What happens when you film your family’s mundane routines for eight years? Cinematographer Ashley Connor and director Joe Stankus found out.

Their debut feature “It Goes That Quick” started as a playful experiment. Connor and Stankus cast their own family members in short films, capturing grocery runs, work commutes, tree plantings. The kind of stuff that makes up a life but rarely makes it into movies.

Then they kept filming. For eight years.

The 70-minute hybrid doc premieres April 25 at MoMI’s First Look Festival, with both filmmakers in attendance. Set across highways and suburbs of the Northeast, the film follows two families as fiction and reality start to blur together.

Connor’s no stranger to intimate work. The DP earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for “Madeline’s Madeline” and recently shot HBO’s “The Chair Company” and “Remarkably Bright Creatures” with Sally Field. But pointing the camera at her own family is a different beast entirely.

For Stankus, it’s his first feature after years of acclaimed shorts that played New York Film Festival and Rotterdam.

The result sounds less like a traditional doc and more like a meditation on why we document anything at all. Those trivial moments, it turns out, are the ones that stick.

A prescient cyberpunk mystery about privacy, surveillance, and digital paranoia just earned a major nod from Booklist.

The Private Eye, the Eisner Award-winning series from Brian K. Vaughan (Saga, Pride of Baghdad) and artist Marcos Martín (Friday, Barrier), is now available in paperback from Image Comics. Booklist called it “truly one of a kind” in a starred review, praising its “stunning artwork, propulsive sequential-art storytelling, and a thought-provoking premise.”

The story takes place in 2076, after a catastrophic data breach called “the cloud burst” exposed everyone’s secrets. Society responded by abandoning the internet entirely. People now hide behind masks and fake identities, desperate to cling to whatever privacy they have left. It’s a world where anonymity became the ultimate luxury.

At the center is an unlicensed private investigator who stumbles onto a case that could change everything.

Vaughan and Martín originally released The Private Eye as a pay-what-you-want digital comic in 2013, a bold experiment that paid off. The story feels even more relevant now, tapping into fears about AI manipulation, surveillance, and what happens when trust in technology collapses.

For creators worried about where the digital world is heading, this one hits close to home.

A son’s tribute to his late father is heading back to where it all began.

“Voices: The Danny Gans Story” will screen three times at the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival on April 25, 26, and 27. The timing is significant. Danny Gans attended Cal Poly SLO in 1976, playing baseball as a left-handed power hitter before being drafted by the Chicago White Sox. His widow also attended school there.

The documentary, directed by Danny’s son Andrew, explores the life of the legendary Las Vegas entertainer who held the title of “Las Vegas Entertainer of the Year” for more than a decade. Danny performed to sold-out crowds at The Mirage and Encore, beloved for his voice impressions, comedy, and heartfelt performances.

But the film digs deeper than the public persona. It examines the private complexities of a man who went from professional baseball to entertainment stardom.

Danny died suddenly in 2009. May 1, 2026 marks the 17th anniversary of his passing. The festival screenings fall during Mental Health Awareness Month, adding another layer of resonance to this emotional documentary.

Andrew will attend all three screenings and be available throughout the festival. The film has been winning awards and leaving audiences in tears at festivals nationwide.

A new series shot on Vancouver Island is about to make waves, and it’s the first bilingual French-English drama ever produced in British Columbia.

*Surf Bay, côte Ouest* launches nationally on TV5+ April 24th, with a Crave release set for 2027. The 10-episode series follows Camille Felton as Margot Swann, a pro surfer whose Olympic dreams collide with environmental activism when she fights to protect her hometown’s old-growth forest from tourism development. The clash puts her at odds with her own community and family.

Producer Anthony Cauchy, originally from France, developed the project after falling for BC’s surf scene. “The surf beaches of Vancouver Island are truly unique,” he says. Director Dominic Desjardins (*Paris Paris*) adds that the show offers “active environmentalism that isn’t defeatist at all, which feels refreshing.”

Shot in Tofino, Ucluelet, and around Vancouver, the production brought together a bilingual cast and crew, with over 60% speaking French. The series even landed a David Suzuki cameo and support from surf brands like Billabong and Rip Curl.

The series had its world premiere at Montreal’s Festival Courts d’un Soir, with a public Vancouver screening set for April 17th at L’Alliance Française.

For a BC indie production pulling off a bilingual series with this scope, it’s proof that regional stories can punch above their weight, especially when they tap into something universal like the fight to protect what you love.

Lav Diaz has turned Ferdinand Magellan’s brutal voyage into something mesmerizing. His latest film, “Magellan,” just dropped exclusively on the Criterion Channel, and it’s getting serious attention from critics.

Gael García Bernal plays the Portuguese navigator who led the first European expedition across the Pacific and into the Philippines. Diaz reimagines that journey as something hypnotic, caught between beauty and violence. Variety calls it “mesmerizing,” In Review Online labels it “a masterpiece,” and Slant says it’s “one of the most beautiful movies of the year.”

The film doesn’t shy away from what colonization cost. As The New York Times notes, Diaz “shows what was lost when the ostensibly old world discovered everyone else.” It’s politically rigorous, visually stunning, and García Bernal reportedly delivers one of his finest performances.

The Criterion Channel has it streaming now, with Blu-ray and DVD releases coming soon. For filmmakers tackling historical epics with a critical eye, this one matters. Diaz continues proving that slow cinema can pack a serious punch.

The final season of *BLEACH: Thousand-Year Blood War* is getting a theatrical run before it hits streaming.

VIZ Media and Fathom Entertainment are bringing the first three episodes of *The Calamity* to U.S. theaters June 25–29, ahead of the broadcast and streaming premiere. Tickets go on sale May 29.

The theatrical event includes exclusive behind-the-scenes content featuring creator Tite Kubo and directors Tomohisa Taguchi and Hikaru Murata discussing the production. Both subtitled and dubbed versions will screen nationwide.

*BLEACH* returned in 2022 to adapt the manga’s climactic Thousand-Year Blood War arc after the original series wrapped in 2012. The comeback has been massive. It took home Anime Trending’s “Anime of the Year” in 2024 and earned multiple nominations at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards, including nods for Best Action, Best Continuing Series, and Best Score.

The series routinely pulls 9.4/10 ratings from fans and critics. It’s part of Shonen Jump’s original “Big 3” alongside *One Piece* and *NARUTO*, making it foundational viewing for a generation of anime fans.

*The Calamity* picks up as the Soul Reapers and Quincies face their final battle, with Yhwach and the Royal Guard transforming the Royal Palace into the Wahr Welt. The fate of three worlds hangs in the balance.

This gives fans a chance to experience the finale on the big screen before everyone else catches it at home.

More than one in seven Canadians live with some degree of hearing loss, but their experience is rarely represented on screen. Brian Ceci is changing that with his feature documentary debut, HEARD.

The film follows Ceci, a Hard of Hearing cinematographer, as he connects with others on the HoH spectrum to build community and visibility for an identity that exists in the space between hearing and Deafness. Using vérité footage, family archives and candid interviews, HEARD explores what it means to belong to a community defined by a shared spectrum rather than a single experience.

“Growing up wearing hearing aids, I never saw films featuring character depictions of hearing loss outside of Deaf themes,” says Ceci. “While Deafness is certainly an important marginalized group, there is a gap between hearing and Deafness that is essentially voiceless, even in 2026. I know people like me want to feel seen, and of course heard.”

HEARD makes its theatrical debut at Vancouver’s Rio Theatre on April 14th and 19th, with accessibility features including open captions, ASL interpretation and Auracast audio for hearing aid users. Additional screenings in Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto are set to be announced.

The TELUS original film will stream free on TELUS Optik TV and TELUS Stream+ starting April 21st. It’s produced by Ruckus Machine Pictures, a company founded specifically to tell impact-driven stories from underrepresented communities.

Agatha Bock doesn’t need your help. The 90-year-old tends her massive garden, bakes and cans everything she eats, and hasn’t had running water in a decade. She’s doing just fine, thank you.

Her niece, filmmaker Amalie Atkins, spent six years filming Agatha’s daily routines on her rural Manitoba farm, and the result is stunning. AGATHA’S ALMANAC opens May 15 at New York’s Film Forum for its U.S. theatrical premiere.

Shot on 16mm by an all-female crew led by cinematographer Rhayne Vermette, the doc captures Agatha’s fierce independence with visual poetry. Watch her harvest a 15-pound watermelon by kicking it along with her rubber boot. See her preserve heirloom seeds and maintain her ancestral farm without a car, cell phone, or functioning landline.

The film already won Best Canadian Feature Documentary at Hot Docs and made TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten list for 2025. Critics are calling it “tender and melancholy but so full of life” and praising its “wondrously luminous” cinematography that makes Agatha’s strawberries look impossibly red and her watermelons eye-poppingly pink.

This is what indie documentary filmmaking looks like when it’s done right. No agenda, no manufactured drama. Just a niece learning from her aunt that a handmade, independent life can be its own kind of art.

The post-apocalyptic thriller Snowpiercer is pulling into new territory. Radial Entertainment just dropped the series on Roku, Pluto TV, Tubi, and Plex, with a CW premiere set for mid-April.

It’s a smart play. Free, ad-supported streaming is where the eyeballs are moving, and Snowpiercer has the goods to capitalize. Set seven years after Earth becomes a frozen wasteland, the series follows humanity’s remnants aboard a perpetually moving 1,001-car train. Class warfare, survival politics, and power struggles fuel the drama across every carriage.

The pedigree is there. Executive producers include Scott Derrickson (The Black Phone), Oscar winner Bong Joon-ho (Parasite), and Park Chan-wook (Oldboy). The cast brings serious heat too: Jennifer Connelly, Daveed Diggs, Sean Bean, and Alison Wright lead a roster stacked with award winners.

Seasons 1-3 are streaming now. Season 4 drops this summer.

The move puts quality serialized drama in front of cord-cutters and free streamers who might have missed it the first time around. For creators watching how legacy content finds new life, this is the model: take something with built-in fans, strong production value, and a bingeable hook, then put it where people actually watch. No paywall, just ads and accessibility.