REEL | Top 10 Films of the 21st Century So Far

"She turns and walks away."

Janus Films / Block 2 Pictures

1) In the Mood for Love ¹ (dir. Wong Kar-wai, 2000)

2) Mulholland Drive (dir. David Lynch, 2001)

3) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (dir. Michel Gondry, 2004)

4) Ghost World (dir. Terry Zwigoff, 2001)

5) The Social Network (dir. David Fincher, 2010)

FEAST | Global Flavours x Bar Asra x South Granville

"We want to celebrate the connection between cultures, ingredients, and people."

Tokyo Silk (sake, Calpico, pomegranate, and vodka) + Nigata Paper Plane (bourbon, spritz, grappa, and lemon)

South Granville—(May 9, 2025) Bar Asra, the brand new cocktail bar and restaurant, comes from seasoned Sirka chefs Kanwardeep Ahluwalia and Baldeep Singh (co-owners) and occupies the original hundred-year-old location of the legendary Vij's and later its sister restaurant Rangoli.

GENRE | Non-Stop Action – Josh Hartnett Boards 'Fight or Flight'

"I guess this is my last shot at redemption. "

Vertical Entertainment / Asbury Park Pictures

A blonde-haired Josh Hartnett stars as a disgraced former Secret Service operative blacklisted and exiled to Thailand in director James Madigan's "John Wick on a plane" style (same producers) non-stop action-comedy, Fight or Flight, about a commercial airplane possibly full of unknown hired mercenary killers fighting each other to eliminate the same mystery high-value target.

SCREEN | Hiring A Chinese 'Mistress Dispeller' x DOXA 2025

"When a fish takes the bait, your heart will beat with the fish."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

Director Elizabeth Lo documents the eponymous Chinese phenomenon of wives hiring professionals to save their crumbling marriages through one particular middle-aged couple in Mistress Dispeller. How she follows the raw, unfiltered emotions, feelings, and motivations of these strangers is nothing short of fascinating.

SCENE | A Historic Royal Visit – Arts Club Cares for 'Casey and Diana'

"This is like the homosexual version of the Make-A-Wish Foundation!"

Casey House / October 25, 1991

South Granville—Arts Club Theatre Company stages North Vancouver playwright Nick Green's acclaimed, fictionized AIDS crisis dramedy, Casey and Diana, inspired by the late Princess Diana's historic 1991 Toronto visit to Casey House, Canada's first freestanding hospice caring for people (primarily gay men at the time) dying from the HIV/AIDS virus. A real tearjerker of a stage play that premiered at the 2023 Stratford Festival, it's a powerful tale that lives up to the actual impact the event had, destigmatizing the epidemic and humanizing those afflicted.

SCREEN | Catching the Real 'Predators' x DOXA 2025

"I see To Catch a Predator as trying to make a public service entertaining."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

Director David Osit, a survivor of child sexual abuse himself, investigates the lasting impact of the hit 2004 Dateline NBC news program To Catch a Predator, famously hosted by journalist Chris Hansen. His documentary, aptly named Predators, revisits the television phenomenon that turned true crime into popular entertainment as it lured otherwise mild-mannered potential sex offenders with no previous criminal records into a trap where they were confronted and arrested on camera.

REEL | Marvel Redeems the 'Thunderbolts*' – Our Saddest Avengers

"Righteousness without power is just an opinion!"

Marvel Studios

Marvel reforms and redeems their own lesser misfit roster of anti-heroes (or past villains) in their off-brand Avengers-style team-up, Thunderbolts* (note the asterisk). Beef producer/director Jake Schreier helms the latest refreshingly straightforward adventure that tries hard and mostly succeeds in recapturing the MCU's original flavour of unlikely superhero fun, not too dissimilar from Guardians of the Galaxy or Suicide Squad.

SCREEN | Elizabeth Olsen Observes 'The Assessment'

"Because this society needs people who know what it is to love a child."

Magnolia Pictures / ShivHans Pictures

The appealing trio of Elizabeth Olsen, Alicia Vikander, and Himesh Patel star in French music video director Fleur Fortuné's discomforting sci-fi chamber drama, The Assessment, about a vaguely utopian near-future with strict rules around parenthood. Vikander plays an "assessor" who must judge Olsen and Patel's couple and their potential viability of raising a child over the course of seven long days.

REEL | Daisy Edgar-Jones Gambles Away 'On Swift Horses'

"Everything's looking real prosperous around here."

Sony Pictures Classics / Mongrel Media

Rising stars Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi play in-laws, Muriel and Julius, on similar paths apart in veteran television director Daniel Minahan's monochromatic, mid-'50s period queer romantic drama about post-Korean War relocation in the still unconquered American West. On Swift Horses' dual parallel romances represent the constrained and repressed cultural identity of the time, based on Kansas author Shannon Pufahl's novel of the same name, as adapted by screenwriter Bryce Kass.