Andrew Webster

This one is a TV series from the BBC, but in just two episodes I was hooked. Rebecca Hall stars as a woman who suddenly starts hearing a low, persistent hum. The problem is that it seems she’s the only one who can. There are all kinds of physical side effects — bad sleep, nosebleeds, anxiety — but the real issue is the mystery of it all. Not only what the sound is, but why her?

What if Uncut Gems was a comedy? That’s how this film from Juno director Jason Reitman feels.

OK, maybe not all of them, but Charles and I are covering TIFF again this year and filling this stream with our many, many thoughts. Highlights so far include The Substance and The Life of Chuck. But you can check out plenty more right here.

The nods to Iron Giant and Castle in the Sky are pretty obvious, but even still Wild Robot carves out its own distinct vibe. It’s centered on a helper bot (Lupita Nyong’o) that washes up on an island filled with wildlife but no humans. Quickly it finds a mission: preparing an orphaned gosling for migration.

Super assassin 13 (Aurora Ribero) has one problem: she actually has feelings. That’s how she ends up pulled into Jakarta’s underworld searching for a young boy. The film is full of derivative moments you’ve probably seen in other revenge-fueled action flicks — blood on the snow in Japan, a neon-lit shootout in a club, drug deal gone horribly wrong — but makes up for it with some inventive fight choreography and an escalating level of cartoonish ultraviolence.

An amazing name for a horror satire that can’t really decide what it wants to be. Its story of a high school science teacher (Brandon Routh) saving a small town from an infestation of violent plants is meant to be a send-up of ‘90s-era horror like The Faculty. It looks and sounds the part, but leaves itself stranded in the middle: not funny enough to be a spoof, and not scary enough to work as horror.

In the future, a test makes it possible to scientifically determine your ideal soulmate. (It’s a premise very similar to last year’s Fingernails, only less gross.) Initially, it seems that the film is going to do the typical romcom thing when best friends Laura (Imogen Poots) and Simon (Brett Goldstein) have a clear connection despite their opposing views on the value of the test.

An oil tycoon (Michael Shannon), art curator (Tilda Swinton), and their son (George MacKay) are separated from the apocalyptic horrors outside, spending their time in a bunker writing books, arranging flowers, and eating lots of cake. But the facade steadily slips away after a young survivor (Moses Ingram) enters their home.