections on family, the jury is thrilled to present an Honourable Mention to Arvin Belarmino and Kyla Danelle Romero’s remarkable Agapito. The jury also wants to acknowledge the brilliantly nuanced and committed performances of the film’s young cast.”

 

Short Cuts Award for Best Canadian Short Film:

The Girl Who Cried Pearls, dirs. Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski | Canada  

 

Short Cuts jury’s statement: “In addition to highlighting the film’s daring technical achievement and sumptuous artistic direction, the jury also wants to recognize a fable about greed and the capacity of artists to create a fantastic world by the power of their narrative voice. The Short Cuts Award for Best Canadian Short Film goes to Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski for The Girl Who Cried Pearls.”

 

Honourable Mention:

A Soft Touch, dir. Heather Young

 

Short Cuts jury’s statement: “A Soft Touch really pierced our hearts. It finds a way to transform routine, everyday moments into a quietly devastating portrait of neglect and resilience. With searing precision and simplicity, the film illuminates how easily older folks can be overlooked, and in doing so, demands our attention, empathy, and accountability. The jury awards an Honourable Mention to Heather Young’s A Soft Touch.”

 

Short Cuts Award for Best Animated Short Film:

To the Woods, dir. Agnès Patron | France

 

Short Cuts jury’s statement: “This wordless journey into the bond between two siblings becomes a transcendent meditation on the mysteries of time and memory, love and loss, connection and transformation. Animated with lush, cosmic beauty and vibrating with tenderness and insight, the film plunges its viewer into deep, deep feeling. For its overwhelming artistry, luminous spirit, and soul-expanding sense of mystery, the jury presents the Short Cuts Award for Best Animated Short Film to Agnès Patron’s To the Woods. The jury also wants to note the film’s jaw-dropping sound design and the work of composer Pierre Oberkampf, whose score ranks among the best film music of recent years.”

 

FIPRESCI PRIZE

 

The FIPRESCI jury is awarding the International Critics Prize, dedicated to emerging filmmakers, to a debut feature film having its World Premiere in TIFF’s Discovery or Centrepiece programmes. The 2025 FIPRESCI jury members are: Katharina Dockhorn (Germany), Francisco Ferreira (Portugal), Jean-Philippe Guerand (France), Andy Hazel (Australia), and Justine Smith (Canada).

 

FIPRESCI Prize:

Forastera, dir. Lucía Aleñar Iglesias | Spain/Italy/Sweden

 

FIPRESCI jury’s statement: “Spanish cinema, long shaped by the exuberance of Pedro Almodóvar, has found a new distinctive voice in Lucía Aleñar Iglesias. Set on sun-drenched Mallorca, Forastera follows 16-year-old Cata, whose carefree family holiday is brought to a halt by the death of her grandmother. In her grief, the teenager takes on the older woman’s persona — wearing her clothes, adopting her gestures and silences. Aleñar Iglesias directs with restraint and precision, finding power in understatement. Performances from newcomer Zoe Stein and veteran Lluís Homar anchor the film’s dreamlike rhythms. What might sound slight becomes luminous: a meditation on an adolescent’s first encounter with death, and a ghost story about how the past lingers in the present. Forastera is a quietly assured debut, simple yet transformative, marking Aleñar Iglesias as a filmmaker the FIPRESCI jury would like to bet on.”

 

 

NETPAC AWARD

 

Presented by the Network for the Promotion of Asian Pacific Cinema, the NETPAC Award recognizes films specifically from the Asian and Pacific regions. The jury consists of three international community members selected by TIFF and NETPAC, who award the prize to the best Asian film by a first or second-time feature director. The 2025 NETPAC jury members are Dina Iordanova, Helen Lee, and Keoprasith Souvannavong, who is serving as Jury Chair.

 

NETPAC Award:

In Search of The Sky (Vimukt), dir. Jitank Singh Gurjar | India

 

NETPAC jury’s statement: “For offering an indelible tale of tolerance, desperation and faith, conveyed through a unique lens of realism and poetics, elevated by striking performances. In Search of The Sky (Vimukt) is a truly independent achievement by Indian filmmaker Jitank Singh Gurjar. The film transports the audience to rural central India, where an impoverished elderly couple contends with their cognitively challenged adult son and the villagers who threaten their existence. A beacon of hope comes in the form of the Maha Kumbh Mela, a pilgrimage to the world’s largest spiritual gathering where they seek renewal and new possibilities of life.”

 

BEST CANADIAN DISCOVERY AWARD

 

The Best Canadian Discovery Award celebrates works of emerging filmmakers who contribute to enriching the Canadian film landscape. All Canadian first or second feature films in Official Selection are eligible for this award. The winner will receive a cash prize of $10,000 CAD.

 

Jury members presiding over both the Best Canadian Discovery Award and Best Canadian Feature Film Award are: Jennifer Baichwal, Sophie Jarvis, and R.T. Thorne:

“Thirty-five films in 10 days gives you some perspective on the cinematic zeitgeist in our country. As a jury, we were particularly impressed by the wonderful variety, breadth, and strength of storytelling in the Indigenous films supported by the Indigenous Screen Office. This was a powerful indicator of the future of cinema in this country, and we look forward to seeing more in the future.”

 

Best Canadian Discovery Award:

Blue Heron, dir. Sophy Romvari | Canada

 

Jury’s statement: “Blue Heron, written and directed by Sophy Romvari, is a film centered on a family struggling with a troubling personal crisis, where all elements — script, direction, cinematography, performance and editing — unite to powerfully transcend the sum of their parts. The complexity of story, perspective, and emotion is conveyed with understated simplicity — nothing is superfluous — and the transitions between real and imagined, past and present, are seamless, as well as heartbreaking. Blue Heron is a stunning and assured feature debut about love, grief, memory, and the yearning to go back to the moment before everything changed.”

 

Honourable Mention:

100 Sunset, dir. Kunsang Kyirong | Canada

 

Jury’s statement: “We as a jury were struck by the remarkable world-building in 100 Sunset, Kunsang Kyirong’s directorial debut. She invites us into the apartment complex that is home to members of the Tibetan immigrant community in Toronto, where we experience the gossip, rivalries, and intrigues through the eyes of an observant young thief who rarely speaks but seems to register everything. The growing friendship between the thief and a newly arrived young wife is a study in seeing and being seen, and the interplay of an old DV camera perspective takes us along on their journey of expanding horizons.”

 

 

BEST CANADIAN FEATURE FILM AWARD

 

The Best Canadian Feature Film Award honours the unique craft and storytelling in Canadian cinema. All Canadian feature films in Official Selection — excluding first or second features — are considered for the award. The winning filmmaker will receive a $10,000 CAD cash prize.

 

Best Canadian Feature Film Award:

Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband), dir. Zacharias Kunuk | Canada

 

Jury’s statement: “Wrong Husband, directed by Zacharias Kunuk, is a love story from thousands of years ago that blends the epic and intimate and immerses viewers in a mesmerizing and unique cinematic experience. The supernatural is ever-present and matter of fact alongside exquisite details of the daily rhythms of ancient Inuit life. The humour, gentleness and stoicism in the characters’ interactions is deeply moving, and the landscape is both a sublime setting and a character in itself. This is a beautiful and not unexpected achievement from a master storyteller.”

 

Honourable Mention:

There Are No Words, dir. Min Sook Lee | Canada

 

Jury’s statement: “An Honourable Mention goes to There Are No Words, written and directed by veteran documentarian Min Sook Lee. This film is a profound and devastating story of unspeakable loss; the shifting shape and mingling of individual and collective memory; the sometimes brutal immigrant experience; and how past violent personal and political realities can continue to define the identity of a family.”

 

 

PLATFORM AWARD

 

Marking the tenth anniversary of the Festival’s competitive section, Platform champions bold directorial vision and distinctive storytelling on the world stage. The Platform Award is a prize of $20,000 CAD given to the best film in the programme, selected by an in-person international jury: Carlos Marqués-Marcet (Jury Chair), Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and Chloé Robichaud.

 

Platform Award:

To The Victory!, dir. Valentyn Vasyanovych | Ukraine/Lithuania

 

Platform jury’s statement: “To The Victory! is the unanimous choice for this year’s Platform Award amongst a very strong selection. Bringing cinematic language to its roots and, at the same time, masterfully playing with audience expectations, this film dismantles convention to reveal deeply resonant universal emotions. Director Valentyn Vasyanovych has choreographed a mise-en-scène rendered with masterful precision, arriving at the kind of refined simplicity that can only be achieved with artistic maturity and bold vision. He has deftly used comedy to address a very complicated and complex situation into a work that is both audacious and profoundly beautiful. Ultimately, the film returns us to the very essence of cinema — reminding us why we are compelled to tell stories on film, and why we continue to do so.”

 

Honourable Mention:

Hen, dir. György Pálfi | Germany/Greece/Hungary

 

Platform jury’s statement: “The jury also wishes to recognize the extraordinary artistry of director György Pálfi, whose work exemplifies boldness, intelligence, and creative ingenuity. Blending cinematic genres in an inventive and seamless manner, Hen demonstrates remarkable precision in its camera movement and shot composition, resulting in an exceptionally effective narrative. György’s unwavering commitment to exploring humanity through the perspective of the hen yields a singularly original vision — a work of stunning originality, unlike anything else in contemporary cinema.”

 

Awards descriptions including eligibility can be found here: tiff.net/awards. Information on the People’s Choice Award voting process can be found here: tiff.net/vote.

 

Last Sunday, TIFF hosted its seventh annual TIFF Tribute Awards, in partnership with Rolex. Photos of the event can be found here.

 

The 50th Toronto International Film Festival, presented by Rogers, concludes today. The 51st edition of the Festival will take place September 10–20, 2026.

 

Details

Written by: Gilbert Seah

Parent Category: Articles

Category: Movie Reviews

Published: 08 September 2025

FILM REVIEWS

DOWNTON ABBEY (UK 2025) ***½

Directed by Simon Curtis

 

 

DOWNTON ABBEY is the third and final film of the franchise.

The film follows the Crawley family and the Downton Abbey staff as they enter the 1930s. When Mary finds herself at the centre of a public scandal caused by her divorce and the family faces financial trouble, the entire household grapples with the threat of social disgrace. The Crawleys must embrace change as the staff prepare for a new chapter with the next generation leading Downton Abbey into the future.

The story is set in the 1930s.  The Crawley family and their staff are facing financial trouble, and there are threats to their social standing.  A central plot line involves Lady Mary: she is at the centre of a public scandal following her divorce. This causes social backlash in the era’s more rigid society.  With so many characters in the franchise, there are many other stories.

Other storylines include generational transitions and “passing the torch.”  Upstairs, the older generation (Lord and Lady Grantham) must confront change and decide how to hand over responsibilities.  Downstairs with the help staff, equally important, and among the staff, there’s also movement: retirement, changing roles, and new leadership as younger characters step up.

The biggest name in the film is surprisingly non-British Paul Giamatti, who plays the uncle who loses a majority of the money of the Downton estate.  But as everyone is so nice, he is forgiven and even sympathized with/

DOWNTON ABBEY is the brainchild and baby of writer Julian Meadows, who also produced the film.  To his credit, he has devised quite a good screenplay that brings together all the multiple characters, giving each one their uniqueness as well as their stories.  The script also pays tribute to past characters, such as the one played by Dame Maggie Smith, who is seen, posthumously, at the end of the film.  Meadows is also cheeky to praise himself for being good at writing in the film.

In the story, the building is in need of money for repairs.  This is also, ironically, true in real life.

Meadows’ script covers several key issues that keep the audience attentive.

Change vs tradition: The film explores how a grand estate like Downton Abbey adapts (or struggles to adapt) to social, financial, and cultural shifts in the 1930s.  Legacy & responsibility: Who will lead Downton in the future? How to preserve what Downton stands for while also moving forward.  Scandal & reputation: Lady Mary’s divorce becomes a focal point, showing how society viewed marriage, divorce, respectability, and social reputation at that time.

Farewell/closure: As the title suggests, this is meant as a final chapter—wrapping up the arcs of many characters,

The DOWNTON ABBEY fans, and even if one is not, should enjoy and be entertained in this supposedly final entry.

The film opens only in theatres this week, September 12th.

Trailer: 

SPINAL TAP: THE END CONTINUES (USA 2025) ***½
Directed by Rob Reiner

 

Decades (41 years to be exact)after the first THIS IS SPINAL TAP movie, one that popularized the mockumentary concept, the creators have returned, finally with a sequel with the title THE END CONTINUES, a phrase that contradicts itself.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is an upcoming mockumentary comedy sequel to the 1984 cult classic THIS IS SPINAL TAP. Directed by Rob Reiner, who also reprises his role as documentarian Marty Di Bergi, the film follows the fictional British heavy metal band Spinal Tap—David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer)—reuniting after a 15-year hiatus for one final, legally obligatory concert.

Rob Reiner is famous for playing the role of Meathead in the series ALL IN THE FAMILY, also known as the son of famous vaudeville comic Cal Reiner, who also directed Oh, GOD.

The band members are David, Derek and Nigel, each having gone their own way after the breakup.  The film unfolds as it traces each of their lives, less than the filmmakers think the sequences are.Nigel is now running a cheese and guitar shop in Berwick-upon-Tweed and plays in a local folk band.

• David lives in Morro Bay, California, composing music for true-crime podcasts and hold music.
• Derek, residing in London, curates the “New Museum of Glue” and has even composed a symphony called Hell Toupée.                                                                                    

The fondness for the mockumentary genre has long faded, as can be observed in this movie.  Even jokes like the leaking foldable wine glass and David’s wife sleeping, unknown to him, with another band member, fail to register any laughs.

The best thing bout the film is the star-studded cameos, including Paul McCartney, Elton John, Questlove, Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, Lars Ulrich, Chad Smith, and more. with a soundtrack featuring both new Spinal Tap tracks and re-recordings of classics, including a new version of “Stonehenge” featuring Elton John, and guest leads by Beatles McCartney and John.

SPINAL TAP: THE END CONTINUES is amusing at best.

Trailer: 

Details

Written by: Gilbert Seah

Parent Category: Articles

Category: Movie Reviews

Published: 26 August 2025

FILM REVIEWS:

THE ANTIQUE (Georgia/Finland/Switzerland/Germany/Russia/Croatia 2024) ***
Directed by Rusudan Glurjidze

Because of the world’s disapproval of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian films have been missing lately in the North American scene.  THE ANTIQUE is a rare Russian film, but actually a Georgian production with Russia as one of the co-producing countries.  The film is inspired by the 2006 unlawful and brutal deportation of Georgians from Russia, as well as the real-life deportations that deeply affected director Rusudan Glurjidze and her homeland, and is partly filmed in Russian.  It is the Georgian entry for last year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature.  (It did not make the shortlist.)  The unlawful and inhuman deportation is reminiscent of what Trump and his ICE agents are doing at present in the United States.

Lado, a young Georgian smuggler trafficking antique furniture across borders, dreams of getting rich quickly, but his girlfriend Medea is done waiting.  She buys a dirt-cheap apartment in St. Petersburg’s historic centre, fully aware it comes with a peculiar catch: the flat’s eccentric elderly resident, Vadim Vadimich, isn’t going anywhere.   Vadim is THE ANTIQUE of the film title, obviously.  As Lado is swept up in a government crackdown and forcibly deported, Medea finds herself hiding from police in a wardrobe of the very warehouse they once relied on. Left behind, she begins an unlikely, uneasy cohabitation with Vadim, navigating a strange limbo of loss, resilience, and bureaucratic absurdity. 

THE ANTIQUE is a quietly powerful portrait of displacement, endurance, and the unexpected bonds that emerge when history barges into your home.   The mood and atmosphere of the troubled times are effectively captured on film despite the otherwise meandering narrative that jumps from one character to another.

  Georgia's Official 2024 Oscar Entry, THE ANTIQUE, Makes its Exclusive North American and Canadian Premiere on Film Movement Plus on 8/29.

 

Trailer: 

CAUGHT STEALING (USA 2025) ***** Top 10

Directed by Darren Aronsofski

 

CAUGHT STEALING is a black crime noir, set in 1998.  Henry "Hank" Thompson (Austin Butler) tends bar on the Lower East Side, where his girlfriend Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz) works as a paramedic, and frequently calls his mother (surprise cameo by a well-known star revealed only at the end of the film) in Patterson, California to discuss their beloved San Francisco Giants.  A star baseball prospect in high school, Hank is haunted by the car crash that killed his friend Dale and left him with a career-ending knee injury.

Hank's neighbour, British punk Russ (Matt Smith), returns to London to see his ailing father, leaving Hank to care for his cat, Bud.  Searching for Russ, Russian mobsters Aleksei and Pavel viciously beat Hank, who loses a kidney.  Hank can no longer drink, smoke, or do drugs. After the Russians break into Russ's apartment, narcotics detective Roman questions Hank and reveals Russ is a drug dealer connected to deadly Hasidic brothers Lipa and Shmully Drucker. Finding a key hidden in Bud's litter box, Hank notifies Roman when the Druckers search Russ's apartment.

CAUGHT STEALING, as the title implies, means stealing a base in baseball.  The lead character is not only obsessed with baseball but also stood in line for being drafted into the big league until something drastic happened.  The references to baseball and to the U.S. baseball teams run throughout the film and will be a delight to baseball enthusiasts while being a bit too much for others.

Director Aronofsky blends flashbacks, nightmares and jump scares well into the narrative.  His pacing is excellent, too, building the film up to a good climax that no one would suspect of happening.  Credit goes too to the scriptwriter Charles, who based the script on his own book.

Austin Butler, all bulked up now, since his breakout role as ELVIS, is once again excellent in the role, proving him to be a star in the making.  He also stole the movie DUNE 2 from Timothee Chamalet.  He only gets to use his muscles once in a boxing duel with a bad guy while acting the victim during the rest of the film.  Regina King also stands out as a crooked New York cop.

Director Aronofsky makes good use of locations with the film shot in New York’s Lower East Side.  The rows of fire escape stairs at the back of buildings remind one of the sets in WRST SIDE STORY but the staircases are used here for a different purpose.  The film paints a bleak look at New York City with all the crime, drugs, mafia and crooked cops.

CAUGHT STEALING is Aronofsky’s best film to date, balancing drama, action in a thriller genre with its raw energy, unpredictability and occasional black absurdist humour, including some Jewish jokes like not driving during Shabbos.   At best, it reminds one of Hitchcock’s NORTH BY NORTHWEST, in which an innocent man is caught in an intrigue of crime, as well as AFTER HOURS (Griffin Dunne is also in both films).  Aronofsky’s last film THE WHALE, was excellent too, showing the director at his prime with his new films improving one after another.  It will be a worthy wait to see his new project in the making.

CAUGHT STEALING opens everywhere in theatres on Friday, August 29th.

Trailer: 

CHRISTOPHER: A BEAUTIFUL REAL LIFE (Denmark 2025) **
Directed by Nynn Duva Hall

 

CHRISTOPHER, the documentary is about Christopher Lund Nissen, a Danish singer from Copenhagen, signed to EMI Denmark. In November 2012, he won an award at the Danish Music Awards 2012.  He was born in Frederiksberg, but later moved to Amager, Denmark, with his parents and younger brother Oliver.  In 2012, Christopher moved in with his girlfriend, Danish singer Medina.  The couple later split up. In 2014, he began a relationship with Danish model Cecilie Haugaard.  The couple married in June 2019.  The pair welcomed their first child, a daughter named Noelle, in 2021. In 2023, Haugaard gave birth to the couple’s second child, a daughter.  This is where the film begins.

The film offers an intimate look at the life of Danish pop icon Christopher (Christopher Lund Nissen).  It explores the complex crossroads he faces between his soaring career and his growing family responsibilities.  At the same time, his personal life is flourishing—his partner, model and influencer Cecilie Haugaard, is expecting their second child.  This newly found happiness brings a profound dilemma: chasing fame or cherishing family time.
Questions like: "Is the dream worth the cost?" and "Can he turn down the biggest opportunity of his life to preserve what matters most?”

There is nothing wrong with this Danish doc except for the question of whether this really intimate look at a foreign star would really interest the average moviegoer.  The segments are realistic, if not touching enough, but there are too many segments telling the same message.  This is not to mention that it is difficult to feel sympathetic for a white, wealthy, good-looking, and famous couple that has everything already laid out for them.  Put me in their shoes and give me their problems anytime!
CHRISTOPHER: A BEAUTIFUL REAL LIFE opens for streaming this week on Netflix.

Trailer: 

FANTASY FOOTBALL RUINED OUR LIVES (Italy 2025) **
Directed by Alessio Maria Federici

 

This Italian sports comedy contains quite an unfamiliar topic for Canadians, which makes the comedy an odd watch.  For one, football in Italy means soccer.  One needs to know first of all what fantasy football is.  This is not explained in the movie, and is assumed that one knows what it is.

In the film, the characters are part of the “Mai una gioia” fantasy football league, where each participant drafts real soccer players into their virtual teams and scores points depending on those players' actual performances.

A tight-knit group of friends participates in a fantasy football league called “Mai una gioia” (“Never a joy”). On the day of Gianni’s wedding—also the season’s final and most critical league day—Gianni disappears and fails to submit his lineup.

The film begins with a no-show of the groom, with the bride cursing on the wedding day.  Police arrive to arrest the fantasy football league.

As the film progresses, secrets unravel through group chat chaos—insults, accusations, incriminating screenshots, and even dark comedic "death threats.”  These are not particularly funny,y with the actors acting like humanized cartoons
The film attempts to show, it is presumed, how fantasy football can spiral from harmless fun into an all-consuming battle of pride, betrayal, and revenge.

The film misses the goal and ends up a silly mess of mostly missed humour.

FANTASY FOOTBALL RUINED OUR LIVES opens for streaming on Netflix this week, an original and horrid comedy.

Trailer:  

LURKER (USA 2025) ***½

Directed by Alex Russell

 

LURKER is a film about a fan and a stalker - the same person.  But to distinguish it from the typical slasher or psycho thriller film, the term lurker is used.  But LURKR is neither a thriller nor a slasher film but a sort of satire on the music/fan industry.

When a twenty-something retail clerk, Matthew (Canadian rising star Theodore Pellerin) encounters a rising pop star, Oliver, also known as Oliver (British actor Archie Madekwe) in his store, he takes the opportunity to edge his way into the in-crowd.  But as the line between friend and fan blurs beyond recognition, access and proximity become a matter of life and death.

A few details are left unexplained.  One is Oliver’s British accent, which is never addressed.  The film begins with Oliver accepting Matthew into the group and putting Matthew in front of his current cameraman.  Oliver is impressed with Matthew’s work and decides to hire Matthew to make a documentary about him.  Matthew is more than delighted to be in Oliver’s closed-knit group.  But Matthew’s talent precedes him.  Matthew grows obsessive and jealous, especially when Oliver takes an interest in Jamie (Sunny Suljic), Matthew’s work colleague.

The bond between two people makes a sensitive topic that can be geared towards homosexuality.  Director Russell stays away from this topic, making it clear that the two men have no sexual attraction for each other.  But there are two homoerotic segments in the film.  One is the spontaneous wrestling match Matthew imposes on Oliver, Matthew wrestling in his underwear.  The other is Oliver and Matthew making love, having sex, with females the same bed while gazing into each other.  The film was screened in Europe at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival in the section Berlinale Special Gala, where it was screened in competition for the Teddy Award.

It takes a while to be charmed by LURKER.  Russell’s film is initially all over the place and one wonders initially where the story is leading.  But one soon realizes that this is director Russell’s style and the spontaneity and roughness of the film add to the film’s uniqueness.  The film is aided by one terrific performance by Theodore Pellerin in a breakout performance.  Pellerin is always good and has been seen in a small role in a couple of films.  LURKER will surely put this young talent in the spotlight.

The film also serves as a late coming-of-age story of Matthew.  At the beginning of the film, Matthew says on camera that he is happy and needs nothing more out of life.  But this is not true and Oliver shows how insecure he really is.  But his obsession and conviction, though he does indulge in some blackmail and dishonesty, finally gets the fame Matthew gets, whether deserving or not.  LUKER also serves as a cautionary tale of fame, how it might be overrated and whether it might not always be deserved.  There is also a twist surprise ending.

LURKER premiered in Canada at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal and opens in theatres August 29th.

Trailer: 

UNKNOWN NUMBER: THE HIGH SCHOOL CATFISH (USA 2025) ***
Directed by y Skye Borgman

On the internet, catfishing is when someone creates a fake online identity and persona, often using false photos and information from others, to deceive someone into a relationship, usually to scam them for money or emotional exploitation. The person creating the fake profile is called a "catfish," and the act is a form of online deception that can occur on social media, dating apps, and other platforms. 

UNKNOWN NUMBER: THE HIGH SCHOOL CATFISH is a chilling true-crime documentary directed by Skye Borgman (Girl in the Picture, Abducted in Plain Sight). It explores a harrowing case of cyberbullying that shattered a small Michigan community, Beal City.

The story unfolds in Beal City, Michigan, where 13-year-old Lauryn Licari and her boyfriend Owen, became targets of anonymous, harassing text messages that began in October 2020 and resumed in September 2021.  The messages escalated rapidly, becoming vicious, explicit, and deeply personal.NetflixBig Rapids Pioneer.  As months passed, suspicion ran rampant throughout the school and community. Parents, officials, and even the FBI got involved in trying to trace the source.NetflixBig Rapids Pioneer
The identity of the catfish is only revealed at the end in a twist, which is, as expected, someone close to Lauryn.

The film is an ok watch, but comes lower on the score in the scale of Netflix’s true crime dramas.  It is difficult to feel sympathetic for young teens who have nothing better to do than spend the whole time looking at their phones, though what has occurred is a crime.  The teens cannot speak properly without the overuse of the word ‘like’, which makes listening to them quite annoying.

UNKNOWN NUMBER: THE HIGH SCHOOL CATFISH open for streaming on Netflix August 29th, 2025.

Trailer:

Trailer: 

Details

Written by: Gilbert Seah

Parent Category: Articles

Category: Movie Reviews

Published: 20 August 2025

FILM REVIEWS:

FALL FOR ME (Germany 2025) **
Directed by Sherry Hormann

 

FALL FOR ME is a German film shot in German and some Spanish, set in Mallorca, about German sisters.

Lilli visits her sister Valeria, surprised to learn she's engaged to a Frenchman, Manu. She spontaneously meets nightclub manager Tom, sparking an instant connection. A dark secret lurks behind the island's events.

This is a film about scammers, as the audience is told at the beginning that for a scam to work, it must be something that the victim or target really wants.

The scamming in the film takes its time to pop up, around the 30-minute mark, which means that the film is padded with little nonsense that can be both boring and annoying.

Described as an erotic thriller, the film turns up more as a tease than anything else.  There are erotic shots of nipples through wet tops, but never any full nudity.  The danger is also not as threatening as it sounds, while the film moves at too slow a pace to be a satisfying thriller.  Positive for the movie, however, are the stunning surroundings of Mallorca (the seas and cliffs) the film is shot and the story is set.

FALL FOR ME opens for streaming on Netflix this week.

Trailer: 

 

GOLD RUSH GANG (Thailand 2025) **

Directed by Wisit Sasanatieng

 

GOLD RUSH GANG follows a real folk legend—Ko-Wah Thungsong—into a modern epic.  The story draws on real events and local history, heightening its authenticity and cultural resonance.

Set in post–World War II Southern Thailand, the story follows Ko-Wah Thungsong, a legendary bandit akin to a Thai Robin Hood. He leads a motley crew of skilled misfits as they attempt to hijack a Japanese Army train carrying a fortune in gold.  Their mission: to use the loot to drive out the invaders and return prosperity to their people.

Supposedly based on a real-life figure and real events, what transpires on-screen looks so silly and manipulative that credibility is shot out the window.  The Robin Hood-style action comedy can hardly be called exciting or even remotely funny.  The subplot of the romance is also contrived, if anything else.

One can hardly be excited when one has a band of bandits on horses using weapons like little axes and crossbows fighting against a hundred time their number of Japanese soldiers, all armed with military hardware.   Yet no bandit is killed.

The film is in Thai and written by the director and Phetthai Vongkhamlao, the actor playing Ko-Wah.

GOLD RUSH GANG is open for streaming on Netflix this week.

Trailer: 

RELAY (2025) ***½

Directed by David MacKenzie

 

The title of the film RELAY comes from a communications service used in the film called ‘relay’, used in covert operations.  The use of relay is of utmost importance in the operation of the protagonist's work.

The "relay" in the title is a statewide or regional phone relay system—often termed the "Tri-State Relay"—that connects callers using assistive devices (like typed text) with operators who speak the messages aloud and vice versa.  In the film RELAY, Ash (played by Riz Ahmed), a shadowy "fixer" helping whistleblowers return stolen documents in exchange for guaranteed safety, exploits this service to remain anonymous.  He types messages on a special assistive device (that looks like a typewriter with a skinny digital screen), which then gets read aloud by relay operators to the recipients, with no identifying information retained or traceable back to him.   It is a shrewd means of communication in a hyper-surveilled world: the service doesn’t log caller information or preserve records, so Ash’s voice, number, and location remain hidden, even when brokering dangerous exchanges between whistleblowers and corporations.  It is central to both the plot and tone—enabling the fixer, Ash, to orchestrate secret exchanges under high stakes, while also reinforcing the film’s mood of paranoia and emotional distance.

Ash (also known as Tom in the film) is a reclusive “fixer” who mediates covert deals between whistleblowers and corrupt corporations—while preserving complete anonymity. He conducts communications via a public telephone relay service (designed for the deaf and hard-of-hearing), leveraging its operator-mediated anonymity to stay off the grid.

When Sarah (Lily James), a former biotech scientist, reaches out, offering secret files about dangerous genetically modified wheat in exchange for her safety, Ash embarks on a high-stakes game.  Together, they navigate a tense cat-and-mouse chase, pursued by corporate operatives led by Dawson (Sam Worthington).

The film has the feel of classics in the mystery/noir genre like THE CONVERSATION, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1971 classic, and the more recent MICHAEL CLAYTON.

Academy Award Winner Riz Ahmed is once again excellent in the role, mostly without much dialogue in the first half.  The use of the relay to promote intrigue and also humour and tension is marvellous.

There is an expert twist at the end (not revealed as a spoiler in this review) that should get the audience delighted.  A little slow-paced, but the reward comes with patience and the wait for the conclusion.  Also working well is the emotional state and personality of Ash, which makes the film more relatable.

Scottish director David MacKenzie proves himself once again an apt and rewarding director.  His previous HELL OR HIGH WATER was his career best, and the upcoming FUZE, to be screened at TIF,F is his new film to watch.

RELAY premiered in Toronto at TIFF last year and is in theatres this week.

Trailer: 

THE TRUTH ABOUT JUSSIE SMOLLETT? (USA 2025) ***
Directed by Gagan Rehill

 

THE TRUTH ABOUT JUSSIE SMOLLETT? features Smollett interview plus talks with police, lawyers and investigators claiming new case evidence. Viewers can judge who's telling the truth about the Jussie Smollett case.

Jussie Smollett is an American actor and singer.  He began his career as a child actor in 1991, debuting in The Mighty Ducks (1992).  From 2015 to 2019, Smollett portrayed musician Jamal Lyon in the Fox drama series Empire, for which he is best known.  But it is not his career that is focused on in the doc, as the actor did something criminal that is more interesting and which is what makes this new Netflix original documentary.

In January 2019, Smollett claimed to have been a victim of a hate crime, but police later determined that he had staged the attack with two acquaintances.  He was initially charged with filing a false police report, but charges were dropped after he completed community service and forfeited $10,000.  In 2020, a special prosecutor re-indicted him, and he was convicted on five counts in December 2021.  He was sentenced to jail in March 2022, although his release was ordered after six days. The sentence was upheld on appeal in 2023, but the Illinois Supreme Court later reversed the conviction in 2024 on the basis that he had fulfilled the plea agreement made in 2019.

The ultimate answer to the question on the truth of the hate crime is left unanswered and left to the audience to decide based primarily on Smollett’s testimonies and interviews.  The doc is interesting enough as its subject and what had happened to him.

The doc plays like a detective mystery in parts when the cops question irregularities in Jussie’s attack.  Why was he still carrying the sandwich after the attack?  Anyone would not have.  Why did he fold the noose so efficiently, like a prop when taking it away from his head?  The camera footage and hunting down of the suspects are also interesting parts of the doc.

THE TRUTH ABOUT JUSSIE SMOLLETT opens on Netflix Friday, August 22nd.

Trailer: 

 

 

Details

Written by: Gilbert Seah

Parent Category: Articles

Category: Movie Reviews

Published: 12 August 2025

Capsule Reviews:

100 SUNSET (Canada 2025) **
Directed by Kunsang Kyirong

Though Canadian in production, 100 SUNSET looks very much like a Tibetan production, mostly because large part of the films shot in Tibetan and most of the players in the film are Tibetan.   The story is driven by the activities of Kunsel (Tenzin Kunsel), the taciturn introvert at the film’s centre. Kunsel’s fascination with others manifests in her two primary pursuits: spying on her neighbours with a newly acquired video camera and committing petty thefts. vBut after she meets Passang (Sonam Choekyi) — an enigmatic newcomer with a much older husband — Kunsel must venture beyond her comfortable position as a wary, watchful outsider.  The film suffers from a weak narrative, giving the effect that the film looks aimless in the director’s delivery.  It is also difficult to tell who is whom and how the characters are related at the start of the film.  !00 SUNSET is the apartment block in the Parkdale district, where the protagonists live.  The film has familiar sights of Toronto, mainly in the poorer suburbs.

AKI (Canada 2025) ***½

Directed by Darlene Naponse 

 

The doc is told in seasons beginning with winter and closes one full cycle.  The largely wordless doc is compensated for by the beauty of Northern Ontario. All of the seasons pass in bright blooms, vivid foliage, and white shining snow, in director Darlene Naponse’s AKI. Set on Atikameksheng Anishnawbek (formerly known as Whitefish Lake First Nation), her home community in Northern Ontario, Naponse’s latest captures soundscapes, the natural world, and the generations of inhabitants and all types of creatures calling this territory home.

In a documentary that is almost completely wordless — except for some Anishinaabemowin — Aki finds beauty in the smallest of moments, from the kids playing hockey on an outdoor ice rink, to the joy of a dog running through a lake.  The best way to enjoy this wonderful doc is to just sit back and enjoy!

 

AMOEBA (Singapore/Netherlands/France/South Korea 2025) **½
Directed by Siyou Tan

 

AMOEBA is a coming-of-age story of one young rebellious student in the city-state of Singapore, where rebellious behaviour is very much discouraged, if not severely punished.  There is one scene where a girl is punished by caning.  Sixteen-year-old tomboy Choo Xin Yu (Ranice Tay) seems like a misfit when she joins a highly competitive, elite all-girls school in Singapore. But she quickly befriends three others who share her rebellious nature. While the girls struggle to fit in, they pledge loyalty to each other and vow to start a gang as a form of resistance. When their rebellious acts — recorded by the girls on a camcorder — are discovered by their teacher, their lives are upended.  What keeps haunting Choo may be more than just the ghost she suspects is in her room.  The film is a worthy first feature, but her first feature can be noticed from her lack of detail or the depth of her story.  There are no signs for the reason that Choo’s school is an elite one, except for the fact that it is mentioned that it became number one in Singapore.  The students and families live in cramped HDB flats and not in big houses with parents who are doctors or lawyers, which is typical in an elite school.  Even though a fiction film, the claim that the school is the first to build an Olympic-sized swimming pool is not true (the first was ACS, where this critic was educated).  The depth of rebellion is only superficial and could be looked upon with greater depth, such as the problems with the overly strict government.    

 

 

 

AMOUR APOCALYPSE (Peak Everything) (Canada 2025) **
Directed by Anne Emond

Director Anne Emond tackles male trauma with her forty-year-old protagonist suffering from insecurity and a need for acceptance.  Adam is a kennel owner, Adam grappling with climate anxiety. Amid a natural disaster, he embarks on an adventurous, bilingual romantic journey to find her.  Adam has issues that the story blames on his affection-avoidant father, and lets his young assistant take advantage of his good nature.  To help combat his eco-anxiety, Adam orders a therapeutic solar lamp. Through the lamp's supplier's technical support line, he meets Tina, a radiant woman with a voice that soothes all of his worries.   The film is a strange love story of sorts.   Director Emond gets her character, Adam, to cry, mope, and come to terms with himself.  Her female characters, those that Adam encounters, like Tina and his kennel helper, have stronger personalities.  It is hard to identify with a protagonist with self-worth issues, but the film feels too like one with too much of a female slant.

BAD APPLES (UK 2025) ***

Directed by Jonatan Etzler

 

A British satire directed by a Swede with that rare Nordish humour with a stir that involves with Saoirse Ronan playing Maria, an elementary teacher at a ritzy private school.  But her \s plagued by the epic bad behaviour of one extremely foul-mouthed and disruptive child, Danny. After he has a violent altercation with another student, Maria is forced to take action.  This involves unexpectedly kidnapping him and locking him up in her basement while Danny is declared missing and searched for by the police and local community.  While watching the events unfold, the one question on everyone’s mind is how everything would end, and one is sure that it would be in Maria’s favour.  However, the ending is kind of awkward with credibility issues. Otherwise, not a bad and amusing look at desperation and coping with one’s problems.

 

THE BALLOONISTS (USA/UK/Austria 2025) ***½

Directed by John Dower

 

Wonder is the one aspect in film that wows audiences. THE BALLOONISTS is about explorers with dreams and how they do their utmost best in life to achieve them.  The doc begins with a history of explorers trying to travel around the world in an air balloon, but failed, or as the film says. learns from their failures, before settling on two who achieved their dreams - Biran Jones and Bertrand Piccard, Piccard himself being an extremely difficult person to work with, reminiscent of the CEO who designed the disastrous vessel to explore the Titanic wreck.

Filmmaker John Dower focuses his narrative on the 1990s when the race intensified among competitors to be the first in history. He taps into a rich archive that captures all the highs and lows on camera. Virgin mogul Richard Branson was among the highly publicized aeronauts to encounter successive failures. The perils were numerous: technical malfunctions, changing winds, severe storms, ice formation, and the threat of certain countries shooting down unauthorized aircraft.  Central to this story is the Swiss explorer Bertrand Piccard, who became obsessed with hot air balloons as a boy. He was driven to match the legacy of his father, Jacques Piccard, a renowned inventor and explorer. Bertrand partnered with the English pilot Brian Jones on the custom-built Breitling Orbiter 3.  Wonderfully entertaining and plain wonderful!  And one can learn a thing or two about engineering as well.

BLOOD LINES (Canada 2025) ***½

Directed by Gail Maurice

 

Canadian Indigenous director Gail Maurice returns after her acclaimed ROSIE with another entertaining hit that also encompasses current Indigenous issues.  Maurice plays a mother, riddled with cancer, who returns to reconciliation with her daughter, taken away from her because of drink.  Meanwhile, the daughter, also a storyteller and store clerk, Beatrice (Dana Solomon) is completely taken by a new woman who arrives in her Métis community looking to find her biological family. Beatrice decides to help Chani (Derica Lafrance) in order to spend more time with her.  Meanwhile, a chorus of older women, collectively referred to as “The Grannies,” tries to get Beatrice to mend things with her mom. Director Maurice’s tale is also full of humour that lifts the dramatic tale up several notches.  Entertaining while making a point with an important message.

THE BLUE TRAIL (Brazil/Mexico/Chile/Netherlands 2025) ****

Directed by Gabriel Mascaro

 

It is a dystopian future in Brazil, and seniors are given a hard time.  They are forced to stop work and leave work for the younger population. At the same time, the government is forcing them to socialize in ways they deem acceptable to them.  Tereza, 77, has lived her whole life in a small industrialized town in the Amazon, until one day she receives an official government order to relocate to a senior housing colony.  The colony is an isolated area where the elderly are brought to « enjoy » their final years, freeing the younger generation to focus fully on productivity and growth. Tereza refuses to accept this imposed fate. Instead, she embarks on a transformative journey through the rivers and tributaries of the Amazon to fulfill one last wish (her bucket list wish) before her freedom is taken away—a decision that will change her destiny forever.  This is a very funny and timely film and one of the best films about seniors in a long time, and I am not talking COCOON here.  The stunning cinematography of the rivers in the Amazon is simply breathtaking.  

CALLE MALAGA (Morroco/Fr/Spa 2025) ***
Directed by Maryam Touzani’

 

This is Carmen Maura’s movie all the way, the esteemed veteran actress who appears in almost every frame of the movie.  Maura won fame and acclaim from Pedro Almodovar’s films, including his first hit, WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS?  María Ángeles (Carmen Maura) is a fiercely independent senior living in the Spanish quarter of Tangier. When her daughter Clara (Marta Etura) arrives for a long-overdue visit, she comes with an agenda: to pressure María into selling the home — left in Clara’s name by her late father — to offset her own post-divorce financial struggles. But María, deeply embedded in her community and cherished by her neighbours, quietly resolves to stay.  Determined not to be displaced, she devises a resourceful plan to earn enough money to keep the apartment and buy back the cherished belongings her daughter hastily sold to an antique dealer in preparation for the sale of the property. In the process, María unexpectedly finds a romantic spark with someone she once viewed as an adversary.  The film is shot in the director’s home in Tangier and shows the local street vendors' shops and surrounding architecture.  Quite slow-moving and sentimental, this is the film, however, that Maura’s fans will love.

THE CHRISTOPHERS (USA 2025) ***½

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

 

Director Soderbergh teams up again with writer Ed Solomon to create a stylish chamber piece rich with dialogue and colourful characters set in the art world of forgery and deception.

The film centers on Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), a once-celebrated painter now reclusive and dwindling in relevance, and his estranged children who see his unfinished series of paintings ("The Christophers") as a potential posthumous windfall. They hire Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), a struggling art restorer posing as his assistant, to finish or forge these works so they can profit from them after his death.  Lori and Julian begin a relationship that is both hateful and tolerant, which grows for the queerest of reasons.   McKellen is excellent in delivering his lines, exhibiting black humour, pathos, and respect for both his character and for himself as an actor. Again, another small but wonderful entertainment from Soderbergh.

THE CONDOR DAUGHTER (La Hija Condor)(Bolivia/Peru/Uruguay 2025) ***
Directed by Álvaro Olmos Torrico

 

A female coming-of-age cautionary fable of the conflicts between tradition and modernization and between duty and personal desire.  The film follows Clara (Marisol Vallejos Montaño),a young, smart and resourceful woman living in the community of Totorani, high in the Bolivian Andes.  Her adoptive mother, Ana (María Magdalena Sanizo), has dutifully taught her the ancient traditions of midwifery, including the tender Quechua songs believed to help safely usher newborns into the world.  But while Clara loves, respects, and is expected to continue this tradition, she dreams of discovering the wider world on her own, and maybe even conquering the city with her gifted voice.  The film benefits from director Torrico’s attention to detail in both her characterization of Clara as well as the capture of the rural period and atmosphere, despite the film’s somewhat languid pace.  Torrico moves the film towards the expected ending with a conflict showdown between mother and daughter.

 

THE COST OF HEAVEN (Gangne Ton Ciel)(Canada 2025) ***
Directed by Mathieu Denis

 

As the film title implies, there is a cost, and a very expensive one, to get to heaven, and it takes fight to do it. The cost of Heaven is a cautionary tale of a hardworking man, Nacer (Samir Guesmi), who figures that life has cheated him and he has not gotten the riches he deserved.  Of course, he does not realize that he has a loving wife and three children.  But the film shows him appreciating them at the start during a Christmas dinner, but his greed causes him to lose sight of things, till a life-altering lesson causes him to become a sort of prodigal son.  The film was inspired by a true crime Montreal incident, it seems.  Director Denis gets his details correct on the investing wheeling and dealing, including the crypto safe haven.  Nacer and his wife speak French with a French accent, showing them to be likely immigrants, while the rich and powerful speak with a Quebecois accent.  The happy ending seems too convenient for one.

COPPER (Cobre)(Mexico/Canada 2025) ***
Directed by Nicholas Pereda

 

Mexican Canadian director Pereda has a unique sense of storytelling.  It is slow-framed, weird in execution, and has a Kafka-ish feel of mystery and intrigue.  What seems to be happening high not and nothing is what it seems.  The story focuses on a poor worker named Lazaro, who, one wonders, is a liar or one who is really suffering health issues as he keeps asking the docket for days off work.  Facing skepticism, suspicion, and scorn from just about everyone he encounters, Lázaro doesn’t fare much better with his own family members, including the aunt who seems to be the object of a special longing.  Wry humour is also present, making this slow-burning film entertaining in a surprising way.

COVER-UP (USA 2025) ***
Directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus

 

This is a doc about a brave and risk-taking reporter nicknamed Sy who exposes the deeds of the wicked.  “It’s complicated to know who to trust. I barely trust you guys,” says Seymour Hersh. He’s speaking to the directors Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, about his career as an investigative reporter.   The film goes back and forth with Hersh’s interview.  He is shown with all candidness displaying eagerness, energy, anger, and also anger as the director pushes his boundaries.  Time after time, Hersh has exposed brutal realities that governments and corporations wanted to cover up.  He shares behind-the-scenes details of how he reported the My Lai massacre, Watergate, the operation of CIA spying on Americans, and the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, to name a few of his major headlines.   Every step of the way, he faced fierce pushback from powerful interests.  President Nixon is heard on tape saying, “This fellow Hersh is a son of a bitch.”  As they say, Hersch might be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch.   One often hears about the cover-ups, but this doc combines news of cover-ups with the man behind them.

 

DANDELION’S ODYSSEY (France/Belgium 2025) ***½

Directed by Momoko Seto

  

Following the footsteps of the Oscar-winning animated FLOW from Latvia, DANDELION’S ODYSSEY is a stunning animation with little plot, though penned by three writers, but it is more than made up for by the imaginative journey that defies time and space.  Dendelion, Baraban, Léonto and Taraxa are four odd friends; four seeds used to belong to the same dandelion. Rescued from a nuclear explosion that destroyed the Earth, they find themselves hurled into the cosmos, travelling through planets and constellations. When they land on an unknown planet, they set off on an unforgettable adventure to find a new home and settle for good, through planets and constellations. When they land on an unknown planet, they set off on an unforgettable adventure to find a new home and settle for good.  The story is told through sounds and music, with a little cuteness thrown in as the seeds with their tentacles often dance in the wind.  This is director Momoko Seto’s first full-length animated feature after three shorts.

 

DEAD LOVER (USA 2025) **

Directed by Grace Glowwikcki

 

DEAD LOVER, as the film title implies, is one weird movie.  If one likes very, very weird movies, then this is your kind of movie.  I myself, this critic loves fucked up films, but thiamine is just too much for me..  The reason is that director Glowwicki just does what she likes, regardless of anything anyone thinks, or crypto or narrative, or logic.  Writer-director Grace Glowicki stars as a wily gravedigger whose stench has left her bereft of amorous suitors. That is, until a horny dandy (co-writer Ben Petrie) with a penchant for her fetid funk enters this vibrantly chiaroscuro picture. The two consummate their love, but when a misbegotten voyage reduces the gravedigger’s lover to a mere severed finger, she feverishly turns to unnatural sciences to concoct a means of literally resurrecting the relationship.  There is a reference to  Mary Shelley at the film’s start, but all in all, this is one bad, indulgent, crazy, weird film..\

 

DEUX PIANOS (Two Pianos)(Franc 2025) **
Directed by Arnaud Desplechin

 

The French film bears two heavyweights - director Arnaud Desplechin and Oscar nominated French speaking actress Charlotte Rampling.  But the story revolves around a virtuosic pianist, Mathias Vogler (Francois Civil), who travels to his hometown of Lyon, where his childhood mentor Elena (Rampling) convinces him to collaborate on a series of concerts at the city’s historic auditorium.  Elena is a supporting characte,r but the main character’s (Mathias) story is cliched all the way from start to end.  In a park, he encounters a boy who seems to be his doppelgänger.  This strange child leads Mathias to Claude (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), a woman he once passionately loved — and whose reappearance threatens to destabilize Mathias’ already-fragile mental state.  Mildly entertaining at best, that at least avoids melodrama.

DINNER WITH FRIENDS (Canada 2025) **
Directed by Sasha Leigh Henry

 

A film that aims high to be the new THE BIG CHILL or HUISBANDS, the Canadian first feature DINNER WITH FRIENDS is one boring, clichéd dinner party.  The film attempts to cover many issues, like a gay couple, a straight couple breaking up, and another couple having their first baby.  The film takes a while before one can figure out who is who.  The audience only ever sees the group together, with the exception of the first scenes introducing long-married couple Joy (Tattiawna Jones) and Malachi (Alex Spencer) as they debate whether to put in the effort to reunite the friend group. Once together, long-held tensions and inside jokes lend authenticity, suggesting these friends have spent their twenties together.   There are many, many dinners during the course of the film, so that a more appropriate title for the film would be DINNERS WITH FRIENDS.  Another major flaw of the film is that all the characters speak the same way; for example, they all use the word ‘shit’, because it is one writer penning the dialogue for all the friends.

DIYA: Prix du Snag (Chad, France, Germany, Côte d’Ivoire 2025) ***½

Directed by Achille Ronaimou

 

Fast-paced with the urgency that the protagonist faces, DIYA is the local African term for the price of blood.  Dane (Ferdinand Mbaissané, winner of the Best Actor award at FESPACO 2025), a driver for an NGO in the capital, has the misfortune to run over a schoolboy.  His pregnant wife (Marina Ndormadjingar Solmem) runs to his aid to pay the hospital bills, but it’s too late: the child succumbs to his injuries, and his family summons Dane’s. He will be subjected to the diya, the blood debt, the payment of an exorbitant sum he doesn’t have.

Cleverly orchestrated, Diya puts us right at the heart of Dane’s torment: repaying the debt or languishing in prison far from his soon-to-be-born first child.   Dane is a good person depicted in the film as one who is sympathetic to the child’s mother.  It is a much scramble for funds as the director takes his audience through the colourful and informative journey of the villagers and people.  All ends well with a surprise ending in what can be described as a well-orchestrated and entertaining yet powerful movie.

EPIC: ELVIS PRESLEY IN CONCERT (Australia 2025) ***
Directed by Baz Luhrmann

 

Baz Luhrmann returns to the subject of his most audacious film — 2022’s Elvis — with the extraordinary EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert. Free of contemporary interviews with experts, critics, or other stakeholders.  The doc is exactly what the title implies,  a series of Prestley’s concerts.  Brilliantly compiled with an aficionado’s enthusiasm and sensitivity, the film shifts skilfully between rehearsals, where Presley is cheerful, hard-working, even goofy, and live performances that vary from powerful and grandiose to rushed. There are moments where he can’t keep up with the breakneck arrangements and loses his breath. (He was booked to do at least two shows most days.) Among the standouts are “Polk Salad Annie” and “Burning Love,” a chart-topper he cut in early 1972.  Director Luhrmann is known for his quick edits and again is true in the doc.  There are hardly any segments that last more than 12 seconds without a cut.  One of Presley’s songs is intercut with 4 performances of the same song - not bad for a nouvelle achievement.  Prestley’s fans will enjoy this doc immensely.

 

EXIT 8 (Japan 2025) ***
Directed by Genki Kawamura

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mazes and maze puzzles have always fascinated people.  Trying to get out of a seemingly endless puzzle is the goal.  In the new Japanese movie EXIT 8,  Arashi superstar Kazunari “Nino” Ninomiya plays the Lost Man, a backpacked commuter trapped in an endless, sterile subway corridor. To escape at Exit 8 — where his ex awaits his thoughts about her pregnancy — he must obey one rule: if anything looks off, turn back. Miss a single anomaly and he’s snapped to the start, condemned to loop again. The premise becomes a taut metaphor for guilt, responsibility, and the paralysis of indecision.  There is nothing really much moe in the story, but Nino makes turn after turn in one corridor after corridor for the full length of the movie.  Definitely a movie that is NOT to be seen twice, credit should be given at least to the filmmaker to capture the attention of audiences for a full 90 plus minutes without incident and with much repetition.  No one walked out during the screening - a rare achievement.

FLANA (Iraq/France/Qatar 2025) ***
Directed by Zahraa Ghandour

 

Ever since the fateful day her 10-year-old friend and neighbour, Nour, went missing, Ghandour has been looking for answers. Focusing on the concept of “flana,” an Iraqi term for forgotten or anonymous women, Ghandour links past and present, connecting with her elders and peers while attempting to find her childhood playmate in the context of disappearances that still happen every week.  Director Ghandour adds her own words (i.e., her view) in many scenes.  She says that the homeless females are placed in prison-like conditions in Central Baghdad, while those guilty of putting the girls there remain free.  The effect of the American invasion of Iraq makes all the matters worse, especially for the girls who have no guidance or anyone to tell them or teach them what is going on.  Nour is first born a girl, then abandoned by her mother, adopted before being abandoned again by her adoptive parents, and left deserted when her adoptive parents tell her that they will return with cookies, only never to return.  Ghandour’s tale is a heartfelt one, and her aim of getting the news and stories of abandoned women in Iraq is a sad eye-opener.

THE FURIOUS (HK/China 2025) ***

Directed  by Kenji Tanigaki

 

Action movies make a lot of money.  Examples being the John Wick franchise, the Bourne Identity franchise, the EQUALIZER series, just to mention a few.  The key to all these is the choreographed action scenes and maybe a little plot.  THE FURIOUS satisfies the plot criterion with a deaf-mute kung-fu expert father who trains his daughter before she is kidnapped in a human trafficking scheme involving top brass.  The plot is only secondary to the film, but at least the film plays the plot as if it is all important, which is a good plan.  The action sequences are excellent and better than the average Hollywood action flick.  The introduction of an archer bad guy and a strong man bad guy helps, too.  Just sit back and enjoy the violence!

 

FUZE (UK 2025) **½
Directed by David MacKenzie

 

Brit David MacKenzie, known for the excellent HELL OR HIGH WATER and the recently released RELAY, returns to TIFF with a high-stakes thriller with lots of twists and turns entitled FUZE.   When a World War II-era bomb is found in a construction site in a busy area of London, the authorities quickly spring into action, determined to save the throngs of innocent bystanders in the vicinity. Scripted by Ben Hopkins (the mind-bending The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz, TIFF ’00), Fuze moves at a breakneck pace. As the tension mounts and time threatens to run out, it soon becomes clear that no one can truly be trusted.  MacKenzie has the clout to attract high-profile actors like Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Theo James, Sam Worthington, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw.  The film also benefits from famous London sights like Edgeware Road, where the robbery takes place.  But the script written by the writer of THE NINE LIVES OF TOMAS KATZ is too over-the-top to be credible unaided by the supposedly humourous closing credits, not as funny as the filmmakers think.

HONEY BUNCH (Canada 2025) 

Directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli

A genre-bending sci-fi thriller with a 70s look and setting, this film is as weird as nothing normal can be expected in a tale that involves love in a remote rehab facility.  The story follows Diana, who wakes from a coma with fragmented memories.  Her husband, Homer, takes her to an experimental trauma centre hidden in the remote wilderness, yet the reason eludes her... As fragments of her memory start to return, and just as more of the plot is revealed to the audience, so do disturbing and sinister revelations about her marriage.  Grace Glowicki and  Ben Petrie are marvellous as the troubled couple, with two British veterans Kate Dickie andJason Isaacs lending their hands as well.  Character actor Julian Rching, who has appeared in more than 200 films, also has an appearance here.  The film is bookended by the segment in which Diana carries Homer into the sea, but the climax before the ending scene is something really out of the ordinary.   Be prepared for one of the most gross-out set pieces seen in a film this year.

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT (French title: A Simple Accident)(Iran/Fr/Lux 2025) ***

Directed by Jafar Panahi

 

If one recalls the premise of a victim recognizing his or her torturer and kidnapping him for revenge, one will definitely remember the disturbing play and film DEATH OF A MAIDEN.  A variation of this premise is utilized in director Panahi’s latest Palme d’Or Winner IT WQW JUST AN ACCIDENT.  Panahi has been jailed for his political activities.  Its driver, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), is heading home with his wife (Afssaneh Najmabadi) and daughter (Delmaz Najafi) when he hits a dog, killing the poor animal and destroying his engine. Seeking roadside assistance, he wanders into a warehouse. Here, a worker named Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) spots him, and it's possible they are not meeting for the first time. Vahid’s life has been in shambles since his hellish time in prison, due to the actions of a torturer he calls Pegleg — and he thinks Eghbal is this man. While his impulse for revenge is swift-acting, doubt is sewn by his captive, and Vahid must seek out help from other survivors, including Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a spitfire wedding photographer, and a bride named Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten) who brings her groom (Majid Panahi) and their impetuous friend (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr) along for the ride.  The film isn't half bad, but it suffers from an overwrought and too lengthy melodramatic ending.

 

JOHN CANDY: I LIKE ME (USA 2025) ***
Directed by Colin Hanks

 

The doc on Canadian comedian JOHN CANY: I LIKE ME is so-called as Candy has a problem of being comfortable with himself, being overweight, as the doc shows time and again.  Despite his talent and losing quite a bit of weight in the past, which included hiring a personal trainer, the man is still feeling the problem.  The doc, featuring candid testimonies from John Candy’s friends and family — including Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Catherine O’Hara, and more — Colin Hanks’ wildly entertaining documentary celebrates one of the most beloved comedic actors of our time.  Included are clips from his hits like PLAINS, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES and UNCLE BUCK, while not forgetting his flops such as WAGONS EAST.  The doc goes through all the processes required for a doc like showing Candy’s childhood, family, rise to fame, and fall from grace.

 

KARMADONNA (Serbia 2025) *

Directed by Aleksandar Radivojević

 

What happens if you get a call from God on your cell phone?  This is the premise of a horror first, Midnight Madness in Serbia.   Aleksandar Radivojević (co-writer of A Serbian Film) makes his directorial debut with an audacious satirical thriller about an expectant mother (Jelena Djokić) who receives a phone call from a deity that demands she obey a list of murderous instructions.  After a sinister demonstration of the self-proclaimed deity’s omniscient powers, the voice offers an ultimatum: murder a select list of individuals or lose her unborn child. And this is how Yelena finds herself descending into the Serbian criminal underground to cross names off a divine hit list, from corrupt cops to toxic social-media influencers.  The film becomes increasingly bloody and ridiculous as it progresses, and by the last 30 minutes, nothing makes sense.  Walk out of this one while you can!

THE KING FOX (Malaysia/Indonesia 2025) ***
Directed by Woo Ming Jin

 

The Malaysian film shot in the country’s native language of Malay in an unnamed fishing village, probably the east coast of Malaysia, judging from the white sandy beaches, is a story of twins Ali and Amir.  Having lost their mother at birth, the pair are left to depend on each other after their father leaves them for a new, younger wife. This proves to be especially burdensome for Ali, who looks after his brother. Amir’s vocabulary is limited to a few words, and his difference makes the two of them prone to bullying. But Ali never doubts this brother’s brilliance. One day, the twins come across a mesmerising woman, their new English teacher, Ms. Lara (Dian Sastrowardoyo), dancing on the beach. Her arrival ushers in changes to their seemingly unbreakable relationship.  The film is mainly a growing-up, coming-of-age film with some sensitive moments that lift the film out of the ordinary.  The film also depicts what local school life is like, despite the film’s occasional choppy narrative.

KOKUBO (Japan 2025) ***½

Directed by Lee Sang-il

 

Directed by Lee Sang-il and starring two of Japan’s most prominent actors, Ryo Yoshizawa and Ryusei Yokohama, Kokuho is a gripping tale of friendship and rivalry in the world of Kamigata kabuki.  The story opens in Nagasaki in 1964 and unfolds over five tumultuous decades. It follows Kikuo — the son of a slain yakuza boss — who, at fourteen, is taken in by a celebrated kabuki master and raised alongside Shunsuke, the master’s son and designated heir. Their bond — part brotherhood, part rivalry — drives an epic saga of ambition, sacrifice, scandal, and devotion, culminating in the emergence of a singular kokuho: a living “national treasure.”    The film educates the audience on the world of kabuki with all the lavishness and splendour of the disciplined choreography, costumes, makeup up and voices.  The kabuki is so controlled that all the female roles are played by males.  As such, the two male actors are extremely good-looking, with the film bearing lots of homo-eroticism.  The only problem is that the film his way too long at 3 hours, stretching the last bit way too far.  The film is a hit in Japan.

THE LAST VIKING (Denmark 2025) ****
Directed by Anders Thomas Andersen

 

THE LAST VIKING teams director Anders Thomas Andersen with Mads Mikkelsen after MEN & CHICKEN and RIDERS OF JUSTICE in yet another weird, violent, and fucked-up (but in a good way) movie.  Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas play Anker and Manfred, brothers who are reunited after Anker’s years-long jail stint for a bank robbery. Since Manfred is the only one who knows where the loot is buried, Anker has no choice but to contend not only with his brother’s many psychological issues but the legacy of the traumas they suffered in their childhood.  Andersen assembles a highly memorable gallery of misfits, miscreants, and many other unique individuals with their own foibles and fixations, one of which may involve re-forming the most famous pop band ever.  Mikkelsen is simply marvellous as the mentally challenged John aka Manfred, who, if not jumping out of cars or windows, is trying to harm himself by stabbing his hand with fondue forks.  Likely the most fucked up but entertaining movie of the year.  And by the way, it is also ultra-violent.

 

LAUNDRY (South Africa/Switzerland 2025) ***1/2
Directed by Zamo Mkhwanazi

 

 

 

 

A small yet powerful movie about Apartheid.  Filmmaker Zamo Mkhwanazi’s quietly powerful debut LUANDRY crafts an intimate portrait of a Black family navigating the uneasy privileges and hidden costs of exemption within the violently unequal system of apartheid South Africa.  The film is set in 1968, the same year that negative international opinion against apartheid fomented during the Summer Olympics, but 26 years before the end of the institution.  A family owns a laundry business, the store set up, unfortunately, in the white section of the city.  The patriarch of the family, Enoch, goes to see the mayor in order to be able to get permission to continue his business, only to be insulted and thrown into prison when he finally speaks out.  The story also focuses on the son, a talented instrument player, wishing to play for the black celebrity of the city, who has had an affair with the father.  Director Mkhwanazi films the conflict segments with crafted finesse, creating some very intense scenes, scenes that lift he film out of average family drama.  Of course, worse are the abuse and the degrading Apartheid scenes that are to be seen to be believed—Shot in Zulu (the family’s background) and English.

 

LILITH FAIR: BUILDING A MYSTERY (Canada 2025) ***
Directed by Ally Pankiw

 

 

Back in the ’90s, conventional “wisdom” suggested that commercial radio couldn’t play two women in a row. Frustrated by this, Sarah McLachlan went on tour with Paula Cole to offer audiences an entire night of women’s artistry. That tour went so well that the next summer, McLachlan debuted Lilith Fair, named after the Lilith of Jewish lore:  Adam’s renegade first wife. It became the year’s top-grossing festival simply because the artists were so good. Besides the luminaries noted above, the Fair’s eventual roster included Fiona Apple, Tracy Chapman, Dixie Chicks, Sheryl Crow, Suzanne Vega, Indigo Girls, and Pat Benatar.  The doc celebrates the empowerment of movement that includes black women and gay women at the same time.  Of course, there are the evil morons who fight against Lilith, including the likes of Jerry Falwell and anti-choice Americans.  The doc stays away from Trump, who is yet another moron who should be denounced in the doc.  The film also mentions the revival of Lilith, which was a failure, but ends on a high note with McLachlan performing a song at the conclusion of the film.

LITTLE LORRAINE (Canada 2025) ***½

Directed by Andy Hines

 

 

 

 

 

The film begins with the news of underwater mining in the waters around Cape Breton, where the audience is told that 148,000 people of the time.  Most were miners, but the mines closed, and employment was at its lowest.   The film title is derived from the name of a village in Nova Scotia, located on the east coast of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada.  A 1986 mining explosion that left 10 men dead in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, launches this thrilling drama, inspired by a true story, that merges coastal fishing with an international cocaine smuggling ring.  With the closing of the mine, Jimmy (Stephen Amell, television’s Arrow) is suddenly out of work, just as his untrustworthy great uncle Henry (prolific Nova Scotian actor Stephen McHattie) saunters in with a business proposal: join him on his lobster fishing boat.

Believing it’ll be a way to safely support his family, Jimmy also convinces his friends Tommy (Joshua Close) and Jake (Steve Lund) to join him, and very quickly, the three are rolling in the cash. The emotional toll also takes effect, particularly on Tommy, one of the crew members, when he ends up confessing to the priest during confession.  The moral issue of whether to support one’s family also comes into the equation.  Also included in the story are the effects of drug use, as in cocaine use by the locals.  LITTLE LORRAINE  is a solid film with a good story reflecting the atmosphere and period of Cape Breton with credible performances all around.

LUCKY LU (USA 2025) ***

Directed by Lloyd Lee Choi

 

LUCKY LU is far from lucky in yet another story of an immigrant who strives for a living using a bike. We have seen it all before in Vittorio De Sica’s classic BICYCLE THEIVES and the recent SOULEYMAN’S STOY, both films are much better than this one.  LUCKY LU is set in NYC, where Lu awaits the arrival of his wife and daughter.  New York food delivery driver Lu has been in the US for five years, hanging onto his dream of running a restaurant while doing whatever it takes to get by. As Lucky Lu begins, Lu has just acquired his first apartment, a sparsely furnished one-bedroom with a single window that lets in morning light. And he has found the place just in time — his wife and daughter are on their way from China. “A new place. A new beginning,” says his landlord. But Lu’s fresh start will prove agonizingly difficult to secure. A pretty dismal film, even if Lu gets the rent at the end, as it is just the beginning of a whole off of struggles.  Message in this film?  Do not immigrate.

MAMA (Israel/Poland/Italy 2025) ***1/2
Directed by O Sina

O MAMA tells the story of a mother, Mila (Evgenia Dodina, in a devastating and powerful performance), told from the character’s point of view of a suffering mother who has given up her family to work abroad in order to provide for her family financially.  She returns after an accident involving her arm, only to discover family problems like her cheating husband and her daughter pregnant and getting married.  Mila is no saint, having an affair with a younger black gardener ( a steamy sex scene), as well.  Director Sinai steers her drama away from melodrama and cheap dramatic theatrics while concentrating on the details of what can be called a character-driven story of human relationship decay within a family.  No one is perfect in this story, and no judgment is made. 

MEADOWLARKS (Canada 2025) **
Directed by Tasha Hubbard

 

 

MEADOWLARKS is based on director Hubbard’s  2017 documentary Birth of a Family.  Director Hubbard’s Meadowlarks is an emotional, fictionalized true drama that follows four siblings, separated by the Sixties Scoop, as they come together over a week.  Sixties Scoop refers to the term given for the then-common practice of removing Indigenous children from their families, often without consent, and placing them with the child welfare system.  There are no fewer than 3 Canadian films dealing with his topic at TIFF this year.  Instead of dealing of issues like how the siblings got to each and reunite, how they got taken away, Hubbard concentrates more on awkward small talk, gifts, and forced bonding events, the one brother and three sisters do their best to get to know one another after decades apart, their interactions and how they come to terms with one another.  Unfortunately, Hubbard stays on melodrama and emotional theatrics to tell her story, resulting in forced sentiment and overlong hugging and screaming sessions that go on with dysfunctional families that one has already seen too much of.  The audience is also forced to sit through one of the siblings, Justine’s full rendition of her ‘treat singing’.

MEMORY OF PRINCESS MUMBI (Kenya/Switz/Saudi Arabia 2-25) **
Directed by Damien Hauser

Drawing on modern technology i.e. AI) to visually restore kingdoms, director Hauser presents us with sumptuous settings while focusing on the human aspect: namely, the life and death of Princess Mumbi (Shandra Apondi), as told by the filmmaker Kuve (Abraham Joseph), who is threatened by his rival, the prince (Samson Waithaka), to whom the beautiful princess has been promised…  The film appears to b all over the place, with making doc to a romance and then death all summarized at the end of the film.  Princess Mumbi emphasizes in the film that filmmakers should make what audiences wish to see and not what they think international audiences like.  This amateurish-looking film with pastiched colours does not seem to heed either saying.

MILK TEETH (Romania/Denmark/France/Greece/Bulgaria 2025) **
Directed by Mihai Mincan

 

MILK TEETH is the story of how the younger sister copes with her missing elder sister after she goes missing while taking the trash to the dumpster, while she continues to play.  Maria feels guilty, as it was actually her turn to take out the garbage, and her sister was angry at her before she went missing.  But director Mincan is less interested in solving the case, instead reflecting on Maria’s feelings in the setting of a socialist Romania.  He could have done both.   While her mother (Marina Palii) loses her grip on the day-to-day and her father (Igor Babiac) loses his hope, Maria takes matters into her own hands, determined to find her sister. As Maria’s investigation begins taking a toll on her own mind, and her family continues slipping through the cracks, the auspicious political revolution dawning in Romania acts as a backdrop for their own personal nightmare.  The blurred narrative does not help the slow pace of the narrative.  There is no happy ending or solid closure to Maria’s demise.

 

 

NI-NAADAMAADIZ: RED POWER RISING (Canada 2025) 
Directed by Shane Belcourt

Armed with only having eight minutes of archival footage of 90 days in 1974, when 150 people took over Anicinabe Park in Kenora in protest over the ongoing mistreatment of Indigenous people at to work with, director Shane Belcourt — collaborating with acclaimed author and journalist Tanya Talaga who also serves as writer and producer — crafts a captivating and educational documentary of the struggle, injustice and racial prejudice of the Indegnuous people.  The movement is led by the charismatic and eloquent Louie Cameron, leader of the Ojibway Warriors Society. The protest reached all the way to the nation’s capital and beyond — it even caught the eye of the American Indian Movement, whose members joined the cause.  There are interviews carried out with Cameron’s close family like his wife and son, who bring an urgency and credibility to the story.  There is much to be learned, and the doc really puts one in the shoes of the mistreated.  Indian beaters, gay bashers, and  KKK members - why is there so much unnecessary and stupid hate in the world?

 

NO OTHER CHOICE )South Korea 2025) ***½

Directed by Park Chan-wook

 

The film starts with a family group hug, and Man-soo has it all: a loving wife, two talented children, and two happy dogs.  He even bought the beautiful forest-enclosed house where he grew up.  Then, after 25 years of dedicated work for Solar Paper — where he was awarded Pulp Man of the Year in 2019 — Man-soo is suddenly given the axe.  Soon, he is falling behind on his mortgage payments, and his wife Mi-ri insists they put the house up for sale.  Man-soo is desperate to scoop a coveted position with Moon Paper, but he knows there are other job seekers who match his pedigree. So he hatches a plan: invent a phony paper company, reach out to each of his rivals, lure them into a meeting… and, one by one, dispatch the competition.  It is a wicked and occasionally hilarious satire based on the novel THE AX by Donald Werstlake. Director Chan’s film takes its time to establish the plot, but it is all worth it in this deliciously wicked thriller.

NOMAD SHADOW (USA/Spain/France 2025) ***

Directed by Eimi Imanishi

 

American Japanese director Eimi Imanishi’s debut feature NOMAD SHADOW is an ambitious drama following a young Sahrawi woman as she determines her future after a major shakeup in her life.  The film begins with a dance club in Madrid as Mariam is escorted out of the club for drug selling.  As a result, she is deported from Spain to her home country in the Western Sahara.  Matters get worse as she tries to assimilate into life with her family.  The film shows what life in eh Shra is like and how people, particularly when faced.  Director Imanishi adds a surreal touch with scenes of Mariam on a boat at sea.  Through Mariam’s journey, he audience examines what both home and belonging mean.

NOVELLE VAGUE (FRANCE 2025) ****
Directed by Richard Linklater 

 

 

Having spent several years writing for Cahiers du cinéma, Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), not yet 30, declares, “The best way to criticize a film is to make one.” So off he goes, convincing George de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst) to fund a low-budget independent feature and whipping up a treatment — there was never a proper script — with fellow New Waver François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard) based on a news item about a gangster and his girlfriend.  A meticulously and handsomely delivered black and white homage to the French New Wave aka NOUVELLE VAGUE, sees the homage paid through the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s A BOUT DE SOUFFLE, also known in English as BREATHLESS.  Cinephiles will definitely delight in all the film references as well as the depiction of New Wave greats like directors Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Agnes Varda and husband Jacques Demy.  The film also depicts the idiosyncrasies of Godard, who shot BREATHELESS sans script and sand continuity, much to the chagrin of his financial backers, makeup artist and collaborators.  Seberg wanted to quit many times, but Belmondo finds all this absolutely amusing.

 

NUNS VS. THE VATICAN (USA 2025) ***
Directed by Lorena Luciano 

 

Like other docs about the abuse and misconduct of the Catholic Church, NUNS VS. THE VATICAN focuses on abuse by the priests on female nuns instead of male boys.   The thread of the doc is nothing out of the ordinary as it covers the abuse, the cover-up, the testimonies and possible prevention of further misconduct.  This doc by director Luciano covers the material from a more personal perspective, mainly from the abuse of an informer nun, Gloria, as she identifies the abuser, Marko Rupnik, who has gained much fame from his artistic works that have been displayed in churches around the world.  One can see the torment and trauma Gloria has experienced,d which makes this doc all the more relevant.   Ultimately, all of Rupnik’s art has been removed, but still, this man should be in prison.

 

 

OCA (Mexico/Argentina 2025) ***½

Directed by Karla Badillo

 A young nun sets off on a poetic, mystical pilgrimage to save her dying congregation, encountering others whose own trials of faith, privilege, and contradiction mirror her haunting search for divine meaning in a fractured, material world.  The film is described as Bunuel-ish for the reasons that the events in the film feel surreal and also for the religious overtones.  The protagonist is a catholic nun who travels to San Vincente on a motorcycle.  She is full of faith and believes that God has a plan not only for herself but also for others, especially those she meets on the way to a sort of pilgrimage.  She encounters a variety of odd characters, including a wealthy femme fatale driven in her car by her trusty chauffeur, a pilgrimage of villagers hoping to meet the arch-bishop in San Vincente and also robbers who steal her motorcycle.  OCA , the film title is a Spanish game in which there are twists and turns to get to the winning pots, just as the nun has to manoeuvre her way out of tricky situations.  A very intriguing film with lots of intriguing characters and events.

OLMO (USA/Mexico 2025) ****
Directed by Fernando Eimbcke

14-year-old Olmo is going through adolescence..  The film begins mischievously with Olmo’s dream, and he steps inside a hot rod with his sexy teen neighbour.  The toilet roll beside his bed shows him ready to finish off the dream with a happy ending.  OLMO tells the story of his quest for sex with his neighbour, who needs a stereo for her party.  To be invited, he has to steal and repair the broken one that belongs to his parents.  His father is bedridden with MS, and his mother is stressed, overworking, and behind with 3 months' rent.  The film is beautifully shot with the setting of 1979, bearing the mischievousness of the early John Hughes teen comedies, but this one has a message.  Director Eimbcke balances his family drama and growing-up story with plenty of humour, while avoiding sentimentality and melodrama. Totally remarkable and delightful performances all round, especially from Aidan Uttapa as Olmo.  Family is everything, even at the end of the film, when the mother still does not have enough money to pay the rent, when one knows everything is going to be all right. 

ORWELL: 2+2 = 5  (USA/France 2025) ***
Directed by Raoul Peck

 

 

ORWELL: 2+2 = 5 is high high-profile documentary produced by heavyweights Alex Gibney (TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE; ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM) and Raoul Peck (I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO; ERNEST COLE: LOST AND FOUND), who also directs the doc.

George Orwell, born George Blair, is an English writer famous for 1984 and ANIMAL FARM.  He started to write 1984 on the Scottish isle of Jura in 1948.  This doc is a blend of Orwell: his life and works with current events that include Trump’s fascist rule, the Ukraine invasion by Russia and the Palestinian/Israel War.

The doc includes old photos of Orwell as a baby and as a boy in school.  He belonged to the poorer end of the middle class.  His father, having the same status, assumed a higher status by taking a military post in the British colonized countries.  Orwell hated those in authoritarian power, as evident in his two most famous works, 1984 and ANIMAL FARM.  Orwell’s writing drew from his personal experience of poverty in Down and Out in Paris and London, of colonialism in Burmese Days, and of revolutionary uprising in Homage to Catalonia.  Most notable: At age 46, nearing death from tuberculosis, the last sentence he wrote was: “All that matters has already been written.”

The doc is most entertaining with clips of related movies, particularly Michael Radford’s 1984, which starred John Hurt as Orwell.  More than a dozen films are featured, particularly from multiple different adaptations of 1984 and ANIMAL FARM

The doc evokes a very depressing look at today’s world, at what it has become.  The doc concludes with a solution for what can be done.  This is reflected in organized protests by the people, like the Black Lives Matter walk.  But these solutions are difficult to come by and take lots of time and dedication from the people involved.

A POET (Un Poeta) (Colombia/Germany/Sweden 2025) ****
Directed by Simón Mesa Soto 

 

Coming right from Cannes, where A POET, in the Un Certain Regard section, won the Jury Prize, the film revolves around Óscar Restrepo, an aging poet who once had hopes of literary success but whose life has since drifted into obscurity, melancholy, and self-destructive habits.  He lives with his mother, struggles with unemployment, and drowns some of his disappointments in alcohol.  While teaching in a secondary school, he mentors Yurlady, a teenage student who shows raw talent in writing.  But fate is not on his side, as things go south for the poor soul.  A POET is tragedy in its most gruesome form, with Oscar brilliantly played like a monstrous troll by Ubeimar Ríos.  Dream big but achieve chaos!  One of the best of the festival!

THE PRESIDENT’S CAKE (Iraq 2025) ***½

Directed by Hasan Hadi

In the tradition of Jafar Panahi’s Iran 1995 film THE WHITE BALLOON, THE PRESIDENT'S CAKE has a young protagonist spending the entire film trying to find ingredients to make a cake in celebration of President Sudan Hussein’s birthday.   It is 1990s Iraq,  Young Lamia (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef) lives with her ailing grandmother, Bibi (Waheeda Thabet Khreiba), eking out an existence in a remote village where the best means of travel is by meshouf, a kind of canoe. Disaster strikes when Lamia is “honoured” with bringing the cake for her school class’s mandatory celebration of Saddam Hussein’s birthday.  In other circumstances, this might be an innocuous responsibility, but Bibi and Lamia can’t afford the ingredients — and the last family that didn’t comply was dragged through the streets.  Director Hadi takes his audience around the poorer streets of Iraq, showing how people eke up a living, and it is not a pretty sight.  People are poor and often dishonest.  Hadi paints the wonderful innocence of children, especially of Lamia, not even knowing at the film’s start that her grandmother was selling her off for good.  The film has premiered and been lauded at Cannes.

A PRIVATE LIFE (Vie privee)(France 2025) ***

Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski

 

Lilian (Foster), an American psychoanalyst in Paris, is devastated to learn that her client Paula (Virginie Efira) has taken her own life. Or has she? Visits from Paula's furious widower, Simon (Mathieu Amalric) and taciturn daughter Valérie (Luàna Bajrami), along with the discovery that files have been stolen from Lilian's office, suggest that Paula may have fallen victim to foul play.  Assisted by her ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), Lilian undertakes some amateur sleuthing.  Academy Award winner Jodie Foster stars in this strange murder mystery black comedy, playing an American psychiatrist working in France.  Foster speaks perfect French and it is strange but wonderful to watch her totally inhabit the role.  She works with French veteran Daniel Auteul, who plays her ex, Matthieu Amaric, in an angry, deranged encounter among others.  The script contains a lot of crazed characters, Jodie’s psychiatrist being one of them, with her conspiracy theories of murder and her past life.  It all turns out well at the end with a happy ending, though a bit too far-fetched for the film’s own good.

 

RENOIR (Japan/Singapore/France/Philippines/Qatar 2025) ***        

Directed by Chie Hayakawa

RENOIR captures the delicate and troubled transition from childhood to adolescence through the eyes of Fuki, an 11-year-old girl grappling with her father’s terminal illness, portrayed by incredibly talented newcomer Yui Suzuki.  Drawing on her own childhood experiences and set in the late 1980s when the director was the same age as her protagonist, Hayakawa’s narrative unfolds through the eyes of Fuki (Yui Suzuki), an 11-year-old girl coping with her father’s terminal illness. As Fuki navigates the emotional turbulence of preadolescence, she is left to fend for herself, with her mother (Hikari Ishida) overwhelmed by work and the stress of caring for a dying husband (Lily Franky).  The film is a slow burn but covers effectively the subjects of grief, emotions, adolescence and a parent/daughter relationship.  The heart of the story of Fuki’s father having cancer while her mother is working and stressed out over the situation, leaving Fuki much to herself.  The film covers too many issues, such as a sex predator and leaves too many unanswered questions about the issues brought forward.  One can argue that life is similar without many solutions, and director Jayakawa is providing a nuanced, though authentic, story of her past.

RETREAT (UK 2025) ***1/2

Directed by Ted Evans

 

Directed by Ted Evans, who is himself deaf, debuts his first and impressive genre-bending thriller with a deaf and deft thriller set in a commune of deaf inhabitants.  The story begins with a German newcomer, Eva (Anne Zander), entering the facility only to discover that nothing is what it seems.  Unlike other thrillers where the newcomer tries to escape, Eva is converted to start, while another, Matt, who has stayed there since 4, wishes to escape.  And all hell breaks loose as nothing is what it seems in this dark institution.  Director Evans builds his film to a credible and frightening climax.  The film has the feel of classics like LOGAN’S RUN and THE HANDMAID’S TALE.  An impressive, remarkable first feature!

ROOFMAN (USA 2025) ***½

Directed by Derek Cianfrance

 

ROOFMAN is the true story of a thief/robber named Jeffrey, aka ROOFMAN, who enters many McDonald’s through the roof, and hence the nickname.  A US military veteran unable to make ends meet, Jeffrey (Channing Tatum) gets caught robbing McDonald’s restaurants to provide for his kids. He’s tried, sentenced, incarcerated — and promptly breaks out.  While on the run, he finds his way into a Toys “R” Us, where he crafts a makeshift hideout behind a wall. Months pass, the manhunt is all but forgotten, and Jeffrey finds himself falling for Leigh (Kirsten Dunst), one of the store’s employees. A connection is forged, though Leigh knows nothing of Jeffrey’s criminal status nor his current residence inside her workplace.  Director Cianfartnce, who also co-wrote the script, ups the ante on charm with the film’s subject’s personality of always being a good guy, meeting the story.  The film plays as a romance, a comedy with a few very funny parts and a bit of a thriller.  Everyone loves to root for an underdog, especially with one as nice as Roofman, Jeff.  ROOFMAN is better and more entertaining than the film looks.

SACRIFICE( UK/Greece 2025) ***

Directed by Romain Gravas

 

A satire in its most energetic and blackest form, with nuanced actors like John Malkovich and Vincent Cassel who add to the mayhem, makes this climate change satire SACRIFICE an unforgettable experience, even if it is often too over-the-top and ridiculous.  Bracken (Vincent Cassel), a fusion of your least favourite billionaires, is present to muster support for a highly questionable deep-sea mining effort targeting essential minerals.  Complicating his efforts is Joan (Anya Taylor-Joy), the leader of a doomsday eco-cult.  She and her acolytes are convinced the only way to prevent the catastrophic, world-ending eruption of the huge volcano burbling off the coast is to offer up suitably famous sacrifices.  But the film centres on a self-centred Mike Tyler (Chris Evans) who is more concerned about his toupee than the proceedings.  Watch this one for all that it's worth!

SAIPAN (UK/Ireland 2025) ****

Directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn

 

SAIPAN is the real-life drama behind star player Roy Keane’s rift with manager Mick McCarthy on the eve of the 2002 World Cup, Saipan is a story of ego, loyalty, and identity that resonates beyond the world of sports.  What began as a dispute over professionalism and pre-tournament training conditions on the remote Pacific Island of Saipan escalated into a national reckoning, dividing a country where football can be sacred. It was a moment that transcended sport, sparking pub debates, tabloid frenzy, political commentary, and even parliamentary mentions.  Steve Coogan delivers a riveting turn as McCarthy, opposite a formidable performance from Éanna Hardwicke as Keane.  This is a film not only for those who love the game of football.  What is most surprising is how the directors turn a story without a happy ending into an uplifting one.  There are a lot of solid quotes in the film as well, with a standout confrontation scene between the two men.

THE SECRET AGENT (O AGENT SCRETO) (Brazil/France/Germany 2025) ***** Top 10

Directed by  Kleber Mendonça Filho

 

Brazil, 1977. Marcelo, a technology expert in his early 40s, is on the run. He arrives in Recife ( seaside town in Brazil) during carnival week, hoping to reunite with his son, but soon realizes that the city is far from being the non-violent refuge he seeks.  Marcelo is told by the police chief that perhaps 100 people will die during the carnival, a joke that carries on throughout the movie.  Marcelo’s past is catching up with him, but he chooses to bring his life to a close with the satisfaction of spending the rest of his life with his son.  His son is presently staying with Marcelo’s parents, who care very much about the boy.

Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, who also wrote the script for the film, is a familiar name to many cinephiles and film critics, making his name in his 2012 multiple award-winning NEIGHBOURING SOUNDS, also set in his birthplace of Recife in North East Brazil, and also his recent 2023 documentary PORTRAITS OF GHOSTS.  THE SECRET AGENT is a film the director reportedly wanted to make for years and it is not only an excellent film but one of the best to hit screens at both TIFF and in theatres.

The film pays homage to several films of the 70s when the film is set (actually 1977).  Most noticeable is the 1975 Steven Spielberg’s JAWS.  Recife is also a seaside town.  Other films that can be noticed in Filho’s film include actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, most likely in Philippe De Broca’s 1964 film THAT MAN IN RIO.

The film suffers from a rather overlong epilogue, featuring a conversation between two individuals in a hospital, which is a bit of a letdown after a spy-like chase through the streets.

Actor Wagner Moura, who plays Marcelo in the film, also serves as one of the film’s producers.  Some humour is provided by a cameo by Udo Kier who plays a German showing off his bullet scars on his leg.  Some of the supporting cast provide terrific performances.

Director Filho keeps his audience guessing most of the time about what is happening.  There is always a sense of intrigue and mystery from the film’s start when the hero, Marcelo, is driving through a gas station in which a deadman has been shot and covered with a blanket just outside the vicinity of the station at the film’s start to two sudden thugs suddenly appear out of the blue in pursuit of Marcelo.

THE SECRET AGENT has won multiple awards at Cannes, where it premiered.  It runs a lengthy 160 minutes, but every minute is worth it.  A major surprise, THE SECRET AGENT proves intrigue, mystery, action, some biting humour while reflecting the urgency of one’s times, whether the past and present, and how one needs to come to terms with one’s past, despite the risks involved.

 

 

 SENTIMENTAL VALUE (Norway/Sweden/Denmark/France/Germany 2025) ***
Directed by Joachim Trier

This is the Grand Prix Jury Cannes Winner that reportedly received a 19-minute standing ovation, a film that arrives with high expectations, too high to meet.  At its worst, the film is a predictable, artistic, pretentious, but layered film that heads straight to a cop-out happy ending in which telling a story heals wounds.  The story centres on two estranged sisters—Nora, an intense stage actress, and Agnes, who leads a more stable life—who are forced to confront the return of their father, Gustav, a once-celebrated but now forgotten film director. Stellan Skarsgard shines in his performance despite the film’s faults.  Again, too many added components create a hardly believable story of reconciliation (the healing of old wounds) and trauma.

STEVE (UK/Ireland 2025) ****

Directed by Tim  Mielants 

 

Reminiscent of the French classroom drama BETWEEN THE WALLS, done cinema-verite/doc style, or a more maverick styled TO SIR WITH LOVE, the film follows a head teacher STEVE (Cilian Murphy) working in troubled school of boys, somewhat before they become SCUM in a borstal  Steve (Murphy) is the passionate head of a crumbling “last chance” reform school for teenage boys. With meagre resources, overstretched staff, and a mounting sense of futility, Steve must navigate one pivotal and precarious day made more tense by the arrival of a documentary news crew profiling the school, and the result may prove to be more exposé than commendation. The school is part institution and part last-ditch social experiment conducted in a shoddy rural manor house run by tired adults who believe their students still have something to offer the world. The boys, meanwhile, navigate an uneasy border between volatility and vulnerability. Mielants' score top marks in his storytelling technique using a combo of flashbacks and forwards, added by Murphy’s and Emily Watson’s stunning performances,

THERE ARE NO WORDS (Canada 2025) 
Directed by Min Sook Lee

 

The image above shows an old photo of the director and her mother.  Piecing together old letters, photos, and a few videos of her past childhood, director Min assembles and makes sense of the past that wraps an entire family's history, its mysteries and controversies, its lies, and its truth. 

Review embargo lifted after Thursday, 4th 10 pm screening.

 

TRUE NORTH (USA/Canada 2025) ***
Directed by Michele Stephenson

 (no image available)

A bold, informative, and disturbing documentary, Michele Stephenson’s TRUE NORTH is a compilation of archive footage telling of the fight against black racism.  The documentary centres on the 1969 student protests against racism at Montreal’s Concordia University and their contribution to the story of Black liberation.  Director Stephenson lets the events and the activists captured on camera speak for themselves and lets her audience decide for themselves how to make sense of all the information at hand.   The main difference between this doc and others is that it does not hammer you with the filmmakers’ views through their voiceover or writings.

THREE GOODBYES (TRES CIOTOLE) (Itay/Spain 2025) **

Directed by Isabel Coixet

 

 

 

The Italian title of this wonderfully delivered film on the wonder of life as experienced, ironically by the protagonist diagnosed with stage 4 cancer after an emotional breakup, is ‘three riceballs’, which are served in Antonio’s restaurant.  The balls are peeled like an onion to reveal different, unexpected aspects of life.  There are natural surprises in the films, just as a dog happened to walk past in a scene where Marta is speaking with her sister.  Marta (Alba Rohrwacher), a high-school teacher, and her partner, Antonio (Elio Germano), a chef, live in Rome.  While Antonio’s star is rising, Marta seems to lack passion and interest in Antonio’s recipes. One day, after many years together, the pair split after a seemingly trivial argument. Marta withdraws into herself while Antonio jumps into his new endeavour, a restaurant of his own creation. Soon after, everything changes in Marta’s world when she discovers that her loss of appetite has more to do with her health than the pains of separation. Now, with time running out, Marta must learn who she is and what she lives for.  Life is shown in the film as an accidental wonder, with a message that one should do things for oneself, with wonderful, unexpected results. just like watching this strange yet wonderful film from director Coixet.

 

TO THE VICTORY! (Ukraine 2025)

Embargo lifted after screening on Sat Sept 6th 3:30PM ET  

THE UGLY (South Korea) ***½

Directed by Yeon Sang-ho

 

Director Yeo of TRAIN TO BUSAN  tackles a more intimate subject in a lower-budget but no less engrossing movie about abuse (sex abuse, bullying, spouse abuse) of many sorts.  THE UGLY follows Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min), a young man searching for answers about his mother’s mysterious past.  Park skilfully portrays both Dong-hwan and the younger version of his father, Yeong-gyu (in flashbacks), a blind stamp carver obsessed with the beauty he cannot see.  The film quietly interrogates what beauty really means — who defines it, who owns it, and what it conceals. Ironically, the film’s clearest insights into beauty come from its blind characters, further challenging the audience’s assumptions.  Yeon’s story moves slowly, though not without much drama and material, unfolding through flashbacks in chapters from Interview Number 1 to Interview Number 4.

UNDER THE SAME SUN (Dominican Rep/Spain 2025) ***
Directed by Ulisis Porra

UNIDENTIFIED (Saudi Arabia 2025) ***
Directed by Haifaa Al Mansou

 

Saudi Arabian director Haifaa Al Mansour (Wadjda)’s latest film is a mystery crime thriller that unfolds like a true crime drama.  It is a female gender slant that pushes against gender norms and challenges simplistic narratives of femicide,  a female-driven detective story that transgresses all manner of jurisdiction in its dogged pursuit of justice.  A young woman’s abandoned body is found in the desert and bears no identification.  When the Riyadh authorities go to investigate, they recruit police department receptionist Nawal (Mila Alzahrani) to help the otherwise all-male team discover details only a woman would notice.  The intelligent and observant Nawal, a true-crime fan, possesses an unusual degree of knowledge when it comes to homicide investigations. While the police drag their heels, she quietly takes matters into her own hands, going to different all-girls’ high schools to ask about missing students, only to find the administrators uncooperative, wanting no part in any story about supposedly “sinful” girls.  But if it appears all too convenient that Nawal eventually finds all the clues and solves the case, there is more than meets the eye in a clever twist that one would never expect, lifting the film from what one would think is the typical murder mystery.  Well-plotted and delivered in a seldom-seen setting, UNIDENTIFIED is a surprise gem.

A USEFUL GHOST (Thailand/Singapore/France/Germany 2025) **
Directed by Ratchapoom Boombunchachoke

 

Described as a black comedy, A USEFUL GHOST is an over 2-hour slow-burning deadpan comedy that moves so slowly that it takes great effort to stay awake, especially when watching the film during a festival.   The film boasts a fresh idea.  March is mourning his wife, Nat, who has recently passed away due to dust pollution. He discovers her spirit has returned by possessing the vacuum cleaner. Being disturbed by a ghost that appeared after a worker's death shut down their factory, his family rejects the unconventional human-ghost relationship. Msrch’s family accepts the fact and allows him to communicate with the ghost vacuum.  Trying to convince them of their love, Nat offers to cleanse the factory. To become a useful ghost, she must first get rid of the useless ones.  It is weird to see actors talking or making out with a vacuum cleaner, and the director Ratchapoom Boombunchachoke uses the fact for the utmost effect.  The film is mildly amusing and one wonders the point in all of this.

WAYWARD (Canada 2025) ***½

Directed by Mae Martin and Ryan Scott

 

WAYWARD is a Canadian-made limited series by Netflix.  What is the screen are the fruit 2 episodes of an 8-episode series.  Wayward follows rebellious teens Abby (Sydney Topliffe) and Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind) in the early aughts as they skip classes, get high, and listen to their Discmans, unaware that their parents are scheming to remedy their “bad” behaviour by involuntarily admitting them to a mysterious correctional school.  As Abby and Leila innocently enjoy their final days of slacker freedom, detective Alex Dempsey (Martin) arrives in the town of Tall Pines with their wife, Laura (Sarah Gadon), who grew up there and feels drawn to return in her final months of pregnancy.   Tall Pines is the kind of place where everyone knows your name, and homemade preserves are left on your front porch by neighbours, a gesture Laura finds comforting and Alex finds jarring.   It is a creepy place, and the film has an exciting mystery air reminiscent of THE STEPFORD WIVES and the recent WEAPONS.  In case on is wondering, Martin is non-binary, playing a husband.  The first two episodes are nothing but excellent,t making one eager to watch the rest of the series.

YOUNGBLOOD (Canada 2025) **
Directed by Hubert Davis

 

Director Davis, known for his award-winning racism hockey do BLACK ICE directs YOUGBLOOD that looks like a fictionalized doc.  Conditioned by his father, Blane (Blair Underwood) to match any slight with a greater show of aggression, Dean (Ashton James) is a black player whose potential for greatness is stymied by his short temper on and off the ice.  A chance to play for the Hamilton Mustangs could be Dean’s last opportunity to course correct.  But that means contending with toxic teammates and finding a way to work with Murray (Shawn Doyle), the Mustangs’ skeptical coach.   The story, however, is riddled with cliches. made worse with a relationship between Dean with the bench boss’s daughter Jessie (Alexandra McDonald).   Everything goes on as expected in a sports drama, including a final win at the climactic hockey match.  The film is dedicated to the legendary late Canadian director Charles Officer, who was originally slated to direct the film.

Details

Written by: Gilbert Seah

Parent Category: Articles

Category: Movie Reviews

Published: 08 August 2025

FILM REVIEWS:

EAST OF WALL (USA 2024) ***
Directed by Anne Beecroft

 

The complaint about the under-representation of women in films can be clearly discarded these days.  In the area EAST OF WALL, (Wall is a town in Pennington County, South Dakota, United States; the population was 699 at the 2020 census), lives a family run by the strong female matriarch, which is where the story of this film comes from.  The film is so-called as it is the location of the family ranch - the setting of the story.

Despite its small population, Wall is quite famous.  Wall was named for the "natural wall" in rock formations by the Badlands National Park.  The National Grasslands Visitor Center is also located in Wall.

EAST OF WALL can be described as a docu-fiction as it is an authentic portrait of
female resilience in the “New West,” inspired by those who live it.  The film and story revolve around a tough, tattooed Tabatha Zimiga (Tabatha Zimiga plays herself), a rancher with an uncanny gift for taming wild horses.  She and her teen daughter Porshia Zimiga (she also plays herself) are often at loggerheads with her mother.  Porshia blames her mother for the loss of her stepfather,

  Tabatha takes good care of her 3 children – Porshia, older son (played by family friend Wyatt Mansfield) and 3-year-old son (Stephen Neumann as himself) – plus a slew of teens (as themselves) who need somewhere to live.  Tabatha has her hands full with humans to train beside the horses. Tabatha also hasn’t ridden a horse since his death. Instead, she coaches the teens who often perform tricks on horses while selling them at auctions or via TikTok.  Even so, it is a financial struggle.  Then along comes a wealthy businessman (Scoot McNairy) with a proposal to buy her 3,000 acres.

EAST OF WALL benefits from the raw emotions generated from the story of a family often at unease, but shares the common love for horses.  The rodeo riding and horse stunts help in the film's authenticity and also create the proper atmosphere for a horse movie.  The film is beautifully shot by cinematographer Austin Shaboozey.  Despite the fact that most of the cast are non-professionals, a lot of them portray themselves, which makes their performances realistic.

Despite the realistic atmosphere and performances, one can hardly call the film enjoyable for the reason that it is never much fun to watch a family in struggle.  The story occasionally falls into clichéd territory, as one can expect Tabatha to be fighting with the ranch’s buyer over her loss of control of the ranch.  The film’s cop-out happy ending that includes Tabatha having her way with the ranch and the dolled-up reconciliation between mother and daughter are also a bit hard to take.

Director Beecroft and cinematographer Shelton spent three years living with the family, absorbing their daily life before shooting the film.  Their efforts clearly show on screen.

EAST OF WALL has made its debut at various international film festivals and opens August 15 across Canada, including Toronto at the TIFF Lightbox.

Trailer:

FIXED (USA 2025) ***
Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky

Bull (Adam DeVine) is a two-year-old Staffordshire Bull Terrier Mix (aka Bull is a mutt) who frequently humps anything that piques his interest to vent his perverse instincts.  He is friends with Rocco (Idris Elba), a gruff, proud Boxer, Fetch (Fred Armisn), a wannabe-influencer Dachshund and Lucky (Bobby Moynihan), an eccentric Jack Russell Terrier, all of whom except for Bull have been neutered, which makes them a target of ridicule from the haughty, self-absorbed Borzoi show-dog, Sterling (Beck Bennett). Bull also harbours a crush on his show-dog neighbour, a Borzoi named Honey (Kathryn Hahn), but is hesitant to reveal his true feelings for her.

One day, Bull's owners make a great show of pampering him, feeding him treats and filling the toilet with Kool-Aid. Bull realises that he is due to be neutered the following morning, as Luther (Aaron LaPlante), a Great Dane, had a similar pre-neutering experience.  Bull bemoans his experience and soon decides to leave home in order to save himself from being sterilised. He soon reconsiders when he is accosted by a large clowder of alley cats, but is saved by his friends, who came searching for him when he ran away from his home, and they're all chased out of the cats' territory.

Dog owners should relate more than others to this movie, which highlights the eccentricity of the animal.  FIXED is an adult animated comedy about dogs and particularly about a mutt named Bull about to get fixed.  Being fixed means, for Bull, getting mutilated and his balls cut off, which means that there are plenty of high jinks involved with dirty jokes abound.  The jokes are a hit and miss with fortunately, more hits than misses.  But the humour gets nasty in this R-rated comedy.

For example, what do dogs do at the dog park? (Again, those with dogs know how much that is shown on screen is true, and funny.)

• Dogs are happiest when off-leash
• They smell each other’s butts
• Some have sex
• They poo on each other
• They poop and pee all over the place
• They smell each other’s poop and shit
• Some eat shit

A few segments are not as funny as they want to be.  One example is the pair of Mutt’s balls escaping from him.  In a dream!

The best voice characterisation belongs to Brit Idris Elba.  His British accent works for Rocco, a boxer and close friend of Mutt.  Rocco’s funny, self-conscious and offers silly but meaningly advice to Mutt.  The best laugh-out-loud segment comes from Elba, too.  Rocco’s dialogue is also the most foul.  Foul but always funny1

It was way back in 2018 that Deadline Hollywood reported that writer/director Tartakovsky was set to write and direct the film, with Michelle Murdocca producing it.  Sony Pictures Animation (TRANSYLVANIA 2000) was set to produce it, marking the studio's first R-rated film.  Tartakovsky IS An American animator, screenwriter, film producer, and director, best known as the creator of various animated television series on Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, including Dexter's Laboratory, Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars, among others.

FIXED opens for streaming on Netflix this week, from Wednesday, August 13th.

Trailer: 

NIGHT ALWAYS COMES (USA 2025) **½
Directed by Benjamin Caron

 

NIGHT ALWAYS COMES is a crime drama based on the novel of the same name by Willy Vlautin.

NIGHT ALWAYS COMES benefits from Vanessa Kirby, one of today’s best actresses, taking the title role.  Kirby’s best roles include 2022 THE SON, with her recently seen in FANTASTIC FOUR: FRST STEPS (2025).  Kirby rose to international prominence with her portrayal of Princess Margaret in the Netflix drama series The Crown (2016–2017), for which she won the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress.  For her performance in the film Pieces of a Woman (2020), she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress and received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.  Kirby is the best thing about the movie.  Kirby also co-produced the movie with fellow Brit Benjamin Caron as the director.

The film follows a very desperate Lynette (Kirby) who needs to drum up $25,000 for a down payment on a house in order to prevent eviction.

The film moves along briskly, but the trouble with the film is its predictability.  One can see whether the film is heading in the first 30 minutes, as the fact that everything is going wrong for Lynnette is forcing his lady into crime.  Crime can be committed by good people as well, and the film intends to show this fact.  

Another problem is he film’s casting, Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Lynette’s mother, Doreen.  Leigh looks young enough to be the sister.  Also, Lynette’s elder brother, Kenny (Zack Gottsagen from THE PEANUT BUTTER FALCON), looks young enough to be Lynette’s son.

NIGHT ALWAYS COMES opens for streaming on Netflix Friday, August 15th.  A predictable time-wasting yarn that is barely an entertaining watch.

Trailer: 

 

NOBODY 2 (USA 2025) ***
Directed by Timo Tjahjanto

 

I did not see NOBODY, but one need not know anything about the original film before heading out to see NOBODY 2.  NOBODY cost $16 million to make and grossed close to $60 million.  NOBODY 2 has been granted a larger budget of $25 million to make.  $25 million is, in Hollywood standards, a modest sum, which can be said to be efficiently put together in this action-packed comedy that works as a non-demanding summer flick.

NOBODY 2 sees former henchman government assassin Hutch Mansell aka Nobody (Bob Odenkirk from BREAKING BAD and THE BEAR) taking various violent jobs in order to pay off a massive loan.  The loan is the result of Hutch’s exploits in the first movie.  This results in him being away from his family.  He decides he needs a break to spend time with his wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen), son Brady (Canadian actor Gage Munroe) and daughter, Sammy (Paisley Cadorath).  So it is family vacation time.  Hutch takes family with grandpa, David  (Christopher Lloyd) in tow to Plummrville but discovers his childhood memories amusement city is now run by mobsters led by a vicious girl called Lendina (Sharon Stone).  Hutch has to save the day as well as his family.  The thugs led by the sheriff (Colin Hanks) will not leave Hutch alone.

NOBODY 2 works as the film steals from the good bits of a whole slew of successful box-office hits, the most notable being Harold Ramis’ 1983 Chevy Chase hit NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VACATION.  Griswold brought his family to Walley World with Aunt Edna (Imogen Coca) in tow.  In NOBODY 2, it is Grandpa in tow to Plummerville.  Plummerville, specifically the Wild Bill’s Majestic Midway and Waterpark. Plummerville serves as a fictional small tourist town with a tacky, nostalgia-laden waterpark resort that Hutch fondly remembers from his childhood.  Other nods come from films like HOME ALONE (Hutch and gang set up various booby traps for the bad guys), HIGH NOON (the wife stands behind the husband in a showdown involving the villains), and John Wick films (leave Lendina alone and she will do the same).

A disturbing feature about the film is the acceptable use of violence that is allowed for Hutch to keep his family on vacation.  Hutch gets to lose a finger, though this segment is treated in all good fun.  Lots of bloody, violent gore are also present with weapons like daggers and machetes, chopping off limbs and thrusting into various assorted bodies of the villains.

NOBODY 2 still comes across as good clean (or good unclean) fun, all taken with large pinches of salt.  The trailer shows many of the film’s good parts, but there are many, many Moreno shown in the trailer to keep the action comedy still fresh.

Director Timo Tjahjanto is a young 44-year-old Indonesian director specializing in horror and action films.  Definitely a talent to watch, judging for the efficient entertainment derived from NOBODY 2.

NOBODY 2 , the only big movie opening this week, opens in theatres August 15th.

Trailer: 

Details

Written by: Gilbert Seah

Parent Category: Articles

Category: Movie Reviews

Published: 25 July 2025

FILM REVIEWS:

 

DELEGATION (Israel/Germany/Poland 2023) **
Directed by Asaf Saban

 

A delegation is defined as a set of people chosen or elected to represent a larger group.  The delegation in the film DELEGATION refers to a class group visiting holocaust sites in Poland. Three Israeli high school friends take part in a class trip visiting Holocaust sites in Poland – the last time together before two of the boys enter the army.  During the trip, shy boy Frisch, aspiring artist Nitzan and class heartthrob Ido deal with issues of love, friendship, and politics against the backdrop of concentration camps and memorial sites. This journey is supposed to change them forever.

The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoa, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were committed primarily through mass shootings across Eastern Europe and poison gas chambers in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland. The film claims to be a coming-of-age tour about boys discovering their past.

The film is, however, despite good intentions, boring, tedious, while not offering any new insight into the holocaust cause.  Audiences around the world already sympathize with the cause and need not watch the shock boys goof around and flirt with the opposite sex and then sit down to discuss their Jewish past. Audiences are forced to endure the teens’ romantic flings and then have to listen to them talk about how they felt about the holocaust.  The delegation also includes an older survivor of the holocaust who talks about his experiences in the camp.

Instead of a thoughtful and compelling film, DELEGATION fans to avoid all the cliches while forcing the audience to sit through a very tiresome road trip.  The film emphasizes the fact that teenagers can be terribly annoying and full of themselves.

DELEGATION opens on digital August 1st.

Trailer: 

HARLEY FLANAGAN WIRED FOR CHAOS (USA 2024) ***
Directed by Rex Miller

 

The film begins with a man jogging close to the woods with a guitar strung around his back.  He says that he has been angry for the past 50 years, and he says that that is not the man he wants to be.  He is next shown exercising - the guy is quite fit despite his stocky build.  He goes on to say that only death is certain and everything else, optional.

Who is this man?   He is Harley Flanagan.  I have not heard of the man, not being in the funk rock scene.   

Harley Francis Flanagan (born March 8, 1967) is an American musician. Harley Flanagan founded the hardcore punk band the Cro-Mags. He is currently the bassist, vocalist, and sole remaining founding member of the band.  Flanagan began his musical career at age 11 in 1978, drumming for the New York punk band the Stimulators alongside his aunt Denise Mercedes. By the early 1980s, he was a prominent figure in the developing New York hardcore, helping to found the Cro-Mags in 1981 and Murphy's Law in 1982.

Founder of the pioneering band Cro-Mags, Harley Flanagan is a punk rock/hardcore legend who’s defied the odds – along with neglect, sexual abuse, drugs, violence, and PTSD -- and lived to tell the tale. The feature-length documentary, HARLEY FLANAGAN: WIRED FOR CHAOS, dives headfirst into the wild life and times of this larger-than-life icon and is a no-holds-barred ride that isn’t just about the music; it’s about a man forged in fire who’s lived to tell the tale. 

  Raised by a Warhol Factory “it” girl, Harley was thrown into the Lower East Side’s underground scene in the ’70s. Left to fend for himself, by his teens, he was squatting in Alphabet City, stealing food, dodging gangs, and living in a world that he describes as “some serious Lord of the Flies shit.” But, as his life descended into a hellish day-to-day, he was simultaneously becoming a punk rock legend: at the age of 11, he was drumming at CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City with his aunt’s band, the Stimulators. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll weren’t a choice – they were survival.  But Harley was a fighter. Whether on stage, in the streets, or the Jiu-Jitsu gym with Renzo Gracie, he never backed down. As the ferocious frontman of the Cro-Mags, he pushed NYC Hardcore into uncharted territory. But violence, addiction and a traumatic past left deep scars. The streets made him, but they also nearly destroyed him.

The film also includes interviews with: Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Henry Rollins ( Black Flag, Henry Rollins Band), Ice T, Ian Mackaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi, Dischord Records), Keith Morris (Black Flag, Circle Jerks, OFF), Michael Imperioli, Lucy Sante (Author), Anthony Bourdain, Matt Serra (MMA, BJJ, UFC World Champion), Renzo Gracie ( BJJ World Champion) among others.

Harley Flanagan has had a tough and intriguing life, creating lots of trouble as well as ink hits.  A doc is often as interesting as its subject, and the saying is true here.   The doc bears Flanagan's life, warts and all, together with his philosophy of life, distorted, and whether one wants to accept it at all.

Harley Flanagan: Wired for Chaos is a 2024 American documentary film that follows the story of Harley Flanagan, directed and produced by Rex Miller.  The film premiered at the Doc NYC on November 14, 2024,  and will be available online for a One-Week Run Beginning August 8th.

Trailer: 

 

AN HONEST LIFE (Ett ärligt liv) (Sweden 2025) ***
Directed by Mikael Marcimain

 

When a film is entitled AN HONEST LIFE, one can be sure that dishonesty is the main subject.

This new Swedish Netflix film covers several points of interest popular among film audiences.  One it is the fickle story of fate.  Simon (Simon Loof) is about to study law as he believes that he cannot be a success as a writer, only to learn that what he thought was an established life would all be about to change, and naturally, in ways not only never expected but for the worse.  When the film starts, he witnesses an angry riot clash with the police before checking in at his new lodging while studying at the prestigious Lund University.   One also loves a mystery thriller in which a protagonist is an underdog, who exposes the evils of the wealthy while wishing to be one, by hook or by crook.

Lund University is a public research university in Sweden and one of Northern Europe's oldest universities.  According to the film, the university is well-renowned for its law studies.  The university is located in the city of Lund in the Swedish province of Scania. The university was officially founded in 1666 on the location of the old ‘studium generale’ next to Lund Cathedral.

Simon's law school dreams fade as he meets Max (Nora Rios) during a protest.  For one, Simon gets disillusioned pretty fast.  Simon was always at the top of his class, but in this law school, every undergraduate is top of his or her class.  Max initially saves him from being beaten by a riot cop.  Their paths cross again.  Her anarchist lifestyle of excess and deception entraps him before he can recognize the destructive path he is on.

Simon boards at a residence with Viktor and Ludwig, who represent the wealthiest 1%.  “They cannot help it if they are the top 1%,” is Simon’s answer when asked by Max why he stays with them.  This is Simon’s story, as he toys between playing with fire by associating with Max.   Max takes him in to meet her commune led by an anarchist professor named Charles, pretty much like Oliver taken into a children's gang of pickpockets by the Artful Dodger in OLIVER TWIST.

Based on the novel by Joakim Zander with a screenplay by Linn Gottfridsson, the film, a coming-of-age fable, benefits from a Nordic touch in theme and look.  The film was shot in contrasting areas from the oldest University in Sweden to the cheap dance bars in Lund, while interrogating themes of rebellion, social class, betrayal, and ideological seduction.

AN HONEST LIFE op[ens for streaming on Netflix this week.

Trailer: 

 

 

MY OXFORD YEAR (USA 2025) ***
Directed by Ian Morris

 

 

Two films open for streaming on Netflix this week that share similar themes. Both involve romance at a prestigious university, one at Lund and one at Oxford.  Both involve plans gone awry.  Just as one thinks life is planned with study at the university, fate proves otherwise. MY OXFORD YEAR has a female premise and the other, AN HONEST LIFE, features a male.  Both films are not half bad, but stress different genes within a romantic setting.

The film is adapted from Julia Whelan’s bestselling novel (itself based on an original screenplay),.  It explores themes of love, loss, timing, and living deliberately and follows Anna De La Vega (Sofia Carson), a driven American student who receives a scholarship to study at the University of Oxford. Her academic and political ambitions are rock‑solid—until she meets Jamie Davenport (Corey Mylchreest), a charismatic and privileged British poet who also happens to become her tutor. 

The film, shot in Oxford, with the academic buildings that make the city deliver a more respectable romance, with a light comedic rather than dramatic touch, though one can complain fit bing a bit slow in development.  Those familiar with Oxford, closer to London than Cambridge) will recognize local university landmarks like Magdalen College, Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, Sheldonian Theatre, and Windsor Castle.

The film is directed by Iain Morris, responsible for the hit British series THE INBETWEENERS, a series that never made it to Canada, though I did manage to watch a few..  The inbetweeners are the kids in school who are not jocks or swots.  They fall in between.

MY OXFORD YEAR opens for streaming on August 1st.

Trailer: 

 

Details

Written by: Gilbert Seah

Parent Category: Articles

Category: Movie Reviews

Published: 25 July 2025

A real treat for movie fans this week.  The best film of the year, also the scarriest WEAPONS open.  Also opening are the excellent L'HISTOIRE DE SOULEYMANE and FREAKIER FRIDAY.

 

FILM REVIEWS:

ANIMALE (France/Belgium/Saudi Arabia 2024) ***
Directed by Emma Benestan

 

In the Camargue region of the South of France, there remains an infamous, long-standing tradition of bullfighting. Local youths participate in the elegant yet dangerous challenge, practicing a modernized version of the sport that seeks not to kill the animals but rather to showcase agility and dominance. Among them is Nejma, an intrepid twenty-two-year-old with dreams of one day winning the annual competition. The only woman working on the cattle ranch, she trains tirelessly to prove herself equal among the men, both in and outside of the arena. The ranchers share a deep respect for the bulls, though when a loose bull threatens the community of riders and young men begin turning up dead, a hunt to find and kill the creature begins. Nejma fears for the bull, beginning a dark, mysterious transformation of her own. The sophomore feature of French filmmaker Emma Benestan,  ANIMALE is “a brutal disorienting horror fable burning with feminine anger.

The bullfighting scenes in the rink are exciting and marvellous to watch.  It must not only be dangerous for the actors but also for the camera crew to get such candid shots as well as close-ups at the bus charging at the bull experts as well as they dodging the bull.  The bull carries two white tassels and if a tassel is removed, there is a huge prize money involved.  But the bull can also be injured as in one scene where Thunder (the name of the bull)is hurt and has to br brought back to the pen.  

The film is shot in the Southern French coastal region, the Camargue, which is where the director grew up and was raised. The course camarguaise, the form of bull running seen in the film, originates from there and is practised in many villages.  It is different from what the world knows as the other type of bullfighting, known as the corrida, in which the bull is killed.

The director is female and stresses the male-oriented nature of the sport seen on the screen.

The characterization of Nejma comes with a few problems.  The story obviously should’ve had the audience rooting for her, for her female stance and the love of the bulls.  But as she acts crazy, the audience does not end up rooting for a crazy person, and reacts opposite to how the story should feel.

The rogue bull attacking humans and the demand of the public to shut down the shows and restaurants feels something right about Steven Spielberg’s 1975 JAWS.  But the audience is on the other side of JAWS; the audience wants the shows and restaurants opened, despite the rogue bull having to be found and killed.  This is one of the problems of the film - the conflicted emotions of how the audience should feel and react.

The story plays with myth, horror and reality.  The transformation of a human into an animal is the type seen before in werewolf films and in CAT PEOPLE.  The credibility does not always work as the film plays more in reality than in mythical mystery.

ANIMALE is available Digital/DOD August 8th.

Trailer: 

FREAKIER FRIDAY (USA 2025) ***½

Directed by Nisha Ganatra

 

There is a bit of history behind the latest Disney comedy, FREAKIER FRIDAY, that is released this weekend.  The franchise began with FREAKY FRIDAY, made in 1975, directed by Gary Nelson with a young Jodie Foster swapping bodies with Barbara Harris, best known for her role as the female medium in Alfred Hitchcock’s comedy FAMILY PLOT.  This was followed by the Mark Waters 2003 remake with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis.  This latest 2025 version, it should be noted, is a freakier version and not a remake, and it involves two pairs of body swapping.

In the 2003 film, Lohan was the daughter and Curtis the mother, swapping bodies.  Now, Curtis is the grandmother, Tess Coleman and Lohan the single mother, Anna of a precocious surfer daughter, Harper played by Julia Bitters, last seen in ONCE U[ON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD.  In FREAKIER FRIDAY, in a mere 10 minutes of screen time, Anna falls in love with a Brit from London, Eric (gorgeous hunk, Manny Jacinto), whose daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons) is Harper’s classmate and lab partner in school.

The body swaps involve Tess and Lily swapping bodies and Anna and Harper swapping bodies.  Hard to remember?  Well, it is really confusing when the body swaps take place at the 30-minute mark of the movie.  But the writing is good and the actors are totally committed to the project and keep hammering at the story, so everything works well eventually and the audience soon knows who is who and who has swapped bodies with whom.  It is a tough risk to have two pairs of body swapping, as the script has to be kept clear and non-confusing.  Thankfully, it works.

The film is totally geared forth a female audience.   The director and the four body swaps are all female.  Then males Ryan (Mark Hammon), Jake (Chad Michael Murray), and Eric (Jacinto) are all feasts for the female eyes.  The film also includes a rip-roaring concert performance performed partly by Lohan that should titillate female fans of pop and rock music.

Lohan and Curtis carry the film well, especially Curtis, who steals the show.  Lohan plays the ‘straight’ role and allows Curtis to get the laughs.  Curtis should win the Oscar for her performance in this film rather than in the overrated EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE.

The film is directed by veteran comedy Canadian-American director Nisha Ganatra, of Indian descent. She wrote, directed, and produced the independent comedy drama Chutney Popcorn (1999) and later directed the independent film Cosmopolitan (2003) and the romantic-comedy Cake (2005).   Her Indian descent can be observed in the film with several minor character roles played by her fellow Indians.

It should be remembered that FREAKIER RIDAY is a teen female movie at heart, and given what it should be, the film hits well at its target audience, which is largely non-Marvel superhero fans.  FREAKIER FRIDAY is solid comedy and the hard work put in by the cast and crew clearly shows in the film and works well.

FREAKIER FRIDAY opens in theatres August 8th.

Trailer: 

HARLEY FLANAGAN WIRED FOR CHAOS (USA 2024) ***
Directed by Rex Miller

 

The film begins with a man jogging close to the woods with a guitar strung around his back.  He says that he has been angry for the past 50 years, and that is not the man he wants to be.  He is next shown exercising - the guy is quite fit despite his stocky build.  He goes on to say that only death is certain and everything else is optional.

Who is this man?   He is Harley Flanagan.  I have not heard of the man, not being in the punk rock scene.   

Harley Francis Flanagan (born March 8, 1967) is an American musician. Harley Flanagan founded the hardcore punk band the Cro-Mags. He is currently the bassist, vocalist, and sole remaining founding member of the band.  Flanagan began his musical career at age 11 in 1978, drumming for the New York punk band the Stimulators alongside his aunt Denise Mercedes. By the early 1980s, he was a prominent figure in the developing New York hardcore, helping to found the Cro-Mags in 1981 and Murphy's Law in 1982.

Founder of the pioneering band Cro-Mags, Harley Flanagan is a punk rock/hardcore legend who’s defied the odds – along with neglect, sexual abuse, drugs, violence, and PTSD -- and lived to tell the tale. The feature-length documentary, HARLEY FLANAGAN: WIRED FOR CHAOS, dives headfirst into the wild life and times of this larger-than-life icon and is a no-holds-barred ride that isn’t just about the music; it’s about a man forged in fire who’s lived to tell the tale. 

  Raised by a Warhol Factory “it” girl, Harley was thrown into the Lower East Side’s underground scene in the ’70s. Left to fend for himself, by his teens, he was squatting in Alphabet City, stealing food, dodging gangs, and living in a world that he describes as “some serious Lord of the Flies shit.” But, as his life descended into a hellish day-to-day, he was simultaneously becoming a punk rock legend: at the age of 11, he was drumming at CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City with his aunt’s band, the Stimulators. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll weren’t a choice – they were survival.  But Harley was a fighter. Whether on stage, in the streets, or in the Jiu-Jitsu gym with Renzo Gracie, he never backed down. As the ferocious frontman of the Cro-Mags, he pushed NYC Hardcore into uncharted territory. But violence, addiction and a traumatic past left deep scars. The streets made him, but they also nearly destroyed him.

The film also includes interviews with: Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Henry Rollins ( Black Flag, Henry Rollins Band), Ice T, Ian Mackaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi, Dischord Records), Keith Morris (Black Flag, Circle Jerks, OFF), Michael Imperioli, Lucy Sante (Author), Anthony Bourdain, Matt Serra (MMA, BJJ, UFC World Champion), Renzo Gracie ( BJJ World Champion) among others.

Harley Flanagan has had a tough and totally intriguing life, creating lots of trouble as well as punk hits.  A doc is often as interesting as its subject, and the saying is true here.

Harley Flanagan: Wired for Chaos is a 2024 American documentary film that follows the story of Harley Flanagan, directed and produced by Rex Miller.  The film premiered at the Doc NYC on November 14, 2024,  and will be available online for a One-Week Run Beginning August 8th.

 Trailer: 

RUSSIANS AT WAR (Canada/France 2024) ***
Directed by Anastasia Trofimova

 

Russian Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova’s gripping first-person documentary takes the audience beyond the headlines to join Russian soldiers, actually mainly medics, as they place themselves in a battle for reasons that become only more obscure with each gruelling day, each confusing command, each gut-wrenching casualty.  On a more personal note, the film follows a Ukrainian named Ilya, who is about to leave his family and go to war for Russia. Trofimova, though lacking permission, joins Ilya and his supply unit as they make their harrowing journey to the front line. Many soldiers fighting alongside Ilya are very young. Some believe they’re going to vanquish Ukrainian Naziism.  If one wants answers to the reason for the fighting, the film provides none.  Rather, the film emphasizes the futility of war.  In a war, no one wins.  And in the doc, all the soldiers want to go home.  Unfortunately, some don’t, and others return home wounded.  It is still an emotional doc, with one audience screaming during the premiere screening at the Toronto International Film Festival last year that the film is all propaganda.  Whether it is or not, it is up to the individual to decide, as the director takes no sides.  The film was pulled out of TIFF following the incident, but the film finally opens directly to audiences on August 12.

Trailer: 

SOULEYMANE’S STORY (L’HISTOIRE DE SOULEYMANE ) (France 2024) ****
Directed by Boris Lojkine

 

SOULEYMANE’S STORY  follows Souleymane, a recent Guinean immigrant, through the streets of Paris as he prepares for his asylum application interview while working for a meal delivery service on his e-bike.

Racing through the streets of Paris, making food deliveries on his bicycle, Guinean immigrant Souleymane (Abou Sangare) is struggling to stay afloat.  In two days, he has to report for an asylum application interview, where he must plead his case to an immigration officer (Nina Meurisse) who will determine his future in France.  As he rides, he repeats his story. But Souleymane is not ready.

At times, the film feels like an updated modern version of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, as Souleymane relies 100% on his e-bike to survive.  The audience winces at the point when the bike might be stolen. However, the director steers away from this cliché of the bike being stolen, instead having Souleymane encounter a bike accident.  But the bike still works after a few adjustments anyway.

The film plays like Murphy's Law taking effect on the poor protagonist, Souleymane.  Everything seems to be going wrong for him.  His deliveries are difficult, and if the customers are not giving him a hard time (like the lady with the complaint of the crushed bag) or the restaurateurs (Souleymane is told to wait for his turn, thus missing other deliveries).  He encounters an accident on his bike.  His delivery account gets cancelled due to complaints.  He keeps almost missing his last bus back to his lodging, while actually missing one.  He is harassed by the police.   He has trouble with renting his bike and setting up his delivery account.  To add fuel to the fire, there is trouble back home.  His mother is still ill and not improving.  His girlfriend, who still loves him, is about to give up on him.   The question on the audience’s mind is whether anything else can get worse?  And this is one flaw of the film, as it appears that the film attempts to manipulate the audience too much to feel the trials and tribulations of poor Souleymane.  The flaw is lightened with a few acts of kindness in the story. A restaurateur gives Souleymane a bonbon.  It is a small but kind and effective measure.  Souleymane’s girlfriend ends up being sympathetic.

The themes revolve around the exploitation of the 'sans papiers' (without papers) often by fellow Africans - one a fellow immigrant from northern Guinea who lazily coaches asylum applicants to recite false stories of political persecution at their hearings in return for payment, and another who lends Souleymane a food delivery account but then takes half of his earnings every week. The film largely avoids depictions of racism, but equally, there are few acts of kindness in the film.

The cameraman follows the actor on his e-bike as the filming takes place in and around Paris, demonstrating the urgency and desperation of Souleymane’s situation.
The cast is nothing short of excellent, as can be observed in the last 10  minutes of the film’s climax and conclusion of the film.   Abou Sangaré is phenomenal as Souleymane and is

Nina Meurisse as the OFPRA agent.   Camerawork and editing deserve credit for the last 10 minutes of the film.

The film opens in theatres on August 8th. The film is also the winner of the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize and Un Certain Regard Best Actor Prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

Trailer: 

WEAPONS (USA 2025) ***** TOP 10

Directed by Zach Cregger

 

As both the trailer and the film’s introduction go, in the voice of a boy, a mystery has occurred in his town, a mystery that the police have never quite solved and are covering up.  It all happened one night, when 17 children—all but one child from Justine Gandy's (Julia Garner) classroom—simultaneously woke up and ran off into the night. Justine and the rest of the community are left questioning who or what is behind the children's disappearance.

This is a wild premise, and one wonders if the solution to the mystery delivered at the film’s conclusion would be able to match the premise.  Fortunately, it does, in a very weird and unexpected way.  WEAPONS, the reason the film is so-called, is explained in the middle of the film is definitely the most fucked up film of the year, which is arguable the best horror film, if not the best film of the year.  It is a brilliant concoction of horror, mystery, action, drama, filled with raw emotions of anger and desperation, doused with a splatter of wicked black humour, a film that parodies itself as well.  For example, director Cregger knows that his film is a fucked up film, so it is even funnier when a character screams the words: “What the fuck???

The film unfolds in chapters, with each chapter named after one of the story’s characters.  The first chapter is called Justine, followed by Archer, and finally Alex, the last and longest part that explains all the happenings, six chapters in all.  Each chapter unfolds as it is named for the character’s contribution to the story, rather than their points of view.    As would be expected, many segments overlap, which is a pleasure in a way, as the audience sees certain explanations provided then.

As a horror movie, there are enough blood and gore as well as jump scares.  I am not a fan of cheap jump scares, but director Cregger does wonders with his jump scares.  In fact, one jump scare is the funniest part of the movie, which had the whole cinema bursting in laughter.  As far as blood and gore, there are drug needles plunged onto a face, tearing of body insides and head bashings.  Director Cregger also pokes fun at the slasher genre with an undead creature rising up half a dozen times to jump at Archer, refusing to stay dead.

Amy Madigan is simply over-the-top as a cozy Aunt Gladys while Josh Brolin plays the obsessed father Archer who would do anything to find his disappeared son, including helping those he first thinks are irresponsible for the disappearance.  Other notable performances include Garner as Justine, Benedict Wong as Marcus the gay school principal and young Cary Christopher as Alex, the only non-disappearing boy in Justine’s class.

As far as predictability goes, no one can guess what will happen next in the story.  This is also what makes the film so intriguing.  Director Cregger keeps the surprises and shocks coming,

WEAPONS is aptly written and directed by BARBARIAN’s Zach Creger for a modest $38 million.  A definite must-see, WEAPONS opens in theatres this week, August 8th.

Trailer: 

STOLEN: HEIST OF THE CENTURY (UK 2025) ***

Directed  by Mark Lewis

 

STOELN: HEIST OF THE CENTURY is based on the famous 2003 diamond robbery that took place in the diamond capital of the world, Antwerp.  The doc is based on the book “Flawless” by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell.

There were no fingerprints on the sensors, and duct tape on other sensors.  “We were very impressed.  The robbery was flawlessly executed,” says a forensic officer investigator in the documentary.

The doc moves along with quick efficiency, very much like a planned robbery would be executed, making the doc more exciting and pressing in its delivery.  The doc is told primarily from the investigators’ points of view, spoken in accented English, so that the audience has the feel of expert knowledge being delivered in the film.  Also, the title of the film ‘The heist of the century’ emphasizes the enormity of the subject.

The magic question that the film toys with is the identity of the thief or thieves, and how the heist was carried out.  The doc satisfies.

STOLEN: HEIST OF THE CENTURY opens for streaming on Netflix Friday, August 8th.