The Daily | The Criterion Collection

Shifting POVs

David Hudson — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:35:00 +0000

Gina Gershon in Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s Bound (1996)

Thursday morning brought the shocking news that Marjane Satrapi, who told her life story in the graphic novel Persepolis and its animated adaptation, was gone at fifty-six. She “died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life,” reads a statement released by those close to her.

Satrapi grew up in Tehran, where she attended French-language schools and wore the sort of clothes and listened to the kinds of music that had her parents worrying that she would run into trouble with Islamist authorities. They sent her to study in Vienna, and in 1994, Satrapi moved to France. She was an outspoken supporter of the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, and after her husband’s death, she set up the Mattias and Marjane Ripa-Satrapi Cinema Foundation to support foreign students studying film in Paris.

Nominated for an Oscar and the winner of a Jury Prize in Cannes and a César for Best First Film, Persepolis is “the chronicle of a young girl’s coming of age in difficult times, a tale that unfolds with such grace, intelligence, and charm that you almost take the wondrous aspects of its execution for granted,” wrote A. O. Scott in the New York Times in 2007. “And Persepolis, austere as it may look, is full of warmth and surprise, alive with humor and a fierce independence of spirit.”

At RogerEbert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz remembers editor Marcia Lucas, who worked with her first husband, George Lucas, on THX 1138 (1971), American Graffiti (1973), and the first Star Wars trilogy and with Martin Scorsese on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), and New York, New York (1977). Marcia Lucas passed away last week at the age of eighty.

“Winning an Oscar for cutting the original Star Wars with Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch is often marked as her career peak,” writes Seitz, “but personally, I’d put Taxi Driver alongside it. It mixes multiple film genres together—vigilante thriller, character study, screwball comedy, film noir, and ’70s style sleaze-pit exploitation, plus a bit of French New Wave–inspired jump-cutting—particularly in the driving sequences and the ‘You talkin’ to me?’ scene, a collage of behavioral bits invented on the set by star Robert De Niro.”

In memory of sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin, who died last Friday at the age of 104, e-flux has posted an excerpt from his 1956 book The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man. Having coined the term cinéma vérité in his 1957 book The Stars, Morin teamed up with Jean Rouch to make Chronicle of a Summer (1961), “a film whose radical immediacy is still ahead of its time,” as Sam Di Iorio wrote in 2013. In his obituary for the New York Times, Adam Nossiter calls Morin “an autodidact sharpshooter at the edges of academia in France.”

In festival news, Karlovy Vary has unveiled lineups for its Crystal Globe Competition, the Proxima competition for “progressive works of cinema,” and thirteen Special Screenings. The Hollywood Reporter’s Georg Szalai is particularly looking forward to Nader Saeivar’s Hijamat, a family drama coproduced and edited by Jafar Panahi. KVIFF will celebrate its eightieth anniversary with the sixtieth edition running from July 3 through 11.

Two festivals spotlighting Iranian cinema open today, one in Los Angeles, the other in Chicago. And in New York, the Museum of Modern Art is presenting a series of Universal Westerns featuring films by John Ford, Anthony Mann, Allan Dwan, Budd Boetticher, King Vidor, Jacques Tourneur, and Clint Eastwood. There are several screenings of 35 mm prints, and talking to R. Emmet Sweeney, MoMA curator Dave Kehr notes that Universal has been extraordinarily helpful. “They listen to people like us and do the work, which is not what I’m used to,” says Kehr. “We’re doing this in coordination with Narrow Margin magazine, who to me represent a really solid kind of historical criticism that we haven’t seen in a while.”

Before turning to this week’s highlights, let’s note that we must sadly prepare to say goodbye to Slate’s Culture Gabfest. For eighteen years, Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner’s conversations about music, movies, TV, books, fashion, controversy-sparking essays, and the occasional recipe have enlightened and entertained. With just a few more episodes to go, we’re already dreading the absence of their sane and sober contribution to the discourse.

On Sunday, Tribeca will present a thirtieth-anniversary screening of Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s Bound, followed by a conversation with Lilly Wachowski, Jennifer Tilly, Gina Gershon, Joe Pantoliano, and Christopher Meloni moderated by Julie Klausner. Bound is “sexy and dangerous, and it has queer characters who are villains you root for,” says King Princess. For IndieWire, Nick Newman talks with Lilly Wachowski, who recalls a pre-release screening in San Francisco. “The Castro was packed with seven hundred queer women, lesbians, and from the very first reel, they were roaring,” she says. “I have never, to this day, seen one of our films get that kind of reaction in front of an audience. So the folks who we made that film for embraced it entirely.”

A new restoration of Shunji Iwai’s first feature, Love Letter (1995), opens a four-film showcase of his work at New York’s Metrograph this evening, and Iwai will be there through the weekend. “His sensibility—which pairs J-pop music with classical recordings, and delicate compositions with free-flowing camerawork—sees internal emotion heightened in the external world,” writes Alex Lei at Screen Slate. “So palpable are the inner realities of his characters that his films become intimate examinations of contemporary existence,” writes Joshua Minsoo Kim in Metrograph’s Journal. Iwai’s April Story (1998), “about a college student struggling with loneliness, is delicate and wistful, while the feature that followed it, 2001’s All About Lily Chou-Chou, is an oppressively bleak gauntlet of teenage angst,” writes Katie Rife for Letterboxd. “Interestingly, Iwai describes all his films as comedies.”

“Our cinematographic memories of one great artist’s work reverberate across the landscapes, spaces, actors, and colors that mix in our minds so we can speak of the feeling of ‘Ozu’ as one as multifaceted as the word ‘logos,’” writes Greg Gerke in Liberties Journal. “An astute but unheralded commentator on a film website said of Ozu’s films that his characters demonstrate one truism—the older one gets, the more they sense the coming of nothing and they push away from it. I refer to this because unlike many of those characters I was not pushing away, I let it happen, and in terms of the Faulknerian equation, I took grief rather than nothing. And even if his characters did not take grief all the time, Ozu certainly did.”

It’s been quite a week at the BFI. Sight and Sound has posted Farran Smith Nehme’s cover story on Marilyn Monroe and Quentin Tarantino’s ode to Joe Carnahan’s The Rip, and the series Revolutionary Cinema: The Passion of Ritwik Ghatak is on though the end of the month. In an introductory primer, curator Sanghita Sen notes that Ghatak has been described as “a passionate and intensely national filmmaker.” While that’s “especially true of Ghatak’s powerful depiction of the Partition of Bengal and its enduring trauma, his films also speak to much larger global realities shaped by colonial and imperial oppression, constant war, genocide, and displacement.”

For Notebook, Matthew Thrift talks with “prodigious multi-hyphenate” Tsui Hark. “As director,” writes Thrift, “he leaps between comedy (Aces Go Places 3, 1984; The Chinese Feast, 1995) and time-bending romance (Love in the Time of Twilight, 1995), between fantastical melodrama (Green Snake, 1993), dizzying action (The Blade, 1995; Time and Tide, 2000), and whatever Tri-Star (1996) is. As a producer, he quickly became notorious for his meddlesome oversight, while simultaneously scoring smash hit after smash hit.” The conversation touches on action sequences, Leni Riefenstahl, AI, and gender roles. “Every time you go to see a movie, you should be getting a new perspective on who you are,” says Tsui.

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Louis Malle: Portraits of America

David Hudson — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:18:00 +0000

Louis Malle and cinematographer Richard Ciupka on the set of Atlantic City (1980)

Claire Duguet’s Louis Malle, le Révolté is the ideal curtain-raiser for Louis Malle: Portraits of America, the series opening today at Metrograph in New York. In just over an hour, Duguet takes us on a brisk tour of the life and work of a restless artist. Born into a wealthy family in northern France, Malle ditched his studies to join Jacques Cousteau and his crew as they made The Silent World (1956), an undersea documentary that won both the Palme d’Or in Cannes and an Oscar. Cousteau generously gave Malle codirecting credit.

Malle’s first feature, Elevator to the Gallows (1957), starring Jeanne Moreau and famously featuring an improvised soundtrack by Miles Davis, was a hit with critics and audiences alike. Elevator screens in Berkeley on Saturday and then again on August 28, when it wraps the BAMPFA series French Noir: From the Shadows into the Light.

“Malle spent the four decades of his filmmaking life saying, ‘Been there, done that,’ over and over again, searching constantly for somewhere he hadn’t been and something he hadn’t done,” wrote Terrence Rafferty in 2006. “From the chilly elegance of Elevator to the Gallows, in 1957, he moved quickly to the humid romanticism of The Lovers (1958) and then to the frenetic zaniness of Zazie dans le métro (1960). Next came A Very Private Affair, in 1962, a caustic film à clef about and with Brigitte Bardot, which was followed immediately by the melancholic, Fitzgerald-like The Fire Within (1963).”

Malle welcomed the occasional flop. Rejection offered an opportunity for a reset, and in 1968, Malle left France for India, where he shot two documentaries. He returned to Paris just in time for May ’68; he was the Cannes jury member who announced that that year’s festival was shutting down early, and within a few weeks, he joined François Truffaut and other directors in the founding of the Société des Réalisateurs de Films, which launched the Directors’ Fortnight the following year.

A few years later, it was off to the U.S., where he made the films screening in the Metrograph series, met Candice Bergen, and married her in 1980. “I married America a little bit, too,” he says in one of the expertly selected and placed archival clips in Duguet’s portrait. In 1995, Malle passed away far too young; he was sixty-three.

At Air Mail, writer (The Price of Illusion), actor (Julie & Julia), and former French Vogue editor Joan Juliet Buck writes appreciatively about the documentary and its subject, whom she considered a friend. “In later interviews,” she writes, “he’s loquacious, assured, and candid, his dark eyes sincere, trusting, confessional, delighted, sometimes sheepish, fully engaged with the camera and the person behind it.”

Tonight’s screening will be followed by a Q&A with Duguet and an introduction to Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), Malle’s final film, from one of his daughters, Chloe Malle. Renowned stage director André Gregory and his cast, including Wallace Shawn as Vanya, had been rehearsing David Mamet’s adaptation of Chekhov’s play for four years before Gregory asked Malle to bring in the cameras. “Malle was the ideal director for the project, which strips down Chekhov’s late-nineteenth-century story about Russian intellectuals in the provinces and reimagines it as a text for Stanislavski-trained American actors,” wrote Steven Vineberg in 2012.

On Sunday, Duguet will introduce two documentaries. God’s Country (1985) is an exploration of the farming community of Glencoe, Minnesota, which in 1979 had a population of around five thousand. Malle revisited the town five years later and discovered that Reaganomics was taking its toll. “Malle burrows beneath the fairs and bingo nights to get past the stereotypes of the narrow Midwesterner,” wrote Michael Koresky in 2007, “and, in interviewing a wide array of locals, discovers some hidden cultural vibrancy (there’s even a progressive theater group, staging a play titled Much Ado About Corn) and openness of thought, as well as the lingering pain and divisiveness of Vietnam’s legacy, illustrated both by disillusioned war veterans and parents of former protestors.”

For . . . And the Pursuit of Happiness (1986), Malle interviewed recent immigrants to the U.S., including, as Koresky wrote, “Cambodian refugees arriving at JFK airport unable to speak English, a Pakistani schoolteacher-turned–Elizabeth Arden salesperson, an Ethiopian cabdriver, a Costa Rican NASA astronaut, a Vietnamese family practitioner living and working in Nebraska, an El Salvadoran family seeking political asylum, and West Indian poet Derek Walcott, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize. What he discovered, despite all the tensions in the country over border control and immigration restrictions, was an inspiring optimism and sense of pride at being new Americans.”

Atlantic City (1980), screening on Sunday and June 14, “caught the town on an upswing, thanks to the then-recent legalization of gambling and construction of casinos on the boardwalk,” wrote Sean Burns a few years ago for Crooked Marquee. “None of this new business sits well with Lou Pascal, an old-school numbers runner and relic from the mob’s 1940s heyday, touchingly played by Burt Lancaster in one of his great ‘leopard in winter’ performances.”

Susan Sarandon costars as Sara, “an oyster house waitress from Saskatchewan who dreams of being a blackjack dealer in Monaco,” wrote Burns. “With his usual wry reserve, Malle makes a study of the crumbling old tourist traps against the antiseptic new corporate emporiums, the margins bustling with colorful characters like Michel Piccoli’s blustery cardsharp and the director’s future My Dinner with André star playing a mispronunciation-prone waiter, billed as ‘Wally’ Shawn.”

And speaking of My Dinner with André (1981), this “deceptively simple two-hander,” as Amy Taubin called it in 2015, screens on June 12. Shawn and André Gregory play fictionalized versions of themselves, once-close friends meeting up again after the years André spent wandering the earth seeking enlightenment while Wally stayed planted in New York with both feet on the ground. Malle’s “enthusiasm for the project might have had to do with the challenge of making two men talking over dinner into a compelling cinematic experience,” writes Taubin. “That is to say, it was a perfect fit for a seriously eclectic career. As much as Steven Soderbergh today, Malle seemed determined to try something new with every film.”

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Tribeca 2026: “AI Is Here”

David Hudson — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:13:00 +0000

Ash Koosha’s Dreams of Violets (2026)

In the run-up to today’s opening of the twenty-fifth Tribeca Festival, the New York Times’ Sarah Bahr has spoken with Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal—who cofounded the event in the immediate wake of 9/11 to help revive the Lower Manhattan neighborhood—and Rebecca Glashow, the new CEO of Tribeca Enterprises, which owns and operates the festival. Bahr asks all three what they’re most looking forward to in this year’s edition, and De Niro’s answer is the Q&A he’ll be taking part in alongside Martin Scorsese and Jodie Foster prior to Friday’s fiftieth-anniversary screening of Taxi Driver.

A few years ago, we posted a clip from the audio commentary that Scorsese and Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader recorded for our 1990 release of the film on laserdisc. De Niro, of course, stars as Travis Bickle, a Vietnam War veteran coming undone as he drives through the streets of New York at night. Schrader says he wrote the screenplay “essentially for myself—as therapy.” And he was surprised to discover that so many people had “plugged into my own neurosis, bordering on psychosis.” Taxi Driver was “very much a serendipity,” he adds, noting that he, Scorsese, and De Niro had come together at “a certain point” in their lives, “all needing to say the same thing.”

In a way, the three men have synched up again. Schrader has recently been so AI-curious that he “procured an online AI girlfriend. What a disappointment.” But that hasn’t stopped him from predicting that the day will soon come when “us carbon-based fools spend our money empathizing and caring about silicon-based creations.” Beyond AI-generated actors, he can see a future when AI writes a screenplay that measures up to his own work.

Schrader has already prompted ChatGPT to come up with an idea for a Schrader-like script idea, and it gave him The Collection Agency, the story of a lapsed Catholic who meets a girl harboring an old secret. “I could send it out,” he told an audience at Amazon’s AI on the Lot event last month. “I know what response I would get: This is second-rate Schrader . . . but it’s going to be first-rate Schrader soon enough.”

As a kid, long before he picked up a camera, Scorsese famously drew up a set of storyboards for a historical epic set in ancient Rome. By hand, of course. “For seventy years, I’ve been creating my own storyboards,” says Scorsese in a statement released with yesterday’s endorsement of Flux, a text-to-image model created by the AI startup Black Forest Labs.

In an accompanying video, Scorsese describes a scene set in an “almost medieval” town in the Caucasus, and lo, Flux conjures an establishing shot. “I’m interested in the intersection of technology and storytelling, and seeing how that can push the bounds of creativity to create deeper and richer experiences for audiences,” says Scorsese, praising the “cinematic intelligence” that he believes AI might offer. “Remember, cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve.”

As for De Niro, it’s difficult to imagine that he gets too deep into the weeds of programming Tribeca’s lineups, but as a cofounder, he is in a sense a cohost for the premiere of Dreams of Violets, the first AI-generated feature to screen as part of a major festival’s official selection. Directed by Ash Koosha, the film centers on a group of strangers who meet in an alleyway during the protests in Tehran against the Islamist regime in January. Those protests spread across hundreds of cities throughout Iran and led to a government crackdown and the deaths of an estimated seven thousand people.

“I would say eighty percent of [Dreams of Violets] is a recreation of events that actually happened,” Koosha tells Cath Clarke in the Guardian. Before Iranian authorities cut off access to the internet, “we saw things that were just horrifying. It was a bloodbath.” Koosha, a cofounder of the AI company Claigrid and the studio Foundation 0, decided that it was “time to use technology to keep something alive.” In less than three months, he’d completed Dreams of Violets. “If you wanted to do it in CGI, it would cost millions,” he says. “I spent under $2,000.”

“I understand that an AI-generated film about people who actually died raises difficult questions,” says Koosha in a statement. “I have thought about those questions for every minute of every day I have worked on this film. My answer is that the alternative—silence, forgetting, the regime’s preferred outcome—is worse. The film exists because the dead deserve to be witnessed and because the families inside Iran, who cannot speak, deserve someone outside who refuses to forget.”

“AI is here,” Rebecca Glashow tells Sarah Bahr. “It’s part of our everyday lives, and so it’s inevitable that it’ll impact how people tell stories.”

A Few Highlights

Tribeca 2026 will open this evening with Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial VS That’s the Weight of the World), the latest celebration of Black music titans from Questlove (Summer of Soul, Sly Loves!). The screening will be followed by a live performance from EW&F and The Roots. Alicia Keys: Girl From Hell’s Kitchen, from director One9 (Nas: Time Is Illmatic), will close out this year’s edition on June 13.

This year’s Tribeca package in the New York Times includes Nicolas Rapold’s profile of André Holland, who stars in two films premiering at the festival, Alex Vlack’s The Revisionist and Sheldon Candis’s They Fight. In The Revisionist, Holland plays “a struggling writer who seizes the chance to interview a friend’s father, a legendary author (Dustin Hoffman), to the friend’s consternation,” and in They Fight, he’s “a youth boxing coach in Washington, D.C., pulling himself together after a stint in prison.”

Shivani Vora interviews Edward Burns, “the festival’s most frequent returning filmmaker.” Burns’s latest feature, Finnegan’s Foursome, is a comedy about two brothers who take their families to Ireland to take part in a golf tournament in honor of their late father. Erik Piepenburg talks with Jeffrey Schwarz, whose documentary Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders takes us back to the summer of 1979, when New York’s gay community did all they could to disrupt the making of William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980).

Natalia Winkelman opens her overview of Tribeca highlights with Sophia Takal’s Act One, starring “the captivating Ella Beatty, the daughter of Annette Bening and Warren Beatty,” as Hannah, a lonely and aspiring actor who falls under the magnetic spell of acting instructor Melanie (Ari Graynor). Melanie says that she and Hannah share a calling to become “change agents” whose charge is to “show people the path to living their truth.”

“Takal wants Melanie to sound ridiculous, a spout of highfalutin creative babble,” writes Winkelman. “But the character’s rhetoric reminded me a little of the Tribeca Festival itself. For years now, the event has lived in buzzword land. Premieres occur alongside summits, performances, and showcases led by ‘storytellers’ and ‘creators.’ Some attendees may skip movies for live podcast recordings or video game demos. The festival has long been known for its kitchen-sink mélange of high and low, mixed with lots and lots of mushy middle.” And now, “securely in early adulthood, Tribeca has become its own known quantity: maximalist and scattershot, but worth moviegoers’ attention.”

For Cultured, Elissa Suh gets eight recommendations from Tribeca Director Cara Cusumano. “For something that feels slightly out of joint with reality—or, more simply, ‘weird as hell,’ as Cusumano puts it—try Ponderosa, which moves through its uneasy world with a logic all its own,” writes Suh. “Alexis Bledel, Jack Dylan Grazer, and Bill Camp star in a film that reportedly went through the festival programming team at unusual speed—the kind of work that demands immediate discussion afterward. Directed by Rob Rice and shot by rising indie cinematographer Barton Cortright (who also shot another festival entry, Lucy Schulman), it’s daring, disorienting, and best approached as cold as possible.”

At Vulture, Mike Albo profiles the subject of Jyllian Gunther and Stephanie Schwam’s Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Story. From 1977 until 1998, Byrd, “perpetually clad in a spiderweb crochet bikini,” hosted strippers, porn stars, and local celebrities such as Sandra Bernhard and Michael Musto on her Manhattan Cable Network late-night show. “While AIDS was all but ignored on mainstream television,” writes Albo, “Byrd’s good-natured reminders about safe sex reached thousands across the boroughs struggling with fear and isolation. If there is a media figure she most resembles, it’s Fred Rogers, who also had an uncanny ability to send good energy through the screen and soothe viewers in the (very different) neighborhood. ‘I didn’t even show sex,’ Byrd says. ‘I wanted to turn you on and tuck you in to have good dreams.’”

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Jean-Pierre Gorin in New York

David Hudson — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:14:00 +0000

Yves Montand and Jane Fonda in Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Tout va bien (1972)

There are two sets of program notes for Why? Because . . . with Jean-Pierre Gorin, the L’Alliance New York series opening this evening and running through June 11. The first set comes from programmer Jake Perlin, working here with Yuka Murakami. Perlin introduces Gorin as “a filmmaker, film theorist, and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego” and the cofounder with Jean-Luc Godard of the “revolutionary filmmaking collective” Dziga Vertov Group. The impact of DVG is remarkable, considering that it was only active for a few years in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Perlin notes that Gorin “offered political and theoretical guidance that ignited what he referred to as ‘the revolutionary potential in aesthetics that Jean-Luc brought to his previous films.’”

In the mid-1970s, prompted at least in part by an invitation from critic and artist Manny Farber to teach at UCSD, Gorin left France for the U.S., where he made three films that came to be known as the “Southern California trilogy.” Gorin will be at the Roxy Cinema tomorrow to talk about two of them, Routine Pleasures (1986) and My Crasy Life (1992), and on Saturday afternoon, he’ll be at the e-flux Screening Room to discuss Poto and Cabengo (1980) with Murakami and Lukas Brasiskis. Shot by Les Blank, the unclassifiable Poto and Cabengo is something like an essay film that takes as its starting point twins Grace and Virginia Kennedy, who were believed to have created their own private form of communication.

“At first glance,” wrote Kent Jones in 2012, “we sophisticates may feel like we have the Kennedy household, Routine Pleasures’ Pacific Beach & Western railway crew, and My Crasy Life’s West Side S.O.S., Sons of Samoa, 32nd Street gangbangers all figured out. We are disabused of such notions almost instantaneously. Every rhetorical move is either jarred or knocked out of place by a countermove, and we are left with a cinematic organism in which nothing is frozen and everything is in ceaseless motion. I honestly can’t think of another movie that keeps tunneling through its own foundation as relentlessly as these three do, each stopping just short of a complete cave-in.”

These are “rude and lovably inelegant movies,” added Jones, “resisting any drift into sophistication or severity, and resembling nothing so much as the earliest sound productions of Walsh or Wellman as reimagined by a political firebrand who has just escaped from the prison house of his own theories.”

Jones and Gorin will be at L’Alliance this evening to discuss Jean Renoir’s Toni (1935), a film that, as Ginette Vincendeau wrote a few years ago, signaled “a move on Renoir’s part toward a socially committed cinema and is justifiably recognized as anticipating Italian neorealism.” Toni is the first film Gorin has selected for the L’Alliance series, and it’s here that the second set of notes comes in—and gives the series its title. “Toni, why?,” asks Gorin rhetorically. “Because one who doesn’t think about the Thirties these days is a fool.” But also because, “as Sei Shonagon and Chris Marker would say: ‘There is not a shot in this film that doesn’t quicken the heart.’”

Gorin’s notes follow this pattern right on through the program. “Lumière d’été, why?” Because of “the thread that runs from Toni, Renoir, 1935 to Lumière d’été, [Jean] Grémillon, 1943. Eight years that go from the collective hopes of the Popular Front to the bloody senility of Vichy and its complicity with Nazism.”

Writing about Lumière d’été in 2012, Michael Koresky found “nothing benign about its portrayal of bitter class warfare in the guise of an overpopulated romance. In fact, the film it most resembles is The Rules of the Game, Renoir’s 1939 poetic realist class satire, which was summarily banned by the Nazis when they took power. Lumière d’été—which itself bears traces of poetic realism in its moody fatalism and sympathy with the lower classes—was destined for the same fate; the censors read it as an attack on the establishment, as well as too cynical a view of human nature to show to an already disturbed populace under occupation.”

On Friday, Gorin and David Fresko, a writer who teaches at Rutgers University, will discuss Vladimir and Rosa (1971), featuring Godard and Gorin as the title characters as well as Yves Afonso and Juliet Berto. Why? “Because the films of the Dziga Vertov Group were tagged as Sunday school Maoism and it is time to see them for what they truly were: DIY garage punk experiments.”

The New Yorker’s Richard Brody has described Vladimir and Rosa as “a Brechtian farce of the trial of the Chicago Seven. What emerges is a probing psychological analysis of the modern radical as well as an incipient effort to speak in a new voice in another court: Godard and Gorin themselves, raising a racket on a tennis court with the help—or, rather, the decisive hindrance—of a low-tech feedback loop.”

Vladimir and Rosa was funded by Barney Rosset of Grove Press, and he brought Godard and Gorin to the U.S., where they toured with their films and—somewhat reluctantly at first—talked about what they were up to with Michael Goodwin, Tom Luddy, and Naomi Wise in what turned out to be a lengthy and substantive interview that ran in a 1971 issue of Take One. Ralph Thanhauser’s forty-minute documentary Godard in America (1970) was shot during this tour, and it will screen after Vladimir. Gorin: “I’ll pay you not to watch this film.”

Gorin has much more to say about Yves Allégret’s Such a Pretty Little Beach (1949), which screens on Tuesday. This is “a film on the cusp, both anchored to the past and announcing the future,” he writes. Shot by Henri Alekan, Such a Pretty Little Beach stars Gérard Philipe as a man who checks into a hotel in a seaside town, and while several of the other characters are played with what Gorin calls “the declamatory style of the Thirties,” this man is “another beast altogether. Walled in silence is a figure in a landscape swept by the wind and pelted by the rain. It is as if the existentialism of Sartre and Pavese was finally reaching the screen. Gérard Philipe and his preternatural wounded beauty open a door through which generations of actors will pass.”

Allégret, “nearly invisible from contemporary discussion and almost never revived in theaters,” notes Jake Perlin, “contributes a late era twist on French realism, which will be a significant discovery for many.”

The series will wrap with Godard and Gorin’s Tout va bien (1972). “Because of the names Jane Fonda and Yves Montand the film was released in ‘normal theaters,’” writes Gorin. “After years tinkering in the garage, we were out in the open.” Fonda’s Suzanne is an American reporter who arrives at a sausage factory with her husband, Montand’s Jacques, who was once a renowned nouvelle vague filmmaker but now directs commercials. Moments after their arrival, the workers go on strike and hold their boss, Suzanne, and Jacques captive for a couple of days.

“Tout va bien insists on class struggle throughout but is mainly about radicalizing its stars,” wrote J. Hoberman in 2005. “Their role in the factory is to look and learn. Indeed, Godard and Gorin upped the class-resentment ante by having the striking workers played not by real workers but by unemployed actors.”

The film was a commercial and critical flop and was “tepidly received” when it premiered in the U.S. at the New York Film Festival, notes Hoberman: “I vividly recall my own youthful disappointment that Tout va bien was not Weekend. (Of course, as Tout va bien makes clear, 1972 was not 1968) . . . It is, in any case, a far better movie than it seemed, at least to this former and then skeptical hippie, back in the day.”

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Bleak Week, Year Five

David Hudson — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:49:00 +0000

Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001)

Isabelle Huppert will be in Los Angeles this evening for a twenty-fifth-anniversary screening of Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, and she’ll be taking part in a Q&A moderated by the New Yorker’s Justin Chang. Tomorrow, Sophy Romvari (Blue Heron) will have questions for Huppert about Claude Chabrol’s Violette Nozière (1978) and La cérémonie (1995), and the French megastar will discuss Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016) on Wednesday, Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (2003) on Thursday, and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) on Friday.

In The Piano Teacher, Huppert plays Erika, a repressed professor whose masochistic urges complicate, let’s say, her relationship with a student (Benoît Magimel) who has become infatuated with her. “The film is one of the most compelling accounts I know of a life undone by desire, and of the labyrinth one can be led into by mistaking one’s desire, by having been profoundly wrong about oneself and what one wants,” writes novelist and critic Garth Greenwell. “It’s a brutal film, but also an intimate and delicate one.”

Screening at the Egyptian Theatre, The Piano Teacher is one of three films opening this year’s Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair, the American Cinematheque festival that, in just five years, has become an annual early-summer phenomenon, spreading to nearly one hundred theaters in seventy-three cities around the world. “Turning sadness, depression, and defeat into group activities to be enjoyed together has been an ingenious masterstroke of programming,” notes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times.

“This is the easiest year we’ve ever programmed,” Cinematheque director of programming Chris LeMaire tells Chris Cassingham at Filmmaker. “Because once you have [Isabelle Huppert], everyone’s saying ‘yes.’ If we can have someone that big, then we can ask audiences to take a chance on some of the rarer things in the lineup. If it’s in a festival with Isabelle Huppert and Ari Aster, it must be interesting.” Tickets to the Bleak Week Aster retrospective, by the way, sold out “in just a few minutes.”

There are two other events opening Bleak Week in LA. The first is the world premiere of a new restoration of Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001); cinematographer Roger Deakins and his collaborator and wife, James Ellis Deakins, will be on hand for the Q&A at the Aero Theatre. The second is Cinematic Void’s presentation of Dead Presidents (1995) with Allen Hughes—who codirected with his twin brother Albert—taking questions at the Los Feliz Theatre.

The guest list for the LA edition of Bleak Week 2026 is pretty impressive. Al Pacino will be there for tomorrow’s screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1974), and then there’s Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin, 2004), Theresa Russell (Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing, 1980), Werner Herzog (Heart of Glass, 1976), Mick Jackson (Threads, 1984), Denis Villeneuve (Incendies, 2010), Louise Weard and Vera Drew (Castration Movie Chapter III, 2026), and Richard Kelly (Southland Tales, 2006). And like Huppert and Aster, Warwick Thornton (Sweet Country) will be in town throughout his retrospective.

In St. Louis Magazine, Max Havey notes that the Bleak Week program at the Hi-Pointe Theatre “features boundary-pushing arthouse classics (Persona, The Devil’s Backbone), European films soaked in existential angst (The Vanishing), and American blockbusters that confront the collapse of the American Dream (Unforgiven, No Country For Old Men, The Mist).” Director of programming Brett Smith: “Some of these films are difficult and very challenging, but I think they are incredibly meaningful experiences. They put you back in touch with your humanity in ways that other films can’t.”

“What’s extremely important to us,” LeMaire tells Cunningham, “is that we don’t impose a lineup. We don’t even say it has to be seven days. What is a ‘week’ to you? What would that look like in your programming?” Talking to Columbus Underground’s Hope Madden, David Filipi, Director of Film/Video at the Wexner Center for the Arts, says that he and his team “wanted to show some films that seemed to be real standards of the Bleak Week idea,” such as Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). “The most interesting part of coming up with the films is coming at the theme of the series in so many different ways.” The Hughes brothers’ Menace II Society (1993) is “such a film about hopelessness and not having options.”

“In honor of the world’s current descent into madness and self-destruction, I felt it was fitting to embrace the despairing theme of combat in our selection of films,” says Glenn Heath Jr., the artistic director at San Diego’s Digital Gym Cinema. “Here you will find literal warfare, from the colorless terrain of the Volga (The Red and the White) to the sewers of Warsaw (Kanal) and the jungles of the Philippines (Fires on the Plain), and the psychological kind on the open plains of the American West (Meek’s Cutoff) and the dark canals of Venice (Don’t Look Now).”

At IndieWire, Jim Hemphill previews this year’s Bleak Week in New York, which runs at the Paris Theater from Friday through June 11. Carrie Coon and Tracy Letts have selected and will introduce Lonely Are the Brave (1962), written by Dalton Trumbo, directed by David Miller, and starring Kirk Douglas, Gena Rowlands, and Walter Matthau. Azazel Jacobs will introduce an archival 35 mm print of Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), and Mary Bronstein (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You) will introduce Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995).

Among those taking part in Q&As will be Steve Buscemi (Trees Lounge, 1996), Michael Almereyda (Nadja, 1994), Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham (Miracle Mile, 1988), and composer Carter Burwell (The Man Who Wasn’t There). If Bleak Week were to have a patron saint, it would be the late Béla Tarr, and a good number of this year’s programs throughout the Americas and across the Atlantic feature at least one of his films. In New York, it’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).

The “magnificently miserable lineup” at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Massachusetts, “comes to a thunderous conclusion” with Tarr’s 439-minute Sátántangó (1994), notes Sean Burns at WBUR. “From the opening eight-minute sequence of cows milling around an empty village, the movie slows down your metabolism and bends your perception of time, turning grim monotony into an epiphany. You’ll never have another experience like this. Superfan Susan Sontag said she would be glad to see Sátántangó every year for the rest of her life. Indeed, there’s something ceremonial about these Bleak Week screenings that feels necessary and even fortifying now that the world around us is such a precipitous shambles.”

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Slipping Free of the World

David Hudson — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:29:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Aleksandr Kaidanovsky in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979)

Our Criterion Mobile Closet has arrived in Portland, Oregon! We’ll be in town all weekend, and in partnership with PAM CUT, we’ve lined up a Saturday afternoon screening of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986). Portlandia creators Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein will join us on Sunday evening for a live recording of our Criterion Channel series Adventures in Moviegoing.

In Los Angeles, a screening of the late Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994) at the Aero Theatre will serve as a prelude to the fifth edition of Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair, the American Cinematheque festival running through June 7. We’ll take a look at the lineup next week, and wherever you are, it’s likely that some of these bleak movies are heading to a theater near you within a few days. Bleak Week expands this year to seventy-three cities across the U.S., Canada, Latin America, and the UK.

In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan writes about nine highlights of this year’s UCLA Festival of Preservation, which opens today and runs through Sunday. The festival “showcases the widest variety of motion pictures in impeccable condition,” notes Turan. “This includes not only Hollywood and foreign-language features but newsreels, shorts, animation, documentary, and experimental work as well as television programming. Admission is free, no reservations necessary, so be bold in your choices.”

Also in the LAT, Mary McNamara previews Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon, the exhibition opening at the Academy Museum on Sunday and on view through February 28. In New York, Film Forum’s thirteen-film series Marilyn 100 is on from today through June 11.

Philip Hartman’s No Picnic (1986) has been held over at Film Forum through Thursday. “Watching it now evokes a certain nostalgia for jukeboxes, cigarette machines, the St. Mark’s Cinema, the Atlas Barber School, and Bleecker Bob’s Records,” writes David Schwartz at Screen Slate. The cinematographer on No Picnic was Peter Hutton, and on Saturday afternoon, the Roxy Cinema will present a series of New York Portraits that Hutton shot on 16 mm from 1972 to 1990.

NYC has a lot to offer this weekend. A series of Urban Odysseys is on from today through Thursday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Anthology Film Archives spotlights one of the late great innovators of experimental theater with Robert Wilson on Screen (through Friday), and the Museum of the Moving Image presents By the People, For the People: Real American Tales, a sesquicentennial series running through July 7. On a somewhat related note, Debra Granik is in Berlin for the opening weekend of the Arsenal series On Life in America: The Films of Debra Granik, running through June 12.

This week’s highlights:

With Cannes wrapped, the New Yorker’s Justin Chang has ranked all twenty-two films in the competition, Pietro Bianchi has posted his two-part dispatch to e-flux, and, in a delightful piece for Notebook, Pedro Emilio Segura Bernal revisits two remarkable Cannes Classics screenings: The Fast and the Furious, which we’ve touched on more than enough here already, and the Pelechian Project, a program of five short films by “the Armenian master” Artavazd Pelechian, all of which—plus one more, Mountain Patrol (1964)—will screen next month at Il Cinema Ritrovato. Called on to introduce his work, Pelechian spoke “in the manner of a man who has always been more interested in images than in words,” writes Segura Bernal, “but who can, when required, construct a sentence that illuminates a decade of thinking.” The power of the films themselves “is not diminished by the small screen. If anything, the intimacy of the [Salle] Buñuel amplified it, the way a small room can sometimes make a sound larger than any concert hall, and with this private proximity allow the audience to lose themselves in the ineffable distance between two frames.”

Pelechian is eighty-eight, and Pere Portabella, a Catalan filmmaker and former senator who took part in the writing of the 1978 Spanish Constitution, is ninety-nine. Looking back on April’s comprehensive retrospective at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (BAFICI), Victor Guimarães writes in Documentary Magazine that Portabella’s “oeuvre might suggest a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde figure. On the one hand, he is the modernist auteur of nonlinear narratives such as Nocturno 29 (1968) and Pont de Varsòvia (Warsaw Bridge, 1989). On the other hand, he’s the man who dared to capture an underground gathering of former political prisoners in El Sopar (1974). This seemingly riven personality—between uncompromising artistry and the commitments of a leftist intellectual—coexists with further contradictions . . . There is no doubt that Portabella is a committed socialist; yet, as an avant-garde artist, he is also a ferocious critic of everything that moves.”

Fitting “five ghost stories from four directors into a framework that gathers its own supernatural momentum,” Dead of Night (1945) is “the most imaginative British horror film of the postwar era,” writes Malcolm Gaskill in the London Review of Books. “The overall effect of Dead of Night is spectral disorientation, bending the familiar out of shape and reversing the reassuring thrust of time’s arrow. It’s oddly unsettling that the war, which must have loomed large in the characters’ recent lives, is never mentioned or even alluded to,” and that absence “only makes its agonies, invisibly encoded, more traumatic. There’s nothing more horrific than the violent removal of identity, the fate of the characters thus representing the unease of a nation peering unsteadily at the future.” Gaskill wraps with an astonishing true story that begins when a mathematician, an astronomer, and an astrophysicist walk into a screening of Dead of Night.

Based on the 1970 novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who would later adapt their Roadside Picnic (1972) as Stalker (1979) for Andrei Tarkovsky, Grigori Kromanov’s Estonian sci-fi whatsit Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (1979) screens this evening, tomorrow, and on June 5 as part of Metrograph’s Hotel Europa series. “For two thirds of its runtime, Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel operates, quite entertainingly, as a police procedural and a locked-room mystery,” writes Nick Pinkerton in Metrograph’s Journal. “There are anonymous poison pen notes, red herring clues, unaccounted for movements, contradictory testimonials, an unexpected visitor in the middle of the night, a baffling piece of futuristic technology in a dead man’s briefcase . . . and then, shortly after a scene straight out of a Hercule Poirot mystery—[Inspector] Glebsky gathering the dramatis personae around the dining room table with the intention of unmasking the killer—Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel becomes something entirely, for lack of a better word, alien. Things are not what they seem.”

As it happens, the latest stop on Keith Phipps and Scott Tobias’s climb at the Reveal from #100 to #1 as they talk their way through Sight and Sound’s 2022 Greatest Films of All Time poll is Stalker. “As to where Stalker fits into the tradition of thoughtful 1970s science fiction,” writes Phipps, “it’s tempting to just see Tarkovsky as sui generis, but he wasn’t alone in seeing the philosophical potential in science fiction. The beginning of the decade is filled with examples of pessimistic films that took the era’s headlines to their darker conclusions, but I think Stalker more closely resembles something like René Laloux’s trippy, animated feature Fantastic Planet, Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, je t’aime, or Agnès Varda’s Les créatures, all films that are less interested in the ‘science’ part of ‘science fiction’ than the places their films could go after slipping free of the world we know.”

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Italian Cinema, Present and Past

David Hudson — Thu, 28 May 2026 10:30:00 +0000

Marcello Mastroianni in Mario Monicelli’s The Organizer (1963)

Opening this evening with Carolina Cavalli’s The Kidnapping of Arabella, the twenty-fifth edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema will run through Thursday, when it segues straight into History, Italian Style, an ambitious twenty-nine-film series exploring the evolution of modern Italy from unification in the nineteenth century through the rise of Mussolini to fall of fascism in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Both series are copresented by Film at Lincoln Center in New York and the famed Italian studio and distributor Cinecittà.

Benedetta Porcaroli won the award for Best Actress when The Kidnapping of Arabella premiered in the Orizzonti program in Venice last fall. She plays Holly, a young woman convinced that seven-year-old Arabella (Lucrezia Guglielmino) is her younger self. Holly whisks Arabella away from her preoccupied dad (Chris Pine). In the Hollywood Reporter, Leslie Felperin found it “a bit icky to be making a farce out of child abduction,” but “young lead Porcaroli and the even younger Guglielmino show off terrific comic timing while colorful cameos from an assortment of mesmerizing character actors, especially Eva Robin’s as a kooky aging showgirl, add sparkle.”

Like Cavalli’s film, the other eleven new fictional features and two documentaries in the program are seeing either their North American or New York premieres. There are breezy comedies such as Ludovica Rampoldi’s A Brief Affair, starring Pilar Fogliati, Adriano Giannini, and Valeria Golino, and historical dramas like Primavera, written by Rampoldi and directed by Damiano Michieletto. With his debut feature, renowned opera director Michieletto tells the story of Cecilia (Tecla Insolia), a supremely talented teenage violinist who comes under the tutelage of Antonio Vivaldi (Michele Riondino) in eighteenth-century Venice.

Of the four films that premiered in last month’s Biennale College Cinema program in Venice last year, Massimiliano Camaiti’s Agnus Dei was Glenn Kenny’s favorite. “The title translates to ‘Lamb of God,’ of course, and the documentary, without recourse to voiceover or talking head interviews, follows the lives of a couple of lambs that are born in a monastery and cared for by a group of nuns,” wrote Kenny at RogerEbert.com. “Spare and simple in format—it’s shot in the square-ish 1.37 Academy ratio—it’s also elegant and humble at the same time. And what it leads up to is heartening, likely to move all but the most violently anti-clerical of viewers.”

The other documentary is Roberto Rossellini, Living Without a Script, directed by Ilaria de Laurentiis, Raffaele Brunetti, and Andrea Paolo Massara and the winner of a David di Donatello award. “While the film serves as a reminder of its subject’s status as one of the greats of world cinema—the key figure in postwar Italian neorealism—it also shows his life beyond movies,” noted Geoffrey Macnab when he interviewed Isabella Rossellini for the Guardian just before the doc’s premiere in Rome last October. “In the film, the director seems perpetually on the move: racing cars, studying biology and physics, and experimenting with TV—a medium that he embraced (unlike most of his contemporaries).”

As a tribute to Rossellini on his 120th birthday—he was born on May 8, 1906—the series will present Paisan (1946) with an introduction by Ingrid Rossellini, Isabella’s twin sister. “With this film,” writes Pietro Marcello, “Rossellini was the first to depict in such an observational way the realities of his country at a time when it had been completely destroyed by the war and needed to be rebuilt. When I think of the episode of Paisan that takes place in Naples, I see my father, who likewise grew up in the middle of the rubble. Rossellini poured his affection for his country into Paisan, and it touches me all the more when I think of my own father and the history of Italy as a whole.”

Marcello served as a consultant alongside curator Emiliano Morreale as History, Italian Style was being put together, and the series includes Marcello’s great Martin Eden (2019), which transposes Jack London’s 1909 novel to postwar Italy. History, Italian Style will open with something like an overture, the original 316-minute cut of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976).

“1900’s immense running time was not just a stunt,” wrote Bilge Ebiri for Senses of Cinema in 2004. “Bertolucci cut a wide swath through history, telling the story of two boys born on the same day in 1901 (the date of Giuseppe Verdi’s death)—Olmo (played by [Gérard] Depardieu as an adult) is the son of peasants and destined to be a socialist; the other, Alfredo ([Robert] De Niro as an adult) is the son of landowners and destined to be a hopeless bourgeois, an unwitting defender of fascism, and an inadvertent propagator of crimes against his laborers. The vast historical melodrama that ensues is one of Bertolucci’s most committed and audacious works.”

After Thursday’s marathon screening—there will be a second screening of 1900 in the afternoon on Sunday, June 7—the series will roll out in three parts. “Risorgimento” features films set in the tumultuous period of rebellion and revolution that began with uprisings in the early nineteenth century, culminated in the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, and reached completion in 1871 with the establishment of Rome as Italy’s capital.

The eight films in this section include two by brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Gianni Franciolini’s satirical Ferdinand the 1° King of Naples (1958), Roberto Andò’s adventure comedy The Illusion (2025), and two operatic classics from Luchino Visconti. Opening in 1866 during the Third Italian War of Independence, Visconti’s Senso (1954) stars Alida Valli as a countess who, against all her political convictions, falls helplessly in love with an Austrian lieutenant played by Farley Granger. When Senso was finally released in the U.S. in 1968, Mark Rappaport went to see it five times. “I thought it was the most beautiful movie ever made,” wrote Rappaport in 2011, “and have had no reason during the intervening years and after many subsequent viewings to change my mind.”

Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) is “intimately faithful to the spirit” of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel, observed Michael Wood in 2010, “even when it shifts time lines and details of dialogue, and inserts a whole battle sequence. A movie audience, Visconti said in an interview, needs to see Garibaldi’s men fighting the soldiers of the Bourbon government in the streets of Palermo, and to see Tancredi Falconeri (Alain Delon), the nephew of the prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster), fighting alongside the revolutionaries, in order to perceive what is at stake—‘the disruptive power of the historical conjuncture and the real risk Tancredi is running’ as the old order is overturned and a new Italy is born.”

Nine films screen in the “Belle Époque” section, including Mid-Century Loves (1954), an omnibus film with stories directed by Rossellini, Pietro Germi, Glauco Pellegrini, Mario Chiari, and Antonio Pietrangeli; Mauro Bolognini’s The Lovemakers (1961), featuring a young Jean-Paul Belmondo and Claudia Cardinale; Laura Samani’s Small Body (2021), which the Observer’s Wendy Ide finds “as enchanting as it is unusual”; and Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s Heads or Tails? (2025), starring John C. Reilly as Buffalo Bill.

Mario Monicelli’s The Organizer (1963) stars Marcello Mastroianni as a traveling professor who becomes an advisor to striking textile factory workers in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Turin. The Organizer is “variously (and, for some, disconcertingly) jaunty, sentimental, comic, and baffling, as Monicelli applies the tonal shifts associated with the French New Wave to a straightforward saga of working-class solidarity,” wrote J. Hoberman in 2012. “Above all,” this is “a movie about how difficult it is to organize collective action, set in a period when Italian unions barely existed.”

The third section, “The Rise and Fall of Fascism,” offers Amarcord (1973), “a scathing satirical critique of Italian provincial life during the 1930s,” as Peter Bondanella, the author of The Cinema of Federico Fellini, has put it; Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere (2009), the story of Mussolini’s ascent as seen through the eyes of his first wife, Ida Dalser; and The Conformist (1970), which Calum Marsh, writing for the Village Voice in 2014, called “Bertolucci’s boldest and most expressive film: Here, protagonist Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) recedes into fascism not for the authority he expects it will confer but for the comforts.”

With Love and Anarchy (1973), starring Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato, Lina Wertmüller “offers a masterpiece that stuns both visually and emotionally,” wrote Patricia Erens in Jump Cut in 1974. “Juxtaposing the power of the historical fact against the frailty of the individual, Wertmüller focuses on the struggle of a youthful Italian revolutionary to accommodate two conflicting forces: the external political realities of a fascist regime and his intimate feelings towards a beautiful young prostitute.”

Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970), which centers on a well-to-do Jewish family in the late 1930s and early ’40s, won the Golden Bear in Berlin and an Oscar a decade after Sophia Loren won her Oscar for her lead performance as a mother seeking to protect her teenage daughter during the war in De Sica’s Two Women (1960). Loren and Mastroianni costar in Ettore Scola’s A Special Day (1977), which Deborah Young has called “one of the most telling films ever made about Italian fascism.”

Set in 1944, Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio (2024), the winner of the Grand Jury Prize in Venice and seven David di Donatello awards, including Best Film and Best Director, is “a momentous vision of everyday rural existence in the high Italian Alps,” writes Jessica Kiang in Variety. “The remarkable, raw-boned, and ravishing Vermiglio takes place in the past but operates like a future family secret playing out in the present tense.”

“Shooting started on January 18, 1945,” wrote Irene Bignardi in her 2010 essay on Rossellini’s Rome Open City. “The war in the rest of Italy was still on. There was no film stock, and so Rossellini and his team had to use abandoned scraps found here and there. It wasn’t possible to check the rushes. Rossellini, little by little, sold all he owned so that the film could go on. In Italian, as in English, there is the expression ‘to make a virtue of necessity,’ and that’s what Rossellini did here.”

The late cinematographer John Bailey found it “almost impossible to consider Rome Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero as anything other than a linked narrative of the ashes of World War II and of the struggle to rise out of that dustbin of history. They are vital, raw, even primitive in style, full of nonactors who are alternately charismatic and arch; there is an aesthetic in these movies that is stripped to the bone. These films, taken together, are immediate godfather to the French New Wave.”

History, Italian Style will wrap on June 25 with an “Epilogue,” a screening of Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro (2018), which begins its beguiling tale on a tobacco farm where the workers are exploited by the wealthy Marquise de Luna (Nicoletta Braschi). “Rohrwacher, writing and directing her third feature, works in a modest, rough-hewn style that nonetheless feels kissed by a strange and melancholy magic,” wrote Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. “Happy as Lazzaro is slow to reveal its full shape: It’s a realist snapshot of downtrodden lives that gradually takes on shadings of fable and myth, a deceptively plain story that, by the end, all but glows with wonderment and surprise.”

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Cannes Classics: Highlights

David Hudson — Wed, 27 May 2026 09:49:00 +0000

Gemma Jones and Oliver Reed in Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971)

The Cannes Classics program of new restorations and documentaries on cinema is usually the quietest sideshow at the festival, but as both Tim Grierson and Variety’s Guy Lodge note, the hot ticket this year was the one-time-only premiere screening of Ken Russell’s newly restored, director-approved cut of The Devils (1971). As Deadline’s Zac Ntim reports, Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux noted that Peter Jackson was just one of many high-profile filmmakers who had reached out to him for a ticket to the sold-out event.

Russell’s sensationally over-the-top account of the downfall of seventeenth-century French Catholic priest Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed)—brought about in part by accusations of witchcraft lobbed at him by the sexually repressed Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave)—was condemned by the Vatican at the get-go. Screenings at the Venice Film Festival, where Russell won the award for Best Director, had to be limited to the press.

Notorious scenes such as the “Rape of Christ,” featuring a seething swarm of naked nuns, were cut by Warner Bros. even before the studio submitted the film to the British Board of Film Classification, and various truncated versions of The Devils have been floating around ever since. In some sort of stroke of poetic justice, it’s the newly founded distributor Warner Bros. Clockwork that has picked up the new restoration, and following a screening at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna next month, Clockwork will launch a North American theatrical run on October 16.

The restoration is “a stunner, in particular sharpening the film’s stylized black-and-white-and-blood-and-mud color palette to glistening effect,” writes Guy Lodge. “The great joy of The Devils remains how ripe and camp and sensual and funny it is, qualities indulged at full tilt by Russell (not a director who even knew the meaning of ‘half’) in all aspects from performance to production design to orgy choreography.”

More Restorations

Cannes Classics opened with a new restoration of Pan’s Labyrinth, which premiered twenty years ago in competition and still holds the festival’s record for the longest standing ovation—twenty-three minutes. The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough talks with Guillermo del Toro about the long, hard road to the film’s completion and his current, monthslong effort to realize a 3D version. As for that triumphant night in 2006, del Toro, speaking to this year’s audience, said that “in spite of my great body, I’m not used to adulation, and it’s very hard for me to take in love. But Alfonso Cuarón was there with me, and he said, ‘Let it in. Let the love get in.’”

At the end of the seventh episode of the Film Comment Podcast recorded in Cannes, Devika Girish heartily recommends John Abraham’s Amma ariyan (Report to Mother, 1985), the story of Purushan (Joy Mathew), who sets out for Delhi and spots the police carrying away the dead body of an unidentified man. When Purushan discovers the man was Hari, a tabla player, he decides to inform Hari’s mother of her son’s death. All along his journey, Purushan is joined by Hari’s friends as they walk through the southern state of Kerala and bear witness to the political unrest of the 1970s.

Variety’s Naman Ramachandran talks with Film Heritage Foundation director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur about the challenges of tracking down prints of Amma ariyan and securing the rights to restore the film from the Odessa Collective that Abraham had founded in 1984. Surviving members had scattered. The budget had been raised by touring villages and putting on shows, and the idea was to skip a formal release of Amma ariyan and instead take it on a traveling road show. Ramachandran notes that writer K. M. Seethi has described Abraham as belonging to “a rare breed for whom cinema was not just an art, but a public act of resistance, thought, and love.”

Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux has put in time as a judo instructor, and the black belt champion has even written a book about the sport, Judoka. Frémaux tells the festival’s Charlotte Pavard that Akira Kurosawa’s first feature, Sanshiro Sugata (1943), based on Tsuneo Tomita’s novel about the rivalry between judo and jujitsu, has always had a special place in his heart—which is why he teamed up with Cannes Classics head Gérald Duchaussoy to get the film restored. “The studio, Toho, said the film wasn’t Japanese enough and it was too American,” notes Frémaux. “This criticism would follow Kurosawa his whole life. Ozu came to his defense, though, saying, ‘This film tells the story of our country.’”

Star power was a little lacking on the red carpet this year, but Cannes Classics brought at least a bit with the late addition of a restored print of Rob Cohen’s The Fast and the Furious to its lineup. The twenty-fifth-anniversary screening was attended by Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, and Jordana Brewster, and as Keva York reports for Filmmaker, Diesel unabashedly basked in the limelight and was moved to tears when he spoke to “the 2300-odd revved-up attendees.” The film itself “exuded a highly calibrated, hypnotic quality,” writes York, “a kind of Michael Mann for meatheads (complimentary).”

“I’m old enough to remember when The Fast and the Furious was merely marvelous summer trash, a tacky racing flick crammed with techno beats, booty shots, and clumsy dialogue about tuna sandwiches,” writes Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. “Yet, from the literal heights of the Grand Palais’s top balcony, it did feel like a classic—a throwback to an era when movie theaters were full of mid-budget crowd-pleasers shot on location in Los Angeles.”

New Documentaries

For all its heart-wrenching drama, another new restoration in the program, Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women (1960), is probably remembered first and foremost for Sophia Loren becoming the first actor to win an Oscar for a non-English-language performance. And this was after she won the award for Best Actress in Cannes for her turn as a widow who leaves Rome with her daughter (Eleonora Brown) during the Second World War.

In Francesco Zippel’s Vittorio De Sica: Staging Life, we hear from Brown how Loren took her under her motherly wing during the production, which comes as a welcome balm after learning about the trick De Sica pulled on Brown to get her to cry during a crucial scene. It comes as quite a surprise to learn what the man was capable of after having spent a good hour by that point watching him practically radiate genuinely human warmth and compassion.

De Sica lived enormously, both in his professional career and his private lives—plural, because he had two. In 1937, having established himself as an up-and-coming performer on stage and screen, he married Giuditta Rissone, an actor better known at the time than he was. Their daughter, Emilia, was born a year later, and in 1942, De Sica met and struck up a relationship with Spanish actor María Mercader. They would have two sons, Manuel and Christian.

Zippel’s animated interludes come off at first as superfluous frills, but it turns out that they serve his narrative well when it comes to illustrating, for example, the way De Sica would set the clock back in one household so that he could celebrate New Year’s Eve at the other and return in time to the first one. Every family member interviewed in Staging Life beams with memories of De Sica’s love and attention, and when each family finally learns of the existence of the other, every member seems to recall celebrating their own family suddenly doubling in size.

Isabella Rossellini recalls playing with the De Sica kids while their fathers talked shop, and the filmmakers brought in to discuss the impact of such films as Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1952) become far more than just a parade of famous faces. Wes Anderson realizes that his nine-year-old daughter is so shaken by Shoeshine (1946) because she’s fallen into this world De Sica has conjured, and these boys have become her friends. Asghar Farhadi incisively draws lines between De Sica’s neorealist period and the Iranian films that would follow. And Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are engaging and at times borderline hilarious as they ping-pong favorite scenes from the De Sica oeuvre.

There are snippets from archival interviews but no direct interviewees in Nostalgia for the Future, Brecht Debackere’s exploration of the 550 neatly ordered and numbered boxes of clippings, notes, photos, books, films, objects brought back to Paris from the farthest reaches of the globe, VHS tapes, CD-ROMs, and other assorted paraphernalia left behind by Chris Marker and now stored at the Cinémathèque française. Charlotte Rampling’s narration is a seventy-five-minute letter to Marker from Debackere, who has taken an eight-year deep dive into the archive and reemerged with a personal essay that moves not chronologically but from idea to idea, reflecting on a life lived in secret but also somehow on the page, on the screen, and online.

Barnaby Thompson’s “thoroughly exhilarating and enjoyable” Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean “shows a deeply driven man, propelled by his vocational dedication to the cinema as well as by his own romantic and sexual restlessness,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “Yes, he was a classicist,” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, but “Lean was also a radical filmmaker, perhaps the key inventor (along with Hitchcock) of modern Hollywood cinema . . . I realized, watching clips of the two Dickens films Lean directed during the ’40s (Great Expectations and Oliver Twist), that the reason I’d never fully appreciated how original and movie-forward they were is that their influence had been so thoroughly absorbed into the language of cinema.”

The subject of Mike Mendez’s Dernsie: The Amazing Life of Bruce Dern will turn ninety on June 4. Dern is “a terrific storyteller, as blunt as you might expect but wittier and warmer,” writes Caryn James in the Hollywood Reporter. “In the way of such documentaries, the film’s tone is adoring, but Dern’s no-nonsense attitude cuts through most of the treacle.” And Dern has more stories to tell on the Doc Talk podcast cohosted by writer and director John Ridley and Deadline’s Matthew Carey and in Nicolas Rapold’s interview for Sight and Sound.

“The reason I made the documentary is I’m interested in people knowing that if you stay long enough, you’ll find people that give a shit,” Dern tells Rapold. “I’ve been doing this a long fucking time. And I know what it’s like to not be found until you’ve been in the business for years. And it’s all because I played little tiny roles. But when you look at the roles I played, I made a difference in every movie.”

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Cannes 2026 Awards: Fjord, Minotaur, and More

David Hudson — Tue, 26 May 2026 09:54:00 +0000

Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve in Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord (2026)

Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, the winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, was “by far the most divisive film in competition,” according to the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin. Not everyone would agree. Just yesterday, the New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan reiterated his assertion that “the most divisive movie by far” was actually Na Hong-jin’s alien invasion movie Hope, whose chases thrilled many while others were thrown off by the jankiness—the bad kind, not the Boots Riley kind—of the effects.

Some welcomed the open questions raised by Arthur Harari’s body-swapping mystery The Unknown, and some simply found the film dark, dull, and inscrutable. Even films widely perceived as critical favorites, such as Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, found their detractors. That’s to be expected. The lack of passionate engagement, one way or the other, not so much. “As is always the case at Cannes,” writes the NYT’s Manohla Dargis, “there was plenty to like and admire, but the word love was not heard all that often.”

“To be completely honest,” quipped jury president Park Chan-wook at the press conference following Saturday night’s awards ceremony, “I didn’t want to award the Palme d’Or to any of the films, because it’s an award that I myself have never gotten. But I had no other choice.”

And so the festival’s top prize went to Fjord, and after it premiered last week, we took a first look at the conflicted critical response. Often in the same review, we’ll find admiration for Mungiu’s assured direction—he won his first Palme d’Or in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days—and reservations about where, as Fjord’s sole credited screenwriter, he steers his story.

Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve star as Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, the parents of five children ranging in ages from infancy to the mid-teens. He’s Romanian, she’s Norwegian, and they have just moved the family from Bucharest to a tiny town in her home country. The neighbors’ warm welcome cools as they discover that the Gheorghius are not only conservative Christians but also believers in corporal punishment. When one of the teen’s bruises are spotted in gym class, Child Protection Services are called in.

Is spanking physical abuse? “Mungiu is not really curious on this front,” writes Sophie Monks Kaufman for Sight and Sound, and “he ushers the very people who could resolve this off stage: the children themselves. He is far more motivated by the chance to vilify the ghouls working for the CPS—they have more in common with the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) than with caring professionals.”

“In the butterfly-effect plotting of Mungiu’s films, incidental and ambiguous gestures, often hidden in the blocking of a single long take, acquire load-bearing narrative importance,” writes Mark Asch for Film Comment. “Here in Cannes, art is affirmed as an expression of cosmopolitan, humanist values that are assumed to be universal. Fjord asks whether or not many of these values—secularism, a commodified liberal commitment to free agency—are not simply elite heuristics.”

Grand Prix and Jury Prize

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Elena (2011), Leviathan (2014), and Loveless (2017) all won awards in Cannes, and on Saturday, Minotaur won the Grand Prix, essentially the festival’s second-highest honor. Zvyagintsev has been telling reporters that his return to the festival is one of “the best things that happened to me” over the past nine years. During the pandemic, he suffered a bout of COVID that kept him immobile for eighteen months, and as he recovered in France, Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Shot in Latvia, Minotaur is the first film Zvyagintsev has made outside of Russia. Set in 2022, it’s an adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife (1969) starring Dmitriy Mazurov as Gleb, the well-to-do CEO of a shipping company. His wife, Galina (Iris Lebedeva), is having an affair with a young photographer, Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk), and his teenage son, Seryozha (Boris Kudrin), wants nothing to do with any of them. Complicating the tension on the home front, Gleb has been charged with selecting fourteen employees to serve in Putin’s “special military operation.”

All of Zvyagintsev’s films “see-saw between the micro and macro, domestic dramas and larger allegories of life under the metastatic cancer of the Putin regime,” writes Leonardo Goi at the Film Stage. “Zvyagintsev is making space for a bourgeois love triangle against the backdrop of a war that’s blotted out everything else, and where domestic stories of such scale, in some fundamental sense, hardly matter. It is this cognitive dissonance that makes Minotaur such a fascinating oddity.”

This year’s Jury Prize went to The Dreamed Adventure, the fourth feature from Valeska Grisebach (Longing, Western). Set in Svilengrad, a Bulgarian town close to the borders of both Greece and Turkey, The Dreamed Adventure seems to begin as the story of Said (Syuleyman Letifov), a former local who has returned to conduct a little shady business. Then Said’s old flame Veska (Yana Radeva), who has been overseeing an archeological dig, takes over the film’s narrative.

The Dreamed Adventure is “a verité social drama, cast with nonprofessionals, that from the improvisational immediacy of small-scale real life, gradually gathers all the elements of a sprawling crime epic,” writes Jessica Kiang for Variety. “It would be difficult to overstate how much the textures and tempo of this film—organically, unobtrusively shot by Bernhard Keller and quite brilliantly edited by Bettina Böhler—are alien to the way we’re used to seeing gangster-movie plotlines develop.”

“As an ultimately warm and feminist voyage to the new frontiers of capitalism,” writes Mark Asch at Little White Lies, “The Dreamed Adventure is as panoramic as Toni Erdmann, and like Maren Ade’s film, it always comes back to the performances at its center: Letifov, with his John Wayne squint and cherubic dimples, and especially Radeva, in her first-ever film performance, with her wise, weathered face and spine of steel.”

Three Directors, One Screenplay, and Four Performances

There was a minor flurry of chaos and confusion when the jury announced that it was awarding the Best Director Prize to the three directors of two films that could hardly be more different in form, content, and tone. Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo—Los Javis, formerly a couple and still a team—bounded joyfully up to the stage, followed by a more serene Paweł Pawlikowski, and the three of them wandered around a bit, circling the single prize on a pedestal. “That was a piece of disastrous mise-en-scène,” joked Pawlikowski when it was his turn to speak.

Ambrossi and Calvo’s The Black Ball is “the kind of film that feels weightier during the watching than it does when looked back on the next day,” suggests Vulture’s Alison Willmore. Cowritten with Alberto Conejero, inspired by Federico García Lorca’s unfinished La bola negra, and incorporating Conejero’s play La piedra oscura, The Black Ball opens in 1937 and steps back to 1932 before leaping ahead to 2017 to tell the interconnected stories of three gay men in Spain.

“Los Javis execute this mighty vision with thrilling technical bravado,” writes Richard Lawson in the Hollywood Reporter. “Nearly every shot in the film is a carefully composed wonder, either an eye-popping still-life tableau or a breathtaking bit of camera movement, all done up in lush, expensive-looking period detail. It’s a dazzlingly assured film, delivering the heady satisfaction of seeing something ambitious actually land its nervy attempt.”

“Nearly 160 minutes is rather a long time to spend around the filmmakers’ brashly symphonic style,” finds Variety’s Guy Lodge, especially “in the company of characters who, as neatly as their paths collide over time, remain fairly two-dimensional throughout, played with serviceable sincerity but not much granular detail by an attractive ensemble.”

Pawlikowski’s black-and-white Fatherland, which we took a first look at last week, spends a mere eighty-two minutes with Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika as a speaking tour takes them on a somber journey from Frankfurt to Weimar. Writing for Sight and Sound, Nicolas Rapold suggests that Fatherland is “a dangerous film to have in a festival because it’s such a model of economy, almost casually demonstrating intelligence and cinematic beauty in half the runtime of other pedigreed auteur efforts.”

Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto won the award for Best Performance for an Actress for their turns as two women who form a fast and deep friendship in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden; here’s a quick overview of early reviews. And Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne won the award for Best Performance for an Actor for playing two Belgian soldiers fighting in the First World War and falling in love in Lukas Dhont’s Coward, a film that, for the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, “reeks of manneristic affectation and phoniness.”

Guy Lodge disagrees. “Coward blossoms as a love story of marked tenderness,” he writes, “but with a queasy, nervy undertow, as we wonder if it can possibly survive the brutality of war, and of men in general. It works in large part because Macchia—a gently stoic, aptly unformed presence with a stolid sadness in his trudging gait, who can go from boy to man with a slight shift in the light—and the far more vocal, focus-pulling Campagne have chemistry visible almost entirely in the different ways their bodies move and balance each other: one still, one quicksilver; one molded by the men around him, one brazenly opposing that physicality.”

Un Certain Regard

When Gilles Jacob became the festival’s delegate general in 1978, he launched Un Certain Regard, a program that has especially lately focused on emerging filmmakers. The Un Certain Regard Prize was established in 1998, and this year’s jury presided over by Leïla Bekhti presented the award to Sandra Wollner’s Everytime. After Jessie (Carla Hüttermann) falls to her death, her mother (Birgit Minichmayr), sister (Lotte Shirin Keiling), and boyfriend (Tristan Lopez) decide to take the trip to Tenerife that the mom and her two girls had been planning.

Gregory Oke’s cinematography “evokes the heady bouquet of suncream and slush puppies as the sort-of family wander around Tenerife in a half-daze,” writes Hannah Strong at Little White Lies. “Much of Everytime’s power comes in the things that these people want to say but can’t, and the enormous burden of regret that they share, as well as the way grief has shaped their worlds since Jessie’s death. It’s a ghost story of a sort, in which a family are finally allowed to pretend, just for a moment, that the unthinkable never happened.”

Elephants in the Fog, the debut feature from Abinash Bikram Shah and the first Nepali film to be selected for UCR, won the Jury Prize. Pirati (Pushpa Thing Lama), the matriarch of a community of transgender women, leads the search when one of her favorite daughters, Apsara (Aliz Ghimire), goes missing.

“Through hazy rural environments,” writes Siddhant Adlakha for Variety, “through gentle, tasteful sex scenes, and through calculated code-switches to navigate social norms (‘Use your deep voice,’ Pirati tells one of her sisters, as they phone Apsara’s family for help), Shah weaves a potent tale of loss, loneliness, and desperation, led by a stunning first-time performance. Lama, a social activist of several decades, sheds any sense of artifice in playing the headstrong Pirati, a woman whose convictions are as compelling as her desires, her vulnerabilities, and even her hypocrisies.”

Louis Clichy’s animated Iron Boy—the story of Christophe, a ten-year-old farm boy who must wear a metal corset to keep his body from falling over—won a Special Jury Prize. “Framing Christophe’s stiff little body against the surrounding green fields or the buildings of his drab provincial enclave, Clichy powerfully captures those eureka moments you have as a kid when your world is suddenly opened up by beauty, and you realize you’re not alone,” writes Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter.

Bradley Fiomona Dembeasset won the Best Actor award for his portrayal of Robert, a seventeen-year-old Congolese refugee in Bangui, the capital of Central African Republic, in Rafiki Fariala’s debut feature, Congo Boy. Robert’s parents are in prison, so it’s up to him to look after his four siblings while holding down odd jobs and studying for his upcoming exams. But what he really wants to do is sing.

Fiomona delivers an “open-hearted and entertaining performance, deftly moving between emotionally heavy dramatic scenes and others full of gaiety,” writes Murtada Elfadl in Variety. “His face registers Robert’s many dilemmas, while his physicality and singing show why he can be a star. Despite its uneven writing, Congo Boy succeeds because of Fariala’s emotional clarity, avoiding many pitfalls of the familiar rise-to-fame musical story. Anchored by its charismatic star, the film ends on an acute, genuinely moving note of hard-earned hope.”

A temporarily renamed Best Actresses award was presented to the three leads in Valentina Maurel’s Forever Your Maternal Animal. Having spent a few years in Belgium, Elsa (Daniela Marín Navarro) returns to her home in Costa Rica to find that her parents have split and left the house to her younger sister, Amalia (Mariangel Villegas), and it’s a mess. In the meantime, Elsa’s mother, Isabel (Marina de Tavira), is working on reviving a collection of erotic poetry she wrote in her teens.

“These could be some of the best female characters at Cannes this year,” writes Marta Bałaga at Cineuropa, “completely delulu, infuriating, and fun. They are connected, but they don’t really know—or like—each other. And they don’t know themselves either. Elsa is the very definition of adrift: obviously looking for something and ready for a change, but she has no idea what it would even look like . . . It’s hilarious and so, so relatable, how nobody here approves of anyone else’s choices.”

The Camera d’Or, presented to the best first feature premiering in any section in Cannes, went to another UCR selection, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s Ben’Imana, which Sheri Linden, writing in the Hollywood Reporter, calls “a searing and intimate portrait of a nation’s reckoning.” In 2012, eighteen years after the Rwandan genocide, one of the last of the community tribunals is held in a village where Vénéranda (Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi) formerly forgives the man accused of killing many of her closest relatives. But her sister insists that Vénéranda has no right to speak for their family.

“Dusabejambo walks a tightrope with formidable grace in her reckoning with the legacy of genocide,” writes Sophie Monks Kaufman at Little White Lies. “She honors the burdens of survivors, distilling hundreds of hours of real testimony . . . One of the many miracles of the structurally refined screenplay, cowritten with Delphine Agut, is that it allows suffering to breathe without languishing in despair.”

To wrap, let’s note that the Critics’ Week Awards were presented last Thursday, and a handful of films premiering in the Directors’ Fortnight won awards on Friday. Critics at Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, Vulture, the Los Angeles Times, and Screen have notes on their favorite films at Cannes this year, and Nick Davis and Tim Grierson as well as contributors to the Film Stage and Sight and Sound offer titles-only ranked lists. Then there’s this nifty feature at Notebook: Seven-Word Reviews.

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Better Parts

David Hudson — Fri, 22 May 2026 08:41:00 +0000

Did You See This?

James Spader in David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996)

Introduced in 2024 and presented on behalf of the Chantal Akerman Foundation, the Directors’ Fortnight’s Audience Award goes this year to I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, the fifth feature from Clio Barnard (The Arbor, The Selfish Giant). Based on the novel by Keiran Goddard and written by playwright Enda Walsh, I See Buildings tracks five friends who have grown up together in Birmingham and are now going on thirty. “It’s a loving return to what once was a cliché of British film,” writes B. Ruby Rich for Sight and Sound, “the noble working class, crushed by defeat (economic) or dependence (drink, drugs). Films designed to tug at audience heartstrings.”

As the Fortnight wraps in Cannes, the French Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers has selected its Special Jury Favorite, Lila Pinell’s debut feature, Shana. Eva Huault plays “a twentysomething with no filter, endless chutzpah, and nonstop boyfriend problems,” writes Lauren Wissot for Slant, and “what begins as an unassuming dramedy about a short-fused Zoomer who doesn’t give two fucks slowly reveals to be something far more consequential.”

Another first feature, Sarah Arnold’s Too Many Beasts, has won the Europa Cinemas Label as Best European Film premiering in the Fortnight. Arnold has found “clever new ways to tell a familiar story of crooked cops and small-town corruption,” writes Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter. “What sets this slickly helmed, darkly funny debut apart from other entries to the genre is Arnold’s unusual blend of wildlife, agrarian strife, sexual frustration, and longstanding regional feuds, which in this case involve the gentrification of one of France’s oldest pastimes: game hunting.”

Actor-turned-director Pegah Ahangarani’s Rehearsals for a Revolution not only got picked up today by Sony Pictures Classics, it’s also won the L’Oeil d’or, the award presented to the best nonfiction film premiering in any section in Cannes, including the Fortnight and Critics’ Week. Writing for Screen, Jonathan Romney calls Rehearsals “a searching documentary that can surely lay claim to being the timeliest film in Cannes this year. Going right up to the present and the war currently waged by the U.S. and Israel with Iran, the film focuses on several key moments when Iran entertained real hope for social change, only to find it repeatedly crushed.”

In her latest dispatch from Cannes, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis notes that the “most harrowing drama this year hands down has taken place offscreen.” On the day before the festival opened, Libération published an open letter decrying the growing influence of billionaire Vincent Bolloré, who holds a controlling stake in telecommunications conglomerate Canal+ S.A. and “whose news outlets have promoted the far right,” as Dargis points out. “The letter warned that his influence would lead to ‘a fascist takeover of the collective imagination.’ On Sunday, the head of Canal+, Maxime Saada, said at an event that the company would no longer work with the signatories.”

There are well over six hundred of them, including Juliette Binoche, Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo, Walter Salles, and Ken Loach. “The threat of a boycott in the arts is gravely unsettling,” writes Dargis, adding that “it also could be calamitous given how many movies rely on French financing, including from other countries.”

In other festival news, the lineup for this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato is set. Running from June 20 through 28, the fortieth edition of Bologna’s festival celebrating cinema’s rich history will feature more than five hundred films, including the world premiere of a new restoration of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), Lino Brocka’s newly restored Weighed but Found Wanting (1974), and new documentaries on Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Jean Cocteau, Orson Welles, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

This week’s highlights:

Starring Keke Palmer as the head of a team of shoplifters out for righteous revenge against a ruthless fashion maven (Demi Moore), I Love Boosters is “a screwball farce, a Day-Glo dystopia, a heist flick, a sci-fi adventure, and a psychedelic social satire, double-stuffed with anti-capitalist themes and absurdist detours, plus a touch of vampire cunnilingus,” writes Emily Nussbaum in her profile of director Boots Riley in the New Yorker. Writing Boosters, Riley saw it as “his best chance to infiltrate the mainstream,” writes Nussbaum. “He’d spent decades as a critics’ darling, first in music and then in film and TV; in Oakland, he was perfectly in synch, a Marxist bohemian auteur-virtuoso whose class-war themes were native to the culture. Now his goal was to blast Boosters far beyond that radius, turning it into a summer blockbuster, a popcorn hit with a revolutionary heart.”

“Casual Viewing,” an essay on Netflix by Will Tavlin that n+1 published last year, quickly became the magazine’s most widely read piece in its twenty-plus-year history. The latest issue features Tavlin’s pithily observant meander through Park City during the last edition of Sundance to be staged there before the festival moves to Colorado next year. Tavlin talks with a few veteran critics and insiders, sits in on a few panels, and of course, sees some movies, including The Moment, a mockumentary starring Charlie XCX as herself. Director Aiden Zamiri’s film “wants us to understand that Charli’s creative success happened in spite of her record label and the morons who run it,” writes Tavlin, “a lesson for anyone trying to rebuild indie cinema. Much like the boom that followed [Steven Soderbergh’s] sex, lies, and videotape [1989], any future indie renaissance will be built first and foremost around great films by singular artists. It will not be reverse engineered from above, by industry executives and nonprofit operators whose ideas consist of crackpot marketing stunts and who use the words value corridor in conversation. But that won’t stop any of these people from trying.”

Revisiting Crash (1996) thirty years after its premiere kicked up a storm in Cannes, Travis Woods writes at Letterboxd that David Cronenberg’s adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s novel “strips the chassis of its source material for parts, ripping out and keeping the story’s metal heart (the near-death trauma of car crashes violently freeing its characters from their icy emotional purgatories, a rebirth that hot-wires their potential for romantic and sexual intimacy) while abandoning the rest (including a car-crash sex/death cult that plans to kill Elizabeth Taylor in an elaborately goregasmic wreck).” Crash “presages Cronenberg’s more meditative twenty-first-century work because it reckons with death, confronts it, and considers whether it can be yet another transformative event, rather than a final one.” Sidenote: Debbie Harry tells the Observer’s Megan Nolan a quick story about an exchange on the set of Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983).

The Brazilian Film Critics Association, Abraccine, has polled its members to come up with a list of one hundred “essential” (rather than “best”) Brazilian films. The list is “revisionist in the ways one would expect it to be,” writes Filipe Furtado, comparing the results to the last Abraccine poll, which was conducted in 2015. “It is more diverse, with fourteen movies directed by women instead of five, more movies by Black filmmakers, a higher number that deals with queer and racial themes, a slight increase in shorts and nonfictions, and one animation.” Voters have also “moved away from the traditional Brazilian film historiography that centered around Cinema Novo and, to a lesser extent, Cinema Marginal movements and found more movies that existed in the margins.” Cinema Novo, the new wave that swelled in the 1960s and ’70s, “was inseparable from an awareness of Brazil as a neocolonial country, serving as a model for other ‘poor’ and ‘imperfect’ cinemas across Latin America and the then-called Third World,” writes Tiago de Luca at the top of an annotated list of ten “great Cinema Novo films” at the BFI.

At eighty-two, Wallace Shawn has two plays running in New York through Sunday, What We Did Before Our Moth Days and The Fever, and he’ll be heard next month as the voice of Rex the dinosaur in Toy Story 5 before appearing as Buckminster Fuller in Greg Pritikin’s The Man Who Changed the World. “The last forty-nine years that I’ve been acting feel like a very short part of my life, and something I took up quite recently and never expected to do,” Shawn tells Greta Rainbow in Interview. “But I think probably every actor thinks, ‘I should have had better parts,’ and I’m one of those people. Every actor may feel it, but it doesn’t mean they’re right. Somebody has to play small parts. But I do get annoyed. Having just seen [Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street (1994)], I think, ‘Why wasn’t Brooke Smith in every film? She’s mind-blowing. She’s incredible.’”

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La Gradiva Tops the Critics’ Week Awards

David Hudson — Thu, 21 May 2026 08:59:00 +0000

Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva (2026)

On Wednesday evening, Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva won the Grand Prize presented by the Critics’ Week jury, presided over by Payal Kapadia (All We Imagine as Light). French critics will be pleased. Throughout this year’s Cannes Film Festival, contributors to Libération, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, Cahiers du cinéma, and other publications have been rating films premiering in the Critics’ Week and Directors’ Fortnight programs at Wask, the critics’ grid maintained by Thomas Gastaldi. La Gradiva took the lead early and held it.

Atlan, a cinematographer who was nominated for a César for her work on Louise Hémon’s The Girl in the Snow (2025), has cowritten her first feature as a director with Anne Brouillet. The title is a reference to Wilhelm Jensen’s 1902 novel Gradiva, the story of an archeologist who becomes obsessed with a woman depicted in a bas-relief he comes across in a Roman museum. In a dream, the anthropologist sees his Gradiva walking the streets of Pompeii as the eruption of Vesuvius subsumes the city in 79 AD. Freud was so taken by the novel that he psychoanalyzed the archeologist in his 1907 essay “Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva.”

In Atlan’s film, French Latin teacher Madame Mercier—“played with superb intelligence and sympathy by Antonia Buresi,” notes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw—takes her class of high-school students on a field trip to Pompeii and Naples. As Amber Wilkinson writes in Screen, “three teenagers immediately catch the camera’s interest on the train south. Chief among them is Toni (Colas Quignard), a disruptive joker who commands attention from both students and frustrated teachers. His best mate, James (Mitia Capellier), is a lothario, even managing a quick close encounter on the train—a scene that sharply contrasts intimacy with Toni observing from outside the carriage. Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), meanwhile, is an arty loner, introduced as she watches Toni watching James. Whether you are an observer or a participant is a crucial element of teen life, and Atlan takes her time tracing this through everyday interactions, from dancing to drinking dares.”

More Awards

Aina Clotet has been acting since she was eleven, and in 2024, she won an award for Best Performance at Canneseries for This Is Not Sweden, which she created and directed. Now the first feature she’s written, directed, and starred in, Viva, has won the Rising Star Award. Clotet plays Nora, who has not only just turned forty but also beaten cancer. Viva is “a portrait of a woman ablaze, racing to seize every second of life in the face of the threat of losing it,” writes Alfonso Rivera at Cineuropa. Whether Clotet “succeeds in creating a role compelling enough to balance out the overfamiliarity of well-worn formulas will very much depend on individual affinities,” suggests Jay Weissberg in Variety.

Two collateral prizes were also presented on Wednesday. The Gan Foundation Award for Distribution, presented to support a theatrical release in France, went to Zou Jing’s A Girl Unknown, the story of a girl in China moving from one family to another—and then to a third—between the ages of six and eighteen. Each family gives her a new name. “In a commendably restrained manner,” writes John Berra for Screen, “Zou closely examines how such cycles of displacement cause existential anxieties to fester to the point of identity dissolution.”

The SACD Award, presented to the best screenplay by France’s Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers, went to Blerta Basholli and Nicole Borgeat for Dua, the second feature directed by Basholli, who won a Grand Jury Prize, a Directing Award, and an Audience Award at Sundance for Hive (2021). Pinea Matoshi stars as thirteen-year-old Dua, an ethnic Albanian in Kosovo in the late 1990s, when Serbians led by Slobodan Milošević were beginning a clampdown that would eventually lead to war.

“Unlike the majority of war movies, Dua avoids hysteria by focusing on the relatively small instances that can tip a person over the edge,” writes David Jenkins at Little White Lies. Dua takes up judo, and just when “it feels as if things are about to get all Karate Kid on us,” writes Jenkins, “the film shifts away from all that and doubles down on the fact that this is not a fair fight, and that it’s going to take more than some finely-honed grappling skills to send the Serbians packing.”

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Hope and Fjord

David Hudson — Wed, 20 May 2026 08:52:00 +0000

Hoyeon in Na Hong-jin’s Hope (2026)

Last year, in the main competition alone, Cannes launched Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, Bi Gan’s Resurrection, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind—and that’s just skimming off the top of a stellar lineup. By this point in the festival’s seventy-ninth edition, the general consensus seems to be that, even with a few days left to go, there is no way this year is going to measure up. But the consensus stops there.

A glance at the critics’ grids cited in yesterday’s roundup reveals an unusual diversity of clashing opinions. When Kyle Buchanan, the New York Times’ man on the awards circuit, predicted the other day that Scarlett Johansson’s performance in James Gray’s Paper Tiger would put her in the running for an Oscar, a fellow pundit scoffed that Johansson’s turn was more deserving of a Razzie. Buchanan reports on a debate over Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden that seems to have gotten a lot noisier than the movie.

And just when Buchanan was thinking that Fjord might win Cristian Mungiu another Palme d’Or—his 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won in 2007—“as the closing credits began, the journalist in front of me broke into derisive laughter,” he writes. “But I don’t expect any competition film still to come will prove more polarizing than Hope,” Na Hong-jin’s long-awaited follow-up to The Wailing (2016).

Hope

The mostly elderly residents of Hope Harbor, a remote South Korean town tucked up near the DMZ, are alarmed by reports of a tiger wandering down across the border, ravaging a bull, and leaving the bloody mess in the middle of a road. It isn’t long, though, before police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and rookie cop Sung-ae (Hoyeon, the model-turned-actor who broke through in Squid Game) realize that no tiger could have torn a tank-sized hole through the local real-estate office or flung a car halfway across town.

“It’s hard to overstate just how wildly entertaining this first hour is,” writes Jessica Kiang in Variety. Na’s alien invasion movie is “inflected with Western and 1950s sci-fi B picture flourishes, so that it plays like an expansive and expensive riff on Ron Underwood’s cult classic Tremors, with genius cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo (Parasite, Burning, The Wailing) wielding his gliding camera with such insolent grace that it seems like serenely sarcastic commentary on the chaos and carnage of Lee Hwokyoung’s production design.” Kiang’s problems with Hope have to do with “the weightless, old-school video-game aesthetic of the alien monster design” and a “slack middle section” of a movie that runs well over two and a half hours.

“Set piece after kick-ass set piece, the movie delivers, from the vehicular daredevilry to the electrifying horseback scenes in the forest, with lots of superbly choreographed clashes,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. But for IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, Hope is “a trite and tedious bumpkins vs. monsters saga that only has the creative propulsion to sustain itself for about forty-five minutes, and not enough to spare it from some of the worst creature effects this side of the Syfy Channel or The Mummy Returns . . . It’s clear that something went terribly wrong in the making of this movie, but the worst part about it is how much goes ecstatically right before the wheels fall off.”

The most expensive movie in Korean history, Hope also stars Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton in roles that the spoiler-sensitive are not going to want to hear about. “I don’t know whether there’ll be a sequel after this one,” Na tells Joshua Rothkopf in the Los Angeles Times, “but if so, that sequel is going to be centered around them. So picking the right actors was very important for me.”

Fjord

The Gheorghius are a no-phone, no-internet conservative Christian family who have just moved from Bucharest to a small Norwegian town where the prevailing air is friendly, respectfully agnostic, and liberal. Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) have four kids and a baby, none of whom are allowed to listen to secular music. Misdeeds earn a whack on the butt.

When the eldest daughter, Elia (Vanessa Ceban), shows up at school one day with a few bruises, child services are alerted. The children are questioned and whisked off to foster families—the baby, too. “It’s never made precisely clear just how severely, or how knowingly, Mihai and Lisbet have harmed their children,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge, “while both Stan’s and Reinsve’s measured, tightly clenched performances are courageously dour in affect, inviting no easy sympathy from viewers, whatever their degree of culpability. As this community scandal grows, mutates and eventually reaches the judiciary . . . the stakes shift: In certain lines of questioning from the prosecution, the Gheorghius’ personal beliefs seem to be on trial as much as their parenting.”

“If Fjord were a film involving, say, a family of Muslim immigrants, you might expect certain rhythms to its conflicts and power dynamics,” writes Vulture’s Alison Willmore. “But the Euro-on-Euro aspect and subsequent value clashes in Mungiu’s film create wildly unpredictable rearrangements of sympathies as the story unfolds. Mungiu remains shockingly gifted at drawing suspense out of characters who are trying to navigate unfair systems, but even if it’s never really in doubt that the Gheorghius should be allowed to have back the children they clearly love, it’s also enjoyably disorienting to watch a movie in which the main underdog is a bigoted pro-spanking Christian traditionalist who is being menaced by cheerfully polite humanists who keep citing the word trauma. It wouldn’t take much to turn this scenario into a right-wing culture-war fantasy.”

At Little White Lies, David Jenkins isn’t having it: “You could imagine the high priest of bureaucratic cynicism himself, Franz Kafka, watching this film . . . and saying, ‘No, sorry lads, it’s too much.’” Fjord is “so hysterical about apparent top-down government oppression in the Scandinavian ruralities that it might play as the less-entertaining half of a double bill with famed anti-weed PSA, Reefer Madness. Watching this film, you’re left to wonder what Norway has done to Mungiu to prompt this wacky broadside.”

“Mungiu has spent years performing the same sleight of hand: presenting the absence of a thesis as the only thesis his films are willing to embrace,” writes Victor Morozov at Films in Frame. “Fjord is determined to convince us that no clear resolution is possible. But in doing so, it overlooks the fact that this is already a form of resolution in itself. The characters are reduced to dispensable pretexts, mere vehicles for an impeccably engineered dramaturgy. To be fair, Mungiu has remained entirely consistent in this regard, and contemporary society . . . may well seem to validate his position. But that does not save his cinema from feeling increasingly rigid and overdetermined.”

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All of a Sudden and Paper Tiger

David Hudson — Tue, 19 May 2026 11:14:00 +0000

Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden (2026)

One of the new features at the freshly relaunched Film Comment is a critics’ grid showing contributors’ numerical ratings of films premiering in Cannes. As of this writing, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden has taken the lead among the contenders for the Palme d’Or. At Moirée, All of a Sudden is tied with Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland—which we took a first look at yesterday—and James Gray’s Paper Tiger for second place behind Arthur Harari’s The Unknown.

Fatherland is out front on the grids at Screen and Ioncinema, but Paper Tiger has pulled ahead at the International Cinephile Society. A film festival is, of course, much more than a horse race, but we can take these scores as a prompt to sample some of the most notable early critical responses to the new films by Hamaguchi and Gray.

All of a Sudden

To be clear, even some admirers of Hamaguchi’s past work, such as Happy Hour (2015) and Drive My Car (2021), have their problems with All of a Sudden. Jonathan Romney is one of them, as he explains on The Last Thing I Saw, but for host Nicolas Rapold, it was well into the film’s 196 minutes when he found himself clicking in with it. On the Film Comment Podcast, it’s Devika Girish raising objections while Inney Prakash argues the case for the defense.

Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) is the director of an elderly care center on the outskirts of Paris, where she’s introduced a program—Humanitude, a real thing—wherein patients are treated with dignity, taken out of the beds where the healthcare system would have them filed away, and encouraged to participate in communal activities. Some of Marie-Lou’s underlings object that the facility is already too overstretched and understaffed to spend all the extra time and effort, but Marie-Lou, teetering on the edge of burnout herself, does have her supporters.

Heading home after another trying day, Marie-Lou spots a young man running through a park and immediately recognizes that he’s developmentally challenged—and on his own. She rushes to his side, and spotting a GPS tracker, waits for his guardians to arrive. One of them is Mari (Tao Okamoto), the director of a Japanese theater on tour, and she hands Marie-Lou a flyer with an invitation to the next show. What Marie-Lou sees is a production inspired by the work of psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, an advocate for the reform of Italy’s approach to the treatment of the mentally ill.

“There are multiple theatrical performances which nest neatly within the drama,” notes David Jenkins at Little White Lies, “and there are numerous Q&A sessions—a Hamaguchi kink—in which the unique dynamic of responding to intimate questions in public allows for the most unguarded and poetic answers.”

It’s during the Q&A following this first performance that Marie-Lou and Mari, switching between French and Japanese—Marie-Lou completed a degree in anthropology in Tokyo and Mari studied philosophy at the Sorbonne—discover that they are kindred spirits. Marie-Lou learns that Mari is suffering from a form of cancer that can at any time—and all of a sudden—take a severe turn for the worse.

“Almost half the running time of this three-hour-plus film is given over to the women’s first extended meeting,” writes Dennis Lim for Film Comment. “As they make their way from the theater to the Seine and eventually to Marie-Lou’s workplace, amid fading light and into the still suspension of night, the gravity of Mari’s situation stretches time and imbues it with urgency, imparting a tender, searching intensity to their flowing conversation. All of a Sudden deepens the philosophical inquiry of Evil Does Not Exist (2023). If that film contemplates the folly and fragility of human existence on a despoiled planet, this one asks how we might live in a failing body (as we all will) and within a tangle of broken systems (as we already do).”

Cowriters Hamaguchi and Léa Le Dimna have drawn from a 2019 collection of correspondence between medical anthropologist Maho Isono and philosopher Makiko Miyano, who knew that cancer would soon take her life. As Leonardo Goi notes at the Film Stage, during one of their lengthy discussions that will actually incorporate diagrams on a whiteboard, Mari prods Marie-Lou “into discussing her university dissertation’s central dilemma—why does capitalism lead to lower birth rates?—only to pivot from that and problematize the genesis and scope of her empathy-driven approach to elderly care.”

If all of this sounds a little dry, Jessica Kiang assures us in Variety that All of a Sudden “achieves a kind of levitating grace . . . It is difficult to divide any one thing from the other here, from those inextricably interlinked lead performances to Samuel Andreyev’s sparing score to Azusa Yamazaki’s liquid editing and the camerawork from DP Alain Guichaoa, that is unobtrusive yet makes intensely talky scenes feel roomy and cinematic. All the craft is in humble service of a screenplay uncommon for its faith in the power of language and communication to transform and to console.”

Paper Tiger

Adam Driver delivers what IndieWire’s David Ehrlich describes as “a career-best performance” in James Gray’s ninth feature as Gary, a flashy former cop who’s done well in the private sector and is now getting itchy as he peers down the barrel of a divorce. It’s 1986 when he rolls up to a house in Queens with caterers from Peter Luger Steak House and dinner for his younger brother, Irwin (Miles Teller), and his family. Irwin’s wife, Hester (Scarlett Johansson), appears flustered to see Gary after what appears to be quite a while, and Irwin and Hester’s teenage sons, Scott (Gavin Goudey) and Ben (Roman Engel), marvel at the pistol Gary keeps in his ankle holster.

Gary has come to Irwin with a business proposition. Brooklyn’s infamously polluted Gowanus Canal is up for a good cleaning and gentrification. While the Italian mafia is on its way out, the Russians are moving in, but Gary assures Irwin that he can handle them. The idea would be to apply Irwin’s engineering experience and know-how to a potentially lucrative consulting gig. Irwin has been fretting over how he might be able to afford sending his son Scott to a decent college and maybe even moving to a more upscale neighborhood, so it’s a yes.

But one night, Irwin decides to show his sons the canal, and as they pull up, they spot Russians dumping industrial waste. For the Russians, that makes Irwin and his boys a problem that needs to be taken care of. Back home, in the meantime, Hester isn’t telling anyone about the vision-impairing bouts of wooziness she’s been experiencing lately.

“Elements of Paper Tiger are drawn from Gray’s own experience,” notes the New Yorker’s Justin Chang, “and you may recognize plot points from some of his earlier films, namely Little Odessa (1994) and We Own the Night (2007): a gnarly Russian-mob milieu, a festering estrangement between two brothers, and a mother who is succumbing, or has already succumbed, to a grave illness. Johansson has been showily dowdified—thick-rimmed glasses, a big blond wig—but never loses her hold on the character; when her voice cracks and her eyes widen in shock, she conveys a bone-deep understanding of Hester’s anguish and fear.”

“While Driver is pure neighborhood movie star,” writes Hannah Strong at Little White Lies, “it’s Teller who gives a transformative performance as the meek and mild Irwin, just trying to do right by his family but instantly in over his head and blustering about it.” For Vulture’s Alison Willmore, Paper Tiger is “a tragedy with the momentum of a thriller,” and Time’s Stephanie Zacharek finds that there are passages when “this picture is wrenchingly tense, as if Gray were discovering a gift he didn’t know he had, playing on the audience’s nerves the way you’d gently tighten the pegs on a violin.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney calls Paper Tiger “a bracing melodrama—the good kind, fueled by raw emotional power, not the artificial kind that traffics in overwrought audience manipulation—with a dark, burdened heart . . . While the obvious antecedents outside of Gray’s own body of work might be Coppola or Lumet or Scorsese or Mann, I kept thinking while watching of the early crime films of Akira Kurosawa, from Drunken Angel and Stray Dog up to the classic police procedural, High and Low.”

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Cannes: Three Critical Favorites

David Hudson — Mon, 18 May 2026 09:18:00 +0000

Sandra Hüller in Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland (2026)

We wrapped last week noting that the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis felt that Cannes had “gotten off to a quiet start” this year. Now that we’re halfway through the seventy-ninth edition, the volume may be inching up.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw calls Paweł Pawlikowski’s main-competition entry Fatherland “an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain.” At IndieWire, Siddhant Adlakha suggests that The Diary of a Chambermaid, premiering the Directors’ Fortnight, “might be [Radu] Jude’s most slyly character-focused work, culminating in a completely unexpected emotional gut punch.” And Club Kid, the debut feature from comedian Jordan Firstman, has livened up the Un Certain Regard program, taking critics by surprise and sparking a bidding war between eager distributors. A24 won.

Fatherland

Leonardo Goi closes his first Notebook dispatch from Cannes with a visit to the grave of Klaus Mann. The son of Nobel laureate Thomas Mann was only forty-two when he died of an overdose on the French Riviera in the summer of 1949. Speaking recently to the New Yorker, Olivier Assayas suggests that Mann’s The Turning Point (1942)—the autobiography of a gay man who grew up in an antifascist milieu and eventually, like most of his family, self-exiled from Germany—“should be compulsory reading in schools.”

Fatherland opens with Klaus (August Diehl), disheveled and desperate in his Cannes hotel room. He’s on the phone with his sister, Erika (Sandra Hüller), who begs him to emerge from his funk and join her and their father on a return trip to Germany, a country none of them have set foot in since 1933. Klaus and Erika, a writer and war correspondent, had been close all of their lives. In the 1920s, they paired up with actors Pamela Wedekind and Gustaf Gründgens to perform plays they’d written, and for a few years, Erika and Gründgens were married.

Played by Joachim Meyerhoff, Gründgens briefly resurfaces in Fatherland, wounded by having been execrated in Klaus’s 1936 novel Mephisto, a thinly veiled portrait of an actor who ingratiates himself with the Nazis and lands the role of Mephistopheles in a production of Goethe’s Faust. Gründgens’s feeble attempt to explain himself in Fatherland earns him a slap across the face from Erika.

The year 1949 marked the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Goethe, and two cities invited Thomas Mann to speak at their respective commemorations: Frankfurt in an increasingly Americanized West and Weimar in an East beginning to recede behind what would become the Iron Curtain. In reality, Mann made the trip with his wife, Katia, but Pawlikowski and cowriter Henk Handloegten have tweaked the timeline and overall outline of Mann family lore to have him accompanied by Erika.

Pawlikowski has reteamed with cinematographer Łukasz Żal, who, as he did with Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), shoots Fatherland “in a lustrous monochrome that turns shadows into punctuation marks and sunbeams into something holy, and that makes its performers, chief among them an incredible Sandra Hüller, look lit from within,” writes Vulture’s Alison Willmore. “The world cracked open, and now everyone’s striving to fit the jagged pieces back into a box called civilized society. In the East, that means obliterating the recent past and starting anew in pursuit of communist utopian dreams under the already alarmingly heavy hand of the Russians. In the West, it means pretending to have never cared for, much less been aligned with or had anything to do with, the Nazis, gliding forward on an oil slick of denial with the CIA guiding the way.”

Thomas Mann is played with a somber gravity by Hanns Zischler, who may be best known to international audiences as Hans in Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005) but who made his mark in Europe appearing in early films by Wim Wenders and working with Chantal Akerman, Jean-Luc Godard, Liliana Cavani, and István Szabó, who in 1981 directed an adaptation of Mephisto. Zischler also played Dr. Serenius in a 1982 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus.

Hüller, who won a Silver Bear in Berlin a few months ago for her lead performance in Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, is also appearing this year in the smash hit Project Hail Mary and alongside Tom Cruise in this fall’s Digger. In Fatherland, she’s “at her best—quiet but barbed, with a honed inner edge of defiance—as a woman who seems to have embraced daughterly subservience in response to the spiritual exhaustion occasioned by war and exile,” writes Jonathan Romney for Film Comment. “Żal’s photography has a dappled, luminous grace that elevates the realist period evocation, finding beneath the rubble and brutalist concrete some residue of the Romantic-era grace of Goethe’s bygone world. Right up to its gorgeously direct ending, set to a Bach organ piece, Fatherland is at once simple and a very special achievement—not just a serious film but one that dares to take seriousness itself seriously.”

The Diary of a Chambermaid

Radu Jude calls The Diary of a Chambermaid “a variation on” the 1900 novel by Octave Mirbeau previously adapted by Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, and Benoît Jacquot. Jude’s version is “modest in scale and rich in ideas: essentially an essay film disguised as a conventional narrative,” suggests Victor Morozov at Films in Frame. “Migration, economic inequality, and the idea of a two-speed Europe are not background concerns; they shape the entire film, reframing Mirbeau’s perversely charged material through a distinctly contemporary lens. Less formally radical than some of Jude’s recent work, the film still retains his familiar experimental impulse, folding in reflections on art and society, history and contemporary life, as well as the uneasy relationship between theater, literature, and cinema.”

Gianina (Ana Dumitrașcu) works as a housekeeper in Bordeaux for a microaggressively liberal French couple, Pierre (Vincent Macaigne) and Marguerite (Mélanie Thierry), and as a nanny for their son, Louen (Louen Bouteiller). Gianina has left her own daughter, Maria (Sofia Dragoman), with her grandmother (Liliana Ghita) in Romania. Maria misses her mother terribly, so Gianina tries to steal what time she can to maintain digital contact. At night, Gianina rehearses at a local theater, where she has been cast as the lead in a rowdy adaptation of Mirbeau’s novel.

In the house, Gianina is “an obedient, semi-invisible servant,” writes Sarp Sozdinler at In Review Online, while on stage, she’s “a carnal beast that’s open to all forms of pleasure and experimentation. The duality here might seem a touch convenient, yet both spaces demand something morally compromising from her. The French family sees her as mere labor, though never as far to see her as a part of the family . . . The theater troupe sees her as an abject material for art, subjecting her to challenging, and at times humiliating, requests that vary from nudity to emotional exposure.”

At Little White Lies, Mark Asch finds that The Diary of a Chambermaid is “such a perfect encapsulation of Jude’s preoccupations that he can basically replay variations on his characteristic scenes to make a rich text in a singular voice; it’s proof that he’s a major contemporary filmmaker even when he barely gets out of second gear.”

Club Kid

“Ask any gay man with a social-media account, and they likely have an opinion about Jordan Firstman,” writes Ryan Lattanzio at IndieWire. “The backlash-courting queer actor/comedian, controversial most recently because of an online flare-up over querying the sexual realism of Heated Rivalry, is labeled either candid or confrontational. He also has a record of taking on sexually explicit projects like Sebastián Silva’s suicide-ideating, ketamine-fueled dark comedy Rotting in the Sun. His status as a self-aware, hyper-online provocateur may not seem to suggest the makings of a bona fide filmmaker, but just wait.” Club Kid is a “hugely crowd-pleasing, excruciatingly funny, and poignant first film.”

Firstman stars as Peter, a party promoter in New York who, on a hot and woozy night in 2016, is drawn into a threesome and his first and only sexual encounter with a woman. “Evoking Sean Baker in its style, a whirlwind ten-minute opening sequence—sweatily shot by Adam Newport-Berra and feverishly cut by editors Taylor Levy and Sofía Subercaseaux to a steady, heavy throb of bass—establishes this world to either seductive or nightmarish effect,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge. Ten years of stimulants and repercussions wash by until the best friend of that one woman arrives from London to tell Peter that the mother of the child he didn’t know he had has “tossed herself off,” and now the doe-eyed boy, Arlo (Reggie Absolom), is his problem.

Fortunately, Arlo is so winning that Peter is motivated to sober up. “From Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid through to Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon a full century later, we all know what tends to happen in the movies when manchild meets actual child,” writes Lodge, “and the real surprise of Club Kid is that Firstman is happy to follow the formula.” At Little White Lies, Hannah Strong puts it this way: “Like the very best remixes, Club Kid is familiar at its core but lovingly transformed by a new artist.”

“I don’t think the film is a public renouncement of Firstman’s social milieu, a ‘guys, haven’t we grown out of this?’ bit of smarm from someone trying to give his image a mainstream polish,” writes Richard Lawson in the Hollywood Reporter. “But it is, maybe, suggesting to those who might be lost in the party that life can be led with more—and I apologize for using this particular buzz word—intentionality. It’s a call to consciousness, really, a gentle urging that slowing down is not giving up, that cool is not the only currency, and that what happens in the dark room may not always stay there.”

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Corbaz, Critics, and Cannes

David Hudson — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:50:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Teo Hernández’s Feuilles d’été (1983)

In the Los Angeles Times, Charles McNulty remembers film critic, interviewer, and talk-show raconteur Rex Reed as “the acerbic embodiment of The Critic.” Reed, who has passed away at the age of eighty-seven, wrote for countless publications over the course of six decades and famously costarred with Raquel Welch, John Huston, and Mae West in Michael Sarne’s Myra Breckinridge. As Clyde Haberman notes in the New York Times, the movie was “so bad that Mr. Reed put it at the top of his own list of the ten worst films of 1970.”

“He didn’t mince words or allow nuance or second thoughts to stand in the way of a zingy phrase or a colorful wisecrack,” writes McNulty. “There’s an element of sadistic, John Simonesque glee to his attacks on the personal appearances of actors . . . But what he loved, he loved with an all-consuming passion.” McNulty quotes a passage from Reed’s appreciation of Geraldine Page in which “he elevated a television review into literary art.”

Reed was easy to ridicule, and Ed Park and Dennis Lim did it succinctly and well in the Village Voice in 2005. But as Farran Smith Nehme points out, “the full story of Reed” is complicated. “Politically incorrect (to put it politely) to an extreme, at times offensive degree,” Reed also stood his ground, and occasionally, that ground was a good place to be.

Reed fiercely defended Peter Davis and Bert Schneider, the director and coproducer of the 1974 Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds, when Bob Hope arranged to have Frank Sinatra put some distance between them and the Academy. And even in his eighties, he could be fun. Nehme has a couple of stories to tell.

Before turning to this week’s highlights, let’s note that New Yorkers will have to choose between three tantalizing screenings this coming Tuesday evening: Frank Peregrini’s The Scar of Shame (1929) at Light Industry, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Touching the Skin of Eeriness (2013) at the Center for Theatre Research, and a selection of rarely screened shorts by Guy Maddin accompanied live by the Flushing Remonstrance at Cobble Hill Cinemas.

Let’s also flag some fine new writing on the subjects of a few recent roundups. For Filmmaker, Nick Kouhi looks back on the sixth edition of Prismatic Ground, and Forrest Cardamenis has begun posting his thoughts on this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival. And Andrew Chan (Film Comment), Bilge Ebiri (Vulture), and Isaac Feldberg (Letterboxd) have each recently spent some time with Tony Leung.

Patrick Wang, the writer and director of the remarkable films In the Family (2011), The Grief of Others (2015), and the two-part A Bread Factory (2018), has been working on A. Rimbaud for a couple of years, and now, he’s rolling it out slowly and carefully. Tuesday night’s screening at the Roxy in New York was sold out, but there will be two more on May 20 and 26. At Screen Slate, Christopher Bell talks with Wang about casting Blake Draper, who plays the libertine poet from the ages of fifteen through thirty-seven. “There have been people who’ve seen it who have questioned if it’s different actors,” says Wang. “I think that’s a wonderful reflection on his work.”

A new restoration of Aloïse (1975) is the centerpiece of a Metrograph series focusing on Liliane de Kermadec, who started out as a set photographer for Agnès Varda and Alain Resnais before becoming a prolific writer, director, and producer. Aloïse Corbaz, a Swiss outsider artist championed by Jean Dubuffet and institutionalized as a schizophrenic in 1918, is portrayed as a teen by Isabelle Huppert, then twenty-one, and as an adult by Delphine Seyrig. “Aloïse is a strange, austere film,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns, adding that it showcases “Huppert’s talent for conveying emotional turmoil churning beneath a placid surface—a quality that has come to define many of her greatest roles in the half century since . . . Seyrig’s Aloïse is of a piece with the widowed homemaker she plays in [Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman] and the languid diplomat’s spouse in [Marguerite Duras’s India Song, both films also from 1975]. All are touched by madness in some way, their psychic disintegration stemming from rules and codes taught to be immutable and created to stifle and oppress.”

The robust new issue of the Ideas Letter includes Leo Robson’s constructively critical assessment of A. S. Hamrah, the film critic best known for the pithy capsule reviews periodically rounded up in n+1. “Hamrah’s combative posture serves as a rhetorical strength and a source of meaning, especially in his longer ruminative pieces,” writes Robson. “But Hamrah’s work also exhibits the drawbacks of accentuating the negative . . . At times, his work ceases to resemble criticism altogether and functions instead as the portrait of a temperament.” Also in this issue, Kéchi Nne Nomu writes about the implications of producer David L. Wolper’s decision to cut Ousmane Sembène’s segment of an omnibus film shot at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich that was to have been called Visions of Nine. “Visions of Eight—despite its absence of Sembène’s vision—is a beautifully made, occasionally ambitious film, much to Wolper’s credit,” writes Nomu. “But it is also a film about Sembène’s erasure.”

The nineteen-film retrospective Teo Hernández: A Pomegranate Orchard and the Bitter Well, on now at the Museum of Modern Art through May 26, showcases work that, as Maximilien Luc Proctor writes at Ultra Dogme, “weaved several primary filmmaking pillars into the foundation of his life’s work: the diaristic impulse, a spiritual openness, layering of veils and tableaus throughout the visual field, and a deep connection to the physical human form.” Commenting on the resurgence of interest in these Super 8 films, Phil Coldiron writes at Screen Slate that “there’s a stark distance between Hernández’s opaque, sensual lyricism and the essayistic, even didactic, tendencies that continue to dominate the institutional spaces available for contemporary work outside the conventional narrative feature. His films, in a word, are naïve in a way that had gone entirely out of fashion a generation ago.”

We’ll wrap with a reminder that there’s a festival going on in France, even if it has “gotten off to a quiet start,” as Manohla Dargis puts it in the New York Times. For the Guardian, Agnès Poirier writes about Cannes as an exhausting yet irresistible experience, and at RogerEbert.com, Lisa Nesselson finds it “as inspiring as it is slightly eerie to see so many stories firmly anchored in WWII” this year. The festival was, after all, founded in response to Leni Riefenstahl winning the Mussolini Cup for Best Foreign Film in Venice in 1938, and Club Ciné founding editor Tom Macklin traces an anti-authoritarian streak running through Cannes from its first full edition in 1946 to the presentation of the Palme d’Or to Jafar Panahi last year. As for this year’s edition, the first podcasts are out from Film Comment, Nicolas Rapold’s The Last Thing I Saw, and the essential critics’ grid Moirée.

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Cannes Openers

David Hudson — Thu, 14 May 2026 09:19:00 +0000

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

Traditionally, Cannes does not put its best foot forward when presenting an opening night film. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman ticks off a few past duds such as Michel Hazanavicius’s Final Cut (2022) and Maïwenn’s Jeanne du Barry (2023) and then adds that Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss, which has opened the festival’s seventy-ninth edition, “may be the worst festival opener I’ve seen in a decade.” At In Review Online, Hugo Emmerzael finds that the film “props up the worst tendencies of French cinema all at once.”

The Electric Kiss does have at least one champion in the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, though. He calls it “a deeply charming French rom-com.” Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, in the meantime, has opened the Un Certain Regard program and emerged as the first triumph of Cannes 2026. As for the independent sidebars, Kantemir Balagov’s Butterfly Jam and Phuong Mai Nguyen’s In Waves, which have opened the Directors’ Fortnight and the Critics’ Week, respectively, have been met with mixed reviews.

The Electric Kiss

Venus Electrificata is one of the main attractions at a Parisian carnival in 1928. Suzanne (Anaïs Demoustier) places herself between two generators, allowing the current to flow through her body. She sells kisses for thirty centimes a jolt. Suzanne is taking a break in the psychic’s tent when a grief-stricken painter, Antoine (Pio Marmaï), tumbles in. He mistakes Suzanne for the psychic and demands to speak with his recently deceased wife, Irène (Vimala Pons, seen in flashbacks).

Spotting an opportunity, Suzanne obliges. Antoine’s spirits are lifted, and he starts painting again. His dealer, Armand (Gilles Lellouche), is thrilled and insists that Suzanne keep up the ruse. But she’s discovered Irène’s diaries and finds herself falling in love with Antoine.

The Electric Kiss “promises snap, crackle, and pop—but the sparks fizzle out before it reaches its unapologetically contrived climax,” finds Jonathan Romney at Screen. “Based on an original idea by directors Rebecca Zlotowski and Robin Campillo, the film shows undeniable complexity and mischief, echoing a vintage tradition of French comedies (Renoir, Sacha Guitry, René Clair). But it is rather hampered by pedestrian execution, dominated by claustrophobically stagey interior-bound dialogues, the more effusive crowd scenes tending to stand out as production numbers rather than feeling part of an organic whole.”

“Salvadori was last on the Croisette in 2018 with the far jauntier screwball crime romance The Trouble With You,” notes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “Working with the same cowriters, Benjamin Charbit and Benoît Graffin, Salvadori struggles to breathe life into The Electric Kiss, a film whose air of strained whimsy falls flat . . . While the romance, the deception, the surprise discoveries, the attempted suicides (genuine or fake), and the burlesque comedy should be gathering steam, it all becomes a tedious muddle.”

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

“For kids who grew up sneaking glances at horror movies at sleepovers or between shopping channel infomercials on late night television, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma feels like coming home,” writes Hannah Strong at Little White Lies. Hannah Einbinder (Hacks) stars as Kris, a queer filmmaker who has broken through at Sundance and been tapped to reboot a slasher franchise, Camp Miasma, that has become a “zombie IP,” merchandized to the point of oversaturation and drained of the thrill seeing the vengeful ghost Little Death (Jack Haven) off teenage campers.

Billy (Gillian Anderson), who played the final girl in the original movie, refused to take part in any of its sequels, and now lives as a recluse—at the very site where the first Camp Miasma was filmed. Kris has tracked her down, and she’s determined to cast Billy in her rejuvenation of a depleted cinematic universe.

Following We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Teenage Sex and Death is Jane Schoenbrun’s “most accomplished, most persuasive, and most playful movie yet,” writes Jessica Kiang for Variety. “Anderson appears to be enjoying her foray into Sapphic high-camp tremendously, and the supporting cast is speckled with equally game performers, from Eva Victor’s punk DJ to Dylan Baker’s insufferable studio exec, to Kris’s lover Mari (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and her dopey hookup Thor (Aren Buchholz). But then everyone here, in front of and behind the camera, looks to be having a great time, which keeps the mood bouncy, however gory or splattery or thematically knotty the moment.”

“If something about the now-problematic gender-bending killer of Camp Miasma reminds you of 1983’s Sleepaway Camp, Schoenbrun is not coy about the parallel,” notes Richard Lawson in the Hollywood Reporter. “If Billy, who wears a turban and caftan in a few scenes, calls to mind Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard, Schoenbrun directly assures you that that is not an accident. There is a hyper awareness to TSADACM, a determination to point out each of its Easter eggs and allusions, lest the viewer think Schoenbrun is trying to outsmart anyone. Schoenbrun is welcoming us into a collective pool of memory, though they have very particular, very personal things to discuss once we’re all in there.”

Teenage Sex and Death is “about what happens after gender dysphoria’s annihilation—a reflection on the sexual unease experienced once you’ve finally fit into your body but perhaps don’t know what to do with it,” writes IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio. “You can view the work as a visceral slasher send-up, a stylish academic exercise about gender expression and inquiry in horror iconography, or as just a plain old, super fun, future cult lesbian classic. Either way, it will take multiple viewings of this film to fully embed yourself inside it—body, brains, and all.”

Butterfly Jam

Kantemir Balagov’s first two features, Closeness (2017) and Beanpole (2019), were both set in Russia, and both premiered in the Un Certain Regard section, where they both won the FIPRESCI Prize. Beanpole also scored Balagov a UCR Award for Best Director, but after he spoke out against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2002, Balagov self-exiled to the States. Cowritten with Maria Stepnova, Butterfly Jam was originally set in the North Caucasian region of Russia, but he’s transplanted the story, embedding it in the Circassian community in Newark, New Jersey.

Brother and sister Azik (Barry Keoghan) and Zalya (Riley Keough) arrived in the States in their teens, and they now run a diner where Azik’s delens, fried flatbreads stuffed with potatoes and cheese, are a hit. To the Circassian customers, they taste like home. Azik’s sixteen-year-old son, Temir—often called Pyteh, meaning “little one”—is a promising wrestler who loves his dad but is beginning to doubt that any of Azik’s hare-brained schemes will ever pan out. Azik’s boisterous friend Marat (Harry Melling) pops over too often to tear up the place, infuriating Zalya, who has more than enough on her hands, especially with a baby on the way any day now.

“An agreeably shaggy, mood-driven portrait until a startling act of violence that recalibrates proceedings entirely—a comparable jolt to the one that stunningly stopped Beanpole in its tracks, though far later and more wayward in its fallout—Butterfly Jam is most rewarding at its most relaxed, when Balagov’s flair for movement, ambience and particularity of place is most generously on display, in tandem with Nickel Boys DP Jomo Fray’s propulsive camerawork,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge. “Even out of place and not entirely on form, Balagov remains a filmmaker of outsize, thrillingly declarative talent.”

“Drawing on his own cultural context and working with the Safdie brothers’ street-casting whiz Eleonore Hendricks, Balagov illuminates corners of Newark that food tourists can only guess at,” writes Mark Asch at Little White Lies. “Akdogan, a teenage Kazakh immigrant with no previous film experience, is a find, as is the professional mourner who weeps into a Bluetooth microphone connected to a karaoke speaker. Every time the film begins to seem fatally overdetermined, Balagov doubles down and produces a moment of absurd grace.”

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw finds Butterfly Jam to be “contrived, tonally uncertain, implausible, and frankly plain silly in its underpowered kind of magic-unrealism.” But for IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, it’s when the film “seems doomed to repeat the same dark fatalism of Balagov’s earlier work that it suddenly affirms itself as the bittersweet fable that it’s been all along. It’s only then, after shit has gone bad enough that the film seems like it’s about to steer into self-parody, that this seemingly unclassifiable whatsit assumes its final form as a half-formed (and highly bizarre) fairy tale about the magic that’s baked into even the most anguished of family histories.”

In Waves

Based on AJ Dungo’s 2019 graphic novel, In Waves is the story of AJ (voiced in the English version by Will Sharpe), an introverted skateboarder who falls hard for an outgoing surfer, Kristen (Stephanie Hsu). AJ is terrified of the water, but Kristen and her crew coax him out onto the waves, and not long after he masters them, a dreaded diagnosis upends both of their lives.

“A doomed love story, especially one based on real-life young people braving their own The Fault in Our Stars-style tale, is bound to shatter even the coldest of hearts,” writes Tomris Laffly in Variety. “Earnest, disarming, and unapologetically conventional, prolific graphic artist Phuong Mai Nguyen’s elegantly animated feature debut In Waves grasps this fact on such a philosophical level that it aims to do not a great deal more than wash over the viewer with its raw sentiments. Right out of the gate, you can see a soft-hearted tearjerker on approach like a rolling wave, one that will inevitably swell in size and break at the exact spot that you’ve been standing.”

But at Little White Lies, David Jenkins warns that “just when you think the film has reached absolute peak earnestness, it finds a way to sneak just a little bit more in there.” Eventually, In Waves “switches from earnest to maudlin, essentially rolling out like an animated Nicholas Sparks movie as the pair attempt to come to terms with the dismal hand they’ve been dealt.” For Marya E. Gates at IndieWire, the film is “an overly sanitized, almost idealized account of what it is like watching someone you love die from cancer.”

In the Hollywood Reporter, though, Sheri Linden calls In Waves “an understated marvel, its elegant hand-drawn simplicity bolstered by a strong emotional throughline . . . Water is the drama’s connective tissue. With remarkable fluency, In Waves captures its various textures, trajectories, and degrees of translucency, and, in a sweetly sly touch, the way it can spatter against the lens of a camera . . . This is a movie that effortlessly marries primal poetry to the quotidian.”

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Previewing Cannes 2026

David Hudson — Tue, 12 May 2026 09:59:00 +0000

Lukas Dhont’s Coward (2026)

Laura Dern, Ben Kingsley, Steve Coogan, Vincent Cassel, Rosie Perez, Sandra Bernhard, Kumail Nanjiani, Heather Graham, and Laura Smet are all expected to show up in Cannes over the coming days and weeks, but not to promote any of their movies. Instead, they have been cast in the fourth season of The White Lotus, which will turn on the rivalry between the teams behind two fictional films set to compete at the festival.

As Elsa Keslassy reports in Variety, the production of Mike White’s satirical skewering of Americans spending and lounging on the French Riviera will keep a low profile during the festival’s seventy-ninth edition, which opens today. A few red-carpet shots will be nabbed here and there, but the team will wait to truly take over the resort town after the festival wraps on May 23.

Previous seasons of The White Lotus have been set in Hawaii, Sicily, and Thailand, and while brainstorming up ideas for the new season, producer David Bernad and his team happened to have a stopover in France. “We went to dinner, and we had a really specific experience with a waiter and a maître d’, and it was the stereotype,” Bernad recalled. “It was a very funny moment . . . We literally canceled all the other places we were going. We were like, okay, we’re shooting here.”

The Guardian’s Xan Brooks has a fun piece about other productions that have used Cannes as a backdrop, including Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale (2002), a 2017 episode of Call My Agent with Juliette Binoche, and Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague (2025). “But the best films about Cannes generally throw bricks from the wings,” writes Brooks. “They’re the outsiders, the opportunists, the equivalent of those smash-and-grab robbers who stole $130 million worth of gems from the Carlton in 2013.” David Winters’s The Last Horror Film (1982) “remains the ultimate piece of guerrilla Cannes filmmaking, shot on the fly and framing the celebrity circus as a tawdry circle of hell.”

Competition

“Tame” is the word Natalia Keogan used to describe this year’s competition lineup when it was announced last month. “Sure,” she wrote for Filmmaker, “there are several globally renowned directors making anticipated returns—Paweł Pawlikowski, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Pedro Almodóvar, Asghar Farhadi, Cristian Mungiu, and Ira Sachs—but it all just feels so conventional.”

Montclair Film artistic director Tom Hall, on the other hand, points to four films: Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, which tracks Thomas and Erika Mann’s 1949 road trip through a Germany in ruins; Emmanuel Marre’s A Man of His Time, starring Swann Arlaud (Anatomy of a Fall) as a provincial inspector who aims to rescue France from the Vichy regime; László Nemes’s Moulin, which depicts a face-off between French Resistance leader Jean Moulin and Klaus Barbie, the head of the Gestapo in Lyon; and Lukas Dhont’s Coward, which is set in the trenches of the First World War. Hall finds that “it is impossible to ignore the argument this program is making about how the echoes of the past are reverberating like alarm bells today.”

Several publications have put together annotated lists of the films their contributors are looking forward to most. Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, starring Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto as a French director of a nursing home and a Japanese theater director, is on nearly all of those lists. We should note here that Amneisascope will present Hamaguchi’s rarely screened Touching the Skin of Eeriness (2013) at the Center for Theatre Research in New York on May 19.

Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas has already opened in Spain, and Variety’s John Hopewell reports that reviews have been “good to great.” For the Hollywood Reporter, Scott Roxborough profiles Catherine Deneuve: “At once liberated and conservative, radical and restrained (and, some would say, occasionally reactionary), Deneuve, more than any actress, more than any filmmaker, embodies French cinema in all its glorious, confounding contradiction. Deneuve is not just a legend of the Croisette. She’s the legend.” Deneuve lends her aura to Farhadi’s Parallel Tales, costarring with Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel, Virginie Efira, and Pierre Niney, and to Marie Kreutzer’s Gentle Monster, playing the mother of a concert pianist (Léa Seydoux).

Mungiu has told the Film Stage that his Fjord—starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as parents who move their family to the small Norwegian town where she grew up—is “about this huge polarization in the society of today. If you watch what is happening in a lot of countries, this difference between conservatives and progressives has gotten so big that people have started hating each other, literally, and hoping that the other side disappears.”

At AnOther Magazine, Alex Denney is excited about Hope, directed by Na Hong-jin, “whose last film, The Wailing, was a work of rug-pulling horror genius to rank with the best of Bong Joon Ho’s work.” And at Cineuropa, David Katz spotlights Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the directors of the “innovative TV series Veneno and La Mesías. Carrying great early buzz, their ambitious feature” The Black Ball is “inspired by an unfinished play by Federico García Lorca,” and “it follows the interconnected lives of three different queer men at three points in Spanish history: 1932, 1937, and 2017.”

David Canfield talks with Ira Sachs for the Hollywood Reporter about “his vividly sad but vibrant drama,” The Man I Love. Rami Malek stars as Jimmy George, a queer entertainer in mid-1980s New York. Jimmy knows he’s dying of AIDS, but he’s intent on mounting a new play. “I feel like I need to go into the world with this movie with as much of me as possible,” says Sachs, “and the fearlessness of Jimmy in the face of mortality is really beautiful. It came from a very deep place for me.”

The only other American film competing for the Palme d’Or is Paper Tiger. “It’s a sore point among many admirers of James Gray’s work that despite five previous competition entries, the writer-director has never won a major award in Cannes,” writes THR’s David Rooney. “Perhaps his sixth contender will change that. Miles Teller, Scarlett Johansson, and Adam Driver star in the gritty 1980s-set drama about two brothers chasing the American dream, who find their mutual loyalties tested as they navigate a dangerous world of corruption and violence, leading to the terrorization of their family by the Russian mob.”

Park Chan-wook is presiding over the jury this year, and it’s here that we should at least briefly mention a vital component of the festival, the Marché du Film, the market where packages are pitched and deals are sealed. THR has surveyed several of the most promising wares on the table, and among them is Park’s The Brigands of Rattlecreek, a western written by S. Craig Zahler (Bone Tomahawk) and starring Matthew McConaughey, Austin Butler, Pedro Pascal, and Tang Wei.

Un Certain Regard

Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section focuses on promising filmmakers early in their careers, and the section will open tomorrow with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the third feature from Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow). Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson star in the story of a reboot of a slasher franchise that has the director obsessing over the star of the original film. “This movie was very consciously designed to be fun,” Schoenbrun tells THR’s Canfield. “When I look around in our ‘post-woke, post-Biden’ era, I don’t see any other trans artists getting budgets, and that’s a fucking shame. I shouldn’t be the only one who’s making movies at this level of budget.”

One of the “fifteen films to watchlist” selected by Ella Kemp for Letterboxd is Club Kid. In his feature debut, Jordan Firstman writes, directs, and stars as “a washed-up New York party promoter whose world shifts on its axis when he must care for the son he never knew he had,” writes Kemp. “Few people understand how to capture modern-day youth and the heady joy and darkness of nightlife and internet living like Firstman.”

“Spitballing from afar,” writes the Los Angeles Times’ Amy Nicholson, “the Un Certain Regard title that’s seized my attention is Zachary Wigon’s Victorian Psycho, a gothic horror film starring Maika Monroe and Thomasin McKenzie. Wigon’s most recent film, Sanctuary, was a twisty thriller about sexual politics with Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott that deserved to make more of a splash. Maybe this will.”

Deadline has a teaser for Manuela Martelli’s The Meltdown, the story of Inés, a nine-year-old girl who befriends a fifteen-year-old German skier, Hanna, at a resort in the Andes in 1992. But then Hanna mysteriously disappears. Deadline also offers a clip from Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, in which a tragedy unites a young woman’s mother, younger sister, and boyfriend. And the Hollywood Reporter has two clips from Viesturs Kairišs’s Ulya, starring Kārlis Arnolds Avots as the famous Latvian basketball player Uļjana “Ulya” Semjonova.

Out of Competition

The Electric Kiss, a comedy set in 1920s Paris about a fraudster who falls in love with the widowed painter she’s been duping, will officially launch this year’s festival tonight. For the New York Times, Jillian Rayfield talks with director Pierre Salvadori and notes that The Electric Kiss will also open today in hundreds of French theaters, as every Opening Night film must. Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux tells Rayfield that he “issued the rule about fifteen years ago to give the films ‘strong commercial momentum,’ and because ‘it reinforces our core belief: Cinema is meant to be experienced in theaters.’”

Shot in Tokyo and Copenhagen, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell depicts a woman’s search for her father as an eerie mist engulfs a futuristic metropolis. Refn’s debut feature, Pusher (1996), has been newly restored, and he’s been talking about that as well as the trajectory of his career, giving distributor Neon its name, the future of cinema in the age of AI, and more with Nick Newman at IndieWire and Chris Shields at Screen Slate.

Midnight screenings include Colony, the latest zombie movie from Yeon Sang-ho, whose Train to Busan (2016) will be back in theaters in August, and Quentin Dupieux’s Full Phil, starring Woody Harrelson as a wealthy industrialist trying to reconnect with his daughter (Kristen Stewart) by taking her on a trip to Paris. Dupieux tells Elsa Keslassy that Full Phil is “like Emily in Paris in hell—a fever dream, a nightmare version of it.”

Cannes Premiere

Talking to Keslassy about his quarter of a century as artistic director, Thierry Frémaux does not say that the Cannes Premiere section was created in 2021 to accommodate the overflow of films selected for the competition that year as well as the previous year, when the festival was canceled due to the pandemic. “Alongside the competition or Un Certain Regard, I wanted to be able to showcase works that fall somewhere in between,” he says. “Cannes Premiere speaks for itself. It has nothing to do with ‘taking films away from the competition,’ as has been written.”

Introducing his interview with Kiyoshi Kurosawa for Letterboxd, Isaac Feldberg notes that the director has described The Samurai and the Prisoner as “a cross between a samurai film and a locked-room mystery.” Set in sixteenth-century Japan, the story “centers on a general of the warlord Oda Nobunaga who rebels against his master’s tyrannical methods; besieged within his castle and struggling to protect its people, he’s confronted with a series of mysterious crimes, ultimately entering into an uneasy alliance with a brilliant, dangerous military strategist he’d previously imprisoned in the castle dungeon.”

The program includes Volker Schlöndorff’s Visitation, a story set in a lakeside house near Berlin and spanning from the 1930s to the fall of the Wall in 1989. The cast features Lars Eidinger, Martina Gedeck, and, as an older soldier, David Bennent, who was eleven when he starred in Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum (1979).

Special Screenings

Among this year’s special screenings is Steven Soderbergh’s John Lennon: The Last Interview. “I think people, when they heard about this project and that I was using AI tech, jumped to the absolute worst conclusion, which is, ‘He’s going to try and bring John Lennon back to life,’” Soderbergh tells Deadline’s Matt Grobar. “And all I can say is, have we met? Do I look like somebody that would do that? So it’s a little hard to talk about also because I feel once you’ve seen the movie, you go, ‘Oh, of course.’” As always with Soderbergh, this is a rich and engaging interview and a highly recommended read.

Benicio Del Toro, the star of Soderbergh’s Che (2008), gave Christophe Dimitri Réveille an idea that eventually became Che Guevara: The Last Companions. It’s the story of three of the fifty or so men who followed Che on his quest to carry the flame of the Cuban revolution to South America. After Che was shot and killed in Bolivia in 1967, these three survivors trekked across 1,500 miles, chased by around four thousand Bolivian soldiers. “These are not men who are out for themselves,” Réveille tells Farah Nayeri in the New York Times. “They want to come out alive so that they can rearm and resume the struggle.”

Cannes Classics

This afternoon, Guillermo del Toro will be on hand for a twentieth-anniversary screening of Pan’s Labyrinth, which Kazuo Ishiguro has called “a great movie about how human beings need fantasy.” The appreciation is mutual. Del Toro is currently working on an adaptation of Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant that he calls a “fascinatingly difficult stop-motion movie for adults.” Earlier this month, del Toro was awarded a BFI Fellowship, and Mar Diestro-Dópido spoke with him for Sight and Sound about monsters and movies. Dozens of titles are name checked, but “Fellini is the third most formative filmmaker in my life with Hitchcock and Buñuel.”

When the Cannes Classics lineup was announced last week, the headline-grabber was the new restoration of Ken Russell’s original cut of The Devils (1971) assembled from the original camera negative. Drawing from a 1952 book by Aldous Huxley and a 1960 play by John Whiting, Russell tells the story of the downfall of a seventeenth-century French Catholic priest (Oliver Reed) brought about by a sexually repressed nun (Vanessa Redgrave). In an appreciation of Russell, Mark Kermode wrote last year that a Catholic theologian had “correctly described” The Devils as “depicting blasphemy” without “being blasphemous.”

Cannes Classics will present restorations of Akira Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata (1943), Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1945), Roger Corman’s Machine Gun Kelly (1958), Luchino Visconti’s The Innocent (1976), Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Iron (1981), Jerzy Skolimowski’s Moonlighting (1982), Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1993), and five films by Artavazd Pelechian. “Defined variously as a documentarian, a poetic film essayist, a quasi-experimental artist, and a montage neo-theorist, Pelechian’s global esteem, for a certain geek margin of cinephiles, may be the most outsized relative to output since Jean Vigo,” wrote Michael Atkinson for Sight and Sound in 2020. “Everywhere you go to read about him, you find Sergei Parajanov referring to him as ‘one of the few authentic geniuses in the world of cinema.’”

Also lined up are two new features—including Jean-Gabriel Périot’s A Life, a Manifesto, a documentary portrait of film critic Michèle Firk—and three new short films. One of them is Jia Zhang-Ke’s Torino Shadow. “In 2025, Carlo Chatrian reached out to me with the idea of making a short film in tribute to the art of film,” says Jia. “I immediately accepted his invitation, and I would like to use this short film to confess my love of cinema and the filmmakers I so deeply adore.”

Mark Cousins’s The Story of Documentary Film (The 1970s) is one of five nonfiction films premiering in the program. The other four are docs on Chris Marker, David Lean, Bruce Dern, and Vittorio De Sica, whose Two Women (1960) will also screen, newly restored. Sophia Loren’s lead performance won her a Best Actress award in Cannes—and an Oscar.

Last Wednesday, Cannes added a twenty-fifth-anniversary screening of Rob Cohen’s The Fast and the Furious. As it happens, Hua Hsu had reviewed Fast and Furious Franchising in the New Yorker the previous week, noting that author Dan Hassler-Forest “argues that the series is central to understanding the evolution of Hollywood over the past twenty years. At first, it was easy to dismiss these movies, built on ‘predominantly male characters entering their phallic automobiles in an endless series of epic dick-measuring contests.’ Yet Hassler-Forest found himself fascinated with the ‘surprisingly intricate mythology’ of the franchise, ‘all the more compelling for the fact that it had so obviously been made up as it went along.’”

Cinéma de la Plage

Free movies on the beach! The 2026 Cinéma de la Plage program opens tomorrow with a fortieth-anniversary screening of Tony Scott’s Top Gun. Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men, screening on Sunday night, turned fifty last month, prompting appreciations from Anthony Breznican (Esquire), Rory Doherty (Letterboxd), New York Times journalists, and in the Los Angeles Times, Ann Hornaday, who has been researching a book about the film’s making.

“I’ve done my share of genuflecting,” writes Hornaday, “most recently as chief film critic at the Washington Post, whose city room was as vivid and fully realized in the movie as Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman’s Carl Bernstein.” Hornaday touches on the absence of Post publisher Katharine Graham in the movie and recalls conversations with the late Redford, who “bemoaned the ‘downward slide of this thing,’ by which he meant the constellation of institutions All the President’s Men celebrates: not just journalism and a robust First Amendment but a Washington where investigators, prosecutors, judges, the Senate, and Congress did their jobs regardless of partisan loyalties, and a Hollywood where a studio as mainstream as Warner Bros. would agree to finance a tough-minded film about a contentious and still-raw period in recent history.”

Ken Loach, who has made a few tough-minded films himself, will be on the beach next Tuesday for a screening of a new restoration of Land and Freedom (1995), which follows an activist from Liverpool to Spain, where he joins the republican forces fighting Franco’s fascists in the mid-1930s. Loach is “perhaps the most accomplished and intelligent Marxist practitioner of social realism left in England,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader thirty years ago, and Land and Freedom is “historically convincing as well as gripping—Loach near his passionate best.”

Directors’ Fortnight, Critics’ Week, and ACID

Of the three sidebars to the main event, Directors’ Fortnight has become the one showcasing the latest films from directors with proven track records, while Critics’ Week and ACID focus on lesser known but auspicious talents. For Ella Kemp, one of the highlights at the Fortnight will likely be I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning. Clio Barnard teams up with screenwriter Edna Walsh (Hunger, Die My Love) “to tell the story of five childhood friends now entering their thirties,” writes Kemp. “The cast brings together many of the best young British and Irish actors working today, including Anthony Boyle, Lola Petticrew, Joe Cole, Jay Lycurgo, and Daryl McCormack. If anyone knows how to find the soft parts within the hard times that come as an inevitable part of life in Britain these days, it’s Barnard.”

Rebecca Mead’s recent profile of Radu Jude in the New Yorker makes only a brief mention of his very loose adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 novel The Diary of a Chambermaid, but this is an intriguing prospect. Ana Dumitrașcu (Dracula) plays a Romanian housekeeper working for a family in Bordeaux, and the cast also features Marie Rivière, Vincent Macaigne, and Mélanie Thierry.

The Film Stage has a trailer and poster for Bruno Dumont’s Red Rocks, featuring a cast of very young kids competing in a game that involves nerve-wracking leaps from high cliffs. Set in Lagos, Nigeria, Clarissa draws from Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway and is directed by twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri, who broke through in 2020 with Eyimofe (This Is My Desire). Other promising Fortnight titles include Lisandro Alonso’s Double Freedom, Kantemir Balagov’s Butterfly Jam, Dominga Sotomayor’s La perra, and another film from Quentin Dupieux (Full Phil), Vertiginous.

Critics’ Week is introducing us to the directors of the first and second features in its lineup via interviews linked from each of the films’ pages. And the filmmakers who have programmed this year’s ACID lineup tell us that this year’s selection “reflects both the alarming folly of our era and our ability to face it.”

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May Books

David Hudson — Mon, 11 May 2026 08:56:00 +0000

Marilyn Monroe

“There are more photographs of Marilyn Monroe reading than there are of her naked,” wrote Audrey Wollen in a 2019 essay for Affidavit. “The public seems permanently surprised at her literacy, even when we are making a show of not being surprised.” Wollen noted that in 1999, “Christie’s auctioned off nearly four hundred books from Marilyn’s personal library, a roster of classics ranging from Proust to Hemingway.”

An eager reader, Monroe wrote as well. Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters appeared in 2012, and having come across the collection ten years later, Eliza Gonzalez wrote in a piece for the Paris Review that Monroe’s “choice of line often seems naive, her images are sometimes clichéd, but in places something flares, that strangeness I associate with poetry that feels open rather than finished before it begins. It is the kind of poetry that risks failing to go anywhere at all but, when it succeeds, surprises the reader, and the poet, too.”

The Monroe centenary—she was born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926—is being celebrated with film series and exhibitions as well as a Sight and Sound cover story by Farran Smith Nehme. And of course, there are books. IndieWire has an excerpt from The Marilyn Monroe Century: From Norma Jeane to Icon―A Story in Photographs, a collection of never-before-seen shots by Bruno Bernard. The book has sparked a conversation between Lena Dunham and Alissa Bennett at Interview.

Marilyn Monroe 100: The Official Centenary Book is precisely what the title promises, a volume sanctioned by the estate, and in the new Bookforum, Moira Donegan calls it “a dense and vivid collection.” The New Yorker is running an edited excerpt from the introduction, in which Rachel Syme writes that Monroe knew “how to befriend the camera, even when she was lonely (and she was often very lonely). She was an uncanny beauty—the sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes, the bobbed bunny-tail nose, the accentuated beauty mark, the overdrawn smile—but that wasn’t what made people rush to send pounds of fan mail. Hollywood was full of beauties. What people fell for was the way Monroe knew how to be photographed; she had the rare ability to seem, at least in still photos, both completely spontaneous and incredibly deliberate.”

“From the vantage point of 2026,” writes Donegan, “the tragedy of Monroe’s life lies in its foreclosed possibilities. What if, while being an object of desire, she had been allowed to be anything else? What if, confronted with the force of her beauty, her audience had been strong enough to see her also as a mind—grieving, brilliant, needful, and struggling?”

From Hollywood to Hungary

“Hollywood is a terrifying place,” writes author Kelly Yang (The Take). “No position is forever, no parking spot ever really secure.” For the New York Times, Yang has written up an annotated list of eight of her favorite Hollywood thrillers, including Charles Yu’s “gut punch of a novel” Interior Chinatown; Crystal Smith Paul’s Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?, the story of a Black actor who passes for white and becomes a star; Isabel Kaplan’s “darkly funny” NSFW; and May Cobb’s The Hollywood Assistant: “Sex! Scandal! Murder!”

Putting together a list of the best crime novels of 2023 for the NYT, Sarah Weinman warned readers that Everybody Knows is “as bleak as Hollywood noir gets.” The author is Jordan Harper, a screenwriter whose latest novel is A Violent Masterpiece, which chases after a live-streamer roaming the seamier streets of LA, a street lawyer hired by a pedophile producer, and a woman who works for an underground private concierge company catering to the ultrarich. “A Violent Masterpiece reads like pure rage cooled into crystalline prose,” writes Weinman. “This is the noir novel for our times.”

“The world we exist in—the world we’ve made—is all death drive, all the time,” Harper tells the NYT’s Brooks Barnes. “It’s hard to make the villains in your book as villainous or stupid or disgusting as the villains in real life. So writing at an extremely high volume was quite intentional.” Harper has joined Guide for the Film Fanatic hosts Jason Bailey and Mike Hull to talk about the novel—and about John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian (1982).

In Esther Kinsky’s Seeing Further, a nameless narrator comes across an abandoned movie theater in a small town in southeastern Hungary. She buys it, and with the help of the former projectionist and one or two other locals, she reopens it. Too few come, and by the end of a single season, the theater is closed up again. “The theater is an ‘emblem for the great truth of cinema,’ and while it represents an age of film unlikely to return,” writes Walker Rutter-Bowman in the Nation, “Kinsky’s ultimate point is that even when hope isn’t practical, it’s the right thing to do.”

New York and London

On May 21, J. Hoberman will be in Berlin to talk about his latest book, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. He’ll also present three films: Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959), Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (1963), and Jonas Mekas’s The Brig (1964).

“Everything Is Now is a sweeping trove of obscure facts and colorful figures, plucked from hundreds of sources, tracing a countercultural groundswell that swiftly coalesced into mainstream myth,” writes Prudence Pfeiffer in the New York Review of Books. “The city had an embarrassment of broadside riches during the rough decade covered by this book, circa 1958 to 1971; the Village Voice, where Hoberman would later spend four decades as an influential film critic, and the East Village Other, which the Blondie musician Chris Stein once described as ‘fucking nuts,’ stand out . . . It’s a lot to move through—this is not a quick read—but often thrilling.”

“The clichés about spring in New York City are true,” writes Michael Lee Nirenberg for Time Out. “Even the most jaded, seen-it-all New Yorkers crack a smile in May.” Nirenberg offers a guide to ten movie locations in the city, and he’s also been talking about his new book, Cinematic Immunity: An Oral History of New York Filmmaking As Told by the Crews That Got the Shot, with Daniel Moran at the New Books Network and Nicolas Rapold, the host of The Last Thing I Saw.

“Not a tidy, polished monograph, but a radical collage of images, memories, and manifestos,” writes Wheeler Winston Dixon in Senses of Cinema, Duncan Reekie’s BOOM! The Exploding Cinema and the New London Underground “documents the chaotic, collective energy that gave rise to Exploding Cinema in the early 1990s and has sustained it for over three decades. It is an indispensable chronicle of a movement that stubbornly refused to play by the rules of either the commercial mainstream or the state-subsidized avant-garde.”

3 Women

The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman talks with Ellen Burstyn about Poetry Says It Better: Poems to Help You Wake Up, a collection that traces the story of her life through the poems she’s loved over the years. “I like what metaphors set off in your mind,” says Burstyn. “I like what poetry plays with.”

Lulu in Hollywood, the classic collection of eight autobiographical essays by Louise Brooks, has just been reissued and is now also available for the first time as an e-book. When it first appeared in 1982, James Wolcott, writing for Esquire, called Lulu a “tart, fleet, gossipy book, a whip-flicking display of wit and spite.” Brooks “emerges not as a white goddess wreathed in incense, but as a sassy companion, wisecracking, knowledgeable, completely free of cant and coy sentiment.”

Reading Lynn Hershman Leeson’s memoir Private I has prompted Joanne McNeil to watch or rewatch all of the artist’s work. “Each of her films and videos seems to develop from what she learned from the last,” writes McNeil for Filmmaker. “The quasi-documentary format she first explored in shorts from the 1970s and deepened in [Twists in the Cord, 1994], and Conceiving Ada [1997] builds once more in the disquietingly monumental Strange Culture (2007) . . . I can’t begin to express how inspiring it is to read Private I and to learn from Leeson how life as a woman artist can be a decades-long series of beginnings.”

A Few Auteurs

Writers on Film host John Bleasdale talks with Robert P. Kolker and David Wyatt about The Film Auteur: Angles of Vision, a history of the French theory championed by Andrew Sarris in the U.S. in the 1960s. The book also examines the work of forty-eight directors, and naturally, Jean-Luc Godard is one of them. In the new Senses of Cinema, Arta Barzanji writes that Godard’s Scénario notebooks, completed at the end of his life, “belong to a long history of Godard treating paper, print, and graphic work as parallel forms of cinema.”

Akira Kurosawa’s serialized memoir Something Like an Autobiography, first published in 1981, takes his story up to the making of Rashomon (1950). Appearing shortly after Kurosawa’s death in 1998, Long Take aimed to complete the picture by gathering the director’s writings and interviews and reflections from his daughter and colleagues. Writing in Senses of Cinema about the new translation from Anne McKnight, Tony McKibbin observes that “Kurosawa had no idea how to live in the twentieth century, yet was determined to get the lives of samurai warriors living in the sixteenth right.”

In an excerpt from A Century of Hitchcock: The Man, the Myths, the Legacy up at IndieWire, Tony Lee Moral tells the story of how Rod Taylor’s drinking almost got the production of The Birds (1963) shut down.

Theory and Practice

Montreal-based publisher caboose has begun rolling out free PDFs of its backlist electronic-only titles, beginning with scholar and critic Jacques Aumont’s Montage, a wide-ranging essay on the theory and practice of editing. Also freely accessible is Aumont’s essay “This Is Not a Theorist: Notes on André Bazin.” In the meantime, caboose is currently putting together Reading with Sergei Eisenstein, a collection structured along the lines of the 2023 book Reading with Jean-Luc Godard.

Celebrating the reissue of the late critic Greg Tate’s 1992 collection Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, Carl Wilson writes in Bookforum that “Tate machine-gunned gold nuggets across the page in what-the-fuck sentences with the cadences of rap—of which he was the first crucial theoretician—plus the cognitive dissonances of free jazz, a fat bassline of moral clarity, and a syncopated shuffle of cultural-political thought set in spin as if Stuart Hall and Roland Barthes were tag-teaming it behind the turntables.” Tate’s “spiritual cinematic siblings were many, such as Julie Dash and early Spike Lee (in the moment he thought She’s Gotta Have It represented a ‘coup of staggering proportions . . . a populist black post-structuralist’s dream’), but his nearest and dearest in the film fraternity was the cinematographer Arthur Jafa, whose video essays Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016) and The White Album (2018) are the nearest things to a Tate essay come to full audiovisual life.”

Reviewing Cinematic Encounters with Disaster: Realisms for the Anthropocene for Senses of Cinema, Scott Robinson finds that author Simon R. Troon’s “theoretical touchstones are a mixture of classical realist film theorists like André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer alongside post-structuralist thinkers like Donna Haraway and Deborah Bird Rose.” Troon “contends that cinema can bring us face-to-face not only with the human suffering of eco-catastrophe, but with eco-catastrophe itself, in its elemental forms.”

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Out of Your World

David Hudson — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:54:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Roberto Rossellini’s Blaise Pascal (1972)

Cannes has spent the week setting its jury and screening schedule and lining up its Classics and Cinéma de la Plage programs. We’ll be previewing the seventy-ninth edition, which opens on Tuesday and runs through May 23, early next week. Locarno, in the meantime, has announced that it will present the Pardo d’Onore, its Honorary Golden Leopard, to Darren Aronofsky.

In Berlin, the Arsenal Film Institute—best known to locals for its year-round screenings and to international visitors for running the Forum and Forum Expanded programs during the Berlinale—has reopened at its new location at the silent green Kulturquartier. From today through May 26, the Arsenal will present the city’s first Valerio Zurlini retrospective.

Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair, the series that launched in Los Angeles in 2021 with a gutsy idea and a modest lineup, has expanded to become a global event, rolling out this summer in seventy-three cities. The American Cinematheque has unveiled the schedule for the fifth LA edition, which will open on May 31 with the late Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994) and run through June 7. Special guests will include Isabelle Huppert, Ari Aster, Denis Villeneuve, Werner Herzog, Gregg Araki, Theresa Russell, Louise Weard, and Vera Drew.

On Wednesday, the great poster designer Midnight Marauder passed along the shocking and terrible news that his immensely talented friend and collaborator, Tony Stella, had passed away. All across social media, fans and admirers of Stella’s work—including filmmakers such as Kleber Mendonça Filho and institutions like Japan Society—immediately began sharing their favorite posters, many of them harking back to the era of gloriously hand-painted illustration and all of them shot through with a vibrant immediacy.

“Losing someone so vital to the film world, and so revered by so many of us,” writes Chad Perman at Bright Wall/Dark Room, “leaves a deep and lonely space behind where so much art, passion, and joy used to be.”

This week’s highlights:

On Monday, Film Comment relaunched as a quarterly digital magazine, and the first issue offers Blair McClendon’s cover story on Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters, Erika Balsom’s essay on Lucrecia Martel, Amy Taubin’s profile of Michaela Coel, Jonathan Rosenbaum’s reflections on writing for the magazine in the 1970s, and an introduction to FC’s latest incarnation from editors Devika Girish, Clinton Krute, and Michael Blair. The bright new site features a critics’ grid and notes on forthcoming articles, and subscribers have access to the entirety of every issue FC has published since its founding in 1962.

It’s been seventeen years since Richard Kelly directed his last feature, The Box, and like many, Cory Atad has been wondering what he’s been up to. So for GQ, he called Kelly up last month, and the two of them spoke first about Southland Tales, which critics dumped on when it premiered in Cannes twenty years ago. “A cult has steadily grown around the film,” writes Atad, “and while it hasn’t yet achieved the kind of classic status Donnie Darko quickly accrued, its tribe of evangelists is growing. Its vision of a world consumed by capitalism, self-branding, corporate war-making, and potential apocalypse remain depressingly resonant.” Turns out, Kelly has been writing. A lot. “I’m just sitting on an arsenal of screenplays that, once the first one goes into production, I’m pretty confident I’m just going to be making a whole lot of movies back-to-back,” he says. Also, “I have a gigantic novel that I’ve written. It’s gonna be published later this year.”

Lynne Ramsay’s filmography isn’t quite as sparse as Kelly’s. She’s made five features since her debut short film, Small Deaths (1996), and now, as Mark Smith notes in his profile in the latest issue of the Gentlewoman, she’s got five more projects she’s working on when she isn’t painting, shooting photos, writing songs, picking up her daughter from school, or meditating. And “curiously,” writes Smith, “the director who has given us child drownings, school shootings, and hammer-wielding hit men would like to make ‘the ultimate escapist film,’ as an antidote to our troubled times. ‘Because that’s what I loved as a child—something that just brought you out of your world. There is value to that, and I never thought I’d say that.”

Braddock, Pennsylvania, a boom town during the heyday of the American steel industry, boasted a population of more than twenty thousand in 1920. One hundred years later, that number had fallen to just over 1700. Filmmaker Tony Buba grew up in Braddock and began making a series of films about his home town in the 1970s. “Tony quickly became one of my favorite living American filmmakers,” writes Steve Macfarlane, who profiled Buba a few years ago for Topic. “If you only watch one of his masterpieces, pick Sweet Sal, his 1979 portrait of neighborhood hustler Sal Carulli. If you watch another, make it Tony’s breakout feature, Lightning over Braddock: A Rust Bowl Fantasy (1988), a rib-bruisingly hilarious meditation on the eponymous town’s decline, and a ruthless interrogation of Tony’s mixed feelings over becoming the preeminent documentarian of said decline.” Buba will be in New York on May 15 and 19 when Spectacle screens Lightning over Braddock.

On the 120th anniversary of the birth of Roberto Rossellini, Sight and Sound is republishing Philip Strick’s 1976 interview. Rossellini was in London to present Year One (1974) and The Messiah (1975), neither of which—at the time, at least—seemed to have won much appreciation for the director’s late all-talk, no-action style. But Rossellini was convinced that the educational films he was making for television were having the desired effect. Blaise Pascal (1972), for example, had Italians reading the works of the philosopher and mathematician. “At the point in any Rossellini film when the individual must weigh his own wishes against the needs of his fellow men, individualism always loses,” observes Strick. “Pietro Missirilli goes to the guillotine, General della Rovere steps before a firing squad, Garibaldi hands Italy over to Victor Emmanuel, Socrates drinks hemlock, Alcide de Gasperi catches a train.”

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António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro, Restored

David Hudson — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:08:00 +0000

António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s Ana (1982)

In her program notes for António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro, Restored, the TIFF Cinematheque series opening today and running through May 17, Andréa Picard writes that while their work may not be as well known as Manoel de Oliveira’s, “Reis and Cordeiro’s imprint upon successive generations of Portuguese filmmakers is arguably just as influential, with a mere four films made together. So many of the hallmarks of contemporary Portuguese cinema—whether its focus on its agrarian history, national myths, temporal palimpsests, or visionary style—can be traced back to Reis and Cordeiro’s loose trilogy shot in the remote northeastern Trás-os-Montes region of Portugal, where they elaborated a new cinematographic language.”

Toronto’s presentation of the restorations carried out by the Cinemateca Portuguesa launches Cinema Guild’s rollout of the retrospective across North America throughout the coming months. On Saturday, critic Saffron Maeve will introduce TIFF’s screening of Oliveira’s Rite of Spring (1963), which is essentially a restaging of a reenactment. Oliveira had been working on a documentary when he came across a performance of the passion play depicting the crucifixion of Christ that the residents of the Portuguese village of Curalha put on each year. Oliveira later returned to Curalha with assistant directors Reis and Paulo Rocha to have the villagers, playing themselves, dramatize the production.

Rocha’s first feature, The Green Years, was also completed in 1963, and he asked Reis to collaborate with him on the screenplay for his follow-up, Change of Life (1966), which screens on Sunday. By this point, Reis was a poet of considerable renown, and as Cordeiro recalled in a 1997 interview, when she met Reis in the mid-1960s, he “had already written the so-called neorealist Poemas quotidianos [Daily Poems, 1957], about workers, dockers, rural women, and housewives.” In Change of Life, a soldier returns to the fishing village where he grew up, and as Ela Bittencourt writes for Notebook, the characters’ lines, written by Reis, “have a fiery back-and-forth energy to them, often leaping over the music.”

Cordeiro, a psychiatrist, was working in a sanatorium in Lisbon when she came across a drawing that would lead to the first film she would make with Reis. It should be emphasized that, as Cordeiro noted in that 1997 interview, “We were both, each of us, responsible for one hundred percent of each film.” The exception is Jaime (1974), a half-hour study of the art left behind by a patient, Jaime Fernandes. Cordeiro requested that she not be given a codirecting credit because, even though she instigated the project and contributed to its production, she was still learning from Reis, who had already made a few short documentaries. Pedro Costa has called Jaime “a surprising and quite surrealist film that stands apart from his usual work. A beautiful artist’s portrait conceived in a very modern manner, like a collage.”

From 1977 until his death in 1991, Reis taught at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema in Lisbon, and Costa—whose Ossos (1997) will screen in Toronto on May 15 and 17—was one of his first students. “He was somewhere between a peasant and a guy in a rock band,” Costa tells Edward McCarry in a terrific interview for Metrograph’s Journal. “He was not the usual teacher that I knew from my studies.” Trás-os-Montes (1976), the first of three features credited to both Reis and Cordeiro, “was the first Portuguese film that gave me some clues,” says Costa. “Before then, I couldn’t figure out how to make films and shoot personal things, but Trás-os-Montes opened a lot of doors and windows, in every sense.”

When McCarry and Graham Carter presented Trás-os-Montes at Metrograph, they called the film “an intensive labor of recollection, an epic of a land and a way of life on the edge of oblivion. In 1974, while traveling through villages in this isolated region, Reis and Cordeiro recruited a cast of inhabitants old and young to materialize their histories, legends, dreams, and nightmares for the camera. The rebelliousness of the peasants, their everyday existence far from the laws of church and state, their closeness to ancient things, to trees and rocks—these encounters informed the dialectical approach of the film, where fiction and reality, past and future swell in an immediate present.”

“As a poet,” writes Jonathan Mackris for Screen Slate, “Reis spent the ’50s traveling through Portugal, refining the style of his writing to match the terse regional dialects of those he lived with. This same method informed [Reis and Cordeiro’s] filmmaking, highly collaborative and completed across several years, working in off-hours and out of season. ‘We never filmed anyone without becoming their comrade or friend first,’ they told Cahiers du cinéma when asked about their approach in Trás-os-Montes.”

Reis and Cordeiro returned to the region to shoot Ana (1982), which centers on a serene matriarch played by Cordeiro’s mother, Ana Maria Martins Guerra. “Ripe with floating symbols of the ancient and modern world,” wrote Haden Guest when the Harvard Film Archive presented the series The School of Reis in 2012, “Ana is a meditation on history and human civilization and the infinitesimally small but profound role of the individual within the larger movement of longue durée. The film’s minimal and Rilke-inspired dialogue reveals Reis and Cordeiro’s interest in a deeper, nonverbal mode of communication, not only between generations but also between the land and those passing through it.”

Rosa de Areia (1989), Reis and Cordeiro’s final feature, is also their most abstractly essayistic, drawing on texts from a diverse array of writers including Franz Kafka, Michel de Montaigne, and Carl Sagan. The Theater of the Matters is running a never-before-published conversation about the film with its makers conducted by João Pedro Rodrigues and Amândio Coroado in 1989. “The film’s construction is above all elliptical,” said Reis. “There are scenes which, paradoxically, are constructed from autonomous shots. For anyone with a traditional concept of scenes as spatial, thematic units, etc., this will raise many problems of analysis.”

“People are unaccustomed to cinema that requires a bit more effort to watch,” added Cordeiro. “Either they’re used to music videos—what I call the ‘universal sauce’ system—or to the traditional narrative thread where they can easily project themselves onto one of the characters. It’s a psychological law; even we function that way.” Reis: “People have almost no senses left; they mainly have a taste for food, and even that has gone bad . . .” Cordeiro: “I’m an optimist, António is a pessimist. People are intact; they just don’t know how to use the potential they have within them.”

“The mystery when it comes to Reis and Cordeiro,” wrote Dennis Lim in an outstanding piece for Artforum in 2012, “is how works of such apparent austerity can achieve such complex effects—[Jean] Rouch even credited them with inventing ‘a new cinematographic language.’ No less than with Robert Bresson or Straub-Huillet, filmmakers who prompt similar questions, the guiding principle is distillation as revelation, an insistence on finding what Cordeiro, in an interview with Cahiers du cinéma, termed ‘literal images, images of an immediate and adequate vision.’”

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