As French-Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan hits 30, he wants to reflect on his coming of a certain age. In Matthias & Maxime—which screened as part of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival—he has assembled a group of friends as they make a short film. When his character Max is required to kiss his best friend they realise their long suppressed feelings for each other. Max is, however, about to embark on a two-year trip to Australia and audiences are kept enthralled as to whether he might stay and pursue the relationship. It’s a very romantic story …

The first international trailer for The Death and Life of John F. Donovan has landed online, offering a look at writer/director Xavier Dolan’s long-delayed English-language debut. The dramatic epic was shot in two halves back in 2016 and 2017, but Dolan famously tinkered with the structure pretty heavily in post-production, going so far as to completely remove the film’s principal antagonist character played by Jessica Chastain. The finished story chronicles the correspondence between a teen-TV-heartthrob-turned-movie-star named John F. Donovan (Kit Harington) and a young fan named Rupert (Jacob Tremblay), …