TIFF 2026: “Children Untold”

Miwa Nishikawa’s riveting historical drama Children Untold stems from rather unique origins: the story for the writer and director’s feature film is derived from her own, as yet unpublished, novel, inspired in turn by research and archival testimony she began gathering while working on her 2020 movie Under the Open Sky, whose protagonist was modeled […]

TIFF 2026: “Ah Girl,” “Memories of a Forest,” “Nosotros”

The burden of expectations- those of family, culture, and society- permeate these three films screening at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, tackling the topic in very different stories across different continents. All first features, Katharina Rahl’s Memories of a Forest and Joaquín Ruano’s Nosotros, make their international and world premieres, respectively, in the festival’s […]

Venice 2026: “Lovers in the Blue Night,” “What Belongs to Others”

The Venice Film Festival‘s Orizzonti section- which typically spotlights new voices in international cinema- has been particularly exciting this year (the delightfully quirky Diane in the Loop, which I also recently reviewed, just won the category’s prize for best film). Loneliness, whether in love or family or community, has been a common theme I’ve picked […]

Venice 2026: “One Minute to Midnight”

Sometime around Léo’s (Melvil Poupaud) third encounter with a different woman in Nicolas Pariser’s One Minute to Midnight, I asked myself a desperate question: Why should I care about this man? The French drama, premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival, abandons a plotty narrative in favor of the walking-and-talking structure that can be […]

Venice 2026: “No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman”

At the end of writer and director Halkawt Mustafa’s propulsive war thriller No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman, Vyan (Avan Jamal), the Kurdish sniper whose harrowing journey to save her sister forms the backbone of the film, states that “Only when we face death do we understand the value of life.” It’s […]

Venice 2026: “Diane in the Loop”

Harnessing the traditionally masculine language of westerns and applying it to a fierce and funny tale of feminine rage and reckoning, writer/director duo Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni’s third feature Diane in the Loop opens with an image that feels immediately iconic: the back of their protagonist, Diane’s (Ninon Borsei), head as she dons a […]

Venice 2026: “House of the Wind”

“You know, children bring a house to life.” Josette (Josette Kwanya) utters those words to her son Benoît on one of their many Zoom calls, the only method by which she ever sees or speaks to her adult children, who long since left their native Cameroon in search of better opportunities in Western countries. House […]

Review: “Boorman and the Devil”

Toward the end of Boorman and the Devil— David Kittredge’s impressively thorough and candid documentary about the legendarily troubled production of Exorcist II: The Heretic— the director speaks briefly to Jeff Kanew. Kanew is primarily remembered today for directing 80s comedies like Revenge of the Nerds and Troop Beverly Hills, but in the mid-1970s, he […]

Review: “The End of Oak Street”

It isn’t far into its runtime before the double meaning in the title of David Robert Mitchell’s rather unclassifiable throwback blockbuster The End of Oak Street becomes clear. The first alludes to the film’s literal location, a cul-de-sac at the back of a neighborhood called Flowervale, circa 1982. Our first glimpse of it is one […]

Review: “One Night Only”

As One Night Only, Will Gluck’s portrait of a dystopian hellscape masquerading as a frothy rom-com, approaches its third act, a potential love interest for Monica Barbaro’s Allie caps a whimsically-delivered monologue about how a government mandate forbidding pre-marital sex outside of an annual 12 hour time frame actually makes the act more special and […]