Included in this post is a review of Nomadland , my top choice from the recent Toronto film festival which was mostly online.   More on that festival at these links: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/09/2020-toronto-film-festival-highlights https://variety.com/2020/film/awards/awards-circuit-nomadland-oscars-1234772307/ First broadcast September 14 on the PBS as part of its 33 rd “POV” season is the 2019 TIFF selection Love Child , an excellent documentary about a family of Iranian asylum seekers who find themselves stuck in bureaucratic limbo in Turkey. [*More comment at: http://povmagazine.com/articles/view/tiff-review-love-child .   And for a discussion guide see: https://www.pbs.org/pov/engage/resources/love-child-discussion-guide/film-summary/ .] At an actual theatre I was able to see a special documentary A Night at the Louvre: Leonardo Da Vinci which is a cinematic guide to the museum’s decade-in-the-making special 500 th year anniversary e...

Flying west recently for brief visits in Saskatoon and Calgary was a strange experience with everyone masked throughout and the only thing distributed being a sealed Air Canada “Clean Care” package including a small bottle of sanitizer, latex gloves, and an extra mask (though you already needed one just to enter the airport).   With almost no international routes operating, including from U.S. destinations, my return flight from Calgary to Toronto was on a big 300-seat Boeing 787-9 “Dreamliner” with over 100 movies available on the entertainment system.               Older titles can sometimes be discovered on streaming services.   For example, I watched the 1989 France/Egypt coproduction Alexandria: Again and Forever after The New Yorker’s Richard Brody recommended it as “a masterpiece hiding on Netflix”.   Also recently added on Netflix: the documentary Capitalism in the 21 st Century based on the book by T...