By Madeleine Wall The only directorial debut to make it into this year’s official Cannes competition, Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s Banel & Adama is a clash of love and tradition in rural Senegal. At 18, Banel (Khady Mane) was widowed from Adama’s (Mamadou Diallo) brother, and as per tradition, he married her in his sibling’s place. This…

By Madeleine Wall Documentary filmmakers James Burns and Stevie Salas, who previously worked together on The Water Walker (2020), have again turned their camera to an Indigenous environmental activist. Serving as both audience and director proxies, Haudenosaunee activist Layla Staats is the structuring force of Boil Alert; her hero’s journey is to learn about the…

By Madeleine Wall Under the neon sign, middle-aged Helen (Louise Brealey) begins her night shift at the local chicken factory. Her days are all the same, and though she takes comfort in her friends and coworkers, she is unable to leave her dreary life. She lives with her separated husband Greg, who has a much…

By Madeleine Wall With its double epigraph from Simone de Beauvoir and Diablo Cody, Molly McGlynn’s Fitting In wears its heart, and its influences, on its sleeve. As the new girl in town (somewhere in New Jersey), teenage Lindy (Maddie Ziegler) is navigating a new school, her nascent dating life, and her barely-holding-it-together single mother…

This year, the ever-industrious Saïd Ben Saïd has commissioned Catherine Breillat—for the 75-year-old director’s first film since 2013’s autobiographical Abus de faiblesse—not to specifically reimagine the story of Phaedra à la her other literary adaptations, but rather to remake May el-Toukhy’s 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts, in which a successful lawyer has an affair with her adolescent stepson.

In Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe, director Robert McCallum presents a profile of Coombs, his family, and the changing face of Canadian media; he outlines the life and afterlife of what is clearly more than just a TV show. 

By Madeleine Wall The young and beautiful Jagna (Kamila Urzedowska) is ripe for marriage, and every man in the village has eyes for her. Unfortunately, Jagna is only interested in the married Antek (Robert Gulaczyk), and their star-crossed romance is the kindling to Jagna’s demise. The second hand painted feature animated film by  DK and…

By Madeleine Wall A docu-fiction hybrid scripted entirely in Inuktituk, Tautuktavuk is the most recent Isuma Collective production, another stand-out in their radical practice of filmmaking. Directors Carol Kunnuk and Lucy Tulugarjuk, who are real-life cousins, play sisters Uyarak (Tulugarjuk) and Saqpinak (Kunnuk). Separated by land and lockdown, these women must cross real and virtual…

By Madeleine Wall On her trip home to the northern village of Sápmi, Lena’s (Risten Anine Kvernmo Gaup) bus nearly hits a deer. This isn’t an unusual occurrence for the Sami community, whose relationship with reindeer is fundamental to their culture, but Lena notices the reindeer’s herder, Mahtte (Nils Ailu Kemi), for the first time.…

By Madeleine Wall Splattered over the news and the internet, Poland’s migrant crisis has been making headlines for years. In response, aggressive security measures have been installed, including building a 186-kilometer steel and barbed wire wall along the Belarus border to keep them out. Navigating more than one boundary, Kasia Smutniak’s documentary Walls is a…

By Madeleine Wall Set in 1920s Littlehampton, England, Thea Sharrock’s Wicked Little Letters is a winking, ahistorical comedy. The upright and morally superior Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) has been receiving expletive laden poison pen letters. Living under the thumb of her father Edward (Timothy Spall) each one shakes the repressed household to their core. They…

By Madeleine Wall “What are you doing here?” Marian Malin (Brigitte Hobmeier) is asked by the locals, her husband, and herself. Fleeing Vienna, the prodigal child has returned to her grandparents’ farm seeking isolation—but she’s not welcome here, not because she’s a stranger, but rather because she knows too much. Unraveling as a slow-burn mystery,…

By Madeleine Wall For Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), the mastermind behind Hawthorne, a prestigious farm to table restaurant located on an isolated island, revenge is a dish best served in multiple courses. He’s invited a select dozen to his restaurant, known for its inventive approach to food, molecular gastronomy at its finest, for a perfectly…

By Madeleine Wall Nazare, Portugal boasts of having the largest waves in the world. Averaging around 50 feet in height, they often end up going up to 80, with 100 as the highest ever recorded. Crowds gather along the shoreline to see these massive behemoths rise and fall, and often catch sight of small figures,…

By Madeleine Wall It’s not always a bad thing if a house is haunted. Over a long hot summer in the late ‘80s in non-specified rural Canada, Nicole (Maddy Martin) and Veronica (Jenna Warren) take over the abandoned house that used to belong to Nicole’s family. Both are keen to get away from their own…

By Madeline Wall After having to sell his successful restaurant, The Coyote, ten years ago, chef Camilo (Jorge Martinez Colorado) lives a quiet, solitary life in Montreal. The meals he cooks for his friends are beautiful, but rather than working in a kitchen, he spends his evenings as a janitor. He is trying to return…

By Madeleine Wall  Stop me if you’ve heard this one before—a woman walks into a bar at the end of the world. The woman, simply known as She (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) settles down into a Northern Ontario dive bar for the evening, gradually noticing the young man He (Braeden Clarke) at the jukebox. As the weather…

By Madeleine Wall Despite having arrived in Canada five years ago from Syria, Rashid (Hussam Douhna) and his wife Fahra (Amani Ibrahim) have not entirely settled in. Whatever promises a country founded in Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water gave them, they wake up without working hot water. Thorncliffe Park, their home, is a…

By Madeleine Wall Winner of this year’s Caméra d’Or at Cannes, Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s Murina is a competent but slight combo of thriller and coming-of-age film basking in the sun of the Adriatic sea. Armed with a speargun and clad in a white bathing suit, 16-year-old Julija (Gracija Filipovic) cuts a striking figure in the…

By Madeleine Wall It is easy to be certain in the daylight. For gendarmerie sergeant Masoud (Navid Pourfaraj), maintaining order in the small Kurdish village of Zalava is a balancing act between accommodating the superstitions of the villagers and the rapidly changing modern world. These beliefs are foundational to the villagers, part of their genetics,…

By Madeleine Wall In a large, gloomy house somewhere in Europe, sometime after a war, Albert (a brittle Paul Hilton) lives in isolation with his charge, ten-year-old Mia (Romane Hemelaers). Mia does not speak, and Albert’s main communication with the outside world is from sporadic telephone calls, asking about the state of his ward. Mia…

By Madeleine Wall After 2019’s summer of scammers, from the fall of Elizabeth Holmes to the false starts of Caroline Calloway, the cold industrial winter of Hamilton feels particularly harsh. The glossy cautionary fables of the warmer months are long gone, and instead we have something on a smaller scale, a tale of the banality…

By Madeleine Wall Hiding from the world behind solitary, mindless work, Mehmet (Ihsan Önal) serves as the superintendent of an anonymous apartment complex. The residents mainly keep to themselves, but as Mehmet settles in for a day where the only thing of note on the agenda is the installation of a new antenna, things rapidly…

By Madeleine Wall It is much harder to make a film like a fairy tale than one expects. When we look back at half- remembered stories from our childhood, they seem simple; we often forget the horrors and complexities that come from sparse storytelling. Minos Nikolakakis’ Entwined takes the form of such a tale, but…

By Madeleine Wall The only static aspect  of Hind Meddeb’s documentary Paris Stalingrad is the area from which the film takes its name. Beginning with this eponymous space, Meddeb expands to the treatment of the refugees who must stay there, focusing as much on the newcomers  as the Parisians and their varying levels of aid.…

By Madeleine Wall It is inevitable that any reunion will always be more than the sum of its parts. Tamar Shavgulidze‘s Comets is a slight drama where two childhood friends, Irina (Nino Kasradze) and Nana (Ketevan Gegeshidze), have their own Janus-faced meeting. The film begins in the domestic realm of Nana, who spends a morning…

By Madeleine Wall Taking place during a barren Hamilton winter, Calvin Thomas and Yonah Lewis’ White Lie is as intimate as it is claustrophobic. Katie (Kacey Rohl) is a cancer poster child, a star of local fundraisers and surrounded by supporters. But Katie begins her day shaving her head, her chemo appointments involve getting empty…

By Madeleine Wall Signs of progress involve mobility, whether in the form of a shorter commute, or simply the ability to go farther, faster. As a city grows, its populations move from one point to another, and some spaces only exist as transitory places. Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky’s Interchange focuses on the spaces…

By Madeleine Wall Not unlike its South-shall-rise-again predecessor from 90 years ago, Emma Tammi’s The Wind pits woman against landscape, and when confronted with what little remains of Western civilization, things begin to unravel. Tough to the point of being worn down, Elizabeth Macklin (Caitlin Gerard) first appears in the doorway of her home, covered…

By Madeleine Wall Adrift in a South Korea where professional advancement appears to be the only option, lonely, 31-year-old Ja-young (Moon Choi) has a chance encounter one evening with the beautiful and enigmatic runner Hyun-joo (Ahn Ji-hye), who inspires Ja-young to ditch the civil service exam she’s spent years studying for and move out. But…

By Madeleine Wall Taking place over the four long years after the Arab Spring, Naziha Arebi’s documentary Freedom Fields tracks the changes, and the lack thereof, after revolutionary fervour calms down. The film focuses on a group of young women attempting to become Libya’s first all-female soccer team and who, despite their best intentions, end…

By Madeleine Wall Loosely based upon a Denis Diderot story, Emmanuel Mouret’s Mademoiselle de Joncquières is a vengeance tale, dry and brightly lit to the point of wash-out. Taking place predominantly in estates in the French countryside, this period piece is about the repressed fury of a woman scorned, and the double standards of the…

By Madeleine Wall The amount of skill that goes into taking care of someone is on full display in Phoenix, which begins with its protagonist, 13-year-old Jill (Ylva Thedin Bjørkaas), entering the apartment she shares with her family. Having taken responsibility for the well-being of her depressed and alcoholic mother Astrid (Maria Bonnevie) and her…

By Madeleine Wall As each era’s monster reflects its larger cultural identity, the turn to the eco-zombie, in both last year’s The Girl With All the Gifts and now in Carolina Hellsgård’s ENDZEIT – EVER AFTER, presents us with an undead horror directly responding to humanity’s transgressions against nature. After this particular zombie plague, only…

By Madeleine Wall Compiled from archival footage of Maria Callas’ stage performances, interviews with the press, Super 8 home movies and the occasional letter, Maria by Callas attempts to create a portrait of a woman using as many angles as possible. Tom Volf’s film is more interested in Callas’ personal life than the professional career…