Audrey Diwan’s Happening follows a young woman’s journey in the 1960s to even find a backstreet abortionist amidst a culture of shame and silence.
Gender and Sexuality
Explore depictions of masculinity, femininity, and sexual identity.
The Lost Daughter is a skillful adaptation by Maggie Gyllenhaal
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut skillfully adapts Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, the story of a middle-aged woman who shouldn’t have had kids and is now spiraling while on vacation. The film is now streaming worldwide on Netflix.
A Tale of Love and Desire is a sensitive coming-of-ager
In Leyla Bouzid’s A Tale of Love and Desire, things get complicated for eighteen-year-old Ahmed (Sami Outabali) when love and desire become intertwined.
TIFF Review: The Mad Women’s Ball is a shallow look at ‘female hysteria’
Mélanie Laurent’s The Mad Women’s Ball suffers in comparison to Alice Winocour’s Augustine (2011), which tackles the same story with more psychological complexity.
Benediction thoughtfully depicts a community of gay men
Benediction may be Terence Davies’s gayest film yet: a character study of a WWI poet who keeps trying to reinvent himself and find solace.
The Surrogate: Jasmine Batchelor stuns in a smart, thorny exploration of surrogacy
Jasmine Batchelor gives one of the best performances of the year in Jeremy Hersh’s The Surrogate, a smart and sensitive drama about a pregnancy surrogate who finds out the foetus will be born with Down Syndrome.