Portside

Critics are fawning over Good Luck to You, Leo Grande for its “brave” sex positivity. But the crowd-pleasing comedy is actually anxiously prescriptive, and it relies on an angelic and selfless sex worker to teach a middle-aged woman how to love her body.

The Janes felt only months ago like a warning. Now it feels like a manual for action.

David Cronenberg’s latest film, Crimes of the Future, is a return to the “body horror” genre. It brings back the gross-out gore that first made his career in the 1970s — but without the thrills.

Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes' expansive and emotional documentary about the Jane Collective sheds necessary light on a very recent history.

The US military is likely hoping, as they did with the original, that “the box office will be a bell ringer” for them, and it will help restore the military’s image, which has been savaged by wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere.

Audrey Diwan’s film adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s abortion memoir, Happening, captures the violence and drama of its source material. It depicts a time when sex, for young women — without the resources of contraception and abortion — carried unfathomable consequences.

For almost two decades before 1939, Alfredo Cecchetti worked as a cameraman documenting the rise of the Fascist Party in Italy and its leader Il Duce, Benito Mussolini. Alfredo C. helped to immortalize the great machine of the Italian Fascist Regime – both in Italy covering countless public appearances of Mussolini and after 1939, the Italian invasion of Albania, as he followed the Italian troops and then filmed the new Italian settlers. Embedded in the archive are many films that were part of the Italian Fascist propaganda machine.

The Northman is about a glowering, muscle-bound man-mountain named Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård, son of Stellan) who as a boy witnesses the killing of his father, King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke), and the abduction of his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), by the king’s betraying half-bastard brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang). Amleth vows revenge.

A military romance suffers under the weight of KGB surveillance in this restrained period drama set in Soviet-era Estonia.

Winner at the Venice film festival, Audrey Diwan’s film, "Happening", captures the panic of an unwanted pregnancy before the legalization of abortion in provincial France.