Cinecenta Films

06/19/2026

The Wizard of the Kremlin
June 19 & 20: 5:00 pm, 7:30 pm
Having spent much of this century fashioning such delicate fancies as Personal Shopper and The Clouds of Sils Maria, Olivier Assayas returns to the muscular geopolitical storytelling of Carlos, his biopic of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, with this sprawling attempt to map the ideological transformation of post-Soviet Russia through the rise of Vladimir Putin. Adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s novel, The Wizard of the Kremlin opens by insistently declaring itself fiction. It is, rather, a lightly fictionalised biopic of Vladislav Surkov, architect of the modern Kremlin, a mysterious figure in the West save for a few choice sightings in such similarly ambitious projects as Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self and HyperNormalisation. What follows is a dense, exhaustively narrated account of power, media manipulation and political storytelling…-Irish Times

"Jude Law plays Putin in an extraordinary performance; wearing a near-permanent grimace and barely ever raising his voice, he’s a nonetheless transfixing screen presence."-The Atlantic

06/16/2026

The Golden Spurtle
June 17 & 18: 5:15 pm, 7:00 pm
93% RT
Eccentric food-preparation competitions are usually the domain of eagle-eyed TV execs who must attempt to work out the drama can be spun across 24 weeks and showcase a dozen ​“characters” for the nation to root for. Filmmaker Constantine Costi manages to go from top to tail in a whip-cracking 75 minutes, chronicling as he does the 2023 edition of the World Porridge-making Championships in the wee Scottish burg of Carrbridge in his charming film, The Golden Spurtle. We’re largely placed in the hands of porridge Chieftain, Charlie Miller, who is planning to hang up his own spurtle after this, the 30th edition of the event. Chefs, foodies and porridge-lovers from around the globe assemble to take part in a knock-out competition whereby each contestant is given a short window to produce a dish made solely from oats, water and salt.-Little White Lies

06/13/2026

The Painted Life of E.J. Hughes
June 14: 5:20 pm, 7:00 pm
For 70 years, E.J. Hughes captured the landscapes of British Columbia in vivid, dreamlike detail. Too shy to attend his own art openings, he struggled in poverty and obscurity until a twist of fate helped him become one of the most beloved—and highly valued—artists in Canadian history.

Recently nominated for 4 Leo Awards including Beat Feature-length Documentary and Best Director and winner of Golden Sheaf Award for Best Director at the Yorkton Film Festival

06/12/2026

Victoria, are you even prepared for the sublime and fabulous comedy of Tracy & Martina: Going out West? We hope so... Two nights only!

Tracy & Martina: Going out West
June 15 & 16 5:00 & 7:00

Similar to Matt Johnson's Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie earlier this year, Goin' Out West has little regard for how the comedy will work for those outside Canada, or outside the Atlantic region for that matter. The film has been made with a particular audience in mind, and thanks to Williamson, Vardy and Lyle's purposeful ignorance of periphery, Goin' Out West serves as a prime example of Canadian comedy at its best.-EXCLAIM!

Two Cape Breton best friends head west to Alberta for the first tim...

06/11/2026

Fuze
June 12 & 13: 5:00 pm, 7:00 pm
The opening credits of the heist thriller Fuze flicker and shake like action-movie credits used to do back in the good old Tony Scott days. That’s an early indication that the film, from director David Mackenzie and writer Ben Hopkins, has a clear sense of what tradition it wants to honor. The film prizes style, but has no higher ambition than to entertain, with an economy of means and no fussy pretension. …It begins as a story of civic suspense: A London construction crew unwittingly digs up an unexploded bomb from the Blitz, similar to an event that really happened in Plymouth last year. It’s a compelling setup, connecting the sleek modernity of Fuze to a horror of the past. The clock ticks all too swiftly as the police and military work to clear the area and bring in a special team, led by an army major played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who will try to defuse the bomb.-The Hollywood Reporter

06/09/2026

LUCID
June 10 & 11: 5:00 pm, 7:10 pm
Victoria Filmmaking heroes/ Co-Directors Deana Milligan and Ramsey Fendall will be on hand for Q&As after the 7:10pm shows!

…Short star Caitlin Acken Taylor returns as lead character Mia, a struggling art student whose dabbling with candy elixir ‘Lucid’ opens up her creativity, but also a forgotten darkness from her past. Whilst the story presented within Lucid is a compelling one, telling of one young woman’s journey to accept both her present and past self; this is a film whose strength lies in its visuals. Considering that the protagonist is an art student, this comes as no surprise, but the imagery itself is. The art experienced in Lucid is not the traditional pastels and watercolours. Mia is conceptual with her work, and the results are grungy and gnarly. There is a grittiness to Mia’s art and this is mirrored through the onscreen grain of Lucid provided by the use of 35mm and 16mm to shoot the film. The use of camera also adds a hazy, dreamy quality to the appearance and helps support the more surreal elements of Lucid that start to take over. The sets and costumes are made of beautiful garbage, everything on screen an extension of Mia herself.-The Hollywood News

“Simply stated: Lucid is a phantasmagorical 90’s banger, whose period setting isn’t simply a nostalgic crutch, but instead an actual device to tell an intriguing story of its time.”-Cinapse

06/08/2026

Orlando, My Political Biography
June 9: 5:00 pm, 7:00 pm
Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography as its starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado has fashioned the documentary, Orlando, My Political Biography, as a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto which premiered and took home four prizes at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival. For almost a century, Woolf’s eponymous hero/heroine has inspired readers for their gender fluidity across physical and spiritual metamorphoses over a 300-year lifetime. Preciado casts a diverse cross-section of more than twenty trans and non-binary individuals in the role of Orlando as they perform interpretations of scenes from the novel, weaving into Woolf’s narrative their own stories of identity and transition. Not content to simply update a seminal work, Preciado interrogates the relevance of Orlando in the continuing struggle against anti-trans ideologies and in the fight for global trans rights.

06/06/2026

Amrum
June 8: 5:00 pm, 7:00 pm
98% Rotten Tomatoes
It’s the spring of 1945, and word of the Second World War’s impending end has reached the residents of Amrum, an island off the coast of Germany. The general response to this news seems muted; apart from an outspoken potato farmer (Diane Kruger) who looks forward to the conclusion of “Hi**er’s damn war,” the islanders know that their rage against the N**i regime is, like an illegal radio or extra rations, something best kept to themselves. Hille Hagener (Laura Tonke), a Third Reich true believer, is shattered by grief; cradling her newborn baby, she murmurs, “What kind of a world is this for a child to grow up in?” Her tough-minded sister, Ena (Lisa Hagmeister), sees things with greater clarity. She pulls a photograph of Hi**er out of its frame and—here’s the meme-able moment—quietly burns it on the kitchen stove, as if to mark the end of an era and, perhaps, of a collective delusion.-New Yorker

“For all of us wondering when an ugly time will fade, the moment will resonate like a cautious, dawning hope”-LA Times

06/03/2026

CAROLINA CAROLINE
Victoria Exclusive - 97% Rotten Tomatoes - From the director of DINNER IN AMERICA
June 5 & 6: 5:00 pm, 7:00 pm
Caroline and Oliver, the outlaw protagonists of “Carolina Caroline” played by Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner, are like characters in a Bruce Springsteen song: two lovers, born to run, surviving on schemes and unbridled passion for each other, who can’t see the water rising around them until it’s up to their necks. Together, they represent a classic on-screen American duo, previously immortalized in lovers-on-the-run films like “They Live By Night,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” and “Badlands.” But Caroline and Oliver are the kinds of people who have never seen those movies — they’re blissfully unaware that the story of their relationship is an old one, and it doesn’t have a happy ending.-IndieWire

A young woman skips her small town — in search of her estranged mot...

06/02/2026

Mile End Kicks
June 3 & 4: 5:00 pm, 7:00 pm
There might never be a better movie released in this era that celebrates the vibrancy of Montreal’s cultural sphere quite like this one. Not even Québec-based productions ever captured the feeling Levack imbues through Grace Pine’s (Barbie Ferreira) journey of self-discovery. The twenty-six-year-old music critic decides to quit her job at an incredibly sexist magazine and move to Montreal, in an attempt to write a book about Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” – a watershed moment not only for Morissette’s journey as an artist, but for Canadian music as a whole. At her apartment in the Mile End, her roommates Madeleine (Juliette Gariépy) and Hugo (Robert Naylor) introduce Grace to the band Bone Patrol, led by singer Chevy (Stanley Simons). The burgeoning author immediately becomes infatuated by the frontman’s charms and vocal talents, but also develops an affinity with the band’s guitarist, Archie (Devon Bostick). What you think will happen happens, but part of the charm of such a predictable coming-of-age tale isn’t necessarily the story being told, but what’s around it. –Film Speak