ScreenAnarchy

Venice 2026 Review: LOVERS IN THE BLUE NIGHT, Tender Social Drama Caught in Its Own Emotional Web

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 14:02:02 -0500

Anuparna Roy's second feature intertwines queer longing, displacement, caste and emotional misrecognition in the nocturnal margins of Mumbai.

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STEVEN SPIELBERG: THE SPOTLIGHT COLLECTION Brings Home Eight Modern Classics

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 13:02:01 -0500

Eight cinematic masterworks from Steven Spielberg are brought together in a beautiful 4K UHD collector's edition.

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Now on VOD: BURY THE DEVIL, Fluid Camerawork and Lead Performances Elevate Familiar Horror

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:00:00 -0500

On a very dark and stormy night, Julia arrives for her very first overnight shift as a hospice nurse, only to end up trapped in a remote lakeside house with Evelyn, a dementia patient who might be dealing with something supernatural. Julia took the job out of guilt because she avoided her own mom while she was dying of dementia. Now, she is stuck in this remote house, gradually unearthing the truth about their patient's past, realizing something supernatural is wrong with Evelyn. Things get worse when Evelyn’s estranged ex-husband, Randall, shows up in the middle of the night, all "Torches and Pitchforks." He and Evelyn shared this dark past—they lost their daughter and used a sketchy spiritual ritual to try and save...

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Echoes: The Changing Art of Pakistani Film Posters

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:02:11 -0500

Pakistani cinema had streets, walls, billboards, and cinema entrances long before a YouTube trailer or social media existed. One year after independence, Pakistan entered cinema with its first film, Teri Yaad, which ran for five weeks on cinema screens, as per British Online Archives. The country officially saw the dawn of the Golden Age of Lollywood, when a film's marketing involved hand-painted posters. Lahore and Karachi became the primary filmmaking hubs, where hyper-vibrant, hand-painted posters defined the era's visuals. The art, technique, Urdu typography, visual styles, and cultural influences that make these posters distinctive have changed over time. For clarification, let's take the poster of 1979's Maula Jatt and 2022's The Legend of Maula Jatt. The 1979 poster (above) has an unmistakable look of classic...

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Venice 2026 Review: ARRESTED MEMORY, Screwball Cop Caper Brings Melancholy to the Police-Action Formula

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:02:10 -0500

Japanese cult filmmaker Sabu refreshes the police-action formula with screwball comedy and melancholic undertones.

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Now On Demand: MISTURA, Peruvian Comfort Food

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 09:02:09 -0500

Barbara Mori, César "Pudy" Ballumbrosio, Christian Meier, and Hermelinda Luján star in Ricardo de Montreuil's crowdpleasing film.

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Venice 2026 Review: JUPITER, Claustrophobic Political Thriller for the Current Time

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 07:02:07 -0500

Alexandre Smia's gripping feature debut locks Denis Ménochet inside the machinery of presidential power, where rational calculations lead toward an unthinkable conclusion.

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Steven Spielberg's DISCLOSURE DAY Lands on Home Video with Its Wonder Intact

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:02:01 -0500

Blockbusters both new and old are now on 4K UHD from Universal, Warner Bros., and Sony.

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Opening This Week: NEVER AFTER DARK, PRIMETIME, YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:02:12 -0500

Plus: 'Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!,' 'Heart of the Beast,' 'Ryuichi Sakamoto: Diaries.'

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Toronto 2026: Wrap -- All Our Coverage (So Far)

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 11:02:11 -0500

Our curtain raiser, our reviews, our poster columns, and an interview.

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Sound And Vision: Olivia Wilde

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 10:00:03 -0500

In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we discuss a duo of music videos by Olivia Wilde. Olivia Wilde might be known mostly as an actor. But after three films as a director that show a wide variety of styles and genres, it is clear she is the real deal of a good actor-turned-director, a feat which is still quite rare. You might think that her three films and two music videos don't have a lot in common. One is a highschool-comedy, one is a scifi-thriller, one is a razorsharp black comedy set in one room and the music videos are a skating-video and a dance-choreography shot on a phone. You would be...

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Toronto 2026 Review: MARIE MADELEINE, An Unforgettable Experience

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:07:08 -0500

Géssica Généus directs and stars.

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Toronto 2026 Review: EVERYTHING ELSE IS NOISE

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 13:02:01 -0500

Opening with one of the most pleasurable and ambient scenes of 2026, Everything Else Is Noise announces its intentions immediately. Gridlocked traffic in a Mexico City intersection struggles to move and to find space in a complex interactive dance, while we listen to someone warming up the bow-on-strings of a cello. Nicolás Pereda’s latest exquisitely calibrated comedy of manners devotes a sizeable amount of its slim (but typical for this director) 71-minute runtime to let this scene play out in all its anticipatory banality before introducing us to its lead character. Teresa (Teresita Sánchez) is a composer who has lent out her apartment to a fellow female composer for a television documentary interview that morning. Her neighbour first comes up to complain about the cello...

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Toronto 2026 Review: THE UNKNOWN, Elevated Body-Swap Thriller Is A Magisterial Masterwork

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:02:12 -0500

Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider lead Oscar-winner Arthur Harari's mind-bending thriller.

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Vlissingen 2026 Review: TOO MANY BEASTS Delightfully Zigs And Zags

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:00:05 -0500

A few minutes into Sarah Arnold's debut film Too Many Beasts I was wondering if the booklet of Vlissingen's Film by the Sea Festival had been misprinted. A comedy? This? Judging from the gore, lighting, music and ehm... bodycount, I was still deciding whether this was going to be a creature feature or a serial killer thriller. And the next few minutes didn't exactly make things easier, with our protagonist being a decidedly unsympathetic mentally broken policeman drunkenly stalking his ex. But as the narrative starts to develop, the fun starts too, just when you as a viewer catch on to what the hell is happening. We follow Fulda, who starts working in a rural village on the French mainland. Demoted after a violent incident...

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Toronto 2026 Review: UNION TOWN, The Power Divide Is Real

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:02:11 -0500

With Union Town, master documentarian Barbara Kopple completes a trilogy she began with the Oscar winning documentaries Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) and American Dream (1990). From the coal mines of Kentucky to the factories of the Midwest, Kopple shifts her focus to New York City, a so-called ‘union town’. Her intensive investigation of class struggle becomes a sharp callback to ancient times, when the lower class was robbed of their humanity by their unending servitude. Kopple’s formidable persistence in her mission once again exposes the endless courage of the human spirit. Deeply invested in presenting raw, empathic stories of the unsung workers who toil to keep the American economy running, here she profiles crucial labour battles as they unfold. They involve workers from UPS and Amazon, as well as...

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Toronto 2026 Review: HALF, Malayalam Vampires Throw Down the Beats, and Slay On the Beatings

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 10:02:10 -0500

Somewhere in the vast open spaces of the Rajasthan Desert in Northwestern India, there is a highly organized group of bandits operating a well-oiled machine of hijacking, car-stripping, electronics and jewellery fencing. The local cops are in their pocket, and they even have an onsite crematorium for getting rid of the bodies. One fine and sunny day, they try their usual business of a pair of vampire fraternal twins who happen to be passing through in their white Chevrolet Cruz. Violent, bloody and quite imaginative mayhem ensues as it is a showdown between bandits versus vampires. That is about it. And that is about all there needs to be. It's a stylish genre mash-up of vampire, martial arts action, Western, Mad Max vehicular bedlam,...

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Toronto 2026 Review: MISTY GREEN, Profane Hollywood Satire Is Fitfully Amazing

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 09:02:09 -0500

Chris Rock, as a Hollywood insider kimono-opener, wants to regale us with joyously crass anecdotes about the business' lurid inner workings. In his telling, everyone is a coke-addled fuck-up cheating on their partners, sleeping around for roles and money, and uninterested in art or progressivism. With Misty Green, he's breathlessly eager to spill the tea, only he can't get out of his way. His profane Hollywood satire needs to compete with issue-based digressions about police brutality, mental illness, and racism, making even the slender 100-minute runtime feel crowded. For what it is, though, Misty Green is entertaining with memorably vulgar dialogue, and Rock assembles an A-list cast in walk-on roles to play degenerate assholes. The gravy train is up for the titular Misty Green (Rosalind...

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IN THE GRIP OF TERROR: Amicus Productions Returns to UK Cinemas With First New Feature in Forty Years

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:00:00 -0500

Amicus Productions is officially resurrecting its legendary portmanteau blueprint with In the Grip of Terror, the studio’s first new horror feature in over four decades. Hitting select UK cinema screens this October and November, this brand-new anthology links its sinister tales through a central framing story set inside a mysterious hospital run by cult icon Laurence R. Harvey (The Human Centipede II). The film delivers a treat for vintage horror purists by adapting classic spine-chillers from masters of the macabre like H.P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and E.F. Benson. It stars Golden Globe nominee Jane Merrow (Hands of the Ripper) alongside rising genre face Megan Tremethick. This theatrical rollout also marks the launch of British Horror Studio Picture House. This new distribution arm already...

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Toronto 2026 Review: ANCHORS AWEIGH, Deadpan Profundity, with Sailing Metaphors

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 18:02:06 -0500

Matt Barats is an idiot. He says so himself. He should have dropped a knee in his marriage proposal to his rich, blonde, much younger girlfriend. He didn’t. Now she is kissing her co-worker in the park. And here he is. On a boat he cannot sail. In a marina by the airport. Alone with his childhood DV videotapes. Wallowing in self-pity, unacknowledged narcissism, and a questionable artistic project of unconnected vignettes. Vignettes. Yes, vignettes. Vignettes. After honing his confessional-cringe style with Cash Cow, a film about a struggling actor waiting for some Domino’s advert royalties to roll in while he wallows in a tent in Mormon country, Barats returns with Anchors Aweigh, a smart film about cluelessness. Or, perhaps, a self-aware film about a...

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Venice 2026 Review: NO PARADISE IF YOU ARE KILLED BY A WOMAN Goes into Stealth Mode to Confront the Scars of War

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:02:03 -0500

Merging the exportable mechanics of a stealth-combat thriller with the political urgency of Kurdish resistance, Halkawt Mustafa delivers an ambitious Iraqi-Norwegian genre film.

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Toronto 2026 Review: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BRIAN MULRONEY

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 14:02:02 -0500

Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney is, in the words of our former honourable Prime Minister from Baie-Comeau, a "little bit of genius in everybody that causes something to happen in Canada, and that thing has got to be rewarded.” And rewarded it shall be: With post-modern satire that is both gentle and savage. Matthew Rankin’s propulsive, stylised and hyper-ironic political tele-visual remix is a work of staggering amusement. Both him and his team have assembled an unfathomable amount of archival footage and RetroOntario ephemera. They have leavened it with sensational fantasia-constructs, and slathered it all visually with the remix-aesthetic of 21st century Twitch-collective RacerTrash set to the sounds of Francophone electro-pop. The result is a whirligig of Canadian political machination, Game of Thrones filtered through the...

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Now Playing: RESIDENT EVIL, BAD APPLES, SHAUN THE SHEEP: THE BEAST OF MOSSY BOTTOM

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 12:02:12 -0500

Also: John Wilson's delightful doc 'The History of Concrete,' plus Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe in tough-minded period adventure 'The Weight.'

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Friday One Sheet: MINOTAUR

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 11:00:00 -0500

Refraction and separation are the key elements in the CREATE's release poster for Andrey Zvyagintsev's superb festival prize-winner, Minotaur. There are some echoes and rhymes with the design work of Akiko Stehrenberger, specifically the remake of Funny Games, one of the best posters of the 21st century. There are no tears, however, for this is scathing and cynical critique of Russia in the guise of an infidelity drama, however the typography, the credit block, and the colour palette all track. If you are going to borrow, borrow from the best. (Note also, Minotaur is also a loose and re-contextualized remake of Nouvelle Vague filmmaker Claude Chabols' La Femme Infidèle.) One of the films key visual motifs is to put its lead characters behind glass. Their modern minimalist home, the corner office, and...

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Access:Horror 2026: One Day Live Event Next Week, Program Streams Later in October

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 10:30:00 -0500

The folks from the Access:Horror Film Festival are returning with a hybrid format focused on disability representation and intersectional storytelling in genre cinema. The festival begins with an in-person opening night showcase on Friday, September 25th at 8:00 PM at the Alamo Drafthouse Winchester in Virginia, hosted by Jazzmin and Kat from the Girl, That's Scary! podcast. The live event features nine short films, including The Hog Queen starring Marisa Bode and Mango produced by Wunmi Mosaku. Tickets and festival passes are available on the Lost Weekend Film Festival website. Then the festival moves online from October 4th through November 1st, offering a month to stream 19 international short films. The digital lineup is divided into three thematic blocks: Edibles, Your Body Keeps the...

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Venice 2026 Review: DIANE IN THE LOOP Channels Inherited Generational Rage into a Whimsical Yet Touching Feminist Western

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 10:02:10 -0500

Belgian filmmakers Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni turn intergenerational trauma into an eccentric tale of revenge and rebirth, veiled as unexpected feminist Western fairy tale and family road movie.

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Toronto 2026 Interview: DIARY OF A MAD OLD MAN Director Wayne Wang on Adapting Junichiro Tanizaki, Bringing Chinese and Japanese Stars Together

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:02:09 -0500

Director, producer and screenwriter Wayne Wang reflects on desire, ageing and psychological temptation in what may be his final film.

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Toronto 2026 Review: THE DEBUT, Community Theater Satire Is a Feature Length SNL Skit

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:12:07 -0500

Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti lead Jesse Eisenberg's musical comedy for A24.

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Toronto 2026 Review: NOBODY'S VIOLENCE, Profoundly Engaging, Genre-Shattering, Surreal Investigation

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:02:05 -0500

Veteran Canadian avant garde filmmaker, Denis Côté once stated that he measures the success of his works by the number of walk-outs. It's doubtful that his wish will be satisfied with his latest. Nobody's Violence (Violence du corps de l'autre) is a profoundly engaging, genre-shattering, surreal investigation of a futuristic euthanasia enterprise. Reteaming with actress Larissa Corriveau (Mademoiselle Kenopsia) and fellow director Vincent Biron as cinematographer, Côté fashions a swirl of dreamlike energy that riffs on genre films ranging from dystopian sci-fi to character study to bitterly ironic satire of the power of the rich. He even throws in romance. It's so utterly engaging that it is certain to haunt audiences well after the end credits roll. The film's brilliance lies in Côté's narrative strategy:...

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Toronto 2026 Review: COWARD, Gentle Romance in Shadows of War

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:32:04 -0500

Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne shared the Best Actor prize at Cannes for Belgium's Oscar entry.

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Toronto 2026 Review: LA BOLA NEGRA, Netflix's Ambitious War Epic Is Destined To Be an Awards Juggernaut

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:32:03 -0500

Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi's Cannes award-winner is a visually splendid historical drama.

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BAD APPLES Review: There Is Always One

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 13:02:01 -0500

Saoirse Ronan stars in Jonatan Etzler's unsparing satire.

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THE WEIGHT Review: Gold, Greed, Betrayal, Violence, and Murder, Made Remarkably Engrossing

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:02:12 -0500

Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe star in Padraic McKinley's feature directorial debut.

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Toronto 2026 Review: DIARY OF A MAD OLD MAN Turns Erotic Obsession Into an Anti-Erotic Meditation

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 10:02:10 -0500

Wayne Wang returns to literary adaptation with a disquieting chamber drama in which senescence becomes its own form of erotic suspense.

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Toronto 2026 Review: LOOK BACK Sees Hirokazu Kore-eda Struggle to Bring Tatsuki Fujimoto's Acclaimed Manga to Life

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 01:00:00 -0500

Celebrated filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda returns to the pages of Japanese manga for inspiration once again, unveiling this thoughtful adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s acclaimed 2021 coming-of-age one-shot, Look Back. Reuniting actresses Natsuki Deguchi and Aju Makita, both of whom featured prominently in the director’s 2023 Netflix drama series The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, the film tells the story of two burgeoning young mangaka, who meet in junior high school and forge a life-long friendship. Look Back was previously brought to the screen in 2024 by Kiyotaka Oshiyama, whose 58-minute anime was met with rapturous praise and no small degree of surprise. Up until that point, there had been only glimpses of this kind of emotional tenderness in Fujimoto’s work, who was best known...

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Toronto 2026 Review: ELSINORE, Centered By Andrew Scott's Haunting, Unforgettable Performance

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:42:02 -0500

In Elsinore, the new biopic on Scottish actor Ian Charleson (1949-1990), director Simon Stone thankfully avoids most of the usual cliches of the genre to create a deeper cinematic experience. Anchored by Stephen Beresford's (Pride, 2014) script, with a career-defining performance by Andrew Scott in the lead, the director manages to elevate a typically uninspired genre of filmmaking. Beresford centres his script in the final act of Charleson's life and career, giving Stone the opportunity to create a taut, absorbing cinematic experience. After his massive success in Chariots of Fire (1981), Charleson went through a professional drought in the latter part of the 1980s. On top of that, he was diagnosed with HIV. Although the disease was proving too powerful, eventually turning into AIDS, Charleson...

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Anime Weekly: Crunchyroll's Fall 2026 Season Revealed

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:32:12 -0500

'#I'm Looking for a Zombie,' 'Dreamland,' and much more.

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RESIDENT EVIL Review: Zach Cregger Brilliantly Reimagines the Decades-Old Series for Our Discontented Times

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:00:00 -0500

After 25 years, seven films, an animated series, and even a live album, it took Zach Cregger, the writer-director behind back-to-back horror standouts, Barbarian and Weapons, to properly adapt Resident Evil, Capcom’s survival-horror videogame franchise, into a live-action film that captured the CapCom series' essential elements, not just playability, but replayability: Not just the survival horror elements, of course, but more importantly, the unrelentingly suffocating, claustrophobic mood, the personal stakes (survive or die), and the aptly named Umbrella Corporation as a placeholder or symbol for a government-industrial alliance that poses a literal existential threat. That's not meant as a knock, of course, on the commercially successful, if otherwise critically dismissed, six-film series starring Mila Jovovich and (mostly) directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (Monster Hunter,...

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SLOW HORSES S6 E1 Recap: You're a Target. And So Are You. You Too.

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 10:30:10 -0500

Gary Oldman, Jack Lowden, and Kristin Scott Thomas reprise their roles in the British spy series.

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Toronto 2026 Review: BAD LIEUTENANT: TOKYO, Takashi Miike's Fairy Tale of Redemption

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:12:02 -0500

Is the Bad Lieutenant ‘franchise’ an excuse for wild auteur filmmakers to craft slyly black comedies full of sex and violence, and ideation-detritus that never made it into their other pictures? Is the Bad Lieutenant franchise even a franchise, or a vaguely connected idea of directorial maximalism? After the cult success of Abel Ferrara’s disturbingly violent, sexual, and catholic soaked New York City character study (essayed by a fearless, often naked Harvey Keitel), every 15 years or so another sensationally eccentric director will take a shot at this in another city. In 2009, it was Werner Herzog grafting his own proclivities and non-sequitur asides with Nicolas Cage in post-Katrina New Orleans. When a producer purchased title rights, it led to some misunderstanding that...

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GRIZZLY MAN Heads to Criterion Collection in December 2026, Plus NASHVILLE in 4K

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:40:12 -0500

Also: Anthony Mingella's 'The English Patient,' Pietro Germi's 'Divorce Italian Style,' Ernst Lubitsch's 'The Shop Around the Corner,' and 'Sara Gómez's Revolutionary Cuba.'

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THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE Review: Nothing Is Permanent

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:02:12 -0500

John Wilson's documentary is illuminating, fascinating, hilarious, and poignant.

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Home Video: THREADS 4K, THE WAR GAME 4K, and More From Severin

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 11:02:11 -0500

The list of films dealing directly with what it might be like to experience a nuclear war at ground zero is shorter than you might think. As powerful as Dr. Strangelove (1964), and Fail Safe (1962) are, they’re also highly stylized, and end before the effects of a nuclear war can begin. Likewise, excellent made for TV efforts like By Dawn’s Early Light (1990) and Special Bulletin, which aired April 29, 1984. On The Beach (1959) is also lacking in any sort of immediate realistic depiction of postwar life, taking place in a submarine in a world where cobalt bombs (non-existent but theoretically possible) have created a lethal radiation cloud that is enveloping the world. We are spared overt sights of the pure devastation and suffering...

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Echoes: Pakistan Has An Indie Film Movement. Why Aren't We Talking About It?

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 01:02:01 -0500

Traditional Pakistani cinema relies on commercial Eid releases, celebrity-led projects, and box-office numbers, implying a risk-averse industry culture. However, there's another kind of cinema that is quietly in the making: Pakistani indie cinema. I have talked about films that we need but haven't been made yet, which include unconventional stories. What if these unconventional stories require minimal budget without the intervention of major television networks and commercial production houses, as in the case of Zombeid (2026)? These unconventional stories aren't anything like mainstream commercial blockbusters and studio-backed feature films, like The Legend of Maula Jatt (2022) and Jawani Phir Nahin Aani (2015), which pretty much encapsulate what Pakistani independent cinema looks like. Some of the notable examples of Pakistani indie films include Sarmad Sultan Khoosat's...

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Toronto 2026 Review: WILD HORSE NINE, All Flourish and No Feeling

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:00:00 -0500

What does Salvadore Allende’s 9/11, Hank Williams, the JFK assassination, and an empathy for insects have in common? How does a stable democracy result in homosexuality, which leads, eventually, to fine quality cheeses? Writer-director hyphenate Martin McDonagh is here to tell all in Wild Horse Nine, a 1973 period piece buddy comedy spy film about mortality, which takes place mainly on tiny Easter Island. The film often plays like a superficially connected alternate-universe Burn After Reading (arguably the Coen’s most underrated and dismissed film) prequel, or sequel, or side-quel. But whatever. The point is, John Malkovich’s aging spy, Chris, is writing his memoirs on decades of destabilizing democracy, while on both a death-wish and a vacation, and it is going to be irreverent as fuck....

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Toronto 2026 Review: FURIES, A Feverishly Hellish Heist By Women Scorned

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:02:05 -0500

What is the world coming to when you have to steal your own hard earned money? Dalia is in need of a significant surgery. Until then, her medicine is only available on the black market, where half of it is counterfeit, and all of it is expensive. Maro has lost custody of her young son after her salon business went under due to lack of funds. The two sisters have been living on top of each other in Dalia’s cramped apartment, with Maro doing hair and beauty appointments on the balcony in the sweltering heat in between short visits with her boy for only a few hours on weekends. Beirut in 2023 was hell. A few years after a massive harbour explosion, an ongoing currency...

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Toronto 2026 Review: ALL OF A SUDDEN, Gently Drawing the Viewer Into More Difficult Realities

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 16:02:04 -0500

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's latest, All of a Sudden is a revelation. A meditation on the everyday lives of his characters and the weightier ideas orbiting them, the film transcends the experiences and ideas it presents. Considering that the film glides between realism and lyricism, all considerations of any individual's current realities slowly merge to offer a broader and profoundly hopeful statement on human connection. As usual, Hamaguchi deliberately crafts a film that manipulates time: Wordy and slow-paced in places but then breaking free into something eternal. Hamaguchi's ingenious ability to craft affinities evident in life's often random interactions (as witnessed in previous films Drive My Car, 2021, and Evil Does Not Exist, 2023) has never been stronger. Conceding that circumstances throw people together, Hamaguchi continues to...

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Opening This Week: RESIDENT EVIL, BAD APPLES, SHAUN THE SHEEP: THE BEAST OF MOSSY BOTTOM

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:02:12 -0500

Plus: 'The History of Concrete' and 'The Weight.'

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THE SECRET AGENT 4K Review: A Masterpiece of Memory and Resistance

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 11:00:00 -0500

It's hard to fathom, even in hindsight, how a film about a dictatorship, its long reach into the lives of seemingly ordinary people, a love of old movie houses and carnivals, and something of an experimental narrative structure, could translate into one of the most critically and commercially successful films of recent times. But sometimes the film goddesses smile upon a filmmaker and his audience, and we get a masterpiece like The Secret Agent, that finds universal appeal in its specific story. Criterion has assembles a wonderful 3-disc edition of the film for its collection. Kleber Mendonça Filho's cinema has always combined the personal and the political; memory and erasure; the ordinary person versus the tyrant and the evil. The Secret Agent is his most ambitious film to...

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Toronto 2026 Review: MINOTAUR, Russia As A Psychological-Visual Labyrinth

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0500

Andrey Zvyagintsev interrogates Russia in the same way 1990s era Zhang Yimou interrogated China: Methodically, metaphorically, and with an astutely savage eye for beautiful visuals to mask the criticism. There is a scene in his latest film, Minotaur, where the narrative briefly leaves the main characters and drama of the infidelity story, to follow some municipal workers refreshing a propaganda Special Military Operation recruitment poster. It has the purpose of driving Russia’s indifference towards honour and service, while also offering a bit of exposition in the form of a perfect ‘show don’t tell’ visual. Unlike Yimou’s post-Hero nationalistic reinvention as China’s top patriotic filmmaker (and Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies director), I do not suspect Zvyagintsev is going to be welcomed back into the fold any...

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