Frédéric Batier/Film A-G/Komplizen Film
It has been nearly three years since a federal court ordered the unsealing of the Epstein files, and the country has settled into a posture of exhausted shrugging. Our elected officials have shown little appetite for holding the alleged predators accountable, and the message, repeated until it curdles into wallpaper, is that this is terrible and nothing can be done. That resignation is its own kind of damage. Outrage that never gets answered becomes numbness, and numbness is a luxury only the safe can afford.
Continue reading “Who Looks Away” »
Agata Grzybowska
Paweł Pawlikowski has made a career of the stateless: people shaken loose by war who never find a sense of home in the place that takes them in. He returns to that territory in “Fatherland,” and to the stark monochrome that has become his signature, as recognizable as a thumbprint. The film is loosely inspired by an episode from the life of Thomas Mann – played here by Hanns Zischler – the Nobel Prize-winning author who fled Nazi Germany for Switzerland and then, as the war closed in, for the United States. In exile, Mann was famously said to have declared that where he was, there was Germany. It is a grand sentence, and the film seems to wonder what it costs the people standing next to him. Mr. Pawlikowski zooms in on a single vignette, Mann’s 1949 trip to give a speech in Weimar, then under Soviet occupation. It is a small canvas, but a whole divided country is stretched across it, and a journey that drew suspicion from both sides of the Iron Curtain becomes a test of who owes what to whom.
Continue reading “To Sit Between Two Chairs” »
Film Movement
The U.S. release of “Case 137” has the peculiar timing of a film arriving late to its own moment. Having premiered at Cannes in 2025, Dominik Moll’s police procedural has forfeited much of the festival buzz that might have helped propel its U.S. release. But the delay has yielded an inadvertent advantage: a film about police brutality during France’s 2018 Yellow Vests protests arrives as a new wave of student demonstrations, fueled by grievances over public services and met by forceful police responses, has begun to evoke that earlier period of unrest. As images of teargas-clouded streets and burning debris circulate across social media, the past seems less past than prologue. Film Movement, the U.S. distributor, may not have anticipated the convergence. No marketing campaign, at any rate, could have manufactured a more persuasive argument for the film’s urgency.
Continue reading “Nets That Catch Only Small Fish” »
Carla Oset
“La Bola Negra” wants to be an authoritative epic of Spanish queer history, stitching together the distant past and the present across three parallel timelines separated by eight decades. It is an ambitious undertaking, and a worthwhile one in principle: to excavate the lives queer people were forced to conceal, to recover what history has tried to erase, and to show how the past continues to haunt the present. Yet the film’s cultural significance does much of the heavy lifting. Its own storytelling is considerably less persuasive, scattering ideas across time and space without quite connecting the dots. The result is a film whose ambitions are more compelling than its execution, and whose insistence on historical resonance too often substitutes for the harder work of dramatic invention.
Continue reading “Skelly in the Closet” »
Neon
With “Fjord,” Cristian Mungiu becomes the 10th filmmaker to win the Palme d’Or twice — not that membership in this particular club necessarily confers a place among the world’s cinematic immortals. Mr. Mungiu, whose “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” won the prize in 2007, is hardly the only Romanian New Wave filmmaker of consequence either; these days, the movement’s most restlessly inventive figure is arguably Radu Jude. Still, “Fjord” is a defensible choice from a Cannes competition that offered no obvious front-runner. It is also a thoroughly depressing, frequently unpleasant film, one whose bleakness might be easier to bear if its moral provocations were more illuminating than exasperating.
Continue reading “The Worst People in the World” »
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” »
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” »
Focus Features
I don’t know what’s with writing and domestic partners Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s weird obsession with lesbians, especially ones that look like Margaret Qualley. Following “Drive-Away Dolls,” they return with “Honey Don’t!,” yet another very blah entry in their supposed sapphic noir trilogy.
Continue reading “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” »
A24
This is Spike Lee’s second stab at remaking an Asian masterpiece. The first, 2013’s “Oldboy,” based on Park Chan-wook’s 2003 Cannes Grand Prix winner, was faithful down to replicating the iconic single-shot corridor fight scene. But it wasn’t well received at all. The result wasn’t as dark or as sickly funny as the original. Perhaps Josh Brolin should have chowed down on a live octopus for good measure.
Continue reading “Success Not Guaranteed” »
