1st on Film

Dutch director Nanouk Leopold’s seventh feature provides uncommonly vivid views of southern Irish scenery and the driven, haunted woman (Natasha O’Keeffe) at the story’s core. A slow-burn thriller about reckoning with trauma and containing the furies that threaten to reduce everything to ashes, Whitetail is rife with the same tightly coiled tension that exists deep within its protagonist. It’s jus...

40 Acres is a 2024 Canadian post-apocalyptic thriller film written and directed by R. T. Thorne (in his feature directorial debut). The film stars Danielle Deadwyler as a matriarch of descendants of African American farmers who settled in 1875 in rural Canada after the first Civil War. Two hundred years later, they are trying to survive in a decimated future. In a post-apocalyptic future where foo...

Ali's life in Canada as a young immigrant turns upside down when his naïve cousin Omid arrives from overseas under mysterious circumstances to live with him in a newcomers settlement house. On the cusp of achieving his goal to settle in Toronto, a tide of misadventures derails Ali's plans, costing him his job opportunity and romance, which ultimately drives him to his wits’ end. Neema Naz is an Ir...

Egghead & Twinkie is a colorful teen road movie directed by Sarah Kambe Holland and starring Sabrina Jie-A-Fa and Louis Tomeo. Known as the first feature to successfully crowdfund on TikTok, this indie production has taken the film festival circuit by storm. Available now on VOD in North America

On the night they move from the city into a sprawling suburban home, parents Josh (Ben Foster, Finestkind, TIFF ’23) and Rachel (Cobie Smulders, High School, TIFF ’22) are jolted by a car crashing into the tree on their front lawn, killing the driver and injuring his passengers. And once Josh discovers the accidents are a regular occurrence due to the design of the road, he becomes obsessed with b...

Kryptic is a Canadian horror thriller film, directed by Kourtney Roy and released in 2024. The film stars Chloe Pirrie in a dual role as Barb Valentine, a cryptid hunter who has disappeared while hunting for the Sooka, a mysterious forest creature, and Kay, a woman who herself encounters the Sooka while searching for Barb, and abandons her life to embark on a new quest for meaning and identity aft...

My Dead Friend Zoe is a 2024 American comedy-drama film written by Kyle Hausmann-Stokes and A. J. Bermudez, directed by Hausmann-Stokes and starring Sonequa Martin-Green, Natalie Morales, Gloria Reuben, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Morgan Freeman, and Ed Harris. It premiered at South by Southwest on March 9, 2024, and was theatrically released in the United States on February 28, 2025. Kyle is an award-winni...

In a Kaiju-filled Japan, Kafka Hibino works in monster disposal. After reuniting with his childhood friend Mina Ashiro, a rising star in the anti-Kaiju Defense Force, he decides to pursue his abandoned dream of joining the Force... when he suddenly transforms into the powerful "Kaiju No. 8. " With help from his junior colleague Reno Ichikawa, Kafka hides his identity while striving towards his lif...

Film synopsis: May 1984. An unemployed ice cream truck driver steps onto the game show Press Your Luck harboring a secret: the key to endless money. But his winning streak is threatened when the bewildered executives uncover his real motivations. Director , Samir Oliveros joins the podcast this week to discuss the film and its upcoming theatrical release April 4th. #podcast #interview #paulwalterh...

Film Synopsis: A determined aspiring chef, AMIR struggles to carve out a path for himself and gratify the expectations of his parents, FARHAD and AREZOU – while his younger, Canadian-born brother, MAHYAR, appears to cruise through life effortlessly. When Amir’s parents receive news that a family friend from Iran has died and left his inheritance solely to Mahyar, the unexpected bequest triggers a...

LUCY: THE STOLEN LIVES OF ELEPHANTS is the first documentary film which reveals the plight of elephants in captivity and investigates the lies that zoos tell an unknowing public under the guise of wildlife conservation and education. At the heart of the film is Lucy, Edmonton Valley Zoo’s lone and ailing 48-year-old elephant and the people fighting to send her to a sanctuary in California where sh...

Synopsis In a not so distant future, there is a reality where in order to save the planet, "death is everyone's job," with 50-year-olds taking the sacrifice, while teenage artists need to document it. Eight years since her last feature, filmmaker, writer, and visual artist Ann Marie Fleming brings her gentle, introspective touch to the timely genre of environmental science fiction. Can I Get A Wit...

Presented by ‪@filmtoppings‬ & ‪@1streviews‬ The 2025 Golden Slice awards honours the best in film this year with a large array of awards. You casted your vote on social media and here we are to present the winners! Thank you to everyone who submitted votes and thank you to all of the presenters: @bigvicmedia @moviewatchinggirl @moviereviews100 @whythebookwins @moviereviews7 @augustkellerwrites @m...

Season 2 premieres Wednesday, January 15 (9 p.m.) on CBC and CBC Gem. ALLEGIANCE is a high-octane police procedural drama uniquely set in Surrey, BC. The CBC Original series from Lark Productions in association with Universal International Studios stars Supinder Wraich (Sort Of) as Sabrina Sohal and Enrico Colantoni (English Teacher) as Vince Brambilla. The series focuses on identity and belonging...

North of North Premieres today Tuesday, January 7 on CBC and CBC Gem. Siaja (Anna Lambe, True Detective: Night Country, Trickster) is a young Inuk mother who dreams of reinventing herself in her tiny Arctic community of Ice Cove, a town where everybody knows your business. After a spontaneous — and extremely public — exit from her marriage, Siaja finds herself navigating the unpredictable, and oft...

Stefano, Ben and Gal from the 1st team discuss the newest addition to Robert Eggers every growing catalogue. Nosferatu is a remake of F. W. Murnau's 1922 silent film Nosferatu, itself inspired by Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. The film stars Bill Skarsgård as the titular character and Nicholas Hoult and Lily-Rose Depp as the married Hutter couple, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph I...

The 1st Reviews team had the pleasure of chatting with Allan Hawco and Josephine Jobert about starring in the new procedural drama, Saint-Pierre. Synopsis : After Royal Newfoundland Constabulary Inspector Donny “Fitz” Fitzpatrick digs too deeply into a local politician’s nefarious activity, he is exiled to work in Saint-Pierre et Miquelon (the French Territory nestled in the Atlantic Ocean just of...

Solo Leveling Follows the adventures Sung Jinwoo in a world that is constantly threatened by monsters and the evil forces. In his battles Sung transforms himself from weakest hunter of all mankind to one of the strongest hunters in existence. Reawakening is a great jump start for new fans into the series as the film recaps season 1 and gives a great sneak peek into season 2 that begins January 202...

Facing a long winter of lockdown and combating a bad case of writer’s block, a desperate filmmaker agrees to rescue a traumatized dog with his girlfriend. Part rescue dog rom-com, part auto-fiction psychodrama, and part family scrapbook, this debut feature displays a disquieting amount of emotional authenticity, capturing what it means to be human. Director and writer, Ben Petrie joins the podcast...

Movie synopsis: What should have been an uneventful ride back to campus unexpectedly becomes a nightmare as MAX, a diabetic, biology grad student, is entrapped in a diabolical new-age wellness experiment. With her insulin supply dwindling, Max is forced into a deadly game of cat and mouse where she must escape at all costs or risk becoming the next test subject to extend the lives of the rich and...

Ash (Cara Gee) and Joe (Peter Mooney) meet at the bookstore that he owns. They begin seeing each other and find themselves falling in love. That all changes when Ash and Joe are enjoying coffee at an outdoor café and a man walks by with a gun and shoots Ash — then disappears into thin air. Grieving, Joe contemplates suicide, but soon discovers that his reality isn't quite what it seems to be. He d...

In this interview, Stefano from the 1st team talks with director, Karl Janisse about his newest mini series, Passage. Part of the Unknown 9 video game series, Passage is a 7 part web series available now for streaming. Synopsis: It’s 1914, and the crew of the SS Talaria descends into a puzzling charade of madness after departing the docks of Cairo. Emilia Duprey, a lone stowaway stealing passage t...

Triumph is a 2024 Bulgarian-Greek black comedy film directed by Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov. It will star Maria Bakalova, Julian Kostov, Julian Vergov and Margita Gosheva. After the Fall of Communism in the early 1990s, a classified task force of high-rank Bulgarian Army officers led by a psychic channeler starts digging a hole in search of a mysterious artifact which will bring about the...

The second season of the American fantasy television series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is based on J. R. R. Tolkien's history of Middle-earth, primarily material from the appendices of the novel The Lord of the Rings. Set thousands of years before the novel in the Second Age of Middle-earth, the season depicts the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron and the creation of more Rings of Power....

The second season of the American fantasy television series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is based on J. R. R. Tolkien's history of Middle-earth, primarily material from the appendices of the novel The Lord of the Rings. Set thousands of years before the novel in the Second Age of Middle-earth, the season depicts the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron and the creation of more Rings of Power....