TIFF 2026: “Head to Head,” “Salvation”

These two films, blending drama with shades of black comedy, premiering in this year’s Toronto International Film Festival‘s Discovery section tackle current trends, with varying degrees of success: Ghasideh Golmakani’s self-reflexive film about filmmaking and the oppressive restrictions imposed on women in Iran, Head to Head, and Tom Nicoll’s anxiety-inducing study of the dark side […]

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stems from rather unique origins: the story for the writer and director’s feature film is derived from her own, as yet unpublished, novel, inspired in turn by research and archival testimony she began gathering while working on her 2020 movie Under the Open Sky, whose protagonist was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

KVIFF 2026: “Robert Richardson: The White Devil,” “The Hanging of Stuart Cornfeld”

I generally enter biographical documentaries— especially ones centered on Hollywood figures— with arms crossed and an eyebrow raised, but I thought both of the industry docs I watched at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival this week, programmed as part of the festival’s Special Screenings sections— Robert Richardson: The White Devil (the thrice Academy Award-winning […]

KVIFF 2026: “The Guest,” “Lover, Not a Fighter,” “Incinerator”

This year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival concluded with numerous worthy films being awarded, from directing honors for the cringe-inducing family drama The Guest in the Crystal Globe Competition, to recognition for two very different coming-of-age stories in the festival’s Proxima competition: the appealing comedy Lover, Not a Fighter and the mysterious and mesmeric Incinerator. […]

KVIFF 2026: “Only Beautiful Things to Look At”

In communist Czechoslovakia, the state encroached on its citizens’ lives in the most horrifying way imaginable: coerced sterilizations and abortion control was exerted over thousands of women, particularly Romani women. Abortions would only be approved after the women laid bare the intimate details of their lives and relationships before a committee, while other women were […]