May the Fourth be with you, Toronto.

Star Wars fans are once again celebrating May the Fourth. There are a few special events happening in the city to help with that Star Wars Day vibe. Here is where you can get your force on in Toronto.

There is a Star Wars trivia night at Hemingway’s Restaurant in Yorkville, running from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. The evening covers the full live-action timeline of the franchise, from the fall of the Republic through the rise of the First Order, with questions drawn from the prequels, Original Trilogy and Disney+ series. Teams of up to six can compete for prizes, while solo attendees can join a community table and be matched with other players.

On the big screen, fans can head east to the May 4 screening of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story at Fox Theatre, marking the film’s 10th anniversary. The standalone film follows the Rebel Alliance’s mission to steal the Death Star plans, offering a darker, self-contained story that has become a modern fan favourite within the broader franchise.

Classic cinema lovers can also return to where it all began at Revue Cinema, which is screening a 4K restoration of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope as part of its “Perfect Date” series. The May 4 screening revisits the original film that follows Luke Skywalker’s first journey into the galaxy, alongside Han Solo, Princess Leia, and those lovable droids R2-D2 and C-3PO.

Elsewhere in the city, there is more fan trivia at The Rec Room Roundhouse, where Star Wars Trivia takes place at 7 p.m. on May 4. Hosted by Quizmaster Jess, the event brings a game-show-style format.

And, of course, one of the city’s quirkiest bars has a special Star Wars menu. Storm Crow Manor is perfect for those looking to awaken the force within at this Church Street watering hole that is all about fandom with themed rooms, specialty cocktails and a playful, over-the-top atmosphere designed for fans to “nerd out” on Star Wars Day.

Toronto’s spring events calendar is full of activities, but nothing beats gawking at hundreds of dapperly dressed motorcyclists in suits and tuxes, revving their bikes throughout the streets of Toronto (and all for a good cause).

On Sunday, May 17, beginning at 8 a.m. in the Distillery District, the city will once again host The Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride (DGR), which brings together riders on classic and vintage-style motorcycles to raise money and awareness for prostate cancer research and men’s mental health (exact route details are shared on the DGR website when you register).

 

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The event is part charity ride, part style statement! It was founded in Sydney by Mark Hawwa in 2012 after he was inspired by an image of Mad Men’s Don Draper on a classic motorcycle in a suit. And, yes, it totally challenges stereotypes around bikers, but the idea was to create a themed ride that would connect niche motorcycle communities across the globe and raise money for a cause with real stakes.

Movember has been the event’s official charity partner since 2016, and DGR says the money raised helps fund prostate cancer initiatives as well as men’s mental health and suicide-prevention work.

To date, DGR has raised more than CAD $68 million globally for men’s health, and Canada is playing a major role in this year’s event: as of publication, 33 Canadian rides had collectively raised more than $250,000, while Toronto’s ride page showed about $50,000 raised so far.

This year marks the ride’s 15th edition, and it’ll take place in more than 1,100 cities worldwide. And despite the name, the event isn’t just for men. DGR is open to distinguished riders of all genders, and if you don’t ride, there are still other ways to take part, like sponsoring a rider or donating directly.

To register, donate or for more info, visit gentlemansride.com or follow @distinguished_riders_toronto.

Toronto-based filmmaker Sophy Romvari has had lots of conversations about the sounds of summer with people who have seen her directorial debut, Blue Heron. In it, she depicts a family in crisis: at the cusp of the twentieth century, eight year-old Sascha’s family moves to Vancouver Island and her oldest brother, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), begins exhibiting behavioural issues. It’s easy to reminisce about your own summers past when Romvari has captured the season, one that is so closely tied to the idleness of childhood, with such fidelity.

“There’s been more than one person who said: ‘And [there’s] the sound of the Game Boy.’ And I say, ‘There is no Game Boy in this movie.’ People start to extrapolate and assume they’re hearing sounds that don’t actually exist because it would fit within this.” Such an anecdote is emblematic of the project of Romvari’s work in excavating the self and interrogating memory. 

Told in two halves — one as Sascha (Eylul Guven) and her family settle into their new life on the Island, the other as the much older Sascha (Amy Zimmer) reckons with what happened to her brother and her family — Blue Heron is an exquisite examination of memory and loss. At the end of April, Blue Heron’s limited release began in select theatres around the city, starting with a sold-out screening at Cineplex Varsity followed by a Q&A with Romvari moderated by esteemed Toronto director David Cronenberg.

The film has since received seven Canadian Screen Awards nominations, including for Best Motion Picture, Achievement in Direction, Original Screenplay and the John Dunning Best First Feature Film Award — and it’s had a very warm reception, with many early viewers calling it the best movie of 2026 so far and The Hollywood Reporter naming Blue Heron 2026’s “most acclaimed film.”

Two best movies of the year so far are Canadian independent works about love and the power of cinema. Must be something we can learn from this pic.twitter.com/KeQWfoemul

— B.C. Wallin (@BCWallin) April 28, 2026

In depicting Sascha’s childhood, there are few moments of silence as Romvari paints a portrait of a hectic but full home with impeccable sound design.

“It’s really underestimated how much sound is a part of nostalgia and a part of memory,” she says. “So much of what you see on the screen is amplified by what you hear. I really like to play with things you hear off camera, things that build the atmosphere that create a sense of time and place.”

From the scrape of a cereal box against the breakfast table, the bounce of a basketball off the house, each sound is a choice Romvari made with her team. 

With Blue Heron, Romvari’s preoccupation lies with how audiences will scrutinize her filmmaking at a craft level. Romvari has built a career excavating her own self and her memories. The themes explored in Blue Heron — grief, trauma, family, memory — aren’t new in her work, all playing a role to varying degrees in It’s Him (2017), a short about a girl who thinks she sees her missing brother in the background of a film, and most notably in Still Processing (2020), Romvari’s master’s thesis and breakout documentary short. In the latter, Romvari’s parents grant her access to a trove of photographs and home videos they’d kept from her and her brother in the wake of the death of her two older brothers. Still Processing was borne out of lengthy negotiations between Romvari and her parents about the value of such a film’s existence in the first place, with Romvari arguing that the experience would be cathartic, something like therapy. She was right. When it came time for Blue Heron, Romvari’s parents trusted in their daughter’s vision. 

“As much as this film is very personal and it’s very much based on my family’s experience, it is a fiction movie to me,” Romvari says. “When I watch the movie, it feels very reminiscent — and even for my parents. We’ve talked about it at length and it feels like something that we can all see and understand and relate to, but it’s not our family, you know? It’s an artistic expression that is very much in line with the experience, but it’s different.” 

In preparation for the principal photography, Romvari and Blue Heron’s cinematographer, Maya Bankovic, revisited Romvari’s father’s home videos — the same ones shown in brief snippets in Still Processing. Bankovic’s camera roams through Sascha’s house as though it is the seventh person living there, observing its subjects at a distance through a window or a door’s threshold. The similarities between both sets of footage is uncanny and intentional, Romvari told me.

“He would make these really mundane moments feel very important,” she says of her father’s home videos. “He didn’t have a camera in our face. He was trying to actually capture naturalism.”

In her master’s thesis about Still Processing, Romvari writes about how certain documentaries that investigate the director’s personal trauma can often skew towards manipulative, mining obviously difficult topics to evoke emotional reactions from the audience. Throughout her work, Romvari successfully navigates this pitfall by depicting stories from a place of authenticity, even when they are works of fiction. I asked Romvari about the conscious decisions required to keep such work from feeling exploitative.

“It’s almost impossible to make a film without some level of exploitation of someone else’s experience because no one experiences the world in a vacuum. The word is very difficult to define when you’re talking about making films about your experiences because you can ask for permission, but then you’re never going to understand how someone else will feel once those stories are out there,” Romvari says. “That’s also why I have stuck, to be honest, with personal work because I feel like I have the authorship, at least within myself and my family, to tell these stories. I would have a harder time telling someone else’s story. I want to challenge myself to do that, but I am always concerned with how I am depicting something. What about me gives me the authorship to tell this story?” 

Romvari was particularly tactful with how she depicted Jeremy both on the page and on the screen, who stands in for her older brother Jonathan. “I was really trying to make sure that I wasn’t making one character into a villain or a caricature, because I’m depicting someone who’s no longer alive, so he doesn’t have the opportunity to give permission. I tried to create a character who you get a sense of who they are, but he remains quite unknowable.”

Casting for Jeremy was challenging. “Everyone was bringing too much, because I think the role, even as written, could easily be perceived as like the ‘troubled teen’ and I needed a more internalized performance,” she recalls.

Romvari strove to emulate that same naturalism of her father’s home videos; street casting Edik Beddoes, who had never acted on screen before, was one such decision in accomplishing this. Before filming, Beddoes and Romvari met in parks around Vancouver, getting to know one another, with Romvari filming occasionally to help Beddoes be comfortable in front of the camera. Beddoes maintains a striking intensity throughout the film without veering into oppressive; it’s almost shocking for a newcomer to have such a screen presence without even having that many lines. Earlier this year, Beddoes was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award for best supporting performance in a drama film.

Though Beddoes has the supremely difficult task of portraying Jeremy, each cast member is pitch perfect in their roles and, as a whole, displayed an astonishing chemistry that evoked the atmosphere of a real family.

Romvari had acted in some of her own films in the past, but she knew that casting an actor as her stand-in would be instrumental in Blue Heron. “Having someone play the part that is essentially a surrogate character for myself gave me even more creative distance and also allowed me to just focus on the direction.”

There’s a moment in Still Processing where Romvari — no stand-in, it’s a documentary, after all — looks at pictures from her childhood that she’s never seen before. She’s moved, and then she admits something that struck me as so supremely truthful to the experience of growing up with certain trauma: she does not remember the photo being taken.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Romvari about her relationship with memory, especially when trying to model a childhood she may not fully recall — even if her film is a work of fiction entirely separate from her life. For Romvari, many of her memories are closely linked to photographs in that they evince the emotion present even though the exact events are hazy, like in Blue Heron when Jeremy lays motionless on the family’s stoop. Romvari knows her brother had a tendency to the same thing; she has no recollection of it happening, but she knows that it did because of a photograph her father took.

“Sometimes, photographs replace memories and you know that you experienced them because there’s a document of it. That’s a big part of what motivates me to be a filmmaker is this act of creating something in order to validate the experience having existed,” Romvari says. “That’s what Still Processing was, and what so many of my films have been: this desire to create something that you can actually witness and then it acknowledges the reality of something and then you have to confront it.”

The biggest and best concerts, events and shows this month, from Yungblud and A$AP Rocky to Courtney Barnett, eco-thrillers and brassy musicals.

YUNGBLUD

British alt-rock disruptor and Ozzy Osbourne hanger-on YUNGBLUD brings his ‘IDOLS’ – The World Tour to Coca-Cola Coliseum on May 2, promising a spectacle complete with anthems and serious energy featuring one of rock’s fastest rising stars.

Kinky Boots

From May 12 to 31, the feel-good musical Kinky Boots struts into Toronto’s CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre, bringing high kicks, higher heels and even higher energy to the stage. This true story musical — set to Cyndi Lauper’s infectious score — delivers on all levels.

Cicadas

From May 5 to 24, the eerie eco-thriller cicadas takes over Tarragon Theatre. Created by David Yee and Chris Thornborrow and directed by Nina Lee Aquino, the play is set in 2032 in a haunted Trinity Bellwoods home and blends live music and mystery.

Bif Naked

Beloved music icon Bif Naked hits the Paradise Theatre on May 9 as part of the Departure Festival + Conference, with the Toronto premiere of her documentary Bif Naked, followed by an intimate acoustic performance and Q & A.

Fleurs de Villes

From May 6 to 10, Bloor-Yorkville transforms into a free, open-air floral gallery as Fleurs de Villes FLORA celebrates Mother’s Day with more than 30 floral installations supporting Breast Cancer Canada.

A$AP Rocky

On May 31, A$AP Rocky brings his’ Don’t Be Dumb’ World Tour to Scotiabank Arena. Expect a high-energy night of hits, hype and headline-level production as one of hip hop’s most unpredictable and enjoyable live performers hits the stage.

Courtney Barnett

Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett brings her ‘We Are In The Future Tour’ to History on May 22, delivering her signature deadpan storytelling and slacker-rock energy that put her on the musical map following the release of her 2015 debut album.

Tiger Bride

From May 29 to June 14, the world premiere of Tiger Bride transforms Soulpepper into a rock-fuelled, punk-infused reimagining of Angela Carter’s dark fairy tale, starring one of the city’s finest stage performers, Hailey Gillis, in a show that blurs theatre, cabaret and concert.

Fran Lebowitz

On May 8, writer and cultural satirist Fran Lebowitz appears at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall for ‘In Conversation with Fran Lebowitz’, hosted by CBC’s Mattea Roach. Expect her trademark sharp, unscripted commentary on modern life and culture.

Lowest of the Low

Iconic Toronto band Lowest of the Low takes the stage for two shows, May 8 and 9, at the Danforth Music Hall in celebration of the 35th anniversary of the band’s seminal debut album, Shakespeare My Butt. Not to be missed, even by “salesmen, cheats and liars.”

DJ Jessi Cruickshank

On May 9, Canadian comedian, TV host and DJ Jessi Cruickshank takes a turn on the wheels of steel creating a feel-good, no-pressure dance floor takeover with ‘Evening Club – A Dance Party’, running 7–10 p.m. at the historic Concert Hall on Yonge Street.

The Hidden Cameras

Beloved Toronto band the Hidden Cameras, which turned the city on its collective musical head in the early 2000s, is back with a rare show at the amazing Longboat Hall on May 21, with very cool special guest Sook Yin Lee.

In Yorkville’s Mira Godard Gallery, a special and rare commemoration of one of their longest and well-known artists is on the horizon. This May, the gallery will be putting on the Takao Tanabe 100th Birthday Exhibition, in celebration of Canadian artist Takao Tanabe.

Tanabe, a decades-long visual arts advocate and influence on young artists in Canada, is deeply regarded as a leading figure in landscape art. The gallery’s 100th birthday celebration marks a century since his birth. 

Born in 1926 in Seal Cove, B.C., Tanabe later attended the Winnipeg School of Art and then went on to work in New York where he learned from abstract expressionists like Hans Hoffmann at the Brooklyn Museum of Art School. 

In the 1950s, he continued studying in London, England until he eventually found his way to Japan, to study at the University of Fine Arts. In the 1950s and ’60s, he made his way through the U.S., honing in on his landscape painting skills before he worked for Emily Carr University of Art and Design (formerly known as the Vancouver School of Art).

He’s received multiple honours over the years, including the Order of Canada in 1999, the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2003 and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts in 2013.

The Mira Godard Gallery has represented the painter and printmaker’s works for over 60 years. In 1971, Mira Godard Gallery offered Tanabe a monthly stipend for exclusive rights to his paintings. The anniversary marks their partnership with the artist, as well as Tanabe’s legacy. 

Some of his major works have landed him exhibitions such as Takao Tanabe at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2005. 

At the current Mira Godard Gallery Tanabe exhibition, you can find the artist’s paintings and printwork, with some directly from his studio, specifically sent to the gallery for public viewing. His works are focused on British Columbian landscapes as well as scenes of the Prairies.

The Takao Tanabe 100th Birthday Exhibition will be open May 2 to June 27. You can visit the gallery at 22 Hazelton Ave.