KVIFF 2026: “Black Money for White Nights”

The White Nights are a natural phenomenon like no other. For a brief period over the summer, the sun barely dips below the horizon in high latitude areas, meaning that daylight sticks around for a full 24 hours. It’s a sight that Marina (Tanya Shahova) has yearned to witness for the last 30 years. Sixty […]

KVIFF 2026: “Chica Checa”

Zdena (Pavla Tomicová) works as a mail carrier in the small Czech town where she’s lived all her life. She promised her husband before he passed away that she’d be able to take care of their house on her own, but she’s managing that about as well as her life. The building is in desperate […]

KVIFF 2026: “The Match”

Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco’s documentary The Match couldn’t feel more timely. Following its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the absorbing and detailed account of the now-legendary match between Argentina and England at the 1986 FIFA World Cup quarter-finals screens as the opening night film at the Karlovy Vary International Film […]

Annecy 2026: “Julián,” “We Are Aliens”

An affirming tale of self-acceptance and identity told with vibrancy and tenderness, director Louise Bagnell’s Julián— premiering in competition at the 2026 Annecy Film Festival— finds its title character and beating heart in a young Afro-Latino boy (voiced by Knyght Darius Jack) journeying with his father (Anthony Sardinha) to spend the summer with the grandmother […]

Review: “Toy Story 5”

I was five years old when Pixar’s first feature-length film, Toy Story, was released in theaters at the end of 1995. Now I’m 35, and the fifth installment of what’s become a classic animated series with an unfathomable amount of supplementary media and that kickstarted an entire studio’s popularity is just entering theaters. It’s so […]

Review: “Leviticus”

What do you do when the object of your desire turns against you— or you turn against it? That tension between lust and livelihood is explored quite literally in writer and director Adrian Chiarella’s debut feature Leviticus, which fast proves to be an incredible concept for a queer horror movie that’s ultimately too sparsely realized […]

Review: “Disclosure Day”

Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day— part fast-paced chase movie, part sprawling collage of cosmic ideas that marries empathy-driven storytelling with blockbuster spectacle—opens with a literal gut punch directed at the audience. The camera, assuming the position of a wrestler in the ring, rockets violently backward as he absorbs a blow from his opponent, and continues to […]

Review: “Two Seasons, Two Strangers”

I knew immediately after I watched his previous feature, All the Long Nights, on a whim in Berlin a couple years ago that Japanese filmmaker Sho Miyake was going to be one of my guys. Two Seasons, Two Strangers (which won the Golden Leopard at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival) is similarly a carefully observed […]

Review: “I Love Boosters”

Boots Riley is a loud artist. He’s loud in his visual approach to storytelling, crafting gloriously chaotic collages of color and mixed media, running the gamut from stop-motion animation and practical effects to in-camera stunt work and idiosyncratic original soundtracks. And he’s loud in his rhetoric. Riley’s incendiary 2018 feature directorial debut, Sorry to Bother […]

Review: “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu”

On the press tour for Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, director Jon Favreau cited Flash Gordon— specifically the 1936 Universal serial starring Olympic athlete Buster Crabbe, divided into 13 15-20 minute chapters that would screen before feature films in the theater— as a key influence on his movie. The space adventure was an inspiration […]