Seen in June

City Choir performing at Rosedale United Church

More free time has not, unfortunately led to more movies but here’s what was seen in the last 30 days.

City Choir
Rosedale United Church

There’s not much better than hearing a choir of human voices singing together in a beautiful setting on a warm June night.

I Like Me
Prime Video

This documentary about John Candy is pretty standard stuff: talking heads, archival interviews, and film clips. The problem, as Bill Murray articulated, Candy is too nice a guy to make a thrilling film about. Candy was simply a talented, amiable, family oriented and good person, who grew up in Toronto (not far from our current home), lost his father at a young age, which led to a lifetime of feeling responsible for all those around him. That is the suggestion here, that Candy’s anxiety, and work ethic (too many films and projects), came from the loss of his father and led to his early death from a heart issue. Too soon. We miss you John Candy.

Imprint
NFB

This animated short film is a love letter and celebration of traditional printing and the filmmaker’s mentor from a St. John’s based artist. As we find ourselves neck deep in AI slop and digitally manufactured images, the warmth, feel and humanity of traditional printing and film is undeniable. It’s the sort of film that makes you want to pick up a pen or pencil, or a pair of scissors and some glue to start making collages and art of your own.

Mindscape
NFB

A striking example of pinscreen animation where a screen holding pins are manipulated to create type of black and white pointillism. In this short, an artist enters the world they are creating in a kind of meditative dream world.

Free Love

NFB

Like a New Yorker cartoon come to life, this animated short brings us two friends meeting in a cafe to catch up but of course, there’s more between the lines.

The Tooth
NFB

This animated short is funny family story from Guy Delisle, a noted comic book author, about a busy dad who has forgotten to play tooth fairy to his young son’s expectations.

Coiin Firth as the baddie.

Disclosure Day

Spielberg updates his continuing optimistic series of human contact with alien life. It is the return of Spielberg to a big summer blockbuster style film. It’s a road trip, a car chase, a conspiracy, good guys, bad guys and more than a bit of magic. There’s a mystery afoot when weather forecaster Margaret (Emily Blunt) strangely begins speaking in a curious series of clicks, and Daniel (Josh O’Connor) can read mathematics as easily as you can this sentence. There are a lot of recurring themes and imagery here from Spielberg’s earlier films (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and E.T.). In the summer, 50 years after Jaws became the porto-summer blockbuster, at 79 has given us a rollicking and entertaining film that the summer of 2026 needed.

Erin Doherty as Mary Carr.

A Thousand Blows, S01
Disney+

Sort of a female led Peaky Blinders. Set in 1880s London, we follow the adventures and misadventures of Mary Carr (Erin Doherty) who leads an all female gang of thieves and pickpockets known as the Forty Elephants. Her plans for her biggest heist draws in old alliances such as bare-fisted fighter Sugar Goodson (Stephen Graham) and newly arrived Jamaican immigrant Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby). It’s a violent world with shifting loyalties and commitments that draws us in closer with the kind of detail that makes you wonder “Where did they film that?”.