GENRE | Suburban Obsession – 'I Saw The TV Glow'

"This isn't the Midnight Realm! [...] It's just the suburbs."

A24 / Fruit Tree

Non-binary indie filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun writes and directs the coming-of-age art-horror fantasy I Saw the TV Glow about how two troubled suburban youths spiral down a dark path over their shared obsession with a supernatural cult television series from the mid-1990s that doubles as a transcendent examination of queer/trans dysphoria.

FEAST | Italiano x Locanda dell'Orso x Opening x Downtown

Downtown—(May 13, 2024) A new authentic, family-style Italian restaurant, Locanda dell'Orso (Italian for "Inn of the Bear"), just opened for dinner service. It occupies Autostrada's old iconic downtown location (originally Cinara) underneath the historic Victorian Hotel on West Pender.

CABLE | 'The Sympathizer' Betrays South Vietnam on HBO

"Hit me, comrade."

A24 / Rhombus Media

The unlikely international filmmaking pairing of Korean auteur Park Chan-wook and Toronto director Don McKellar adapt Vietnamese-American professor Việt Thanh Nguyễn's bestselling 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel The Sympathizer (aka Cảm tình viên) into dizzingly postmodern historical miniseries dissecting the complex political machinations in the immediate aftermath of a post-Vietnam War United States in the late-1970s.

SCREEN | Digitizing the Afterlife – 'Eternal You' x DOXA 2024

"It's able to hijack the things that we love the most."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

Directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck delve into the deeply troubling world of a "digital afterlife" created by artificial intelligence to extend the lives of deceased loved ones in Eternal You. This very real technology allows startups to effectively digitize those who have passed away by generating simulated versions of them in order to comfort grieving survivors.

REEL | Battle for the 'Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes'

"Apes together strong."

20th Century Studios

The Maze Runner director Wes Ball takes over the durable Planet of the Apes series in a worthy but unnecessary extension of the simian-based franchise's mythology. Set several generations after Caesar's reign in the previous trilogy, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes manages to establish a relatively exciting new direction for the sci-fi action series that evolves the storyline into a biblical yarn involving a slave uprising against a tyrannical ape king.

SCREEN | Saving Cinema – 'The Movie Man' Projects x DOXA 2024

"We're not a destination for anything, really."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

Toronto native Matt Finlin poignantly documents an elderly cinephile's life's work in The Movie Man. We follow septuagenarian business owner Keith Stata, the proprietor of the unique forty-year-old Highlands Cinemas located in the small hamlet village of Kinmount (population three hundred) in the backwoods of Ontario near the Kawartha Lakes, as he struggles to run a house-like movie theatre during challenging times without enough customers or residents to justify his self-described "five-screen movie palace."

SCREEN | On Tamio Wakayama's Life 'Between Pictures' x DOXA 2024

"My boyhood years were a kaleidoscope of joy and pain."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

Multimedia artist Cindy Mochizuki chronicles the remarkable life and career of the Japanese-Canadian photographer in Between Pictures: The Lens of Tamio Wakayama. Told through the framework of Wakayam's own family history of being imprisoned in internment camps, the Telus documentary follows his tireless efforts to capture the 1960s civil rights movement in the American South.

REEL | Ryan Gosling Takes 'The Fall Guy' – Stuntman Action

"She was the sexy bacon all along."

Universal Pictures / 87North Productions

Action director David Leitch sends up his own Hollywood stuntman roots in the silly blockbuster romantic comedy The Fall Guy. Loosely based on the 1980s Lee Majors television show of the same name and filmed across Sydney, the film is a glossy piece of big studio comic spectacle reminiscent of popcorn cinema from decades past.

REEL | 40–Love – Zendaya Breaks 'Challengers'

"Decimate that little bitch!"

Amazon MGM Studios / Warner Bros. Pictures

Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino's exhilaratingly sexy tennis romantic thriller Challengers is about how the magnetic Zendaya (also a producer) is so powerful and talented a force of nature—even only at partial strength due to a career-ending knee injury—that having sweaty, passionate post-match sex with only one of Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist (perfectly pitted against one another) and not both at the same time is simply just not enough for her. We can easily sympathize.