Reel Encounters

From the inception, “Wolfwalkers” wants you to change the way you look at things.

In the first fifteen minutes of Clea DuVall’s romantic comedy “Happiest Season”, the film has delivered a slew of well-worn tropes that align it with a long and storied line of similar romantic comedies and holiday films.

In many ways, Darius Marder’s “The Sound of Metal” feels like a decisively singular story.

Two former Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) premieres, one from 2018 and one from 2019, finally make their way to audiences in the last quarter of 2020, offering different takes on the lengths people go to in service of family.

The new film “S#!%house” (the bowdlerised first part of the title rhymes with “flit”) is performing a deft kind of misdirection with its presumptuous title.

The Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination’s Spectrum Film Festival, which celebrates films by and about queer identities, is running virtually for the month of October.  

“Red, White and Blue”, the third film of Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” miniseries, will wrap up the five-part anthology when it premieres at the end of November on Prime Video.

There’s a lightness to the scenarios in “On the Rocks” that feels almost too precarious.

Very little in Hong Sang-soo’s “The Woman Who Ran” plays as if it is a mystery to be solved.

Early in “Time” Sibil Fox Richardson – you may know her as Fox Rich – is recording a video for her social media, announcing an upcoming talk she’ll be giving.

“I Carry You With Me” opens with an older man, Iván, walking towards the subway in New York.

It speaks to the ever-increasingly blurred lines between television and cinema that one of the most vibrant pieces of filmmaking out of the fall festival season has been the entries from Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” anthology premiering over the course of the New York Film Festival this year.

The first shot we see of Henry Golding as Kit in “Monsoon” is instructive.

The set-up for “Another Round” feels like it’s lifted from a punchline of a very good joke.

  There’s a scene in the middle of “Concrete Cowboy” where the film seems to be firing on all cylinders.

In a way, Kornél Mundruczó’s “Pieces of a Woman” feels doomed by its own title – a film that works better in pieces and moments, than it does as a sustained narrative.

There’s a scene towards the end of “Misbehaviour” that the film has been working to.

In the press notes for “New Order”, director Michel Franco announces that the film is a warning: “If inequality is not addressed by civic means, and if all dissenting voices are silenced, chaos ensues.”

There’s a brief sequence that follows the end-credits of the Nasser brothers’ “Gaza mon amour” that puts the previous 85 minutes into perspective.

Cinema continues to be a reflection of society, and the social and racial disruptions of the current times have been reflected in key titles of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.