REEL | Willem Dafoe Waxes on 'Late Fame' in Life x SIFF 2026

"You must have been beautiful when you were young."

Magnolia Pictures / Vortex Media

Late Fame, based on Austrian dramatist Arthur Schnitzler's posthumous 1895 novella (translated and published in 2014) of the same name, is directed by New York film critic and programmer turned independent filmmaker Kent Jones and stars Willem Dafoe as an unknown, long-lost poet who, as the title suggests, experiences a bit of late-in-life interest and newfound resurgence in his previously published works within a privileged but affluent circle of wealthy, post-graduate literary admirers in present-day Manhattan.

REEL | Top 10 Films of 2026 So Far

"I put the not in astronaut!"

Amazon MGM Studios / Lord Miller Productions

Click on each film title to read its corresponding review:

1) Project Hail Mary ¹ (dirs. Phil Lord & Christopher Miller)

2) The Drama ² (dir. Kristoffer Borgli)

3) Mile End Kicks ³ * (dir. Chandler Levack)

4) Obsession (dir. Curry Barker)

5) Blue Heron * (dir. Sophy Romvari)

REEL | Tony Leung Makes A 'Silent Friend' x SIFF 2026

"I want to find out what plants sense."

1-2 Special / Films We Like

Silent Friend (aka Stille Freundin), a strange but affecting historical tale by visionary Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi, follows Hong Kong superstar Tony Leung as a Chinese neuroscientist studying a beguiling gingko tree on the grounds of a medieval German university town in 2020. It's a uniquely engrossing two-and-a-half-hour film essentially about a professor befriending an old tree through science.

GENRE | 'Obsession' Makes One Wish Willow x SIFF 2026

"It's weird how you two are dating all of a sudden."

Focus Features / Blumhouse Productions

Profilic 25-year-old That's A Bad Idea YouTuber Curry Barker, hailing from Mobile, Alabama, makes his proper theatrical feature debut as an independent filmmaker with a deceptively simple yet twisted supernatural horror romance, Obsession. Essentially a "be careful what you wish for," monkey's paw-type parable, insecure music shop employee Bear (Michael Johnston) wishes for his co-worker and childhood friend (Inde Navarrette) to fall madly in love with him. You get the idea where this is going. Her unnatural love turns into a violent, well, "obsession," rather quickly. Terror ensues.

SCREEN | Swimming Past 'Numakage Public Pool' x DOXA 2026

"Once the pool is gone, it'll be too late."

Hydroblast

Numakage Public Pool, director Shingo Ōta's peaceful eighty-minute observational documentary chronicling the eponymous landlocked suburban Tokyo public swimming pool complex's final months of operations, details the much-loved location through its ten-thousand daily patrons, from the elderly, families, and children, as they fight to keep it open against looming urban development.

SCREEN | John Magaro Drives Across Nebraska – 'Omaha'

"I think we're moving."

Greenwich Entertainment / Vortex Media

Accomplished character actor John Magaro stars as a struggling single father in Utah filmmaker Cole Webley's Midwest family road trip indie drama, Omaha, also his directorial debut. It's a slow but patient indie drama scripted by Robert Machoian that revolves around two children (Molly Belle Wright and Wyatt Solis) and their perspectives on what might really be going on in their family unit.

SCREEN | Amanda Peet Babysits A 'Fantasy Life' of Anxieties

"I think you're an anxious Jew with mild OCD."

Greenwich Entertainment / Vortex Media

New York actor Matthew Shear writes and directs his first feature film, the charming age-gap comedy, Fantasy Life, starring himself, Amanda Peet (also a producer), and Alessandro Nivola, as a laid-off paralegal (also a law school dropout) struggling to manage his crippling anxiety who ends up babysitting the daughters of his psychiatrist's (Judd Hirsch) depressed former actress daughter-in-law with her aloof musician husband (the psychiatrist's son).

SCREEN | Ballet 'Dreams' – Jessica Chastain Crosses Borders

"I'll never abandon you."

Greenwich Entertainment / Vortex Media

Actress/producer Jessica Chastain and Mexican writer/director Michel Franco reteam for their harsh but erotic drama of romantic obsession, simply titled Dreams. Chastain, controlled as ever, plays a wealthy San Francisco philanthropist who becomes obsessed with a much younger Mexican ballet dancer played by accomplished newcomer Isaac Hernández, whom she convinces to come and stay in the U.S. illegally as a means of control.

GENRE | Sam Rockwell Terminates 'Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die'

"I am from the future and all of this goes horribly wrong!"

Briarcliff Entertainment / Constantin Film

After nearly a decade in director's jail, blockbuster filmmaker Gore Verbinski returns with his wacky sci-fi adventure, the bombastic but retro-futuristic Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die. Starring Sam Rockwell as an unhoused-looking time-traveller from the future, who arrives suddenly in a Los Angeles diner, trying to prevent a rogue AI apocalypse from destroying the world—think Terminator meets Everything Everywhere All at Once.

VIFF 2025 | 'Pillion' – Alexander Skarsgård Controls A Rom-Dom-Com

"I have an aptitude for devotion."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2025—The comically mismatched romantic pairing of Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård stars 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.

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 | Smuggling 'Little Lorraine' x WFF 2025

"I think what they miss the most is showering together."

Whistler Film Festival

Based on crimes committed in 1986, Little Lorraine dramatizes the real-life international offshore cocaine smuggling operation that engulfed the titular Cape Breton seaside fishing village in Nova Scotia. Singer-songwriter (and co-screenwriter) Adam Baldwin previously wrote about the true-crime story in his 2022 single "Lighthouse in Little Lorraine," with its music video successfully serving as a proof-of-concept for the subsequent film.

GENRE | Daisy Ridley Survives 'We Bury the Dead'

"Why do only some of them come back?"

Vertical / Game Theory Films

English actress Daisy Ridley stars in Australian writer/director Zak Hilditch's haunting yet unconventional zombie horror drama, We Bury the Dead. Set in Tasmania in the aftermath of a catastrophic nuclear experiment gone wrong, her Ava joins a "body retrieval unit," desperate to find her husband. She gets derailed when some of the corpses her team is tasked to bury awaken and become the living undead.

REEL | Top 10 Films of 2025

"No fear. Just like Tom f*cking Cruise!"

Warner Bros. Pictures / Ghoulardi Film Company

Click on each film title to read its corresponding review:

1) One Battle After Another ¹ (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

2) Sentimental Value ² * (Affeksjonsverdi, dir. Joachim Trier)

3) Sinners ³ (dir. Ryan Coogler)

4) Marty Supreme (dir. Josh Safdie)

5) Train Dreams * (dir. Clint Bentley)

VIFF 2025 | Bi Gan Dreams A Cinematic 'Resurrection'

"The secret to eternal life is to no longer dream!"

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2025—Resurrection (狂野时代 aka Wild Times), visionary Chinese artist turned filmmaker Bi Gan's ambitious dreamscape odyssey of surrealist sci-fi slow cinema, is structured into six disparate but interconnected chapters, each revolving around one of the Buddhist senses, including the "mind." Set in a far future where most people no longer dream and, as a result, can live forever, things start off in a German expressionist style before transitioning into distinct twentieth-century cinematic eras in China.

REEL | Timothée Chalamet Challenges 'Marty Supreme'

"I'm the ultimate product of Hitler's defeat."

A24 / Elevation Pictures

Marty Supreme, the eldest Safdie brother, Josh Safdie's second solo-directed film—after the younger Benny's own debut in The Smashing Machine, also an unconventional sports drama from A24, earlier this year—starring Timothée Chalamet (also a producer), is set in the world of championship table tennis in 1950s New York City. Chalamet portrays a fictional hotshot star player, Marty Mauser, on the rise, based on real-life Jewish-American ping-pong hustler, Marty Reisman.