Scream 7 is unlikely to disappoint franchise fans, because it delivers the familiar ingredients with enough energy and self-awareness to keep the machinery running: media satire, nostalgia, meta-theory, and the enduring thrill of a mask that can belong to anyone.
Dreams critiques privilege effectively, but it does so from a position that never quite identifies with—or fully explains—the social ecosystem it stages, suggesting that this sphere of wealth is less Jennifer’s (Jessica Chastain) lived world than an apparatus she wields. Isaac Hernández is especially compelling—his physical credibility as a dancer and his Spanish-speaking presence ground Fernando’s vulnerability without reducing him to innocence. The result is a film that is less interested in romance than in domination: an unsparing portrait of how privilege can convert desire into ownership, and how the language of love can become one more instrument for denying another person’s individuality and becomes our ideally object of desire and satisfaction.
Crime 101 deserves more credit than it is likely to receive in the crowded marketplace of action releases. Layton, whose earlier work already showed a talent for staging real-world systems with narrative finesse, orchestrates this ensemble with cleverness and restraint, delivering a film that is both satisfyingly watchable and formally distinctive. It is a rare genre piece in which the camera and the soundtrack do not merely accompany the thrill—they are the thrill.
The film’s poster is an apt visual correlative of its central tension: two figures sharing the same city and the same frame, yet inhabiting different moments of that space-time. Their proximity suggests intimacy, but the subtle fracture running through the image—separating them even as they face one another—registers a quieter distance of gaze, posture, and emotional temperature. It captures what Midwinter Break traces with such precision: a long marriage in which partners remain physically together while moving along divergent interior timelines, each carrying a private crisis the other can only partially perceive.
Khatami’s self-description as an orphan or nomadic filmmaker, together with the film’s Canada–France–Poland co-production context, positions cinema as a space of relative freedom—one where the work need not “answer” in advance to national expectation or identity branding. This stance also underwrites the film’s refusal to be reduced to an “ethnic” label as well as a genre film: even as it incorporates Turkish cultural textures with remarkable density, it aims at something more structurally legible—a study of how violence becomes tradition, how familial memory hardens into an inheritance, and how form itself (tableaux and close-ups; shifts from brightness to darkness; the strategic withholding of a guiding musical score) can render that inheritance visible without presuming to resolve it as a linear storyline.
When the father takes the two boys with him to Lagos to seek overdue payment from his boss, the film renders the city legible through sheer proximity: the camera clings to faces in insistent close-up, letting skin and gaze fill the frame against a densely populated, slightly chaotic urban field. The result is an intimacy that feels pointedly personal—almost tactile—so that public space registers less as panorama than as pressure: noise, movement, and crowding filtered through what the father and boys see, endure, and attempt to comprehend during the political unrest in Nigeria in 1993.
The Captive is an intriguing meditation on narration as survival and self-fashioning—an account of a celebrated writer’s life that is deliberately unresolved, and perhaps most persuasive precisely when it refuses to convert captivity, desire, and invention into a single, stable truth.
“Pillion,” the word for the back seat on a motorbike, becomes an apt metaphor for a romance structured around riding behind someone else’s desire, will, and direction. The film Pillion, written and directed by Harry Lighton, is a gay-drama-romance structured around an asymmetrical relationship whose very premise is power: Colin (Harry Melling), a sensitive holiday carol singer and self-effacing “wallflower,” becomes fixated on Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), the strikingly attractive leader of a motorbike club.
The key term—la grazia—is defined as pardon. When the Pope tells De Santis that he possesses la grazia—pardon—the president answers with a simple, disarming question: “What is it?” The film’s answer is neither doctrinal nor procedural. Pardon becomes a late-life problem: not the cancellation of guilt, but the “beauty of doubt,” a state in which passion has been replaced by a fragile ethics of reconsideration. “Whose are our days? No one knows; we must discover,” De Santis reflects, only to arrive later at a paradox: they are ours, and yet a whole lifetime is insufficient to understand them. The film repeatedly returns to this sense of weight and lightness—the gravity of years, the possibility of “absence of gravity”—as if pardon were not a juridical act but a way of inhabiting time.
The series rests on a compelling dual focus: two leads (Hudson Williams as Shane Hollander and Connor Storrie as Illya Rozanov) whose acting registers both vulnerability and a palpable masculine resistance, allowing the emotional tensions of secrecy, desire, and self-protection to remain visible without being over-explained. The result is often striking in its affective clarity: a love story shaped as much by what cannot be said publicly as by what is felt privately.
The film’s opening title card frames this journey as a passage across a perilous bridge between Heaven and Hell, warned to be “thinner than a strand of hair and sharper than a sword”—an image that anticipates both the fragility and the violence that will shape the path ahead.
Cold Storage, anchored by excellent casting, is best approached as a knowingly conventional, tonally mixed crowd-pleaser—cliché in outline, yet sustained by a playful intergenerational pairing and an agile balance of horror, action, and humour.
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is less a conventional “agent” film than a meticulously assembled mosaic of 1970s Brazil. From its opening movements—stitched with the textures of the period, including television-like portraits, echoes of 1970s cinema, and songs that seep into character situations—the film builds a portrait of an era rather than a single plotline. The production design is strikingly precise, recreating the atmosphere, colors, and social rhythms of Recife with a realism that feels lived-in rather than nostalgic.
This week’s two new releases, Timur Bekmambetov’s Mercy and Sam Raimi’s Send Help, approach contemporary genre cinema through two familiar infrastructures of suspense: the tribunal and the survival scenario. Let me be clear, I am a huge fan of both directors! However, both films announce high-concept premises—one grounded in algorithmic justice, the other in workplace humiliation transposed into a desert-tropical-island revenge fantasy—yet each also reveals how quickly an appealing hook can be constrained by formula.
Perfectly a Strangeness (Alison McAlpine) and The girl who cried pearls (Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski) arrive to the 2026 Oscar conversation not by converging on a shared aesthetic program, but by staging two different propositions about cinema’s relation to knowledge. Taken together, these shorts suggest a productive polarity in contemporary Canadian screen culture: the documentary that becomes essay, and the fable that becomes ethics.
François Ozon opens The Stranger with the shock of Camus’s first confession—“J’ai tué un Arabe”—and then rewinds to the mother’s death, the wake, and the day that will become evidence.
Wonder Man intrigues more through its intention (shifting Marvel toward industry satire and social comedy) than through its execution at this stage: too slow, too scattered, and still lacking the center of gravity its title announces.
The film’s cinematography is its first decisive argument: the images are superbly calibrated to evoke the texture and tonal register associated with the French New Wave, not simply as pastiche but as a sustained aesthetic environment. The result is strikingly persuasive—so persuasive, in fact, that the viewing experience raises a central question the film itself seems to invite: is this an homage, or a quasi-ethnographic observation of an artistic “tribe,” and, if so, to what end?
Shannon favors clarity over flourish. The camera locates the game’s architecture—spacing, rotations, the small communications that make a set play work—alongside conversational scenes that index intergenerational memory and the persistence of trauma (Indian Residential Schools). Archival gestures (photos, local broadcasts, news clippings) are woven lightly rather than didactically; ambient sound from gyms and shorelines keeps the film rooted in place. The result is an ecology of images: country, community, and court read as one continuous field.
Bader and Blyth have easy, credible chemistry—the film’s chief asset—and the travelogue structure proves a smart adaptation choice. Instead of a single melodramatic rupture, we get a collage of small decisions (missed cabs, bad rentals, inside jokes) that shows how affection actually accumulates.
by Hudson Moura Father Mother Sister Brother—written and directed by Jim Jarmusch—embraces a deliberately raw, unadorned approach: a triptych of…