The Guardian
A rare documentary in the Venice Film Festival competition, “NAZA” is the latest film from Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two members of the directing team behind the Oscar-winning “No Other Land.” Their new film returns to the genocide in Gaza, but approaches it from an unnerving vantage point: inside the Israeli intelligence apparatus responsible for carrying it out. Mr. Abraham and Ms. Szor assemble testimony from roughly two dozen Israeli intelligence officers, all of whom speak anonymously. Their identities are protected not only by digital alterations to their voices, disclosed at the outset, but by the film’s striking visual conceit: the men and women appear as silhouettes against the nighttime Tel Aviv skyline, their faces reduced to anonymous outlines.
Continue reading “The Final Solution” »
Christine Tamalet/Gaumont France 3 Cinema
A Good Little Soldier (2026)
Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, Stéphane Brizé’s “A Good Little Soldier” exposes a dirty little secret of the corporate world that, until now, seems to have been explored most seriously not by journalists or filmmakers but by TikTok: all that corporate speak about branding, philosophy, core values, company culture, and inclusion is, for the most part, bullshit. These bromides are the brainchildren of human-resources and communications departments, carefully worded to make an organization sound humane, progressive, and vaguely utopian. The people at the top may sign off on the slogans, but few within the organization actually take them to heart, much less allow them to govern their behavior.
Continue reading “Business as Usual” »
83rd Venice International Film Festival
The Venice Film Festival has always been unusually hospitable to horror, having premiered Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” just last year. The competition this time includes two more horror films, “Company” and “The Spiral,” though both are coy about their affiliations, withholding their genre credentials until late in the game. Each is interesting and technically accomplished enough to justify its place in competition. It is the festival’s other choices that are harder to ignore. “Company” is directed by Casey Affleck, an accused sexual harasser. The classics sidebar, meanwhile, includes Roman Polanski’s “Cul-de-sac.” It would appear that #MeToo is over, at least in Venice.
Continue reading “Live to Tell” »
Diego Araya Corvalán/Searchlight Pictures
Martin McDonagh seems to have a very limited range of characters: the same wisecracking, potentially sociopathic misanthropes, regardless of which cultural or historical context he drops them into. In “Wild Horse Nine,” his fifth feature, that context is Chile on the eve of the 1973 military coup, and the misanthropes are two C.I.A. agents. One of them, naturally, is played by Sam Rockwell. At this point the casting is less a choice than a punchline.
Continue reading “Backing the Wrong Horse” »
Anthony Dickenson/Studiocanal
Danny Boyle’s “Ink,” opening at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, offers what may be the most incisive screen portrait yet of Rupert Murdoch — not necessarily because it reveals anything new about the man, but because it understands the peculiar mixture of grievance, ambition, opportunism, and showmanship that has sustained his media empire. The predominantly European-backed production occasionally feels like Hollywood keeping its distance from a mogul whose influence remains difficult to ignore. Yet Mr. Murdoch, played by Guy Pearce in a stroke of inspired casting that reportedly has the mogul’s own approval, is not even the film’s most frightening figure. That distinction belongs to Jack O’Connell’s Larry Lamb, the northern editor of the Daily Mail in Manchester, whom Mr. Murdoch tapped to run the newly acquired Sun in October 1969. Mr. Murdoch may have provided the money and the vision; Lamb supplied the appetite.
Continue reading “If It Bleeds, It Leads” »
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” »
