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The film community is mourning the loss of film festival executive Noah Cowan, who died January 25 at his home in Los Angeles after a year-long battle with Glioblastoma multiforme. He was 55.

Cowan was an enthusiastic booster of independent film, a celebrated film programmer who rose from 14-year-old volunteer to co-director at the Toronto International Film Festival, cofounder of the non-profit Global Film Initiative in partnership with the Museum of Modern Art (2002-2004), Artistic Director at TIFF Bell Lightbox (2009-2014), and executive director at Sffilm (2014-2019).

In recent years he consulted for film, media, and visual arts organizations including IFC, the Telluride Film Festival, and Centre for the Moving Image in Edinburgh.

Born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1967, Cowan earned a degree in philosophy at McGill University that informed the way he looked at the world. He was that rare cinephile who not only was a festival programmer who loved to discover new talent,...

David Cronenberg swaps his  venereal ick-monsters for Samantha Eggar's mater furiosa,  an annihilating female who commits her killings as would the villain of a Greek tragedy -- through her offspring. Oliver Reed is the new-age guru of 'Psychoplasmics,' who teaches Eggar to direct her rage in an utterly unique way. The disturbing concept sounds less preposterous when one finds out it was written in response to a brutal divorce experience. Hell hath no fury. The Brood Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 777 1979 / Color / 1:78 widescreen / 92 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date October 13, 2015 / 39.95 Starring Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle, Henry Beckman, Nuala Fitzgerald, Cindy Hinds, Susan Hogan, Gary McKeehan, Michael Magee, Robert Silverman, Felix Silla. Cinematography Mark Irwin Film Editor Alan Collins Original Music Howard Shore Special Makeup Jack Young, Dennis Pike Art Direction Carol Spier Produced by Claude Héroux Written and Directed by David Cronenberg

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The Brood

Written and directed by David Cronenberg

Canada, 1979

Inspired by his own unpleasant divorce, and the subsequent liberation of his daughter just before his ex-wife was able to take the girl to a California cult, David Cronenberg’s The Brood is essentially an ugly, highly unorthodox custody battle. As the great Canadian filmmaker famously quipped, “The Brood is my version of Kramer vs. Kramer [also released in 1979], but more realistic.”

The Brood is Cronenberg’s sixth feature, coming just after the seemingly out of place Fast Company (1979)—not so very odd given the director’s love for automobile racing—and just before his more exemplary breakthrough, Scanners (1981). It is consummate Cronenberg, with a heady mixture of clinically twisted science and the deep psychological strain that inevitably mars said science with corporeal disfigurement.

With his wife, Nola (Samantha Eggar), undergoing treatment at a facility known as the Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics (a Cronenbergian...