After sliding back into the docu realm, French Canadian filmmaker Geneviève Dulude-De Celles has returned to fiction with Petite rose (formerly titled Fleur bleue) – a co-production between Canada, Belgium and Bugaria. Filming began this week in Montreal. This was selected as part of the Venice Gap-Financing Market in 2023 and received some coin via Eurimages earlier this year. Dulude-De Celles had her fiction feature debut Une Colonie (2018) premiere at the Berlinale. Colonelle films’ Sarah Mannering and Fanny Drew will produce. We’re guessing this works with themes of themes of displacement, immigration, nostalgia, and what is ultimately gained and lost when uprooting.… Read the rest
Although it will invariably be confused with the 2014 Stephen Hawking biopic, Timm Kröger’s fascinating sophomore feature The Universal Theory (Die Theorie Von Allem) blends modern cinema’s excessive obsession with the notion of the multiverse into a gloomy, sci-fi neo noir. It’s also a fatalistic, overcast love story, reminiscent of everything from Solaris (1972) to Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime Je T’aime (1968), utilizing contemporary fascinations folded into vintage aesthetics. In the wake of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), Kröger’s film arrives as if from some fortuitous concentric time loop to revel in the ripple effects of the atomic bomb.… 
While he’s one of the greatest film directors of all time, mostly thanks to a handful of films he delivered during the 1970s New American Cinema movement, 
To borrow a succinct phrase from Beyonce, ‘pretty hurts,’ a sentiment quivering through Coraline Fargeat’s morbidly entertaining sophomore feature, The Substance. Its simplistic title eventually reveals itself to be a vicious bit of irony, considering it refers to a magical titular potion which seems fashioned for those who are actually lacking substance, their worth defined solely by the superficiality of youth and beauty. Los Angeles turns out to be ground zero for this unique riff on Death Becomes Her (1992), plus a formidable array of other cult titles in what is essentially a ‘be careful what you wish for’ moral fable.… 
Satisfying genre films are generally few and far between these days, so it’s with absolute delight to discover something as genuinely impressive as Jennifer Kent’s directorial debut, The Babadook. Expanded from her 2005 short film, “Monster,” it’s not so much that Kent’s premise is anything revolutionary, but her ability to tap into base human fears and without the aid of cheap or excessive frills only makes this simplistic narrative all the more potent. Additionally, Kent’s built her scares around a strong, emotional core, examining the frazzled relationship between a single mother and her son as they struggle to come together after a terrible tragedy.…