The 2025 First Look Festival at the Museum of the Moving Image celebrates adventurous cinema, both fiction and nonfiction. This year’s highlights include the documentaries Elementary and Tata, as well as the docufiction When the Phone Rang.
Essays
Film Review: Charles Burnett’s The Annihilation of Fish
Charles Burnett’s delightful 1999 screwball comedy The Annihilation of Fish has been restored in 4K and is screening across North America.
What to see (and skip) at the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema
The 2025 Rendez-vous with French Cinema features many small gems of the festival circuit, like This Life of Mine, When Fall is Coming, Winter in Sokcho, and Foreign Language.
Theatre Review: HONEY I’M HOME at Factory Theatre
Alex Heeney reviews Lester Trips’ inventive and invigorating production of HONEY I’M HOME, part of the Factory Theatre’s season of shows about AI and technology.
TIFF 2024 Film Review: Tumpal Tampubolon’s Crocodile Tears
Alex Heeney reviews Crocodile Tears, a genre-inflected debut feature about a toxic mother-son relationship, from Indonesian filmmaker Tumpal Tampubolon. The film is one of the best sales titles at TIFF 2024.
TIFF 2024 Film Review: Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc’s Tata
Alex Heeney reviews the personal documentary film Tata by Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc. The film follows Lina as she reconnects with her estranged father and begins to ponder the origins of her intergenerational trauma and how to prevent passing it on to the daughter she’s expecting. Tata is one of the best sales titles at TIFF 2024