Dir: Tony Marra, Canada, 2023. "Billy Runs Boston?" is a film about a runner's relationship with his sister and brother as he tries to qualify for Boston. Includes a Q&A with writer/director Tony Marra and actor Troy Cox. Tony Marra, a Toronto-based actor and runner, has ventured into the world of filmmaking with his debut feature film, "Billy Runs Boston?”. This thought-provoking film delves into various issues facing the running community, including cheating, bullying of cheaters, over-training while injured, the pervasive impact of social media, and the deeply sensitive topic of suicide. Amidst these themes, it also celebrates the profound rewards and sheer joy of running. Complex family dynamics play a pivotal role in weaving the narrative of the film, adding depth and emotion to the story. "If you have any link to the running community, go see it. And it is a must for every runner striving for or has succeeded in a BQ.” “Love this film. Dripping with humanity and poetry and compassion and quirk. This film speaks to human integrity, individual resilience and community transformation that transcends 'Boston'.” "A truly heartfelt film. Brilliantly captivating. A must for all to see!”

Dir: Henry Selick, US, 2009. Dakota Fanning, Ian McShane, Teri Hatcher, Keith David, John Hodgman, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders. Celebrate the 15th anniversary of the acclaimed stop-motion epic that has enchanted fans since its release back in 2009, when Coraline returns to cinemas. “A visual marvel. Gorgeous to watch in all its dazzling stop-motion animation splendor.” - USA Today

Dir: Kelly O'Sullivan/Alex Thompson, US, 2024. Keith Kupferer, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Tara Mallen. Seattle International Film Festival Winner, Best Director and Best Performance. “Ghostlight is one of the best movies of the year, and if that’s a meaningful enough statement for you, then feel free to stop reading now… Ghostlight follows one family, and in particular the father Dan. His daughter has just been suspended from school for aggressively pushing a teacher, a punishment reduced from expulsion thanks to the pleadings of Dan’s wife, Sharon, who is struggling to keep the family together and sane… One day, after another one of Dan’s own blowups at work, a curious woman, Rita, beckons him into the semi-abandoned storefront where she and a ragtag group of actors are busy rehearsing a no-budget, amateur production of Romeo and Juliet. It’s an impulsive decision for both of them… But Dan’s soon drawn to the easy camaraderie of this makeshift theater troupe and the elegant power of Shakespeare’s prose, even though he admits he doesn’t understand any of it. For much of its running time, the film only hints at what’s actually troubling Dan and his family. It’s not a secret, exactly… but the revelation of their tragedy still hurts like a kick to the teeth… In the end, it becomes a film about the world-changing power of artistic communion, about how creativity, compassion, and forgiveness of oneself and others are all pit stops on the same human journey.” - Bilge Ebiri, Vulture.

Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos, US, 2024. Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe. "A macabre triptych in the style of Dogtooth and The Lobster... It’s spectacular. A psychological horror leavened with sly comedy, Kinds of Kindness stars Stone, Plemons, and Dafoe playing different characters in three self-contained stories, but themes and personalities reoccur... [In] The first tale Robert follows the bizarre instructions of his boss that require him to crash his car into another driver. Soon we learn Robert’s life for the past 10 years has been guided by this Svengali overlord down to reading material, sexual habits, and diet... In the second story, Plemons is Daniel, a police officer who awaits news about his wife, Liz, missing at sea... When Liz is found, she seems different... Daniel doubts that this is actually his wife, to the dismay of others who believe he is deluded. He tests her with increasingly bizarre, violent requests... In the final tale Emma and Andrew are devotees of a cult... When Emma is ousted from the group... she seeks to regain acceptance by fulfilling a prophecy, finding the one who resurrects the dead... Fans of the early work of Lanthimos will appreciate his new level of boldness." - Rania Richardson, Film-Forward

Dir: Bill Forsyth, US, 1983. Burt Lancaster, Peter Riegert, Peter Capaldi. “Bill Forsyth’s wonderfully wistful and charming comedy… and its happy-sad aroma is still as pungent as ever… The scene is a fictional fishing village in western Scotland, making its modest living from the lobster bound for the fancy restaurants of London and Paris, but which the locals can’t afford to eat. Mac, a junior oil executive from Texas obsessed with work and material values, has been tasked by his eccentric billionaire boss, Felix Happer, to travel to this village and persuade the entire community to sell up so that Happer can build a refinery there and capitalize on the new gush of North Sea oil… Slowly but surely, hard-hearted capitalist Mac is beguiled by the beauty of the place and the gentleness of the locals… In the early 80s, the idea of building an oil refinery didn’t have the frisson of darkness that it might have now, although this movie certainly saw that drilling for oil meant despoiling nature, and also that the oil business had a high-handed attitude to local communities who didn’t speak English… But Local Hero snares your heart because it takes on a fantasy element: something to do with Happer’s visionary obsession with the stars.” - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian. “A lyrical anti-urban comedy in the great tradition of films like I Know Where I'm Going and Whisky Galore!; and its essential triumph is to prove that comedy can still contain a gentle, almost mystical, aspect without necessarily being old-fashioned.” - Time Out London.

Presented by City Cinema and The Benevolent Irish Society. Dir: John Carney, Ireland, 2016. Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Jack Reynor, Aidan Gillen, Maria Doyle Kennedy. "Sing Street just might be your next favourite musical. Director John Carney previously proved his melodic movie-making prowess with Once and Begin Again, both of which used music to great effect.. Sing Street shifts the focus to Dublin during the 1980s... The film is set when many dreamt of escaping economic blight by boarding a ferry to London. The story centres around Conor, a 15-year-old who uses music to tune out his parents' nightly arguments. With their divorce looming, he is sent to a cheaper Catholic school where he's a target for bullies and a dictatorial headmaster. But none of that matters after Conor spies Raphina, a blow-dried, bangle-clad vision of beauty. To impress her, he forms a band with other like-minded misfits. Propelled by the power of 1980s pop, eye shadow and copious amounts of hair gel, Conor (who renames himself Cosmo) begins to find his own voice... The band becomes proficient surprisingly fast, but you'll be too busy bopping your head to quibble. Like any great musical, this works because the synth-driven songs move the story forward... Boy falling for a girl who's out of his league is nothing new, but it's the open-hearted conviction of Carney and Walsh-Peelo's approach to the material that makes this movie sing." - Eli Glasner, CBC

Dir: Christian Sparkes, Canada, 2024. Mark Lewis Jones, Sara Canning, Mary Walsh, Andy Jones. Atlantic Film Festival Winner for Best Screenwriting and Best Atlantic Director. "The town is dying. That’s the start of Christian Sparkes’ new drama Sweetland... The residents have a chance at government-assisted relocation and job retraining, but the offer is only good if every resident takes it, and Moses Sweetland doesn’t want to... He has little reason to leave: his whole life has been spent in the village... At its core, this is a very Newfoundland story. Outport communities have been resettled in a number of ways over the last 60 years, and the death of these small communities comes with a cultural cost... Jones is well known for playing gruff characters (Outlander, Star Wars: The Last Jedi), and as such, this role feels like it’s made for him... As much as it’s Lewis’s film, though, there are a few memorable supporting performances as well... One other constant is the stark but stunning beauty of Newfoundland... In Sweetland, the landscape itself is a character and perhaps the only one that Moses is truly comfortable with... Sweetland is unabashedly Newfoundland and captures the vibe of small-town living incredibly well; both the community and the isolation that can be created as a result... It is, in short, a good film, and a good Canadian film, and one worth seeing." - Mathew Simpson, That Shelf

Presented by City Cinema and The Benevolent Irish Society. Dir: John Ford, US, 1952. John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Barry Fitzgerald. Academy Award Winner for Best Director and Cinematography. “John Ford’s bluff and sentimental comedy, from 1952, set in the Irish countryside, is as much an anthropological adventure as a romantic rhapsody. It stars John Wayne as Sean Thornton, a big-shouldered American boxer who leaves Pittsburgh for his native Innisfree, where he buys the 'wee humble cottage' where he was born. There, he meets—in a cinematically ecstatic burst of love at first sight — a flame-haired shepherdess, Mary Kate Danaher, whose pig-headed, bull-chested brother opposes the union. Deeply enmeshed, beyond all expectation, in local customs — including the formalized rites of courtship — Sean finds that tradition reaches all the way into the conjugal bed, as the second half of the movie pivots on the consummation of the marriage and the violent battle for family honor on which it depends. Couched as a reminiscence by the village coachman and matchmaker, this lyrical ballad is filled with lavish greenery and antic characters whose manner conceals deep conscience and an iron will. Though Sean deploys the New World’s freethinking ways to break down oppressive rules, the enveloping community offers the tormented pugilist an old-school measure of redemption.” Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Dir: Josh Maroglin, US, 2024. June Squibb, Richard Roundtree, Malcolm McDowell. Provincetown International Film Festival Winner, Audience Award. “Writer-director Josh Margolin’s grandmother Thelma nearly fell for a senior-targeted scam, an incident that serves as the inspiration for Thelma, a warm and witty comedy starring the invaluable character actress June Squibb, who gets her first leading role at the age of 94 and delivers a knockout performance… Thelma is a widow who lives alone and refuses to even consider the idea she’s losing her independence, though it takes her a long time to move from Point A to Point B… and she’d be hopeless on the computer without the help of her goofy but good-hearted slacker grandson Danny… One afternoon, Thelma gets a call from a distraught Danny… she needs to send him $10,000. In cash. To a post office box… So Thelma takes a cab to the post office and mails the 10 grand… Uh-oh. Thelma has been scammed… The police say there’s not much that can be done but Thelma is having none of that… This is an action movie, starring a mismatched pair of seniors who make the unwise decision to travel across Los Angeles to track down scammers…. The hijinks occasionally take a back seat to some serious business… with old pros Squibb and Roundtree turning in captivating and elegantly grounded performances.” - Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times. “Thelma is genuinely one of the funniest films I’ve seen in a while.” - Max Weiss, Baltimore Magazine.

Dir: Baltasar Kormákur, Iceland, 2024. Egill Ólafsson, Kôki. Palmi Kormákur. “A dementia diagnosis… is the catalyst for taciturn Icelandic restaurateur Kristofer to close his Reykjavik restaurant and travel to London in the hopes of reuniting with a Japanese woman he loved and lost there 50 years previously... His decision… may be impulsive - particularly given that it’s 2020, with pandemic lockdown looming and borders closing - but it never comes across as foolhardy… Quickly, the screenplay throws us into a flashback of Kristofer as a charismatic, idealistic student at London School Of Economics... He takes a job… attracted as much by Miko, the pretty daughter of restaurant owner Takahashi-san, as he is by the desire to earn an honest wage... There are also shorter flashbacks to his time in Iceland with his wife... so that the different timelines work together to create a full picture of a life... It’s easy to see how the idealistic, poetic young Kristofer would have grown into the more pragmatic older man, and how his experiences with Miko have shaped his entire life... The majority of the film has a low-key urgency, events driven by the ticking clock of Kristofer’s diagnosis and the tightening grip of the pandemic... Yet, as their story comes full circle and long-held emotions finally come to the fore, there’s a sense of stillness, of peace - and, despite uncertainties past and present - of new beginnings.” – Nikki Baughan, Screen Daily

Dir: Thomas Napper, US/UK, 2024. Haley Bennett, Leo Suter, Ben Miles. “Like the elixirs she so carefully tends to at her vineyard, Widow Clicquot takes time to come into its fullest potential. Initially, it appears a sticky-sweet tale of love, as manifested by its heroine’s determination to carry on the vision of her late husband François. But it takes on added layers as she reveals the breadth of her ambition, and as her rosy recollections of her marriage give way to thornier ones — ultimately yielding a drama that feels more substantive than its 89-minute run time might suggest… Rooted in the history behind the still-renowned champagne Veuve Clicquot… The familiar yellow label becomes a symbol of enduring love, of female empowerment, even of cutting-edge technological advancement… An engaging and fitfully moving portrait of an almost accidental trailblazer. ‘When they struggle to survive, they become more reliant on their own strength,’ Clicquot says of her grapevines. ‘They become more of what they were meant to be.’" - Angie Han, The Hollywood Reporter