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Beatrice Gibson’s At Night

David Hudson — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 07:36:00 +0000

Beatrice Gibson’s At Night (2026)

Beatrice Gibson may have won a Best Emerging Director Award when her first feature, At Night, premiered in Locarno this summer, but for nearly twenty years, her short films have been drawing accolades at festivals such as the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, the Viennale, and the Courtisane Film Festival. Her work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and at Centre Pompidou in Paris. And she’s won the Tiger Award for Short Film in Rotterdam twice—for Agatha (2012) and The Tiger’s Mind (2013).

“Gibson’s short films have partaken of a promising new trend in experimental cinema, one which I think has everything to do with the nonsectarian ways that people come to cinema these days,” writes Michael Sicinski. “The avant-garde was long considered another country, even a ghetto, that had little in common with narrative filmmaking. But today we very much live in a One Cinema universe, where artists see nothing unnatural or transgressive about drawing equally from experimental and ‘commercial’ filmmaking. Folks like Ross Meckfessel, Zachary Epcar, and Basma Alsharif pull from the ambiance and performance elements of art cinema (Lynch, Cronenberg, Godard, Fassbinder) while also foregrounding the medium’s formal potentials and material elements. Gibson’s work is situated in this zone, something best exemplified by her 2018 film I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead, which concludes with a joyous reimagining of the final scene of Claire Denis’s Beau travail.”

Screening in New York on Sunday, in London on Sunday and Tuesday, and at AFI Fest in Los Angeles on October 25, At Night is “a pensive picture set on a hypnotic Parisian night whose dreaminess belies the urgency of the film’s curiosity,” writes Robert Daniels at RogerEbert.com. Corey Atad finds that the film’s “directness and its lyricism recalls everything from Akerman’s News from Home, to the films of Pedro Costa, to Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. A sequence at a concert by an accordion-playing queer artist is one of the best things I’ve seen this year.” At Night’s run time is just eighty-seven minutes, “but I could have watched it for hours.”

Gibson herself appears as B, a British filmmaker who has arrived in Paris to scout locations for a film that hasn’t yet taken shape. “It is easy to make good images,” says B as she records something of a cross between a voicemail and a note to herself. “And the film, wonderfully shot by Ben Rivers, is beautiful,” writes Sam Bodrojan for IndieWire. “The nocturnal photography spills out from dive bars into back-alleys, transforms nondescript storefronts into a magic garden of forgotten infrastructure.”

At Night wanders along Metro tracks, bus lines, and walkways, alighting here and there on the women it finds. Six of them gather in a bar after a reading, and Gibson says that the ten-minute sequence was “inspired by a scene in Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983) featuring her friends—artists and sex workers—in a bar talking. The bar scene in my own film is so fascinating to me, so prismatic, it manages to hold many different points of view with relative tenderness, at the same time as maintaining a kind of tension.”

Artist Pauline Curnier Jardin, poet Sophie Robinson, producer Denna Cartamkhoob, psychotherapist Katia Belo Cardoso, and filmmakers Amy Gwatkin and Laida Lertxundi are more or less playing themselves, and so, too, is Diocouda Diaoune, whose Didi has not only previously collaborated with B on other films but also worked for B as her son’s nanny. B and Didi aren’t exactly estranged, but they’re getting there, and in the back of a convenience store, they try to talk it out. A definitive resolution, though, turns out to be elusive.

“It’s Gibson’s refusal to pin her film down that makes At Night so refreshing, and one of the few films from this decade that tackles ideas around privilege, class, and identity with the complexity they deserve,” writes C. J. Prince. “I didn’t realize the extent to which race and class would play out,” Gibson tells Sophia Satchell-Baeza in an interview for the BFI. “I come from a place of privilege and several other characters don’t. There was a critical tension in that, so I wrote my character in as a way to explore it.” Liyo Gong is “an amazing editor. I can honestly say that she coauthored this film . . . My lonely, wandering, sad self was constructed in the edit.”

Structurally, At Night draws on what Gibson tells Jordan Cronk in Filmmaker are “two key sources: the poet Alice Notley’s cult epic poem The Descent of Alette, in which a woman ventures down toward the core of the earth via an oneiric series of subways and caves, and Kathy Acker’s novel Don Quixote, whose gender-flipped protagonist is a knight who rides around on an epic quest following an abortion.”

Talking with George MacBeth at e-flux, Gibson says that “the central question of the film is quite simple to my mind: What is the best way to be, to exist, inside the particular historical moment that we find ourselves? How should we be in relation to it? How should I be in relation to it and in relation to others? . . . I think we live in fucking complex times, and I wanted to make a complex film.”

“The opening quote from Alice Notley (‘I am a tone of voice, warming, shifting, pausing, changing, including, asserting, exulting, including, turning and including’) is as much a manifesto for the late poet’s craft as it is for the director’s,” writes Leonardo Goi for Filmmaker. “Like Notley, who viewed poetry as a permeable realm into which different voices could coalesce, Gibson treats cinema as a polyphonic world, a medium that brings together not just disparate art forms, but disparate people: all her films are odes to the sanctity of communal work and friendship.”

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Fests and Events

David Hudson — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 13:14:00 +0000

Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton in Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984)

This week is packed. The New York Film Festival is on through Monday, Yorgos Lanthimos is presenting a selection of favorites at the Athens International Film Festival through Sunday, and the Busan International Film Festival has just opened with the world premiere of Kim Jong-kwan’s The Table: Day and Night. It’s an anthology film tracking the stories of four couples who cross paths at a café in Seoul as summer turns to fall.

Busan’s thirty-first edition marks its first year as an “A-list festival,” a classification granted by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF) to just sixteen other top-tier festivals, including Cannes, Venice, Berlin, and Sundance. Zhang Yimou is presiding over the competition jury, Michelle Yeoh will receive the Asian Filmmaker of the Year Award, and other special guests this year will include Isabelle Huppert, Lee Chang-dong, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Lav Diaz, and Tsai Ming-liang.

“If you are anything like me,” writes Pamela Hutchinson, “then you may well consider the two-hour flight to Italy for the Pordenone Silent Film Festival at least partially justified by the chance to see four minutes of a lost F. W. Murnau film. Right or wrong, it’s how we’re made. And yes, today I did get to see two separate fragments of Murnau’s Satanas (1920). Well, they say the devil has all the best films.”

Pordenone’s forty-fifth edition is on through Saturday, and in her daily dispatches to Silent London, Hutchinson likes to include an “Intertitle of the Day.” For example: “Wretched woman! Don’t you know your corpse is lying in one of the rooms in this house?” That one’s from Augusto Genina’s dramedy La maschera e il volte (1919).

Wednesday

Tomorrow sees the opening of seventieth BFI London Film Festival with Simon Stone’s Elsinore, and the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw and contributors to Sight and Sound offer guides to the highlights. The fifty-third edition of Film Fest Gent will open with Lukas Dhont’s Coward. In her Little White Lies review, Hannah Strong notes that Coward “continues the Belgian filmmaker’s exploration of queer belonging as first expressed in Girl and Close, but establishes a sense of growing ambition and skill, here channeled into a layered wartime drama.”

Of the more than a hundred features screening in Ghent, Sabzian has selected ten to spotlight as well as one exhibition, Sentiments, Signes, Passions, conceived by Fabrice Aragno and focusing on Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Book (2018). Film Fest Gent has invited Mariano Llinás and Agustín Mendilaharzu to take part in a symposium on El Pampero Cine, the collective they cofounded more than twenty years ago with Laura Citarella and Alejo Moguillansky. And within the Classics program, attendees will find an Eric Rohmer retrospective.

Robert Beavers will be in Toronto tomorrow evening to present three of his films, The Sparrow Dream (2022), The Hedge Theater (1986–1990/2002), and The Ground (1993–2001). “Beavers has created one of the most distinctive oeuvres in contemporary cinema, celebrated for its meticulous 16 mm and 35 mm formal lyricism,” writes TIFF Wavelengths programmer Andréa Picard. In The Sparrow Dream, Beavers revisits places he’s lived, and throughout, notes Picard, “pages of an illustrated copy of The Odyssey are turned, and a meditation on memory is awakened to a resplendent state of being in time.”

In Berlin, Arsenal will launch a twenty-film series, Just Revolutionary: The Films of the Ninjin Club, celebrating the production company founded in 1954 by Ineko Arima, Keiko Kishi, and Yoshiko Kuga and featuring work by Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Masaki Kobayashi. “Within the rigid, strictly hierarchical, patriarchal Japanese studio system of the 1950s and 1960s, which expected actresses to embody a traditional image of the women and largely denied them positions behind the camera,” writes Milena Gregor, Ninjin Club was “entirely unprecedented both politically and socially.”

The Cinémathèque française’s Jean-Paul Belmondo retrospective will run parallel to the exhibition Belmondo, le Magnifique, on view from tomorrow through January 31. The Cinémathèque is also celebrating its ninetieth anniversary, offering Parisians 180 films screening through November 29. General Director Frédéric Bonnaud explains that the entire staff was consulted to come up with a list restricted to two films per year of the Cinémathèque’s existence—and only one film per director would be allowed. “Ultimately,” writes Bonnaud, “what began as a simple diversion has become—modestly yet confidently—an ideal introduction to a history of cinema.”

Thursday

The Independent Film Festival Boston’s Fall Focus program is on from Thursday through Tuesday, and after a break, it will return on October 29 to run through November 4. Suggesting that “you won't find a better preview of the coming wave of end-of-year specialties and critical favorites,” Ty Burr recommends seven features he’s seen and flags five more he’s looking forward to catching. And that’s out of a total of twenty-seven.

“The sad reality is that a lot of these movies will not get a proper local release,” IFFBoston executive director Brian Tamm tells Sean Burns at WBUR. “You know, the last Mike Leigh film only played at the AMC Boston Common. There’s a real chance that for some of these films, the only way you’re going to see them in an art-house theater projected by people who care if they look and sound good is at this festival. So I feel like we’ve got an obligation to fit in as many movies as we can.”

The Chicago Film Society will screen a 35 mm print of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) at the Music Box Theatre. Megan Abbott notes that while the film was met with “aggressive, outraged” reviews when it was released, it is now “considered a masterpiece, a virtuoso achievement of craft and cunning that has profoundly influenced generations of directors (from Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma to Michael Haneke and Kathryn Bigelow) and helped inspire an entire subgenre of ‘slasher’ movies centered on a psychopathic killer and a cast of beautiful women who fall under his knife, axe, machete.”

Editor Claire Atherton is best known for her thirty-year collaboration with Chantal Akerman, and recently, she’s been working with Éric Baudelaire, Wang Bing, Bani Khoshnoudi, and others. Atherton will be in New York to introduce and discuss her work for the first several days of the series that the Museum of Modern Art will present through October 23. “When I’m asked about my approach to editing, I always insist on the fact that you need to discover while doing,” Atherton said a few years ago. “It’s important to know where you’re starting from, but you have to take the risk of not knowing where you’re going.”

Friday

Alex Cox will be spending the weekend in Los Angeles as the American Cinematheque screens six of his features, including his first, Repo Man (1984), whose “outlandishness isn’t forced; it’s forceful,” writes Sam McPheeters. “Sid & Nancy (1986) continued the punk trajectory in a (mostly) dramatic direction. Straight to Hell (1987) inverted this format by using punks, including members of the Circle Jerks and the Clash, as actors, drawing out the gloopy spaghetti-western violence of Repo Man’s main firefight. Walker, shot in the summer of 1987, is Cox’s most overtly political work, a pointed satire that, along with such other films of its time as Missing, Romero, and Salvador, dared to depict the Grand Guignol of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.”

Facets will present The Revolution Is My Boyfriend: The Films of Bruce LaBruce from Friday through Sunday, and in the Chicago Reader, Annette LePique talks with senior programmer Raphael José Martinez and a few of the filmmakers and artists who will be conducting Q&As with LaBruce, including Joe Swanberg, Henry Hanson, Susanne Sachsse, and Frédéric Moffet. “Once again, there is plenty to fight for and against, and woke queers are starting to actually wake up!” LaBruce tells LePique. Those nowhere near Chicago may want to tune into our new Criterion Channel program Bruce LaBruce: Reluctant Pornographer.

The Weekend

The eighteenth Lumière Festival, founded in Lyon and overseen by Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux, opens Saturday to run through October 18. This year’s Lumière Award will be presented to Joel and Ethan Coen, and other special guests will include Todd Haynes, Abel Ferrara, Tsui Hark, Robert Eggers, Zhang Ziyi, Agnès Jaoui, Nadine Labaki, and Bérénice Béjo. Retrospectives will focus on Ettore Scola, Norman Jewison, Gustav Machete, women filmmakers, and Greek cinema.

Also on Saturday, New York’s Metrograph and Razom for Ukraine will launch Oleksandr Dovzhenko: Earth and Empire in the run-up to this year’s Ukrainian Cultural Festival (October 18 through November 6). Jonathan Rosenbaum has called Dovzhenko “a pagan mystic whose masterful films look as wildly experimental, as dreamlike, as hysterically funny, as fiercely tragic, and as beautiful today as they did a century ago.” The series features such classics as Arsenal (1929) and Earth (1930) screening from 35 mm prints and live accompaniment to the silent films.

“Dovzhenko had the strange fate to extend his vocation beyond the grave, employed in this clandestine mission by his surviving collaborator, codirector, and wife Yuliya Solntseva,” writes Alena Lodkina for Metrograph’s Journal. “Solntseva directed five features based on the scripts, diaries, memoirs, and notes that Dovzhenko left behind, two of which—Poem of the Sea (1958) and The Enchanted Desna (1964)—will show as part of Dovzhenko’s retrospective.”

On Sunday, Mezzanine will present a rare 35 mm screening of the theatrical version of Peter Watkins’s Edvard Munch (1976) at Brain Dead Studios in Los Angeles. Writing for Not Coming to a Theater Near You in 2005, Leo Goldsmith called Edvard Munch “a rich and intensely personal film, representing a widening breadth of subjects, concerns, languages, and milieux in [Watkins’s] filmmaking.”

Let’s wrap with two events in London. Fireflies Press cofounder Giovanni Marchini Camia will be at the Close-Up Film Centre on Saturday to introduce a screening of Morvern Callar (2002) and to launch Anwen Crawford’s new book on Lynne Ramsay’s second feature. And on Sunday, Sonic Cinema, the series programmed by Oliver Dickens, will present a rare screening of Tony Conrad’s audiovisual experiment Loose Connection (1973/2011) preceded by a live solo performance by violinist Billy Steiger.

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Elsinore and The Man I Love

David Hudson — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:04:00 +0000

Andrew Scott in Simon Stone’s Elsinore (2026)

Opening his appreciative review of Simon Stone’s Elsinore in the Guardian, Benjamin Lee reminds us that for a not-so-brief period of time around thirty years ago, the fates of gay characters in movies were determined almost exclusively by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993) “showed a wider audience a mostly clean and palatable version of the crisis, and won Oscars for doing so,” writes Lee, “and for a time, when gay men weren’t acting as sassy friends to women in need, they were coughing up blood in lonely hospital beds.”

Lee notes that “the inevitable and understandable pushback, allowing for a wider breadth of stories, brought us more ‘queer joy’ and ‘chosen family,’ but it also allowed some to forget just what a time of unimaginable annihilation it was . . . It’s right for us to focus on the increasingly restrictive terrors of the now and hope for a brighter, gayer world in the future, but it’s also vital to remember the nightmares of the past and to honor those who fought their way through it.”

In part, this is what Elsinore sets out to do, and the same might be said of Ira Sachs’s The Man I Love. Both films are set in the late 1980s and in lively and historically vital capitals of the theater world—Elsinore in London, The Man I Love in New York—and both end as they must. Elsinore premiered to raves at Telluride and will open the seventieth BFI London Film Festival on Wednesday, and while The Man I Love was greeted with mixed reviews in Cannes, Sachs’s film seems to be finding and connecting with its audience as it screens this week at the New York Film Festival.

Working for the first time as a producer, Andrew Scott stars in Elsinore as Ian Charleson, the real-life costar of Chariots of Fire (1981) and Gandhi (1982), back-to-back winners of Oscars for Best Picture. Charleson’s movie career didn’t take off as expected, though, and when Daniel Day-Lewis abruptly walked off the stage during a National Theatre production of Hamlet in 1989, Charleson asked director Richard Eyre (played in Elsinore by Johnny Flynn) to allow him to take over.

Eyre, an old friend who was aware of Charleson’s diagnosis, was reluctant at first, but then relented, and Charleson delivered a Hamlet for the ages. When Ian McKellen won the 1989 Evening Standard Award for Best Actor, he handed his statuette to Charleson, saying he’d just seen “the perfect Hamlet” the night before. Charleson died less than two months later.

“Hamlet is a poem of death,” Eyre has written. “It charts one of the great human rites of passage—from immaturity to accommodation with death. Hamlet grows up, in effect, to grow dead.” Scott himself took on the role in 2017, delivering a widely praised performance running nearly four hours about 150 times. “You’ve got 1,500 lines,” Scott tells IndieWire’s Anne Thompson. “He’s got the most actual lines to learn in any Shakespeare character, I think, apart from Iago, and then you’re the Prince, and you’re the grieving son, and you’re the lover. And then in the third act, you have to do a sword fight. I mean, that’s fucking mental. It’s crazy.”

Andrew Haigh, who directed Scott in All of Us Strangers (2023), tells the Guardian’s Catherine Shoard that Scott’s turn as Charleson is “simply astonishing. I struggle to think of a better performance. Andrew embodies the character so completely, it feels as if we are watching lived experience. But make no mistake, this is a performance of incredible skill. Andrew is completely fearless in the role.”

Stone, probably best known among moviegoers for The Dig (2021), started out as an actor himself before becoming a prominent stage director in Australia and London. He tells David Canfield in the Hollywood Reporter that sports movies such as Rocky and The Karate Kid are among the unlikely inspirations for the narrative flow of Elsinore, which was written by Stephen Beresford (Pride). “I studied a lot of ’70s, ’80s, ’90s Hollywood dramas,” says Stone. “Seeing how they were structured, you get that sense of cathartic joy at the end of a struggle.”

So far, C. J. Prince, writing for the Film Stage, is one of the few critics to pan Elsinore. “While it’s clear he gives it his all,” writes Prince, “the shoddy construction of Elsinore as a series of poorly edited Andrew Scott sizzle reels makes it impossible to tell how good a performance he gives. This is prime overwrought awards bait, a star vehicle with Stone drunk at the wheel, crashing over and over again to wring out some precious tears from viewers.”

But for the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, Scott’s “searing dual performance” as Ian Charleson and as Charleson’s Hamlet “makes Simon Stone’s film an emotional powerhouse even if it doesn’t avoid inspirational cliché.” Further, “one of the most fascinating insights into queer history comes with the appearances of iconoclastic director Derek Jarman (David Dawson), a friend for whom Charleson had played a punk angel in 1978’s Jubilee,” notes Rooney. “For anyone who recalls Jarman’s seismic influence on queer cinema with uncompromising films like Sebastiane, The Angelic Conversation, Caravaggio, and Edward II, hearing the director say, ‘Ian, remember me,’ with the knowledge that any encounter could be their last cuts deep.”

“For my part,” writes Vulture’s Alison Willmore, “the most wrenching scene in the movie is one in which Ian sits up in bed at the clinic after having been hospitalized, preparing to tell his parents, played by Peter Mullan and Georgie Glen, that he is gay and dying of AIDS. Scott’s face, in this shot, is a whole novel, disintegrating into tears before being shored up again, eventually rearranged into something resembling a welcoming smile that teeters on the edge of collapse. Ian is terrified of the conversation that’s about to happen, of having to admit to lying, of telling his mother and father that they’re due to outlive him. But he’s also an actor, and he works to put together the expression he wants to greet his parents with like he’s creating a masterpiece out of shattered glass.”

The Man I Love, too, “is about a man who refuses to let the fact that he’s dying stop him from making art and about a thriving late-’80s queer scene that similarly refuses to be cowed by the AIDS epidemic decimating its population,” writes Willmore. “More than either, it’s about being with someone who barely has room in their life for you, a theme that Sachs has returned to in different iterations over the years, from the chaotic love triangle in Passages to Keep the Lights On’s chronicle of a yearslong relationship with a man with addiction issues.”

Rami Malek stars as Jimmy George, an actor whose experimental theater company, the Mechanicals, is preparing to stage a word-for-word recreation of André Brassard’s Once Upon a Time in the East (1974), a French-Canadian ensemble piece that plays, as Sachs has put it, “as if Altman’s Nashville had been made by Fassbinder.” While Jimmy’s longtime partner, Dennis (Tom Sturridge), renders tender loving care, a new downstairs tenant, Vincent (Luther Ford), has fallen for Jimmy, who proves eager to welcome the attention from his young admirer.

In the New Yorker, Justin Chang has his reservations about The Man I Love, but Richard Brody is all in. “With subtle brilliance,” writes Chang, “Sachs evokes the tones and textures of his milieu and makes inventive use of music: the George Gershwin song of the title, a recurring French ditty from the Brassard film. What’s missing, though, is a center worthy of the frame. Malek is an actor of lithe physicality—his body language in the dance scenes has a witty expressiveness—but he never conjures a sense of Jimmy’s inner life. Seldom has his emotional range felt more glaringly inadequate.”

“Sachs thrills to the mutual inspiration of theater people at leisure,” writes Brody, and “the domestic riffing of performers, bouncing songs and jokes to one another as if tossing beach balls, offers moments of immortal joy.” The Man I Love is “turbulent and tender, emotionally bruising and vulnerable throughout, its quasi-operatic fervor contrasting poignantly with its physical confines and its clinically inevitable decrescendo.”

“While the movie belongs to Malek—who makes Jimmy both languorous and revitalized by creativity, weakened by declining health but hurling himself with ferocious tenacity into whatever life he has left—Sturridge is the stealth MVP,” writes David Rooney. “With an impressive economy of means, the actor gets at something fundamental to the relationship between artists and their partners, comfortably occupying the tight spaces left available by a magnetic man who sucks up most of the oxygen in a room without even trying. Dennis is a character not given to big emotional displays, but I found Sturridge’s performance ineffably moving.” And Ford plays Vincent “with the dreamy invulnerability of youth and a refusal to consider consequences.”

“In a scene where the camera slowly pans across a room as people simply chat around a dinner table,” writes Kyle Turner for Slant, “or another in which it lands on a dancer in a shimmery red jacket, Sachs makes you believe that this was the sort of creativity that gave the city its lifeblood at a time when so many people were losing their lives. These snapshots of artists hanging around, rehearsing, and partying are a more convincing tribute to that time than the fairly generic love triangle that anchors the film.”

Sachs’s films are “satisfyingly dramatic while understanding that, especially when telling some form of love story, an element of unknowability must be maintained,” writes producer and former Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay. “Downtown artists John Jesurun and John Kelly were theater advisers here, and as someone who worked in this world in the 1980s, the film’s textures and relationships feel uncannily true to that scene while revealing emotional dynamics within it I had never seen represented on screen.”

“It’s admirable and even exhilaratingly rebellious how much Sachs, from film to film, seems disinterested in expanding his audience,” writes IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio. “He is one of the only American filmmakers of a certain profile who is putting gay stories on-screen with a frank emotional honesty and richly literate curiosity about film history, which he pours into every frame.”

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Under Watchful Eyes

David Hudson — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 12:11:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War (2018)

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda, whose debut feature, A Generation (1955), rerouted the course of his country’s cinema. As Michał Oleszczyk has written, Wajda excelled at the game of “making one’s art under the watchful eye of the Communist authorities—and then turning it against them.” Wajda carried on working at a furious pace right up until he passed away in 2016. From today through October 22, New York’s Film Forum is presenting Andrzej Wajda 100, and further commemorative series are being hosted by the Yale Film Archive (through December 17) and the Jacob Burns Film Center (October 9 through 15).

The Pordenone Silent Film Festival presents a preopening screening tonight before its forty-fifth edition officially launches tomorrow to run through October 11. Harold Lloyd stars in Sam Taylor’s comedic hit For Heaven’s Sake (1926), and for live accompaniment, Oscar Marchioni, who has composed a new score, will conduct the Zerorchestra.

This week’s highlights:

In this week’s New Yorker, Anthony Lane profiles Paweł Pawlikowski, whose Fatherland completes a trilogy begun with Ida (2014) and Cold War (2018). The three films explore “the mystery of borders, geographical and spiritual, like a doctor tenderly probing an unhealed wound,” writes Lane. “For the many moviegoers who became conscious of Pawlikowski only at the time of Ida, the range of films that preceded it may come as a surprise. Not that it’s easy to get hold of the damn things, even with the aid of Vimeo and YouTube. A few remain elusive, including Václav Havel: A Czech Drama (1989), which is not a drama but a documentary, made in what was then Czechoslovakia before the Communist regime caved in. In short, we could use a full retrospective to plug the gaps.” And Lane gives us a tantalizing preview of what such a program might offer.

“Perhaps no other filmmaker has portrayed the human difficulties of coupling and uncoupling with such sustained sensitivity and insight,” writes David Polansky in an essay on Eric Rohmer for Liberties. “Much like Jane Austen’s, Rohmer’s plots appear simple and bourgeois on the surface, yet they contain dizzyingly high stakes cloaked in the quotidian. He is among cinema’s great observers of the bourgeoisie. There’s a very funny scene in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, in which a character laments the jaundiced view of the bourgeoisie that prevails among the intelligentsia. Well, Rohmer would be the antidote.” In the meantime, the latest reviews of Élisabeth, Rohmer’s only novel, come from Geoff Andrew and, for the New Left Review, Emily Bickerton.

As the new restoration of My Brother’s Wedding (1983) tours North American theaters, M. Sellers Johnson talks with director Charles Burnett for Film International about his follow-up to his landmark debut feature, Killer of Sheep (1978). In My Brother’s Wedding, Pierce (Everett Silas), a young Black man in South Central LA, must decide whether to attend the titular ceremony or the funeral of a troubled friend scheduled for the same day. Burnett says the dilemma is rooted in an incident in his own life, a period when he felt “being a brother’s keeper” was the most urgent calling. “I was a great fan of Ermanno Olmi, who did The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978),” Burnett tells Sellers. “His films are like Bresson’s films, to a certain extent. Very dry, in a way. Using real people and not actors. I was a great fan of his.”

Directed by Bob Fosse and starring Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce, the stand-up comedian with “a naughty boy’s playful, infectious energy that helped him get away with the comedy equivalent of murder,” Lenny (1974) is “a textbook case of two territorial alphas destined to drive each other crazy,” writes Sean Burns at Crooked Marquee. Fosse was particularly “interested in Bruce’s toxic relationship with his stripper wife, ‘Hot’ Honey Harlow [Valerie Perrine], a destructive duet that made them the Sid and Nancy of the burlesque set . . . As a filmmaker, Fosse was fascinated by fears of inadequacy and secret shames. We get searing, quicksilver glimpses of how the hang-ups and double standards that Lenny ridicules onstage are rooted in his own experiences. It takes one to know one.”

Let’s wrap with a poem. Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), featuring an immortal performance from Conrad Veidt as a haunted and haunting sleepwalker, is the quintessential work of German Expressionism and, as Clayton Dillard wrote in Slant in 2014, it “remains cinema’s preeminent embodiment of dream-screen anguish.” The latest issue of the New York Review of Books offers “Paging Dr. Caligari” by Elaine Equi, whose work has appeared in several volumes of The Best American Poetry and who has written extensively about the poetry of Frank O’Hara and Ed Ruscha. Here are two lines from three stanzas: “Can a person already in a trance be hypnotized again? / I need to decide something—anything will do.”

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Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard

David Hudson — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 10:08:00 +0000

Rooney and Kate Mara in Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard (2026)

In the early 1980s, the case of Freda and Greta Chaplin, twin sisters from Yorkshire, kicked up a flurry of media attention in the British press. The Chaplins had been obsessing over a local truck driver and were briefly locked up for harassing the man. The story lit a spark in Werner Herzog’s imagination, one that smoldered for decades until he hit upon the brilliant idea of casting Rooney and Kate Mara as Jean and Joan Holbrooke, two sisters in contemporary Ireland—not twins, they insist—who go on trial for taking sneaky revenge on the beau (Orlando Bloom) who has spurned them for another woman.

“In its tale of two sisters bonded so closely that they do everything in eerie, exact unison, and the rejection they subsequently face in the world, we can see a variation on the twisted innocents and holy fools that populate so much of the director’s work,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. “Bucking Fastard is dedicated to David Lynch, but perhaps Herzog should have dedicated it to his younger self, to the Werner Herzog who made The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Even Dwarves Started Small, and Woyzeck—sigh, the things that guy could have done with this deliciously weird tale. Bucking Fastard is nuts, yes, but it could have been, should have been nuttier—transcendentally, galactically nuttier.”

Leonardo Goi, writing for the Film Stage, has his reservations as well, but “if I cannot bring myself to dismiss Bucking Fastard entirely, it is not out of auteurist reverence, but because the wide-eyed romanticism that permeates it feels genuine, heartfelt, and occasionally infectious.” For one thing, “there’s an irreducible tension between the two women—and the actresses who embody them—that makes their union a highly volatile, staticky relationship, and Herzog mines their joint activities (vacuuming, making tea, or opening a can of sardines before a friendly counselor played with saint-like patience by Domhnall Gleeson) for some surreal choreographies.”

“Where many twin narratives concern the desire to be seen as individuals,” writes Hannah Strong at Little White Lies, “this film explores the concept of two sisters who yearn to be a single entity and the complications such a desire creates in a world obsessed with individualism.”

The Maras’ sister act—“think the eerie supernatural twins in The Shining (1980) but much more cheeky fun, and dressed by Wes Anderson’s production team,” suggests Stephen Dalton at the Film Verdict—is “an impressive feat of disciplined acting that exerts its own peculiar fascination,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “At least for a while. Part of it is the identical outfits, a look that mixes Olsen twins with sister wives and a dash of Franciscan monk. Love the brocade granny handbags. But radical anti-fashion aside, this bizarro fable about unfulfilled love, oversized knitwear, and abandoned story threads frays beyond repair, well before it reaches an abrupt and perplexing halt.”

To escape the media frenzy, Jean and Joan Holbrooke move into an apartment in Dublin before taking up an aunt’s invitation to live with her out in the countryside, where the sisters discover a cave and decide to burrow their way through a mountain to some mystical land where they will find true love. “From there, Bucking Fastard becomes a set of wriggly vignettes more than a linear story,” writes Time’s Stephanie Zacharek, and “the meandering storyline is pure, sweet, gaga Herzog.”

In Sight and Sound, Nicolas Rapold finds that “Herzog’s latest eccentric yarn is probably his best fiction feature since he had his second coming in the 2000s as a kind of superhero Teutonic auteur,” and at the Daily Beast, Nick Schager suggests that Herzog has crafted “perhaps the most beguiling—and downright bizarre—film of his career.” It “may play at times like a greatest-hits compilation,” writes Mark Hanson at Slant, “but the sincerity with which Herzog regards the sisters’ stubborn hopefulness in the face of a selfish and uncaring world gives the film a lasting emotional power.”

Bucking Fastard screens on October 8, 10, and 12 at the New York Film Festival; on October 14 through 18 at Film Fest Gent; and on October 21 and 23 at AFI Fest in Los Angeles.

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Arthur Harari’s The Unknown

David Hudson — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 14:35:00 +0000

Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider in Arthur Harari’s The Unknown (2026)

Arthur Harari’s The Unknown, screening on Friday, October 2, and Monday, October 12, at the New York Film Festival, was met with both glowing and damning reviews when it premiered in competition at Cannes. On the Film Comment Podcast, Jordan Cronk, Adam Piron, and Ruun Nuur tried to explain to host Devika Girish what it was about the film that they just couldn’t shake. Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (2023)—which, like The Unknown, stars Léa Seydoux—came up, making what appears to be one of the year’s great stumpers all the more intriguing.

Niels Schneider, perhaps best known for his work with Xavier Dolan, costars as David, a photographer who has been documenting the changing cityscape of Paris. Eva (Seydoux) has caught his attention before she shows up at a club with a hungry yet passionless stare at David. After a furious hookup, David wakes up to discover that he’s inhabiting Eva’s body. Freaked out, David heads out to track down his previous body, and when he finds it, he realizes that there is a teenage girl in there, Malia (Lilith Grasmug).

David—appearing to the viewer, remember, as the spitting image of Léa Seydoux—and Malia (Schneider) go looking to unravel the mystery, and their path leads them at one point to Malia’s father, played by Radu Jude. “Not to make too much of what is a relatively small (though not insignificant) role,” writes Jessica Kiang in Variety, “but Jude’s anomalous casting as Malia’s Marcus Aurelius–quoting, crane operator dad does carry with it a current of eccentric vivacity that the rest of the film sorely lacks.”

For Kiang, it’s “an interesting instinct, to drain the body-swap premise of its comic, Steve-Martin-channelling-Lily-Tomlin potential so that it hews closer in feel to something like Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’—a clear inspiration here, albeit shorn of the novella’s absurdist gallows humor. But along with the comedy, a lot of the life has drained out of the concept too.” And for Hannah Strong at Little White Lies, The Unknown’s “intriguing premise is completely underserved by its oblique script.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney suggests that “calling this sui generis freakout horror or sci-fi or even fantasy seems simplistic. There’s a surface kinship here with films like It Follows and especially Under the Skin, in which post-coital afterglow sours fast. But the director declines to get too specific about his allegorical intent, which could be sexual trauma or gender identity or just a mysterious body-snatcher nightmare. Either way, this is a spellbinding psychological puzzler led by a typically fearless performance from Léa Seydoux.”

“One of the best aspects of The Unknown is its lack of causes,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, adding that “the crisis is inexplicable, traceable to nothing like environmental catastrophe, biological mutation, or supernatural curse. Something has happened to these characters, it may have afflicted a few others, and they all must simply deal with it . . . The transformations are achieved with a rare virtuosity—the actors’ precision fuses with the meticulous screenwriting (by Harari, his brother Lucas, and Vincent Poymiro, based on a graphic novel by the brothers)—and the direction anchors the characters in their respective milieux in ways that, through the disturbance of normalcy, turns familiar places and habits strange and uncanny.”

Harari—best known for his 2021 feature Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle and for cowriting Anatomy of a Fall (2023) with his partner, director Justine Triet—“reaches new heights, adopting a late-modernist approach that I’d have no problem filing alongside works from the likes of Kieślowski, Antonioni, and Lynch,” writes Blake Williams for Notebook. “Harari flirts with the ridiculous while maintaining a firm grasp on sincerity, and The Unknown is as mesmerizing as it is because it allows the viewer to effectively (and affectively) embody an intersubjective perspective on the world, whereby the increasing disassociation we feel towards our own bodies is treated as a serious and defining development of modern life.”

Williams adds that The Unknown is “an allegory for cinema-going, too, yes, and it takes that task seriously as well. But the allure of this film’s confidence to keep expanding, to unremittingly fall deeper into itself with each new scene, nearly every shot, is one that easily transcends its function as cinema. It goes so far as to encompass the sense that only ever being able to exist as ourselves, bound into a single body and consciousness for life, feels further from an absolute than ever.”

At Reverse Shot, Julien Allen argues that “nothing, however challenging or opaque, is gratuitous in The Unknown—especially given that identity and visual familiarity are active components of the narrative. Body-swap, previously the cinematic preserve of comedy (Freaky Friday, All of Me) or genre (Face-Off, Possessor), here provides the starting point for an absorbing existential drama, which at times thrillingly exploits its marriage of narrative thriller techniques and Freudian fantasy.”

Further, Allen suggests that The Unknown “operates as an electroshock-fueled invitation to outflank our standard operating procedures when identifying with screen characters visually, and to begin to dig into, comprehend, and relate to ‘others’ (in all senses of that word) on a much deeper level. The souls (Eva, David, Malia) to whom we have been introduced are still intact and worthy of investment, but their afflictions mean that they no longer fit the world around them. That is a challenge for them, but more valuably, it is a challenge for us.”

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September Books

David Hudson — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:50:00 +0000

Shirley Clarke

The latest—and, as always, essential—roundup on new and noteworthy books is out from Sabzian, and Tillo Huygelen opens with word that Cinematek, the Royal Belgian Film Archive, is dedicating its library to film theorists and historians David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. “The inauguration of the Bibliothèque Bordwell-Thompson is accompanied by a carte blanche curated by Thompson, giving a personal take on the collections and of the research that connected the two scholars so closely to the archive,” writes Huygelen.

That series opens tomorrow with a screening of Alberto Capellani’s Germinal, “one of the great films that made 1913 the annus mirabilis of early cinema,” as Thompson points out in her program notes. Bordwell / Thompson: Carte Blanche runs through November 22, and December will see the publication of Observing Film Art: Themes from the Work of David Bordwell, an impressive collection edited by Charlie Keil and Murray Smith.

On Thursday, J. Hoberman will be at L’Alliance New York to introduce a screening of Jean Rouch’s Moi, un noir (1958), the subject of one of the chapters in his new collection, Across the Movi-verse: Writing on Film, 2011–2021. Another chapter is “No Success Like Failure: A Natural History of the Film Maudit,” and on October 11, Hoberman will introduce Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) at the Museum of the Moving Image.

A. S. Hamrah will be at the n+1 office in Brooklyn on Thursday to discuss Last Week in End Times Cinema, his “study of bad news in the movie industry over the course of 365 days,” with n+1 contributor Will Tavlin and coeditor Lisa Borst. And on October 22, Hamrah will introduce the Vital Signs Film Series screening in Oakland of Zach Clark’s The Becomers (2024).

Starting Saturday, New York’s Metrograph will present Trains: Local Routes, the first half of a two-part series Genevieve Yue has curated in conjunction with the publication of her latest book, Trains. This is the latest title in Cutaways, a series of small-format books, “each entry a journey through the history of cinema guided by a single motif or formal device.”

Cutaways is coedited by Yue and Erika Balsom, whose collection The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture has just hit shelves. On October 5, Light Industry in Brooklyn will celebrate the publication of The Machine That Kills Bad People, a collection of essays commissioned by the screening series that ran from 2018 to June of this year at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Programmed by Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, Maria Palacios Cruz, and Ben Rivers, The Machine that Kills Bad People was known for its double bills, and on the program for Monday evening are Bette Gordon’s Anybody’s Woman (1981) and Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily We Go to Hell (1932).

Then on October 6, Balsom will return to Light Industry to deliver an illustrated lecture on A.A.A. Offresi (1981), in which hidden cameras capture the interactions between a French sex worker and her clients in Rome. A.A.A. Offresi was scheduled to be broadcast on Italian television, but instead, a Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI) presenter announced that the broadcast had been cancelled “at the formal request of the president of the parliamentary oversight commission.”

Critical Context

Siegfried Kracauer, the critic and theorist remembered first and foremost for his 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, was “among the first to treat films as social symptoms, but today we do it all the time,” writes Jimmy So in the New Republic. When the Nazis came to power, Kracauer fled Berlin for Paris before emigrating to the U.S., and “he carried not just trauma but a conviction that culture could offer early warnings of political disaster. In exile in the United States, he set out to trace a line from Weimar expressionism to the psychic conditions that enabled the Third Reich. If it had happened in Germany, who was to say it couldn’t happen in the United States?”

“For Anwen Crawford, author of the recent Decadent Edition from Fireflies Press,” Lynn Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002) is “as substantially immersive as it is impossible to grasp,” writes Katherine Connell for Screen Slate. “There are many ideological and historical frameworks that Crawford uses to contextualize the film’s temporal setting, including globalization, Cool Britannia, New Labour, ’90s rave culture in deindustrialized Scotland, as well as its pre–social media and post-9/11 theatrical release. This academic rigor is helpful in working through the sociopolitical implications of the film, but what Crawford’s text most profoundly reveals is that the truest way in to Morvern Callar begins and ends with a personal, haptic relationship to its contents.”

“To be young and in love with films in the early 1960s was to participate in what felt like an international youth movement,” wrote Phillip Lopate in the first chapter of his 1998 collection of essays and criticism, Totally, Tenderly, Tragically. Out now from Sticking Place Books, Essaying Movies gathers Lopate’s conversations with Carrie Rickey (A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda). Sticking Place has also just published Cheshire on Film, a collection of interviews and essays by critic and filmmaker Godfrey Cheshire.

More Conversations

Over the weekend, Ioncinema’s Eric Lavallée reported that Kristen Stewart is set to star in Olivier Assayas’s Spiritual World as Ada, “a haunted young woman with clairvoyant powers who is visited by mysterious premonitions.” Stewart and Assayas have previously worked together on Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) and Personal Shopper (2016), and the remarkable cast lined up for Spiritual World also features Vicky Krieps, Niels Schneider, Riley Keough, Wagner Moura, and Barbara Sukowa. Assayas on Assayas presents a wide-ranging series of conversations between the director and critic Jean-Michel Frodon.

Meridian gathers Claudia Nedelcu Duca’s interviews with Andrei Ujica, the writer and director who collaborated with Harun Farocki on Videograms of a Revolution (1992) and is best known for The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (2010). “Ujica’s extraordinarily powerful montage of newsreel footage is not a record of the Romanian dictator’s appalling misdeeds,” wrote Jay Weissberg for Variety, “but rather a sly use of Ceausescu’s own propaganda to drive home a devastating critique of both Romanian society and international realpolitik: We all let this happen.”

Fierce and Feisty

In Laurence Kardish’s Shirley Clarke: The Passionate Life and Radical Works of an Exceptional Filmmaker, “a unified field of constant artistic creation appears, of which the feature films were merely the most conspicuous public traces,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “Paradoxically and strikingly, these newly revealed continuities of Clarke’s life and work not only put her movies in perspective but also reflect essential concepts of the cinema—and of cinema’s place in her time.”

One of Clarke’s many early supporters was Louis Sher, who by the early 1960s, was running the largest independent cinema chain in the U.S. Clarke’s first feature, The Connection (1961), premiered to considerable acclaim in Cannes but was banned by local censors when it arrived in New York. Sher propelled Clarke’s case forward in the courts by screening The Connection in Los Angeles and declaring in ads: “Now you can see the film that New York tried to ban!” The story is told—along with countless others—in lively detail by filmmaker and programmer Mike Plante in Sensation Cinema: The Audacious, Defiant History of Louis Sher and the Art Theatre Guild.

Making Movies

“As Joseph McBride’s recent book George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director demonstrates in much detail, enjoying a Cukor movie invariably means enjoying what particular actors do and how they do it,” writes Jonathan Rosenbaum at the top of his notes on ten films, including his own favorite Cukor, Sylvia Scarlett (1935). At IndieWire, Jim Hemphill recommends Illeana Douglas’s Jungle Red! The Making of MGM’s The Women, “one of the most entertaining and enlightening books ever written on a single film. Douglas’s approach is informed equally by her background as an actor (Cape Fear, Grace of My Heart) and her work as a film historian for Turner Classic Movies; her filmmaking experience gives her the ability to clearly convey all the complex machinations at work on a film set, but what makes the book special is the way she combines this intimate firsthand knowledge with a historian’s broader perspective.”

With Shooting Eve, Sam Staggs delves into the making of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s beloved All About Eve (1950), starring Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, and a young Marilyn Monroe. And Daniel Titley traces the history of a lost landmark of the silent era directed by Tod Browning and starring Lon Chaney in The Hypnotist: The Lost Story of London After Midnight.

Writers on Film host John Bleasdale talks with Mark Edlitz about Maverick in the Machine: Orson Welles and the Battle Over Journey Into Fear, and at Wellesnet, Ray Kelly notes that the book sheds “new light on one of the most turbulent chapters in Orson Welles’s Hollywood career.”

Fabulous Fictions

Speaking of Welles, anyone who has “a vague connection” to the novelist Booth Tarkington will likely attribute it to Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), the troubled adaptation of the 1918 novel. “Welles may have been one of the last writers to speak of him in unqualified, glowing terms,” writes filmmaker Patrick Wang (A. Rimbaud). “I find Tarkington an eminently capable writer, an even better dramatist, and the rarest interpreter of human psychology and action. His stories are as structured as Brecht, as emotional as Arthur Miller, and as tragically revealing as an Act V monarch in an Elizabethan drama.”

“Deprivatizing my body grants me the capital I crave.” With Bree: An Autobiography, Hannah Bonner takes on the voice of Bree Daniels, the call girl vividly portrayed by Jane Fonda in Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971).

In his New York Times review of Hollywood, Ending, the latest novel by John Green (The Fault in Our Stars), David Canfield notes that the main characters—rising young actors cast in a hot biopic called Andy Warhol Never Gets Old—navigate “an imposing landscape of film-industry veterans including exacting directors, weary publicists, cunning agents, and prying journalists. The Tinseltown setting proves dramatically canny: The spotlight always seems to find the young, but it is not for the weak.”

Hollywood Men

“What do you get when screen heroes share their stories?” asks Tim Teeman in the New York Times. “A lot of sex, bravado, determination, illness, depression and insecurity, love-life mazes, addiction, recovery, and—one thing they all share—battles to vanquish various demons.” Tim Teeman has notes on “six potential page-turners”: Ke Huy Quan’s Never Say Die, Dolph Lundgren’s Fights Worth Fighting: Finding Strength in Struggle, Sylvester Stallone’s The Steps, Michael Douglas’s One Helluva Ride, Joe Manganiello’s Bloodlines, and Kyle MacLachlan’s Fictional Selves. Melena Ryzik notes that Fictional Selves “charts MacLachlan’s kinship with [David] Lynch, who died last year; his roles, both earned and lost (he passed on sex, lies and videotape); and his romantic relationships, including with Laura Dern, his Blue Velvet costar, and the actress he cheated on her with.”

Ari Emanuel, “who inspired the manic Ari Gold character on the TV show Entourage, is almost a caricature of a Hollywood personality; cunning, quick-thinking, charming, and heroically profane,” writes Connie Bruck in the New Yorker. “There are three Emanuel brothers: Zeke, the doctor and intellectual; Rahm, the former congressman, White House chief of staff, and mayor of Chicago; and Ari, the businessman. All are consummate schmoozers, though Ari and Rahm balance their ingratiating manners with ferocious tempers.”

Ari’s memoir, Roll the Calls, “breathlessly charges through its 400-plus pages, dropping names, settling scores, and swearing up a storm,” writes the NYT’s Nicole Sperling. The Hollywood Reporter has an excerpt, and Emanuel has been talking with—and at—Lane Brown (Vulture), Matt Donnelly (Variety), Dominic Patten (Deadline), and New Yorker editor David Remnick.

Easy on the Eyes

For AnOther Magazine, Baneet Sarai leafs through Almodóvar Art: The Art in the Films of Pedro Almodóvar. “Exploring the design of his films from pugnacious early gems like Dark Habits to mature masterworks like Volver and All About My Mother,” writes Sarai, “the book has been lovingly compiled by his creative director, Juan Gatti, whose partnership with Almodóvar is one of the most prolific director-designer relationships. Together, they have created a saturated, madcap world that values expression over naturalism, mood over narrative. ‘Pedro conceives of his films as a complete aesthetic experience,’ says Gatti.”

Hat & Beard Press, in the meantime, is previewing another handsome volume, SV105401: The Blade Runner Contact Sheets by Stephen Vaughan, and the sample pages here are tantalizing. Along with shots snapped on the set of Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic, the book will include essays by Paul Sammon (Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner) and critic and novelist Joanne McNeil.

Forthcoming

Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko will turn twenty-five next month, and over the past ten years, the writer and director has been working on a sequel of sorts—a novel, whittled down to around six hundred pages from Kelly’s 800-plus-page first draft. The Philosophy of Time Travel, due in December, will reconstruct events following the death of young Donnie Darko on October 4, 1988, and Kelly is currently planning to expand the project with animated and live-action films.

Chances are, you’ve seen the trailer for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, written by Quentin Tarantino, directed by David Fincher, and starring Brad Pitt, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Rick Dalton’s stunt double in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). The new film hits theaters during the Thanksgiving holidays, and then Tarantino’s novelization, The Adventures of Cliff Booth, will be out on December 8. His novelization of Once Upon a Time appeared three years after the movie, whereas the new one will be released before The Further Mis-Adventures lands on Netflix on December 23.

November will bring Scott Ryan’s oral history The Road to David Lynch’s Wild at Heart as well as The Future of Reality, a collection edited by Kevin B. Lee, Flavia Mazzarino, and Marine de Dardel that “asks filmmakers and scholars to respond to a contemporary reality framed and filtered by algorithms and synthetic media.” And looking way ahead to 2028, we’re already anticipating Glenn Kenny’s monograph on Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945).

Endnotes

Matthew Sorrento, the editor of Film International Online and Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon, has launched a new scholarly film and television imprint, Channel Academic. Recent and forthcoming titles include Woody Haut’s Kiss Me Deadly: In Search of Noir’s Great Whatsit and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’s The Blair Witch Project: Josh’s Blair Witch Mix—An Absent Soundtrack Found.

For more recommendations, turn to the Film Stage, where Christopher Schobert has notes on David Thomson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies—the latest reviews come from Scott Bradfield in the New Republic and Tim Riley in the Los Angeles Review of Books—as well as Scout Tafoya’s The Otherworld: The Mythic Dimensions of Christophe Gans and Sydney Pollack: Collected Interviews, edited by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Cronin.

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What If This Was Real?

David Hudson — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:21:00 +0000

Did You See This?

David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986)

The San Francisco Film Preserve launched a new festival yesterday, and it’s running through the weekend at the Roxie Theater. The inaugural edition of Re:Vision offers thirty-four films in fourteen programs, and Screen Slate has been spotlighting highlights throughout the week.

Patrick Dahl writes about short films by Len Lye, whose work is “as playful and joyous as any mainstream animated spectacle, but is far more invigorating in its instability.” Arlin Golden revisits Margot Benacerraf’s Araya (1959), “an impressionistic portrait of sustained toil” on Venezuela’s Arayan peninsula. And Corina Copp writes about Karen Sperling’s The Waiting Room (1973), a “psychological Lehrstück, if I may, that uses straight female friendships and relationships as a surface at a time when it was *just* beginning to feel outrageous that feminists continued to dwell primarily on the problems of the bourgeois domestic sphere.”

Now on view at Pace Gallery in Los Angeles through December 23, David Lynch: LA is an exhibition of photographs made between 1979 and 2008. “True to the Lynchian sensibility, there’s obviously a sense of liminality to his photographs,” writes Ava Lachini for Flaunt. “Though his visual language is ostensibly universal at this point, Lynch’s singular perspective still feels new.”

Another opening in Los Angeles made a lot more noise this week. “Both surgically somber and proudly over the top,” writes New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, designed by Ma Yansong and funded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, is “a weird kind of wonderful and an instant city landmark.” Luke Skywalker’s X-34 Landspeeder is in there as well as work by Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo, and several comic artists, including Winsor McCay, Frank Frazetta, George Herriman, Jack Kirby, and Robert Crumb.

Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony, the most complete survey of the artist’s work yet, has just opened at the New Museum in New York. On view through January 3, the exhibition features new work and two of Jafa’s landmark moving-image pieces, Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016) and the Golden Lion–winning The White Album (2019). “Together the films project alternately outraged and euphoric versions of United States racial history,” writes Holland Carter in the New York Times.

On Thursday, Marina Vlady, who won a Best Actress Award in Cannes for her performance in Marco Ferreri’s The Conjugal Bed (1963), passed away at the age of eighty-eight. Though she played Lady Kate Percy in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1966), Vlady was best-known internationally for her turn as Juliette Janson, a housewife who earns a little extra cash as a part-time prostitute in Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967). “With the whispered complexities of a semiotic secret agent, Godard’s voiceover introduces her first as an actress and then as a character,” wrote Nathan Lee in the Village Voice in 2006. “Acting is montage.”

This week’s highlights:

We mentioned yesterday that the new Film Comment is up, and there are new issues out from Cineaste and Film Quarterly as well. In a Cineaste “Web Exclusive,” Ehsan Zamani writes about five Iranian films “that, through their social narratives, have each entered the sensitive territory of religious politics in a unique way.” Freely accessible features from FQ include a dossier on David Lynch and Mulholland Dr. (2001), a conversation with Christian Petzold about Miroirs No. 3 (2025), and—relatedly—a poem by Erin O’Luanaigh inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940).

Speaking (again) of Lynch, he was so impressed with Godfrey Cheshire’s review of Blue Velvet (1986) that he cold-called the writer and they wound up hanging out at The Cave in Chapel Hill. Let’s flag a few more recent newsletters: Patrick Wang (A. Rimbaud) introduces a series of six hourlong videos on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel The Leopard, Luchino Visconti’s 1963 adaptation, and last year’s Netflix miniseries; Farran Smith Nehme writes about Joan Crawford, Clarence Brown’s restored and revived Letty Lynton (1932), and Gilbert Adrian’s costumes; then there’s Corey Atad on Crawford, Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945), and style; Filipe Furtado on curtain calls from Hitchcock and John Wayne; and Fred Barrett on Paul Fejos’s Lonesome (1928), Valerio Zurlini’s Violent Summer (1959), and Ishmael Bernal’s A Speck in the Water (1976).

With the Metrograph series Winona Ryder, Analogue Youth returning next month, Christine Smallwood surveys the career in a Journal piece, suggesting that “a strong contender” for Ryder’s best role was Charlotte Flax, the devout Catholic daughter of a wayward mother (Cher) in Richard Benjamin’s Mermaids (1990). When a young man sparks something in Charlotte, she “discards her cardigan, wiggles into Cher’s hot pink dress, and heads out into the night,” writes Smallwood. “This combustive mix of female sexuality and Christian iconography recurred in Ryder’s career, next in the fever dream psychosis that is Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the melodramatic delirium of The Crucible. If Ryder is not entirely convincing as a seventeenth-century Puritan, she is more than persuasive as a mean girl who, through force of will and sexual fury, summons the girls around her into a vengeful and possessed army.”

One admirer of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) is Neil Jordan, who has overseen the restoration of his own Interview with the Vampire (1994). “If you look at F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, they’re expressionist, poetic nightmares,” Jordan tells Dan Mecca at Letterboxd. “But then the entirety of Bela Lugosi and Hammer Horror turned the whole vampire into a joke, really. It was great to restore it to something like its origins, in a way. And that’s what Francis did. He was brave enough to add all this huge opulence to the Carpathian Mountains and the characters. I had this different, beautiful book, which was even richer than Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, and it was more challenging and more interesting in many ways. In a strange way, it was more like: What if this was real?”

Let’s wrap with an engaging, hourlong listen. In 1980, the New York Review of Books ran “The Perils of Pauline,” an eight—thousand-word takedown in which Renata Adler argued that fellow New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael’s collection When the Lights Go Down was “jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” Jarrett Earnest, host of the NYRB podcast Private Life, talks with Lucy Sante about what she perceives as the lawyerly construction of Adler’s argument—that the demands of Kael’s weekly gig amplified her “quirks, mannerisms, tactics, and excesses”—and about the impact of the piece on the literary milieu of New York at time. The conversation then segues into Sante’s own writing for the NYRB.

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Previewing the 64th New York Film Festival

David Hudson — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 12:24:00 +0000

Adam Driver in James Gray’s Paper Tiger (2026)

The sixty-fourth New York Film Festival opens tomorrow with James Gray’s Paper Tiger, starring Adam Driver and Miles Teller as brothers who, in mid-1980s New York, cook up a money-making scheme and stumble into some very serious trouble with the Russian mafia. It’s “a film that I adore,” NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim tells David Canfield in the Hollywood Reporter, and “one that we really wanted to champion. I think twenty, thirty years ago, this would’ve been a great film; in the current context, for an American filmmaker to make a film like this, it’s a miraculous film.” Paper Tiger “balances something that feels really gritty and true to the New York of [Gray’s] childhood but also has this mythic grandeur that I think relates to Shakespeare or Greek tragedy—it’s a bold thing for a film to do.”

Canfield is particularly keen on talking about Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, one of an unusually large number of features seeing their world premieres in New York this year. Yura Borisov, who broke through internationally playing the Russian henchman Igor in Sean Baker’s Anora (2024), plays real-life computer scientist Ilya Sutskever, who crosses paths with Sam Altman, a young entrepreneur who would eventually become a cofounder and the CEO of OpenAI.

“For me, this is absolutely a film about today,” says Lim. “People are asking me questions about how AI is going to affect the future of filmmaking, and I think, how is AI going to affect the future of human existence? What’s really impressive about this film is how it strikes, for me, a perfect tone. It gets across that the situation that got us here is at once horrifying and hilarious and something to reckon with; the film gets this trajectory across with a real sense of moral urgency, and I think it’s finally beginning to hit home with people that we have to reckon with it.”

Lim, a frequent Criterion contributor, is also the author of David Lynch: The Man from Another Place and Tale of Cinema, his 2022 book on the 2005 film by Hong Sangsoo. A second edition with a new afterword is in the works, and at the Film Stage, Nick Newman asks Lim if he could imagine not programming a new Hong film. There are two lined up in the Main Slate this year, The Day She Returns and Nowhere to Lay My Eyes.

Newman’s question is a tough one for Lim, because he’s convinced that Hong is at work on “one project, and every film just adds to this massive, ongoing film in progress. So I don’t know; he seems to do it in enough ways every time. I actually think the two from this year are among two of my favorite recent Hongs.” The Day She Returns is the one “I’m maybe especially fond of because I feel like this is one that people are possibly likeliest to dismiss because it’s so minimal. It’s one that he filmed in four days, and it’s just an interview and then another and then another. But I think it’s conceptually so smart.”

Talking to Film at Lincoln Center’s Jordan Raup about the festival’s history and mission—“It’s just: how do we make an argument for cinema?”—Lim notes that “I’m pretty sure that our audience is going to go for Arthur Harari’s The Unknown, a film that I think was overlooked in Cannes and is a really interesting twist on a genre film, and a film that I think really should be taken seriously.”

As it happens, in the latest “Goings On” newsletter from the New Yorker, Richard Brody briefly spotlights a few standouts, including The Unknown, “a harrowingly intense, metaphysical melodrama, set in and near Paris, where three people, after casual sexual encounters, discover that they have swapped bodies with their partners. The exotic premise is developed with relentless seriousness, even severity, extracting deep pathos from the characters’ eerie reckonings.”

Beyond the Main Slate and its lineup of thirty-four features, Spotlight is “a section that I created to kind of expand the purview of what we might show,” Lim tells Raup, and Currents is “a section that’s very dear to my heart and very important for the identity of this festival. And that section, which we think of as a section for adventurous work, is a bigger and more robust section in this current iteration of the festival.”

As always at the NYFF, Revivals is as rich as any other section. This year’s lineup includes new restorations of Alexander Kluge’s debut feature, Yesterday Girl (1966), and Luchino Visconti’s final film, L’innocente (1976), as well as Paula Delsol’s recently revived first feature, La dérive (The Drift, 1964).

“The reemergence of La dérive is part of one of the most significant phenomena in contemporary film culture: an archive fever running high enough to inspire delirium,” writes Erika Balsom for the New York Review of Books. “The ratio between hype and quality is sometimes askew. But then there are rediscoveries like La dérive, which fully justify the fanfare. Now what baffles is not the film itself, but how something so accomplished and so proximate to the French New Wave could remain so little known for so long.”

For guidance through the immense NYFF64 program, the package put together at Slant might be a good place to start. At the Film Stage, the staff is recommending that New Yorkers prioritize a dozen films that have yet to secure distribution in the U.S. because it may be a while before a second chance to see them comes along.

The publication to keep a close eye on throughout the festival’s eighteen-day run will be FLC’s own magazine, Film Comment. The new fall issue is out and features Robert Daniels’s interview with James Gray and Imogen Sara Smith on Paper Tiger as well as Melissa Anderson on another Main Slate entry, All of a Sudden, along with Inney Prakash’s interview with director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. “As per usual,” write editors Devika Girish, Clinton Krute, and Michael Blair, “more articles (and podcasts) will be added to the issue each week, so keep an eye out, especially for our upcoming NYFF64 coverage.”

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Beyond Fest 2026

David Hudson — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:13:00 +0000

Robert Pattinson in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime (2026)

A lineup of eighty-one features may make Beyond Fest the biggest film festival in Los Angeles, but it’s Angelenos who have made it the highest-attended genre festival in the country. Presented in partnership with MUBI and the American Cinematheque, the fourteenth edition will open this evening with Primetime and a Q&A with director Lance Oppenheim.

Robert Pattinson stars as Chris Hansen, the Dateline NBC correspondent who landed his own show when the network decided that To Catch a Predator might be its strongest competitor against ABC’s monster hit Lost. Hansen’s team lured pedophiles into a house where they believed they would be having sex with a minor. Instead, Hansen would stroll onto the set with evidence of their intentions before handing them over to law enforcement.

To Catch a Predator, which ran from late 2004 to late 2007, “functioned first and foremost as entertainment,” writes Noomi Fry in the New Yorker, “which largely mooted its other vaunted missions—to serve justice, to get to the bottom of sexual pathology, to provide solace to abuse survivors—while also flattening the essential humanity of the show’s subjects, turning troubled individuals’ actions into a quasi-pornographic exhibit meant for an audience’s voyeuristic titillation.”

One of the questions Primetime raises is whether we really need a dramatization of a story told so well by David Osit in his documentary Predators, which was named one of the best films of last year by the New York Times and the Guardian. “Strange to say about a film full of child molesters, but Hansen comes off as the most unsympathetic person in the picture,” wrote Sean Burns when Predators premiered at Sundance.

Oppenheim’s version offers at least two justifications for itself. First, besides Pattinson—and yes, there is already Oscar chatter—the film boasts a terrific cast that includes Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Alex Winter, and Phoebe Bridgers.

In her review for Variety, Jessica Kiang writes that Primetime’s “uncompromisingly grimy approach would be actively repellent were it not for the extraordinary performances, which make Primetime a thing you cannot stop watching even as the desire to flee to the nearest shower cubicle grows. Most obviously, front and center, and in endlessly intrusive close-up, there’s Pattinson—who also serves as producer—playing the arrogant, fame-addicted, megalomaniac Hansen. Pattinson’s mimicry of the real Hansen’s physical mannerisms, like the awkward staging of his gotcha moments while he clutches a sheaf of damning chatroom printouts, is one thing. But his vocal impersonation, capturing the self-consciously over-rehearsed cadences of Hansen’s speech, is uncanny.”

The second justification is the consciously mapped-out historical context. “The screens in the backgrounds of Primetime repeatedly show us the fall of Iraq, the capture and trial of Saddam Hussein, wanted posters of Osama bin Laden,” notes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. “Among other things, Oppenheim suggests that To Catch a Predator, among the most popular shows of the early Forever Wars Era, represented the confluence of militarization, surveillance, paranoia, celebrity, and entertainment, as well as the kind of frontier justice George W. Bush often dreamt aloud about—all parts of a legacy our society is still dealing with.”

Festival Favorites

Also screening tonight is Bassam Tariq’s Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, fresh from its premiere in Toronto. Mahershala Ali stars as Latif, “a recently widowed father of three who’s struggling to maintain the division between his family life and the work he does as a hitman for a local Arab big shot,” as Vulture’s Alison Willmore describes him. Your Mother is “a film about faith, grief, fatherhood, and stabbing people to death, and it whips ass in a way that makes its origin story feel downright serendipitous.”

The director and star had been preparing a reboot of the Blade franchise that ultimately fizzled out. Your Mother is “clearly the film that Tariq and Ali were meant to make together all along,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge, “a dazzling hardboiled action drama that boasts at least as much lethally fancy swordplay as Blade, and significantly more ideas. Taking the hoariest of premises within the genre—jaded hitman is forced to take one last job—and significantly complicating it with finely drawn family drama and, most unusually and unexpectedly, a nuanced examination of Islamic faith in modern America.”

Half of Toronto’s Midnight Madness program is heading to Los Angeles, including Samjad’s “gory martial arts curry western” Half. Joshua Giuliano’s River is “an intensely meditative slasher with a chilly, arthouse edge,” writes Rocco T. Thompson at Slant. At the Film Stage, C. J. Prince calls Paolo Strippoli’s The Spiral a “devilishly fun Twilight Zone-esque tale told over four chapters and an epilogue. Think Richard Matheson’s short story ‘The Box’ scaled to apocalyptic heights, where a mother’s guilt traps her unaware family into a decades-long barter system from hell.”

Eugene Kotlyarenko’s “adventures in capturing ‘screenlife’ are, in my opinion, some of the most radically exciting feature work in cinema today,” writes Corey Atad. Vintage Violence is “internet-era ADHD filmmaking, done with extraordinary precision, and it’s funny. Extremely funny . . . I don’t know that we need too many more people making movies as online-brained as this, but I’m so glad Kotlyarenko is out there doing it, and doing it so damn well.” And according to Vadim Rizov at IndieWire, Matt Barats’s Anchors Aweigh poses the question, “What if Ross McElwee were a cretin?”

The Liberation, a Telluride premiere, is inspired by the real-life story of director Guy Nattiv’s grandmother. Carrie Coon stars as Rita, a Holocaust survivor who fell in with a community of women in the 1980s. “It was not her fault that this group happened to be a cult,” writes Joshua Rothkopf in the Los Angeles Times, “one that exploited her financially, sexually, and spiritually.” Nattiv “clearly has a lot of anger, turning the structure of a story that usually has an inspiring ending into something dark and cautionary. But I couldn’t shake it for days.” Coon is “endlessly fascinating, toggling between desperation and euphoria, while also bringing the best out of costars Tracy Letts and Bella Ramsey.”

Retrospectives and Revivals

Night Visions: The Shock and Awe of M. Night Shyamalan, a twelve-film retrospective, will open with the Eastrail 177 Trilogy—Unbreakable (2000), Split (2016), and Glass (2019)—and the director will be there. “The official history of M. Night Shyamalan’s career reads something like this,” wrote Josh Cabrita for Reverse Shot in 2019. “While hitting the jackpot with 1999’s The Sixth Sense and proceeding to make whatever he willed for the next decade, Shyamalan continually proved himself a gifted director often sabotaged by his lackluster writing and penchant for self-aggrandizement. For me, a true believer, the most sound argument for Shyamalan’s body of work has little to do with his auteurist status—that is, the formal and thematic continuities that can be taken as de facto evidence of his mastery. The most persuasive counter-narrative to the above history would instead upend misconceptions about the individual films themselves, demonstrating their mastery over form, the value of their nondenominational spirituality, and their complicated philosophical frameworks.”

Word came just yesterday from the Hollywood Reporter’s Borys Kit that Robert Eggers intends to direct and produce an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. On Friday, Beyond Fest will present A Decade of Decay: A Robert Eggers Marathon, beginning in the afternoon with The Witch (2016), followed by The Lighthouse (2019), The Northman (2022), and Nosferatu (2024), and including a Q&A with Eggers. Dernsie: The Marathon begins on the morning of October 4 with Joe Dante introducing The ’Burbs (1989) and culminating with a chat with Bruce Dern and Mike Mendez, whose Dernsie: The Amazing Life of Bruce Dern will see its U.S. premiere.

E. Elias Merhige will introduce the new restoration of his Begotten (1989), “an underground cinema landmark championed by the likes of Susan Sontag and Amos Vogel,” as Jordan Raup notes at the Film Stage. James Gray will discuss not only this year’s Paper Tiger but also Little Odessa (1994). On October 2, Q&As and screenings will include Richard Kelly and Donnie Darko (2001) and Guillermo del Toro and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), and Beyond Fest will host the world premiere of the VHS Edition of Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

One of the most-anticipated highlights of this year’s Beyond Fest—tickets were snapped up pretty quickly—will be the world premiere of the “Director’s Final Cut” of Miami Vice (2006), and Michael Mann will be on hand to take part in a Q&A. Twenty years ago, the film “seemed primed to quickly fade from cultural memory,” writes Brogan Morris in the Guardian. “Critics have since declared Miami Vice ‘genius’ and a ‘demented masterwork,’ while the fervency of the film’s fandom today rivals that of arguably any movie by the Heat and Collateral filmmaker Mann.”

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Long Live the Underground!

David Hudson — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 13:47:00 +0000

Stan Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night (1958) and Abigail Child’s Mayhem (1987)

Stan Brakhage’s films may “explode with sensual beauty,” as Fred Camper wrote in 2010, but they can also engage with some of the darkest moments of the soul with a profoundly emotional intensity. As Marilyn Brakhage has written, in Anticipation of the Night (1958), “the subjective camera of the unseen hero restlessly pursues elliptical transformations of imagery in an associative montage culminating in the shadow of a man who has hanged himself.”

It wasn’t the subject matter of Anticipation of the Night, though, that led Cinema 16, the film society founded in New York by Amos Vogel, to turn down a screening. Instead, it was a perceived formlessness that Jonas Mekas heralded as “a totally new, subjective cinema.” The rejection of Brakhage’s film by Cinema 16 led Mekas and nearly two dozen other filmmakers to form the New American Cinema Group and to found the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in 1961: “We don’t want false, polished, slick films—we prefer them rough, unpolished, but alive; we don’t want rosy films—we want them the color of blood.”

The Cooperative aimed to distribute the work of any artist who chose to submit it, and five years later, the late Ken Jacobs initiated the Millennium Film Workshop, which provided equipment, work spaces, and weekly screenings. Both landmark institutions are still thriving, and from Wednesday through October 8, the Museum of Modern Art will salute their legacies and ongoing impact with a multifaceted series, Long Live the Underground! Celebrating Six Decades of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Millennium Film Workshop.

“Somehow, by breaking all the rules of conventional cinema, underground film excavated the unconscious of American culture,” writes Ara Osterweil—a painter, professor, and the author of Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film—for MoMA’s Magazine. “When I first encountered underground films from the 1960s as a graduate student in my 20s, they blasted open new imaginative possibilities for the convergence of art, life, sexuality, and friendship . . . What a pleasure to re-experience cinematic gems like Ken Jacobs’s ludic portrait of Jack Smith in Little Stabs at Happiness (1963), Storm de Hirsch’s trippy extravaganza Peyote Queen (1965), Paul Sharits’s viscerally throbbing Piece Mandala/End War (1966), Tom Chomont’s sensuous Phases of the Moon (1968), or Joyce Wieland’s casting of New York City’s most popular rodent in her allegorical critique of the Vietnam War: Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968).”

Osterweil also emphasizes that the series pushes way past mere nostalgia. “Startling films like Palcorecore (Dana Dawud, 2023) remind us how urgent these institutions remain for the dissemination of unexpected visions of our devastated yet still wondrous world,” she writes. “Even two-minute sketches like How to Disappear Completely (Cameron Granger, 2020) and LESPRI (Jard Lerebours, 2024) demonstrate the profound capacity of experimental film not only to speak to but to work through personal and collective trauma.”

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TIFF 2026: The People Have Chosen

David Hudson — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 10:55:00 +0000

Guitarricadelafuente in Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s La bola negra (2026)

Anyone mentioning the People’s Choice Award voted on by attendees at the Toronto International Film Festival is going to add, as Stephanie Goodman does in the New York Times, that the coveted prize “can be a bellwether of the Best Picture Oscar, as in 2018 and 2020, when Green Book and Nomadland went on to win at the Academy Awards.” This year’s winner, announced on Sunday as TIFF 2026 wrapped, is La bola negra (The Black Ball), directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi.

Los Javis, as the two-man team is commonly known, shared the Best Director Award in Cannes with Paweł Pawlikowski (Fatherland), and La bola negra won its first audience award when it screened at the Sydney Film Festival in June. It’s the first film in a language other than English to win the People’s Choice Award since Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now? won in 2011. La bola negra will open in theaters on October 16 before landing on Netflix in December.

Cowritten with Alberto Conejero and inspired by an unfinished Federico García Lorca story, the film rolls out “a neorealist tale of a closeted young man seeking membership at a casino in 1932, a tragic wartime romance set in 1937, and a lo-fi drama about a historian prompted to investigate all of this in 2017,” writes Sophie Monks Kaufman at IndieWire. And there is a “fourth element, which serves as the connective tissue for everything,” a “timeless poetic expression of love for all the queer storytellers who died before they could truly live.”

Siân Heder’s disability-rights drama Being Heumann opened this year’s festival, and it’s the second runner-up. The first runner-up is Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky, “an underdog story about an underdog story,” as Vulture’s Alison Willmore puts it. It’s about “how down-and-out actor Sylvester Stallone, broke and forever typecast as a meathead thug, wrote a project about a small-time Philly boxer who gets a shot at the championship and then insisted anyone interested in making the movie agree to let him play the lead role.”

I Play Rocky is “a feel-good story with a guaranteed happy ending,” adds Willmore, noting that this “puts it in the sweet spot for Farrelly, who after decades of making gross-out comedies with his brother Bobby, went solo to make Green Book,” a “road trip movie that proposed that centuries of dehumanizing racial animus could be overcome by unlikely friendship and some ethnic humor. Say what you will about Green Book, and there’s a lot to say, but Farrelly definitely understands the mechanics of the sort of broad dramedy someone could take their grandmother to see around the holidays. (It’s no mistake that I Play Rocky goes wide on November 20, right before Thanksgiving.)”

Simon Stone’s Elsinore, starring Andrew Scott as Ian Charleson—the real-life star of Chariots of Fire (1981) who pushed through his ultimately terminal illness to deliver an immortal Hamlet at the National Theatre in 1989—won the International People’s Choice Award. We’ll take a closer look at Elsinore when it opens the seventieth BFI London Film Festival on October 7.

The first winner of the International People’s Choice Award when the prize was introduced last year was Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, and as it happens, both two runners-up this year are Korean films as well: Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love and Hur Jin-ho’s The Assassin(s), which Siddhant Adlakha, writing for Variety, calls “a clockwork political saga sure to spark curiosities about the attempted assassination of strongman South Korean prime minister Park Chung-hee in 1974, which resulted in the death of his wife, first lady Yuk Young-soo, as well as a young bystander.”

Reviewing “this entertaining procedural” for Screen, Tim Grierson notes that it “grows angrier as it barrels forward. The Assassin(s) focuses on three characters—a detective, a veteran newspaper editor, and his young reporter—who work together to unravel the truth, and the deeper the conspiracy goes, the more engaging the narrative becomes. In the process, the film reveals itself to be an impassioned salute to a free press and a condemnation of a corrupt government that knowingly deceived its citizens.”

Barry Avrich’s Darlene Love: I Know Where I've Been—described by Robert Daniels at RogerEbert.com as “a loving, endearing tribute to the best voice of her generation”—won the People’s Choice Documentary Award. The first runner-up, James Marcus Haney’s Black Sunflowers, “offers a painful portrait of Ukrainian youth caught at the moment when life should have been opening up,” writes Nataliia Serebriakova for FilmInk. “Instead, an entire generation has been forced to learn how to live alongside death.” And the second runner-up, Mila Aung-Thwin’s The Ultra Runner, is a portrait of ultramarathon competitor Tiberiu Uşeriu.

Directed by Matthew Rankin (The Twentieth Century, Universal Language), Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney won the People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award. Corey Atad is one of many freshly won-over fans, and he calls Ladies and Gentlemen “an almost impossible-to-describe, kaleidoscopic comedic documentary account of the former Canadian Prime Minister’s rise to the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives in the late-1970s and early ’80s, before finally winning the ultimate seat of power in Canadian politics. It’s an incredibly engrossing, and laugh-out-loud hilarious, surreal experience of a film.”

The first runner-up is Paolo Strippoli’s The Spiral, which premiered in the main competition in Venice. The Los Angeles Times’ Joshua Rothkopf calls it a “rapturously silly, ultra-enjoyable Italian horror movie that demands its own franchise pronto.” Sabu’s Arrested Memory, the second runner-up, stars Ethan Juan as an undercover detective whose memory is slipping, and it’s brought Johnnie To’s Vengeance (2009) to the minds of both Jake Cole at IndieWire and Sean Gilman at In Review Online.

Launched in 2015, TIFF’s Platform Prize “honors filmmakers with strong directorial vision and distinctive storytelling.” This year’s winner is Theja Rio’s Angh, “an exquisite elegy to the people of Nagaland, India,” as Robert Daniels describes it for Screen. “It concerns Anghba (Anghlong Konyak), an aged chief trying to stave off the slow death of his traditional village at the hands of a patronizing white American Baptist missionary (Douglas Henshall). Unlike most films about assimilation, no outward physical violence occurs here. The blows are instead to the spirit—especially when the chief’s mute son Amao (Sobino Rengma) becomes infatuated with the new colonizing religion. The chief’s holy battle is a tragic fight against the inevitable.”

Jurors Pablo Trapero (president), Amma Asante, Sylvia Chang, Luc Déry, and Albert Lee gave a Special Jury Award to Amanda Kernell’s Brace Your Heart. “In a remote Sámi village in the Swedish mountains,” writes Nikki Baughan for Screen, “twenty-year-old Ejva (Elli-Sara Valkeapää) inherits her father’s herd of reindeer after he dies unexpectedly. Forced to balance her grief with the needs of her family, the physical demands of the job, and the patriarchal traditions of this isolated community, Ejva faces a monumental challenge even before a horrifying encounter further knocks her confidence. Anchored by a raw, naturalistic performance from Valkeapää and expressive craft, this is a small but fierce exploration of female resilience.”

“Wavelengths, TIFF’s programming section for unconventional, artist-driven filmmaking, has long been an oasis for what Scott MacDonald has called ‘a critical cinema,’ works that interrogate social structures as well as the conditions of their own making,” writes Michael Sicinski for Notebook. No awards are presented to the works screened in the program, but Sicinski’s annual Wavelengths roundup is always an essential read.

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To Be Free

David Hudson — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:52:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972)

Patricio Guzmán’s The Battle of Chile (1975–1979) “endures to this day as a furious witness to a terrible history,” wrote Samuel Brodsky when he interviewed Guzmán for Film Comment a few years ago. The three-part chronicle of events leading up to, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the military coup that put an end to leftist Salvador Allende’s democratic government in Chile is “widely regarded as one of the towering achievements in the history of documentary film,” wrote Sukhdev Sandhu for the Guardian in 2012, and it “nearly didn’t happen.”

Chris Marker (La Jetée) had championed Guzmán’s documentary feature debut, The First Year (1972), which captured the first twelve months of the Allende administration. “Allende’s election had shaken the continent, the streets were heaving,” wrote Kaleem Hawa for Another Gaze last year, but a blockade on imports of film stock meant that Guzmán and his team couldn’t carry on working.

Marker sent a one-line telegram: “I will do what I can. Chris.” A month later, forty thousand feet of black-and-white film stock landed at the airport in Santiago. The completed film had to be smuggled out of the country with the help of the Swedish embassy. One cameraman had been killed during the shooting and another was “disappeared” in 1974. Guzmán, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of eighty-five, left Chile and worked in exile in France and Spain.

After the military junta was ushered out of power in 1990, Guzmán began making return trips to his home country. “Quieter and more inwardly focused than their predecessors,” writes Daniel Witkin for Reverse Shot in 2020, “Guzmán’s latter-day films show that the rage of his previous works are coalesced into a calm, resolute probing for personal and historical truth. Interweaving explorations of Chile’s landscape with interrogations of its national memory, they are at once free-associative and intricately constructed.”

“Beyond his directing,” writes Natalia Hernández Moreno for Cinema Tropical, “Guzmán was a foundational theorist and educator who reshaped how documentarians approach nonfiction storytelling across the Spanish-speaking world. Through his widely influential text Screenwriting for Documentary Film (El guion en el cine documental) and decades of teaching—including masterclasses at Cuba’s International Film and Television School (EICTV) in San Antonio de los Baños and institutions across Europe and the Americas—he argued passionately that nonfiction cinema demanded the same narrative architecture and poetic freedom as fiction.”

This week’s highlights:

Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972), which depicts the Angolan struggle for independence from Portuguese colonization, is “a cinematic work of immense historical and cultural importance that stages a reckoning with the interlocking systems of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy,” wrote Yasmina Price a few years ago. Writing for Sight and Sound, Rachel Pronger notes that the film is “not an abstracted public lecture on Marxist theory; it’s an intimate film, made by someone with skin in the game. Maldoror’s filmmaking was driven by a conviction that women like her should be telling their own stories.” Pronger also interviews Maldoror’s daughter Annouchka de Andrade, who has curated a season of her mother’s films running through October 4 at BFI Southbank in London.

Soraya Nadia McDonald points out in the Guardian that Maya Annik Bedward’s documentary Black Zombie establishes that “zombies are a Haitian idea, invented to capture the metaphysical anguish of being torn from one’s home and subjected to torture, rape, and forced labor.” Introducing his interview with Annik Bedward for Letterboxd’s Journal, Isaac Feldberg notes that the film is “concerned with not only the long history of the zombie but also its distortion in early Western literature and the cinema that followed.” This is a rich conversation touch on films ranging from White Zombie (1932) with Bela Lugosi through George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) to such recent films as Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025).

Avec Kim, the new wordless short film by Claire Denis for the Miu Miu Women’s Tales series, is now online and features Suzanne Lindon as a mechanic spiffing up a vintage Ford Granada and then cleaning up to head out to pick up a friend played by Kim Gordon, who provides a transporting soundtrack. In 2020, Lindon directed her first feature, Spring Blossom, and she tells Alex Denney at AnOther Magazine that, as the daughter of Sandrine Kiberlain and Vincent Lindon, she just knew that “people on Twitter and everywhere else would want to kill me because I was doing a movie. I know I grew up in a very privileged bubble in which it’s [possible] to make a film when you’re nineteen, but I’ve never hidden myself and I just decided to do whatever I wanted, which I think Claire appreciated.” Denis, says Lindon, “has this independence and spirit of just doing what she wants and saying what she has to say.”

New York’s Metrograph is currently presenting a series of films by Tsui Hark, and Nick Pinkerton has a piece in the Journal on “Tsui’s agonized howl of a movie,” Don’t Play with Fire (1980). Newly restored, Tsui’s third feature tracks three rebellious teens who team up with a young woman and blunder their way into the criminal underworld. “Tsui’s Hong Kong, like Dickens’s London, comes off as both teeming and oddly intimate, a city where the closeness and squalor of housing leads to much of life being lived on the streets, and people’s paths are constantly crisscrossing,” writes Pinkerton. “As abject and anguished as Tsui’s film may be, it is anything but enervating; the combination of virtuoso talent and fierce commitment to a vision never is.”

In 1964, Britain’s Granada Television broadcast what was to have been a one-off, Seven Up!, a collective portrait of fourteen seven-year-olds, ten boys and four girls, directed by Paul Almond. Michael Apted, a researcher who helped select the children, decided to follow up in 1970 with 7 Plus Seven, checking in on the same kids at fourteen. And he carried on, every seven years, passing away three years after completing 63 Up (2019). Now Asif Kapadia has directed the two-part 70 Up, which “has a more reflective and elegiac tone than in previous years,” writes Lucy Mangan in the Guardian. It’s “something of a meta-narrative too, as the participants give their thoughts about the series and about Apted.” In a touching piece for the BBC, George Wright talks with the surviving subjects of “the longest-running documentary series ever made. In 2024, it was voted the most influential TV show of the past fifty years.”

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Alex Gibney’s Musk

David Hudson — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 11:53:00 +0000

Alex Gibney’s Musk (2026)

In a recent cover story for the Hollywood Reporter, Steven Zeitchik calls documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney “the closest the current film world has to a Bob Woodward.” Gibney won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), an investigation into the CIA’s use of torture, and he’s won Emmys for Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012), which traces the history of clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief (2015).

In 2022, Gibney and his team began working on a film about Elon Musk for HBO. Within two years, they had what they considered to be a pretty solid account of the South African–born software engineer who developed an uncanny talent for turning money-losing companies into personal cash cows before cofounding PayPal (and then stepping away), founding SpaceX, taking over Tesla and the satellite network Starlink, cofounding OpenAI (and then stepping away), and taking over Twitter and rebranding it as X, where his own account is boosted while others—particularly those expressing views he disagrees with—are throttled.

By 2024, though, Musk was actively campaigning for—and to a considerable degree, helping to finance—the reelection of Donald Trump. Dressed in black and describing himself as “dark, gothic MAGA,” Musk joined the second Trump administration as the overseer of the newly launched Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whose dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is widely believed to have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands around the world.

HBO encouraged Gibney to carry on working on Musk, whose running time swelled from two hours to six before being whittled back down to around four. Immediately after the film’s premiere in Venice, Alex Spiro, an attorney acting on behalf of Musk, issued a legal threat. Gibney was not fazed. He’s been down this particular road many times before. But as THR’s Etan Vlessing reports, Gibney is worried about the eventual fate of his film.

It’s screening this month in Toronto and is slated for a theatrical release next month, but Paramount’s eventual takeover of Warner Bros. may lead to a dead end at HBO Max. “Larry Ellison, who is cited in the film, is one of Elon’s friends and one of the investors in his takeover of Twitter,” noted Gibney on Sunday. “And his son David Ellison,” the current CEO of Paramount Skydance, “has shown he’ll twist whatever facts are at his disposal in order to please the Capo dei Capi who happens to be the President of the United States. So that is a deep concern. But so far, so good.”

If the Ellisons turn out to be a roadblock, reviews will certainly not be. “If most of what [Gibney] presents here about Musk isn’t particularly new,” writes Beatrice Loayza in the New York Times, “there is a fearsome power to the way the director brings it all together. Musk isn’t just a pesky fixture in the news cycle. Gibney’s mega-portrait asks us to look at the sum of his actions and take him seriously as a threat to democracy.”

“None of what we have seen and thought about Musk can fully ready us for what the filmmaker has done here,” writes Steven Zeitchik. Musk is “an adventurous but methodical movie grounded in the thesis that, as he sees it, a dangerous huckster is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data. Gibney’s basic take on Musk is that he’s a confidence man whose power comes only from the stock market and disappears the minute we see through the facade of sales pitches—but [he] can do a whole lot of damage until that happens.”

“Predictably,” writes Leonardo Goi in his Notebook dispatch from Venice, “Gibney could not land a tete-à-tete with his subject, leaving Musk to summon a second-hand portrait sketched by reformed disciples and longtime skeptics. It also resorts to deep-fake technology to stage talking head–style segments where a digitally created Musk spouts some of the deranged stuff he’s said in public, a choice that befits the fake persona he’s nurtured and opportunistically tweaked through the years.”

Addressing Musk’s hard swerve to the right—especially during and after the pandemic, Musk established close ties with Argentina’s Javier Milei, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and the ascendant right-wing parties in France, Germany, and the UK—Slate’s Sam Adams points out that Gibney shows how Musk “found on Twitter an endless stream of pseudo-information to rationalize his own biases, the ultimate resource for a man who had come to believe that his own gut was the most reliable source of all. He discovered that his most unrestrained statements—which is to say, often, his most racist or sexist or simply cracked—got the biggest response, and he followed the trail his followers laid out for him.”

Ultraconservative and anti-trans influencer Ashley St. Clair, who has had a child with Musk, is one of Gibney’s interviewees, and as Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri notes, she “utters the film’s most terrifying line when she discusses the danger that Musk represents through his collusion with the government and his harnessing of the satellite technology that now effectively runs much of the world: ‘Elon is a nuke,’ she says.”

“This declaration comes near the end,” writes Rolling Stone’s David Fear, “and by that time, there’s more than enough evidence from the prosecution to suggest St. Clair’s sentiment should be taken very, very seriously. It’s not just that Musk has amassed a staggering amount of money, power, and influence. By this point, he seems to be all in on using these things to push an agenda that goes beyond self-preservation and enrichment, and now flirts with annihilation. Most portraits simply give you a sketch of the subject. This one gives you existential chills. It’s designed to scare the living shit out of you.”

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Jeremy Thomas: An Astonishing Career

David Hudson — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:53:00 +0000

Mark Cousins’s The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (2021)

“One of the greatest film producers, Jeremy Thomas, died last night,” posted writer and filmmaker Mark Cousins on Saturday. “I made it back from America to be with him at the end. We drank red wine and cried. Truly loved him.”

Cousins is probably best known for his epic 2011 documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey, but he’s also made “more, shall we say, idiosyncratic works,” as Matt Zoller Seitz puts it at RogerEbert.com. The Eyes of Orson Welles (2018), for example, is framed as what Glenn Kenny has called an “unabashedly, unapologetically personal” letter to the director.

For Seitz, The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (2021) is “one of Cousins’s best and most entrancing films. It’s a ‘road movie’ that follows Thomas, the producer of The Last Emperor, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Sexy Beast, Crash, Naked Lunch, and other notable features, as they drive from the UK to the Cannes Film Festival, with both Thomas and his biographer ruminating on what the work means and where it came from.”

“The job of film producer has always been notoriously hard to define,” wrote Mark Olsen at the top of his review in the Los Angeles Times, “because it can be so many different things: creative coach, finance manager, general facilitator, problem solver.” So, which is it? The Storms of Jeremy Thomas “basically answers ‘all of the above.’ At one point in the film, Thomas himself describes producing as ‘putting together people, ideas, and money.’”

A few years ago, Glenn Kenny hosted a Q&A with Thomas following a screening of Cousins’s film and hung out with him a bit outside of the theater bar while the legendary producer fired up a joint (and for the record, Kenny abstained). On Saturday, Kenny reflected on Thomas’s legacy in a piece with a killer title, “Come On, Don’t You Want to See a David Cronenberg Movie of Naked Lunch?”

“Thomas had filmmaking in his blood,” writes Kenny. “His dad was Peter Thomas, who directed Bob Hope and Katharine Hepburn in The Iron Petticoat on the one hand, and the penis-transplant-movie-with-a-Kinks-soundtrack Percy on the other. His uncle Gerald Thomas directed a slew of Carry On comedies. He spoke of his relatives with pride, and gratitude for what they had taught him; he wasn’t the least bit abashed by their work. He knew, as the best film workers do, that the love and the heartbreak and the headaches and the just damned hard work of picture-making is largely the same no matter what genre or register you’re working in. The last thing to be in this business is a snob.”

“A brilliant and inexhaustibly creative man,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “self-effacingly charming and quietly spoken in a world of loudmouths and show-offs, and hypervigilant for new talent,” Thomas “was more like a cross between an entrepreneur, an enigmatically clever and kindly Cambridge don, and the movie world’s favorite cool uncle, or maybe cool great-uncle.”

Raised in London, Thomas began working right out of school as an assistant editor on such films as Ken Loach’s Family Life (1971) and Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972). The first film he produced was Philippe Mora’s Mad Dog Morgan (1976), starring Dennis Hopper as a real-life outlaw in 1850s Australia.

When he returned to England, Thomas teamed up for the first time with Jerzy Skolimowski on The Shout (1978), and the pair would reteam—with Thomas serving as either producer or executive producer—on Essential Killing (2010), 11 Minutes (2015), and EO (2022). In 1980, Thomas made the first of three features with Nicolas Roeg, Bad Timing, followed by Eureka (1983) and Insignificance (1985).

After producing Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1982), Thomas turned to Stephen Frears’s The Hit (1984), starring Terence Stamp, John Hurt, and Tim Roth as British gangsters in Spain. “Frears turns this fish-out-of-water phenomenon of nouveau riche cockney gangsters seeking Shangri-La in Andalusia into a moral fable fraught with fatalism, an idea that clearly fascinated Jeremy Thomas,” writes Graham Fuller. “Sixteen years later, he and director Jonathan Glazer made Sexy Beast, in which the good life enjoyed by retired safecracker Gal (Ray Winstone) on the Costa del Sol is rocked by the psychotic Logan (Ben Kingsley), sent by his boss to bring Gal to London for a heist.”

Then came the towering milestone of an astonishing career, The Last Emperor (1987), independently produced, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, and the first—and so far, only—Western production that the Chinese government allowed inside the Forbidden City. “This was an epic of foreign coproduction, filled with the hope that China was ready to be a part of the whole world again,” wrote David Thomson in 2009. “And, yes, this is the film that won nine Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay,” but “don’t be misled by all this pomp and glory. The Last Emperor is better than that—especially if you realize early on that it’s not just an epic but also a small film, one in which, somehow or other, the scope of David Lean has been enriched with the vision of Ozu.”

Further Thomas and Bertolucci projects include The Sheltering Sky (1990), Little Buddha (1993), Stealing Beauty (1996), and The Dreamers (2003). In 2014, Sight and Sound’s Nick James sat down with Thomas for a long and relaxed chat. One anecdote segued into the next, and when it came to Bertolucci, Thomas noted that “there was a gaiety around his shoots. Lunch was a very important part of the filmmaking experience. It was a great lesson in how to handle talent.”

“A Jeremy Thomas production should always be pleasurable,” suggested James. “There’s no point otherwise,” said Thomas. “This is why I have trouble with minimalist cinema. For me a film should have aspirations to be grand. What’s going on is a privileged collaborative creative moment between a group of people. Travelling and arriving are very different. The travelling part is always magnificent in the memory, the arriving just okay.”

Luca Guadagnino interviewed Thomas for his seven-hour-plus documentary on Bertolucci, Joie de vivre, which has just premiered in Venice. “Jeremy Thomas’s death leaves a gigantic void,” Guadagnino tells Variety. “The space he was fulfilling was a space of pure cinema. Someone who knew how to collaborate with filmmakers and make them better, and how to be himself—a great filmmaker.”

Thomas did, in fact, direct one feature, All the Little Animals (1998), starring Christian Bale as a mentally impaired young man who takes shelter in the home of a recluse played by John Hurt. Roger Ebert noted that the film “has a fearsome single-mindedness that suggests deep Jungian origins.”

Thomas “loved directors,” Terry Gilliam tells Variety. Gilliam, who worked with Thomas on Tideland (2005) and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018), adds that the producer was “fearless in getting some very unlikely films financed and released, often to worldwide success . . . Most of all, he was a joy to work with. You always felt protected and encouraged, rare qualities to experience, especially when lack of time and money are swirling around you, raging at your head. Filmmaking is not cheap, and the pressures are intense, but Jeremy always remained calm and supportive. He was a rare and very unique gem in the world of producers.”

Further collaborations hammer home Gilliam’s comments: Karel Reisz (Everybody Wins, 1990), Cronenberg (Naked Lunch, 1991; Crash, 1996; A Dangerous Method, 2011), Takeshi Kitano (Brother, 2000), Richard Linklater (Fast Food Nation, 2006), Jim Jarmusch (Only Lovers Left Alive, 2013), Ben Wheatley (High-Rise, 2015), Matteo Garrone (Tale of Tales, 2015), and Takashi Miike (Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, 2011; Blade of the Immortal, 2017; First Love, 2019). And Miike’s Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo has just premiered in Toronto.

“We promised to celebrate the world premiere here in Toronto and have a good drink together,” Miike tells Variety. “This sudden news came out of nowhere, leaving me completely in shock and deeply saddened. Jeremy gave me my wings—he was a great mentor and an irreplaceable friend. Rest in peace for now. Until we meet again.”

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Underrepresented, Women Triumph in Venice

David Hudson — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:59:00 +0000

Mathilde Arcel and Flora Yde Sander in May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown (2026)

“I actually didn’t see Woman Unknown,” quipped jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal at a press conference following Saturday night’s presentation of the awards at the eighty-third Venice International Film Festival. “I just was like, ‘It’s made by a woman and so, Golden Lion!’”

Launching the always-teeming fall festival season, Venice opened nearly two weeks ago with another press conference in which Gyllenhaal was asked to address the paucity of women filmmakers in the main competition lineup. Only one of the twenty-one contenders, May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown, was directed solely by a woman, while NAZA, a late addition, was codirected by Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham. “There’s a systemic problem,” said Gyllenhaal. “It’s harder for women to get films financed.”

On Saturday, Gyllenhaal noted that she naturally “anticipated” being asked whether she and her fellow jury members—filmmakers Kaouther Ben Hania, Xavier Giannoli, Shahrbanoo Sadat, and Johnnie To; composer Daniel Blumberg; and theorist Francesco Casetti—had given the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, to Woman Unknown because May el-Toukhy is a woman. “I just want to celebrate a beautifully made movie that I felt was like a laser beam just for the well-made movie that it is,” she said.

El-Toukhy broke through in 2019 with Queen of Hearts, which was remade in 2023 by Catherine Breillat as Last Summer, and she has told the Hollywood Reporter’s Lily Ford that she worked “sixteen hours a day for more than a year” to make Woman Unknown. “I’ve spent all my savings. I’ve used every part of me to make this film and all the resources, all the muscle power I have.”

Her story is set in Copenhagen in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when Danish women accused of consorting with Nazi occupiers—“often regardless of evidence or circumstance,” as Hannah Strong notes in Little White Lies—were dragged out onto the street by the Resistance to be publicly shamed, their hair shorn, their clothes shredded, their naked bodies smeared with swastikas. “This is an angry, despairing film,” writes Sophie Monks Kaufman at IndieWire. “The spectacle of a supposedly freedom-fighting group, not so much over-correcting in the wake of collective trauma, but weaponizing that very trauma to unleash hell on a vulnerable group evokes Haneke-level bleakness in its assessment of human nature.”

Mathilde Arcel, who won the Coppa Volti for Best Actress, stars in her first feature as Marie, a housemaid and nanny engaged to her employer (Carsten Bjornlund), a widowed clothing manufacturer. Marie “carries herself as if permanently bound in a corset,” writes Beatrice Loayza in Variety, “breath held, mouth tight, her eyes shifty as if dreading the next reprimand. It makes sense given her workplace’s exacting standards, in which place settings are arranged according to centimeter-precise measurements and stony head maid Esther (Marina Bouras) is always watching.”

The screws are tightened when an old classmate (Thorbjorn Hedegaard) threatens to reveal a secret from Marie’s past. “Shot by Jasper Spanning,” writes Jonathan Romney for Film Comment, “this is a rigorous, intensely claustrophobic film, and Arcel’s performance is terrific—at first inscrutable, then agonizingly intense as Marie’s inner conflicts lead her to the point of explosion.” Woman Unknown screens tomorrow, Thursday, and Sunday in Toronto and next month in London.

Jury Prizes

Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, which explores the tense and complex dynamics between two married couples, won the Grand Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize. We took a first look at early reviews last week, and we’ll likely hear a lot more about Lee’s first feature since Burning (2018), especially when it screens at the New York Film Festival. For now, though, let’s simply note that Jessica Kiang, who has turned in an outstanding review for Variety, expands on her enthusiasm—engagingly and at length—in a conversation with Nicolas Rapold on The Last Thing I Saw.

The Special Jury Prize went to NAZA, whose title references an Israeli military acronym for the number of civilian casualties expected with each strike against a single target in the country’s ongoing campaign against Hamas in Gaza. “At one point,” notes Xan Brooks in the Guardian, a producer of the film, “approval was given to kill 500 NAZA for one Hamas member.”

Introducing his interview with Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor—who codirected the Oscar-winning No Other Land (2024) with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal and are now being accused of treason by Israel’s culture minister, who is threatening to strip the filmmakers of their citizenship—the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough calls NAZA “one of the most shocking and controversial documentaries of the year. It may also prove to be one of the most indispensable.”

“The film’s setup is disarmingly simple,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. On rooftops in Tel Aviv, Abraham talks with twenty-four Israeli intelligence officers. It’s night, so they can’t be seen, and their voices are altered to safeguard their anonymity. The interviewees explain how they use AI to determine targets and then send out drones to complete the job.

“They admit to knowingly wiping out entire neighborhoods, fully aware of the catastrophic human toll,” writes Ebiri. “These were not outliers, or accidents, or isolated incidents. The murders were, again, part of a system. ‘Do you think it’s a genocide?’ Abraham asks one of his subjects. ‘Yes, absolutely,’ is the response.”

Director, Screenplay, and More

The Silver Lion for Best Director went to Ilya Khrzhanovsky, who has spent twenty years working on a project inspired by the life and times of quantum physicist Lev Landau, spawning plenty of controversy as well as two features, a television series, and an installation in Paris—so far. More features and series are planned, but the latest iteration, entitled simply Dau, presents itself as a sort of summing-up.

“Weighing in at just over 200 minutes,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge, “and spanning four decades in the life of a physicist involved in the Soviet atom-bomb project, the film certainly announces itself as a grave and major work. But beneath the impressive, sometimes seizure-threatening sound and fury of its formal construction, Dau feels dramatically and rhetorically thin: It plays as an avant-garde counterpart to such American films as Oppenheimer and The Brutalist (whose Oscar-winning DP, Lol Crawley, is one of three credited here), which likewise portrayed the social and ideological turmoil of a historical era through the portrait of a single tortured man.”

Stéphane Brizé, Coralie Amédéo, and Olivier Gorce won the award for Best Screenplay. Directed by Brizé, A Good Little Soldier stars Alba Rohrwacher as “a woman swimming in the turbulent waters of middle management, trying to both appease her superiors and deal with problematic employees who can’t seem to get along,” as Jordan Minter describes her in the Hollywood Reporter. “If the somewhat sardonic tone of A Good Little Soldier, as well as its focus on a female protagonist struggling to maintain her place in the hierarchy while also being a good mom, is something of a departure for the French auteur, this is very much a Brizé movie through and through. In other words, the film is tense, realistic, and compellingly performed . . . but also a bit schematic and didactic.”

John Malkovich, who costars in Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine with Sam Rockwell, won the Coppa Volpi for Best Actor. The year is 1973, and the CIA has sent a bickering pair of agents to Easter Island on a mission that has something to do with the destabilization of Chile’s democracy not long before a military coup will overthrow Salvador Allende and his governing coalition. Malkovich is “having fun here, and his pleasure becomes our delight,” writes Time’s Stephanie Zacharek.

The Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor or Actress went to Malou Khebizi for her turn in Cédric Kahn’s A Place to Heal, which the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw calls “a docu-realist study” of a psychiatric facility for teens aged between fifteen and eighteen. In this “powerful and committed” film, writes Bradshaw, Khebizi plays Lucia, “a defiantly sexualized wild child with a clear issue of abuse in her background, permanently at war with her mum, involved in chaotic abuse for which the term ‘sex work’ is not entirely accurate.”

Orizzonti

In Diane in the Loop, the winner of the award for Best Film in the Orizzonti program spotlighting up-and-coming talent, twenty-eight-year-old Diane (Ninon Borsei) discovers that her mother (Sandrine Black) was raped a few years before she was born. And she’s out for revenge. The film’s producers are Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, and as Matt Zoller Seitz writes at RogerEbert.com, “writer-directors Anne Sirot and Raphaël Balboni not only honor the masters but also infuse the tale with dry humor and a playful air of mystery that is uncharacteristic of them, which makes the movie bearable when it goes dark.”

Jacqueline Lentzou (Moon, 66 Questions) won the award for Best Director for her second feature, A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra. Fifteen-year-old Jo (Evita Andriopoulou) is dealing with a series of everyday frustrations as well as a crush on a new friend, Phaedra (Anastasia Gouliamou), when nightfall brings “a devastating narrative left-turn,” as Hannah Strong puts it. The film’s “final moments are among its most affecting, carefully, quietly showing the void left by a senseless loss.”

Jury president Valérie Donzelli; our own president, Peter Becker; and fellow jurors Elizabeth Lo, David Pablos, and Barbara Ronchi presented a Special Orizzonti Jury Prize to House of the Wind, which also won the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for the best first feature in any competitive program at the festival. Writer-director Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu dedicates the film to his mother, Josette Kwanya, who turned in her starring role before passing away in 2024. House of the Wind is “a compelling study of old age, solitude, and solidarity between generations against the backdrop of contemporary economic challenges in the director’s native Cameroon,” writes Jonathan Romney for Screen.

Director Tommaso Landucci and cowriter Damiano Femfert won the award for Best Screenplay for Children of the Monkey, starring Riccardo Scamarcio, who won the Best Actor award, and Lidiya Liberman as a couple who devote their lives to caring for their disabled son. “This is a heart-wrenching but effective examination of a number of complex themes, carefully woven together into a lively, poetic depiction of the challenges that come with parenthood,” writes Matthew Joseph Jenner for the International Cinephile Society.

Giornate and Critics’ Week

Giornate degli Autori, the sidebar founded in 2004 and modeled on the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, showcases ten films each year, and this year’s GdA Director’s Award went to María Aparicio for Sometimes Sadness, Sometimes Rebellion. Eva Bianco plays a woman passing through Madrid when she’s approached by an Argentine historian (Roger Koza) at the Reina Sofía Museum.

The jury headed by filmmaker Carla Simón issued a statement: “We left the cinema deeply moved, by a sadness and a spirit of rebellion that do not oppose one another, but coexist as two faces of the same disorientation.”

The winner of the Grand Prize at the forty-first Settimana Internazionale della Critica, the independent parallel section organized by the National Union of Italian Film Critics, is Tommaso Usberti’s Before the War. Piero Usberti, the director’s brother, stars as the young and proudly macho Guido, whose worldview is upended when he finds himself falling for Sonia, a Kosovar immigrant to Guido’s small town in northern Italy.

Jurors Chloé Barreau, Júlia Berkes, and Caterina Mazzucato praised Before the War as a film that “relies as much on silence as on words, where sound and music become a battlefield in their own right to explore urgently contemporary themes: toxic masculinity, impossible desire and the individual’s profound loneliness.”

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Turning Points

David Hudson — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:35:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Jafar Panahi’s No Bears (2022)

The trailer has racked up nearly six million views and become an instant meme. Codirected by Nathan Fielder (The Rehearsal) and Lance Oppenheim, whose Primetime has premiered in Venice to mixed-to-positive reviews, You Can See Everything was the big surprise screening at Telluride last weekend and is now the latest addition to the lineup of this year’s New York Film Festival.

In 2022, Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors in her health-tech company Theranos, and one month before she began serving an eleven-month sentence in the summer of 2023, she gave Fielder, Oppenheim, and their small crew wide-open access to her home. “What begins as a fascinatingly intimate portrait of a deluded or disingenuous scammer reveals as something even wilder, more ambitious, and less predictable, until we’re left to ponder what value a personal truth has at all,” writes Angie Han in the Hollywood Reporter.

Around halfway into the three-hour running time of You Can See Everything, Holmes is off to prison, and “controlling partner Billy Evans takes center stage, along with the real star of the film, a celebrated actress that Fielder recruits to help him in his inquiry,” notes Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Times. Moderating the Q&A after the premiere at Telluride, Emma Stone, Fielder’s costar in The Curse, “called this section of the movie a ‘rom-com caper’ and she’s not far off.”

As Venice heads into its final weekend, Toronto has opened with Being Heumann, starring Ruth Madeley as disability-rights activist Judy Heumann and directed by Siân Heder, whose Coda (2021) won four top awards at Sundance and three Oscars. Heder lets Being Heumann “get shaggy, which appropriately captures the smoky, late-’70s vibe of these hippy-ish protesters,” writes Richard Lawson for the Guardian. “Heder’s ensemble, perhaps the largest cast of disabled actors this critic has ever seen, grooves on this energy, having poignant fun with the anarchy of it all. Eventually, though, things have to get more serious, because these are serious matters, and Heder’s film flattens into something far more generic.”

We’re in Toronto, too—not with the Criterion Mobile Closet this year but with our first brick-and-mortar store. You’ll find Cinema Cellar at 129 John Street, not far from TIFF Lightbox and the Scotiabank Theatre. Elsewhere, the Los Angeles Silent Film Festival is on through the weekend, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is presenting Alternative Visions through November 18. João César Monteiro, Poet-Provocateur is on at the Harvard Film Archive through October 30, and the Yale Film Archive is hosting Man of Vision: Andrzej Wajda Centenary Film Series through December 17.

Andrei Ujică, “one of contemporary cinema’s finest film essayists,” is being celebrated with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through Wednesday just as Meridian, a collection of Claudia Nedelcu Duca’s interviews with Ujică, is coming out from Sticking Place Books. There are also series on in New York dedicated to the work of the late Anja Breien, and in conjunction with the publication of Music Sets You Free, composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Sight and Sound is republishing its 1970 interview with Claude Chabrol as his films screen at BFI Southbank and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. ICA will also host the UK premiere of Robert Wilson and the CIVIL warS (1987) and screen two more films by Howard Brookner as well as Aaron Brookner’s 2016 tribute, Uncle Howard. And in Vienna, the Austrian Film Museum is presenting The Early Spring of Chinese Cinema 1922–1964 through October 22.

Before turning to this week’s highlights, let’s note that, with TCM, we’re copresenting a new season of The Plot Thickens, the podcast hosted by Ben Mankiewicz. Stanley Kubrick, an eleven-episode series, begins on September 24.

“Iranian cinema in the second half of the twentieth century inevitably calls to mind poetry, stillness, contemplation, nature, and illumination,” writes Ali Farahmand in the new Brooklyn Rail. “From Sohrab Shahid Saless to Abbas Kiarostami, from Amir Naderi to Bahram Beyzaie, and across much of post-Revolutionary Iranian filmmaking, one encounters a common faith in omission and narrative economy—a faith that strips the image of immediate spectacle to create space for reflection.” But in the twenty-first century, films by such directors as Jafar Panahi, Asghar Farhadi, and Mohammad Rasoulof share “a common impulse: a movement away from metaphor and toward lived reality . . . In a world where the street, the prison, violence, and death continually intrude upon everyday life, can metaphor still remain the privileged path to truth, or must the poet inevitably become a witness?”

Mark Asch has a terrific piece in the Baffler on films about researchers delving into archives. “Shot in large part in the Gothic environs of academic libraries,” writes Asch, Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor “chases a nagging, marginal query into the dimmest parts of the stacks, where a narrative is reanimated for posterity, page by page.” The “satire of academia” in Ricky D’Ambrose’s Notes on an Appearance (2018) is “more acid,” while an “on-screen academic’s feeling of communion with the past, and commensurate anxiety over her obligation to it, is also a major component of a series of films made by the director Sofia Bohdanowicz and star Deragh Campbell,” including Veslemøy’s Song (2018) and MS Slavic 17 (2019).

Taking Steven Shaviro’s new book Neptune Frost: Movies Minute by Minute as an inspiration and guide, Charles Tonderai Mudede writes in the new e-flux Journal about “the most important Afrofuturist work of this decade, poet Saul Williams and playwright Anisia Uzeyman’s 2021 film . . . What Neptune Frost—and Shaviro’s analysis—make clear is that for an interpretation of technological development to be meaningful, it must not be universalized but specific to capitalism. Advanced technologies do not come from the stars (Black Panther) nor from the distant past (Sun Ra), but from ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ in an economic system that came into existence four hundred years ago. If this fact is missed, then the future, and therefore science fiction, is also lost. And if the future is lost, then Afrofuturism as a movement is worthless. Our battles are in front of us, not behind us.”

When Alan Jacobs reads James Agee, David Thomson, or Pauline Kael, it “doesn’t matter, it never matters, whether I agree with them.” Jacobs’s essay in the Hedgehog Review on the critics he returns to most often focuses primarily on Kael: “Twenty-five years after her death in 2001, and thirty-five after she retired from writing reviews, it is clear that Kael wasn’t a film critic at all. She didn’t write reviews, or even essays; rather, each of her ‘reviews’ was a chapter in her autobiography—an autobiography written over decades and built not on a narrative arc but rather a long series of occasions. For Kael, movies become the occasions for writing the story of one’s life.”

At Defector, Vikram Murthi looks back on three summer hits, all of them tinged with horror and made by extraordinarily young men. Curry Barker’s Obsession attempts “to critique misogyny while playing up ‘crazy girlfriend’ clichés for shocks or laughs,” while Kane Parsons’s Backrooms “fares slightly better with regards to subtext, but its obliquely creepy vibes run headfirst into a trite pop-psychology framework and some insipidly unreal monsters. In sharp contrast,” the “allegorical surface” of Alexander Ullom’s It Ends, in which four recent graduates find themselves stuck on a seemingly endless road to nowhere, “allows for multiple universal and generation-specific interpretations.” Murthi notes that in a 2024 Filmmaker profile, Ullom remarked: “The promise of a future or nuclear family is dead, so enter the world and form your own moral system, and good luck.”

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Robert Greene’s Too Much Sugar

David Hudson — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:53:00 +0000

Robert Greene’s Too Much Sugar (2026)

“Simply put,” wrote Robert Greene for Sight and Sound in 2020, “all movies are hybrids.” By that point, Greene had made a string of features—Fake It So Real (2011), Actress (2014), Kate Plays Christine (2016), and Bisbee ’17 (2018)—that delved further and further into the conviction that he expressed in a 2014 essay for the same magazine, namely, “that I prefer to see the relationship between fiction and nonfiction more as an unstable continuum.” And as “the kind of marketing term” that “might be useful in some vague branding sense,” hybrid is “ultimately reductive and potentially damaging to the films to which it becomes attached.”

In 2021, Greene pressed deeper into a realm where fiction and nonfiction are doing much more than blurring the lines between them with Procession, in which six men who had been abused by priests collaborated with Greene and his crew to create reenactments of the most traumatic episodes of their lives. Now, with Too Much Sugar, which has premiered in the Orizzonti program in Venice, Greene is enriching his collaborative process with his subjects.

Or, as Jordan Mintzer puts it in the Hollywood Reporter, Greene is “creating a unique form of cine-therapy that has become the indie auteur’s trademark. Here, he turns the camera on a pair of friends from the tiny rural enclave of Moberly, Missouri, revealing working-class men marked by euphoria and heartbreak, love and family trauma, pranks and pathos in a seldom-depicted pocket of small-town America.” Greene encourages ex-convicts and best buds Ryan “Holli-wood” Holliger and Michael “AccRite” Midgyett as well as members of their families to make short films depicting their own lives as they wish they could be.

“We might see Holliger yelling instructions to his son as he teaches him how to punch,” explains Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, and “a few minutes later, we see the son doing the same to Holliger, a role reversal for the movie they’re making. Elsewhere, a realistic fight breaks out—until someone yells cut. Pretend tears become real tears. The movies these people make have one foot in genre and another in the awful truth. One kid wants to make a supernatural fantasy, another a gangster movie, another a boxing movie. Holliger’s mom, diagnosed with breast cancer, wants to make a horror movie about her cancer, called Die Cancer, Die!”

For Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com, what ultimately makes Too Much Sugar “powerful, as opposed to merely intriguing, is its mid-narrative pivot toward AccRite. He’s been a broken husk ever since he lost one of his sons, then sixteen, in a senseless shooting after a house party. AccRite wants to make a time-travel thriller in which he rescues his son and brings him forward into the future where he can live a full life. The agony emanating from AccRite’s haunted face and often watery eyes is almost too much to take . . . That so many of these moments could be either real, caught-on-camera eruptions of pure pain, or improvisational theater exercises that mutate into primal scream therapy further emphasizes the film’s belief that, deep down, everyone knows how to act, and would use it for therapeutic purposes all the time if they only knew how.”

“By the time I got to seventh grade, when I was about twelve years old, I had lived in fifteen different places,” Greene tells Nataliia Serebriakova in an interview for the International Cinephile Society. “So when you move around that much as a kid, you learn that you are a different person in every single one of those places . . . That was something that, through the process of making these films, I realized I had done, and I realized that is why I was obsessed with it. Through making films that are about people’s realities, but then watching them perform what they want to be, what they hope to be, what they dream to be, and all these other things, you realize that that is what we all do. That is survival.”

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Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love

David Hudson — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:50:00 +0000

Jeon Do-yeon and Cho Yeo-jeong in Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love (2026)

Throughout the Labor Day weekend, premieres of some of the season’s most promising films were popping off in Venice and Telluride. The first episodes of the fall marathon are out from the Film Comment Podcast and The Last Thing I Saw, and critics are posting ratings to the grid at Moirée. While some are scoping out Oscar prospects for a few standout performances—for example, Julianne Moore’s in Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, Robert Pattinson’s in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, and Andrew Scott’s in Simon Stone’s Elsinore—others have been enthralled by what the Hollywood Reporter is calling the “sensation” of Venice, Possible Love, the first feature from Lee Chang-dong since Burning (2018).

“Clocking in at 164 minutes, it’s a huge, novelistic work,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. “Lee, already a master of absorbing dramas, has made what might be the most powerful, political, hypnotic film of his career.” Venice’s eighty-third edition, “and awards season in general, is filled with bravura performances, with brilliant actors doing high-wire acts that pull us into their characters’ realities while also allowing us to admire the risks the actors themselves are taking. By contrast, the characters and the performances in Possible Love creep up on us, steadily and slowly, until we’re so invested in their lives that even minor events can take our breath away.”

Sul Kyung-gu, who starred in Lee’s Peppermint Candy (1999) and Oasis (2002), plays Ho-seok, who has been laid off by SP Heavy Industries. When he joined a strike to protest, SP called in the state to conduct a brutal crackdown. Ho-seok is hurting—and drinking—and his wife, Mi-ok, does what she can to cope. The pair have a son, Cheol (Jung Seol), and a yearslong bond that is strong but strained. As Mi-ok, Jeon Do-yeon, “delivers another once-a-century performance less than twenty years since her first collaboration with Lee,” Secret Sunshine (2007), writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich.

Enter Ye-ji, an aspiring filmmaker who has decided to make the private lives of the laboring class the subject of her first documentary. Cho Yeo-jeong’s Ye-ji has reminded more than a few reviewers of her Yeon-kyo, the well-meaning woman who has married into wealth and privilege in Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019). Ye-ji’s husband, Sang-woo, is played by Zo In-sung, who has broken through internationally this year with a leading performance in Na Hong-jin’s Hope. And Ye-ji, who has befriended Mi-Ok and is dead sure that Ho-seok would be the ideal subject of her film, convinces Sang-woo to have the working-class couple over for a weekend in their well-appointed home.

“The movie’s most potent scene occurs late in the film when, with Ye-ji’s camera rolling, Ho-seok finally lets his guard down,” writes Time’s Stephanie Zacharek. “Ye-ji may be getting the footage she set out for, but has she earned it honestly? Sul Kyung-gu is sensational here. If the character he’s playing is key to Ye-ji’s movie-within-a-movie, he’s also Possible Love’s anguished beating heart.”

“There is perhaps a subtle critique here, of the predatory instincts of the filmmaker towards their subject, of the desire to invade someone else’s life and shape their reality according to your own will,” writes Jessica Kiang in Variety. “These are instincts that Lee has somehow been born without. His subjects may be fictional creations but, especially as embodied by such a fine cast, they’re allowed to live and breathe their own private existences, their own personal idiosyncrasies, yielding characters who are almost as unknowably strange as, in your secret heart, you know yourself to be.”

“Through tipsy confessions and wistful recollections, Lee carefully unpacks the contrasting marriages, masterfully observant and tender in his approach,” writes Hannah Strong at Little White Lies. “Under the surface, desire is a knife edge, whether it’s the blunt sense of ownership over everything that comes with generational privilege or the sharp ache of the working man for a sense of security. It’s a remarkable feat that Lee contains so many narrative threads within Possible Love without ever losing command of them.”

“In its scenes of factories, union gatherings, and ex-employee counseling groups,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, “Possible Love at times seems to sit somewhere near the process-based approaches of, say, Laurent Cantet or Frederick Wiseman, while its unhurried build from low-key conversation-as-action into more emotionally charged territory reminded me of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s recent All of a Sudden. But comparisons aside, this is unmistakably a Lee Chang-dong film, its aching humanism reflecting the co-existence of despair and hope.”

Possible Love opens with a dedication to Dekalog: Ten (1988), the final chapter in Krzysztof Kieślowski and cowriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s series tackling each of the Ten Commandments. The dedication is a nod to an ongoing project to reimagine each installment, but Possible Love strays farther from the original than Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales has from Dekalog: Six. Following the premiere in Venice, Possible Love heads next to festivals in Toronto and New York and will see a limited theatrical release on October 23 before landing on Netflix on November 6.

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Holding Our Own

David Hudson — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 08:47:00 +0000

Did You See This?

Mike Leigh’s Bleak Moments (1971)

And we’re off. Venice has opened with Danny Boyle’s Ink, and Telluride, opening today and running through Sunday, has announced a lineup of more than sixty features. The Colorado festival with what IndieWire’s Anne Thompson calls a “Rocky Mountain summer-camp vibe” will host the world premieres of Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, with Julianne Moore; Andrew Haigh’s Colm Tóibín adaptation, A Long Winter; Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care, with Kate O’Flynn; Simon Stone’s Elsinore, with Andrew Scott; and David Zellner and Nathan Zellner’s Alpha Gang, with Cate Blanchett.

Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman, will see its world premiere at the New York Film Festival (September 25 through October 12). Artificial is one of more than 250 titles lined up for the seventieth BFI London Film Festival, slated to run from October 7 through 18. The festival will launch Ray Gunn, the long-awaited animated sci-fi mystery from Brad Bird (The Incredibles), and The Trip to the Northern Lights, the fifth season of Michael Winterbottom’s travel series featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.

The Viennale, in the meantime, is previewing a 2026 edition (October 22 through November 3) that includes special programs dedicated to Jocelyne Saab and Austrian films of the 1990s as well as a Robert Aldrich retrospective copresented with the Austrian Film Museum. An accompanying book edited by Christoph Huber features a foreword by Dominik Graf: “We have been missing a director like Aldrich for decades. And we miss him especially now.”

This week’s highlights:

The new Yale Review features an essay by Bilge Ebiri on “what I’ll call reticent auteurs, directors whose scarce output lends them a certain mystique.” Víctor Erice, for example, or Lance Hammer, Charles Laughton, Barbara Loden, Elem Klimov, Julie Dash, and of course, Terrence Malick. “The category is a capacious one,” writes Ebiri, “encompassing reclusive geniuses, thwarted iconoclasts, and tragic shooting stars. Some of these artists make only one movie. Some make more but resist the temptations of a prolific career, because of their own exacting standards, the challenge of raising money to make films, or forces beyond their control. The idea of a reticent auteur has less to do with a filmmaker’s individual circumstances and more to do with our response to what they make.”

“Four city jerks, privileged and frustrated young men from Kolkata, head to the countryside for a few days of slothful rest and rowdy dissipation,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody as he revisits Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest (1970), “a teeming, turbulent, confrontational meld of emotion and observation, placing the eruptive pressure of societal conflict amid the seeming trivia of social life . . . As the story unfolds, relationships between friends, transactions with locals and bureaucrats, episodes of love and lust, and moments of painful self-awareness produce a subjective panorama of unredressed inequality, squandered energy, stifling tradition, and a restive quest for liberation.”

In a piece for Filmmaker on Universal Westerns, the Museum of Modern Art series that ran this summer, Ricky D’Ambrose notes that critic Philip French sensed in the genre “‘a pessimistic feeling about the fragility of American civilization and its problem in putting down roots.’ For French, the ghost town is emblematic here because it becomes the one place where ‘the central characters are doomed to die or emerge shriven.’ In our own time, this ‘pessimistic feeling’ has found another form: namely, the ‘elevated’ horror film, in which the ghost town has reached a state of immanence and in which dread is either domestic or dispersed into ambient trauma and grief. Perhaps the present glut of horror movies, many of them having zipped through the YouTube-to-Hollywood pipeline of recent years, will one day look as sealed and symptomatic as Italy’s waxen white-telephone movies of the 1930s, which perfected the comforts of the private world at the moment that the public one was being utterly dismantled, with fascism on the rise.”

Contemporary at 75 is a season of events happening this fall all across London celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Contemporary Films, a distributor founded in 1951 by Charles Cooper, “the East End–raised son of Jewish refugees from the Russian pogroms” and “a Communist whose first involvement in film was with Kino, distributor of such titles as Battleship Potemkin (1925) in the 1930s, when anti-Soviet censorship was at its height,” as Henry K. Miller writes for the BFI. Contemporary has introduced Londoners to the work of Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda, Yasujiro Ozu, and Mike Leigh, whose directorial debut, Bleak Moments, was picked up by Contemporary in 1971. “We were fresh on the block and innocent,” Leigh tells the Guardian’s Andrew Pulver, “and you take everything for granted in some way. But actually, when you think about it, they were pretty remarkable and they embraced this thing.”

To mark the twelfth anniversary of a film that took twelve years to make, select theaters have been screening Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014) again, giving the Los Angeles Times’ Mark Olsen an opportunity to chat with the director about his cast “actually having lived those years and earned those feelings”; what differentiates that epic shoot from one of his current projects, an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Merrily We Roll Along that will take twenty years to complete; and about the endurance of cinephilia. “I started noticing this post-pandemic,” says Linklater. “The audience that came back was really strong and it was young . . . I’m glad to see cinema holding its own within the bigger struggle for what people think is worthy of their time.”

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