Pity poor Klara, she’s a B1 AF (artificial friend) and the store across the street is selling B3s that can do anything B1s can do, only better. The B3s are better looking, more agile, don’t lose their balance whenever they go outdoors, and will probably not be found standing like a flamingo at any random moment. Obsolescence, like death, comes for us all, but it is often injudicious about scheduling.

Such is the world in Klara and the Sun, Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 dystopian novel of the same name. It was Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017. While the book remains somewhere in a TBR stack that can reach the moon and back, I found the film charming, moving, and occasionally very funny. I know I’m in a very small minority.

After getting ideal placement in the window of the B1 store, Klara (Jenna Ortega) catches the attention of Josie (Maria Tharia), an abnormally precocious (“lifted”) but socially isolated teen, who is shopping for an artificial friend with her mother Chrissy (Amy Adams). Josie knows she can have a B3 but there’s something about Klara that she cannot live without.

Josie and Chrissy, while wealthy enough to want for nothing, live in the countryside in relative isolation. Their household has experienced more than its share of tragedy. Apart from her mother and housekeeper, the only other human Josie has regular contact with is her next-door neighbor and boyfriend Rick (Aran Murphy, son of Oscar winner Cillian Murphy). Rick is plenty smart but he never underwent the “lifting” process like Josie did (experimental genetic modifications to rapidly enhance the subject’s intelligence).

Despite her immersion in academic theories and classical literature, Josie is drawn to the quirks and imperfections of Klara when it’s time to find an artificial friend: the clumsiness, the naivety, the over-reliance on the sun.

What emerges is less a conventional science-fiction story than a modern fairy tale. It doesn’t break new ground but its charms worked on me.

As a gifted student in grade school many eons ago, I found the scene where Josie is around her fellow “lifteds” incredibly funny and recognizable. We’re all kind of terrible and too smart for our own good. Being singled out for my intelligence wasn’t always pleasant, but being surrounded by other gifted kids didn’t necessarily make childhood any less awkward.

Beyond the familiar social awkwardness of gifted/lifted children, I was also taken with the world Waititi created around them.

I’ve always had a particular fondness for world-building, though it can’t carry a film on its own. I have aphantasia, meaning my mind doesn’t create visual images on its own, so I especially enjoyed seeing how Taika Waititi adapted the world Kazuo Ishiguro created.

There’s another reason I may have been more receptive to Klara and the Sun than most critics: I consider myself a 51% AI optimist. AI is already making the world more accessible in ways that are practical, not merely theoretical, but I’m hardly unaware of the potential consequences for jobs, creative work, and the environment.

I understand why Klara and the Sun might not work for everyone. Its sentimentality can be a bit much, and its ideas aren’t especially revolutionary. But I found its peculiar little world and the friendship at its center enormously appealing.

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Klara and the Sun opens in theaters on Friday, October 23.

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(2026 | USA | 174 minutes | Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim)

You Can See Everything documents the days leading up to Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’s 11 years, three months of incarceration at a minimum security prison in Texas that began on May 30, 2003. Despite enduring a criminal trial that ended in convictions for defrauding investors, Holmes appears dumbfounded that she would be subjected to imprisonment and doesn’t appear to have an answer as to why she’s in the position she’s in. Please allow me to try.

Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 at age 19, after dropping out of Stanford, promising to revolutionize health care by creating a technology that could run as many as 200 tests on a few drops of blood from a single pin-prick. She raised over $700 million from investors like Rupert Murdoch, Carlos Slim, the Walton family, and Larry Ellison. At its peak, the company would be valued at $9 billion and Holmes owned approximately half of the company. The technology never worked as promised and Holmes and her former boyfriend/COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani engaged in a years-long campaign of deceit to hide the failing technology from investors and regulators. Employees who challenged Holmes or Balwani, questioned the technology, or raised concerns about patient safety frequently faced intimidation, retaliation, or dismissal. The company concealed technical failures and delivered inaccurate laboratory results to patients, some of whom received results suggesting very serious medical conditions, including cancer. Meanwhile, Holmes was a genuine rock star, a Silicon Valley wunderkind who racked up accolades and billions in paper wealth based on technology she had repeatedly been warned was unworkable as promised. She continued to tout its promise even as patients made health decisions based on unreliable results. Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors and Balwani was convicted of defrauding investors and patients.

This has all been documented in public court documents, as well as through the reporting of John Carreyrou in the Wall Street Journal and his essential 2018 book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.

Feigns of ignorance or not, Elizabeth Holmes has earned every moment of her prison sentence. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about the movie.

For some inexplicable reason, TV star Nathan Fielder (along with veteran documentarian Lance Oppenheim) was given almost unlimited access to Elizabeth Holmes and her boyfriend Billy Evans, an heir to the Evans Hotels hospitality group and tech entrepreneur, in their San Diego rental home. He is an omnipresent figure in the Evans-Holmes household and it’s a bit unsettling when we see him looking on during unguarded moments. But he and his cameras are there all the time, including when Evans takes a shower. The result is one jaw-dropping moment after another.

While Fielder might be a curious choice, he was also an inspired one. His show Nathan For You rests on the premise of saving small businesses with schemes like liquor stores selling minors a voucher for booze they can pick up once they turn 21 or a gas station offering a rebate that you have to climb a mountain to collect. The schtick works because people are usually too polite to say “this is ridiculous.”

Holmes, who looks like a Disney character with enormous eyes (it’s been meme-ed to absurdity already), does not appear to have much, if any, self-awareness. She is fully committed to her ignorance and innocence, even when it beggars belief. She tells Fielder at one point that she has no idea what she was convicted of, and at another that she has never told a lie, not even a white one. At one point, Fielder makes Holmes and Evans watch Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine to illustrate what it’s like to interview her.

Although I’ve likely followed the Theranos case as close as any other film critic in America, this movie continued to shock me moment after moment, with nothing you can do to prepare yourself for it.

While the scenes with Holmes wild themselves, the movie reaches its maximum velocity without Holmes, while Evans acts as her voice while she’s in prison. I run the risk of spoiling too much because it’s a documentary that reveals one unexplainable and inexplicable moment after another. I still cannot comprehend a scene where Evans gets particularly heated defending Charlie Kirk.

Throughout You Can See Everything, I found myself frustrated that viewers might not grasp how terrible Theranos’s misdeeds are, as it’s never really spelled out and Fielder never confronts Holmes about most of what I mentioned in paragraph two. I thought the same thing with Lance Oppenheim’s previous film Primetime, which I thought failed to capture the true rot of NBC’s To Catch a Predator, while still being damning and riveting.

Like Exit Through the Gift Shop, You Can See Everything works as a puzzle that you try to solve in real time while knowing that you can’t trust what you’re seeing. The narrators are too unreliable. But you probably won’t believe whatever Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans tell you. You shouldn’t.

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You Can See Everything opens in theaters everywhere today, October 16.

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Imagine going for a dive to reclaim your father’s remains supposedly near shore, but instead ending up in the belly of a whale in a matter of moments. It’s not some sea shanty… it’s a real thing thanks to writer David Krauss and writer-director Brian Duffield. Jay Gardner (Austin Abrams) has never had what you’d consider a good relationship with his father. Always being harassed for not following in his footsteps or at the very least chided on to appreciate nature in the intense, nearly fanatical way, his old man did. Before an aggressive form of cancer could take his life, Jay’s dad Mitt (Josh Brolin) left on his own terms without actually saying goodbye. The inner turmoil that kept eating away at Jay finally got the best of him and pushed him to go on an impulsive dive to find any remains for a proper burial of the man that both encouraged and antagonized him most of his life. Just as he thought he’d found what he was looking for, out of nowhere a sperm whale on the hunt for a giant squid swallows up his prey and Jay at the same time leaving him (and us) in an overwhelming state.

Basically it’s Moby Dick visually bigger than life and terrifyingly tight quarters with only a single tank of air to keep him alive. The audience gets a front row seat for the thoughtful rumination of a man with mere minutes to live. In this time of regrets and fears, he focuses on the relationship with his father. The story originated as a book, so it seems pretty obvious the author (and Whalefall film co-writer) David Krauss had some things to work through and here it is on a giant screen so we can take in every moment of it as if it were our own. Quite literally the audience witnessed minute by minute a man’s life ticking closer to its end while he was held captive in a fleshy, toxic and terrifyingly claustrophobic prison. Amidst the panic inducing, life-threatening events was a slow and emotionally gut-wrenching journey to figuring out how to love a father that never seemed satisfied and love himself no matter what path forward he would be taking.

Just as you’d expect from the director of Cocaine Bear (if you haven’t seen it, Whalefall will probably tell you a lot about how that one goes too) there are emotional arcs along with insane situations that you could never expect to find yourself in. Not sure how others wend their way through, but I was left wondering what I’d do if it were me. With almost one-hundred percent certainty, I would have been crushed or killed within the first few minutes, but that’s not a fun or interesting story. There were definitely some liberties taken, some stretching of imagination, some “that was waaay too lucky” moments, but it wouldn’t have worked without those so I’ll give it a pass. If I were offered the option to watch Whalefall again? I don’t think I’d take it, but I’m not worse off for having seen it the first time. If you love thrillers with an unclear villain (or no villain at all) and a lot of emotional turmoil then this is the one for you.

Whalefall arrives in theaters on 10/16

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Alex Gibney has established himself as a go-to director for documentaries exposing the dark underpinnings of influence and power. Be it for television or the screen, based on books or original reporting, he has shaped complicated stories into digestible yet illuminating films. Taxi to the Dark Side, about abusive CIA techniques in Afghanistan, won him an Oscar in 2007. He brought home an armful of Emmys for Going Clear, an investigation of Scientology. In recent decades, alongside fascinating portraits of artists and creatives (including this year’s potent portrait of Salman Rushdie in the aftermath of a terrorist knife attack), his subjects have included tech titans like Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Holmes, and major economic and global phenomena like Enron and WikiLeaks. His latest documentary follows the natural progression of this path to profile perhaps the most frighteningly influential of all: Elon Musk. Commensurate with the outsized scale and unimaginable scope of his influence, Gibney’s attempt to tell the whole story stretches for nearly four hours. That runtime is more than enough to curdle the stomach, yet barely scratches the surface. 

Bifurcated into two parts with a very necessary intermission, the film opens with an introduction to Musk’s contradictions. A man who’s convinced that we’re likely living in a simulation who also claims to be committed to preserving humanity via colonization of space. A lover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy who might not understand that it’s meant to be funny. An online shitposter with a diabolical laugh yet no detectable sense of humor. But more importantly, a self-styled inventor who hasn’t actually invented much of anything himself. There’s perhaps a grudging sense of admiration in these early sections of his rise to power, even as they expose the degree to which much has been an unbelievably successful confidence game.

We meet an awkward young man whose early involvement/investment in the nascent tech world led to both an early ouster and a massive financial windfall. The vast sums of money gained him the freedom to dabble in electric cars, later rewriting the history of Tesla, a company that he invested in, to one that he founded. Gibney gains insight into his business practices by way of the company’s facility with image manipulation regarding the capabilities of its self-driving cars, which had a bad habit of crashing and killing people. Tech journalists, government partners, and an ex-wife provide context and insight through interviews. Odd beliefs and family history emerge alongside his corporate antics. Later, a similar pattern of ownership and self-promotion emerges while SpaceX’s rockets explode on the backs of massive government contracts. Just as things seem on the edge of failure, a successful launch marks a triumphant turn. 

Fittingly, this liftoff mirrors the degree to which the second half ascends in the scale of bizarre contradictions, shady practices, and personal behavior from a mere mortal tycoon to an Omega Level player whose erratic beliefs, score-settling, and terrifying influence have already reached a scale of planetary influence. Gibney casts the signature event ushering in the current era of our history alongside a veritable supervillain: was, naturally, the Covid-19 pandemic, which marked the first time in a decade when someone tried to tell Elon Musk what he couldn’t do. The virus seems to have awoken his mind to a new reality, flipped a switch on his skepticism of Artificial Intelligence, and ignited a passion for meddling in politics. It finds him throwing massive sums into elections, allying with other tech moguls, and ultimately purchasing Twitter for an outrageous price to assure the “free speech absolutism” to assure that the worst of the worst have a platform for their dangerous ideas. Soon enough, a scorched-earth campaign to reshape one media company was magnified into a similar effort to drastically reshape the government of a president that he helped to elect. 

Nauseating on their own — inexperienced young men purging government agencies and programs for laughs while causing the deaths of millions through cancellation of food aid, research programs, and vaccine assistance — these latter-day segments also paint an upsetting portrait of the man himself. From an embrace of the fashion of “Dark MAGA,” we see a chainsaw-wielding maniac desperate for laughs and attention alongside deeply unsettling personal stories of custody battles for a cute son who’s treated like a mascot contrasted with the cruel disowning of his trans child and indifference to a Nazi-loving generative AI that’s easily employed to generate sexually abusive images of women and children. All illustrate the degree to which spinning one failing endeavor into another makes him the world’s richest man (to the tune of over a trillion dollars in wealth) whose companies (having escaped regulation, in large part via his speedrun through targeted government downsizing) have granted him unprecedented global influence. Flipping the on/off switch for Starlink grants veto power in matters of warfare; tweaking the algorithm enables politicians friendly to his financial aims to rise across the globe. It’s not a pretty picture, but a synthesis that’s essential to understanding just how boiled we are becoming as frogs.

Alongside so much vital material, Gibney does make a series of near-catastrophic choices in shaping his documentary. Some, like the reliance on figures like Ashley St. Clair as a primary witness, are understandable. Despite being an opportunist whose beliefs have shifted drastically with the tides of influence, she offers a rare insight into Musk, including unsettling insinuations about his hand in the 2024 election. Others, structural choices, though, are more baffling. While using familiar techniques like counterposing real history with fiction (The Man Who Could Work Miraclesserves as a central metaphor) and pop music clips, Gibney responded to the lack of direct access to Elon Musk by creating a virtual photorealistic AI avatar to give voice to previously recorded comments available in the licensable archive. With its oversized face and gleaming white teeth, this creation does look uncannily like Musk and succeeds in being deeply annoying. I cringed every time it appeared on screen, which fairly or not may have been the desired effect. Equally off-putting is the choice to introduce an ongoing metaphor of a low-res first-person shooter style video game to illustrate concepts like collecting influence and dramatizing events like mass firings. I’m not a gamer, but these antic sections with jarring soundtracks both undermine the seriousness of the material and serve only to stretch the already long-running time. Four hours in the company of a humorless, vindictive megalomaniac and his world-breaking exploits is already a lot to ask. Padding it with these segments adds unnecessarily to the pain.

There’s an extent to which these choices are forgivable given the film’s aims and Gibney’s facility in assembling and synthesizing vast amounts of material. The deeper, unsolvable problem, though, is almost a synecdoche of the problem with Elon Musk himself. So vast is the scale of his reach and so troubling the ways that he achieved it that in attempting to describe it all, it boggles the mind. Episodes that consume a few minutes of screen time could easily be multi-hour documentaries of their own, from the financial double-dealing, the spigot of SpaceX/Starlink/X/Tesla, unimaginable troves of government data gobbled by the DOGE program, his attempt to repopulate the world via his own targeted sperm donation, an embrace of unchecked AI and robotics, not to mention the widespread reports of drug use. The challenge to the viewer, then, is to take in this material without being overwhelmed by a sense of futility. Perhaps the ship hasn’t sailed, and this era of gaslighting normalization of impossibly wealthy people in absurd costumes, appalling demeanor, jestermaxxers ruling the world via the apparatus of the unchecked power that they’ve grabbed from us isn’t forever. It’s not Gibney’s job to fix any of this, and even though they say that knowing is half the battle, we’re left wondering — as the credit roll — whether it’s too late to collectively figure out what the other half is. 

Musk had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Featival. After opening last weekend in limited release, it expands to additional theaters on October 16th
Image credit Greg Segal courtesy of Bleecker Street

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Beyond the films themselves — which screen at the Sea View and Orcas Center in Eastsound — the festival has quite an array of ancillary programming to make the weekend worth the trek. Those of us from Seattle making a pilgrimage by ferry or small aircraft won’t be the only guests over the weekend. Filmmakers expected to be in attendance include Josephine director Beth de Araújo (who will be presented with this year’s Jean-Marc Vallé Vanguard Award), Humboldt USA director G. Anthony Svatek , We are the Shaggs director Ken Kwapis, Landscapes of Memory director Leah Galant, The Endless Frontier director Marilyn Ness, as well as a host of guests from Radioheart: the Drive and Times of Kevin Cole including the subject himself, film co-director Peter Hilgendorf, and executive producer Susan Benson.

Other planned events include the panel True Stories, Unscripted featuring special guests from this year’s OIFF documentary program talking about what it takes to capture real life on film (Friday, October 16, 12:30-2:00pm at Parish Hall). On Saturday, the festival plays host to a conversation with Producer Pamela Koffler and Gregory Ellwood (The Playlist). With a career that includes Past Lives, Carol, May December, Boys Don’t Cry, Far from Heaven, Still Alice, First Reformed, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Happiness, I’m Not There, Zola, A Different Man and Materialists, Koffler is scheduled to be honored by the Academy’s Irving G. Thalberg memorial award at the upcoming Governors Awards next month. And of course, what would OIFF be without a party? Saturday night closes out with a “Wonderful World of Oz” dance party featuring Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt and DJ CARE spinning tunes to lure festival goers into busing a move at Parish Hall.

Also of note, the festival’s primary venue, the Sea View Theater in the heart of quaint Eastsound is recently under new ownership. Say a little farewell to your favorite seat, whether it’s cozy or a BYO cushion: as part of new proprietors Kerry Boyte and Mark Maunder’s commitment to ensuring the continued operations of the venue long into the future, they’ll be working with OIFF to renovate the place with a new lobby, lounge, and state of the art projection and sound following the close of this year’s festival.

The “main” festival runs from October 14-18th. Although You Found Me is the designated “closing night” feature on Sunday, films continue at the Sea View for passholders who stick around Monday and Tuesday. the selection of films brought to the tiny island is truly stunning with highlights from the year’s most prestigious festivals making their first appearances in the Pacific Northwest via a handful of cozy island theaters. In total, The program brings together 43 feature-length films from 15 countries: 33 narrative features, including three animated films, and 10 documentaries; with 18 films helmed by women directors.

If you’re still itching for a glorious autumn weekend out of town tickets and some passes are still available.

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Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (part of the Oscar-winning collective behind No Other Land), have returned with NAZA. Now playing in theaters, and soon to follow online, it is another striking piece of documentary and journalism that illuminates the horrors of the last three years in the conflict between Israel and Gaza.

The most effective pieces of No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary, happened at night. Outside of its first-person documentation of the resistance to regular Israeli military incursions into the Occupied West Bank, the candid conversations and burgeoning friendship between an Israeli journalist (Yuval Abraham) and Palestinian activist (Basel Adra) underscored the gulf between the freedoms accorded to them in their daily lives as well as the constraints on their future aspirations. Growing close to them while made the portrayal of inhumane treatment, government betrayals, and ceaseless harassment in the destruction of Masafer Yatta all the more enraging. 

With NAZA, they double down on the conversational theme, entirely structured around late-night talks. Here, though, they’re interviews conducted on Tel Aviv rooftops over the course of the last three years. Yuval Abraham is back in a journalistic role and we watch as he speaks to nearly two dozen members of Israel’s military whose voices and appearances are disguised to protect their identities. Both films feature revelatory talks in the evening shadows, but where No Other Land’s were heartfelt connections, these use the privacy afforded by the remote locations and twilight shadows to chilling effect. Where the specificity of No Other Land left me so angry and heartbroken I wanted to throw rocks, NAZA’s big-picture approach to revealing systematic practices of state violence is a kind of infuriating from which there is no coming back. 

With very limited archival footage, conversation remains the fundamental currency of the documentary. In place of re-enactments or sophisticated graphics, concepts are illustrated by the men (and women) describing the practices of the IDF in Gaza with hand-drawn sketches. As we watch them put pen to paper to outline bombings of apartment blocks or the positioning of snipers on food lines while candidly describing casualty counts, it’s like a very low-fi rendition of The Act of Killing. All the while, the camera often cuts away to calm, methodical scenes of urban life viewed through Tel Aviv high-rise windows. Filmed at a distance, these narcotizing montages play like one of an AppleTV screensavers that I’d zone out to while having a dental procedure, though my hygienist invokes far less pain. The submissive effect of the long-distance photography alongside the matter-of-fact revelations makes for an eerie contrast with what the scenes they’re describing in Gaza, only 44 miles away. 

Structured over several chapters, the film opens with a historical wide lens, detailing the degree to which constant Israeli surveillance was built into the West Bank from the very origins of its telecommunications infrastructure. We hear how this constant scrutiny has evolved from the practice of anti-terrorism into a system of modern warfare that has become deeply reliant on computer models and artificial intelligence. The film’s title is taken from the internal terminology used by the IDF to calculate the “acceptable” number of civilian casualties for any given operation in a war increasingly conducted at a distance with bombs and drones.

As these soldiers and operatives talk about their work, it reveals the degree to which compartmentalization has served to insulate the practice of war from the people practicing it. Targets are determined by AI models applied to communication networks; casualties are left to equations; the humans are just doing their job as a cog in a giant machine. To an extent, these discussions apply to broader issues in the ways that wars are now conducted across the globe. That death can be dealt so easily from above with so little emotional toll is frightening in general, but as applied to the asymmetrical conflict playing out in Gaza, there are harrowing specifics. 

A frequent thread is the ease by which the system enables an abdication of responsibility, even after describing the hundreds or thousands of civilians whose deaths they personally oversaw on a given day.   Some acknowledge that the operations were “insanely fun”, akin to completing caffeine-fueled levels on a video game. Others, when challenged, several of the interviewees acknowledge that in the abstract, the actions they describe would constitute war crimes. Most participants must feel disillusioned enough by the system to have participated in the documentary; but few — even with disguised voices — sound as if they’re haunted by the role that they played. There’s always someone or something above whose orders were being followed. Some have left the service; others still believe in the mission. Given the banal tone by which some describe their participation in a genocide as part of a high-status, well-paying job, that Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest) is an executive producer.

Most of the individual revelations deriving from these conversations have already been published (in The Guardian, which will release the film online after its theatrical release). So there is not necessarily a bombshell contained here to grab headlines. However, collecting all of these stories into one concise piece, though, has an impossibly profound effect in describing a systematic government practice of unrelenting violence. As a documentary, it is an artful depiction of heroic journalism. For much of the audience who goes to see this film, it will serve as a brilliant synthesis of the awful shape of this seemingly endless crisis. One can hope that for others it will mark a clear bright line that irrevocably awakens an horrible understanding of the unfolding genocide.

It is horrifying to see little drawings translated to the vast numbers of civilian lives taken in service of killing low-level targets of suspected terrorist involvement. Tallies grow, the “acceptable” ratios stretch to absurdity, boggling the mind of the viewer and occasionally even the interviewees as they recognize the scope of death they’ve dealt. Hearing in plain language the degree to which the flattening of the Gaza Strip is the point of the mission is clarifying toward what anyone with eyes has long suspected. Acknowledgement that the intentional constraint of humanitarian aid is intended to force migration and induce fear reinforces what most external observers have been shouting. But it is the anecdotes about watching (or causing) unspeakable cruelty and suffering, often at the distance afforded by the remote surveillance operation, that are the film’s most searingly unforgettable. The stories draw the breath right out of you. 

Still, most of the masterful film leaves the ground-level view of Gaza to our imagination. Throughout, Yuval remains impossibly unreactive, allowing the cavalcade of self-indicting revelations to proceed in abhorrent detail. The pictures these stories and sketches conjure are indelible. When the film finally shows actual footage on the ground, it’s so much worse than you imagined. A must-watch documentary, among the most important of this year or any other. 

Naza arrives in local theaters on October 9, including a run at the SIFF Uptown.
Image courtesy of the Guardian

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(2026 | Chile/Argentina/Luxembourg/Germany | 100 min | Lisandro Alonso)

Lisandro Alonso’s Double Freedom (Spanish title La Libertad Doble), is a quasi-remake of his 2001 debut, La Libertad, one of the most important art films of the 21st century. Shot with a crew of ten people, La Libertad observed a day in the life of Misael, a young ranch hand who worked at the Alonso family’s farm. The film observes Misael as he goes about his daily routine, felling trees, selling lumber, and (in)famously, capturing, butchering, and eating an armadillo. A slow film about slow labor, the film was a sensation that spoke directly to questions surrounding slow cinema aesthetics and their antagonistic yet inextricable relationship with a culture of globalized hyper-speed. Just as important was the film’s blurring of fiction and documentary, its artifice so ambiguous, its direction so meticulously neutral, that it represented a freedom not just from society and industrial production methods, but genre distinction altogether. Alonso’s project would clarify through the rest of the 2000s as the dual odysseys of Los Muertos and Liverpool explored capital’s infectious spread through remote Argentinian communities, but La Libertad remains his most singular achievement as one of cinema’s most thrillingly open and mystifying achievements.

La Libertad Doble is a back-to-basics proposition for Alonso after the hellish shoot of 2023’s Eureka, which marked the director’s first film set in the United States and his second collaboration with Viggo Mortensen after 2015’s Jauja. Alonso has publicly stated that these two films made him want to quit filmmaking altogether, so the decision to return to La Libertad and its independent production methods is a rare case of a director deciding to “size down”, attempting to reject this new environment of MUBI and NEON-produced international coproductions and the outsized power of Western European film funding.

More than anything, La Libertad Doble is about how you couldn’t make La Libertad today. This is clear from the opening shot, a continuation/recreation of the original’s bookended images of Misael sitting by a campfire eating armadillo, wearing the exact same outfit he wore 25 years ago. The impossible continuity (see also: the “same” dog) immediately breaks from the original’s docu-fictional veneer, and as Misael uncannily goes through the same routine with minor variations (e.g. he pooped in the woods in the original, but pees here), we’re keenly aware that on some level, he’s simply going through the motions. There’s a startling effect to watching these images, especially because no one expected a remake of this particular film, and the past 25 years have only honed Alonso’s craft. This isn’t a shot-for-shot remake. There’s so much rigor in the elongated static framings and the dense sound design that Doble feels more constructed than the original, but also more emphatically beautiful.

It’s both shocking and inevitable then, when a narrative emerges. Misael receives notice that his sister, Micaela (Catalina Saavedra), is being released from a mental institution on account of budget cuts. While La Libertad only featured Misael’s family through a brief phone call, Doble follows Misael as he picks up Micaela, and eventually brings her back to live with him. Micaela’s introduction serves a dual purpose, simultaneously illustrating the unfeasibility of Misael’s Edenic lifestyle in Argentina’s contemporary political conditions, and the impossibility of Alonso’s placid, unglamorous style in today’s filmmaking ecosystem (case in point: Cannes didn’t see fit to program Doble, a sequel to one of its most famous 21st century premieres, in its official selection). The title is ultimately quite literal, encompassing two characters, two days, two ironic notions of freedom, the IP-ification in the numbering a representation of capitalism’s reach into cinema’s margins.

Micaela reconfigures the film into a triptych, one that’s remarkably similar to Eureka. Like that film, which also opens with pastiche, the standout middle segment of La Libertad Doble, in which Misael visits the institution, with its sullen gray interiors and the striking image of a slumped body in the foreground, has a similarly nightmarish Lynchian quality. When Misael and Micaela return to the farm with their newfound pressures, the tone is sober, but not really despondent. There’s an intriguing mystical quality (like the last segment of Eureka), especially when Micaela drifts off into the forest on her own, imposing her own freeform sense of time, and the pair seem to take these new conditions with the same opaque melancholy as the opening. That tonal equilibrium eventually feels obstinate, defiant, even, especially when we see the pair walking through an open field, finding their way through the mythic, solitary expanse.

Alonso’s own defiance appears in the post-credits scene, one of the greatest in recent years, which shows the original ending to La Libertad that the Cannes selection committee forced Alonso to cut 25 years ago. In a nod to Taste of Cherry, a young Misael turns to the camera and laughs. Back then, such a gesture might have played like jovial gamesmanship, but in 2026, it’s developed into something crushingly bitter.

Double Freedom plays at NYFF on October 5, 8, and 12. It is currently seeking distribution.

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The Social Network, about a Harvard nerd turning his longing for connections into a world-devouring platform, is among the greatest wide-release films made in this increasingly dismal century. Working from a rapid-fire script from Aaron Sorkin, David Fincher discovered an film that was emblematic of the times, in large part due to a brilliantly realized and thorny lead performance from Jesse Eisenberg that intercuts between a present day deposition to expose the past, we see the founder transform from a lonely  college kid, oblivious to social cues and drunk on nascent power, into a lonely executive, guarded against the slings and arrows of a lawsuit aiming to take a piece of his kingdom. 

Since then, the world, our relationship to social media, and its relationship to the world have changed dramatically and almost entirely for the worse. So it makes sense that all these years later, Sorkin has returned to the well of the Facebook. However, in what’s becoming an unfortunate pattern, someone in power at a movie studio has made the catastrophic decision to allow him to direct his own script. At one point in his career, he may have been gifted enough at spinning out enough crackerjack dialogue to cover up other flaws in storytelling and characterization, but in my experience his scripts have been better served by being produced by someone with enough skepticism and influence to counterbalance the writing. Here, there’s no such ballast, and the film suffers greatly. Cringeworthy throughout, it’s so blind to its own faults that its already-dated revelations make for a dull retelling of very recent history.

Like its vastly superior predecessor, The Social Reckoning uses Sorkin’s favorite device: cross-cutting between interconnected episodes in history. The first thread concerns a Wall Street Journal reporter beginning to dig into the algorithmic practices of Facebook in 2019. The other finds Facebook’s CEO being prepped by image consultants in a theater-style war room for impending congressional testimony in January of 2021. Spoilers for recent history, but astute audiences might remember that something else Facebook-related also happened in that month. Spoilers for the way Sorkin writes: there’s some fudging of timelines to get all of these pieces to fit together for the sake of drama, especially if it provides occasions for monologues, especially if they’re repetitive ones. 

To that end, the film opens with one of his favorite tropes: a woman who seems very smart but is maybe actually kind of dumb and definitely evil. Here, it’s an attractive blonde woman standing on the side of the road next to a car experiencing mechanical trouble. The police come to her assistance, smell alcohol on her breath, and are confronted with what to do. For a minute, you think this drunk lady is outsmarting them (she’s not actively driving after all) until the plot turns and she reveals herself to be a monstrous MAGA-style influencer who captures the venomous exchange for online clout. It’s painful to watch this once and Sorkin will return to it over and over again within the frame of the movie to hammer home what’s a fairly obvious point to anyone alive in the year 2026.

Back in the real world we meet our two protagonists. Mikey Madison plays a socially isolated Facebook data engineer (Frances Haugen) who’s been running some classifiers as part of the platform’s perfunctory and much-ignored Civic Integrity Team. Sorkin lets you know she’s smart by the way she wears glasses and armwarmers, but emphasizes her ineffectiveness in the way she piles all her speeches onto note cards, info-dumps statistical modelling language to uninterested colleagues, and snappily corrects her troglodyte coworkers about their misunderstanding of mythology.  Elsewhere, we meet Jeremy Allen White as a virtuous but perpetually befuddled Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz just as he’s rolling in late to an important pitch meeting in San Francisco. Despite wanting to do an extensive investigation of a powerful tech company, he’s presented as an incredibly ignorant and underprepared, a thirty-something who has managed to have missed the boat on all aspects of modern-day technology. Unaware of how to use Google Maps (or take an Uber from the airport) and seemingly never having directly interacted with social media platform, he’s a perfectly odd fit for the assignment he chose for himself. Maybe the real Horwitz (who graduated prep school in 1999, went to Pomona, and did a fellowship at Columbia) was actually so oblivious at the time, but as a character on a big screen the comatose level of awareness makes for tough sledding as a protagonist. 

The second main piece of the story finds us in 2021, with Jeremy Strong playing Mark Zuckerberg as he’s forced by his handlers into rehearsing answers for an upcoming session in front of Congress related to the platform’s practices as they regard to political speech and advertising. If I had one hope for this movie it would be that it was at least justified by a fascinating performance by Strong, but alas all of his Method is in vain. He portrays him as an openly sociopathic robot, a flimsy stereotype of the far reaches of the neuroatypical spectrum. Any complexity or humanity from the role created by Eisenberg in The Social Network is long gone, washed away by the billions of dollars and godlike insulation of monarchic moguldom of the intervening decades. Here and in flashbacks, Strong shows the character rarely feigning an interest in even appearing human. The spiteful and short tempered persona approximately works as a punchline, but grows tiresome very quickly. 

Most of the film’s time is spent on Horwitz’s reporting that would become The Facebook Files, a feat that apparently resulted from one very fortuitous response to spamming a bunch of Facebook employees with LinkedIn messages. Looking to find out whether comments are being filtered, he’s essentially handed a much much bigger story by Haugen, who despite loving Facebook and its mission (despite her constant mistreatment and disregard) has seen some alarming statistics about the catastrophic societal effect of the platform’s newfound focus on “engagement” as a key metric of success. Dozens of other dangers are mentioned, though none feel quite as shoehorned as the scenes reminding us of the harassment of young girls on instagram and the resulting self-harm. The grand reveal of the platform’s radicalizing effect is another place where the fast pace of history works against Sorkin. Even with a personal angle as motivation for Frances in becoming a source, a thirtysomething reporter discovering the bare minimum of how a social media platform works and a whistleblower revealing that reposting vs. simply liking hateful content drives people toward hateful groups now feels painfully self-evident.

Even when retelling history, one could hope that the docudrama form has the power to make a complex problem engaging or the process to discover the truth to be fascinating. Unfortunately, the decision to portray Horwitz as an idealistic idiot (perhaps as an audience stand-in) deeply backfires. From the vantage of 2026, the revelations not only seem obvious, his inability to understand the things that Haugen is telling him, let alone to have done any homework beyond pestering his perpetually abusing his interns, makes for a dull series of discoveries. Even when she’s styled like her character in Anora sneaking into hotels (apparently to deflect attention), Madison does what she can to make her portrayal of a brave whistleblower carry the weight of the immense personal risk that she’s taking to give this reporter a career-defining story, but she’s really left out on a limb in terms of scene partners.

It’s not entirely Jeremy Allen White’s fault, but he’s playing a man who doesn’t know anything about social media, has never hiked, hasn’t heard of celiac or gluten intolerance (see above about having gone to Pomona and Columbia), barely understands simple charts and graphs. It’s hard to take him seriously as a reporter, let alone as a human being who was alive and in the world. Sorkin seems to love him to the point that he lets him drop a terrible ‘mansplaining’ retort in the middle of an argument. Even the audience at the press screening groaned. Sorkin’s dialogue is allegedly his strength, but it only works when we have reason to believe the characters are too smart for their own good. Without that foundation, and applied to paper thin characters, the wordplay is annoying and repetitive. What should be a movie about journalistic fireworks plays out more like soggy cereal barely snapping or crackling let alone ever popping.

You can feel the filmmakers realizing that part of the story is a dud in the way that the finale seeks to heighten the stakes (with something that feels fudged, timeline wise) with real world implications. Just as Jeremy Strong’s version of ZuckerBot is almost roused from his shell in a stand-off with a former colleague (Bill Burr as Charlie Garrigan, seemingly brought in for the sole purpose of undermining the competence of  Wunmi Mosaku’s crisis manager) over a pet issue of fact-checking political ads, all hell literally breaks loose. What had been building to a journalism bomb dropping shifts instead to the actual world breaking. The instinct to thread this needle makes sense, but it also feels like a hackneyed ploy and a desperation move, compete with an eye-roll callback that’s far Too Cute. Zuckerberg is so sidelined and limited in his dialogue that one wonders about terror of impending lawsuits in determining exactly what words could be uttered during the film. Regardless of the decision tree, the result is near-comedic in its simplicity. 

With little in the way of visual panache (cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth returns, but everything looks like Vancouver or a hotel room) or sonic excellence (gone is the iconic Reznor/Ross duo that innervated Network), the lack of storytelling innovation falls flat and fails the actors. You almost feel bad for Jeremy Strong having to get such a terrible haircut living as this character for not very much in the way of a return. Ironically or not, the final moments call back to a scene in which Horwitz explains the happiness of overtime-enabling buzzer-beater to Haugen in neither of them knowing the result of the overtime (even weirder: the game they’re watching almost certainly did not exist). As the audience, though, we don’t need the novel’s worth of end title cards to know what came of all the risk and reporting. Even a few years after these events, the air is completely out of the story and the writer/director is nowhere up to the challenge of trying to make sense of that unfortunate but true reality.  

The Social Reckoning arrives in theaters on October 9
Images courtesy Sony / Columbia Pictures

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The second entry in Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends series, Exile, takes place just days after the conclusion of Part I, when all of the journalists at the last remaining independent TV outlet in Russia, TV Rain, were forced to flee the country after the invasion of Ukraine. Taking place from 2022 to early 2026, Loktev follows the journalists as they scatter across the globe, hopping from country to country as each new home becomes increasingly unviable for either their personal safety or their continued coverage of Russian news.

Though the film is largely in the same format — handheld iPhone cinematography of domestic hangouts — the effect is quite different from Last Air in Moscow, which had the quality of a present-tense community portrait moving inexorably towards a conclusion its characters thought impossible. Even more than being about journalism, Last Air in Moscow struck me as a film about the ways we convince ourselves everything will be okay in the face of rising authoritarian power, whether that be through hero narratives or the maintained illusion of daily life. In Exile, any semblance of normalcy is completely shattered. This ends up being a much more action-packed scenario than Part I, prompting one character to even describe her life as being stuck in a low-budget spy film. Indeed, this film features espionage, a dangerous trip back to Russia, a criminal sentencing, and even a poisoning. The effect is an anxious drift that makes each successive departure and arrival, complete with a set of desperate embraces, incredibly moving.

Spread across the world, with a few of the journalists eventually moving to the US, part of the film’s interest is seeing the range of problems faced by each journalist depending on where they’ve landed. For the middle-aged Anna Nemzer, hopping from Israel to Latvia to Georgia to the US also means uprooting her daughter, who treats each subsequent move as a fresh heartbreak. For another journalist, even though she has started a new life with a new girlfriend in Europe, she still plans to return to Russia and face a prison sentence.

Through these proceedings, which includes a final blow to the journalists’ hope of returning to their homeland (the death of Navalny), their unwavering commitment to their work becomes a Sisyphean feat. It’s easy to come up with reasons for why the work is important, whether that be the principle of asserting non-propagandistic reality or, as they describe it, supporting a minority that feels helpless and alone, but feeling the durational struggle in this episodic form is another beast entirely.

My Undesirable Friends — Part II: Exile played at NYFF on September 27. It is distributed by MUBI, entering limited theatrical release this weekend.

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My Wife Cries is as wonderful a film Angela Schanelec has ever made about the unknowability of others and the inexhaustible beauty of the everyday. Thomas (Vlademir Vulević), a construction worker, receives a call from his wife, Clara (Agathe Bonitzer), and finds her crying on a park bench. Though she initially seems distraught over her involvement in a car accident, we discover that this offscreen event, which re-emerges later in the film, is simply a punctuation mark to an affair that started when Thomas stopped attending dance lessons with her.

Both the title and this opening stretch make it seem like this is Schanelec’s first film to really center a man (Music, a very loose Oedipus adaptation, notwithstanding), but most of My Wife Cries actually follows Clara as she wanders throughout Berlin in ways that feel like a maturation of Schanelec’s early trilogy of Places in Cities (evoked in the car crash story), Passing Summer, and Marseille. There’s a lot of I Was At Home, But… in here as well (she even sorta repeats the iconic Pieta-like image near the end), what with the tracking shots and the Straub-ian style of recitation that’s become Schanelec’s stock and trade.

That subjective disconnect between the film’s title and content is the essence of Schanelec, who operates at extremes of naturalism and theatricality, searching for some sort of reconciliation, whether it be through words, performance, movement, or radiant, shimmering light. The sense of unreality is as much an effect of her dialogue, with its lengthy, monotone discussion of offscreen events, real or imagined, as her montage, which seems to constantly undermine our understanding of spatial relations, even in the simplest of conversations. In their attempt to access characters’ ineffable private lives, Schanelec’s films aim for the transcendent in the most basic sense of the word. Her attitude towards surface is succinctly explained during a character’s birthday celebration. After receiving smiling childhood photos from his mom, he turns to his girlfriend and tells her, “I was just born, but I was already so anxious”.

The mystery that emerges through Schanelec’s montage and performances is only matched by the ecstatic beauty of what’s in the frame. Portraits of bodies, whether they be of a delicate sleeping face or a naked body are bathed in soft, golden light. In the park, the light and wind streaming through the trees have the sensual touch of an experimental filmmaker.

This would ordinarily make Schanelec someone who seems suited for digital filmmaking, but I appreciate that she’s someone who’s committed to mining the expressive depths of the Bressonian model, whose needle drops have never wavered from the 70s American pop of her youth. The rare moments of musical synchronicity are instantaneous and sort of ridiculous. In one example, a conversation between Clara and her coworker in the park is interrupted by an impromptu band performance, one that’s dismantled by the rain as soon as it starts. Later, while Clara is ill and resting on the couch, Thomas and her friends spring into a fully choreographed dance to Leonard Cohen’s “Lover Lover Lover”, the sort of laughably cartoonish number that’s nonetheless a moment of collective feeling, and one that Clara realizes she’s on the outside of when she wakes up. She gets her own near-miraculous encounter in the final image, a reverse-shot held just long enough to register its narrative import that seems to quiver with emotional import.

My Wife Cries played at NYFF on September 28, 29, and 30. It is currently seeking distribution.
Image courtesy NYFF.

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