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

Historical fiction has been a subgenre of filmmaking for generations, but it’s fascinating to consider how these journeys to the past are shaped by the present in which they are made. The war in Gaza and the rise of both Fascism and Anti-Semitism around the world have led to what feels like more stories set

This year’s Centerpiece and Special Presentations section of the Toronto International Film Festival featured a striking postwar drama from Danish-Egyptian director May el-Toukhy, a tender narrative debut from documentarian Kim Bartley, and the follow-up film from last year’s breakout star Chase Infiniti.  Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner “Woman Unknown,” the latest from writer-director May

I have left the mountainous confines of Telluride and am currently winding down mountainous roads to Grand Junction. But I am also unspooling much of what I saw at a festival that included far more laughs than I anticipated. Some of those zingers are in two of these films, though one is decidedly not (you’ll

Maya Annik Bedward’s incisive documentary “Black Zombie” isn’t merely a look back at the cinematic origins of the supernatural re-animated monster. It’s a powerful parsing of how the historical distortion of Vodou and the Black diasporic people of Haiti was engineered by exploitative white colonialists, showmen, and hacks to create a being whose obvious racist