First Look, First Weekend

At the Film Stage, Rory O’Connor has called The Misconceived an “incisive, inventive movie about the anxieties faced by the never-quite-made-it creative class.” Now in his forties, Tyler (John Magary) had hoped to be directing movies by this point in his life. Instead, he finds himself doing renovation work for an old college friend, Tobin (Jesse Wakeman), a sculptor successful enough to be campaigning to have his work invited to the Whitney Biennial.

That’s a fine set-up for discomfiting drama, but here’s the thing. As Kienitz Wilkins explains to Nicolas Rapold on The Last Thing I Saw, he’s aiming to conjure something “authentic” via “inauthentic” means. The world of The Misconceived was built with Unreal Engine, a source-available commercial software driving such video games as Hogwarts Legacy and creating virtual sets for live-action shows like The Mandalorian.

“As was the case with its spiritual predecessor, The Plagiarists (2019), in which Kienitz Wilkins turned digital editing and awkward social interactions into dialectical exercises,” writes Chris Cassingham at In Review Online, “The Misconceived’s obvious accoutrements—3D animation, motion capture, stock music—obscure the more nuanced trickery simmering underneath their surfaces.” And the result is “a wildly entertaining film.”

“The Misconceived is, on its face, a surrealistic nightmare,” writes Chloe Lizotte at Reverse Shot, “and that feels right for the state of affairs it’s describing. But Wilkins and co. have found a way for the surrealistic nightmare to convey something personal and homegrown. The Misconceived is about the layers upon layers of human-made artifice that always stand between the maker and the viewer,” ultimately “transcending its status as a single film to expand on a self-referential, deeply idiosyncratic body of work.”

The first showcase screening of the festival offers another set of fortysomething adults at a crossroads. Noah (Chris Pine), a divorced single dad, and Rebecca (Jenny Slate), high-school teacher and debate coach, were once teenage sweethearts. And now they’ve walked back into each other’s lives. “Whether playing sexy comedy or hostility, raw emotional agita or hollowness, Chris Pine and Jenny Slate are so damn fine in Carousel that you keep wondering why we seldom get to see these gifted actors bite into characters of such substance and complexity,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “Rachel Lambert’s latest is a strange and beguilingly lovely relationship drama. Eventually. But first, the writer-director needs to get out of her own way.”

In 2024, Damian McCarthy’s Oddity won audience awards at SXSW and the Overlook Film Festival, “and while it was topping year-end horror lists left and right, I was a bit less enthusiastic,” writes J. Hurtado at ScreenAnarchy. McCarthy has now cast Adam Scott as a reclusive and rather rude novelist who travels to an isolated Irish inn with, legend has it, a haunted honeymoon suite. “Whatever it was that was missing from Oddity for me is here in spades with Hokum, a nonstop fright factory that immediately bumps McCarthy into the upper echelon of contemporary horror filmmakers,” writes Hurtado. “It’s a gripping story that unrelentingly ramps up the tension while simultaneously delivering some of the year’s best jump scares.”

Kunsang Kyirong’s 100 Sunset is rooted in a Tibetan community in Toronto, where eighteen-year-old Kunsel (Tenzin Kunsel) steals a camera and befriends Passang (Sonam Choekyi), a recent immigrant. Kunsel’s “burgeoning fascination” with Passang “catalyzes a narrative charged with a sense of everyday enigma, with characters trying to get to the bottom of their own impulses and desires,” writes Adam Nayman in the Toronto Star. “At once precise and suggestive, 100 Sunset vibrates on dual frequencies of intimacy and unease that make it one of the most accomplished Canadian debuts in recent memory.”

Programmed by Genevieve Yue and David Schwartz, Little Stabs is a selection of avant-garde shorts that opens with a four-minute film by Alexandre Koberidze (Dry Leaf). Lewis Klahr, Janie Geiser, and Kyath Battie will be on hand to say a few words about their latest works. Filmmaker, writer, and former researcher Erin Espelie will then present Ideas of Order, a rumination on cyanobacteria, the first organisms known to have produced oxygen. Experimental filmmaker Stephanie Barber narrates.

It Goes That Quick, the first feature codirected by editor Joe Stankus and cinematographer Ashley Connor, will see its world premiere at MoMI on Saturday. “A fittingly personal collaboration, it charts their extended family over a decade-long period with Mekas-esque intimacy,” writes Jordan Raup at the Film Stage.

Ramzi Bashour’s road movie Hot Water is “mellow, laid-back, and lived-in, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” wrote Jason Bailey in a dispatch from Sundance. Lubna Azabal plays a Lebanese single mom traveling from Indiana to California with her Americanized teenage son (Daniel Zolghadri). “The story beats don’t go anywhere unexpected,” notes Bailey, “but the performances are winners; Azabal turns a purely reactive character into something active and alive, Dale Dickey is (as ever) a joy in  her brief but memorable appearance, and Zolghadri is a real find; his mixture of charisma, restlessness, and recklessness legit recalls Mark Ruffalo in You Can Count on Me.”

Shot in Romania, Turkey, and Ukraine over a stop-and-go period of nine years, We Put the World to Sleep stars director Adrian Țofei and cowriter Duru Yücel as fictionalized versions of themselves, filmmakers trying to make a movie about the end of the world and then deciding that they should just go ahead and actually end the world. Part of a trilogy that began with Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015) and will conclude with Pure, We Put the World to Sleep won the Best Midnight Feature award at last year’s Nightmares Film Festival.

The day begins at noon with two films running about half an hour each. Mohamed Mesbah—who will be taking part in a panel discussion about Muslim and SSWANA lives on-screen later in the afternoon—will present Still Playing, which centers on a Palestinian video-game developer whose work reflects the struggle of trying to raise two sons in Gaza as the war rages. And with L’mina, Randa Maroufi works with coal miners in Jerada, Morocco, to reconstruct an underworld in a living room with the aid of 3D scans and intimate Super 8 footage.

Ken Jacobs’s A Date with Shirley (2025), which MoMI calls a “colorful and cubist record of a Chinatown haircut,” will screen as part of The Whole Shebang: Celebrating Ken and Flo Jacobs, New York’s monthlong salute to one of the community’s most beloved couples. Shirley will be preceded by two shorts, Ana Vaz’s The Tree (2022) and Friedl vom Gröller’s Veronique (2025).

Valentyn Vasyanovych’s To the Victory!, set in Ukraine in some hopefully near future when the Russians have gone back home, won the Platform Award in Toronto. “Taking the acting lead, Vasyanovych and his crew run a Symbiopsychotaxiplasm playbook for scenes that repeatedly undercut and draw attention to their own construction,” wrote Vadim Rizov at Filmmaker last fall. “The mode is black comedy, with lots and lots of drinking, and whether or not you’ll like it depends as much on your tolerance for Ukrainian men getting hammered and skanking to Madness as your interest in master-shot compositional excellence. I found it all very funny and sharp.”

Nonfiction filmmaker Robb Moss’s “most remarkable work is his trilogy of ‘river films,’” writes Scott Macdonald at the top of his interview for Documentary Magazine, “beginning with the idyll, Riverdogs [1982], and continuing with The Same River Twice (2003), a feature during which several of Moss’s friends and Moss himself revisit Riverdogs, from their now-middle-aged perspective.” The Bend in the River (2025) returns again. “Together, the three films are as intimate and thoughtful an evocation of the process of aging as can be found in modern cinema.”

For Morte Cucina, his first feature since 2017’s Samui Song, Thai New Wave filmmaker Pen-ek Ratanaruang reunites with actor Tadanobu Asano and cinematographer Christopher Doyle to tell the story of Sao (Bella Boonsang), an aspiring chef who recognizes in one the diners at the restaurant where she’s working the man who sexually abused her when she was a teen. “I won’t spoil it here,” wrote Katie Rife in a dispatch to RogerEbert.com from Tokyo, “but Pen-ek’s film speaks to the codependent nature of love and hate, and it makes a highly compelling argument for getting some Thai food after the movie.”

Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes won the Directing Award and an audience award when One in a Million premiered in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance. The codirectors first spotted Israa, a Syrian refugee, in 2015, when she was eleven. She was selling cigarettes on a bustling street in Izmir, Turkey. The filmmakers followed the journey of Israa and her family—by bus, boat, train, and too often on foot—to Cologne, Germany, shooting over a period of ten years.

“Azzam and MacInnes give us a modern-day epic that traverses borders—truly, they’ve captured some incredible footage—but they outdo themselves by following that up with an absorbing, complex tale about the challenges of assimilation,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. “And despite all the history swirling around her, Israa remains at the center of this film. The unique achievement of One in a Million lies in the way it allows us to know this young woman while it preserves the mystery of a human soul.”