“Blue Bayou” tells the harrowing story of an American we rarely see in film. Justin Chon’s Antonio LeBlanc, a Korean adoptee living in Louisiana, faces deportation to a country he doesn’t know after an altercation with a police officer. The possibility of being deported threatens to change the lives of his loved ones, like his…

There is a graceful ease to Mia Hansen-Løve’s cinematic prose, one that can feel misleadingly simple at times. But once you allow her placid beats wash over you, the intricacy of her ideas rises to the surface with little effort, revealing the deep thinker and feeler Hansen-Løve always has been. Just think of “Eden” and…

Clint Eastwood will be 92 next May.  Now. To take a particular kind of stock of this fact. The Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira lived to be 106. And he completed his final film in 2015, the year he died. So when we are talking about Eastwood’s ostensibly late filmography, and we consider the speediness…

My continued coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival’s African cinema programming included three more gems: Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s coming-of-age short film “Astel” from Senegal, Khadar Ayderus Ahmed’s romantic drama “The Gravedigger’s Wife” from Somalia, and Jean Luc Herbulot’s genre-defying thriller “Saloum.” Finding raw emotions in both subtle familial drama and larger-than-life situations, these filmmakers each explore how location…

TIFF is often a home for potential Oscar contenders and celebrities who look great on a red carpet but there’s another thing that’s easy to find every year in Canada: very serious subject matter. A trio of films that premiered there this year work with themes of survival, trauma, abuse, school shootings, and much more.…

Maria Schrader’s “I’m Your Man,” which won an award at Berlin earlier this year before a limited theatrical release from Magnolia next week, is a clever little movie, a film that defies its set-up as a familiar, quirky rom-com to become something deeper and more poignant about the human condition. Of course, using unimaginable technology…