Reel Encounters

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.

One of my favourite creative moments in any medium is the beginning of the finale of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park with George”.

There’s an undercurrent of restrained anxiety throughout the six episodes of the new Netflix miniseries, “The Chair”.

The acronym CODA – child of deaf adults – is, perhaps, an unusual name for the new Apple TV+ family drama.

There’s a lot happening in the computer-animated musical comedy “Vivo”. At its centre, it’s about the power of music, and seeking to prove that a single song can change a life.