GENRE | Samara Weaving Robs Sweet 'Carolina Caroline'

"Want to go on like five hundred dates with me?"

Magnolia Pictures / Vortex Media

Together, the laidback duo of Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner star as a sexy, Southern bank-robbing couple in Adam Carter Rehmeier's romantic crime thriller, Carolina Caroline. Both are lovable small-time con artists who dream of a simple but better life together on the road, who try not to target actual victims that might actually hurt.

REEL | Still Making Friends – Pixar and 'Toy Story 5' Play Together

"The age of toys is over!"

Walt Disney Pictures / Pixar Animation Studios

Longtime Pixar animator and director Andrew Stanton, joined by screenwriter/co-director Kenna Harris, reunites the whole gang back together for Toy Story 5. Both Tom Hanks and Tim Allen return as Woody and Buzz, but it's actually Joan Cusack's cowgirl sheriff Jessie who emotionally anchors the animated film's topical but touching story about the nature of childhood and friendship in an increasingly technological world.

CABLE | Matthew Rhys Welcomes You to 'Widow's Bay' on Apple TV

"The only way out is through."

Apple Studios

Widow's Bay, comedy screenwriter Katie Dippold's superb new original series, stars the wonderful Welsh actor Matthew Rhys as the exasperated, initially skeptical mayor of the seemingly cursed, titular New England island town desperate for tourism. As a welcoming but weird folk horror-comedy mashup clearly inspired by the many works of Stephen King, its supernaturally mythic small-town elements only heighten its dryly deadpan humour.

REEL | Full 'Disclosure Day' – Spielberg Believes in Close Encounters

"The rejection of this understanding is leading to our extinction."

Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

Disclosure Day is legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg's succesfful return to the extraterrestrial action blockbuster genre he pioneered and a spiritually thematic follow-up to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Framed around the idea of exposing seventy-nine years of (fictional) conspiratorial cover-ups of meaningful alien contact on Earth, his latest film exposes both human ideals and paranoia surrounding the disclosure and societal awakening of a history of otherworldly evidence that we are definitely not alone in the universe.

REEL | 'Masters of the Universe' Summons the Power of Nostalgia

"The universe shall quake in my shadow!"

Amazon MGM Studios / Mattel Studios

Masters of the Universe, Mattel's blockbuster live-action adaptation of the once-popular 1980s toy line and accompanying animated series of the same name, stars the affable Nicholas Galitzine as the powerful He-Man, Prince of Eternia, with a fierce Camila Mendes as Teela, his "Warrior Goddess" sidekick. Laika co-founder Travis Knight's kinetic direction propels the sword-and-sorcery action forward. However, its overabundance of violent fantasy combat stretches the wholly unnecessary two-hour-and-twenty-minute runtime.

GATHER | Web Summit Vancouver 2026 x Global Tech Conference

"We meet at a critical moment in the history of technology."

Physician/author Dr. Gabor Maté and Twitch political streamer Hasan Piker

Waterfront—(May 11 to 14, 2026) For the second year, Web Summit Vancouver's annual multi-day global conference, known as the "Olympics of Tech," gathered 20,235 attendees (up from 15,727 in 2025) spread across three levels of the Vancouver Convention Centre, once again hosted by the titular Dublin-based technology events company.

CABLE | Nicolas Cage Investigates 'Spider-Noir' on Prime Video

"Maybe we can be alone together."

Sony Pictures Television / Amazon MGM Studios

Spider-Noir, the live-action television adaptation of Spider-Man Noir, the 2009 alternate-universe Marvel Comics spin-off webslinger character most widely seen in the Oscar-winning animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and famously voiced by Nicolas Cage, who reprises his role in the flesh this time, is an amusing throwback to the hard-boiled detective film genre. Showrun by screenwriters Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot and executive produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the television series overtly but lovingly leans heavily into its classic film noir influences.

GENRE | 'Backrooms' Finds A Psychological Horror Detour

"It's every place that ever was."

A24 / Elevation Pictures

Talented twenty-year-old YouTuber and visual effects artist Kane "Pixels" Parsons turns his nightmarish 22-episode found-footage creepypasta web series into a fully-fledged psychological horror feature. Filmed in Vancouver, Backrooms' basic premise revolves around a mysteriously elaborate but oddly abandoned series of secret interdimensional "backroom" liminal spaces found beneath a suburban discount furniture warehouse showroom located in a generic strip mall somewhere in 1990s middle America.

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.