What's On
Oscar® Shorts 2025: Documentary
Four of this year's short documentary nominees are from the USA, and three of them deal with violence: a prisoner on death row, Parkland, and a police shooting incident in Chicago, 2018. Happily the other nominees focus on classical music.
Oscar® Shorts 2025: Live Action
This year's live action shorts include films from India, South Africa, the USA, the Netherlands, and Croatia about rhinos, robots, and testing times.
The Inheritance
The inheritance is a house in Philadelphia bequeathed to Julian by his grandmother. He asks his girlfriend Gwen to move in, and next thing he knows there's an entire collective, The House of Ubutu, a commune that will be a safe space for Black folk.
Cure
This month's VIFF Premium member selection is a spellbinding thriller from Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Detective Kenichi Takabe (Koji Yakusho) is faced with a string of apparently unmotivated murders committed by different people, but bearing the same signature.
Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat
In January 1961, seven months after Congolese independence, Patrice Lumumba is assassinated. In excavating the history of this political murder, this essay-film traces the complex and unlikely intersections of American jazz and Cold War geopolitics.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
A tense mystery and an act of radical protest, this film tells the story of an Iranian lawyer who’s lost his handgun and knows someone in his family took it. With every moment, his wife and daughters grow more afraid of him–yet none of them will confess…
Tori and Lokita
Sharing a sibling-like bond, immigrants Lokita (17) and Tori (12) work as performers in a trattoria, dealing drugs on the side, while navigating an indifferent bureaucracy. When Lokita is held captive in a marijuana grow op, events spiral out of control.
Emilia Pérez
When a defence attorney (Zoe Saldana) is enlisted to tend to the affairs of a notorious drug lord (Karla Sofía Gascón) completing gender affirmation surgery, there will be blood, ballads, and dance numbers. A maximalist musical from Jacques Audiard.
The Stand
This rousing doc explores a 1985 dispute over logging in the Haida Gwaii. Taking us from canny retrospective commentary to the thick of the action, director Chris Auchter employs animation and a wealth of archival footage to riveting effect.
Dune: Part One
Adapting Frank Herbert’s legendary novel for a true big-screen experience, Denis Villeneuve confirms his status as a visionary maker of blockbusters.
Dune: Part Two
Nominated for Best Picture, and for cinematography, production design, visual effects and sound, Denis Villeneuve's second helping of Frank Herbert cosmology gives us jaw-dropping spectacle and epic storytelling.