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

Anthology Film Archives
Films by Philippe Garrel, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Pierre Clémenti show in a tribute to Tina Aumont.

Film Forum
A Terry Zwigoff retrospective begins; a 4K restoration of No Picnic starts while Jerry Schatzberg’s Reunion continues; Kiki’s Delivery Service shows on Sunday.

Roxy Cinema
Jack Harlow has programmed prints of Birth and Pauline at the Beach while Predator plays on Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image
Richard Linklater presents Fast Food Nation in a 20th-anniversary 35mm screening, while Labyrinth shows for its 40th anniversary; How to Marry a Millionaire plays on Friday.

BAM
Films by Chantal Akerman and Buster Keaton screen in a Robert Wilson series.

IFC Center
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path (newly restored in 4K) and Chime continue; 2001, Blue Velvet, Noroi: The Curse, American Psycho, Midnight Cowboy, and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover play late.

Paris Theater
Barton Fink shows on 35mm this Sunday; a series on films that inspired Beef features a print of Revolutionary Road.

Metrograph
Made in U.S.A., Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Bambi, The Emperor and the Assassin, and Chinatown play on 35mm; Holy Trips, After the Case, The Westlake Files, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Tahar Cheriaa, and Empress Li continue.

We’re thrilled to announce that Stubborn Beast, a new feature directed by film critics and video essayists Scout Tafoya and Tucker Johnson, will begin production this month in Savannah, GA. The film, about a family of step-siblings and divorcees trying to get through a particularly rough holiday without their matriarch, is set to start filming on April 28 and wrap in mid-May.

The film stars Paul F. Tompkins (Lodge 49, Bojack Horseman), Meredith Salenger (Star Wars: Tales of the Empire, The Journey of Natty Gann), Sam Clifford (Apple TV+’s Cape Fear), Bill Corbett (Mystery Science Theater 3000, Rifftrax), Lorelai Linklater (Boyhood, American Trash), and Autumn Noel, star of vertical dramas such as The Words and Baby Please! Don’t Come Home for Christmas. 

The film follows a grad student played by Clifford who comes home for the holidays in need of a heart-to-heart, only to find her gone and her stepfather, Stephen (Tompkins), home by himself. The pair must deal with their emotional troubles together for the first time, without a sobering matriarchal influence. 

The film is executive produced by Mark Pellington (The Mothman Prophecies, and the upcoming This is Buzz and Lone Wolf) and will be produced by Tafoya and Johnson’s Honors Zombie Films, along with Salenger, Tompkins, Sean U’Ren, Thomas Hedges, Ben Lebermann, and Ryan Harrison Warnberg. After a successful crowdfunding campaign, the film is still looking for financial partnerships and distribution.

“This is the happiest moment of my life and I’m also completely terrified,” said Tafoya. “It is absolutely a dream come true to work with this cast. Tucker and I have heard Paul F. Tompkins more than we have our own voices, Meredith Salenger is one of the great unsung talents of her generation, Sam and Autumn are about to explode and we get to be there on the launchpad. You write books about Ford and Hooper like I have and you sort of dream about leveling up to make something the way they might have. But how often does it happen? I actually can’t believe we get to make this.”

Johnson noted, “Scout has had so many more brushes with film culture over the years but because we love movies an equal amount we’ve never struggled to bond over the idea of finally getting the chance to really make one at this level. We simply couldn’t feel more fortunate to have a cast and crew that’s generous enough to trust us with their time. We can’t wait to wrangle everyone’s talent and make something we’re truly proud of.”

Johnson and Tafoya’s previous work as filmmakers includes Eyam and Hang the Pale Bastard, and their work as essayists includes The End of History on the influence of Ridley and Tony Scott. Tafoya is the author of books on John Ford and Tobe Hooper and the creator of the highly lauded series The Unloved at RogerEbert.com. 

Tompkins is repped by UTA, Salenger by Authentic Talent & Literary Management, Clifford by Privelege Talent, and Noel by Key. 

Meredith Salenger photo courtesy of Nick Holmes.

Returning to the Cannes Film Festival a few years after her acclaimed feature debut Plan 75, Chie Hayakawa unveiled her Tokyo-set period drama Renoir in the competition section. Picked up by Film Movement, it’ll now roll out this summer. Ahead of a theatrical release beginning May 29 at the IFC Center, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the U.S. trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “Suburban Tokyo, 1987. Imaginative eleven-year-old Fuki begins her summer break lonely and adrift – her kind, terminally ill father has landed once again in the hospital and her mother, distracted by the inevitability of his diagnosis, hasn’t much time for her daughter. Fuki responds to the situation not with tears but with placid curiosity about the prospect of death – becoming fascinated by the occult and experimenting with hypnotism. As the summer passes, Fuki encounters a string of lonely, imperfect adults, all of whom nudge her closer to an emotional truth she isn’t quite ready to name yet.”

Rory O’Connor said in his Cannes review, “With all its quotidian detail (shot in gorgeous, faded colors by DP Hideho Urata), the appearance of veteran actor Lily Franky, and glacial pace, Renoir is a coming-of-age story that will be familiar to fans of Hirokazu Kore-eda, but there’s little (if any) of his sentimentality here. Hayakawa’s gaze is as consistent as it is observant, presenting the joys and perils of a formative summer in equal light. The story follows Fuki (Yui Suzuki), an introverted 11-year-old doing her best to feel through adolescence. Her father (Franky) is stuck in a hospital bed with cancer while her mother, Utako (Hikari Ishida), stresses over work. Often left to her own devices, Fuki retreats into her imagination and takes an interest in hypnosis, which she practices on a woman upstairs and a new friend from her language school. The film is set in 1987, during Japan’s economic bubble, and reflects some of Hayakawa’s own experience of losing her father at a similar age.”

See the trailer below:

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

All You Need Is Kill (Kenichiro Akimoto)

The new All You Need Is Kill—director Kenichiro Akimoto and Studio 4°C’s animated reimagining of the time-loop novel that inspired Doug Liman’s Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow—asks: what makes this day different from all others? Its response, as a work with two decades of alternate versions in other mediums hanging over it, is to stake out an identity for dazzling visual style and extra video-gamey structure, with conventional drama taking on the mechanical quality of something already experienced a thousand times. – Eli F. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Alpha (Julia Ducournau)

Julia Ducournau has turned 180 degrees since Titane, the gritty and bizarre thriller that Spike Lee’s Cannes jury awarded the Palme d’Or in 2021. There’s no doubt that all eyes are on her newest, Alpha, in a way they weren’t on Titane after Raw. Her first and most horrific film by a landslide (too much to ever gain a wide audience) was a cannibal movie about a teen girl starting veterinary school. Here, no bodies are eaten or impregnated by a fire-hood car. But almost everyone’s is crumbling. – Luke H. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Atropia (Hailey Gates)

In the fictional country of Atropia, everything is played for real. Nestled into the southern California desert, the U.S. military-built training ground looks, acts, and even smells like an Iraqi city, populated by a plethora of actors pretending to be insurgents and merchants. The town––colloquially called “The Box,” one of 200 mock villages throughout the country––is meant to be an immersive, role-paying environment, a sophisticated warfare simulation for soldiers before they’re deployed to the Middle East. Upon entering this facsimile, the mission is clear to those preparing for combat: complete objectives, learn the culture, and stay alive. – Jake K-S (full review)

Where to Stream: MUBI

The Chronology of Water (Kristen Stewart)

As a director, Kristen Stewart takes words and embodies them, carving each into the flesh of her filmmaking like scars. You can’t breathe underwater. The transfiguration of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir is a suffocating experience, keeping one under even as you think you might briefly come up for oxygen. By the halfway mark, Chronology may have induced dissociation. But you don’t look away, you don’t leave. You kick forward, stretching ahead. You reach the wall, break the surface, and breathe the air. Stewart’s staggering debut is more than catharsis—it feels and understands everything that leads to it. — Blake S.

Where to Stream: VOD

The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason)

Imagine an Icelandic Sally Mann early in her career, desperate for attention from the high-art community. She lives off the land in a remote countryside and relies heavily on her five-person family to make her art. But instead of capturing her life with a camera, Anna writes with the extended duration of the sun; instead of silver-screen prints, she cuts and produces metal art that gestates spontaneously outdoors across entire seasons. Now, with all of that in the background, imagine a heartwrenching separation unfolding over a year’s time, one with three children at the center, clashing ideologies in tow, and well over a decade of resentment and remorse wrought by the laziness of a fisherman husband who hasn’t held up his end of the bargain in existential ambition or self-care. Hlynur Pálmason’s magnum opus (to date) is about exactly what it sounds like: the love that remains between ex-partners––in its shredded, preserved, bitter, adoring, simple, altogether impossible complexity––and the possible futures that can emerge. — Luke H.

Where to Stream: VOD

Magellan (Lav Diaz)

With a Western star at the center and a breezy runtime of 163 minutes, it’s easy to label Magellan Lav Diaz’s most “accessible film.” If you’re a diehard, however, it’s clearly the thing he’s worked towards his entire career. Amidst a corpus dedicated to excising the demons of a country without an identity and brutally colonized many times over, he finally turns his attention to the Philippines’ original sin. Ever the shit-stirrer, Diaz spits on the myth of Ferdinand Magellan and paints him as he was: a weak, pathetic man who stumbled his way into destabilization, all the while castigating us for wanting to see it. It’s no accident that Magellan begins with an indigenous woman being startled by an offscreen noise, staring into the camera, screaming, and running away: even the prying eyes of “compassion” are complicit, and Diaz lets you know it. –– Brandon S.

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

The Running Man (Edgar Wright)

Edgar Wright has mostly stayed in the pocket of action cinema since Hot Fuzz paid loving homage to the bombastic genre in 2007. But because subsequent projects like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Baby Driver maintained the same comic self-awareness about how divorced the genre was from anything approaching reality, The Running Man suggests his first pure action vehicle––the kind of brainless, trigger-happy adventure Nick Frost’s bumbling cop in Fuzz would have thrown on between rewatches of Point Break and Bad Boys II. It’s perhaps the first film of his that you couldn’t describe as a genre-comedy hybrid. Which isn’t to say he’s made something humorless, but that he’s consciously trying to retreat from making an “Edgar Wright film” with a joke-heavy screenplay that would threaten to diffuse tension. What a shame, then, that the most spectacular sequences here are when he allows himself to let loose, working towards his instincts rather than against them. – Alistair R. (full review)

Where to Stream: Prime Video

undertone (Ian Tuason)

undertone (stylized all-lowercase) writer-director Ian Tuason staged his debut feature entirely in his Toronto childhood home with only two on-screen actors, with the other performances playing out in audio form only. After a Fantasia premiere last summer nabbed it an audience award, A24 scooped it up and reopened the edit, not unlike NEON’s recent handling of Shelby Oaks. Undertone joins a host of the distributor’s titles that have found great success in playing the Sundance Midnight category, whether their own productions (Hereditary) or fellow acquisition titles (Talk to Me). – Caleb H. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Also New Streaming

Hulu

Shelby Oaks

Kino Film Collection

Ajami
The Mole

MUBI

Cold Tropics
Eletrodoméstica
Endless Cookie
Friday Night Saturday Morning
Green Vinyl
Tatsumi

Netflix

Roomates

VOD

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
The Napa Boys
Slanted

Even with a 90th birthday next year, Ridley Scott is showing no signs of slowing down. The director is putting the finishing touches on his latest film The Dogs Stars, marking his first since 2024’s Gladiator sequel. With a cast including Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, Benedict Wong, and Allison Janney, 20th Century Studios have now dropped the first trailer ahead of an August 28 release, delayed from its initial spring release.

Based on Peter Heller’s book and scripted by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant), the film is set in a world where survival is instinct, but humanity is a choice. Scott tells the story of Hig, a young pilot who, together with a military survivalist, Bangley, has carved out an efficient but isolated homestead in a brutal post-apocalyptic world until a mysterious radio transmission spurs Hig to venture into the unknown in search of the hope and humanity he still believes exists. 

See the trailer and poster below.

Listen to our discussion of Scott’s career below.

You may have forgotten (or altogether missed) that David Chase wrote and directed just one feature film, and that its black-and-white rework is exclusively streaming on the Criterion Channel. To supplement his great Not Fade Away, the Sopranos creator has programmed and been interviewed for a new Adventures in Moviegoing that debuts this May, boasting Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows and Lacombe, Lucien, Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana, and Dino Risi’s Il sorpasso. More than anticipating the interview, I will invest (some) hope that this puts into the universe (just enough) energy for another film from one of American cinema’s great minds.

May’s flagship program seems to be ’80s Remakes (and Their Originals!), which does as it says on the tin: Breathless and Breathless, The Thing and The Thing, The Man Who Loved Women and the closest Burt Reynolds ever got to Truffaut. Meanwhile, Office Romances offers a mix of Dorothy Arzner’s Working Girls, His Girl Friday, The Apartment, and John Ford’s severely underrated The Whole Town’s Talking. Jonathan Ali has guest-programmed You Don’t Get Freedom, You Take Freedom: Caribbean Activist Cinema, featuring the likes of Bitter Cane and Med Hondo’s West Indies. Premiere-wise, Debra Granik’s Conbody vs Everybody makes its debut on the Channel, while Lav Diaz’s Magellan, Thierry Fremaux’s Lumière, le cinéma!, and a restoration of Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ’45 make appearances.

Criterion Editions of Buñuel’s Él, Woman of the Year, Cat People, and His Girl Friday begin streaming. The Ross Brothers, Kimi Takesue, and Bill Douglas each have a series of movies streaming, including the COVID-era favorite Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. Special notice to Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break and Sean Baker’s Four Letter Words, being added to Stunts and Directed by Sean Baker, respectively (as if it could possibly be the other way around).

See the full list of May additions and find more at the Criterion Channel:

95 and 6 to Go, Kimi Takesue, 2016

Against All Odds, Taylor Hackford, 1984

An Unfinished Film, Lou Ye, 2024

The Apartment, Billy Wilder, 1960

The Big Clock, John Farrow, 1948*

Bitter Cane, Ben Dupuy and Kim Ives, 1983

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, Turner Ross and Bill Ross IV, 2020

Bound, Kimi Takesue, 1995

Breathless, Jim McBride, 1983

Cat People, Jacques Tourneur, 1942

Cat People, Paul Schrader, 1982

A Chinese Ghost Story, Ching Siu-tung, 1987

A Chinese Ghost Story II, Ching Siu-tung, 1990

A Chinese Ghost Story III, Ching Siu-tung, 1991

Clockwatchers, Jill Sprecher, 1997

Conbody vs Everybody, Debra Granik 2024

D.O.A., Rudolph Maté, 1949

D.O.A., Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, 1988

Daughter’s Daughter, Huang Xi, 2024

Desk Set, Walter Lang, 1957

E=NYC2, Kimi Takesue, 2005

Él, Luis Buñuel, 1953

Four Letter Words, Sean Baker, 2000

Grenada: The Future Coming Towards Us, Carmen Ashhurst, Samori Marksman, and John Douglas, 1983

Haiti: The Way to Freedom, Arnold Antonin, 1973

Heaven’s Crossroad, Kimi Takesue, 2002

His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks, 1940

House of Cardin, P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes, 2019

K-On! The Movie, Naoko Yamada, 2011*

Looking for Adventure, Kimi Takesue, 2013

Lumière, le cinéma!, Thierry Frémaux, 2025

Man Wanted, William Dieterle, 1932

The Man Who Loved Women, François Truffaut, 1977

The Man Who Loved Women, Blake Edwards, 1983

Maya, Give Me a Title, Michel Gondry, 2024

More Than a Secretary, Alfred E. Green, 1936

My Ain Folk, Bill Douglas, 1973

My Childhood, Bill Douglas, 1972

My Way Home, Bill Douglas, 1978

No Way Out, Roger Donaldson, 1987

The Office Wife, Lloyd Bacon, 1930

Onlookers, Kimi Takesue, 2023

Point Break, Kathryn Bigelow, 1991

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Tay Garnett, 1946

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Bob Rafelson, 1981

Queen Bee, Ranald MacDougall, 1955

Riotsville, U.S.A., Sierra Pettengill, 2022*

Rosewater, Kimi Takesue, 1999

The Shepherd and the Bear, Max Keegan, 2024

The Spirit of ’45, Ken Loach, 2013

Summer of the Serpent, Kimi Takesue, 2004

Suspended, Kimi Takesue, 2009

Sweet Sugar Rage, Harclyde Walcott and Honor Ford-Smith, 1985

The Terror and the Time, Rupert Roonaraine, 1978

That Which Once Was, Kimi Takesue, 2011

The Thing, John Carpenter, 1982*

The Thing from Another World, Christian Nyby, 1951

Tokyo Trial, Masaki Kobayashi, 1983

We’re No Angels, Michael Curtiz, 1955*

We’re No Angels, Neil Jordan, 1989*

Western, Turner Ross and Bill Ross IV, 2015

Where Are You Taking Me?, Kimi Takesue, 2010

The Whole Town’s Talking, John Ford, 1935

Woman of the Year, George Stevens, 1942

Women of Suriname, At van Praag, 1978

Working Girls, Dorothy Arzner, 1931

*Available in the U.S. only

Short though we may be on novel ways to make movies, Pete Ohs has perhaps cracked something new. Seeing each film he makes as a “table of bubbles”—a beautiful, fragile thing that can’t support the burden of anything ideological or physical—he’s worked closely with actors, inevitably credited as co-writers, to shape a narrative project as it’s actively in motion. Yet the films don’t seem improvised, half-formed, or inert; they instead coast on the unpredictability of which its characters are capable and seem susceptible to almost any potential narrative event. Ohs followed last year’s delightful (and still-undistributed) The True Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick with Erupcja, which follows the same model but has perhaps seen a slight uptick in profile for being led (and co-produced and co-written) by Charli XCX.

This, however, is not the locus of the film, a two-hander between Bethany (XCX) and Lena (Lena Góra), friends whose bizarre, nearly supernatural connection yields difficulty when Bethany arrives in Lena’s Warsaw with a fiancé (Will Madden’s Rob). Figuring out just how these two relate to each other and where a reunion takes them (such as Jeremy O. Harris’ ex-pat artist Claude) is some of the most fun I’ve had with a film this year, which doesn’t negate the discomfort of its lead character’s selfishness, nor the fear that all of this could careen in the wrong direction.

That never does is a testament to Ohs and his team of actor-writers, but he’s rather practical about the whole thing in conversation, ultimately comparing his process to more traditional filmmaking modes—a roundabout way to the same destination. We spoke as Erupcja was preparing to make its U.S. debut at New Directors/New Films just ahead of a theatrical release that begins this Friday.

The Film Stage: Sometimes—sometimes being a lot of the time—a movie has a kind of preconstructed, preconceived narrative around it. You’ve been very good at being transparent about this “table of bubbles” idea with which you make movies. I think that there was something about this movie being shot in a foreign country, foreign language, huge pop star, where all of those things—to be totally transparent, having established I think the movie is great—going into it I was a little like: what is this thing going to be?

Pete Ohs: Yeah, totally! [Laughs]

Like, is this going to be a real movie? And then pretty much from the first scene it’s clear that it’s like a real movie.

Right. That’s also so many versions of “not-real movie” it could be. Is this Crossroads with Britney Spears? Is this just some, like, improv slop that’s just a mess of junk? What is this thing?

Yeah. If it were Crossroads it would be reclaimed in 20 years by the Letterboxd crowd, so you’d win out in the long run.

Right! In the long run.

But I think you’re getting off on a good foot. Maybe that’s a way of asking how much you think about or are aware of or concerned with a kind of pre-established narrative that might exist around a movie, or how much that doesn’t even enter your consideration because, ultimately, the film is the film and the film speaks for itself.

With these movies, and it’s connected to the “table of bubbles” thing, but so much of it is set up in a way that we needn’t and shouldn’t and the point is to not think about all that stuff. Certainly the point is to be aware, to be engaged, to hopefully, potentially make something with some sort of value—some sort of interesting piece of art. But because it’s not a traditional movie where the production, where the budget is at a size such that it needs to be anything to justify its existence, it’s okay—in my opinion and the opinions of my collaborators and producers—that we don’t need to worry about it, about what it’s going to become. And that becomes just a really interesting—for me, for us—sandbox to play in, an interesting place for creativity to be exercised. For me, because what I’m actually prioritizing with myself and with these actors is what our experience is,  it, every time, becomes a really beautiful, life-affirming two weeks spent on Earth.

Yes. Sure.

And something I’m happy to do again. So in that way, we succeed, and then once the movie becomes whatever it is, we deal with that later.

We deal with that here in this room.

Right! Make sense of it. But also because the filmmaking process is… I approach it very holistically, and I try to be really aware, as a human, that as the thing sort of starts to solidify, you’re able to keep making choices that continue to inform what it is and thus how it’s going to exist in the world. In the movie there’s all these color blocks, which is a fun stylistic choice, and that happens for lots of different reasons, but there’s no Brat-green color block. Like, intentionally aware of: we’re making a thing that exists within the context of now. We could do it and it will mean something; we could not do it and it would mean something. If we’re making Crossroads, we’re probably using Brat-green a bunch more.

You know, we’re, like, really intentionally trying to tie it to the star that is Charli, but the spirit of this movie is not that. It’s Charli wanting to just be a collaborator and artist who’s getting to experience acting and filmmaking, and it’s not a product that we’re trying to position to maximize our return. Thus—hopefully, in my opinion—how I experience it, maybe it maintains some sort of artistic integrity [Laughs] and hopefully that’s what you feel. You’re like, “Oh this is a real movie.” Regardless of whether it’s a good movie, at least it is a movie that is doing what it’s going to do and not trying to manipulate the market.

Well, it’s a testament that I love the color blocks and I found them working as this palette-cleanser, interstitial structural device, and not for one second did I consider the idea that Brat-green would appear. I was really shocked reading about the post-production and final construction of the movie, which to me felt so complete and workable, presentable as is. And there’s a thing I think I wrote it down: you said, “I was entering with nothing at all.” Conscious of other films where maybe you had a bit more going in. So what is “nothing at all”? What did you actually enter with that let you say on day one, “We’re setting up the camera here, you’re gonna say this”?

For the movie, what we basically entered with was the awareness that one character spoke Polish, one character didn’t, and that volcanoes were involved somehow. That’s sort of what I brought to the actors, and through little bits of conversations, we get some basics that at least, again, create some sort of framework. Like, “Okay, your character is going to work at a flower shop.” We don’t know how that’s fully going to get used, but that at least helps us know that we should ask around and be like, “What’s a flower shop we could film at? The two of you”—like, Bethany and Rob— “are these British tourists.” Okay, Rob well knows he needs to practice his British accent. Some things that let you be ready to play, but you don’t really know what it’s gonna be. The day before everyone arrived, I was just like, “How does this movie start?” And I went on a walk in the morning and I came back and I was entering the building that I was living in and I saw the reflection in the window and I saw the little keypad that I always get a kick out of because it’s, like, so specific for me to Poland.

Right.

And I just saw this reflection and I was like: “Right. Here’s my first scene.” You know, for these characters arriving: them doing the keypad and you have a little bit of, “What’s the tension? What’s the drama?” It’s like, “Oh, they have the keypad wrong.” They have to do a little couple-bickering moment about who remembers the keypad number. And then you’re like, “Okay, great, I at least know what the first scene is.” So it’s like that’s almost what I have as far as what we’re going to shoot. The other way in which I mean “entering this movie with nothing” was that I had gone through a really intense personal thing where, a month-and-a-half prior, my father had passed away. It’s a crazy thing to experience that, you know, is part of life and when that happened I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if we should shoot a movie. I didn’t know if that was the right thing for me, if it was the right thing for anyone.

What I eventually decided to do was not decide anything. Previous Pete thought this was a good idea. “I’m just going to keep operating from that place and not decide to not do it. I’m just going to let the ball kind of continue rolling.” But I was so lost in grief that I was like, “I actually don’t have anything. All I really have is my faith in the process.” Not in religious terms, but just in this filmmaking thing that I’ve been doing every year that I have muscle memory for, that I’m like: it’s a system I have set up; just trust it and let go.

And that’s what happened, and once the movie starts getting made, once the ball starts rolling, I fall into those patterns of making that is this rhythm of writing scenes, of doing the mental gymnastics of storytelling and character development and turns and “how does this scene connect to this,” and all that kind of stuff. Then the same thing happens that always happens, which is: a movie starts coming into focus. And it was okay for me to have no clue what I was doing and where we were going [Laughs] and that, thankfully, these collaborators both brought ideas, brought support, and also brought enough trust in this process to go with me on this journey and get to the end of it.

Erupcja premiere at New Directors/New Films. Photo by Arin Sang-urai, courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center.

That’s all very well said, and gets at why I like the movie so much: it felt like there was this constant process of discovery. Even though it’s not a plot-heavy movie, it activated a similar part of my mind that an incident- and intrigue-heavy movie would. Part of it is that certain of the relationships aren’t so over-explicated, but it’s about the kind of feeling between the actors in the room. You can tell she’s kind of bored with him; you can tell that he’s a little over-eager; but then with the girls, I was asking myself: are they romantically involved? Is there something else going on? And I wonder what kind of energies you were picking up from the actors in the rooms that helped you decide it would be this way, and how you decided certain things would be directly explicated in dialogue or voiceover, and how certain things would not be.

Everything is coming from a place of intuition and generally not overthinking, because there isn’t time to overthink. You just have to keep following what feels good and knowing that this is a multi-stage process, and there’s going to be opportunities later to make sense of it or to inject more ideas to, again, make something work in a way that you didn’t realize it could at the time. The other thing about making movies: not every movie can get made this way, nor should it. I think the fact that it’s a movie about characters that, I guess, don’t really know themselves that much, do not express their emotions that much—or aren’t that good at it—also lends itself to a movie that doesn’t have any dialogue written yet. You know, if this is a character who’s so fully formed within themselves as a human, then they should be talking more. But we are intuitively and consciously creating a story with characters who are not in that place, and thus it doesn’t feel wrong for them to be a little more reserved in this situation.

Similarly, Charli is a stranger to all of us. She is just meeting her co-star, her romantic partners. So the hard thing would be to say, “You are deeply, madly in love and you have known each other since you were eight years old. Go.” But if you set yourself up for success, you say, “You know what? There is distance between you. You’re not fully letting him in.” [Laughs] Work with that and find the way in which that continues to be interesting. But again: leaning into what you already have, which is an MO of the whole production model. It’s like, “What are your resources? What is within grasp?” And make the most of what that is. Then, similarly with Lena and Charli, we know that we want these characters to have some sort of past. We don’t yet know what that is. I don’t like defining things until you have to.

But so what happened was just: we shot the movie in order. Those two characters don’t actually interact until, like, the fourth day of the shoot. So those first few days are, like, every night Charli and Lena are sitting on the balcony, smoking cigarettes, talking. And I’m like, “These experiences are your characters’ past.” Like, I don’t care what you’re building. You should. Whatever it is is the truth that we’ll hold onto. I’m not trying to control it, but these are the memories of Nell and Bethany, and we know that the memories are from the distant past. That means they’re gonna change. Some of them are gonna feel more present, some of them are gonna be remembered incorrectly.

So the fogginess of memories is also us playing to our strength, to the fact that, no, we didn’t sit down and write extensive character backgrounds of everything they did, because not only did we not do that—they didn’t. You haven’t done that. But also, that’s not necessarily how memory needs to work. So that also fits within the themes of the story that we are moving through. And I think, again, sort of having an awareness about what you’re working with and what it is and what it can’t be and not trying to force it allows it to still end up being something that feels good, feels correct.

You’re talking about these very immediate, present-tense things of the characters—how they’re actually interacting on screen—but then you have this voiceover. What most surprised me was discovering that that was not part of the film for a long time. Voiceover is notoriously very tricky, and if it goes badly, it goes very badly.

Yeah. [Laughs]

But here it goes so well, and it feels like the spine of the movie. There’s, I think, the inclination to say it’s very French New Wave, and I think you had said Jules and Jim was an inspiration. But it also feels very novelistic to me. This is my roundabout way of asking what some of the thinking was, outside of the Jules and Jim thing, with what you do tell, what you don’t tell, the kind of tone that you’re trying to strike—the sort of ominpotent, Jupiterian thing that it has.

Yeah. I love operating from a place of intuition. I love the journey of discovery of moving towards the unknown. So yes: we did not know there was going to be voiceover. I knew there could be. I knew that’s a thing you can do at some point. But who knows if that’s going to be the correct thing at any point? And as I’m putting the movie together, I’m like, “Every movie sucks until it doesn’t.” [Laughs] Like, you do your first rough cut and it’s bad. You do some work and you think it starts to get better but, like: no. You have to be honest. You’re like, “No, it still sucks.” Sometimes they suck for a really long time.

There’s this saying I like: there’s nothing better than your dailies, nothing worse than your first cut.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there’s a long list of things to do and so you just: “Be patient, keep doing the things, keep injecting more ideas. Now there’s some more sound stuff. Now it’s getting tight and it’s not quite as long. It’s getting better, it’s getting better. It still sucks. It hasn’t crossed the suck threshold quite yet. [Laughs] But it is getting better.” But, like, time and energy are limited resources, so you’re not sure you’re gonna get there. You just don’t know. So in the journey of trying to see if we’re going to get there, seeing if we’re going to find it, we’re experimenting with different things. I feel that something’s missing. I’m like, “The movie’s not in its final form yet. What if we tried some voiceover?”

Okay, what if we tried some voiceover? We’ve opened ourselves up to the idea of voiceover. Who’s talking? And we did an experiment where it was going to be Bethany, Charli’s character, reciting poetry that she had written when she was 16 years old. And in my mind of trying to justify this I’m like, “Right, there’s a poetry element in the movie. There’s this thing about when they met when they’re 16. There’s the romanticizing of emotions, of Shakespeare—this idea that she might write poetry like this that could exist in this universe.” And so I write a bunch of poetry as a 16-year-old. I have Charli read it, just record it on her phone. I put it all on there and you’re like, “No, that’s not good.” [Laughs] You know, like: that did not work.

But you still are aware that something is missing. Then eventually this Jules and Jim idea comes, and what happened after seeing a minute of Jules and Jim—being like, “Oh right, that kind of voiceover, that could be cool”—is: I went over and got on my computer and I typed a line of voiceover and I used the Polish Google Translate, and it has a voice in there. I just pressed play and I heard that and I was like, “Oh, that’s cool. That’s interesting.”

Sure. Yeah.

And put that in there and put some music in there and like, “Okay, this feels good, intuitively. This feels interesting. This feels like continuing to explore it.” And just naturally that voice is detached, which also is similar to what the Jules and Jim thing is, too. But I’m also now experiencing, “Right, this is sort of like a detached voice entity.” And you’re starting to understand, “Okay, who is it that’s talking?” Because at another moment of voiceover brainstorm we’re like, “Should it be Lord Byron? Like, should the voiceover be Lord Byron narrating this movie? That could be cool.” But that’s not where I arrived—I arrived at this other thing that was feeling good—and so once you’re starting to write it, you have to make rules about: what is the perspective of this character? It’s omniscient. How omniscient?

And you start thinking about—or I started thinking about—the narrators of books, and I read enough and thought about it enough to know that there are different kinds of narrators. There are narrators who exist in the minds of the characters, who know every emotion and thought they’re thinking. And then there’s ones who are actually quite removed, and just intuitively for this, it was feeling correct that this narrator is not explaining everything these characters are feeling—that he’s actually just giving facts—and so with each little moment of voiceover I’m like, “What facts can he share?” And intuitively this is feeling good. As I then would analyze “why is that feeling good,” I’m reflecting on how a point of this story is exploring characters who are not that good at communicating. And if all of a sudden we introduce a narrator who, from minute one of the movie, could tell us everything that they’re feeling, then there’s not a point to the rest of the movie. “Okay, so right, so that’s not what he has access to. He has access to this other thing.”

But then what excited me was: this is an opportunity for me—the filmmaker, the artist—to interject ideas, to make small moments feel more meaningful, to put my humor, my sense of humor into this. Because I don’t take life seriously. I don’t think it’s healthy to. Like you need to have a sense of humor. I take life seriously, but you need to have a sense of humor. And so without the voiceover, the movie very easily becomes melodramatic in a way that’s not cool. It’s like, “Oh, it thinks this is real. It’s treating all this like it’s really that significant.”

The voiceover became this really useful tool that was making me feel good and so much relief that I finally found that way to subvert the thing that I had made, and that just became really exciting for each opportunity of another window of voiceover I could put in there. It’s like, “Oh, great, another opportunity to to put a joke in that I find funny—like, an inside joke essentially.” But as also a way of just letting the audience know that I know this isn’t that serious. [Laughs] You know? Like, that’s almost the point. They are acting like they are the center of the universe. They are acting like they cause volcanoes to erupt. They are delusional. The film is not delusional.

Erupcja premiere at New Directors/New Films. Photo by Arin Sang-urai, courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center.

There’s this complication, which is that you’ve made a movie about someone who is pretty selfish and reckless—I think she treats her boyfriend pretty terribly in the last act of the movie—but you also don’t hate her. But you also don’t hate her because you’re saying, “Oh, you know, she had a rough childhood” or something. You know what I mean? What was it, between what you had kind of constructed and Charli XCX’s performance that helped bring that out?

I mean, I extremely value empathy [Laughs] as a thing that we should encourage amongst all of our fellow humans, and in making something, I am having empathy for all these characters. I’m trying to not judge—I’m just trying to understand—and I know that Charli very much was also coming from that place. I mean, I’m writing these movies with the actors. That doesn’t just mean “what happens next?” It’s also like, “Who are these people?” So these are conversations we are having where she’s putting herself in her character’s shoes—she’s imagining other people she knows and loves and who have done good and bad things. And it’s a game we are playing of trying to understand why humans are the way they are. Why do they do what they do?

Thus I do think it allows us… because, like, that’s always what our intention is. It’s the way we’re always engaging it. We’re not trying to define; we’re just trying to understand. That we do end up with a movie that isn’t saying this person is good or bad. It’s actually just setting up some scenarios, trying to have these characters act in real ways—the ways in which we’ve seen people behave or people we know behave—and make sure that it tracks, that there’s a logic to it. Then hopefully, within our own experience, by the end of it we understand a little more about them and each other. So that was happening during the shoot because it’s so alive—it’s so active, these conversations—and then, in the edit, I’m putting the movie together and I’m sharing cuts with Charli, and she’s a producer on the movie, she’s giving notes; she’s a collaborator.

Yes, of course.

And she’s also doing a really good job as an artist of being objective, of not having notes that are like vanity-based but are just like, “I feel like we don’t dislike Bethany enough. I also feel like Rob is kind of too annoying.” Like, all these subtle things that you can further tweak to eventually settle into that correct balance of being able to understand all these characters and the way they’re acting. If Rob is too annoying, you’re like, “This is nonsense. She should leave him right away.” Like, he needs to present some sort of value; they need to have some sort of connection so that these events that we can’t change… like, “This is what happens in the story. So she can’t be too mean, she can’t be too nice.” And you just try to like thread that needle as you go through.

But that literally is just what filmmaking always is: adjusting the performances so that it’s telling the story that you’re trying to tell. So despite the fact that we’re there without a script, it’s like we’re still just doing what filmmaking is. We’re still just doing the thing you always have to do and make sure that somehow it feels truthful to these characters that you’ve created.

The Rob character seems like quite a sweet, loving guy, which is part of what makes the turn kind of difficult. But it’s also like: they’re just not on the same page.

I know.

And it’s funny, too, because as I say that out loud, it seems so simple. Like: just write something where one guy is nice, and the girl isn’t bad but they’re not on the same page. But then watching it it feels much more alchemical. Which, to me, is why the movie is exciting.

Mmm. I do so much on these movies. It looks like I’m just doing everything. I’m totally not. Not only are there various people at various stages of production and post-production also contributing, but the actors are not just writers. They’re also, like, production designers, they’re also set decorators—they are so involved in the balancing of performance and nuance that are these choices that they are making in order to create these characters that didn’t exist. Like, I’m not doing that, you know. I’m editing it to help it be its best version, but these are things that they are thankfully bringing to these characters.

I’m curious about Charli’s notes. Also, I feel kind of stupid just calling her “Charli” but “XCX” also sounds funny. But you know who I’m talking about. She obviously has quite a prodigious background in music. It seems like this film thing is kind of new for her. I wonder what about the nature of her notes was… I guess everybody’s notes are ultimately unique, but was there anything about them that seemed unique in the sphere of: she’s coming at this having spent time in a different medium, now fresh to this one?

I know. I don’t know if it’s that I’m also sort of medium-agnostic in that, like, I used to be in a band, I make music, I did the score of my first movie. It’s all just creativity; it’s all just making things. Such that it’s not that I felt like I was getting notes from a musician. I just felt like I was getting notes from a creative person who has thoughts and ideas. And she does watch a lot of movies, and she also doesn’t have a big ego. She understands it’s a journey and it’s all about asking the right questions at the right time. Give me one second to try to really remember her literal notes, because I like your question. [Pause] I mean, unfortunately it’s not that her notes felt like it was a musician. Her notes were very big-picture.

I see.

They were good notes. Sometimes when a note is too specific—like, “We should do this”—it’s like, “Ah, that’s actually not helpful.” But it’s this observation about the movie, understanding where we’re at in the edit, her questions just being about: “Are we… is this right?” You know, not saying that it is or isn’t, but kind of questioning, “Are we pushing?” Maybe that’s the way in which it was musical: it probably felt like when you’re in the mix of a song. And it’s not about, “We need to re-record or rewrite this, like, synth line.” It’s just like, “Is it too loud? Are we doing too much too soon? What if we saved that for later, and then it would have more impact in another spot?” I guess that is the way in which there might be a similarity with the way she gave notes on the movie and the way she might give notes on a song as well.

I’ll just quickly add, as someone who has spent a lot of time in Poland, I feel like you captured it very well: a country in the Western world—you get cell phone signals—but at the same time, when I’m there I just kind of feel like I woke up in another world altogether. I think you captured that well, particularly from the boyfriend’s perspective.

Yeah, cool. That’s great. A thing very much for me is how much Polish cinema has been about World War II. And it just felt so good to be like… because if you go there and experience it, it is the specific modern culture that it is. And it just felt fun to make something present in that place.

Even if she’s kind of pulling a ruse, I think Bethany’s point about it being a city of love is not totally wrong.

It’s not totally wrong!

Erupcja enters a limited release on Friday, April 17.

Looking for what to see in theaters? Our feature, updated weekly, highlights our top recommendations for films currently in theaters, from new releases to restorations receiving a proper theatrical run.

While we already provide extensive monthly new-release recommendations and weekly streaming recommendations, as distributors’ roll-outs can vary, this is a one-stop list to share the essential films that may be on a screen near you.

Amrum (Fatih Akin)

There’s a reason behind the odd credit at the start of Amrum: “A Hark Bohm film by Fatih Akin.” While the two collaborated before on the latter’s In the Fade, this project had a different beginning. Bohm wrote the script to direct himself before realizing he wouldn’t have the strength to do so. Raised on the island of Amrum (and a teen during the film’s 1945 setting), it was surely a very personal project that Akin initially refused to take over. – Jared M. (full review)

Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari)

Blue Heron, Romvari’s feature debut, once again mines the director’s own history, following a Hungarian family of six as it settles in a nondescript stretch of suburbia outside Vancouver. The opening line, “I struggle now to remember much of my childhood,” belongs to the youngest child, Sasha (Eylul Guven), the film to her older stepbrother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), a sullen, taciturn adolescent with a history of self-destructive behavior no one has learned how to deal with, much less address. Yet Romvari refuses to write him off as a troubled child. Yes, the kid is most certainly not all right, but he traverses Blue Heron as its most mysterious, elusive character, and that impenetrability is a measure of Romvari’s empathy. Rather than pathologizing his pain––a tendency his own parents succumb to––she invites us to sit with it and bask in his drawn-out silences, in the gaps between the words and imperfect memories that grown-up Sasha (Amy Zimmer), in the film’s second half, will try piecing together. – Leonardo G. (full review)

The Blue Trail (Gabriel Mascaro)

The Blue Trail, the lively new film from Gabriel Mascaro, takes its name from the secretions of a mythical snail. Azure and oozing, the substance, when dropped on the iris, is rumored to grant a vision of things to come. This news is welcomed with admirable disinterest by Tereza (Denise Weinberg), a woman of a certain age who has, due to recent state insistences, decided there’s no longer much use in looking ahead. The film is set in a near-future Brazil where the lives of the elderly are overseen by some cruel combination of governmental interventions and half-interested offspring. In Tereza’s world, leaving one’s locale now requires a permission slip, and those without are rounded up in so-called “Wrinkle Wagons.” Anyone lucky enough to reach their 80th birthday, as Tereza soon will, are rewarded with a move to The Colonies: a place no one seems to know much about, aside from the fact that anyone who goes there doesn’t return. – Rory O. (full review)

Chime (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Relegated to a mystifying worldwide NFT release, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s first of three films last year is now available to see exclusively in theaters alongside a restoration of his earlier feature Serpent’s Path. As Rory O’Connor said in his review, “How do you even start to write about Chime, a film that keeps secrets guarded and lives off the shocks of its knife-edge turns? It’s safe to say the director is Kiyoshi Kurosawa. It’s also safe to say Chime is 45 minutes long, making it feel more like the pilot for a TV series we’ll never see––only adding to the intrigue. Like much of the director’s work, it’s the kind of thing you could have seen late night on television when you were much too young. It would have also left a mark.”

The Drama (Kristoffer Borgli)

Some critics are going to say The Drama is not about race, or that if it is, this is simply an accident born of colorblind casting. There is a reveal—the reveal the entire premise hinges on—early in the film that would perhaps make more sense to people if it had come from a white person. It’s definitely something that, historically, is more associated with troubled white American men. But this is a film, not real life, and The Drama presents us with a character viewers have never seen on the big screen before. – Jourdain S. (full review)

Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze)

Languorous without becoming laborious, meditative without becoming meandering, abstract without becoming abstruse, Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf is a road movie unlike any other. It follows Irakli (David Koberidze), a father in search of his daughter, a sports photographer whose sudden disappearance is less of an enigma to solve than a vehicle for Koberidze’s imagination to serenely drift. Featuring Giorgi Koberidze’s charming, addictive score and shot on a Sony Ericsson, the fuzzy look of which transforms mundane landscapes into foreign-seeming textural images and hypnotic sequences, Dry Leaf, at 186 minutes, actively heightens our perception to its bucolic territory, its singular wavelength. It’s the kind of film where the destination is less important than the journey, where submission to its logic is more meaningful than a resistance, and where, like a vivid dream, its numinous sensations linger long after viewing. No matter the resolution, Koberidze has established himself as a modern enchanter. – Nirris N.

Faces of Death (Daniel Goldhaber)

Director Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei are intimately familiar with the darker side of the Internet. Their 2018 debut, Cam, remains among the quintessential horror films of the Internet age, and with their reboot / remake / reimagining of Faces of Death, they bring the past into startling view of the present. It’s a film that recognizes there’s a little bit of a sicko in all of us, and there may be nothing we can do about it. – Devan S. (full review)

Fiume o morte! (Igor Bezinović)

Learning about Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 16-month occupation of Fiume, a tale vividly retold in Igor Bezinović’s new, Tiger Award-winning documentary Fiume o Morte!, I spared a thought for Yukio Mishima. D’Annunzio’s life didn’t end so theatrically, but the two men––celebrated writers and hyper-nationalists with hubristic military dreams and similarly contested legacies––certainly shared a taste for the quixotic and chaotic. Was D’Annunzio a fascist colonizer, as those who still remember him in Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) claim, or was he the admirable dreamer as romantic as his poems? A century later, the jury’s still out. – Rory O. (full review)

John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens)

Written by Almereyda and Stephens, with voiceover from Chloë Sevigny, Earth Coincidence paints Lilly as a 20th-century polymath, a one-of-a-kind maverick hellbent on “getting his hands on the steering wheel of consciousness.” Yet a hagiography this is not. Fascinated as it may be with its subject––a man bestowed with a “panoramic thinking” that led him to operate at the interstice between science and sci-fi––Earth Coincidence is as keen to praise Lilly for his contributions to things like the Save the Whales movement as it is to expose some of his most barbaric theories, not least that a steady diet of LSD would prove as eye-opening to his aquatic tenants as it did to him. (Whether or not that’s true we’ll never know, though it’s safe to say the acid injections Lilly routinely administered to his dolphins didn’t make their captivity any smoother.) Where others might have played the most salacious aspects of Lilly’s saga and astonishing drug intake for shock value, Almereyda and Stephens are after something different––namely, the processes through which ideas can be absorbed into the mainstream and meaningfully shape it. – Leonardo G. (full review)

Kontinental ‘25 (Radu Jude)

“The id grows tedious,” art critic Jackson Arn wrote recently, “when left to speak too freely.” The Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude keeps his in check by grounding flourishes in pure mundanity. Near the end of Kontinental ’25, an ex-professor, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), and her former student, Fred (Adonis Tanța), sit by an anti-communist resistance monument in Cluj and watch a horrific video of a drone attack on a Russian soldier. Having found the dead body of a man she evicted earlier that day, Orsolya, who now works as a bailiff, is looking to blow off some steam. They move uphill and Fred––whose delivery bag is plastered with Romanian flags, so as not to be confused with immigrant gig workers––serenades her. Next, they have sex in the bushes. The film up to this point has been awash with ideas and vaguely apocalyptic images: Roman ruins, a robot dog, a dinosaur park, zoomed-in footage of the Hindenburg disaster, a scene from Robert Aldrich’s atomic-era nightmare Kiss Me Deadly. This should all be a lot, but somehow Jude keeps it together. – Rory O. (full review)

Miroirs No. 3 (Christian Petzold)

Christian Petzold’s fifteenth feature Miroirs No. 3 marks his fourth with Paula Beer, the actor-muse he first directed in 2018’s Transit, a film that shares significant themes with his newest––chiefly that of total strangers inexplicably recognizing each other and immediately feeling a deep, soulful bond with nary a word. Needless to say Miroirs No. 3 is, like the others, an enigma. – Luke H. (full review)

Palestine 36 (Annemarie Jacir)

You almost believe Amir (Dhafer L’Abidine) wants the village perspective when asking his chauffeur Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya) to explain the Palestinian experience outside the city to a collection of landowners at his table. He’s barely able to get the preamble out before one of the guests reminds him of his place: it’s them who pay British taxes while the farmers never pay off their debts. There’s no clearer picture of just how powerful a role greed plays in our world’s tone-deaf political discord. They ignore their kin’s real issues while wondering if “Zionism could be a good thing,” since their property matters most. – Jared M. (full review)

Revelations of Divine Love (Caroline Golum)

Medieval life happened so long ago that our natural inclination is to view it from an alien remove and marvel at how someone actually lived like that. This is silly, of course: human nature stays fairly consistent throughout history, as do plagues, unrest, or the preparations needed for a holiday. Caroline Golum’s Revelations of Divine Love brings this dichotomy to the forefront, not just in recounting the historical events written down by Julian of Norwich, but by pointedly setting anachronistic characters and dialogue against such plainly artificial, Brechtian sets. Accuracy is not exactly what it’s going for. Rather, it’s charmingly evocative, sure to resonate with anyone mildly familiar with the era. – Devan S. (full review)

The Stranger (François Ozon)

Nobel laureate Albert Camus is one of the most consequential thinkers and writers in the French language, having created absurdist characters and worlds that reflect a view on human existence which remains hauntingly unique. His debut novel The Stranger has seen two notable cinematic adaptations since its publication in 1942: once by Italian maestro Luchino Visconti (1967), most recently by Turkish director Zeki Demirkubuz (2001, under the title Fate). A fellow Frenchman has finally stepped up to revive Camus’ words for the big screen as they had originally sounded; perhaps not coincidentally, it proves the most faithful, hypnotically evocative version. – Zhuo-Ning Su (full review)

Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa)

When Donbass arrived in 2018, sandwiched between the start of the 2014 Russian-backed conflict in the titular eastern Ukrainian region and full-scale invasion of the country four years since its release, the world Sergei Loznitsa trained his camera on was a surreal, decaying wasteland. It’s not that the film was necessarily prophetic about the atrocities that would later spread across Ukraine. But it spoke to concerns that now feel especially of-the-moment, the same that have long served as a cornerstone of the Belarus-born, Kiev-raised director’s oeuvre. While Donbass was a work of fiction, its preoccupations with the way truth can be manipulated also haunt the archive-based documentaries for which Loznitsa is arguably best known. From Blockade (2006) to The Kiev Trial (2022), the director hasn’t exhumed USSR-era footage as a sort of time machine, but a means to reappropriate history from the regime’s official narratives. Which is why to salute Two Prosecutors as the filmmaker’s “return to fiction,” as the Cannes Film Festival did upon welcoming Loznitsa’s latest to its Official Competition, is both technically accurate and somehow misleading. – Leonardo G. (full review)

Yes (Nadav Lapid)

Tel Aviv native, defector, and auteur Nadav Lapid opens his fifth feature in a catastrophic state of carouse. A filmmaker known for his employment of trademark dance sequences, Lapid is back with an equally visceral but uncharacteristically clubby groove in Yes, a work whose sarcastically enthusiastic title points to the relentless ridicule and hometown mockery that defines it. – Luke H. (full review)

More Films Now Playing in Theaters

• Alpha
• Bunnylovr
• The Christophers
• Eagles of the Republic
• Exit 8
• Heads or Tails
• Marc by Sofia
• Mile End Kicks
• The Mountain
• Normal
• Project Hail Mary
• Undertone

Read all reviews here. For our NYC-specific repertory round-ups, including many films that will tour the country, bookmark NYC Weekend Watch.

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 Locarno coverage. The film opens in theaters on April 17.

In Nine Behind, one of Sophy Romvari’s earliest shorts, a young woman is heard sobbing on the phone to her estranged grandfather: “I want to know my family.” It’s a line that haunts all the films the director’s made since. A Canadian-born daughter of Hungarian immigrants, Romvari has long been concerned with fractured identities, and her cinema teems with young, lonely drifters trying to suture them. Even when they do not directly address her lineage––as Grandma’s House, which superimposed old photographs of her late grandmother over shots of the woman’s flat in Budapest, Remembrance of Józself Romvári, a tribute to her grandfather, and Still Processing, which grappled with the loss of two of her brothers––Romvari’s works all double as personal archaeologies. Perched somewhere between autobiography and fiction, they unfurl as seances of self and cinema, and for all their loneliness, there’s something immensely cathartic about them, for director and spectator alike. This is why writing about them can be so difficult: they confront us with a kind of intimacy that can make words ring hollow, that pushes us to consider what can be said, and what––as is often the case across her oeuvre––remains hidden. 

Blue Heron, Romvari’s feature debut, once again mines the director’s own history, following a Hungarian family of six as it settles in a nondescript stretch of suburbia outside Vancouver. The opening line, “I struggle now to remember much of my childhood,” belongs to the youngest child, Sasha (Eylul Guven), the film to her older stepbrother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), a sullen, taciturn adolescent with a history of self-destructive behavior no one has learned how to deal with, much less address. Yet Romvari refuses to write him off as a troubled child. Yes, the kid is most certainly not all right, but he traverses Blue Heron as its most mysterious, elusive character, and that impenetrability is a measure of Romvari’s empathy. Rather than pathologizing his pain––a tendency his own parents succumb to––she invites us to sit with it and bask in his drawn-out silences, in the gaps between the words and imperfect memories that grown-up Sasha (Amy Zimmer), in the film’s second half, will try piecing together. 

All of Romvari’s works could be read as forensic exercises in which a young adult––often a budding cineaste––morphs into a kind of detective, exhuming secrets about her family’s past and wrestling with the aftermath of those discoveries. But in Blue Heron, the visual grammar literalizes those investigative impulses. Instead of milking cheap emotion from tight shots, Romvari and cinematographer Maya Bankovic observe the action from a respectful distance, leaving the camera to linger outside windows and door frames, only to resort to frequent zooms that push against those very barriers, as if to eavesdrop on characters. In another filmmaker’s hands, those movements might have registered as voyeuristic; in Romvari’s, they speak to the limits of Sasha’s perspective. Centered as it is on Jeremy, Blue Heron is tethered to her point of view––the things she saw and heard, the things she was shielded from––and there are moments when the camera feels like an artifact witnessing action from the future, operated by someone who isn’t concerned with simply glancing at those memories so much as bringing them back to life. 

That’s the tragic tension at the heart of Romvari’s cinema. To the newcomer, her films might feel like sprawling family albums, but there’s nothing nostalgic or precious about the way she rummages through them. The old photographs, videos, and many other audio-visual mementos littering her work are shrouds, and in unearthing them, Romvari testifies to the impossibility of capturing something as fluid as time with the stillness of photography. Sasha’s parents often wield a camera to preserve shards of domestic bliss, but there’s a strange sadness hovering above these attempts, a melancholy that comes from treasuring a moment in the full knowledge of its inevitable loss. This isn’t to reduce Blue Heron to a kind of funeral, but to highlight the affection Romvari pours on these people and the world they inhabit. The fastidiousness with which she and production designer Victoria Furuya recreate the 1990s backdrop to Sasha’s childhood––from garments to soundscapes, with old Looney Tunes cartoons echoing across the house––does not suggest a treacly reverie for a lost past, but a director recreating that milieu with genuine care for all its textures.

It’s a critical commonplace to claim a film’s universality depends on how well it nails the specifics––that a work can only truly transcend its settings if it captures them with utmost precision and authenticity. But what happens when those details are rooted in unspeakable, scorchingly private sorrows? Granted, Blue Heron is a work of fiction, a far cry from the more unmediated Still Processing. But Sasha’s family is a stand-in for Romvari’s, and what’s most extraordinary about her first feature is the restraint with which she summons a long history of grief. “There are things that cannot be said aloud,” the director herself observed––notably, via subtitles––in Still Processing, and that ineluctable fact holds true here too. Romvari’s script doesn’t reveal––it intimates, and her film is all the more harrowing for the way it holds its secrets close to the chest.

Halfway through, Blue Heron fast-forwards 20 years into the future. Now a director, Sasha is reaching out to people––friends and strangers––in an attempt to figure out what went wrong with Jeremy, if his fate could have been in any way averted. She invites a group of social workers and records them as they offer their two cents. Unsurprisingly, those boil down to non-answers: “it’s hard to predict… it’s hard to tell.” It is a testament to Romvari’s disarming sincerity that Blue Heron does not strive to provide any of its own, and in the closing chapter––wherein past, present, and future all coexist, layered atop one another––a family reunion swells into a heartbreaking ghost story. For a director whose projects have always tested the medium’s capacity to conjure and make peace with the specters of one’s past, it feels like the kind of moment Romvari’s been working towards from the start. For a brief, miraculous instant, Sasha’s catharsis is ours too.

Blue Heron premiered at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival.

Returning for its sixth year, Prismatic Ground is one of the most eclectic annual showcases of experimental documentary and avant-garde filmmaking, proving that the cinematic form is as vibrant as ever. Founded and directed by Inney Prakash and co-presented by Screen Slate, the 2026 edition will take place from Wednesday, April 29 through Sunday, May 3 across five “waves” of screenings at Brooklyn Academy of Music, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, Light Industry, Anthology Film Archives, and Metrograph, and online with the virtual selection wave ∞. Ahead of the kick-off, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the festival trailer, edited by Graham Carter.

The festival kicks off with the North American premiere of Ka Ki Wong’s I Heard That They Are Not Going to See Each Other Anymore, followed by Nicolás Pereda’s Cobre, on Opening Night at BAM.

As Screen Slate notes, “The full lineup features new films by Dane Komljen, Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi, Rajee Samarasinghe, Dianna Barrie and Richard Tuohy, Onyeka Igwe, Adam and Zack Khalil, Lee Jangwook and more; three early works by Iraqi-Lebanese filmmaker Parine Jaddo; ‘Horror, or the Splendour of’, a second consecutive year’s night of poetry and film guest curated by Courtney Stephens and Shiv Kotecha; a tribute by Blair Barnes to the Sony AVC Vidicon line of tube cameras, featuring Computer Chess filmmaker Andrew Bujalski in person; a focus on Chinese avant-garde short films co-presented by Tone Glow; a tribute to June Givanni by Onyeka Igwe; and expanded performances and readings by Rhayne Vermette, Chae Yu, Félix Caraballo, Xiaolu Wang and Samy Benammar. This year’s recipient of the Ground Glass Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Experimental Media is Japanese filmmaker Kohei Ando, who will be present May 2 at Anthology Film Archives for a screening of his work. Prismatic Ground 2026 will close out at Metrograph on the evening of May 3 with the New York premiere of Isiah Medina’s Gangsterism.”

Check out the exclusive trailer below, along with the full lineup. Learn more and get tickets at the official site. And if you want a taste of past editions, check out the Criterion Channel series.

Opening Night

Brooklyn Academy of Music — Wednesday, April 29, 2026

7PM I Heard That They Are Not Going to See Each Other Anymore (Ka Ki Wong, 2026, 86 min.) + Q&A

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wave 1: murder mystery of the mind

Brooklyn Academy of Music— Wednesday, April 29, 2026

9:15PM Cobre (Copper) (Nicolas Pereda, 2025, 79min)*

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*Co-presented by Cinema Tropical

DCTV’s FIrehouse Cinema— Thursday, April 30, 2026

12:30PM Programming Censorship Workshop

Free Registration

3PM Goodbye, Crescent Moon (Xiaolu Wang, 2025, 17min, Expanded) + A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth (Rajee Samarasinghe, 2026, 8min) + A Bundle of Silences (Sofía Gallisá Muriente, 2026, 24min) + Penkelemes (Onyeka Igwe, 2025, 19min) + New World (Darryl Daley, 2026, 5min) + Q&A

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5PM Afterlives (Kevin B. Lee, 2025, 88min) + Q&A

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7:30PM The Creature of Darkness (Lisa Malloy, Ray Whitaker, 2026, 15min)

+ Let Them Be Seen (Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi, 2026, 75min) + Q&A

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9:30PM Swing Swish Sway (TT Takemoto, 2026, 7min) + Uchronia (Fil Ieropoulos, 2026, 97min)+ Q&A

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11:45PM Anna (Chae Yu, 2025, 15min, Expanded) + That sanity be kept (Michael Barwise, 2026, 10min) + A Shrimp’s Daily Rehearsal (Ka Ki Wong, 2026, 10min) + My Structuralist Film (Angelo Madsen, 2026, 6min) + Injured? (Eislow Johnson, 2026, 14min) + Twin Snakes (Lev Kalman, Whitney Horn, 2026, 15min) + Q&A

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wave 2: cinema is

Light Industry— Friday, May 1, 2026

Tickets for Light Industry programs are available at the venue day-of.

6PM Ouarda Ouarda: yet another flower film (Samy Benammar, with live musical accompaniment by Nicholas Ray, 2026, 25min, Expanded) + Endless Ascent (Félix Caraballo, 2026, 25min, Expanded)

8PM From ‘Images and Sounds’ to ‘Frames and Cuts’ (Isiah Medina, 60min, Lecture)

10PM Leather Graves (Malic Amalya, 2025, 12min, 16mm) + Desire Lines (Dane Komljen, 2026, 107min)

wave 3: on the far side of twilight

Anthology Film Archives— Saturday, May 2, 2026

11AM We deh here (Maybelle Peters, 2025, 7min) + Joy Boy: A Tribute to Julius Eastman (Collective Faire-Part, 2026, 64min)

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11:15AM Lightly Heeled (Kioto Aoki, 2024, 3min, 16mm) + Brumaire (Vincent Guilbert, 2026, 14min) + phototropes (Blanca García, James Devine, 2026, 3min, Super 8mm) + Nude Descending (Dianna Barrie, Richard Tuohy, 2025, 10min, 16mm) + Stitch the Ruin (Željka Blakšić, 2024, 8min, 16mm) + Flowers for an Old Shrine (Long Pham, 2025, 6min, 16mm) + Goodnight, My Dear (Vanij Choksi, 2026, 6min) + Rojo Žalia Blau (Viktoria Schmid, 2025, 10min, 35mm) + La Durete De Mental (Charles-Andre Coderre, 2025, 20 min, 35mm) + Q&A

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12:30PM Another Birth (Isabelle Kalander, 2025, 70min) + Q&A

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1:15PM Ground Glass Award 2026: Star Waars (Kohei Ando, 1978, 3min, 16mm) + Like a Passing Train 1 (Kohei Ando, 1978, 3min, 16mm) + Like a Passing Train 2 (Kohei Ando, 1979, 7min, 16mm) + Oh! My Mother (Kohei Ando, 1969, 10min) + The Sons (Kohei Ando, 1973, 25min, 16mm) + On the Far Side of Twilight (Kohei Ando, 1994, 39min) + Q&A

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2:30PM June Givanni: The Making of a Pan-African Cinema Archive, with Onyeka Igwe: Perfect Image? (Maureen Blackwood, 1989, 30min) + Voodoo Dance: A Tribute to the People of Haiti (Elsie Haas, 1989, 52min) + Q&A

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3:45PM Tamago Stories One (Kioto Aoki, 2026, 3min, 16mm) + Ceiling (Hu Didi, 2026, 8min, 16mm) + Testament (Mike Stoltz, 2026, 6min, 16mm) + Artificial Horizons Test (Mike Stoltz, 2026, 6min, 16mm) + Xtended Release (Joshua Gen Solondz, 2026, 15min, 16mm) + Chang Gyeong (Lee Jangwook, 2025, 18min, 16mm) + Night Swing (TT Takemoto, 2min, 2026, 16mm) + Tooborac (Richard Tuohy, Dianna Barrie, 2025, 9min, 16mm) + Q&A

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5PM Levers (Rhayne Vermette, 20min, Poetry Reading) + Surrendur (Karthik Pandian, 2026, 87min)* + Q&A

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*Co-presented by Triple Canopy

5:45PM Crunch (Invisible Scissors, 15min, Live Music) + Archura Leaves the City Forever (Yusuf Demirors, 2026, 12min) + To Summon a Seer (Alan Medina, 2026, 8min) + 逆立ち逆立ち : If pinholes were right side up, I would be doing handstands (Kioto Aoki, 2024, 3min, 16mm) + Landscape in the afternoon (Lee Jangwook, 2026, 14min, 16mm) + Mounds Above the Earth (Jiayi Chen, 2025, 5min, 16mm) + It Must Be Because I Decided to Leave (Zhouyun Chen, 2026, 19 min) + Q&A

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7:30PM Horror, or the Splendour Of: An Evening of Film and Poetry Guest Curated by Shiv Kotecha and Courtney Stephens (Ft. Ed Steck, Joanne Kyger, charles theonia, Lily Jeu Sheng, Sato Stom, Benjamin Krusling, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha)

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7:45PM Rotating Signals (Chae Yu, 2025, 10min) + The Goblin Play (Chae Yu, 2025, 47min) + Q&A

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9:30PM Chronovisor (Kevin Walker, Jack Auen, 2026, 99min) + Q&A

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9:45PM An Afternoon with a Gnawa (Meena Nanji, 2026, 12min) + Àwọ̀ ojú ọ̀run (The Colour of the Sky) (Judah Iyunade, 2026, 71min)

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wave 4: before everything has a name

Anthology Film Archives— Sunday, May 3, 2026

10:45AM Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski, 2013, 92min, 35mm) + sitrep (Blair Barnes, 2026, 20min) + Q&A

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11AM Concealed and Denied (Jordan Lord, 2026, 35min) + The Glass Booth (Jenny Brady, 2026, 33min) + Q&A

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1PM Atash, Aisha, Teyh: Three Films by Parine Jaddo; Co-presented by Arte East: Atash (Thirst) (Parine Jaddo, 1995, 14min) + Aisha (Surviving) (Parine Jaddo, 1999, 32min) + Tayh (Astray) (Parine Jaddo, 2002, 21min) + Q&A

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1:30PM My Friends in My Address Book (Kohei Ando, 1974, 3min, 16mm) + Every Contact Leaves a Trace (Lynne Sachs, 2025, 83min) + Q&A

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3:15PM Anomalies in a Landscape (Félix Caraballo, 2025, 8min, 16mm) + In the Manner of Smoke (Armand Yervant Tufenkian, 2025, 91min) + Q&A

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4:15PM WORLD ENTERPRISES (Anthony Banua-Simon, 2026, 14min) + Aanikoobijigan (Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, 2026, 80min) + Q&A

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5:45PM before everything has a name (An-li dīng, 2026, 17min) + Masayume (Nao Yoshigai, 2026, 110min)

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6:45PM The Land Lies Heavy: The Contemporary Chinese Avant-Garde*; Article 4 (Hsin-Yu Chen, 2026, 4min) + Branches From Concrete (Zhou Zhenyu, 2026, 14min) + Words Fly Back to the Black Earth (Xiao Zhang, 2026, 19min) + Redland Hooves (Kaiwen Ren, 2026, 27min)

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*Co-presented by Tone Glow

Closing Night

Metrograph— Sunday, May 3, 2026

9PM Gangsterism (Isiah Medina, 2025, 84min.) + Q&A

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Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 TIFF coverage. The film opens in theaters on April 17.

There’s a reason Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill speaks to Grace Pine (Barbie Ferreira). It’s the same reason her pitch endears a publisher to cut her an advance and contract to publish a 33 1/3 book on the subject: the feminist rage; the honesty; the fact that the world was willing to fork over millions of dollars to listen as a woman bared her soul. There’s catharsis in it, inspiration. What’s stopping Grace from achieving that same success through authentic voice and impeccable taste as a burgeoning music critic in Toronto? The adrenaline rush answers: “Nothing!” The inevitable crash back to earth supplies a revision: herself.

That’s not to say the patriarchy doesn’t play its role via an apathetic boss (Jay Baruchel’s Jeff), pedantic colleagues, and self-important new wave of rock-n-rollers finding any excuse to run away the moment she mentions her book’s topic. Writer-director Chandler Levack isn’t letting them off the hook by putting Grace in her own way en route to a coming-of-age epiphany. She’s not letting her lead character off the hook, either. Because there’s an allure to the scenarios to which Grace falls prey. To live the hip lifestyle of a rock chick? To have men actually listen to her expertise and achieve success? But at what cost?

Mile End Kicks gives Grace a chance at her dream by packing a bag and moving to Montreal without a safety net. This city is the Canadian music hub. The literal pulse of everything fresh, underground, and worth discovering––the perfect backdrop to get into Morissette’s head and, by extension, her own to write about that album’s personal impact. What Grace doesn’t anticipate, however, is that going from her parents’ home and semi-circles of bearded men quibbling over irrelevant bands to “the scene” brings a steep learning curve. The distractions coming her way were made to derail the most dedicated artists amongst us.

It starts with an invitation. Grace’s summer flat host Madeleine (Juliette Gariépy) and her boyfriend Hugo (Robert Naylor) are both performing at a loft party that night. She’s doing DJ work between acts, and his band Bone Party is headlining. Grace rebuffs the invitation––her deadline is coming insanely quick and she “doesn’t, like, do drugs”––but the combination of procrastination and FOMO get the better of her, even if she dreads discovering the music is too terrible to lie to their faces. She never would have guessed they’d actually be good, whatever their penchant for rejecting obvious influences to evoke aloofness.

Well, it works. At least in the case of lead singer Chevy (Stanley Simons). He’s a tractor beam of sex appeal that Grace cannot resist, despite Madeleine telling her he’s the worst person in all of Montreal. She’s ready to cross off #4 on her summer to-do list (have sex for real) the moment he starts singing. She’s not necessarily averse to doing it with lead guitarist Archie (Devon Bostick) either. She’s attracted to his honesty and humor––not quite the magnet Chevy is, but he’ll do in a pinch and make a loyal friend. That leaves their bassist Jesse (I Like Movies star Isaiah Lehtinen) schlepping everything back to the van himself.

Herein lies the trouble: is Bone Party really that good, or is Grace’s affinity for two of its members clouding her usually impeccable taste? Unfortunately, her reality soon proves that the answer is moot––she’s going to use the chance that they’re legit to get closer to Chevy and the prospect of hooking up while also sabotaging her own ambition in the process. We know it’s a horrible idea––this guy is an insanely opportunistic con man who only thinks about himself––but we’re beginning to wonder if Grace isn’t a bit of that, too. After all, she’s exploiting Madeleine’s kindness and Archie’s interest to get in Chevy’s pants.

The writing all but stops as Grace falls into the same trap she fell with Jeff, insofar as giving her talent away for free to men who don’t deserve it. She became his workhorse for a year, taking on every assignment he sent regardless of its proximity to music, and still hasn’t processed her invoice (not to mention other heinous behavior yet to be revealed). Now she’s volunteering to become Bone Party’s de facto publicist by pitching interviews to reputable magazines, authoring their marketing materials, and even hanging posters. Grace is here to unlock her inner badass but is propping up another ungrateful man.

It’s a very well-scripted progression: Levack finds a way to authentically let the character think she’s acting under her own volition while ensuring the audience clearly sees Chevy’s manipulations. (The sex scenes are so awkward as Chevy’s narcissism distracts him mid-act that we cannot stop laughing, despite second-hand mortification.) Grace is so focused on what she thinks she should be that she ultimately loses who she is to conform to what the world (which she’s meant to be fighting) desires from her. It’s a devastating, relatable performance by Ferreira that’s desperate for a moment of clarity that could never come too late.

Mile End Kicks premiered at TIFF.

Returning to Cannes Film Festival, Asghar Farhadi’s latest feature Parallel Tales may be his most fitting project yet to premiere at the French festival. Following his Cannes Grand Prix winner A Hero back in 2021, his latest is a French-language project starring Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney, Adam Bessa, and India Hair, “with the participation of” Catherine Deneuve. Ahead of the premiere in competition, French distributors Memento Films have dropped the first French-language trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “Seeking inspiration for her new novel, Sylvie spies on her neighbors across the street. When she hires young Adam to help her with her daily life, she doesn’t realize that he will turn her life and work upside down, until the fiction she imagined surpasses everyone’s reality.”

Speaking about the project, Huppert told us recently, “All I can say is that I really enjoyed working with him a lot. That was really, really great and I loved my role. I’m a writer in the film, with all that that implies, you know? It’s all about imagination and the power of imagination and it’s a wonderful role. I haven’t seen the film yet, but I’m very curious.”

See the trailer and poster below and return for our review.