Christy: Sydney Sweeney Steps Into the Ring – TIFF 2025

Rating: 2 out of 5.

On the night of November 23, 2010, Christy Martin was brutally attacked by her husband. After stabbing her several times, he shot her in the chest, left her for dead on the floor of their bedroom, and went to take a shower. Miraculously, Christy managed to stand up and walk to the street, where she found a driver who took her to a hospital. This episode in the turbulent life of the former welterweight champion feels like something out of a horror movie. In Christy (2025), directed by David Michôd, we revisit the life inside and outside the ring of one of the most dominant female boxers of all time.

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Weapons (2025): Horror That Hides a Social Critique

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Horror has long been fertile ground for exploitation cinema, but it has also served as a playground for filmmakers to smuggle in sharp social commentary, tucked between jump scares and visceral set pieces. Weapons (2025), the latest from Zach Cregger, confidently walks both paths. It’s a taut, impeccably crafted genre film and, at the same time, an unsettling meditation on violence and its chilling presence within schools and in the lives of children.

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Tornado (2025): When East Meets West in a Slow-Burning Duel

Rating: 3 out of 5.

The longstanding romance between westerns and samurai films has yielded some of cinema’s most iconic hybrids from The Magnificent Seven to A Fistful of Dollars. Tornado (2025), the second feature from Scottish director John Maclean, joins this lineage with quiet confidence and striking visual precision. Known for Slow West (2015), Maclean once again proves his deep understanding of the western form, only this time, with the philosophical touch of the Japanese jidaigeki.

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Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Cinema’s fascination with giant monsters is as old as cinema itself. Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025) is the perfect example of how the industry has fully capitalized on this niche. This is the seventh film in a saga that began in 1993 with the release of Jurassic Park, directed by Steven Spielberg. That first installment marked a turning point in the use of digital and animatronic effects, and John Williams’ score would go on to become one of the most iconic in film history.

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Warfare (2025): The Horror of War

Rating: 4 out of 5.

War has always been fertile ground for cinema. Warfare (2025), by Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, ventures into these paths by telling a specific incident during the Second Battle of Ramadi in 2006. American forces were fighting for control of this key city in central Iraq. But Warfare does not aim to be an action film or a thriller that leans on real events to take the audience on a rollercoaster of visual effects and endless gunfights—no. Warfare seeks to be a testimony, a kind of tribute, and a recounting based purely on memory.

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