Good news for voracious local cinephiles! If, after the 10-day main course of the Vermont International Film Festival, you still find yourselves with room for cinematic dessert, drive north to Montréal's Cinemania Festival.

Cinemania's 20th anniversary event, which runs November 6-16 at the luxe Imperial Cinema in downtown Montréal, boasts 55 films (a record for the fest) from all over the world, including works by established directors as well as talented newcomers. The festival's selections place an emphasis on French and Québécois cinema — but fear not, non-Francophones: All films will be screened with English subtitles.

Film lovers might recognize the names of François Ozon, Olivier Assayas, Benoît Jacquot or the Dardennes Brothers, all of whose latest films will screen at Cinemania. Also showing, among many others, is Abuse of Weakness, the latest film by the ever-controversial Catherine Breillat, a film that recently played at VTIFF.

Attention, lovers of cinema: Hie thyselves northward. The 43rd annual Festival du Nouveau Cinéma beckons from Montréal.

Dedicated to the newest of the new in film, the 11-day FNC includes films, videos and interactive digital works from all over the world. All types of moving-image artworks — nearly 400 of them — make up the program: animated and live-action; fiction, documentary and avant-garde; funny, serious, confusing and everything in between.

Cinephiles who wish to see the latest by master filmmakers can feast on new works by Jean-Luc Godard (Adieu au langage), Bruno Dumont (P'tit Quinquin) and David Cronenberg (Maps to the Stars), among others. The festival is also particularly rich in new independent films, such as the Kazakh film The Owners and the Lebanese film Scheherazade's Diary.

Bonjour, hepcats!

Have you noticed that your jazz hands are especially shaky of late? That's a sure sign of jazz festival withdrawal, likely a lingering aftereffect of the recent Burlington Discover Jazz Festival. Other symptoms may include restless foot tapping — often in odd meters like 7/8 and 15/4 — spontaneous be- and/or post-bopping and sudden, loud outbursts of public scatting. But take heart, jazz junkies. Our friendly neighbors to the north have your fix.

On Thursday, June 26, the 35th Festival International de Jazz de Montréal gets under way. (For anglophones, that's the Montréal International Jazz Festival — See? French ain't so hard.) For the unfamiliar, the 11-day jazzenanny is among the most famous jazz festivals in the world. It is also the largest, and by a fair margin. So, as you might imagine, a lot of marquee names appear among the festival's hundreds of performers. Like who, you ask?

How about Andrew Bird, Aretha Franklin, Beck, Ben Harper, B.B. King, Diana Ross, Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Gary Clark Clark Jr., Maxwell, Michael Bublé and Snoop Dogg(?!) to name a few.  

And do you know what else the Montréal International Jazz Festival has? Jazz!