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 […]