Terence Davies is one of the living masters, a filmmaker who has never made a bad movie and has made several great ones. His latest serves as a reminder of his nuance and grace as it tells the life story of Siegfried Sassoon, a famous World War I poet. Davies allows this unique biopic to…

Riz Ahmed is on a hot streak, earning an Oscar nomination for “Sound of Metal” and raves for his work in this month’s “Mogul Mowgli.” To say that Michael Pearce’s “Encounter” derails that run isn’t too much of an exaggeration, however he’s easily the best thing about this deeply frustrating story of mental illness and…

Theodore Melfi’s “The Starling” expends so much energy trying to tug at your heartstrings that it never bothers to develop a pulse of its own. It’s a stubbornly shallow film, the kind that traffics in clichés about grief to such a degree that it almost plays like the kind of parody of Oscar bait someone…

The international slate of films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival included a nice helping of titles from Africa, three of which debuted over the course of the festival’s first three days. These included the Afrofuturist-musical “Neptune Frost” from Rwanda, the horror film “Mlungu Wam (Good Madam)” from South Africa, and mother-daughter drama “Lingui,…

The Toronto International Film Festival, a bellwether for the awards season, typically invites a certain kind of film: prestige period pieces, serious dramas on heavy subjects, and especially biopics. This year offers three wildly different kinds of biopics: an eccentric Victorian set tale concerning one man’s love of cats, a famous actor’s modest childhood within…

Largely loyal to the 2018 highly-acclaimed thriller of the same name, “The Guilty” will offend some cinephiles with its very existence. “Just the see the original,” they will shout, basically ending all conversation about the remake with the accusation that it should have never happened. However, if you’re willing to recognize that the remake industry…