REEL | Christopher Nolan and Matt Damon Conquer 'The Odyssey'

"It was a song of all the promises I failed to keep."

Universal Pictures / Syncopy

Oscar-winning, visionary British-American auteur Christopher Nolan adapts The Odyssey, the second of Homer's two ancient Greek epic poems (after The Iliad), into a metaphysical but immersive action blockbuster experience. Starring regular collaborator Matt Damon as the legendary Odysseus, the departed soldier-king of Ithaca, in another hero role as a man desperate to find his way home, the dense mythical fantasy is a monumental yet accessible journey of pure cinematic spectacle, filmed on the grandest of canvases.

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.

SCREEN | Glaciers and Memories – 'Time and Water' x DOXA 2026

"I have never written a memorial for a glacier."

National Geographic Documentary Films / Sandbox Films

Oscar-nominated Fire of Love director Sara Dosa explores the environmental impact of melting glaciers through renowned, award-winning Icelandic poet/author Andri Snær Magnason's comprehensive family history in their documentary, Time and Water (see also his book, On Time and Water). It's an elegiac portrait of time passing told side-by-side with the Earth's "memories" as climate change ravages the glacial natural wonders.

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.

VIFF 2025 | Holding Onto 'Sentimental Value' – Norwegian Blues

"Why didn't our childhood ruin you?"

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2025—The Worst Person in the World duo of Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier and his actress Renate Reinsve reteam for their searing generational family drama, Sentimental Value (aka Affeksjonsverdi). Set around an Oslo family home, Trier employs the processes of acting, performance, and directing as therapy for a fractured absentee father/daughter relationship.

VIFF 2025 | George Clooney Pays Tribute to 'Jay Kelly'

"I'm grateful I got to see the end before it ended."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2025—The unofficial Mayor of Hollywood, George Clooney, stars as an aging movie star contemplating his life and legacy in the movies, away from his actual family, in renowned dramatist Noah Baumbach's latest comedy, the unimaginatively titled Jay Kelly. Prepare yourself for a stage-like, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style look at past relationships where another successful, rich white man went wrong by alienating his loved ones, to only end up being surrounded by people he employs.

SCREEN | 'Bring Them Down' Shepherds Revenge x TIFF 2024

"Where there's livestock, there's dead stock."

Toronto International Film Festival

First-time writer/director Christopher Andrews makes an assured debut in his tragic Irish revenge drama, Bring Them Down. Told from the points of view of two feuding shepherding families in the remote countryside, the film focuses on the escalation between neighbours from a generational cycle of parental angst, economic uncertainty, and emotional trauma being passed down.

REEL | Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin Tour 'A Real Pain'

"Money is like heroin for boring people."

Searchlight Pictures / Topic Studios

In his sophomore filmmaking effort, accomplished actor/playwright Jesse Eisenberg directs himself alongside Kieran Culkin as two once-close but mismatched Jewish-American cousins on a bonding trip to their ancestral homeland to reconnect after their Polish grandmother (a WWII survivor) passes away. A Real Pain channels the road trip template to explore the interpersonal effects of generational suffering.

SCREEN | Speaking Irish – 'Kneecap' Raps It Up

"Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom."

Sony Pictures Classics / Mongrel Media

Controversial West Belfast hip-hop trio Kneecap, known for rapping republican lyrics in their native Irish language, star in their own titular biographical film about their rise to fame and infamy. Set in 2019, British-Irish filmmaker Rich Peppiatt directs the plainly titled Kneecap with an energetic, riotous verve to its provocative, explicitly anti-UK material of rebellion.

VIFF 2022 | Paul Mescal Goes on Vacation – 'Aftersun' Glows

"Once you leave where you're from, [...] you don't totally belong there again."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2022—First-time filmmaker Charlotte Wells writes and directs a deeply affecting, slice-of-life, semi-autobiographical father/daughter vacation drama. Aftersun is set at a somewhat anonymous ramshackle resort hotel in Turkey during the late-'90s—when MiniDV camcorders and payphones were still around—about a woman remembering her father as a young man, both fondly and honestly, twenty years later as an adult.

VIFF 2022 | Irish Civil War – Feuding Over 'The Banshees of Inisherin'

"How's the despair?"

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2022—British-Irish playwright/filmmaker Martin McDonagh returns to his native Ireland for the black comedy The Banshees of Inisherin. Shot on the island of Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands in Galway Bay just off the west coast of Ireland, this is a bleak (even violent) yet hilarious romp about friendship gone sour.

VIFF 2021 | Growing Up to Be 'The Worst Person in the World'

"I don't want to be a memory for you."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2021—Danish-born Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier answers the questions behind any whirlwind romance, like what actually happens next after the happy couple gets together at the end of a rom-com. The provocatively titled The Worst Person in the World (aka Verdens verste menneske) takes a darkly comic yet wonderfully cinematic approach to its Oslo-set modern romantic drama exploring millennial unrest through the messiness of contemporary relationships.

SCREEN | Bad Economics – 'The Gig is Up' x DOXA 2021

"There is a cost to convenience."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

UBC professor and filmmaker Shannon Walsh personifies the many perils and bad economics of being a part of the ever-growing gig economy in her engaging global documentary about the new labour movement in The Gig is Up. Her film about contemporary capitalism excels in putting such a massive worldwide issue of where modern freelance work is moving, while balancing it with the human cost of the people on the ground.

SCREEN | Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon Leave 'The Trip to Greece'

IFC Films / Elevation Pictures

Journeyman British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom reteams for a fourth (and purportedly final) time with British comedians and longtime co-collaborators Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, starring once again as loosely fictionalized, more performative celebrity versions of themselves, for another installment of their dryly hilarious, semi-improvised travelogue, The Trip to Greece—after the original trip to Northern England then followed by Italy and Spain.

CABLE | An Extraordinary Love – Romancing 'Normal People'

"I think it's pretty obvious that I don't want you to leave."

BBC / Element Pictures

It's hard to express just how breathlessly intimate the new Hulu miniseries adaptation of author Sally Rooney's bestselling Irish romance novel, the flatly titled Normal People, truly feels. Every moment (shot mostly in close-ups) treats the steamy teen soap opera material with such a highbrow prestige television polish. It's easily one of the more true-to-life depictions of young love and frank portraits of sex put to screen.

REEL | To Hell and Back – Sam Mendes Memorializes '1917'

"Hope is a dangerous thing."

British filmmaker Sam Mendes has crafted a truly stunning WWI drama. Simply titled 1917, the film takes a continuous one-shot, nearly real-time approach to tell its basic men-on-a-mission story. Partially based on Mendes' paternal grandfather Alfred Mendes' own real-life accounts, the unbroken film captures the absolute grind and depth of the day-to-day horrors of war as seen from the frontline trenches.

GENRE | Charlize Theron Detonates 'Atomic Blonde'

John Wick co-director David Leitch, also a former stuntman and coordinator, brings his brand of hard-boiled action to 1989 Berlin just days before the fall of the Wall with Charlize Theron (also a producer) starring as one kick-ass MI6 British agent in the exhilarating but incomprehensible Atomic Blonde. Based on Antony Johnston's graphic novel, The Coldest City, the film is a retro-style remix of contemporary action films with plenty of flash to spare.

REEL | Christopher Nolan Battles 'Dunkirk'

"Wars are not won by evacuations."

There are no German soldiers in Dunkirk. Celebrated auteur Christopher Nolan has twisted his trademark filmmaking style to meticulously craft a self-contained war drama about the titular 1940 World War II evacuation (code-named Operation Dynamo). Dunkirk is a sweeping, ambitiously told thriller and time-fractured triptych, told through soldiers at ground level (one week), by sea (one day), and by air (one hour).

REEL | 'The Lost City of Z' Finds Glory

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp."

Moody independent New York filmmaker James Gray ventures into the jungle for his meticulously lush adaptation of journalist David Grann's biography of legendary British explorer Lt. Col. Percy Fawcett. The Lost City of Z (pronounced "Zed" in the Queen's English) is a thoroughly mannered and enlightening cinematic journey about maddening obsession, righteousness, and one's undying ambitions during the turn of the century leading into World War I.

SCREEN | Feasting on the 'Theater of Life'

"What if food waste could feed the hungry?"

Downtown—(January 9, 2017) Produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), Theater of Life follows famed Italian chef turned activist Massimo Bottura and his Refettorio Ambrosiano soup kitchen during Expo Milano in 2015. The documentary directed by Montréal filmmaker Peter Svatek explores ideals of feeding those most vulnerable while using repurposed food waste and the connections made with the local population being served.