As a hallmark of the Xbox 360 era, “Gears of War” was a franchise that really cemented the nitty gritty third-person cover shooter genre into the cultural video game zeitgeist. The muted earth tones of the first three games set the stage for a bloody and visceral world filled with war and monsters. When the

It’s funny, looking back on 2026, that we’ll have gotten two televisual glimpses into the mind of the late, great chef and food writer Anthony Bourdain. One, Matt Johnson’s wry, tender biopic “Tony,” gives us a glimpse of the man’s larval form, the insecure, manipulative boy before he became the Tony we all knew and

Created by George Kay, HBO’s new series “War” follows tech billionaire Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) and his movie-star wife, Carla Duval (Sienna Miller), whose marriage is colder than the dreary London weather. When we first meet him, he sleeps with a young woman who is clearly not his wife, but the morning after their tryst,

In 1966, photographer Barry Lategan scheduled a test shoot: a model’s first-ever photo shoot, meant to market her to other photographers and brands. That model was 15-year-old Leslie Hornby, a slim, boyish girl with a pixie cut and penciled lashes, and those photos became some of the most recognizable fashion portraits ever taken.  Deemed “The

The 51st Toronto International Film Festival has wrapped, the culmination of eleven days showcasing hundreds of films, with thousands of patrons experiencing some of the best (and worst) of world cinema in 2026. A half million people came down to King Street on the opening weekend as part of the festival’s activation, taking in food

There’s an amazing bit of trivia about how there are so many possible shuffles of a deck of cards that it’s almost certain that every single one ever shuffled has been as distinct as a snowflake. I thought of this when considering the panoply of meet-cutes in cinema history: There’s always a new one for

The Midnight Madness section at TIFF has a reputation for its histrionics and crowd-pleasing thrills, but it’s also a programming block that stealthily introduces delightful eccentricities off the beaten path. I love projects like “River,” “The Furious,” and “The Shadow Strays,” but they don’t even scratch the surface of the kind of weird that has

In its 51st edition, the Toronto International Film Festival’s Special Presentation category comprises stories of complex parents, recentering their identity as individuals. Interestingly, the focus on selfhood is overshadowed by a much broader conflict. Of these movies, it’s most peculiar how it explores motherhood versus fatherhood, emotionally and morally.  Set in rural, suspiciously tranquil Mexico,

No one does romance like the “Outlander” franchise. Part of the reason is that it’s a rare kind of television that isn’t embarrassed to be about romance, unabashedly centering love, affection, and longing as the story’s key narrative and emotional drivers. In this fictional world, the relationships at its center matter just as much—honestly, often