By John Corrado In his latest film, the Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident, formerly imprisoned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi crafts another complex and involving portrait of modern day Iran. The film follows a group of people who find themselves at the centre of a moral dilemma, when a worker named Vahid (Vahid… Read More #TIFF50 Review: It Was Just an Accident (Special Presentations)

By John Corrado In his mixing of paranoid espionage thriller and absurdist dark comedy, Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho delivers a culturally specific portrait of his country in the late 1970s in The Secret Agent, seen through the eyes of a man on the run during the waning days of the military dictatorship. The man… Read More #TIFF50 Review: The Secret Agent (Special Presentations)

By John Corrado A man gets off the subway and tries to exit the station. But every time he turns a corner, he ends up back in the same place, stuck in a seemingly endless loop. This is the premise behind the Japanese film Exit 8, a fun and suspenseful little puzzle box thriller from… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Exit 8 (Centrepiece)

By John Corrado Director Oliver Laxe’s Sirât opens on a memorably cinematic scene as a group of outcasts hold a rave in the middle of the Moroccan desert. We see evocative images of massive speakers being set up in the desert, as bodies bop and gyrate in time to the blaring techno music, the beat… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Sirât (Special Presentations)

By John Corrado Sentimental Value is Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s followup to his 2021 modern classic The Worst Person in the World, reuniting him with that film’s star Renate Reinsve. If Worst Person was about a quarter-life crisis and searching for meaning in your twenties, Sentimental Value aims for something even more ambitious in scope.… Read More #TIFF50 Review: Sentimental Value (Special Presentations)