Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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TIFF 2025: The Christophers, I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash, Rose of Nevada
Steven Soderbergh’s films routinely fixate on money—who has it, who doesn’t, what (illegally) acquiring it says about personal status and national identity within global capitalism. So, it’s mildly surprising he hasn’t set a film in the contemporary art world prior to The Christophers, though previous works deployed visual art for character definition (Laura San Giacomo’s character in sex, lies, and videotape is a painter) or as a plot engine (the Imperial Coronation egg as Ocean’s Twelve’s MacGuffin). In his latest two-hander, artmaking serves as a dramatic foundation for extended badinage about creative expression as an imperfect vehicle for immortality. The […]
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TIFF(ty) 2025: The Fence, To the Victory!
In the 1999 mini-series Storm of the Century, a malevolent stranger (played by noted Canadian Colm Feore) shows up outside Stephen King’s longtime fictional community of Castle Rock and repeatedly says “Give me what I want and I’ll go away”—but he doesn’t tell anyone what he actually wants, instead telepathically manipulating people into suicide and other grisly events until finally unveiling his ask. Obviously this made a big impression on me when I was 13, but I’m told the series was in fact terrible, which isn’t hard to believe, and it’s definitely not what should have been coming to mind […]
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Ides of March: The 2025 Venice Film Festival
On the evening of August 8, 1939, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels led a fleet of gondolas down the Canal Grande. He’d been invited to attend the opening of the seventh Venice Film Festival, which began in a lugubrious atmosphere. The specter of a new world conflict was haunting Europe; critics dispatching from the Lido wrote of an “empty” Venice, “long-faced people,” “little dancing” and “lots of play to chase away negative thoughts.” Back then, the festival functioned as a sort of political summit; the Biennale invited delegations from different countries, which would submit the films themselves. Sixteen nations took […]
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TIFF 2025: Wake Up Dead Man, The Wizard of the Kremlin
The lights went down precisely at 6 pm, the designated starting hour for Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man, and people began murmuring in pleasant surprise: at premium TIFF screenings where a starry cast is the main attraction, kick-off time is understood to be more of a loose suggestion than an actuality you can make plans around. Director of Programming and Platform Lead Robyn Citizen briskly thanked the sponsors and brought out Johnson; he worked the room and had his intro done in 2.5 minutes. (Rian Johnson is a wise man.) The sponsor bumpers started at 6:05; “A TIFF miracle!” […]
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Patricia Aufderheide, Jax Deluca Named Fall 2025 Shorenstein Center Fellows
The Shorenstein Center announced today the Fall 2025 cohort of Documentary Film Fellows, who will be working closely with the Documentary Film in the Public Interest (DFPI) initiative. Through the Fellows’ projects, the Shorenstein Center will engage in examinations of public impact and media policy. Shorenstein Center Director Nancy Gibbs said in a press release, “We are eager to welcome these exceptional leaders into our research community. Prof. Aufderheide’s groundbreaking work on ethical practice, and Jax DeLuca’s on the civic power of documentary, could not be more timely at this critical moment for the field.” The Fall 2025 Fellows will […]
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TIFF 2025: Mare’s Nest, Blue Moon (Songs about Decline and Obsolescence)
Narratives of decline and obsolescence, frequently as a consequence of unforced errors made by the wealthy and unaccountable (the latter adjective redundant when paired with the former), are going to be a big theme this fall. The global political situation is self-evident; zooming down to the media tier, rumors of imminent firings and general bloodletting are swirling. (Wait for those quarterly reports to come in at the top of October and let the pain begin.) Zooming way down to the relatively parochial level of “one specific film festival,” TIFF was once a global powerhouse and automatic stop for the year’s […]
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13 Films to Look Out for at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival begins today, with many of this awards season’s festival heavy-hitters (Hamnet, The Smashing Machine, Sentimental Value, Train Dreams) screening for North American audiences. As usual, though, we focus our preview on newer titles as well as a few sleepers that have premiered earlier this year. Below, find 13 films we strongly believe are worth your time at Toronto. Maddie’s Secret The opening night selection for TIFF’s Discovery program is the directorial debut from NYC comedian John Early, wherein he stars as Maddie Ralph, a dishwasher working at a trendy food content company who struggles with […]
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“The Question of Whether Ukraine Will Exist at All”: Valentyn Vasyanovych on TIFF 2025 Premiere To the Victory!
When Valentyn Vasyanovych shot The Tribe (2014) by Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi, he was a cinematographer and emerging director. Shortly after, he developed an impressive oeuvre of his own beginning with Black Level (2017), a dialogue-free film about a wedding photographer in a midlife crisis. Similarly to The Tribe, Vasyanovych was exploring a novel cinematic language within a new wartime reality, establishing a formal strategy consisting of a strictly static camera and deep focus, extended mise-en-scène and minimal editing through which his films can be recognized. Two subsequent fiction features brought him international acclaim, whose frighteningly prescient narratives helped him attain the […]
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“A Desperate Search For a Reason to Wake Up”: Alexandre Koberidze on Dry Leaf
Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze’s second feature, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), was a sprawling city symphony-like romantic fantasy; at 186 minutes, his third feature Dry Leaf runs a half-hour longer, but doesn’t extended the labyrinthine storytelling techniques of his breakthrough film so much as consolidate its strengths and streamline its magical-realist sensibility. Employing a hybrid approach familiar to his award-winning, similarly lengthy debut, Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), Koberdize brings the more meditative and conversational qualities of that film to bear on a strikingly straightforward road trip tale that, rather than traffic […]
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From Twin Peaks to Monument Valley: Duwayne Dunham on Legend of the Happy Worker
It’s well known that George Lucas approached David Lynch to direct Return of the Jedi (1983), and that Lynch (thankfully) demurred, instead pursuing Blue Velvet (1985). Less well-known is the fact that the two films share an editor—Duwayne Dunham, an unlikely hyperspace lane between two otherwise distant cinematic galaxies. As a director himself, Dunham has a body of work that poses yet another wrinkle in space-time: since making his feature debut with Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993), he has specialized in tales of misfit youngsters, predominantly for the Disney Channel. The announcement that his new film, the long-gestating Legend […]
