Female Film Critics 24/375
Penélope Cruz, Rosalind Eleazar, Siân Heder and Isabelle Huppert will be honored at the 2026 TIFF Tribute Awards, part of the 51st annual Toronto International Film Festival. TIFF Tribute Awards celebrate a diverse group of film artists, recognizing outstanding contributions to cinema.
the ceremony takes place on Sunday, Sept. 13, at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel Toronto.
I’m glad I waited to see The Invite on Prime Video because – while Olivia Wilde helms this forebodingly unpredictable sex comedy – it’s not worth a trip to the multiplex. Adapted by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones from the Spanish film Sentimental (2020), it’s basically a four-hander, set in San Francisco. What happens is for you to discover – as all four actors play their parts convincingly. Reminiscent of but not nearly as good as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? it’s yet another deep dive into a tense, troubled, middle-age marriage.
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If you like edgy dinner parties that promise the possibility of sex, drugs and a rock n roll of emotions, then make sure you RSVP for The Invite. Olivia Wilde directs herself, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz in this relationship dramady that will leave you evaluating your own partnership. The film takes place in the living room of the San Francisco apartment of Angela (Wilde) and Joe (Rogen). They’ve invited their rather lively upstairs neighbors, Hawk and Pina (Norton and Cruz), over for dinner, but when the party spirals into unexpected places, Angela and Joe don’t know if they’ve reignited the spark in their troubled marriage or lit the flame that burns it down.
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Months after Guillermo del Toro’s retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, here comes The Bride!, a kinetic yet scattershot story reimagining the creature and his beloved as a 1930s couple on the run, a la Bonnie and Clyde. Writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal has a lot she wants to say in this messy mashup of monsters, mobsters, and even musicals, but it doesn’t all come through loud and clear.
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If you thought we as a society were over trashing big artistic swings by female artists, reaction to writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! will disabuse you of that notion. Though by no means perfect, the new gothic romance centering on and reimagining Frankenstein’s bride is visually stunning, fearlessly kinetic and inventive, and worth celebrating.
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Frankenstein’s monster is lonely. If he’s going to live, he wants to live life to the fullest…in EVERY way…wink, wink. He needs someone who’s like him in mind and body. Abby someone. Abby Normal. Or in this case, Ida, and he wants her to be his (The) Bride! The Bride is a very meta mash up of monsters, mayhem, murder, molls, massive amounts of makeup, meddling men, and the marvelous mind of Maggie Gyllenhaal which all adds up to maniacal movie magic. .
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Two-time Oscar nominee Maggie Gyllenhaal’s long-awaited feature film The Bride, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, arrives in theaters on March 6. The movie is part of the Filmed for IMAX program and will be released in IMAX as well as standard formats. Written and directed by Gyllenhaal, her steampunk take on the 1935 horror classic Bride of Frankenstein is the follow-up to her 2021 Academy Award-nominated Netflix drama The Lost Daughter.
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Film fans will have to wait longer than originally planned to see two-time Oscar nominee Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Gyllenhaal is writing and directing her steampunk take on The Bride as the follow-up to her 2021 Academy Award-nominated Netflix drama The Lost Daughter. Ahead of the 2025 CinemaCon, Warner Bros. announced it is moving The Bride from a Sept. 26, 2025 release date, to March 6, 2026, a springtime slot that has worked well for the studio’s previous event movies.
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If racing cars is your passion, perhaps you might enjoy Michael Mann’s Ferrari, but I found it frustrating in so many ways. It’s ostensibly a deep dive into the pivotal summer of 1957 when Italian industrialist Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) almost lost control of the prestigious automobile company he and his wife Laura (Penelope Cruz) founded in Modena. Enzo Ferrari is still in mourning; his 24 year-old son died the previous year. Given the opening montage of careening cars, one might assume he died in a fiery crash but – no – eventually, it’s revealed that Dino had muscular dystrophy. Crashes consume other characters later on.
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Emanuele Crialese’s L’Immensità (which translates as The Immensity) memorably captures the look and feel of 1970s Roma with this family drama, which stars a magnificent Penélope Cruz in the role of a loving mother but suffering wife who eventually collapses in a mental breakdown. Her slow decline is witnessed by the vigilant eyes of her pre-teen daughter, Adri (Luana Giuliani), who goes by ‘Andrew’ and feels she (he, from here on out) was born in the wrong body, a reality unacceptable in that time and place.
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