A legendary Japanese improvisational quartet creates sounds both mesmerizing and unexpected.

A deep, immersive sound collage develops over an hour and a half, produced by toy keyboards.

The Institute for Contemporary Art has very little street profile, but everybody in Sofia who needs to know about it knows about it.

And where, dear poets, is our future groundbreaking cross-cultural poetry gathering?

Alfonso Cuaron's new film, set in Mexico City in 1970/71, is a rich and complex drama in which the slow unravelling of domestic life takes precedence over larger events.

One of the hits of VIFF 2018 returns to the Vancity Theatre.

Can Mitzi find salvation at hairdressing school?

In this conceptual film, Belgians relate dreams about work.

At any film festival there will be hits and misses: films that you'll rate 5 out of 5, and other films which "didn't work for you," which you'll rate 1. Here are brief reviews of two of my 1s from this year's VIFF.

Another film from Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who somehow manages to produce fine work, despite being under a 20-year ban prohibiting him from directing movies or writing screenplays.

A somewhat routine but enjoyable biopic on the early years of Astrid Lindgren, creator of Pippi Longstocking.

Roller skating is still going strong in America, but the predominantly African-American roller-rink culture is threatened by racist policy.

Sandi Tan tells the story of the strange and ambitious film she made in Singapore in the 1990s, and how it was lost and found.

Hendi and Hormoz is one of those films that VIFF is best at: a human story set in an unfamiliar culture and geography, which draws you in because the dilemmas faced by the characters are, to some extent, universal.

A mother and daughter undertake a months-long, dangerous trek from Vancouver to Alaska across the Coast Mountains.

Hilarity and social activism in a Swedish town when the local teenagers are invited to make a promotional film.

An interesting, but flawed, film about the last years of Oscar Wilde, who lived (and died) in a kind of self-exile in Paris following his release from prison.

This black-and-white film, about a young student filmmaker learning his craft in Paris, is an affectionate tribute to the French "New Wave" cinema of the late 1950s and 1960s.

How to choose which films to see this year? Biopics of Colette and Astrid Lindgren; documentaries about science fairs, guitar makers and yoga; weird films about time travel, zombies and playing Pac-Man as civilization crumbles.

One of the most dazzling animated features that you're ever likely to see, this one-woman tour-de-force is a very personal, very musical, take on the Exodus story, blended with tales from the Passover Seder tradition.

A member of the diaspora returns to Cape Verde for a low-key and impressionist homecoming.

Funny, charismatic and unbelievably smart high school students aspire to win at the International Science and Engineering Fair.

Wild and riotous French people dance all night long to fiddles and hurdy-gurdies and pipes.