Friday’s CIFF Dispatch talks up Harlem doc The Apollo, dark fairy tale Adoration, Guatemalan drama Our Mothers, and Minhal Baig’s coming-of-age story Hala.
foreign
Pedro Costa’s minimalist, based on real events drama is short on plot and long on the relentless weight of living.
Romania’s Corneliu Pourumbiou bogs down excellent production design in droopy, exposition-heavy noir trappings.
Takashi Miike’s gazillionth film is a riotous yakuza caper that traffics in the filmmaker’s impeccable balance of extremes.
Pedro Almodóvar graces us with a shaggy but rewarding portrait of a middle-aged director wrestling with his demons, with an arresting turn by Banderas.
Bertrand Bonello writes & directs a genre defying story about teenage passion & the thin veil between life & death.
Flesh-eating creatures and farcical meta-comedy meet in this refreshing, delightful riff on the zombie genre.
Issa López captures the horror of growing up in a warzone with a gritty fairy tale that would make Guillermo Del Toro proud.
Alejandro Landes’ tense, probing portrait of child soldiers keeps its messages as muddy as its setting.
Danish director Daniel Joseph Borgman’s coming of age drama is an uncomfortable story of abuse, mental illness, and escape.
Sameh Zoabi’s politically-charged satire of Palestinian soap operas works better as farce than social polemic.
The latest adaptation of a Roberto Saviano novel is a familiar, but inventive crime drama.
Dwein Ruedas Baltazar’s third feature is a morbidly beautiful tale filled with unexpectedly rich textures.
Ulaa Salim’s tense, complex political thriller shines a light on the very modern terrors of far-right nationalism, and the radical violence that rises in response.
Culture clash and end-of-life issues collide in Lulu Wang’s scintillatingly heartfelt drama “based on an actual lie.”
Fantasia kicks off its opening night with an atmospheric, if slightly subdued, entry in the Ringu series.
Jessie Buckley rocks the stage in a country-fied music drama that treads too-familiar territory outside its Scottish stage.
Abel Ferrara eulogizes fellow scandalizer Pier Paolo Pasolini in a suitably grimy tone poem featuring Willem Dafoe.
