The Criterion Collection
Ancestry has become a modern secular obsession. Centuries of migration, displacement, secrecy, and reinvention have left most people with at least one unresolved lineage question, and an entire cottage industry has emerged to answer it. Television programs like “Finding Your Roots,” now in its 12th season on PBS, have formalized the fantasy that identity can be recovered through archival diligence and DNA swabs. Even for those who are not famous enough for Henry Louis Gates Jr. to investigate personally, commercial testing kits promise access to a past that once required either aristocratic records or sheer luck. Yet the premise behind this cultural fixation — that knowing where you come from will clarify who you are — often collides with a more inconvenient truth. Families do not preserve history so much as curate it, and the deeper one digs, the more likely one is to uncover not only origins but injuries.
Continue reading “We Aren’t Family” »
A24
Olivia Wilde seems drawn, as both actress and director, to narratives shaped by narcissism, fantasy, and the social hierarchies of desire. The roles she has taken on as a performer and the films she has made behind the camera often feel like variations on the same preoccupation: people trying to understand who holds power in a room, and what that power costs. Her sophomore feature, “Don’t Worry Darling,” staged that anxiety as suburban nightmare; her third directorial effort, “The Invite,” approaches it as a chamber comedy.
Continue reading “The First Rule of Sex Club” »
Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures
It’s perhaps fitting that the New York all-media press screening for Steven Spielberg’s latest sci-fi extravaganza, “Disclosure Day,” took place on an especially apocalyptic afternoon, one in which large swaths of Midtown Manhattan were effectively sealed off from the public because President Donald J. Trump had somehow decided that Game 3 of the N.B.A. Finals between the New York Knickerbockers and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden was the ideal venue for a nap. Anticipating the inevitable disruption, Universal Pictures relocated the screening across town just four days beforehand. What the studio may have underestimated, however, was the depth of contempt the N.Y.P.D. appears to harbor for the public—and the degree to which the department seems to view its primary mission as protecting and serving the One Percent.
Continue reading “Higher Beings” »
Carole Bethuel
In the five years since winning the Grand Prix at Cannes for “A Hero,” Asghar Farhadi has spent considerable time in the headlines. Far less publicized than the plagiarism accusations brought against him by his former student Azadeh Masihzadeh was the eventual court ruling clearing him of wrongdoing. Back in Cannes with “Parallel Tales,” the Iranian filmmaker appears eager to confront the controversy head-on — not by denying the porous relationship between art and lived experience, but by dramatizing it.
Continue reading “Artistic License” »
Guy Ferrandis
La Vénus électrique (2026)
Pierre Salvadori’s “La Vénus électrique” may be the most exhilarating Cannes opener in recent memory: a wholly original, exquisitely engineered period romantic comedy whose emotional buoyancy never comes at the expense of formal rigor. Though screening outside competition, the film possesses the assurance and tonal sophistication of a major contender. It recalls the kind of unabashedly romantic popular cinema that contemporary filmmakers rarely attempt anymore, much less pull off with this degree of elegance.
Continue reading “Body Double” »
Lenke Szilagyi
Following a long-overdue first brush with Hollywood visibility—albeit in the supporting architecture of a Marvel franchise (“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”)—Tony Leung Chiu-wai (not to be confused with his namesake, Tony Leung Ka-fai) takes on another English-language role under markedly different auspices. In place of spectacle, there is reticence; instead of green-screen maximalism, a hushed, faintly metaphysical inquiry. The film, directed by Ildikó Enyedi, whose “On Body and Soul” paired abattoir realism with dreamlike lyricism, unfolds as a triptych of botanical fascination, tenuously bound across time by a single organism: a ginkgo biloba tree rooted in the grounds of a German university.
Continue reading “The Tree of Life” »
La Biennale di Venezia
I first encountered Lucrecia Martel’s “La ciénaga” during its theatrical release in 2001, primed by the high praise of critics I trusted, who framed the film as a study of the moral and social decay of Argentina’s bourgeoisie. That reading seemed persuasive at the time; the languor, the drunkenness, the air of stagnation, all pointing toward a class in quiet disintegration. Revisiting the film 24 years later, at a repertory screening, I found myself arriving at a markedly different conclusion. What once struck me as a portrait of decline now appears as something more foundational and more unsettling: a film permeated, above all, by the afterlives of colonialism.
Continue reading “Reclamation” »
Eric Branco/Summer 2001 LLC
Josephine Decker’s “Chasing Summer” announces itself as an outlier. For a filmmaker whose work has often been marked by fragmentation, sensory abrasion, and a willful resistance to narrative comfort, this new film feels almost disarmingly straightforward. It unfolds as a recognizable homecoming story, complete with old grudges, unresolved romances, and the uneasy realization that the self one fled is still waiting patiently back where the odyssey began. That air of convention is no accident. It has a great deal to do with the film’s writer and star, Iliza Shlesinger, whose comic instincts pull Ms. Decker toward something cleaner, calmer, and — by her standards — positively classical.
Continue reading “You Can Go Home Again” »
Sundance Institute
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass (2026)
David Wain’s first feature in eight years, “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” arrives as a cheerfully indecorous homecoming — a return to the shaggy, ensemble-driven absurdism that once made his comedies feel like contraband smuggled into multiplexes. A sitcom-bright spoof of Americana that filters “The Wizard of Oz” through celebrity culture, the film is at once junk-drawer eclectic and curiously sincere about the small, stubborn dreams of its heroine.
Continue reading “Somewhere Over the Top” »
La Biennale di Venezia
This is going to sound a bit like inside baseball, but it’s not every day you see a major studio releasing anime. Within the Sony Pictures corporate structure, Crunchyroll handles such titles by default. Otherwise, they’d go to niche labels such as Destination Films or Sony Pictures Classics. Tangentially, homegrown Sony Pictures Animation productions lately have been dumped on Netflix, including surprise hit “KPop Demon Hunters.” The first (and hopefully not last) anime feature to carry the Columbia Pictures banner proper is “Scarlet” by Mamoru Hosoda, director of the Oscar-nominated “Mirai.”
It makes sense that “Scarlet” merits special treatment and a coveted awards season slot, though, considering its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival among many Oscar hopefuls. It possesses the epic bravado and artistry that exemplify prestige pictures. The voice cast features such luminaries as Koji Yakusho, and it’s a relief the studio has the good sense to not to dub it in English, at least for now. Its credits even boast Danish academics serving as historical and cultural consultants. It’s some serious stuff we’re talking about here.
Continue reading “Enter the Void” »
