Reel Encounters

Before the North American premiere of “Wasp Network” at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) last week, director Olivier Assayas appeared to introduce the film to the audience.

Steven Soderbergh’s new film, “The Laundromat” sprawls across numerous countries, covering varying languages and locales.

There’s a running sequence in the Chilean film “Lina from Lima,” where Lina, our protagonist, searches for eligible men on Tinder.

Wall Street businessmen have been exploiting the working class and the economic system for years.

“I have been here before.” It’s a line from a Dante Gabriel Rossetti poem that is repeated multiple times throughout the William Nicholson film “Hope Gap” and you’ll be thinking about it as the film ends.

About midway through “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” three women sit in the living room of a house.

“The personal is political.” That sentence has taken on a life of its own since the sixties, going from a slogan of second-wave feminism to a socio-cultural observation of the relationship between the public and the private in an ever-changing world.

Early in “Atlantics,” our heroine, Ada, receives some bad news. Director Mati Diop zeroes in on her face as she sits, wordlessly taking in the news.

After its Palme d’Or winning debut at Cannes earlier this year, Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” had its Canadian premiere this past week at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

Quentin Tarantino’s ninth feature film, “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” arrived in local theatres at the tail-end of last week for a very brief theatrical run after being released worldwide in July and August.

The new horror-comedy “Ready or Not” manages to offer an inexplicably pleasant experience considering its plot and genre.

In “Blinded by the Light,” hopeful teenaged writer Javed Khan, a British-Pakistani, writes an essay about his idol Bruce Springsteen titled ‘My American Dream in Luton’.

It’s a bit telling the way that the recently released “The Kitchen” immediately draws comparisons to last year’s Steve McQueen crime film “Widows” and the upcoming Lorene Scafaria film “Hustlers”.

About one hour into “Wild Rose”, our heroine Rose Lynn gets up on stage to sing a cover of Emmylou Harris’ ‘Born to Run’.

In a mid-film sequence in “Hobbs and Shaw,” the new “Fast & Furious” spinoff, one of the heroes tries to talk the villain out of his plan to destroy the world.

At this point, it feels almost futile to belabour the creative laziness of Disney’s penchant of turning their animated hits into “live-action” remakes.

In a mid-year movie season that feels built on familiar tropes (the current slate of films in cinemas affirms this), the recent digital-release “Teen Spirit” probably seems too apt.

Before we see anything, “Spider-Man: Far from Home” begins with a sound cue of a famous pop song.

Most of the newly released “Midsommar” takes place on a Swedish commune where four unwitting American university students have travelled, with a Swedish friend, to take part in a summer festival that moves from idyllic to horrifying as the days go by.

If there’s one thing that remains true about the box-office, year after year, it’s that horror films are a sure bet.