Minhal Baig’s We Grown Now is an earnest, well intentioned, heartfelt look at growing up black and poor in early 1990s Chicago, but it’s also flawed and curiously inauthentic. It’s a film that certainly looks the part and pours a lot of effort into re-creating settings that no longer exist today and boasts natural leading performances from some incredibly talented young actors, but We Grown Now also features a lot of forced poignancy when a more delicate and restrained touch would’ve pushed the material further. It’s the kind of film where one can appreciate the passion that went into it, but ..read more

Despite boasting a cheeky title that subtly refutes its own premise, award winning Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest film, Evil Does Not Exist, has a poignantly sinister side to it that few artists could pull off with the same amount of conviction and grace. A slowly unfolding look at the power of community and the destructive forces of capitalism and privileged conveniences, Evil Does Not Exist takes time and care to show the natural world and human heart as things people won’t truly appreciate until they’ve been eviscerated by outside forces that have no care for such things. It ..read more

Available to view for the first time in several decades and arriving with a newfound sense of context, Let It Be showcases a side of The Beatles that no one was ready for upon its 1970 release. Often cited as a film where viewers could get a ground level look at how and why one of the greatest bands in music history broke up, Let It Be was criticized as being too morose, downtrodden, and devoid of joy, not just by critics who misunderstood the project, but also by members of The Beatles themselves. It was once thought that Let It Be would never see the light of day again during the lifetimes o ..read more

An unabashed summer movie thrill ride, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes might lack some of the depth fans appreciated in earlier entries of this rebooted sci-fi series, but what it lacks in original substance it more than makes up for by having a really good time. With the reigns handed over to director Wes Ball (The Maze Runner trilogy) and screenwriter Josh Friedman (who received story credits on the most recent Avatar and Terminator movies), Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes tells a new story from within the world where primates are the supreme intelligent beings and the few humans left ar ..read more

Reviewing the creatively pieced together documentary Eno is pretty much impossible because the movie I saw will never be seen again. The film itself will keep on existing – and by any metric it’s a good one – but the specifics of the version of Eno I saw are constantly changing and shifting. Not even director Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Urbanized) knows what form Eno will take next. To explain, Eno – a film about pioneering, boundlessly creative musician, producer, and visual artist Brian Eno – is constantly being mixed and re-mixed live in the room by a predictive machine that attempts to never ..read more

Whatever It Takes is the ideal true crime documentary. It tells a riveting, frightening story about everyday people caught up in a web of deceit, paranoia, and threats from all directions. Then it shifts gears to explain the how and the why of what went down in this unique situation before getting to the tragic, but admittedly darkly comedic answering of who was behind all of this. Director Jenny Carchman (The Fourth Estate, Gossip) takes viewers on a rollercoaster ride through a dark corner of the internet to a destination most won’t see coming, unless they’re familiar with the case at hand ..read more

From Thursday, April 25th to Sunday, May 5, Toronto will once again play host to the 31st annual Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary festival, one of the largest showcases of nonfiction filmmaking in the world. And once again, The GATE is proud to bring you coverage of some of this year’s biggest titles. Keep checking this space, as new reviews will be added daily, all the way up until the end of the festival. For a full list of titles playing at this year’s festival, showtimes, tickets, and more information, please visit the Hot Docs website. And now, on with the show! Hot Docs 2024 r ..read more

With her directorial debut, Never Look Away, Lucy Lawless profiles the career and struggles of former CNN camerawoman Margaret Moth to dazzling, heart-stopping effect. The hard living and hard loving Moth – who looked more like an imposing punk rocker than a foreign correspondent – was a relentlessly driven professional who excelled at capturing footage in war zones. Always as close to the action and danger as possible, Moth quickly became a celebrated journalist for her work in places like Baghdad, Kuwait, Bosnia, and Tbilisi throughout the 1990s, and established herself as indispensable memb ..read more

Jennifer McArthur’s Family Tree is a fresh story told from a black perspective rarely glimpsed in ecologically minded documentaries. It will hopefully get people excited about the prospect of tending to land in ways they never thought previously possible. Family Tree chronicles the hard work being put in by two black agrarian families living in North Carolina’s “wood basket.” The Jeffries family is keen to reconnect with their familial roots by learning how to properly tend to and replenish their tree farm. While the sisters (who inherited the property from their beloved grandmother) have to c ..read more

The relationship between a documentary filmmaker and their subject comes under close and decidedly emotional scrutiny in 7 Beats Per Minute, Yuqi Kang’s profile of champion free-diver Jessica Lu. Lu moved from her native China to Hawaii in 2012 to pursue her dream of becoming a world class free-diver full time. Famous for her record setting dives and preternatural ability to hold her breath for an amount of time that would frighten most average people, Lu started winning championships, gaining sponsors, and striving to push her abilities right to the edge. But a near death experience at the pr ..read more