Stonewalling (Huang Ji & Ryuji Otsuka, China)

🇨🇦🇺🇸 Criterion Channel

This highlight of TIFF 2023 is finally available to stream in Canada and the US.

Stonewalling follows a twenty-year-old student studying to be a flight attendant, Lynn (Yao Honggui), gets stonewalled in every aspect of her life when she finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy. It allows Ji and Otsuka to explore how babies and women’s fertility has been commodified in present day China, where the two-child policy has replaced the one-child policy: it’s the age of designer babies instead of forced abortions.

Sibyl (Justine Triet, France)

🇨🇦 Mubi, Hoopla, TUBI 🇺🇸 Prime, Hoopla/Kanopy/Tubi/FreeVee, Mubi 🇬🇧🇮🇪 Mubi 🇦🇺🇳🇿 VOD

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Justine Triet made history in May by becoming the third woman director to win the Palme d'Or for Anatomy of a Fall. As much as I loved that film, I actually think her previous film, Sibyl, is still her masterpiece. Part thriller, part melodrama, and part farce, Justine Triet creates an impressively controlled messiness in Sibyl, which is as surprising and bonkers as its protagonist. Virginie Efira stars as Sibyl, a psychiatrist in the process of closing down her practice in order to return to being a novelist. Starved for inspiration, and on the verge of dangerous territory — the last time she worked as a writer coincided with Sibyl’s alcoholism and a toxic if intense romantic relationship — she takes on one last client, an actress (Adèle Exarchopoulos) in the midst of her own melodrama, in the hopes of helping the actress and helping herself. It's hilarious, bonkers, and a complex portrait of a woman. It also features all-time great performances from Virginie Efira in the lead and Sandra Hüller in a scene-stealing supporting role. Hüller stars in Anatomy of a Fall. This was one of the best films of 2020, and it's still way too underseen.

​Read my appraisal of Virginie Efira's performance.​

​Read my review​

Passages (Ira Sachs, USA)

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Three of the greatest actors working today — Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adèle Exarchopoulous — star in Ira Sachs's exquisitely blocked and sexy love triangle about a narcissistic movie director (Rogowski) in Paris who starts having an affair with a woman (Exarchopoulous) behind his husband's (Whishaw) back. The costumes are amazing and the performances are so compelling that it's hard not to love even if it's a little bit slight.