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” »
Brett Roedel/Disney
A group of 35-year-olds are pulled back into high school in “Never Change!,” through petty bureaucracy rather than magical body-swap or cinematic fable. It seems the graduating class of 2008 at North Meadows High School never technically graduated. Now they must spend two weeks back in the classroom to complete coursework and receive diplomas, under onerous legislation called the Education New Deal. Their original school days were curtailed by a destructive tornado, i.e. by a rare natural event rather than one of the frequent unnatural events that interrupt the education of U.S. high school students in the real world, or end their lives altogether. Marty Schousboe’s comedy, screening at Tribeca Festival en route to streaming on Hulu, makes one direct mention of this parallel, of the risk for any student that coming to school might mean they don’t make it to 35 at all: a teacher notes that compared to 2008, modern high-school can be “a bit funky.”
Continue reading “High School Consequential” »
Tribeca Festival
Tony Kaye’s Wikipedia page records that during post-production of his anti-Nazi drama, “American History X,” in 1998, the director, stewing on various slights, disowned the studio’s cut of the film and unsuccessfully attempted to have his name removed from the credits. The debate escalated quickly. Mr. Kaye’s previous work in TV commercials included a famous 1993 ad for Dunlop tires set to “Venus in Furs” by the Velvet Underground, which shoved the fetishistic high camp of the era’s music videos forcibly into the commercial space and suggested that the man behind it might arrive at production meetings by swinging through the window on a flaming rope. In fact Mr. Kaye really did arrive at one Hollywood confrontation in the company of a rabbi and a priest, with predictably contentious results. “Humpty Dumpty X” shows some period home-video footage of Mr. Kaye retelling this story at the time to director and fellow Brit-in-L.A. Mike Figgis. “There’s no history of performance art in this town,” replies Mr. Figgis, diplomatically shaking his head only a little. “Never air a grudge.”
Continue reading “The Disaster Artist” »
Tribeca Festival
AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About (2026)
The latest documentary to grapple with the fact that artificial intelligence is probably something to worry about spends a lengthy two hours approaching the subject from several angles, doing the topic justice while grinding your optimism slowly down. The initial subject is Geoffrey Hinton, now 78, Nobel laureate for his work on machine learning and one-time member of Google’s A.I. research team, before he resigned to express his concerns about the technology more freely. Mr. Hinton’s father was an entomologist, nudging the film towards visual metaphors about things developing and emerging from cocoons. The film doesn’t mention that Mr. Hinton’s great-great-grandfather was George Boole, one of the historic architects of information science in the first place. Now an elderly apostate in a trade full of young zealots, Mr. Hinton sounds a little like Adam Curtis; the two were born only a few miles apart. In the calming cadence of a grand BBC television series, Mr. Hinton ponders exactly how distressed about the future you should be now.
Continue reading “Oh No Computer” »
Tribeca Festival
Stage magicians and practitioners of close magic, giving you the patter while palming your watch and dropping a goldfish in your martini, are engaged in a deception business with roots going back a very long time. So when that trade is targeted for some up-to-date cyber crime from a different cohort of tricksters, there’s a clash of new magic and old underway. Or there might be if, as far as the magicians are concerned, the pirates had any honor; but they don’t. All that’s happening is straight-up theft of someone else’s original material and consequent loss of income, which tips the heirs to the ancient trickster gods into the same enfeebling online grinder machine as the rest of us.
Continue reading “Trick or Cheat” »
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” »
