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On its fourth weekend, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings still conquered. The first Marvel movie directed by an Asian filmmaker and headlined by a predominantly Asian cast stayed number one and became the biggest-grossing film not only of this year but also of the coronavirus pandemic era.

In 1989 Raul Julia spoke with the journalists of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association about playing Óscar Arnulfo Romero in John Duigan’s Romero. Romero was the Archbishop of San Salvador who was assassinated in 1980 for taking a stand against the death squads of the military dictatorship.

The Guilty stars Jake Gyllenhaal in a remake of the 2019 Danish Oscar entry, Den Skylidge about a 911 dispatcher in a race against time as he endeavors to save a kidnapped woman. In this rendition, a woman (Riley Keough) is held captive in a moving van on an LA highway.

Wars, upheavals, changing politics, all have shaped filmmaking in Iraq. In 1909 the country’s first film project took place, but it was not seemingly in the Iraqi’s DNA to indulge in cinema.

A stirring autobiographical examination of the long shadows of familial neglect and violence, director Gian Cassini’s Comala uses the 2010 murder of his estranged father to explore trauma left undiscussed and truths left unsaid. A world premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, the movie deftly sidesteps any type of pat true crime framing of its details, slowly developing into something much more delicate, ruminative, and haunting.

Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill, which would go on to sell 33 million copies worldwide, arrived with a bang, stirring up no small amount of cultural commentary and controversy with its emotionally raw lyrics. So, it’s perhaps fitting that a documentary about its making, reception, and touring, which recently enjoyed its world premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, would end up also engendering friction.

The People’s Choice Award winner in the nonfiction section of the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, The Rescue recounts a three-week story that gripped the world’s imagination in the summer of 2018 – a race against time in impending monsoon conditions to locate and extricate 12 members of a junior football team, ages 11 to 16, and their assistant coach trapped inside a flooded cave in northern Thailand. Co-directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, the Academy Award-winning married tandem behind Free Solo, this well-crafted and highly engaging movie, set for theatrical release later in the year by Greenwich Entertainment, is almost certain to be a mainstay on awards season documentary shortlists.

Finnish director and writer Dome Karukoski loves drama. He tells HFPA journalist Tina Jøhnk Christensen that as a child he watched Macbeth on the BBC.

How would you react if the perfect partner were created for you – designed to respond to your every conscious or unconscious need?  That’s the premise behind Maria Shrader’s German film, I’m Your Man, which captured our imagination at the Toronto International Film Festival. German actress Maren Eggert plays scientist Alma Felser, a single woman who is extremely cynical and reluctant to take on a job evaluating a new line of humanoid cyborgs to determine what rights they should be granted in society.

An autobiographical self-portrait and the feature film debut of Rebeca Huntt, Beba generated considerable buzz ahead of its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. A defiantly uncommercial filmic essay that sifts through questions of mental health, family history, racial identity, and general late-Millennial occupational uncertainty from the perspective of a young Afro-Latina woman of Dominican and Venezuelan parentage, this documentary is unlikely to connect with a mainstream audience; it honestly feels like an act of cinematic self-care as much as anything else.