NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

BAM
Films by Godard, Wong Kar-wai, Apichatpong (on 35mm), Żuławski, Cronenberg, and Tarkovsky x2 screen in Arthouse Sci-Fi.

Film Forum
A Francis Ford Coppola retrospective begins, featuring prints of The Conversation and New York Stories; Robb Moss’ The Same River Twice and Riverdogs begin playing in a new restoration; Billy Liar, Sherman’s March and Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage continue playing in new 4K restorations.

Anthology Film Archives
Strangers on a Train screens on 35mm Friday night; Robert Downey Sr’s No More Excuses shows on Saturday and Sunday; westerns by Barbara Loden, Charles Burnett, Luc Moullet, and more play.

Roxy Cinema
A retrospective of 2006 continues with 35mm presentations of Crank and Click; the director’s cut of 54 screens on Sunday.

Museum of Modern Art
Films by Laurent Cantet, Med Hondo, and more play in Immigrant Nation.

Museum of the Moving Image
A new edition of See It Big: 70mm continues with Hamlet and Lawrence of Arabia; The Umbrellas of Cherbourg screens on Sunday.

IFC Center
Gregg Araki’s new cut of Mysterious Skin and Manhunter: The Final Cut continue; The Panic in Needle Park, The Departed, and Battle Royale show late.

Nitehawk Prospect Park
Fargo screens early.

Sundance gets crowded, and not everything that earns the distinction of premiering in Park City is going to earn waves of publicity. One film that existed a bit in this nether region while still deserving praise is Walter Thompson-Hernández’s If I Go They Will Miss Me, a Watts-set drama that mixes quotidian concerns with great formal ambition, in turn earning comparisons with Jonathan Demme, Charles Burnett, and RaMell Ross. With a nationwide release set for September 18, the first trailer has arrived.

As Jordan Raup said in our review, “Finding poetic beauty in the quotidian, Walter Thompson-Hernández’s If I Go Will They Miss Me centers on coming of age in housing projects of southern Los Angeles. It’s a way of life often depicted with a grittiness that favors do-or-die intensity, yet this emerging director of great promise takes an opposite approach. One where dreams of flight are always on the mind as the planes coming in and out of nearby LAX are constantly passing above. Greek gods, as studied in school, give purpose to a higher calling. An affection and adoration for and from its ensemble (many non-professionals, in this case) form a portrait of a living, loving community that rises above hardship. Just as his characters draw grand personal inspiration, Thompson-Hernández is greatly indebted to a variety of renowned directors, including Barry Jenkins, RaMell Ross, Charles Burnett, and Spike Lee, with the end result a film greater than the sum of its recognizable influences.”

Here’s the synopsis: “In the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, twelve-year-old Lil Ant sees the world and his father the way all children should — full of myth, wonder, and unwavering belief. IF I GO WILL THEY MISS ME is a breathtaking father-son story about imagination, family, and the grace we extend to the people we love.”

Find the preview below:

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2024 festival coverage. The film opens on August 21, 2026.

Shatara Michelle Ford’s sophomore feature Dreams in Nightmares is a Black road trip film with a big heart, full of warmth, healing, and beauty. With their debut film Test Pattern, Ford announced themselves as an essential new voice in Black cinema, with a focus on the lives and struggles of Black women. Here, Ford tackles similar themes with a wider scope that includes Black femmes, queer love, and non-monogamous relationship structures. An even mix of comedy and drama, Dreams in Nightmares is a work that feels both casual and cathartic.

Laid off from her teaching job, Z (Denée Benton) is unsure how to move forward. What’s a creative writing professor to do without students? Is teaching what she really wants, or is it time to switch gears? Z often dreams of a doorway opening into the unknown, but she always wakes before walking through it. Her loving partner Reece (Charlie Barnett) is much more confident, insisting that now’s the perfect time to join their lives together, inviting Z to put her name on the deed to the house they share. It all feels too good to be true––the lover, the house, the time to finally work on her novel. Yet Z is hesitant––is it the state of the world or her own self-doubt? Or maybe this is just the first time she’s been able to stop and consider her choices. Over in New York City, her best friend Tasha (Sasha Compère) has also lost her job and is newly stressed about her living situation with her flighty friend Lauren (Dezi Bing), who she had been supporting financially. In the midst of it all, their mutual friend Kel (Mars Storm Rucker) has seemingly disappeared without a trace. On a whim, Z flies to New York to join her friends and embark on a cross-country road trip to find Kel.

What follows is the story of three Black queer femmes coming to terms with themselves and each other as they try moving toward an uncertain future. Economic inequality, anti-trans legislation, the lack of funding and jobs for the arts, and the loss of community are all in the background of their journey, adding layers of meaning to each scene. Each person in the friend group has an arts background––writing, poetry, visual art, and performance. In one memorable scene, they attend a poetry reading hosted by a beautiful trans poet who temporarily steals the whole film. Dreams in Nightmares is very much about the intersection of art, life, and friendship. Whatever its occasional conflicts, Z, Tasha, and Lauren’s time together is depicted as beautiful, precious, and essential to their creative endeavors. 

Ford’s obvious love for these characters radiates from every shot. The warmth of their skin, the beauty of their hair, and the way they embrace each other feel radical to witness on the big screen. It’s been seven years since Girls Trip – already somewhat dated when it came out – and it’s refreshing to see a group of queer Black femmes – diverse in gender identity and sexually open – have fun together onscreen. It’s a film that feels current by simply depicting the daily struggles of our lives without heightened melodrama or despair. Dreams in Nightmares is a radically optimistic film for our troubled times. 

Dreams in Nightmares premiered at the BlackStar Film Festival.

An immediate movie-of-the-year contender, Chronovisor has lost little of its luster since a February premiere at Rotterdam. After an acquisition from Grasshopper Film, Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s feature debut will open at Film at Lincoln Center on September 4 before a larger theatrical roll-out, and ahead of this is the first trailer.

As Leonardo Goi said in our Rotterdam review, “Ostensibly set in the present, Chronovisor keeps jamming your temporal bearings. Save for the occasional smartphone, the ‘action,’ such as it is, unfolds in a world frozen in time (when Béatrice tries to contact one of Ernetti’s surviving relatives, it isn’t an email she sends but a typed letter). The focus gradually moves from the academic-turned-detective toward the media she consults: we hear recordings of a lecture Ernetti gave about his creation, watch old TV footage concerning the man and others who sought to communicate with the dead, but mostly we read. Chronovisor is so enamored with the written word that close-ups of books and articles comprise most of its runtime—with English translations of their various languages dished out not as subtitles but placed directly over the original text on the page. There’s nothing precious about the choice: Auen and Walker want you to read along with Béatrice, and what’s so fascinating about their film is the way it tries to combine two different art forms (literature and cinema) and different actions (reading and watching) all while adjusting its pace to the time needed to perform both.”

Here’s the synopsis: “While writing a monograph on historical theories of memory, Beatrice, a dedicated and respected academic, becomes beguiled by the story of the “Chronovisor,” an occult device that is said to reproduce visuals from any point in history on a TV screen. Her obsession with the machine drags her from her Upper East Side apartment through the depths of New York City’s hidden libraries, finally to the edge of a breakthrough and a breakdown.”

Watch below:

The Criterion Channel has long been a key source for streaming Japanese cinema. Those credentials increase a fair amount with September 2026: Hideaki Anno’s magnum opus Neon Genesis Evangelion, its little-seen film version Evangelion Death (True)², and The End of Evangelion (another magnum opus of a whole different order) all arrive; while everybody has Kiyoshi Kurosawa in mind, his excellent 2012 series Penance becomes available; the newly restored Linda Linda Linda is featured in “Girl Bands!,” a series that also includes Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Streets of Fire, and Olivier Assayas’ Clean; and an eleven-film Shohei Imamura program has been arranged.

The biggest restrospective is devoted to Abel Ferrara: 19 films, the profile spanning Bad Lieutenant and King of New York to New Rose Hotel (his masterpiece), Tommaso, and Napoli, Napoli, Napoli. Dangerous Game appears both there and in a Madonna series filled out by Body of Evidence and Desperately Seeking Susan, the latter of which crops up in a Susan Seidelman program; Robert A. Nakamura and Carla Simón are also highlighted. The latter set includes the recent Romería, which makes a streaming premiere alongside Lucrecia Martel‘s Our Land and the recently restored director’s cut of Michael Almereyda’s Nadja, itself part of a set comprising Terence Nance’s An Oversimplification of Her Beauty and Alfréd Radok’s Distant Journey.

For Criterion Editions, Michael Mann’s Thief, Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow, Joan Micklin Silver’s Chilly Scenes of Winter, Satyajit Ray’s recently restored Days and Nights in the Forest, Blue Vevet, and Paul Dano’s Wildlife (the director is also subject of a Craft of Acting masterlcass) all land; the out-of-print section gets Paul Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Pitall, Woman in the Dunes, and The Face of Another. I will also note the appearance of Don Siegel’s The Beguiled, about as good as Hollywood movies get, in Southern Gothic.

See the full lineup below and more at the Criterion Channel:

4:44 Last Day on Earth, Abel Ferrara, 2011*

The Addiction, Abel Ferrara, 1995

Aqua, Gints Zilbalodis, 2012

Away, Gints Zilbalodis, 2019

Bad Lieutenant, Abel Ferrara, 1992

The Ballad of Narayama, Shohei Imamura, 1983

The Beguiled, Sofia Coppola, 2017*

Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story, Steve Sullivan, 2018

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Russ Meyer, 1970

The Blackout, Abel Ferrara, 1997

Blood for Dracula, Paul Morrissey, 1974

Blue Velvet, David Lynch, 1986

Blur, Darol Olu Kae, 2025

Body of Evidence, Uli Edel, 1993

Body Snatchers, Abel Ferrara, 1993

Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997

Cemetery Man, Michele Soavi, 1994

Chilly Scenes of Winter, Joan Micklin Silver, 1979

China Girl, Abel Ferrara, 1987

Clean, Olivier Assayas, 2004*

Dangerous Game, Abel Ferrara, 1993

Days and Nights in the Forest, Satyajit Ray, 1970

Desperate Teenage Lovedolls, David Markey, 1984

Desperately Seeking Susan, Susan Seidelman, 1985

Detention, John Hsu, 2019

Distant Journey, Alfréd Radok, 1949

The Doors, Oliver Stone, 1991

The Driller Killer, Abel Ferrara, 1979

The Eel, Shohei Imamura, 1997

Evangelion Death (True)², Hideaki Anno, 1998

Fear City, Abel Ferrara, 1984

Flesh for Frankenstein, Paul Morrissey, 1973

Flow, Gints Zilbalodis, 2024

Grace of My Heart, Allison Anders, 1996*

Head, Bob Rafelson, 1968

Hito Hata: Raise the Banner, Robert A. Nakamura and Duane Kubo, 1980

I Ran from It and Was Still In It, Darol Olu Kae, 2021

Josie and the Pussycats, Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, 2001*

King of New York, Abel Ferrara, 1990

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, Lou Adler, 1982 

Linda Linda Linda, Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2005

The Little Sister, Hafsia Herzi, 2025*

Los Sures, Diego Echeverria, 1984

Lovedolls Superstar, Dave Markey, 1986

The Love Witch, Anna Biller, 2016

Making Mr. Right, Susan Seidelman, 1987

Manzanar, Robert Nakamura, 1972

Marighella, Wagner Moura, 2019

Ms .45, Abel Ferrara, 1981

Nadja, Michael Almereyda, 1994

Napoli, Napoli, Napoli, Abel Ferrara, 2009

Neon Genesis Evangelion, Hideaki Anno, 1995–1996

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion, Hideaki Anno and Kazuya Tsurumaki, 1997

New Wave, Elizabeth Ai, 2024

Our Land, Lucrecia Martel, 2025

Padre Pio, Abel Ferrara, 2022*

Penance, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2012

Prey for Rock & Roll, Alex Steyermark, 2003

Priorities, Gints Zilbalodis, 2014

The Projectionist, Abel Ferrara, 2019

’R Xmas, Abel Ferrara, 2001

Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, Howard Brookner, 1987

Romería, Carla Simón, 2025

Streets of Fire, Walter Hill, 1984*

Summer 1993, Carla Simón, 2017

Thief, Michael Mann, 1981

Third Act, Tadashi Nakamura, 2025

Times Square, Alan Moyle, 1980

Tommaso, Abel Ferrara, 2019

Uncle Howard, Aaron Brookner, 2016

Wataridori: Birds of Passage, Robert Nakamura, 1976

Welcome to New York, Abel Ferrara, 2014*

Wildlife, Paul Dano, 2018*

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Hidden in Pieces, Barnaby Clay, 2025

Zegen, Shohei Imamura, 1987

*Available in the U.S. only

Life must be good when you find yourself asking for a divorce simply because you’re bored. Is that all there is to Marija’s (Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė) decision? No. She’s also fallen in love with someone else. You can’t help feeling, though, that her boredom is a reason for that too. After all, her response to Vytas (Marius Repšys) asking what he can do to make things right is, “Be the man you were twelve years ago.” Back when he was interesting, fun.

Marija brings home the money as an executive at a marketing agency known for creating viral Internet clips while Vytas cooks, cleans, and takes care of their daughter Dovile (Amelija Adomaityte). Has his transformation into a homemaker dried up the passion and inspiration this once-acclaimed filmmaker possessed? Or did he do it to foster his desire to procrastinate? Either way, they’re definitely in a rut, treading water. Cue a war to spice things up.

Well, not really. Saying that makes it seem like Andrius Blaževičius’ How to Divorce During the War is a comedy rather than a drama that’s simply unafraid to highlight the absurdity within its tragic circumstances. Just because there’s humor in the juxtaposition of Marija asking Vytas for a divorce the day before Russia invades Ukraine doesn’t make light of the latter. It merely presents the characters a new distraction via a “First World Problems” litmus test.

Even that’s a bit flippant when the threat to Lithuania is very real. They were part of the Soviet Union. They understand the tactics men like Putin use to brainwash a population into thinking they need his protection from an outside force when he’s the actual threat. What if Ukraine falls? What if their country becomes the next “territory” to be reabsorbed? Add refugees being taken in, and Marija and Vytas are very much a part of this war.

It’s a brilliant lens with which to shine a new light on the domestic squabbles and petty selfishness we all combat on a daily basis. What does it do to one’s ego to be forced from your home because your wife no longer loves you while Ukrainians are fleeing theirs because it’s been turned into a war zone? What happens when you vehemently uphold your morals and quit your job because of its complicity to that war, only to find that job defined your identity more?

Blaževičius sprinkles in so many little details to mine down into the emotional and psychological toll. Discovering your parents have been enjoying a healthy dose of Russian propaganda television for years. Acknowledging altruism feels better in the abstract than it does in reality once you find the very nice family of refugees you’ve taken in are struggling to assimilate to your cleaning demands. The trauma of a child dealing with chaos inside her house and outside.

The film pretty much crisscrosses once Vytas moves out. He was the lost one devoid of purpose while Marija excelled. Then they dive headfirst into making the invasion their new personas as he volunteers and she quits her job—both as much a product of empathy as righteousness. Vytas’ new vocation gets his artistic juices flowing. He becomes a minor celebrity while living out of his car. Marija finds herself at home, in comfort, with nothing to do but stew.

You must thus wonder if Marina (Alla Bineeva) and her teen refugee sons become a new albatross around Marija’s neck .. only worse, since they don’t “pull their weight.” And what of Vytas exploiting the turmoil—wittingly or not—to apply himself again? It’s very telling that, once we get to know them better, he speaks Russian to fully align himself with the Ukrainians as a spokesperson while she realizes she hates the Russians for forcing her to ruin her own life.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that Marija isn’t shone in a very flattering light. There’s an obvious bias insofar as how leaving Vytas renders him a victim before she turns on this tragedy’s real victims because she never, ever wanted to be the one to clean her house. Could Blaževičius have evened things out more? Maybe. We need the conflict between political art and capitalism, but she just happens to be on the wrong side of the marriage and war.

It’s a messy situation all around, though. And Blaževičius’ point is less about our impulse to advocate for others in the midst of unspeakable violence than our penchant to always let apathy settle back in. The separation allows Marija and Vytas to grab hold of the war’s adrenaline rush and rejuvenate their respective verve for life, but we know they’ll revert to their old routine once things get too tough. Because boring is a security blanket. Boring is the real escape.

Repšys and Jakštaitė expertly traverse the minefield between acting like they should and desperately craving to go back to ignoring everyone but themselves. Because the outside world is wild, whether Vytas being exposed to his parents’ echo chamber of indoctrination or Marija experiencing a husband and wife so politically at odds that it’s insane they can still live together. Marina is trying to literally survive while these two fantasize about melting into their couch.

So don’t sleep on Adomaityte. Her Dovile is the linchpin when her parents’ divorce threatens her literal home too. Everything they do (Vytas smashing Russian car windows and Marija popping sleeping pills) is adopted in her own way: their fears and anxieties about Russia are her fears and anxieties about the divorce. Thus everything onscreen is constructed as a mirror with everyone (all things being relative) screaming for a return to normalcy.

How to Divorce During the War opens at IFC Center in NYC on Friday, August 21 and the Laemmle Royal in LA on Friday, August 28 before expanding nationwide.

A common observation from this year’s Cannes Film Festival positioned sidebar titles well above the ritzier, awards-driven competition section, a frequent player in such arguments being Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid. And unlike many films that debut in the south of France one May and might, if we’re lucky, make a stateside appearance through marginal means, the actor’s feature debut is not long in waiting: A24 will release Club Kid on November 6 afrer stops at TIFF and NYFF, and ahead of this comes a first trailer.

As Rory O’Connor said in our Cannes review, “For fans who’ve followed Firstman’s career from Rotting in the Sun to I Love LA, this duck-to-water move behind the camera will come as a welcome surprise. It’s notable that the movie opened in Un Certain Regard, a sidebar the festival’s programmers have often used as a testing ground for movie stars looking to try their hand at the tiller for the first time. The difference with Firstman’s confident arrival is that it feels less the work of a dilettante than a natural.”

Here’s the synopsis: “A hard-partying New York City club promoter sees his whirlwind lifestyle upended by the arrival of the 10-year-old son he never knew he had.”

Find preview and poster below:

Film Fest Knox is still a new occurence, but one worth noting: the festival, just entering its fourth edition, has sought to program a mix of yearly favorites, regional cinema, and experimental works, in turn comprising more than a few films that struggle for finer exposure. As the 2026 edition, which will run November 12-15, prepares to unveil a lineup, they’ve announced that the second annual James Agee Prize is being handed to Tim Blake Nelson in recognition of his “significant contributions to American regional cinema.” Concurrent with the award ceremony on November 14 are two screenings of Nelson’s directorial work: 1997’s Independent Spirit Award-winning Eye of God. There will also be a screening of Michael Gallagher’s The Leader, which screened at this year’s Tribeca Festival, in which Nelson was one of our photographic subjects.

Read the full press release below and more at Film Fest Knox:

FILM FEST KNOX will be held at the Regal Riviera in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, November 12–15, 2026. The fourth edition of the fest will honor acclaimed artist Tim Blake Nelson with the James Agee Prize and will showcase his work as an actor, writer, director, and producer of American regional cinema. Festival passes are on sale today, Tuesday, August 18, and are available for purchase. Festival passes are $100. VIP festival passes are also on sale for $275. Additional programming and ticketing options will be announced in the coming weeks.

Named for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, film critic, journalist, and poet, the James Agee Prize honors artists who have made significant contributions to American regional cinema. Nelson has devoted much of his career to smaller, more personal projects, and in recent years, that has included serving as producer on a growing number of films made outside of Los Angeles and New York City, including Old Henry (2021, Tennessee), Asleep in My Palm (2023, Ohio), Bang Bang (2024, Kentucky), and The School Duel (2025, Florida).

In recognition of this year’s honoree, FILM FEST KNOX will present a rare theatrical screening of Nelson’s Eye of God (1997), the Independent Spirit Award-winning story of a small-town waitress—played by Martha Plimpton in a stunningly great performance—whose pen-pal arrives after being released from prison.

Nelson will be presented with the James Agee Prize on Saturday, November 14 following a screening of his most recent film as both star and producer, The Leader, which premiered in June at the Tribeca Film Festival. Praised by Variety as a “fright film of the soul,” The Leader recounts the true-life story of the “Heaven’s Gate” cult and stars Vera Farmiga and Jim Parsons, along with Nelson.

Following Main Slate, Spotlight, and Current lineup announcements, the final film section of the 64th New York Film Festival has now been unveiled. Featuring 12 features, the section celebrates films that have been restored, preserved, or digitally remastered, bringing both landmarks of cinema history and overlooked discoveries to new audiences.

Highlights include the world premieres of new 4K restorations of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s Gone to Earth and Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kisses, the North American restoration premieres of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye, Ken Russell’s The Devils (on 35mm!), and Luchino Visconti’s L’innocente, as well as a showcase of rare shorts by Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian, and more.

Explore the lineup below and learn more here.

The Devils (Ken Russell)

The Drift (Paula Delsol)

Gone to Earth (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)

Goodbye South, Goodbye (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (Pradip Krishen)

L’innocente (Luchino Visconti)

Just Like Weather (Allen Fong)

Nitrate Kisses (Barbara Hammer)

Report to Mother (John Abraham)

Suicide Note (Fred Camper)

A Well for the Thirsty (Yuri Ilyenko)

Yesterday Girl (Alexander Kluge)

Pelechian Project Program 1 (Artavazd Pelechian)

Mountain Patrol

Land of the People

We

The Seasons

Pelechian Project Program 2 (Artavazd Pelechian)

The Beginning 

Our Century 

The End 

Life

The 64th New York Film Festival takes place September 25 through October 12, 2026 with passes on sale now. Single tickets go on sale September 15 at noon.

Are the kids all right? The latest movie to ponder this age-old question is Wayne Wapeemukwa’s Manhunt, an adolescent road movie told through the prism of true crime—or perhaps it’s the other way around. At times it can resmble a run-of-the-mill boys-trip movie replete with greasy diners, campsite encounters, and the occasional suggestion of sex. At others it more suggests something birthed from Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD stable, not least a late dive into washed-out, game-brained psychedelia. It’s very worth keeping an eye out for.

Manhunt marks Wapeemukwa’s first feature since 2017’s Luk’Luk’i earned the award for best Canadian debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. In the intervening years, Wapeemukwa, who is of Canadian indigenous Michif extraction, received a PhD in philosophy from Penn State before returning to Canada to take on a postdoctoral fellowship at the university of British Columbia. Few filmmakers can boast such lofty credentials, and if they do, they tend not to make movies that are as gripping and visceral as this.  

Watching it in Locarno, Korine’s recent projects came to mind as soon as I heard the coarse (and basically unprintable) dialogue being shot back and forth in the opening scene. That sequence introduces the film’s protagonists, Joey and Kit (portrayed with bags of energy by Harris Lowe and Landon Tunold, respectively), who are communicating the way boys do over headsets while mowing down other players (and each other) in the fictional shooter from which Manhunt takes its name. After a bit of this raunchy back and forth, Kit ask Joey for a progress report on a project they’ve been developing, at which point the camera cuts to show us the device being created on Joey’s 3D printer—a section of what will later become a bright-pink, sporadically functional rifle.

Far from a finger-wagging cautionary tale, Manhunt is neither documentary-like or, for the most part, a dramatization of actual events, though more-than-loosely based on a killing spree that took place in British Columbia circa 2019 when two young men, Kam McLeod and Bryer Schmegelsky, indiscriminately murdered three strangers while taking a road trip. Manhunt is not out to sensationalize those events (Wapeemukwa has wisely changed the victims entirely) but explore with a curious, open mind the kind of lives, choices, influences, temperaments, testosterone levels, and societal pressures that might have led a couple of teenage friends to do such awful things.

What Wapeemukwa does attempt is to aestheticize how the boys’ video-game-addled minds might, when left unchecked, slip into an understanding of the world not as a place populated by humans but NPCs. This is why, when Joey and Kit make a pitstop and meet two attractive German tourists who buy them lunch and ask for a ride, we are immediately put on high alert. This happens right after a first act in which Joey’s home life is shown and Kit’s only hinted at. Joey, the more handsome and introverted of the two, lives with his grandma and his boozy but affable dad. As they’re about to leave in their beat-down van, we see Kit receiving a relatively loving goodbye from his father—the point being that you won’t find any easy answers here.

Manhunt is really at its best from the point its duo becomes four, with Wapeemukwa allowing all kinds of potential futures to open up in real time and making the bluntness of what inevitably comes next hit that much harder. Wapeemukwa then allows the film’s key visual idea (a garish descent into hyperreal blues and oranges) to race towards its conclusion—in other words, oblivion.

Manhunt premiered at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival.

Johnnie To films don’t come around so often nowadays, and the ones that are promised barely seem to materialize. As the absurdly, comically long and not-quite-expected-to-be-fulfilled wait for Election 3 continues and his Japan-set Tony Leung gangster picture, as the star told us, hit some roadblocks, Variety reports that the Hong Kong legend is now embarking on his first western and, somewhat less thrillingly, an inaugural film set in Canada.

With the help of the Fantasia Film Festival’s production market Frontières (which will soon present the project at TIFF) and producer Todd Brown (The Raid, The Raid 2, Mandy, The Furious), To is (per Variety) expected to soon shoot Two Gun Cohen, which tells the true story of Morris Cohen, a “perpetual grifter living in the Canadian prairies who became personal bodyguard, trusted confidant and general to Dr Sun Yat Sen.” Here’s the official synopsis, courtesy of Screen Anarchy:

“The western frontier, 1911. Con man, swindler and general gadabout, Morris Cohen, is in a bind. Sitting in a jail cell after being caught cheating at cards, Cohen’s luck appears to have finally run out. That is until a mysterious Chinese man makes him an offer: ‘Ask no questions, join our service and we will bail you out.’

It’s an easy decision, but little does Cohen know that his new employer is fomenting an armed rebellion half a world away and is being pursued by ruling forces that will stop at nothing to eliminate the threat.”

Patrick Whistler (In Cold Light) is on scripting duties for Two Gun Cohen, the imminent TIFF-marketplace appearance of which engenders hopes for a soon-enough production start for the 71-and-not-getting-younger To.

Hong Sangsoo’s Nowhere to Lay My Eyes is, as his fans like to say, “a good Hong.” Now 35 features into his famously prolific career, that “good” can sometimes ring like faint praise, but Nowhere to Lay My Eyes feels like more than just a break from the norm. It’s funny and in-focus, neither of which have been guarantees of late, and features a now-somewhat-rare lead performance from Kim Min-hee, an actress whose presence has always made his work more vibrant and less prone to spells of gloominess and self-pity—though those Hongs can be good sometimes, too.

Case in point, the opening scene wherein Kim’s character, Sang-hee, and her brother (Shin Seok-ho) arrive on the island of Jeju to her mother (Choi Myung-gil) and stepfather’s house (Kwon Hae-hyo), only for the stepfather (a director, no less) to face-plant off a garden step the moment he appears. We soon learn that Sang-hee was raised by her grandparents on the mainland and this is the first time she’s seen her mother in ten years, and the first that she’s met this man at all. Let’s just say it sets the tone. 

All four actors are regulars, but Kwon’s presence in particular should alert certain viewers to the kind of Hong that Nowhere to Lay My Eyes is. Since starring alongside Isabelle Huppert in 2012’s In Another Country, Kwon has essentially been on retainer. The typical Kwon role is a moderately successful creative type (usually a stand-in for the director himself), so to see Hong cut his character down to size so early says all you need to know about the vibe here.

The central character is of course Kim’s Sang-hee—a 40-something who works for a company that imports “foreign snacks” (ha!) but also, as she awkwardly explains to her bewildered mother, makes experimental films aesthetically similar to the short at the end of Hong’s The Novelist’s Film. Sang-hee likes to capture quotidian moments on a handheld digital camera; she’s also modest enough to post them directly to YouTube soon after. Kwon’s character, by comparison, has just finished a project that required him to shoot for ten years and has now moved on, God help him, to a movie about a grass tomb. No points for guessing which of their two artistic approaches the director is more sympathetic toward.

One of the best descriptions of Hong’s work I’ve encountered compared the Korean master to the kind of painter who will spends years capturing the same landscape again and again: sometimes these turn out to be sketches or doodles, but occasionally, as in the case of Nowhere (which still only clocks in at 72 minutes), the same elements meld into something more. At around the halfway point, Sang-hee meets her stepsister, who is also an artist and explains that she likes to work slowly and through repetition. In narration, Sang-hee admits to finding her a little creepy, and there’s a clear layer of jealousy toward her close relationship with their mother, but the film allows for plenty of warmth and artistic solidarity between them.

This is also a “good Hong” for the simple fact that it looks crisp, bright, and clean, with plenty of those lovely, curling street shots that he seems to like. There’s also a rare-but-quite refreshing use of narration (by Kim) as well as another of Hong’s recent, fuzzy guitar scores. This one’s kinda grungy, to the point that I wondered if the director had recently discovered Slint. There are still a handful of dinner scenes, of course, one in which Sang-hee drinks a little too much and ends up making a disparaging comment about documentary filmmakers, fatally wounding her stepfather’s ego in the process—a bingo-card Kwon scene. 

More interestingly, that sequence also features a bracing reference to Gaza and line of dialogue in which Hong essentially calls himself a scammer—which is, I’m happy to say, more piss and vinegar than we’ve lately come to expect from the 65-year-old. Hong closes his film by showing us one of Sang-hee’s movies: a plaintive shot of a dandelion growing in some weeds that she narrates over as if journaling out-loud. She talks about cinema (and perhaps life) as a process of “regarding.” It would be an apt description for a few of the director’s recent films. Somehow, this one’s got more juice. 

Nowhere to Lay My Eyes premiered at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival and will be released by Cinema Guild.