Montreal, My Beautiful (Montréal, ma belle, dir. Xiaodan He) x WIFF 2026.

Screen legend Joan Chen stars as a Chinese immigrant mother living in the titular French-Canadian metropolitan city who engages in a steamy same-sex affair later in life with a vibrant, young Québécoise woman (Charlotte Aubin). This puts her traditional family situation in turmoil while she enjoys her newfound menopausal sexual freedom. She struggles to juggle her marital and parental responsibilities with the carefree romantic yearning of new love. Director He builds a complex portrait of womanhood that balances strong Eastern culture with familiar Western ideals fluidly.

Winner of the Best Canadian Film prize at the 2026 Windsor International Film Festival.

The Sheep Detectives (dir. Kyle Balda).

H is for Hawk (dir. Philippa Lowthorpe) x VFF 2026.

Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson star as a grieving daughter and her recently departed photojournalist father in an emotional film about taking up falconry in order to process unexpected grief. Adapted from award-winning, non-binary English naturalist Helen Macdonald's acclaimed 2014 memoir of the same name, the biographical film focuses on a year in their life struggling to train a Eurasian goshawk while juggling an academic career. It's a somewhat removed adaptation of interior moments of mourning that reflects on nature as a form of therapy.

Screening at the 2026 Victoria Film Festival on Feb. 10, 12 & 15.

Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair (prod. Linwood Boomer).

Tow (dir. Stephanie Laing).

Forbidden Fruits (dir. Meredith Alloway) x SXSW 2026.

IFC/Shudder's likely future cult classic, female-focused horror-comedy stars Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung, Victoria Pedretti, and Alexandra Shipp as a coven of attractive witches masquerading as mild-mannered retail workers in a Dallas mall. In the strong tradition of teen witchcraft movies like The Craft, the trippy film establishes a clear gothic but moody style and tone that's enticing to watch.

Disclosure Day (dir. Steven Spielberg).

The Wizard of the Kremlin (Le Mage du Kremlin, dir. Olivier Assayas) x TIFF 2025.

Jude Law and Paul Dano star in a fictionalized, English-language political satire of post-Soviet Russian power as a young Vladimir Putin (aka the "tsar") and his kingmaker operative, inspired by the actual titular "wizard," Vladislav Surkov. It aims to retell three decades of empirical history as an extended monologue, drawing on French-Italian essayist Giuliano da Empoli's 2022 debut novel of the same name. There's just something amiss about the westernized telling of Putin's rise to power in the 1990s. Dano's Vadim Baranov greatly understands the inner workings of a totalitarian propaganda state, but the sprawling explanation of the birth of the Russian Federation remains cryptically simple in execution.