The Life of Chuck

Mike Flanagan takes a detour from the macabre with this adaptation of a uniquely structured Stephen King novella that unravels a seemingly ordinary accountant’s world.

With The Life of Chuck, Mike Flanagan takes a detour from the macabre to explore one of Stephen King’s alternate sensibilities in an adaptation that carries the spirit of his most optimistic work. The world feels like it’s ending and everybody’s saying goodbye to Chuck. Wherever Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) goes, he can’t get away from Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston). His face is showing up on billboards, window signs — even TV commercials. What’s so special about this seemingly ordinary accountant and why does he warrant such a sendoff?

Their connection includes Marty’s ex-wife (Karen Gillan), her co-worker, his neighbour, and just about everyone else they know. Chuck’s life story soon begins to unravel in front of us, going back to a childhood with grandfather Albie (Mark Hamill), who teaches him about accounting and passes on a love for dancing, all the while keeping him from a prophetic secret in the attic.

The Life of Chuck starts grand and ends intimate, like a setting sun. It’s a Stand By Me for the multiple lives within each of us, pulled between our dreams and down-to-earth pragmatism. Fans of Flanagan’s skillful storytelling in The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and Doctor Sleep will easily see why he gravitated towards the unorthodox structure of this King novella. Coupled with his impressive knack for elevating simple conversations and interactions into memorable set pieces, Flanagan manages a rare feat: finding warmth in melancholy.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley

Jeff Buckley, a rising star with an otherworldly voice, left the 90s music world reeling when he died suddenly after the release of his debut album. In a tragic accident, Buckley drowned in the Wolf River in Memphis in 1997, leaving behind an unfinished second album and a legion of devastated family, friends and fans. Told through never-before-seen footage from Buckley’s archives and intimate accounts from his mother Mary Guibert, former partners Rebecca Moore and Joan Wasser, Jeff’s former bandmates, including Michael Tighe and Parker Kindred, and luminaries like Ben Harper and Aimee Mann, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Amy Berg crafts an illuminating portrait of one of modern music’s most influential and enigmatic figures.

Blue Moon

Ethan Hawke delivers a charming, lived-in performance as lyricist Lorenz Hart, holding court at Sardi’s on the historic night of his former collaborator Richard Rodgers’ (Andrew Scott) greatest triumph: the premiere of Oklahoma!

In Blue Moon, director Richard Linklater crafts a riveting chamber piece set in real time at Sardi’s on the historic night in 1943 of Richard Rodgers’ (Andrew Scott) greatest triumph: the premiere of Oklahoma! Ethan Hawke delivers a charming, lived-in performance as Rodgers’ former collaborator, lyricist Lorenz Hart, an alcoholic and marginally closeted raconteur grappling with the fact that Rodgers’ biggest success now belongs to a new partnership with Oscar Hammerstein.

As flowers and accolades pour into the restaurant, heralding a new era of American musicals, Hart holds court at the bar, regaling a plainspoken bartender (Bobby Cannavale) and a young, aspiring composer and military officer with stories. His current fixation is a 20-year-old Yale student, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), whom he reveres with a fervour that drifts between romantic longing and aesthetic worship.

Among the guests is essayist E. B. White (Patrick Kennedy), perched in a corner, making his presence known to offer le mot juste — “ineffable” — during one of Hart’s rhapsodic monologues about Elizabeth. The film imagines White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, drawing creative inspiration from Hart as he contemplates a shift into children’s literature.

Hart and Rodgers affectionately spar throughout the night, working through the regrets in their partnership and promising to start anew. Ultimately, through Hart’s reflections on love, art, and legacy, the film becomes a bittersweet elegy for his overshadowed place in musical history — a graceful tribute to the man behind Pal Joey, A Connecticut Yankee, “My Funny Valentine,” and the titular “Blue Moon.”

Conclave

When the Pope unexpectedly dies, Cardinals from all over the world rush to the Vatican, where they immediately sequester themselves. Digital devices are stashed, doors are locked, and windows are shuttered as they prepare for the election of a new leader — one who will not only provide spiritual guidance for the world’s Catholics, but set the tone for the future.

Director Edward Berger returns to the Festival, after his TIFF ’22 selection, the Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front, with this high-stakes drama set within the stunning walls of the Vatican. Featuring scintillating performances from Oscar nominees Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow, Conclave imagines a secret process that affects millions but is witnessed by few.

Cardinal Lawrence (Fiennes) oversees the proceedings, assuming that the contest will come down to a battle between the reactionary, openly racist Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) and the liberal progressive Cardinal Bellini (Tucci). And matters soon turn complicated as rumours circulate, secrets emerge, and acts of sabotage are undertaken. Adapted by Peter Straughan (The Goldfinch, TIFF ’19) from the Robert Harris novel, and lensed by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine (Revoir Paris, TIFF ’23), the film captures the potent gravity of this whole competition with one arresting composition after another.

Conclave unfolds over a tension-riddled 72 hours, depicting a gripping confrontation between tradition, politics, and faith. Featuring brilliant supporting performances — most notably from Isabella Rossellini as the silent yet formidable Sister Agnes — it focuses on the all-too-human aspects of a hallowed procedure, one that speculates on the role of religion in a rapidly changing world.

Tickets are available at the door.
General Admission: $12
North Bay Film Members: $10
Students: $5

The Room Next Door

The Room Next Door might be renowned Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, but he has left none of his signature hallmarks behind. The complex narratives filled with heartbreaking choices, visuals saturated with colour, and the precise rendering of women’s inner lives are very much intact.

Ingrid (Oscar winner Julianne Moore) is a bestselling author so famously afraid of death she has written a book about it. When she learns that Martha (Oscar winner Tilda Swinton, also at this year’s Festival in The End) — a former war correspondent — is ill, she visits her, reigniting a friendship from years past, when both were journalists.

Martha is fighting another war now, and the rekindled closeness between the women means Ingrid is drawn into her treatments as stories are told, secrets are revealed, and regret, redemption, and mortality are discussed over tea. One day, Martha asks Ingrid for the one thing she is most hesitant to give. The way they negotiate life’s deepest choices is what makes the film so memorable.

Almodóvar’s latest is a feast for the eyes, thanks to Eduard Grau’s exquisite cinematography, but all our senses are beautifully captured. We can almost taste the crisp white wine that Ingrid sips and hear nuances in the birdsong Martha adores. Superb performances by Swinton and Moore — who inhabit these complex, flawed, and fascinating women — give the film its pounding heart, making it less about death than about the magic of life while we live it.

Tickets are available at the door.
General Admission: $12
North Bay Film Members: $10
Students: $5

Universal Language

Winter. Somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg. Negin and Nazgol find a large sum of money frozen deep within the sidewalk ice and try to find a way to get it out. Massoud leads a group of befuddled tourists upon an increasingly-absurd walking tour of Winnipeg monuments and historic sites. Matthew leaves his job at the Quebec government and embarks upon a mysterious journey to visit his estranged mother. Time, geography and identities crossfade, interweave and collide into a surreal comedy of misdirection.

Structured like a Venn diagram — at the point of confluence between Jacques Tati and Abbas Kiarostami’s The Koker Trilogy — Universal Language is at once a diary film, an absurdist city symphony and a welling-up of confinement-era emotion exploring the mysterious interzone where one person ends and the rest of the world begins. An elusive, half-remembered dream of home, solitude, our responsibilities to others and the wild turkeys that haunt us. 

Tickets are available at the door.
General Admission: $12
North Bay Film Members: $10
Students: $5

FLOW

A motley but irresistible crew of animals band together for an unforgettable adventure in the watery world created by animator and filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis.

For anyone who ever considered their ultimate dream cast to be a cat, a dog, a lemur, a secretary bird, and a capybara, those hopes will be finally fulfilled in Flow. Thrown together by circumstance in an eerily depopulated world, now submerged in ever-rising waters, the furry and feathered characters in Gints Zilbalodis’ imaginative, astonishing, and thoroughly engaging animated feature must find common ground if they hope to survive an unforgettable journey.

One of the many reasons Flow and its cast are so memorable is that the animals here remain animals. In place of the quippy banter and zany antics of the anthropomorphized critters family-film viewers may be used to comes a more naturalistic-minded approach that allows for more authentic forms of behaviour, movement, and communication. (That last matter is especially important for the characters who’d rather not get eaten.) And thanks to the level of nuance and detail that Zilbalodis and his team create, the individual personalities of these unlikely traveling companions still shine through, especially in the case of the ever-intrepid feline protagonist.

That emphasis on naturalism also adds great richness and wonder to Zilbalodis’ film, a richly visual blend of adventure tale and ecological parable that will enchant and enthrall viewers no matter what their age or animal preference.

Winner of Best Animated Feature at the 2025 Oscars

Tickets are available at the door.
General Admission: $12
North Bay Film Members: $10
Students: $5