VIFF 2025 | Alexander Skarsgård Dominates 'Pillion'

"I have an aptitude for devotion."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2025—Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård star in English filmmaker Harry Lighton's explicit yet crowd-pleasing directorial debut, Pillion, based on British author Adam Mars-Jones' 2020 novel Box Hill. Framed as a stylish, BDSM-themed gay biker romance, both actors are fearless yet earnestly sweet in their tender but often graphic courtship.

SCREEN | 'Spring After Spring' Parades Around Chinatown x VAFF 2025

"She wanted to see us thrive."

Vancouver Asian Film Festival

Chinese-Peruvian-Canadian local filmmaker Jon Chiang, making his feature debut, directs Spring After Spring, a Vancouver Chinatown-based documentary following three remarkable dancer sisters, Anabel, Val, and Lisa Ho. They reunite to lead the annual Lunar New Year Parade after the death of their mother, dedicated community leader and dance teacher Madame Maria Mimie Ho.

CABLE | 'Wonder Man' Casts Yahya Abdul-Mateen II on Disney+

"Let your misery drive the bus."

Marvel Television

Wonder Man, Marvel's self-referential miniseries adaptation of the Hollywood-themed superhero, created for television by Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton and television writer Andrew Guest, stars the imposing but affable Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as a struggling, fame-seeking actor hoping to reboot the eponymous role—think The Studio set in the MCU—while coincidentally being imbued with pure "ionic" superhuman strength and energy powers in a fresh, meta take on the genre.

GENRE | Rachel McAdams Saves Dylan O'Brien's Bacon – 'Send Help'

"Don't ever mistake my kindness for weakness."

20th Century Studios

Master of horror-comedy Sam Raimi directs the twisted desert island survival thriller, Send Help, starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien as our mismatched but stranded co-workers. Essentially a Cast Away-type two-hander with shades of Triangle of Sadness that aims to reverse common but sexist gender roles in the workplace, Raimi's gnarly film mines so many wildly fun genre thrills by slyly toying with our expectations.

SCREEN | Touring the 'Islands' – A Sunshine Noir

"I'm not running away from anything."

Greenwich Entertainment / Vortex Media

Brit actors, Sam Riley and Stacy Martin, star in German director Jan-Ole Gerster's seductively sun-soaked, Hitchcockian tennis noir thriller, the appropriately titled Islands. Set on the eponymous Canary Islands, Riley's burned-out hotel resort tennis pro, Tom, gets entangled with a troubled English tourist couple's unhappy marriage to uneasy consequences.

SCREEN | Kristen Stewart Swims Past 'The Chronology of Water'

"We will publish or perish together!"

The Forge

Talented actress turned first-time feature filmmaker Kristen Stewart directs Imogen Poots in her riveting portrayal of Oregon-based, bestselling author Lidia Yuknavitch in a hazy film adaptation of the latter's 2011 cult memoir, The Chronology of Water. Framed around a tumultuous family life centred on parental abuse leading to both substance and sex addiction before a promising competitive swimming career, the film is a narratively ambitious portrait of personal salvation.

REEL | Amanda Seyfried Shakes 'The Testament of Ann Lee' x TIFF 2025

"All will be clear on the crystal glass of morrow."

Toronto International Film Festival

Norwegian independent filmmaker Mona Fastvold, alongside her The Brutalist director husband Brady Corbet as co-writer/producer, directs another ambitious period biographical drama in The Testament of Ann Lee. Starring Amanda Seyfried as the eponymous pious founding leader of the Shakers religious movement (itself an offshoot of Shaking Quakerism) in the eighteenth-century, the film uses quasi-musical elements and choreography employed in the utopian Christian faith's worshiping practices to tell its historical origins.

REEL | Gus Van Sant Takes 'Dead Man's Wire' Hostage x TIFF 2025

"I'm a man that's fighting for everything he owns, sir."

Toronto International Film Festival

Dead Man's Wire, directed by veteran filmmaker Gus Van Sant, depicts the actual 1977 kidnapping by an otherwise mild-mannered Indianapolis man, Tony Kiritsis, played convincingly by a haggard Bill Skarsgård, of his bank mortgage officer (Dacre Montgomery). What follows is a gritty but detailed dramatization of the 63-hour hostage crisis standoff and subsequent media circus that would later echo through modern American media and culture.

SCREEN | Falling for the 'People We Meet on Vacation' on Netflix

"How about we die alone together?"

3000 Pictures / Temple Hill Entertainment

People We Meet on Vacation, Netflix's new romantic comedy adapted from best-selling contemporary romance author Emily Henry's 2021 novel of the same name, stars the good-looking duo of Emily Bader and Tom Blyth as best friends who get together to travel somewhere in the world for one week every summer. Director Brett Haley mines the whole When Harry Met Sally inspired best friends turned couple angle, but for contemporary audiences, while set against attractive international locations in a flashback format.