C.J. Prince

Come join @cjprince.bsky.social, @tylekurner.bsky.social, Lena Wilson & me on Saturday afternoon as we ponder what we even mean by queer and trans stories? How has this shifted in the last 5, 10, 50 years (or more)?

And what that means for what stories get told, reach you, and are still missing!

Update:

Living Out Loud: A 3-day online summit about queer and trans stories in film, theatre, TV, and the archives. 🎟️ Free to attend 🗓️ Oct 3–5 | 2–4pm ET | Zoom 💬 Join live and help shape the conversation 👉 Register now at seventh-row.com/livingoutloud Big ideas. Lots of time for Q&A + audience discussion. No prep required.

👥 Featuring Elspeth Brown, @emilygarside.bsky.social @bwestcineaste.bsky.social, Anamarija Horvat, Angelo Madsen, @cjprince.bsky.social, @tylekurner.bsky.social, and Lena Wilson

👉 Save your seat: seventh-row.com/livingoutloud

TIFF Review: The Voice of Hind Rajab Brings Questionable Palatability to the Genocide in Gaza In January 2024, the Palestine Red Crescent Society received an emergency call from Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl traveling in a car with her aunt, uncle, and cousins in Gaza City. The Israeli army...

Kaouther Ben Hania's Venice winner The Voice of Hind Rajab is noble in its intentions but filled with questionable choices around its execution. Read @cjprince.bsky.social's review:

TIFF Review: Barrio Triste is One of the Year’s Great Debuts At barely two years old, Harmony Korine’s “post-cinema” company EDGLRD is already branching out. After directing AGGRO DR1FT and Baby Invasion, Korine takes on a producer role for Barrio Triste, the f...

Stillz's Harmony Korine-backed Barrio Triste is exhilarating, tense, personal, enigmatic, and among this year’s best first features.

Read @cjprince.bsky.social's review:

TIFF Review: Two Pianos is Another Rich, Thoughtful Drama from Arnaud Desplechin The past rears its not-so-ugly head in Two Pianos, Arnaud Desplechin’s latest film exploring the ways gorgeous people make an even bigger mess out of the messiness of life itself. Set amidst the world...

Arnaud Desplechin's Two Pianos is an ideal vision of the prestige film: handsomely mounted and splendidly acted while teeming with sudden tonal shifts and emotional volatility.

Read @cjprince.bsky.social's TIFF review:

TIFF Review: Exit 8 is a Videogame Adaptation Heavy on Allegory Adapting a video game like 2023's indie-horror hit The Exit 8 comes with a challenge. Unlike other adaptations, this has no real plot or story to work with––just a high-concept hook. A first-person wa...

Genki Kawamura's videogame adaptation #Exit8 relies on horror’s tried-and-true method of leaning into allegory.

Read @cjprince.bsky.social's TIFF review:

-A Small Fiction of my Mother in Beijing (Dorothea Sing Zhang)
-Ramon Who Speaks to Ghosts (Shervin Kermani)
-Sea Star (Tyler Mckenzie Evans)
-Year of the Dragon (Giran Findlay-Liu)
-Dish Pit (Anna Hopkins)
-Poster Boy (India Opzoomer)
-Once in a Body (Maria Cristina Perez Gonzalez)

10 Must-See Short Films at TIFF 2025 Comprising 48 titles from 28 countries, this year’s Short Cuts program at the Toronto International Film Festival doesn’t represent any sort of significant change from 2024 (48 shorts but from 23 coun...

My annual round up of highlights from TIFF's Short Cuts programme is now live at @thefilmstage.com. As always, whittling it down to just ten films was difficult, and I wanted to mention other films I enjoyed and couldn't include...

thefilmstage.com/10-must-see-...

Jay Kelly Rowling

I'm miserable

Locarno 2025: Dry Leaf, A Balcony in Limoges, Phantoms of July, Two Seasons Two Strangers Thoughts on four films from the Locarno Film Festival, including this year's Golden Leopard winner

I got to see some titles from this year's Locarno Film Festival and wrote a few words about them. Includes Alexandre Koberidze's Dry Leaf, Jérôme Reybaud's A Balcony in Limoges, Julian Radlmaier's Phantoms of July, and Sho Miyake's Two Seasons, Two Strangers.

open.substack.com/pub/acquired...

"Karsh, where we're going we don't need roads."

Life only available for two more weeks

thank god

Deadline revealed today that TIFF withdrew its invite to this film from the festival over several issue, including legal clearance of footage in the documentary.

deadline.com/2025/08/tiff...

Maybe it will be a later addition, maybe it's not playing and they made a mistake in uploading the trailer, maybe it's something else entirely. But given the subject matter it suggests that this might have to do with optics.

The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue _ TRAILER * Premiering at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival * Dir.: Barry Avrich Melbar Entertainment Group www.melbarentertainment.com Please contact: Laila…

TIFF uploaded a trailer today for a documentary about a former IDF general rescuing his family on October 7, even though it wasn't in their TIFF Docs press release and there isn't a film page on their site. They made the video private but the trailer can still be viewed here:

vimeo.com/1105546177

Is it an anti-woke reboot or a TBI

There is no safe space to be a Luca Guadagnino hater

I wrote up some thoughts on a handful of films from the first half of 2025. Includes writing on Sinners, Warfare, Presence, Black Bag, Bring Her Back and more.

open.substack.com/pub/acquired...

Me reading the news about Denis Villeneuve directing the new James Bond movie

Blue sky exclusive list of me fucking around

Cinematheque audiences

I wish I had someone to talk about this to, guess I am part of the select few now who saw the original cut

Not really, I'd say the closest I've come to disliking something by him is The French Dispatch and his animated features. This new one was only a slight letdown after Asteroid City since I thought that was his best film since Moonrise Kingdom.

Materialists bad, Phoenician Scheme just okay, could a potential rewatch of Caught by the Tides save the weekend

The Life of Chuck Review: A Childish Take on Universal Experience Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2024 TIFF coverage. The Life of Chuck opens in theaters on June 6. In just over a decade, Mike Flanagan went from promising indie director to ...

The Life of Chuck tells a simple message, one Mike Flanagan tells with full-throated sincerity, and none of which rings true.

Read @cjprince.bsky.social's review:

The longer a film series continues the more abstract it should become.

Three Queer Discoveries from Cannes 2025 | EDGE United States Three Queer Discoveries from Cannes 2025

Wrote about three solid films playing in parallel sections at this year's Cannes: A Useful Ghost, Drifting Laurent, and Drunken Noodles.

www.edgemedianetwork.com/story/339562

Bring Her Back is a new nadir of the grief/traumacore horror trend of recent years. At least prior trends like the New French Extremity didn't wrap their shitty juvenile instincts in an unearned sense of self-importance and "heavy" themes.