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Dear Danny,We blinked, and ten days passed. How swiftly time goes by when in festival mode, just floating on films and friends. It’s not until I’m on the way home, writing my final dispatch in between airport terminals, that I realize how tremendously exhausted I am. A good time, then, to be reflecting on Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, quite the strong cup of black coffee. As a non-fan of In Bruges (2008) and Seven Psychopaths (2012), I was pleasantly surprised by the grim comic force of Martin McDonagh’s morality tale, a Southern Gothic hamlet pushed through the filter of British Catholic guilt. The eponymous placards are positioned on a dilapidated road and painted red with a confrontational query, part of the crusade waged by the grieving Mildred (Frances McDormand) against the local lawmakers who’ve failed to locate the man behind her daughter’s rape and murder.

It’s been an interesting run-up to the Toronto International Film Festival, and in terms of the survival of the species, the good ol’ U.S.A. has been something of a race to the bottom. What would do us in first: violent neo-Nazis whose activities are almost explicitly condoned by the Klansman In Chief? Or a 1,000-year weather event on the Gulf Coast whose magnitude surely owes something to global climate change, and whose aftermath of collapsing dams and exploding chemical factories has everything to do with systematic neglect?Given the state of things down here, who wouldn’t want to repair to Canada for some challenging cinema? As always, the Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff) is the place to be in September, and Wavelengths once again features the best of the fest. This is because the films selected for Wavelengths are the opposite of escapism. Whether they tackle...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

10 Cloverfield Lane (Dan Trachtenberg)

Forget the Cloverfield connection. The actors who were in this film didn’t even know what the title was until moments before the first trailer dropped. Producer J.J. Abrams used that branding as part of the wrapping for its promotional mystery box, but the movie stands perfectly alone from 2008’s found-footage monster picture. Hell, 10 Cloverfield Lane perhaps doesn’t even take place within the same...

After premiering on home soil at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, Canadian filmmaker Kazik Radwanski’s second feature film, How Heavy This Hammer, screened at the Berlin International Film Festival to critical acclaim. A New York premiere, as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s annual winter First Look series, wouldn’t surface until a year later where, in anticipation of its Gotham debut, it was deemed by the Village Voice as “striking, clear-eyed, and very, very funny” and “justly celebrated as one of the best Canadian films in years.” A microbudget film about an overweight Canadian father saddled with a combative attitude and love for computer games (well, one […]...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries.NEWSWang Bing's Bitter MoneyA touching bit of news from the Canadian independent film scene: When the Toronto Film Critics Association picked Hugh Gibson as the recipient for its $100,000 prize for his terrific documentary The Stairs, Gibson decided to split the award with the other nominees:Kazik Radwanski (How Heavy This Hammer), and Matt Johnson (Operation Avalanche). Solidarity in Canadian filmmaking!Berlin Critics' Week has announced part of its lineup for its festival, which runs concurrently as the Berlin International Film Festival and is intended both as counter-programming and counter-experience. Films so far include I Am Not Madame Bovary, The Human Surge and Bertrand Bonello's Sarah Winchester.Meanwhile, in New York the 17th Film Comment Selects series, which tends to be more unconventional than the Film Society of Lincoln Center's New York Film Festival, will include an "Ultra-widescreen" version of...

Buckle up for a Cold War conspiracy when Operation Avalanche launches on DVD, Digital HD and On Demand January 3 from Lionsgate. Filmmaker and actor Matt Johnson stars alongside Owen Williams and Josh Boles as undercover CIA agents on a mission at Nasa in what Variety is calling “a wild rewrite of space-age history.” A film festival favorite,Operation Avalanche was an official selection at the SXSW Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Hot Docs, and Mammoth Film Festival. The Operation Avalanche DVD will be available for the suggested retail price of $19.98.

Official Synopsis

In 1967 two CIA agents go undercover at Nasa to investigate a possible Russian mole. In disguise as documentary filmmakers, they tap phones and break into offices while purporting to learn more about the Apollo project. But when they end up uncovering a shocking Nasa secret — and a major government cover-up — they decide to embark on a new mission...

Maren Ade’s German comedy won three awards including best director and best actress, while Barry Jenkins’s drama was named best film.

Father-daughter comedy Toni Erdmann was also named best foreign language film. Moonlight won best film and best supporting actor for Mahershala Ali at Sunday’s awards meeting of The Toronto Film Critics Association (Tfca).

Best actor honours went to Adam Driver for Paterson. Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester By The Sea won awards for screenplay and supporting actress for Michelle Williams.

The Canadian Tire Allan King Documentary Award, which comes with a $5,000 cheque, went to Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson. Zootopia won the animation prize.

The best of three finallists selected for the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award will be unveiled at the Tfca Awards Gala on January 10. They are: How Heavy This Hammer by Kazik Radwanski; Operation Avalanche by Matt Johnson; and The Stairs by Hugh Gibson.

The winner of the Stella Artois Jay Scott...

Last year the The Globe & Mail released an article entitled "What is Wrong with the Canadian Film Industry?" that outlined the problems facing our country’s cinema: low box-office numbers, a crisis of English-Canadian identity, an inability to compete with Hollywood entertainments etc., etc. Focused entirely on the industry, the piece fails to mention the resurgence that had been taking root for quite some time. 2015 was an important year for Canadian cinema, but while Room, Hyena Road and Wet Bum ate up the article’s word count, three of the year’s great Canadian films by emerging directors went unnoticed: Isiah Medina’s 88:88, Kurt Walker’s Hit 2 Pass, and Kazik Radwanski’s How Heavy This Hammer. Equating cinema with ‘content,’ a product to be bought and sold, the article is as much a reflection of the problems with Canadian cinema as an exposition of it. But this insidious...

Elle's published a delightful conversation between Aaron Paul and Millie Bobby Brown, the breakout star of Stranger Things. We've also gathered interviews with, among others, Kristen Stewart, Kazik Radwanski (How Heavy This Hammer), David Mackenzie and Jeff Bridges (Hell or High Water), Kelly Reichardt (River of Grass), Ben Wheatley (High-Rise), Joachim Trier (Louder Than Bombs), David Lowery (Pete's Dragon), Mark Pellington (Blindspot), Charlie Kaufman (Anomalisa), Deborah Stratman, Jaume Collet-Serra (The Shallows), Todd Solondz and Ellen Burstyn (Wiener-Dog), Matt Johnson (Operation Avalanche), Meryl Streep (Florence Foster Jenkins), Bérénice Bejo and Brady Corbet (The Childhood of a Leader) and Paulina García (Little Men). » - David Hudson...

Elle's published a delightful conversation between Aaron Paul and Millie Bobby Brown, the breakout star of Stranger Things. We've also gathered interviews with, among others, Kristen Stewart, Kazik Radwanski (How Heavy This Hammer), David Mackenzie and Jeff Bridges (Hell or High Water), Kelly Reichardt (River of Grass), Ben Wheatley (High-Rise), Joachim Trier (Louder Than Bombs), David Lowery (Pete's Dragon), Mark Pellington (Blindspot), Charlie Kaufman (Anomalisa), Deborah Stratman, Jaume Collet-Serra (The Shallows), Todd Solondz and Ellen Burstyn (Wiener-Dog), Matt Johnson (Operation Avalanche), Meryl Streep (Florence Foster Jenkins), Bérénice Bejo and Brady Corbet (The Childhood of a Leader) and Paulina García (Little Men). » - David Hudson...

A friend and a contributor to the Notebook has taken a deep breath of air and expanded his droll short films—which we’ve featured on Mubi—into a modest feature that received a decidedly impressive premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in February and will next show at the New Directors/New Films collaboration between New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art.Short Stay does not feel like a bigger film than director Ted Fendt's charmingly ill-fitting shorts, but rather is more robust, fuller in passing detail and commonplace incident. In other words: unassuming, but charged. This new movie very much resembles Fendt’s wonderful shorts, which feature young people of unenunciated dissatisfaction and nearly inscrutable psychology living small scale lives full of long-time acquaintances, a few friendships, over-visited family homes, and well-trod suburban and small town strolls. Fendt is also...

With his second feature, How Heavy This Hammer, Toronto-based filmmaker Kazik Radwanski tackles the trope of the seemingly soulless main-child with a formal intensity that is at once casual and rigorous, and all the more unnerving as a result. Erwin (Erwin Van Cotthem) is unable to find anything of value in his life beyond the mental and emotional respite of fantasy computer games and the brutish diversions of rugby matches. His wife and two sons are nothing more than grating obligations, whose needs nearly drive him to the brink of an all out crisis. Radwanski renders these quotidian frustrations – […]...

A friend and a contributor to the Notebook has taken a deep breath of air and expanded his droll short films—which we’ve featured on Mubi—into a modest feature that is receiving a decidedly impressive premiere in Berlin. Short Stay does not feel like a bigger film than director Ted Fendt's charmingly ill-fitting shorts, but rather is a more robust, fuller in passing detail and commonplace incident. In other words: unassuming, but charged. This new feature very much resembles Fendt’s wonderful shorts, which feature young people of unenunciated dissatisfaction and nearly inscrutable psychology living small scale lives full of long-time acquaintances, a few friendships, over-visited family homes, and well-trod suburban and small town strolls. Fendt is also a distinctly regional filmmaker; though based in New York, where he is a projectionist and translator, the director chooses to film in and around his home town in south...

While film festivals boast their big World Premieres, the events are also important for smaller films to continue the momentum they've built elsewhere. Last fall, writer/director Kazik Radwanski hit Tiff to unveil his new feature, "How Heavy This Hammer," and after a positive reception, he's getting his passport ready to head to the Berlin International Film Festival to show European audiences what he's cooked up, and today we have the exclusive trailer. Read More: The 10 Most Anticipated Films Of The 2016 Berlin Film Festival Starring Erwin Van Cotthem, Kate Ashley, Seth Kirsh, and Andrew Latter, the uniquely funny film centers on a married man whose life unravels as becomes even more of a social outcast. Here's the synopsis:  The mournful aria already suggests that the battle is lost and sure enough, the walls of the fort are soon breached. Skirmishes, spurting blood, scattered resistance and the defences duly come crashing down,...

Programme includes 34 world premieres.

The line-up for the 46th Berlinale Forum has been announced and will feature a total of 44 films in its main programme, of which 34 are world premieres and nine international premieres.

One focus of this year’s programme is the Arab region, with films shot by mainly young directors from an area that stretches between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, exploring both the past and present of their homelands.

In A Magical Substance Flows into Me, artist Jumana Manna sets out in search of the musical diversity of the Palestinian region.

Tamer El Said’s feature In the Last Days of the City (Akher ayam el madina) sends his alter-ego Khalid through the director’s home city of Cairo, which is in a state of uproar.

Maher Abi Samra’s documentary A Maid for Each (Makhdoumin) grapples with the employment of maids from the Global South in middle-class Lebanese households, a practice...

Below you will find our favorite films of the 40th Toronto International Film Festival, as well as an index of our coverage.Top Picksfernando F. Crocei. The Assassin, Sunset Song, In Jackson Heights, Francofonia, Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, Anomalisa, Right Now, Wrong ThenII. 45 Years, Office, Blood of My Blood, 11 Minutes, Yakuza Apocalypse, The Apostate, How Heavy the Hammer, High-Rise, The Family Fang, Bleak Street, No Home Movie, Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, In the Shadow of WomenIII. The Idol, Spotlight, Eva Doesn’t Sleep, The Clan, Campo Grande, A Copy of My Mind, The Other Side, Hitchcock/TruffautDANIEL Kasmani. In Jackson Heights, Office, Fireworks (Archives), Engram of ReturningII. Spl 2: A Time for Consequence, Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, The Event, Something Horizontal, Anamolisa, Navigator, Fallen Objects, Afternoon, Palms, 11 MinutesIII. Neon Bull, The Reminder, Analysis of Emotions and Vexations, Terrestrial, Blood of My Blood, 45 Years, Francofonia,...

Adam Cook, in a dispatch to Brooklyn Magazine, writes that How Heavy This Hammer, Kazik Radwanski’s followup to his debut feature, Tower, "is "a low-key, understated character portrait of a middle-aged family man named Erwin (Erwin Van Cotthem) who seems casually ambivalent towards life… "On a narrative level, there’s not too much going on here… but Radwanski’s sensitive and empathetic approach effectively brings the viewer into this mundanity and helping us understand the silent pressures and tensions of this unremarkable man and his existential woes." We're collecting more reviews, all of them quite positive so far. » - David Hudson...

Adam Cook, in a dispatch to Brooklyn Magazine, writes that How Heavy This Hammer, Kazik Radwanski’s followup to his debut feature, Tower, "is "a low-key, understated character portrait of a middle-aged family man named Erwin (Erwin Van Cotthem) who seems casually ambivalent towards life… "On a narrative level, there’s not too much going on here… but Radwanski’s sensitive and empathetic approach effectively brings the viewer into this mundanity and helping us understand the silent pressures and tensions of this unremarkable man and his existential woes." We're collecting more reviews, all of them quite positive so far. » - David Hudson...

Dear Fernando,Minotaur is the kind of film we’re able to see at such a big festival as Toronto only because adventurous programming strands like Wavelengths have the patience to present their unique tempo within the hectic atmosphere of the surrounding festivities. And its tempo is indeed unique, evoked through the opiated, satin haze of its digital photography. Two young men and a young woman, bohemian occupants of a Mexico City apartment, lounge, inactive and increasingly beset by a crushing sleepiness. Long takes in widescreen fragment their flat, making its space mysterious and jagged. The few other people who interact with this somnolent trio are all helpers, servants or delivery men, the dialog almost all functional, except for excerpts of a book read out loud periodically about a misremembered or perhaps never-happened meeting. You feel echoes of Last Year in Marienbad and also perhaps Marguerite Duras’s India Song,...

Indie producers Riel Roch Decter and Sebastian Pardo’s prod company label Memory is sprouting a new branch in the shape of a curated traveling short film series. Taking place in Toronto during Tiff on September 12th, the inaugural card for Memory Presents is a talent heavy who’s who of upcoming helmers that we’ve seen, and/or will be seeing at major fests such as Sundance, SXSW, Cannes and Venice/Tiff. The 90-minute-ish program will include world premiere showings from Robert Eggers, Kahlil Joseph (both will already be at Tiff presenting their feature length films) and Patrick Brice (from Creep and The Overnight) along with Sammy Harkham. Noteworthy female filmmakers include SXSW & Cannes-winning short from Pippa Bianco (see still of Share above) and Celia Rowlson-Hall who’ll next to featuring her debut feature Ma at the Venice Film Festival will have her previous short shown as well. We...

Potential awards season contenders Truth from James Vanderbilt and Marc Abraham’s I Saw The Light starring Tom Hiddleston as Hank Williams land world premiere slots, while Paco Cabezas’s Mr. Right will close the festival.

London is the subject of the seventh annual City To City programme that features world premieres of Tom Geens’ Couple In A Hole starring Paul Higgins and Kate Dickie and Michael Caton-Jones’ Urban Hymn with Letitia Wright and Shirley Henderson. Elaine Constantine’s Northern Soul gets a North American premiere.

The world premiere of Catherine Hardwicke’s Miss You Already is among five additions to the galas alongside Mr. Right, an action comedy starring Sam Rockwell and Anna Kendrick.

Matthew Cullen’s Martin Amis adaptation London Fields and David Gordon Green’s Our Brand Is Crisis get first public screenings in the Special Presentations roster with I Saw The Light.

Tiff top brass also unveiled the Contemporary World Cinema section, featuring...