‘A reminder that we can resist’: hard-hitting documentary takes aim at anti-trans rhetoric

Heightened Scutiny is a new film premiering at Sundance looking at the troubling rise in anti-trans legislation and the mainstream media outlets who have helped stoke the fire A new documentary at the Sundance film festival delves into the fight to preserve access to gender-affirming care for minors via the US supreme court, with a major decision due in June 2025, and details the mainstream media’s role in legitimizing anti-trans legislation. Heightened Scrutiny, directed by Sam Feder, argues that the fear-based ideology underlying bans on hormone therapy or puberty blockers for minors has been pushed not only by conservative activists but center-left publications such as the New York Times, the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal, whose articles have fixated on surgery, potential regret or risks. As the film notes, such therapies, with the same side effects and risks, are prescribed for other conditions and only raise alarms when applied to trans youths, and the rate of “detransiti...

Conclave review – Ralph Fiennes takes charge of tense papal election thriller

Toronto film festival: the actor leads a top-tier ensemble, including Stanley Tucci and Isabella Rossellini, in an entertainingly juicy adaptation of Robert Harris’s novel

Like the easily devoured paperback it’s based on, pulpy papal thriller Conclave has a brisk, page-turning allure, filled with juicy intrigue and mystery, a beach read that would follow you back home after. We’ve become grimly accustomed to plot-heavy bestsellers such as this stretched out into indulgent 10-episode seasons of television (such as the recently misjudged re-adaptation of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent on Apple TV+), a baggy over-extension of stories that demand a tighter grip.

So it’s a mercy of sorts to see All Quiet on the Western Front’s Edward Berger transform Robert Harris’s “unputdownable” pot-boiler into a brisk, contained feature instead, a two-hour escape to the Vatican that knows exactly when to drop us in and take us out. It’s a fairly dry set-up in theory but Harris and playwright Peter Straughan (who co-wrote 2011’s equally involving adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) have found humour and suspense in the fictionalised hunt for a new Pope, an election that propels a timely and tense political thriller, scheduled to be released in the US just days before a real one takes place.

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