Reel Encounters

Three witches prophesy nobler futures for a thane. The thane and his wife, covetous of that future, plot to murder their king to accelerate the royal destiny promised to them.

Credit to Jon Watts, director of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and the screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers: in this third iteration of the MCU’s version of our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, they have finally managed to liberate Tom Holland’s Peter Parker from Tony Stark and the previous films’ strange class politics.

There are many moments in Passing when the camera finds Tessa Thompson’s Irene Redfield, a Black woman in 1920s Harlem, in the act of looking.

Early in “The Power of the Dog”, a character tearfully confesses to another, “I just wanted to say how nice it is not to be alone.”

The theatrical poster for “King Richard” introduces us to an important discrepancy.

Anya-Taylor Joy appears about 20 minutes into Edgar Wright’s “Last Night in Soho” as the savvy and confident Sandy.

We first meet Will Sharpe’s version of Louis Wain, painter and eccentric in the early 20th century, as an old man (a well-aged Benedict Cumberbatch) gazing into space as images of a somewhat younger Wain walks solemnly through the street in funereal attire with a group of women.

Every few months a new Marvel film emerges and every few months critics write critiques of the individual movies that dovetail as critiques of the entire Marvel collection.

“Dune” has been built up as a potential turning point of 2021 cinema since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

The opening scene of “No Time to Die” has stayed in mind longer than I expected it to.

If the unhinged earnestness of Tom Hardy’s central performance was the hook that necessitated a sequel to the 2018 “Venom”, it’s a bit surprising that the recently released sequel – titled “Let There Be Carnage” begins with someone other than Eddie Brock and his faithful symbiote friend.

The newly released comedy-drama “The Starling” is the second underwhelming Netflix release starring Melissa McCarthy this year, which is a disappointing fact for such an engaging actor.

Canadian author Miriam Toews drew heavily from personal family tragedies for her 2014 novel “All My Puny Sorrows”.

Two of the best films that played at TIFF this year felt like self-conscious purgings of personal demons from the filmmakers.

Family dramas across generations, continents and genres were a recurring preoccupation at the Toronto International Film Festival this year.

The third season of “Sex Education” opens with a montage of characters primarily devoted to some frantic sex.

To compelling, if varied, results, three films screened at the recently concluded TIFF2021 explored similar themes of women in crisis struggling to acclimate to the systems around them – Canadian family-drama “All My Puny Sorrows”, the Brazilian horror film “Medusa”, and the Danish drama “As In Heaven”.

Biopics tend to get a bad rep, mostly due to a swathe of listless interrogations of real-life figures, but it’s instructive to remember that a biopic is not really a genre of film.

Elia Kazan’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 9, 1951.

The Cinderella story entered European tradition in the 17th century, but records date back to as early as Egypt BC.