The concept of being a flop, a loser, a dud, an empty promise, and a failure in 2026. The new year is already growing old, but the pressure that came in with it grows ever more ripe. Following the straightforward lines of production and consumption along which time…
After A New Love in Tokyo, Banmei Takahashi turned beyond the mortal realm. Japan was fine. His films — whether through home video as V-Cinema or the erotic underground of pink film — had championed women. Sex work was not shamed. Instead, these women were human and searched for…
Italian-American documentarian Gianfranco Rosi has been making films for 30 years, but they’ve never quite been entirely about what is shown on the screen. His 2010 critical breakout El Sicario, Room 164 found him alone in a hotel room with a Mexican cartel hitman who’d previously used that…
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! brashly announces in its opening title card that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein on a dare, and that’s an ethos the film itself has internalized. A postmodern, thumb-in-the-eye of a film that wears its politics loudly, the film functions as an exceedingly loose adaptation of both Shelley’s…
With miscarriage after miscarriage of justice, the United States has all but exposed the amorality at the heart of its empire: first the Epstein files were withheld, then they were redacted, then they found limited release, and, when released, were blatantly defended by the very conditions under which…
For the most part, the documentaries that have made Gianfranco Rosi’s reputation have a firm basis in geography. Sacro GRA (2013) explored life in Rome as circumscribed by the city’s major beltway. Fire at Sea (2016) considered the refugee crisis by focusing on life on the island of…
An old army colleague of mine, Colonel Cosgrove, wept today. He wept at a world so crude and bleak. “Could it be,” his red eyes meeting mine, “that we are so base and low, so utterly lost, that we must deprave ourselves and our fellows? I believe in…
The Bluff isn’t the same kind of pirate film as Pirates of the Caribbean. Unlike the leviathan Disney franchise, The Bluff has very little seafaring, the violence is grueling, and it’s about small folk rather than rich captains and governors’ daughters. The perspective shift is the film’s main…
In those chilly days of the Romantic poet, Samuel Coleridge sought to distinguish two synonyms. What is imagination, and what is fancy? He had this to say: “Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the…
Where is the line between genuine love and selfish devotion? That’s the question bubbling at the center of Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer’s sophomore feature, Honey Bunch. The directing duo, now a couple, having gotten together while making revenge-thriller Violation, keep finding much to mine in the deep,…
In “Wuthering Heights” — as Emerald Fennell sees it — death and ecstasy rest on the head of the same pin. Its opening credits are set to what sounds like someone groaning in pleasure on a squeaking bed; it’s soon revealed to be the last gasps of a…
Krakatoa If one were to conjure an impression of the apocalypse, it might be in the heart of sound — a detonation so vast and infinite that all imaginable existence would cease. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove lent no little irony to the proceedings of annihilation when it overlaid its…
The haze of childhood offers considerable dwelling space for joy and grievance alike; forceful then but mostly latent now, these emotions nonetheless bear the transformative power that frequently molds children into the adults they love and fear most. For seven-year-old Swee Swee (Ong Xuan Jing), the effervescent protagonist…
Luc Besson, famed French director of Léon: The Professional and The Fifth Element, returns from making the relatively obscure June and John (2025) to release the highest-grossing French film of last year, Dracula. Subtitled A Love Tale in some territories, Besson’s Dracula is puerile and flamboyant. It has…
January Reviews Week of December 28 Genre Views We Bury the Dead — Zak Hilditch January 2 by Daniel Gorman Read Review Week of January 4 Genre Views Primate — Johannes Roberts January 9 by Christian Craig Read Review Spotlight Magellan — Lav Diaz January 9 by Matt…
Moonglow Writing in e-flux Journal on Klute’s semicentenary, Isabel Sandoval discussed in detail the immeasurable influence of Alan J. Pakula’s neo-noir crime thriller — especially its central female character Bree Daniels, as well as the actress that played her, the great Jane Fonda — on the kind of…
Writing in e-flux Journal on Klute’s semicentenary, Isabel Sandoval discussed in detail the immeasurable influence of Alan J. Pakula’s neo-noir crime thriller — especially its central female character Bree Daniels, as well as the actress that played her, the great Jane Fonda — on the kind of women…
In any competitive race, the relevant agents can be organized as such: the spectators, who traditionally stay rooted to the spot and view its proceedings as snapshots; the cameras, which assume an omniscient, televised view of start and finish; the corporations, which manufacture and sell the stakes; and…
After a long career as an actress, Marijana Janković stepped behind the camera to tell the story on her own terms. Her debut feature Home, premiering at the 2026 edition of IFFR, offers a narrative built with familiar materials, yet shaped with a quiet precision that feels newly…