Serville Poblete's Sunburn was the most visually stunning Canadian film that I saw at TIFF '26. Sweaty, colourful and bursting with life, it captures Toronto in a way Canadian cinema rarely does: not simply as a location, but as a place with its own personality,...
There is something radical about Seventeen: it is a film about queer Indigenous sex workers that refuses to make sex work the most interesting thing about them. Writer-director Justin Ducharme's feature debut unfolds across 17 hours in Vancouver, following Tamram...
I wanted to like Rubaiyat Hossain’s The Difficult Bride. Its premise pulls you in: a wealthy young Bangladeshi woman approaching marriage begins experiencing increasingly grotesque bodily manifestations as the expectations of femininity, beauty and marital perfection...
There is something wonderfully nostalgic about Mina Shum's Whatcha Want. It looks and feels like the glossy romantic comedies and dance movies of the early 2000's, complete with an irresistible soundtrack and heroine rediscovering herself through movement. But...
How We Stand is frustrating because you can see the great film hiding inside it. Marie Clements begins with an incredible, compelling premise, following three indigenous sisters whose childhood separation continues to shape their lives decades later. There is...
If anyone was going to convince me that we needed another adaptation of Carrie, it was Mike Flanagan. Flanagan has an extraordinary ability to take familiar horror stories, locate the humanity buried inside them and somehow make them feel new again. With Carrie, he...
Canada has plenty of mythology, landscapes and communities capable of inspiring great genre storytelling. Below understands that we don’t need to look anywhere else. Created by Jesse McKeown, this wonderfully atmospheric Newfoundland-set series takes the familiar...
Within the first 20 minutes of Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, I watched a Black father brutally assault his wife in front of their terrified children before being killed by police in front of those same children. I watched a Black American soldier violently assault...
If All That She Wants proves anything, it is that the romantic comedy never needed saving. It simply needed filmmakers willing to remember why audiences fell in love with the genre in the first place. Scarlett Bermingham and Andre Rhymer deliver a funny, sexy, and...