Interesting leading men and women dominate this unusual dispatch, one that gathers films that have almost nothing in common on paper, itself a testament to the variety of styles one can find at a festival as broad-reaching as TIFF. The best of the three is the intense, unforgiving “Wasteman,” another evidence exhibit in the case

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, though that seems unlikely: two guys walk into a twin bereavement support group and uncover an unexpected rapport. Before long, they’ve formed a friendship that—somewhere between mutual healing and toxic codependency—leaves them considering, and quietly hoping, that they’ve somehow stumbled back across their other halves.  To say

Venice had a remarkable non-fiction portion of its 2025 program, including new films by Werner Herzog and Laura Poitras (both covered here). The programmers for Venice don’t fall for generic documentaries shaped by anecdotes told by talking heads, leaning instead on the projects that say as much about their creators as their subjects. Ross McElwee,

One of my earliest memories of watching something on-screen was seeing reruns of the Canadian children’s television series “The Adventures of Dudley the Dragon” on television throughout the day. In it, Graham Greene plays Mr. Crabby Tree, a wisecracking tree who, while frequently in a bad mood, eventually comes around to the incessant questions of

Once again it is my pleasure and my privilege to be reporting to you from Venice, where the Cinema Biennale, known to the American trades as the Venice Film Festival, is unspooling, sort of, but not literally, given that more of the fare is projected from DCPs. Among other things the death of celluloid has

The territorial battles between companies like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have blurred over the last few years, with PlayStation exclusives becoming increasingly available on PCs, and Microsoft continuing to “play nice” by leaking some of their hits into the world of Sony gamers. The latest such release is arguably the biggest to date, offering Sony

Four films about near-death experiences (NDE), shared death experiences (SDE), and related phenomena will be screened at the International Association for Near-Death Studies (“IANDS”) annual conference, August 27-31  at the Hilton in Oak Brook Hills, Illinois, said Janet Riley, the Executive Director of IANDS. The Annual Conference includes four days of education and workshops, and will bring together more

“It was in Odessa that I found those Friday night lights, and they burned with more intensity than I ever imagined… As someone later described it, those lights become an addiction if you live in a place like Odessa…As I stood in that beautiful stadium on the plains week after week, it became obvious that

“A lot of ‘em are gone…the old faces,” Terence Stamp’s Wilson says flatly an hour into Steven Soderbergh’s exquisite neo-noir “The Limey,” with a twinge of sadness he doesn’t allow himself to let breathe. Wilson has come from England after a nine-year stretch for petty crime. An escape followed by an escape. Stamp knew what

Memory is a funny thing. It can form and unwind us, ground and unmoor us. It can also trick us, probably because it’s so aligned with the fluidity of time. In this latest Locarno dispatch, there are three films that consider the effect of time and memory as a creative tool, a language, and a