In celebration of Criterion’s The Complete Kubrick, we’re publishing a season of features dedicated to the filmmaker’s oeuvre and beyond, going through Criterion’s box set era by era and disc by disc—plus a couple of surprises from the archives. Explore more here and read part two below.

The Killing (1956)

Kubrick’s first studio film is also his first unqualified artistic success: a swift, lean and biting noir that (despite a few key low-angle closeups and ominous tracking shots) trades the grandiose visual and musical experimentation most commonly identified as “Kubrickian” for equally groundbreaking experimentation with narrative structure. 

Dissecting the perfect crime, the nonlinear, multi-perspective ensemble heist film follows a conspiracy of workaday men and women, led by future Jack D. Ripper Sterling Hayden as a cocky ex-con methodically plotting his masterpiece, in a complex and audacious scheme to rob a Chicago racetrack mid-race. Based on the pulp novel Clean Break by Lionel White and utilizing the jagged, crunchy mock-stained-glass prose of Kubrick’s favorite hardboiled writer Jim Thompson to bring the scheming dialogues to life, each of the film’s stock viewpoint characters is the protagonist of their own story: Jay C. Flippen as the heist’s cautious bankroller, revealed late in the film to be motivated by concern for his sickly wife; Elisha Cook Jr. as the diminutive teller, desperate to prove his masculinity; Marie Windsor as his unsatisfied wife, a sassy fork-tongued manipulator with designs of her own; Timothy Carey as the hissing, strutting, puppy-loving sniper who never misses his mark; Kola Kwariani as the Russian chessmaster, dissident intellectual and wrestler who, in a perfect Kubrickian irony, is hired as the dumb muscle of the operation.

Rather than dwell on or empathize with any one player, Kubrick’s relentlessly-paced film instead likens them to racehorses, chess pieces and puzzle pieces, continually shuffling perspectives as the clock jumps forward and backward, restaging the same scenes from overlapping viewpoints as the baroque grand design gradually comes into view for the audience. Each piece is maneuvered into the correct place at the correct time to outwit and burgle the inflexible system of state-condoned racetrack security. This player is to execute the feint here, so that one can penetrate the system’s defenses there, so the next one can receive the handoff during the designated window at the designated spot and move on before the mark knows what hit ‘em. The tropes of the heist movie, already established in John Huston’s 1950 The Asphalt Jungle, are combined with Kubrick’s distinct passions for chess, philosophy and tragicomic absurdism to crackerjack effect: each individual fancies themselves the master strategist of their world, but is only privy to a limited piece of the bigger picture. Even the perfect scheme struggles to survive contact with the frailties of the human heart—lust, hatred, and one-sided love—combined with the vicissitudes of chance in a world of individuals one has never even met.

One of his less-seen films today, Kubrick’s breakout hit has nevertheless proven as seminal to generations of American crime cinema as his later masterpieces would be to science fiction, horror and war films. Without the chilly ironies and subversive chronology of The Killing, the outputs of David Mamet, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, Christopher Nolan, and Rian Johnson—to name a few—would be unrecognizable. Amusingly though, for his trouble constructing a bleeding-cool auteurist pulp pastiche that reveals the small-minded artifice of traditional Hollywood forms by scrambling their structure, Kubrick was initially written off as a poseur by Cahiers du cinéma critic Jean-Luc Godard. A more senior film artist, on the other hand, had a different view: The Killing inspired one Orson Welles to promptly declare Kubrick the greatest director of his generation. Given his own output, it’s not hard to imagine what enchanted Welles: The Killing isn’t just a successful Hollywood entertainment, but a winking piece of metacinema that not-too-subtly likens the film director to the criminal mastermind, playfully hoodwinking the audience with the unique power over comprehension and perception exercised behind the camera before humbly submitting to the impossibility of total control.

Paths of Glory (1957)

If The Killing cemented Kubrick as a young maverick in exceptional command of cinematic storytelling, Paths of Glory announced him as a serious artist with serious thoughts on his mind. Adapting WWI veteran Humphrey Cobb’s novel of the same name, Kubrick reunited with Jim Thompson alongside playwright Calder Willingham (also a one-time collaborator of David Lean, Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Marlon Brando, and Jack Garfein) to craft one of the great war film screenplays, a figurative slow pan up and down the ranks of the 1916 French armed forces in a Sisyphean 90-minute chronicle of institutional friendly fire. 

There are quite a few literal slow pans and tracking shots too, of course, and Kubrick combines them with masterful blocking to establish the film’s two conflicting settings and worlds. There’s the palatial French estate (the same used in Last Year at Marienbad), established with ornate period architecture, angular military formations, and graceful X and Y-axis camera movements, where well-mustached generals (real-life WWI vet Adolphe Menjou and subordinate George Macready) dine on fine food, enjoy waltzes, and relay a casualty-heavy, practically infeasible strategy to repel Germany’s forces from above—no one wants to be deemed a coward and relieved of his command, so responsibility for the foolhardy assault is kicked continually down the ranks. And then there’s the snaking, filthy, crowded trenches, represented in claustrophobic lateral tracking shots, where the infantrymen treated as livestock and game pieces have to live with the shelling, the sickness, the dwindling rations, the omnipresence of terror and death, and the condescension of generals touring the frontlines to deny the existence of “shellshock” and demand to know whether each and every soldier is “Ready to kill more Germans?”

Serving as liaison between these conflicting strata is Kirk Douglas, the lone uncomplicatedly heroic leading man in the Kubrick corpus, as stout-hearted patriot Col. Dax, charged with the contradictory duties of protecting his men and obeying his callous superiors. In a subversion of genre norms, the film’s big battle sequence—the charge on the heavily fortified “Anthill,” filmed in slow, grueling right-to-left horizontal movements through fields of fire and flying dirt—is not the climax of the film, but its midpoint. When the operation fails just as Dax warned it would—due in part to the actual cowardice of nepo-officer Lt. Roget (Wayne Morris)—three corpsmen (Ralph Meeker alongside the returning Timothy Carey and Joe Turkel) are chosen as scapegoats to answer for the strategic and moral failures of their promotion-hungry superiors, men who disguise their interest in advancing and maintaining their own dominance as the interest of the state. The final act and climax are a grimly absurd show trial, imprisonment and execution, redolent of Camus’ The Stranger and shot in the film’s most imposing expressionist compositions, in which Dax’s shrewd dissections of the accusers’ obscene logic and the innocent prisoners’ own heartrending, “cowardly” pleas for their lives fall on deaf ears. “There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die!” beams Menjou’s cheerful, wine-sipping Maj. General Broulard while condemning his own countrymen—including, by the end, a man with a concussion who needs to be propped up and prodded awake for his own execution—to senseless deaths as communal spectacle, “for morale.” Broulard is a man, like the film’s other men of power, whose cold strategic models and macho death-cult ideals cannot countenance or survive flesh-and-blood human frailty, and whose hierarchical insulation from consequences for his own frailty diminishes his humanity.

Paths of Glory was an intellectually, professionally, and personally monumental film for Kubrick, held back only by his Hays Code-enforced inability to graphically depict war’s desecration of the body in ways he instead leans on (dreadfully evocative) dialogue to describe. (There is one gruesome exception: the image of a smoldering soldier killed by his own lieutenant’s hand grenade, thrown on an ill-advised nighttime mission in a fit of panic. His killer never faces any consequences.) For its harsh portrayal of the French military in a defensive war against Germany, with WWII so close in the rearview mirror, the film was deemed scandalous in France and denied distribution for nearly two decades. Of course Kubrick’s point was not to attack France: he treats them no less kindly than he would treat America in Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket, and presumably kinder than he would have treated Nazi Germany in the unrealized Holocaust film he was already contemplating by the late 1950s (an early concept of which—to follow the domestic life of a Nazi officer involved in the extermination of European Jewry—bears a notable resemblance to Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest). Rather, Kubrick’s aim was to demonstrate the hypocrisies of hierarchical power and the logic of the nation-state as universal evils.

Extending the absurdist themes of The Killing, Paths of Glory brings the conflict of individuals and systems into sharper political focus. The film foreshadows much of Kubrick’s future work with its forensic depiction of individual men’s egocentric and rationally self-interested maneuvers within a state institution producing, in concert, abjectly cruel and irrational outcomes, devouring the weak while destroying the strong from within. Kubrick’s most humanist film also illustrates his evolving ideas about human nature: here war reduces men to numbers and thus to lesser, colder versions of themselves, compelling them to assume masks of detachment and barbarism as they’re told their natural desire to live is cowardice and their natural individuality is illusory before the uniform abstraction of the nation. (Kubrick’s clever casting and framing emphasize the men’s individuality in size, shape, and skin tone even as they stand shoulder to shoulder in uniform.) One of the film’s most repellent antagonists, Macready’s Brig. Gen. Mireau, initially seems sympathetic and protective of his division until his command is threatened from above; Kubrick’s Rousseauist ideas about cruelty as learned behavior would be complicated by later films that weigh the dehumanizing effect of social systems of control against the violent and senseless aspects of man’s barbarian and animal heritage. The grimly ironic, procedurally detailed depiction of a self-cannibalizing institution in which “the shit rolls downhill” would also be a key inspiration for revered TV writer David Simon, who has cited it as a template for the 21st-century stories of HBO’s The Wire and Generation Kill.

Paths of Glory was also, finally, the film that introduced Stanley to actress Christiane Harlan, his third wife and the love of his life—and, in an irony Kubrick himself couldn’t have bettered, the niece of infamous Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan, director of likely the most antisemitic film ever made, the Holocaust-era agitprop drama Süss the Jew. To Kubrick, one of the great Jewish filmmakers whose awareness of his own Jewishness and haunted fascination with the Holocaust would only grow as the years went by, the notion of guilt by association hardly registered. With Christiane (and her brother Jan, eventually to be a trusted production partner and guardian of the Kubrick estate), Kubrick would be personally and artistically transformed, raising three daughters as he matured from young upstart to wise master, and remained blissfully married until his death more than four decades later. In Paths of Glory’s coda, she plays the lone female character in the entire film: a tearful German girl coerced by the French troops, brought to a drunken tavern to sing before a crowd of leering, barking, animalistic men ready to let loose the pent-up cruelty of the trenches. As her halting nightingale voice rises in the German folksong “The Faithful Hussar”, the masks of barbarism slip from the men in a montage of faces steadily joining her in singing and in tears. For just a fleeting moment before their redeployment, the power of music and visage of a woman acts on them like the opposite of a gun: it destroys rather than reinforces the boundaries of nations, and sheds away everything that death and war have made of men. It’s the most personal and heartfelt grace note imaginable for the likes of Stanley Kubrick.

Criterion’s 4K Paths of Glory disc features a commentary reused from their 2010 Blu-ray, in which critic and author Gary Giddins offers an exhaustive breakdown of the film’s innovative technique, cast and production history, subtle symbolism, revealing changes from the novel, and comparisons to other war films—most of which, unsurprisingly, reveal just how exceptional Kubrick’s directing is even when quietly supporting an exemplary script and set of performances. Arguing against the popular characterization of Paths of Glory as an “antiwar film,” Giddins dissects the verbal chess matches between characters, along with the various ways in which they’re shot, scored, and performed, to highlight how Kubrick uses the theme of war as a platform to examine issues of power, control, and class. Despite some factual errors (Giddins repeatedly misidentifies the waltz favored by Maj. Gen. Broulard as “The Blue Danube” of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame; in fact, it is “Künstlerleben,” also by Johann Strauss), the commentary is a must for those eager to discover whole new layers in a deceptively complex film.

Spartacus (1960)

For his Roman sword-and-sandal epic, Kubrick took over directing duties from postwar genre pioneer Anthony Mann—after filming had already begun—at the invitation of executive producer and star Kirk Douglas. The finished film is the one “studio picture” over which Kubrick felt little sense of authorship, though a Kubrick-approved 1991 reconstruction (the basis for Criterion’s disc) restored several provocative scenes and shots cut by Universal from the original release. It’s nevertheless Douglas and HUAC-persecuted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s film at heart, with Kubrick as uncharacteristic journeyman merely translating their words and characters to the cinematic canvas. 

Adapting the historical novel by Howard Fast, Spartacus is a thunderous, speechifying, and comparatively left-wing peer to the likes of Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments, ditching its contemporaries’ Christianity for an insistently secular parable of the ancient world, framed around the eternal struggle of social underclasses against the wages of exploitation and imperialism. While loosely based on the actual life of the man Karl Marx deemed “the most splendid fellow in all of ancient history,” the film’s vision of Rome—shared by Fast, Trumbo and Kubrick despite a host of other creative differences—analogizes the cruel and decadent twilight years of the Republic clearly enough to a postwar America riven by inequality that it inspired backlash in its day, with prominent conservatives including John Wayne calling for boycotts of the blacklist-breaking production.

Spartacus (Douglas) is a Thracian born into the crucible of slavery, whose muscular stature and knack for defiance earn him a spot in the lucrative and deadly gladiatorial circuit under oily manager Lentulus Batiatus (snake charmer Peter Ustinov, who wrote a substantial portion of his own dialogue to create an urbane and affable antagonist where lesser actors might have leaned into one-note vulgarity). Forced to fight his fellow slaves for the entertainment of Rome’s upper classes—“ladies and gentlemen of quality, those who appreciate a fine kill,” as Batiatus puts it—Spartacus is eventually spurred from quiet defiance to collective solidarity and open rebellion by the petty cruelty of power-hungry oligarch Marcus Licinius Crassus (Laurence Olivier, who like Ustinov sketches welcome texture into what could have been a cutout villain—as in a memorable scene, cut by studio censors from the original 1960 release, in which the surprisingly libertine Crassus reveals himself through salacious culinary double entendre as one of Hollywood’s first openly bisexual characters). Crassus in turn finds himself opposed both on the battlefield by Spartacus and in the chambers of the Senate by corpulent operator Sempronius Gracchus (Charles Laughton), a principled sleaze who correctly perceives Crassus’ ever-growing authority as foreshadowing the collapse of the Republic into an Empire.

As the black sheep of the Kubrick oeuvre, Spartacus is distinct for its stylistic indistinctness amid the genre blockbusters of its day. It’s Stanley’s most talkative film by a mile, filled to the over-three-hour brim with moralistic and expository speechifying, filmed in mostly conventional shot-reverse shot coverage to highlight the performances of its hallowed thespians. It’s also the only Kubrick film with no ambiguity or irony of note: a clash of noble heroes and dastardly villains all neatly sorted out from one another by the pyrrhic finale, with bellowed Trumbo monologues telling the audience what to think and an insistent full-orchestra Alex North score telling them what to feel at all times, should any questions arise. Yet it’s not without distinct traces of Kubrick: dense and wordless panoramic shots establish the scope, depth, and brutality of the film’s world in between dialogue scenes, with clear distinctions drawn between the loose, rough and warm compositions of Spartacus’s growing slave army—in which women, children, and the elderly march to the sea alongside barely-trained men—and the cool, angular regimentation of “civilized” Rome. A morbid vertical tracking shot of corpses stacked to the blood-red horizon in the aftermath of battle is one of the great moving images in the Kubrick library. Institutional decay and barbarism in the guise of civilization return as central Kubrickian themes, and the director clearly takes special interest in aspects of the script exploring the psychosexual and gendered dimensions of power, dehumanization and control: the first act draws particular attention to the commodification of Spartacus’s masculine body and persona by the thirsty consumers of the Roman slaveholding class. 

It’s also an early instance of a Kubrick film presenting indirect, secularized reimaginings of distinctly Jewish narratives: the Roman-Judean conflict is never brought up in the film, yet the framing of the ostensibly pagan Spartacus as armed anti-Roman rebel and unassuming liberator-prophet evokes martyred Hebrew anti-occupation militants like the Sicarii and the slave exodus of Moses. Crucially though, Spartacus is not motivated by religious, ethnic or ideological agendas but by his material conditions and thoroughly individual human desires: the final spark that sets off his revolution is not an intellectualized call to arms but his erotically evoked and consensually reciprocated love for the female slave Varinia (Jean Simmons), whose defiant spirit in spite of her bodily captivity raises the acquisitive lust and ire of Crassus.

To Kubrick, the value of Spartacus was mainly pragmatic: its success assured him the clout to secure studio backing for his more personally ambitious future projects. And a success it was: the film’s box office returns dwarfed Kubrick’s combined previous efforts by orders of magnitude, winning four Academy Awards (albeit none personally for Kubrick) and such high-profile fans as newly elected President John F. Kennedy. The film’s most iconic scene and line—“I am Spartacus!”, an inclusion initially resisted by Kubrick for being too corny—became a cultural meme that survives to this day among internet users who have, in many cases, never seen the other 196 minutes of the film. Contemporary Spartacus admirers include handpicked Kubrick disciple Steven Spielberg, who’s professed his affection for the film (to the public and to Kubrick personally) on multiple occasions; Ridley Scott, whose less ideologically charged Gladiator (and, alas, Gladiator II) would be unimaginable without Spartacus as template; Mel Gibson, whose Braveheart is similarly indebted; and almost certainly John Milius and George Lucas, whose Conan the Barbarian and Star Wars prequel films respectively draw heavily from the images and themes of Kubrick’s epic. (One of the climactic sequences of The Phantom Menace, set in rolling green hills packed with geometrically imposing infantry and vehicle formations, is essentially the final battle of Spartacus with CGI droids and lasers—and a happier outcome.)

Criterion’s disc includes two commentary tracks, both recorded for their previous 1992 LaserDisc release. One features excerpts from Trumbo’s extensive production notes and writings on the film, read aloud by voice actors Michael McConnohie and Barbara Goodson. The other assembles an impressive array of contributors to take turns offering their perspectives on the film, including Douglas (who clearly adored it more than anyone), Ustinov (even more charming behind the mic than in front of the camera), Saul Bass (not just the film’s title designer but an art director sharing significant visual authorship with Kubrick), and Howard Fast (who in an amusing departure from commentary track norms spends much of the film’s runtime tearing it apart, nitpicking every historical inaccuracy, change from the novel and hypermasculine performance choice by Douglas in ways Kubrick himself may have agreed with). Fast at least correctly pinpoints the film’s undervalued MVP: Woody Strode (Golden Globe-nominated for only a few minutes of screen time) as the stoic Ethiopian slave Draba, whose dramatic choice to turn his spear on the masters rather than execute Spartacus for their pleasure plants the thought of revolution in the hero’s mind—and provides one of the most thrillingly intimate and gruesome scenes in the film. Its possible resonance with a 1960 American audience is left unspoken.

Explore more in our season dedicated to The Complete Kubrick.

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.

Ali G: Who Iz I? (Sacha Baron Cohen)

After a perfunctory, slimmed-down theatrical release last weekend, Sacha Baron Cohen’s feature directorial debut has now arrived on Prime Video. Anyone familiar with the comedian’s hijinks, and particularly Borat 2 and Who Is America?, will know what to expect when it comes to this Ali G sequel: a clunky and strained (albeit sporadically funny) reckoning with modern political and societal ills that feels a little too late to the game to pack a genuinely hilarious punch. As streaming slop, one could get much worse, but especially with his last few projects, it feels like Baron Cohen is seemingly content with shooting fish in a barrel.

Where to Stream: Prime Video

American Doctor (Poh Si Teng)

Poh Si Teng’s American Doctor is a harrowing, heartbreaking portrait of Palestinian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian doctors who are risking their lives to tend to the overwhelming victims of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and speak the truth in any way they can. Dan Mecca said in his Sundance review, “When will this end? When will this bloodshed stop? And when will the United States of America stop supporting it? Filmmaker Poh Si Teng offers a clear-eyed, unrelenting look at the genocide in Gaza with her documentary American Doctor. It follows three doctors––Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, Dr. Thaer Ahmad, and Dr. Mark Perlmutter––that are consistently trying to save lives in the Gaza Strip. On some trips they are approved to enter. On others they are denied for specious reasons. Dr. Perlmutter is Jewish, Dr. Sidhwa is Zoroastrian, and Dr. Ahmad is Palestinian. Their mission is the mission of all medical professionals: to heal everyone they can.”

Where to Stream: Watermelon+ (for free through November 6 only)

Black Zombie (Maya Annik Bedward)

More than reclaiming the zombie motif from the knee-jerk response that Night of the Living Dead inhibited, Maya Annik Bedward’s Black Zombie is a reclamation of Vodou from the colonial fear-mongering that used it to demonize Black people the world over. Because it’s 2026 and Haitians are still cautious to admit their connection to the religion. There’s still an outsider belief that Haiti’s recent hardships are a result of its ancestors making a pact with the Devil. – Jared M. (full review)

Where to Stream: Kino Film Collection

The Dog Stars (Ridley Scott)

The Dog Stars—an adaptation of Peter Heller’s hit novel of the same name—follows Hig, aka “Big Hig” (Jacob Elordi), a thirty-something everyman mechanic who lost his pregnant wife to the flu virus that wiped out most of the world. He lives alongside his dog, Jasper, in an airport hangar outside of Denver. His only companion is Bangley (Josh Brolin), another survivor who, unlike Hig, is content with the quaint, gray, quiet life they lead (which doesn’t look terribly different from some rural American living situations today). To Bangley, protecting property is paramount and the very concept of new faces invites trouble. Hig, however, is willing to brave that dark; the risk of unknown danger weighs less to him than the potential benefit of discovering a community. And he has a lead. – Luke H. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Filipiñana (Rafael Manuel)

When Janine (Nour Hooshmand) asks Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto) what the Ilocos region of the Philippines is like—she’s only ever heard it was beautiful without having visited herself—she explains that many spots look and feel just like the posh golf course where they work. What should just be a point of comparison to better understand an unknown, however, is soon revealed as a very purposeful juxtaposition. – Jared M. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

If I Go Will They Miss Me (Walter Thompson-Hernández)

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. Continue reading my full review.

Where to Stream: VOD

Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant (THUNDERLIPS)

A highlight as part of the Sundance midnight section earlier this year, the New Zealand oddity Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant takes its premise—a slacker getting, as promised, extraterrestrially pregnant—to its ultimate conclusion. It’s a B-movie delight that also voices quite a bit about what often goes unsaid around social and personal fears surrounding physical and emotional changes during pregnancy.

Where to Stream: VOD

Never After Dark (Dave Boyle)

Clearly inspired by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (including casting his frequent collaborator Mutsuo Yoshioka and going so far to plan a remake of Pulse), Dave Boyle’s creepy chiller Never After Dark is a stylish yet thoughtful pre-October treat. Following a traveling psychic who uncovers dark secrets at a remote house, Boyle’s Japanese production may take its time to deliver the goods, but when the blood spills, it is done in quite memorable fashion.

Where to Stream: VOD

Seeds (Brittany Shyne)

Evoking Gordon Park’s black-and-white photographs of the New Deal Era, cinematographer Brittany Shyne’s powerful debut feature Seeds offers a portrait of a disappearing way of life for Black farmers in the American South. Its casual approach mostly reflects rhythms of life in a vérité style that’s occasionally broken when the camera is acknowledged. – John F. (full review)

Where to Stream: PBS

Also New to Streaming

Kino Film Collection

The Shiver of the Vampires

Paramount+

Hanging by a Wire

VOD

Forgotten Island
The Stunt Driver
Verity

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

BAM
A series on female possession begins while Ken Russell’s reconstructed The Devils continues—read (or listen to) our interview with Mark Kermode on it.

Roxy Cinema
A print of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre plays on Friday and Saturday, the latter day bringing Silent Night, Deadly Night 5 on 35mm and Suspiria; Halloween shows on Friday and Saturday while Ganja & Hess screens on Sunday.

Museum of Modern Art
A Sergei Loznitsa retrospective continues while Sundays with Steven starts with 2005’s War of the Worlds and 1953’s on 35mm.

Film Forum
A 4K restoration of Alexander Payne’s Citizen Ruth begins playing; Coco shows on Sunday.

Anthology Film Archives
A Troma series continues while films by Frampton, Franju, Jean Genet, and Ernie Gehr show in Essential Cinema.

Museum of the Moving Image
The international version of The Shining makes its U.S. premiere on Sunday, followed by the theatrical cut; Goodbye, Dragon Inn shows on Friday; The Exorcist and a print of Poltergeist are featured in Handcrafted Horror.

IFC Center
Ken Russell’s reconstructed The Devils continues on a restored 35mm print—read (or listen to) our interview with Mark Kermode on it—while The Exorcist, Grey Gardens, and Ju-On: The Grudge play late.

Nitehawk Prospect Park
Godzilla and Halloween screen early on Saturday and Sunday.

Metrograph
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Beetlejuice, Peppermint Frappé, Cría Cuervos, Horror of Dracula, The Brides of Dracula, News from Home, The Addams Family, Something Special, Midnight in Paris, All That Heaven Allows, and Far from Heaven show on 35mm; Terence Fisher, The Leaves are Falling, Trains: Local Routes, and Darius Khondji continue.

Among the most staggering, unforgettable experiences one can have in a theater this year is Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, a drama about loss that skirts seemingly every convention one might want to pre-emptively box it into. Impeccably shot by Aftersun DP Gregory Oke, the Un Certain Regard winner, three-time Gotham Award nominee, and German Oscar entry will now get a one-week, awards-qualifying run beginning next week at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center ahead of a February 12 release. In advance of the roll-out, 1-2 Special has now debuted the first teaser.

Here’s the synopsis: “On the eve of a family vacation, a shocking tragedy disrupts the lives of Ella (Birgit Minichmayr), her younger daughter Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling), and their teenage family friend Lux (Tristan Lopez). One year later, after drifting in a state of suspended grief, the trio reunite and embark on a trip to Tenerife, hoping to recreate the family holiday that never happened. Under a strange new sun, they find that the past, present, and future begin to overlap.”

Rory O’Connor said in his Cannes review, “In Everytime, a sun-dappled film about death and love that might be the best in Cannes this year, the terrible loss of a teenage girl’s life leaves her mother, younger sister, and boyfriend bound in mutual devastation. Set in present-day East Berlin during the balmy months of the year, this is a film that appears at first to be drawn from the same Berlin School approach as Christian Petzold and Angela Schanelec, but there’s little of that cohort’s minimalism or literary melancholy here. No need to know that the DP is Gregory Oke for one’s mind to gradually wander to Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun—another movie about how the worst things still manage to happen regardless of the weather.”

See the teaser below, along with the New York Film Festival Q&A.

When Thomas Mann visited post-war Germany in 1949, he was perhaps the most famous living German author. More than that, Mann was an exemplar of a “good German,” someone who had disavowed the Nazi government, was stripped of his citizenship, and forced into exile.

In Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, Mann (Hanns Zischler) tours the ruins of a partitioned country with his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller). Their journey from Frankfurt to Weimar captures the range of German society, from Nazi collaborators to political prisoners, from the wealthy to the dispossessed. 

Mann tries to frame his journey within the works of Goethe, in part because he has been given an award dedicated to the writer. Hüller’s Erika, on the other hand, is grieving over the suicide of her brother Klaus (August Diehl), her closest confidant.

I spoke with Pawlikowski on Fatherland‘s opening weekend in New York.

The Film Stage: What struck me about Fatherland is its overwhelming grief. The layers of grief that Erika faces with her brother Klaus, that Thomas Mann faces returning to a ruined country, the grief of coping with the Allies and Russia.

Paweł Pawlikowski: It depends on who watches it, I suppose. When you make a slightly understated film, it depends on who’s watching it as to what they get out of it. That’s the purpose of making films which don’t advertise broadly what they’re doing, which is the norm these days. Filmmakers will just tell you what you’re supposed to be feeling and thinking all the time.

Back to your question, yeah, it’s largely about grief. And how would you cope with grief? How do you go on with life when somebody’s committed suicide? How do you cope with the loss of your country?

You credit Colm Tóibín in the credits.

It was just a gesture because a producer sent me his book [The Magician] to possibly adapt into a biopic or TV series. Mann’s life, it’s a huge story. I just picked one episode from it, one that is not actually from the book. But I wanted to make a gesture towards Colm who is a great writer.

Are they Mann’s actual speeches? Did you adapt them?

No, they are Mann’s speeches. In fact, one of them is recorded. You can find it in the Hessischen Rundfunks, the German sound archives. They are also printed. I used two original speeches, but I also conflated the first one with another speech Mann made called Über Demokratie, About Democracy. The quote from Clemenceau about the German romantic cult of death wasn’t in the Frankfurt speech. I added it because it kind of made sense in the story.

Photo courtesy of Aleksandra Modrzejewska.

What drew you to Thomas Mann to begin with?

I like some of his books very much. He’s not my favorite, the passionate love of my life. I wouldn’t put his portrait above my desk, you know. But I’ve always liked his shorter stories and things like The Magic Mountain. The reason I did this was that trip in 1949. It’s an imagined fictional story using real people, perhaps slightly irresponsibly. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, then everyone will blame me. 

It wasn’t so much Thomas Mann, in fact. I was interested in that triangle of Mann and Erika and Klaus. I was interested in the story of the most famous German writer alive at the time, coming back to his country after 16 years in exile. And the country has changed beyond recognition. It’s in ruins. A country that turned its back on him. 

I loved that situation. And the question, “Where is home?” So I was just freely using Mann’s biography to tell an intimate, personal story. There are so many stories you could draw from the Mann family. There are so many points of departure. Maybe I should start an industry of making films out of fragments of the Mann family. I would never tackle the whole story, this huge philosophical soap opera that was the Mann family, you know?

But people ask me, “Are you interested in Thomas Mann?” Yes, relatively. But I was more interested in this moment, and in these three characters entangled together. It’s the makings of a Greek tragedy: the brother and sister, the daughter and father, the father and son. It’s just so rich. You don’t need any more. And fused with the historical factor, it gives me something very powerful. Which I do everything in my means to downplay in my typical style.

Can you talk about working with your performers? Hüller has a scene where she slaps Gründgens at a bar that seems completely spur-of-the-moment. How do you work with her to achieve that?

That was a pretty precise scene, a pretty precisely written one. I fiddled with it a bit; the slap came at the right time. I even timed it with the music in the background, so they could work together. 

Some scenes are really tightly written. Others, I kind of massage into place, just before shooting, or even while shooting. I have the luxury of editing as I shoot. We shoot for five days and take a day off to relax. Then one day to put the footage together. There’s not too much editing because there’s not much coverage. I put the building blocks and the film starts emerging for me, like some kind of documentary. 

Every actor is different. Every actor has a different process. Sandra is a phenomenal actress who has her own needs, her own process. She has to work from within all the time. There’s nothing mechanical about her acting, nothing technical. I mean, she has technique like nobody else I’ve met, but it has to come out from inside her. She has to plug into it in her own way. 

I kind of limited her acting by not doing coverage. Not having the camera catch her work, you know? Our shots are very set, very precise. She has to be brilliant within the shot, the frame. That can be difficult, but it’s also the beauty of this kind of filmmaking. She took to it really well after a while. First, she was a bit surprised, but then she really kind of understood that the image and the performance come together to kind of enhance each other.

It was fascinating watching her. There would be one take in those important scenes where you got goosebumps. The slap with Gründgens, there is this wonderful moment where her face changes while he’s saying these insulting things. Insulting and relatively true as well. That’s why she slaps him, because he’s saying, “It’s easy for you not to sell your soul, you’re a nepo baby, you got it easy. Money, languages, contacts, your father.” What happens in her face is just mind-blowing. There’s always one magical take where it seems to just happen somehow.

What’s really challenging is that she’s not allowed to show her emotions in public.

She does blow her fuse, twice, actually. But the drama in her face is unbelievable. That’s what makes the film for me. It’s like, “Wow, what’s happening there?”

A lot of performance you can get from the context of the shot. It’s not just about what the actor does, but how you hold the shot, where the shot comes from. You kind of know what they’re feeling, even if they’re not showing it. Hans Zischler really underplays Thomas Mann, but you get what he’s feeling without him having to do much. Maybe like a flick of the eyebrow tells you so much. The little twinkle in his eye, or tiny gestures. The context gives them meaning.

It’s a bit suicidal these days to do that because in cinema now everything’s big and noisy and underlined and music tells you what to think and actors are acting away furiously. It’s going against the grain somewhat. It clearly will divide the audience.

How hard was it to recreate the era?

It was time-consuming. We spent a lot of time looking for locations in Lower Silesia, an area of Poland that belonged to Germany before the Second World War. We spent a lot of time with my production designers Marcel Sławiński and Katarzyna Sobańska and with my DP Łukasz Żal driving around, taking photographs, identifying what we could kind of piece together and make a world out of. Time-consuming but very satisfying in the end. In the beginning, I had misgivings that we could actually do it.

The trick is to find really good extras. We spent five months looking for extras in every location where we were shooting. My assistants looked for good faces, faces from the period who don’t look like people today. That helps authenticate the period as well.

I don’t know how you got those opening shots in Frankfurt, following a motorcycle down block after block of wreckage.

It’s a long street in Legnica in Silesia. It used to be Liegnitz in German. A very down-at-the-heels area, poor, impoverished, run-down. It looked pretty damaged, then we added our own rubble. Our production design had this kind of three-dimensional rubble, and then above eye level we added some digital effects. We had about 600 meters of good street, and then the extras were great. It was a painstaking job to create that.

I loved the nightclub scene, a very de-glamorized version of what would appear in an MGM film. The lighting is flatter; you’re often shooting at floor level to show these shuffling dancers. It’s something that would have really existed.

It’s like good photo reportage from era. That was our point of reference: journalist photography from the period. Cartier-Bresson. Not glossy and not ornamental.

Talking about collaborating with your DP Łukasz Żal, how do you build those spectacular frames?

We set up the shots together. I’m kind of more into framing. He’s more involved with lighting, but actually we’re symbiotic. So you can’t tell where the border is. 

The film is based around the image. The mise-en-scène serves the image rather than having the camera covering the scene in a traditional way. Building the image is a crucial component. We started working that way on Ida. We don’t need to talk too much, we just kind of prepare it together. 

Having said that, the production designers Marcel and Katarzyna are very closely involved from quite early on in the process. Like Łukasz, they also worked on Ida and Cold War. 

So it’s not just the DP coming and making shots. It’s more like building the film with the help of the DP and the production designers. People say photography, it’s actually about the image, image-making. How do you frame? What faces are in the shot? What’s the relationship between foreground and background? What’s in focus?

Also, how long you hold onto a shot. You take an editing credit on Fatherland. Had you done that before?

No, I never took a credit, but I’m very involved in editing. I’m always in the cutting room making decisions. On this one I had this young editor [Piotr Wójcik] who was just supposed to press buttons, because I hate all the digital stuff. But he ended up being very good. So he got a credit as well.

I love editing, and, like I said, I edit as I’m shooting. Every five days, I look at the cut and see what the film is more clearly. I kind of forget about the script, and just see how this documentary that I’m making is coming along.

Is it faster to shoot without coverage?

Yes, but to get the shot right takes a bit of time. We have to reframe sometimes. Then I try to combine the background action with extras with the foreground. It’s a bit more fiddly in that way, but at least you don’t have to move the lights around many times.

What must have been frustrating for Mann was that he didn’t have any choices between “Mickey Mouse and Stalin,” as Klaus put it. Mann’s looking for a way to restore his country to what Goethe imagined, but he has no good path.

He got to the limits of politics. In the end, the good thing about being a great artist is that he can always write books. He can move to Switzerland, where everyone goes if they don’t know where they go or where they belong. That is if they have enough money. 

Politically, he was hoping to unify on the basis of this humanist culture. It’s clearly not working. His way of thinking, his language, are at odds with the language of the time, with the simple narratives that are being pushed on both sides. So, yeah, there’s no political way out.

Mann realizes, together with Erica and Klaus, that they’ve lost their fatherland, their homeland. Which a lot of people face today. So the film has its kind of contemporary resonance.

Your film still shows, through Mozart and Bach, through architecture and landscapes, that there is a Germany worth remembering for Mann.

Part of that Germany is in his books. He was such a German writer. He famously said, “Where I am, that’s where German culture is.” A bit over the top, but when you think about it, Germany did exist in culture above all its divisions. There is a continuum. Of course, the country itself was destroyed and polarized, like the world is today. But we can hope that culture is still above that. I mean, even today there’s hope, right?

Fatherland is now in theaters.

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.

La Bola Negra (Los Javis)

If 19th- and 20th-century storytelling was defined by grandiose literature, the 21st is all about cinema. We read less and watch more; consequently, films have become a substitute for sweeping stories that weave various timelines and protagonists. The latest in such regard is Cannes revelation La Bola Negra (aka The Black Ball), a truly ambitious project—inspired by historical truth while remaining a fictional, highly personal undertaking. – Jan T. (full review)

Fatherland (Paweł Pawlikowski)

Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize-winning writer and voice of the German resistance from abroad, fled Germany in 1933 to take refuge in California, where he lived for sixteen years before returning to Germany in 1949 to receive the Goethe Prize in Frankfurt, show face, and embrace the flattery of his snowballing celebrity. That’s where we enter Polish writer-director (and for the first time, editor) Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, a film that traces Mann’s (Hanns Zischler) widely publicized but brief return to his homeland under the guidance of his brilliant, staid daughter and translator Erika (Sandra Hüller). – Luke H. (full review)

Fjord (Cristian Mungiu)

As with R.M.N., Mungiu is in top-shelf operation. Fjord is a triumphant film that tugs at the spiritual and soulful in all of us, regardless of nation, creed, faith, or the rejection of all three. What the court will rule in both cases, and whether or not the Gheorghius will get back their kids, pulses with a pregnant tension as the nearly two-and-a-half-hour film proceeds in what seems 30 minutes. And its end will have you falling off the edge of your seat. – Luke H. (full review)

Gentle Monster (Marie Kreutzer)

“Look into my eyes / can you see they’re open wide / would I lie to you?” Those lyrics linger in the air as a soft whisper for only a moment before the accompanying piano notes carry them away and into the beginning of Gentle Monster, the latest from Corsage director Marie Kreutzer. One might already suspect that the cover of such an emblematic ’90s pop song, pulsating under the fingertips of the film’s protagonist, Lucy (Léa Seydoux), could serve as exposition in some way. Yet the growl camouflaged in Seydoux’s silky voice might just as well be a sign of fatigue—the Lucy we meet in this opening scene is still adapting to quiet, countryside life from a career of touring European capitals. When her husband Philip (Laurence Rupp) interrupts her practice by rushing in, full-on panic attack, it’s the patience in her consoling voice that signals it’s not the first time she has stopped mid-song to make room for him. – Savina P. (full review)

The History of Concrete (John Wilson)

Like a movie tie-in, John Wilson’s debut documentary feature, The History of Concrete, picks up immediately where his HBO series How To with John Wilson left off after three seasons. An elevated public profile does not lead to the next bigger, better project. Instead it’s illustrated via Wilson stumbling upon an empty bag of weed featuring an unauthorized branding of his likeness. The full-sized crew afforded by his show now absent, Wilson is forced back to his roots, filming the day-to-day scenes of New York City life solo. – Caleb H. (full review)

If They Go Will They Miss Me (Walter Thompson-Hernández)

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. – Jordan R. (full review)

Making Marie Antoinette (Eleanor Coppola)

Wrapped inside the visual splendor, luxurious elegance, and ornate decoration of Sofia Coppola’s resplendent and anachronistic Marie Antoinette is the story of a young woman leaving her family behind to help lead another country—an unknown journey and simultaneous document of wealth, excess, and its depressive isolation. Yet despite Coppola tapping into her short filmography’s recurring themes, at least on set, she never contended with the same separation and loneliness of her ill-fated heroine. That’s largely because her mother, Eleanor Coppola, was always by her side—lurking and observing and recording 80 hours of behind-the-scenes footage with her digital camera inside the halls of Versailles. – Jake K-S. (full review)

My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile (Julia Loktev)

With My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow winning the 2025 Indie Film Site Network Advocate Award, the most-anticipated sequel of the year may be Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile, which expands its scope by tracking the journalists who were forced out of Russia and now continue their work across the globe. As Savina Petkova said in our Critic’s Pick review out of Venice, “As Julia Loktev follows her protagonists in exile to Turkey, Georgia, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and the United States, what in any other film could be a chronicle of homes and places becomes a cartography of grief and displacement. Exile tastes as bitter as the collective responsibility of its protagonists, whose acute sense of accountability (‘we let this happen’ are words uttered by several people) clashes with the ambivalence of being Russian today. Still, the strength of their convictions is the driving force behind My Undesirable Friends, the urge to never forget that history is made here and now.”

NAZA (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor)

In a sobering wake-up call to anyone somehow not paying attention to the genocide Israel is enacting, as well as the most essential documentary of the year, No Other Land directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor have returned with NAZA. Luke Hicks said in his review, “Very, very few films, no matter how great or important, are actually urgent. You’ll get around to it eventually; it’ll be stuck in time waiting for you. But NAZA is urgent, an essential film, a living document in conversation with the most pressing issue in the world right now. And it’s the new foremost authority on what’s happening on a granular, behind-the-scenes level in Israel’s crusade against Gaza. It’s much harder to question or deny a genocide that’s happening when the people perpetrating it in real time call it genocide themselves.”

Once Upon a Time in Harlem (William and David Greaves)

Picture this: it’s an overcast day in August 1972. You’re at a cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s townhouse in Harlem. As you awkwardly hold your glass of punch, you’re drowned in cacophonous conversation about art, politics, and society during one of the most vibrant intellectual and creative movements of the modern era. This is the experience of William and David Greaves’ Once Upon a Time in Harlem, an immersive and masterfully rendered documentary that presents a living, breathing oral history of the Harlem Renaissance. Watching it feels like unearthing treasure. – Kent M. W. (full review)

One in a Million (Jack MacInnes and Itab Azzam)

“War is not the hardest thing a person can go through. It’s not as hard as what comes after.” These opening words are the guiding theme of Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes’ One in a Million, an epic saga of exile and assimilation centered on Israa and her family, Syrian refugees who flee their perilous, war-torn homeland to restart life in Germany. Filmed over a decade, the family story also doubles as a coming-of-age tale where both the joy of freedom and tumult of assimilation test every family member’s bonds. While the film’s episodic structure and, considering its sprawling canvas, relatively succinct runtime leave some details less explored, the filmmakers capture, with moving sensitivity, how perceived liberty doesn’t always mean true independence. – Jordan R. (full review)

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (Noah Segan)

The thing about New York City is: it’s never as good as it was, yet it’s still better than anywhere else. The only thing constant is change, and the city is a paragon of that fact. There’s a dwindling number of remnants from the times when it was novel, dangerous, and vibrant. One of those relics is pickpocket Harry Lehman (John Turturro) in writer-director Noah Segan’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. – Kent M. W. (full review)

Possible Love (Lee Chang-dong)

In a year of unknown quantities at the Venice Film Festival, Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love has delivered the triumph for which fans of the elusive director had been hoping. Lee’s first feature since Burning, a modern masterpiece that blew away the competition in Cannes eight years ago, is another novelistic gem, the kind of richly detailed and intricately scripted yarn in which alluring themes like class, sex, and sociology are always on the table to be picked at. It also bears a much-wider and more-specific political purview than its predecessor, which comes at a cost for its dramatic pull from time to time. Lee’s nevertheless returned with the most substantial film I’ve seen in this year’s competition and one that is easily amongst the best of the year so far. – Rory O. (full review)

Primetime (Lance Oppenheim)

Robert Pattinson was born to play Chris Hansen. In the opening shot of Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime—the documentary savant’s first foray into fiction, this one based on a true story—we immediately see the popular To Catch a Predator host as the menace Oppenheim and first-time screenwriter Ajon Singh want us to understand him as. He’s cast in a devilish red light, swallowed by shadow, displayed through an eerie mini-DV grain, and reciting the lines “I will undress you and you will undress me” over and over in Hansen’s trademark brassy, rehearsed, does-he-really-sound-like-that (yes, he does) tone. The chilling music of the haunted fairytale score glitches in and out while children’s-show chimes ring ominously.  – Luke H. (full review)

Queen at Sea (Lance Hammer)

Eleven years ago, Tom Courtenay arrived at the Berlinale with Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years, an exquisitely observed study of emotional dilemma in which the British actor played a doddery romantic whose selfish tendencies threatened to get the better of him. He returns to the German festival with a performance of similar weight and resonance in Lance Hammer’s Queen at Sea, a film that centers on an even more challenging moral dilemma—albeit with results that are slightly less delightfully ambiguous than those Haigh managed in 2015. – Rory O. (full review)

Resident Evil (Zach Cregger)

Resident Evil, as a game series, has always borrowed heavily from cinema, whether it be the fixed angles and Kiyoshi Kurosawa inspirations of the first title to the Texas Chainsaw riffs in the 7th. It’s less about the zombies, more the feeling of powerlessness and weird puzzles. Zach Cregger understands this on a deep level. His follow-up to Weapons may not be a pitch-perfect adaptation of the long-running lore, but it perfectly captures the spirit of Resident Evil as a whole, not to mention what it’s like to play it. The perfect title might actually have been Biohazard. – Devan S. (full review)

Wicker (Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson)

The jealousy of unhappy couples. The pettiness of mean girls. The frustration of insecure husbands. It’s a tale as old as time that’s curiously interpreted by writer-directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer in Wicker, an audacious, captivating film about an outcast woman, her wood-woven husband, and the village that collapses over their love. – Kent M. W. (full review)

Wildwood (Travis Knight)

Because of Coraline, LAIKA’s first effort as a studio and still its best-known, there’s an expectation that each subsequent project will fit comfortably within the horror realm, each new release a rite of passage for thousands of kids previously unaware that movies could give them nightmares. This will inevitably be the same case with Wildwood, director Travis Knight’s lavish and ambitious adaptation of the 2011 YA novel by Decemberists lead singer Colin Meloy, not least because it cold-opens with a young boy committing suicide, ripping out his insides to reveal he was an automaton operated by cogs. The gothic imagery hardly subsides from there, with Knight soon recreating the haunting image from Hitchcock’s The Birds, a murder of crows swarming over a playground ready to feast on unsuspecting children. – Alistair R. (full review)

You Can See Everything (Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim)

Capping off an astounding season for documentaries, another one that will go down in the annals of non-fiction history is Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s jaw-dropping, enigmatic character(s) study You Can See Everything. What begins as a stranger-than-fiction scenario in which a small crew, including the directors, were invited to the home of Elizabeth Holmes mere weeks before she began her prison sentence evolves into a thoroughly riveting study of the thin line between fact and fiction, public versus private personas, and perverse family dynamics hitherto never quite captured on screen before. Read Nick Newman’s review.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (Bassam Tariq)

Latif (Mahershala Ali) is a righteous man. A religious man. He sees himself in a holy war to cleanse the world of his people’s enemies by picking up where the law ends. Those who know about his work justifiably condemn it, whether that be his Imam (Giancarlo Esposito’s Abdul Malik) or his wife. They don’t, however, condemn him. Because they understand his struggle. They know his pain. Why add to it? So, they grant him mercy instead. They accept him and hope he will one day find his way back. – Jared M. (full review)

More Films Now Playing in Theaters

• Digger
• Sense and Sensibility
• Take Me Home
• A Talent for Murder
• Terrestrial

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 2026 Berlinale coverage. The film arrives in theaters on October 30.

Eleven years ago, Tom Courtenay arrived at the Berlinale with Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years, an exquisitely observed study of emotional dilemma in which the British actor played a doddery romantic whose selfish tendencies threatened to get the better of him. He returns to the German festival with a performance of similar weight and resonance in Lance Hammer’s Queen at Sea, a film that centers on an even more challenging moral dilemma—albeit with results that are slightly less delightfully ambiguous than those Haigh managed in 2015.

Incredibly, this is Hammer’s first project to see the light of day since Ballast, his 2008 debut about suicide in the Mississippi Delta that was garlanded everywhere from Sundance to the Independent Spirit Awards. Prior to that, Hammer had worked as a special-effects artist, but for one reason or another, he stepped away from filmmaking directly after his breakout success. As comeback films go, they don’t come much thornier than Queen at Sea. The story begins as a woman walks in on her elderly mother and stepfather having sex and, in a moment of panic, calls the police. Both she and the authorities must then spend several days trying to determine if the mother, who suffers from advanced dementia, had communicated sufficient consent—a process that naturally puts her relationship with her stepfather on incredibly thin ice.

In Haigh’s film, Courtenay (who turns 89 this month and whose voice has taken on the delicious texture of Ratatouille-era Peter O’Toole) played a happily married man whose mind began to wander after receiving news that an ex-lover’s body had been discovered in the Alps. Both he and his co-lead, Charlotte Rampling, took home the festival’s acting awards that year, with Rampling eventually earning an Oscar nomination. In Queen at Sea, his main sparring partner is Juliette Binoche—whose character, whether by fault of her performance or Hammer’s direction, comes off as a little irrational and cold. This disparity is a kink in the film’s otherwise enticing design, and it quickly makes what should be a curious moral paradox feel a little one-sided.

Whether or not you agree with the characterization, Queen at Sea is still well worth seeing, and not just for Courtenay’s performance. Hammer had much of it shot on location and on 35mm by Train Dreams cinematographer Adolpho Veloso. As a result, the film looks consistently gorgeous, especially whenever the action moves outside, to the streets around Balfron Tower in East London—an iconic Brutalist structure that non-UK viewers will likely remember from its cameo in 28 Days Later. Most of what we see of Courtenay’s character, Martin, takes place in his home—a creaky, beautifully lived-in space that Binoche’s well-intentioned but difficult Amanda wishes to remove her mother from in order to check her into a nursing facility. That challenging role is played wonderfully by Anna Calder-Marshall, a veteran actress who famously played Cathy to Timothy Dalton’s Heathcliff in the 1970 version of Wuthering Heights.

To break the tension, Hammer wisely includes a romantic subplot between Amanda’s daughter, Sara (Bridgerton’s Florence Hunt), and a local boy, which allows the film (and the audience) to catch some much-needed fresh air. Indeed, without the severity of work like Vortex or Amour, or the formal trickery of The Father, this frank depiction of dementia can be upsetting to watch. Sara’s arc provides a welcome respite, even if the contrast of a relationship in bloom against one fading into the deepest winter ultimately feels a bit on-the-nose. A fine drama, nonetheless.

Queen at Sea premiered at the 2026 Berlinale.

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2026 Cannes coverage. The film arrives in theaters on October 30 and on Netflix on November 18.

“Look into my eyes / can you see they’re open wide / would I lie to you?” Those lyrics linger in the air as a soft whisper for only a moment before the accompanying piano notes carry them away and into the beginning of Gentle Monster, the latest from Corsage director Marie Kreutzer. One might already suspect that the cover of such an emblematic ’90s pop song, pulsating under the fingertips of the film’s protagonist, Lucy (Léa Seydoux), could serve as exposition in some way. Yet the growl camouflaged in Seydoux’s silky voice might just as well be a sign of fatigue—the Lucy we meet in this opening scene is still adapting to quiet, countryside life from a career of touring European capitals. When her husband Philip (Laurence Rupp) interrupts her practice by rushing in, full-on panic attack, it’s the patience in her consoling voice that signals it’s not the first time she has stopped mid-song to make room for him. 

Somewhere in the Austrian hills, a big house with an even bigger garden offers Lucy, Phillip, and their little boy Johnny (Malo Blanchet) a new start––in the boxes, naked walls, and all one sees is a life being unpacked, slowly but surely. Kreutzer’s script reveals very little directly: fleeting references to Philip’s burnout being the reason to move are countered by the joy with which he holds up a Super-8 camera to document a new chapter in their familial life. Scenes of domestic bliss flicker in the reels as the only real testament to his career as a filmmaker—except for a poster of Bergman’s Persona propped against the wall—in a gesture that feels already like a slight. Instead of taking the opportunity to weave a meta-narrative around an artistic couple and their mysterious decline, Kreutzer refuses to characterize Philip or his work. At the same time, we’re given glimpses of Lucy’s career as an avant-garde concert pianist who solely covers songs by male artists in front of rapt audiences. 

Yes, Gentle Monster‘s perspective is female in the sense that the audience has more access to Lucy’s psychology, but in the second act, Kreutzer splits the perspective by introducing us to a character who has been secondary until then: police officer Elsa Kühn (Jella Haase), who delivers a search warrant at the narrative’s start. When proceedings swerve to Elsa’s life off the clock, we see a hyperindependent woman with an ageing, ailing father who tends to be inappropriate with the live-in nurse, and matching that, Haase’s performance is as stoic as you’d expect from any lead in a police procedural. Lensed by cinematographer Judith Kaufmann (The Teacher’s Lounge, Corsage), the film looks crisp and exposing in its static, wide-shot scenes, countered by the intimate soundtrack from French artist Camille.

Gentle Monster marks the Austrian filmmaker’s return to psychological drama / thriller territory of 2019’s The Ground Beneath My Feet, but the former wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the genre-bending Corsage. In fact, a turn of events following the completion of the her-story period film became the real-life basis for Kreutzer’s new script. Saying any more would reveal perhaps a bit too much about plot than intended, but if the reader is already familiar with a certain scandal that shook the Austrian film industry in 2023, they wouldn’t be surprised by the plot twist that comes early in Gentle Monster, whose title refers to Philip’s character. Rupp, who’s primarily known for his TV roles and 2024’s absurdist comedy Veni Vidi Vici, carries the heavy load for the role of a tortured man whose desperation and resentment are cloaked in love. His face remains expressionless and hard to read throughout as the relationship with Lucy strains and snaps, and no amount of sorries can wash off the stench of secrets he exudes in every scene. 

Léa Seydoux, on the other hand, almost carries the film’s emotional weight like a crown––rather than self-congratulatory, the confidence she radiates as Lucy comes across as a genuine belief that things may not be so bad after all. Even if the plot is one of subdued melodrama picking at the male-inflicted wounds of women, both Seydoux and Haase embody a degree of relatable pretense to spare the men who hurt them while simmering with rage on the inside. For all its measuredness, Gentle Monster is a merciless film, not so much to the viewers but its titular character––a gesture some may deem exaggerated, yet there is a tenderness that steers Kreutzer’s script away from revenge, humiliation, or brutal punishment. For its taboo subject matter, this already says a lot.

Gentle Monster premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.

In Stephanie Ahn’s Bedford Park, Moon Choi plays Audrey, a self-destructive health care worker trapped in a paralyzing relationship with her immigrant parents. The drama, which won the Special Jury Award for Debut Feature at Sundance earlier this year, screened at this year’s Busan International Film Festival ahead of a release from Sony Pictures Classics.

Choi and director Stephanie Ahn appeared at Q&As at the BIFF screenings. Choi was also a member of the Competition Jury, led by Zhang Yimou. She arrived in Busan after a two-week run of The Cherry Orchard at New York’s Park Avenue Armory.

The Film Stage: Bedford Park opens with an intense S&M scene and proceeds through several disturbing moments. How dark were you willing to go?

Moon Choi: To be honest, these are some of my most challenging scenes as an actor. Looking back at my career, I did have some dark or heavily emotional scenes in the past, but what Audrey’s going through in this movie is pretty dark, especially in the beginning. But I don’t really think about it in those terms. I just thought that this is something she is placed into abruptly. Something that she has to go through moment to moment. I didn’t necessarily think: How should I approach this? Should I approach it in a different way from the lighter scenes? I just tried to focus on what she’s actually going through physically and mentally step by step. It was challenging, but I wasn’t uncomfortable about it.

You needed these scenes to define Audrey’s character.

Not only does she go through a miscarriage, but she falls into this habit of self-harming. Meeting up with a stranger, having a one-night stand, having S&M sex, hurting herself with a razor. That’s all very cruel things to do. But when you think about it, there’s something inside her that tries to punish her without being aware of it. Because she thinks that she’s not perfectly being herself. Because she’s trying to make up to her parents’ expectations of who they want her to be. She’s been living her life in a shell of a person for 35 years. 

Self-harming, meeting these strangers for violent sex is kind of a way for her to escape. I don’t think she’s enjoying it. She’s hurting herself, punishing herself for not being able to have ownership in her own life. 

She’s facing impossible expectations from her parents. No one could live that way. The movie shows how her brother self-medicates in his own way.

Logically, it was hard to follow how she ended up that way, but I talked to Stephanie for years and years about this. After I learned that this is where she’s coming from, then afterwards, it was easier. I wasn’t afraid to be on set in that scene. It was more of the process before going on set that was a little tough for me, to try to really feel grounded as an actor who knows that character thoroughly.

How did this production compare to your films in Korea? Did you consider it a small film?

I’ve done both commercial and indie films in Korea. One really micro-budget film called Our Body cost less than $50,000. But I’ve also done Okja. Deliver Us from Evil was a huge blockbuster action thriller in Korea. This was a rather small production, but it felt pretty good. There was so much trust between Stephanie, the producers, and my co-actors. It was a friendly set, like a family. We did feel rushed at times. 

The scenes with my parents, those were shot in two days. We shot from me arriving with a suitcase at the parents, then Audrey getting the note from Eli (played by Son Suk-ku). We couldn’t shoot in order because of the lighting. We’d go from scene 80 or something to scene 3. I had that experience before with micro-budget films. 

You can’t really think of the actor’s process in that situation. What’s important is to save time on lighting and setting up. I felt lucky that I was used to that, because let’s say if I’d only done a big TV series or big commercial films back in Korea, I think going through those scenes in such a rush would’ve been very stressful.

A small production can be an advantage because you don’t get distracted by crew members and equipment.

Also, Son Suk-ku and I didn’t really take time to monitor our acting. I know there are actors who want to play back and see every take, we aren’t like that. We trust that when we feel truthful, the camera must have captured it. So, we didn’t necessarily go through playbacks. That saved time. When an actor goes, “Can we stop for a moment and check what we have?”—that’s when you lose time. We were like, if Stephanie says it’s okay, it’s good, and we just move on.

Moon Choi © 2026 Sundance Institute | photo by Breanna Downs

Did you ever run out of time?

No, I don’t think so. Sometimes Stephanie would say okay after two or three takes because it was great. Sometimes she would explore, do five or six takes to see what happens 

There’s a scene with Audrey and Eli in the car where we listen to the Rocky theme. It’s a long take. We’re starting to listen to the music, getting immersed in it, feeling something very different with each other than what we felt before. Also being present in the moment, in that close space together. We knew that scene was a little different from other scenes where we cut back and forth. We took some time with that scene. I think it’s the seventh take in the movie. 

We shot it in a studio, with the camera starting outside the windshield and then kind of zooming and tracking in together. No cuts. I think it’s a three-minute take. We had the sound people play the song in the car so we could hear it. So, yeah, those scenes take time, but I don’t think we ever went over something like ten takes.

Is there an advantage to working quickly? You have to get everything out there at once.

The thing is, we had so much time for pre-production because I was cast for this part seven years ago. I was working on Korean films and TV series. Whenever I finished a project, I would take time to talk to Stephanie and tell her how my experience went and what I learned from it. Sometimes I would go back to our script and say, “You know, I never thought about this scene in that way, but after finishing this project, now I have more of a sense of it.” You kind of take bits from one project to another, and you learn from this character to that character to build more layers and complexities for Audrey. This was when I was expecting to perform two or three years later when we had the financing ready. We were very frustrated that we didn’t have all of the money, but then I was kind of just thinking, “This will be good for me because I’ll never again have seven years for pre-production for a character.” I literally grew old with her.

When I was cast for the part, I was 30 or 31. Audrey’s supposed to be 36. Stephanie used to say that I looked too young, psychologically and physically. I thought, what difference does it make to be 30 instead of 35? But after 35, you have more life experience in my career, and in my personal life. I found out that Stephanie and I went to the same high school in New Jersey. I lived in the States for three years, from the age of 14 to 17. And that was in Tenafly, a small town in Bergen County, New Jersey.

It’s a beautiful town. But at the time, I thought it was way too much nature. There were deer and rabbits and geese flying around. I came from Seoul, very metropolitan, very crowded. I didn’t speak English. I spent those years learning the language, meeting my first boyfriend, making friends with classmates. Those years really formed me. When I learned that Stephanie went to the same high school, it’s probably why I felt so drawn to the character of Audrey.

Shooting on actual locations helped ground your film. Like that awful shopping mall where Eli works.

The one in Paramus. I used to go there with my mom. My aunt still lives in Paramus. So the shoot was like homecoming for me. The whole experience of being cast in this film, waiting for it to happen, learning about Stephanie’s life and her parents growing old with her, shooting in New Jersey. The whole experience for me as an actor was like a dream come true.

You have a producing credit on the film. You also did still photography.

Originally, Audrey would be drawing with a pad. When Stephanie realized I have a passion for film photography, she was like, “Can you do that actually?” We made that Audrey’s hobby, something she feels very attached to, something that makes her feel like herself. Stephanie wrote this amazing monologue about how Audrey’s father made the family pose in front of his camera, and that’s why she never asks anyone to pose for her.

Bedford Park

Can you talk about being on the Competition jury? This is the first year Busan is an Oscar-qualifying festival.

I felt a lot of pressure when I was asked to be a member of the jury. When I saw the names of the other jurors, I realized I was going to be the only Korean actor. I’ve been in the industry for 17 years, working on everything from indies to blockbusters, in Korea, Japan, and America, so maybe there’s something I can contribute to the team. Also, I can learn from Zhang Yimou or Bi Gan or July Jung, an amazing Korean female director. We had our first meeting yesterday. It was a lot of fun, and we were pretty much aligned. We’re in pretty good shape.

You just finished a run of The Cherry Orchard in New York, playing with Jeon Do-yeon and Park Hae-soo.

We’ve been touring for three years. We started in Seoul, went to Busan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, and finally New York. Usually we’d perform three or four shows at each venue, but in New York we had a two-week run. Sandra Hüller came one night, which thrilled everyone in the cast.

Jeon Do-yeon is also in Possible Love, where she gives a heartbreaking performance.

She’s Korea’s Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman, all combined together. I grew up watching her films. Whenever I told her that, she’s like, “Stop, that makes me feel old.” Working with her was such a big privilege. To be honest, I was so nervous in rehearsals I couldn’t look her in the eye. When she’s acting, she’s so vulnerable, and she opens all channels to you without any prejudice and without any calculation. She makes your acting better because she’s so good.

She’s willing to be the character and not protect herself as an actress, not try to hold onto something that would let viewers know she’s not really that person. 

That’s the kind of actor I aspire to be. She gives everything to the audience. She’s vulnerable, and therefore lovable, but also she’s so human. In Possible Love, she wants to set herself free and set her husband free, and she does everything she can to get there. But she can’t help watching these rich people being nice but also condescending. They’re not your friends. They say they love you, but do they? Is that even possible? The layers that Lee Chang-dong built in that film were so amazing to watch that after the credits were over, I couldn’t get up from my seat.

Bedford Park screened at the 2026 Busan International Film Festival and opens March 5, following a qualifying run beginning Dec. 11 at NYC’s Village East and LA’s Laemmle NoHo 7.

Welcome to The B-Side! Here we talk about movie directors! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they made in between. And sometimes scary movie directors! Happy Halloween!

As is tradition, our dear friend Gavin Mevius (of The Mixed Reviews and The Q Division podcasts) joins us to discuss a Halloween-themed director. This year it’s the great—and very underrated—Jacques Tourneur! Our B-Sides include The Leopard Man, Anne of the Indies, Stranger on Horseback, Nightfall, and Night of the Demon.

We discuss Tourneur’s early, legendary collaborations with producer Val Lewton, as well as his diverse filmography and tackling of most every genre. He’s also “a short king,” as Conor mentions, which is to say he always made films with a short runtime. 

There are many lovely diversions and plenty of discussion about many of Tourneur’s films. We mention some of the few interviews he gave and highlight his honest commentary about his own work. We also talk about Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German, a film that will one day be good!

Listen below and subscribe here. Be sure to give us a follow on Bluesky at @tfsbside.bsky.social. Enjoy!

I would love to tell you that contact with a typhoon is a more exotic, worldly, altogether enriching experience than the more Americanized hurricane. It likely seems a dubious, non-starter notion from the jump, but flying the considerable distance from New York to Tokyo should excite one for any fresh encounter, in noticing the distinctions among public transit or ordering at restaurants or common items at convenience stores. I am sorry to report, however, that being subject to one—this one being the extratropical depression aftereffects of Typhoon Champi, which was declared 2026’s strongest storm—does little, in fact nothing, to elevate the cold splash that’s seeped into your shoes en route to an event or ensuing smell of drying sneakers two days hence. The opening night of this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival was no meteorological disaster (Champi visited the city with its last powers) but a ceaseless drip of rain, which does not have a culturally distinct quality in Japan, nothing with which to later regale American friends.

You are, nevertheless, in one of the world’s most desirable cities to see free movies and talk with interesting people, and the forecast suggests this is all passing by tomorrow anyway. It behooves you to perk up. TIFF, for their part, have embraced this inclement weather as inherent to the texture of their 39th edition’s opening ceremony: enviably styled actors and filmmakers sporting umbrellas is simply part of what it means to be here in 2026, and lucky to be here we are. The talent began the night in a lowkey manner, representing their work by appearing onstage, accepting applause, and taking seats in Ginza’s Hulic Hall without remarks. This is all contra typical festival openers, which can run a bit fraught as men and women (among them the very, very famous) in formal wear are left to the non-formal act of looking over their seat placement on a ticket and asking stone-faced volunteers for help. (It’s also a pleasure to watch, albeit from a distance when assistants tell you to stop looking at their clients.) Whether it’s because many of us have already traveled some length or the festival itself is not quite so obsessed as others with capital-p Prestige, nothing about the night portended heavy concern, a thought nicely buttressed by my being accidentally escorted into a talent-only area after the ceremony’s close.

The night seemed more a celebration of local (in the context of a major global power) concerns. I was most compelled by the presence of Japan’s Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Ryosei Akazawa, whose speech reminded one of Japanese cinema’s ties to national interests. Notwithstanding a brief note about TIFF offering a chance to see films, his was a stump speech about Japan’s need “to respond swiftly and flexibly with the necessary policy measures” to reach a desired 20 trillion yen (roughly equivalent to $126,745,520,000) in content sales by 2033. How much this resonated with the crowd of filmmakers, actors, and jury members (themselves part of those first two categories), I cannot say. Like many with a personal investment in the art, I instinctively wince at hearing film called “content” and chuckled a bit at Akazawa touting the festival’s Japanese debut of Godzilla Minus Zero, the latest entry in the country’s most beloved franchise and a likely international awards contender, as “creating new value and opening up new markets.” Through a glass darkly, however, I can appreciate the honest conflating of economic and arts initiatives—further emphasized with a recorded intro from Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who again brought up 20 trillion yen through noting that film is within Japan’s 17 strategic sectors—when compared with American studios’ obfuscated connections to the military and, increasingly, AI.

The night concluded with a screening of Takahisa Zeze’s Sukiyaki, about which I’ll have more to say in an interview with the director next week. For now I’ll note that Zeze began his career in Japan’s pornographic pink films, has made a number of disturbing (albeit far more chaste) crime, thriller, and horror movies, and has aged into something of an elder statesman, a status emphasized in this biopic of Kyu Sakamoto’s Billboard-topping 1961 song “Ue o Muite Arukō.” The film bears both the expectations of a festival-opening music biopic and strenght of Zeze’s sensibilities—a breezy-enough 155 minutes that makes charming, sometimes truly moving drama from three men’s musical legacies. The greater point, though, is its reinforcing of my appreciation for Japan’s fluid cultural fabric. It is largely impossible to imagine an American with Zeze’s career path in the first place, and about as likely to picture the country’s biggest festival (let’s say Sundance or Tribeca; that’s another problem I won’t get into) opening with his music biopic that, first and foremost, is not terrible, but more importantly preceded by rather straight-faced appearances from the Secretary of the Treasury and President. (I’m aware that the United States’ current leadership is more connected to the porn industry than any other in recent memory.) This combines to evince the Tokyo International Film Festival, and by extension the Japanese film industry it seeks to represent, as a stranger and more special place.

The 39th edition of Tokyo International Film Festival is now underway and runs until Wednesday, November 4.

Released in 2008, Ballast won a Best Director award at Sundance for Lance Hammer, who also wrote and edited the drama set in a troubled family. Hammer waited almost twenty years for his follow-up film, Queen at Sea.

Starring Juliette Binoche, Tom Courtenay, and Anna Calder-Marshall, Queen at Sea examines in painful detail the aftermath of a sexual encounter between an elderly couple. Issues of agency and consent become weapons that threaten to send Leslie (Calder-Marshall) to an assisted living facility. Her daughter Amanda (Binoche) agonizes over decisions that could wreck her stepfather Martin’s (Courtenay) life.

Amanda marks another challenging role for Binoche, in a career filled with outstanding performances. Both Courtenay and Calder-Marshall won supporting actor awards at the 76th Berlinale. Hammer and his film won the Silver Bear Jury Prize.

Hammer spoke with the Film Stage at Berlinale earlier this year, which we’re sharing ahead of the film’s theatrical release this Friday.

The Film Stage: This is your first film in nearly two decades. How many years did it take?

Lance Hammer: I started writing a script in 2015. It took about a year to write. I wanted to see if I could write a script that I cared about. When I finished I said, “Well, I might as well try to show some people to see what they think. Maybe I’ll try to make it.” 

I immediately got a response from a pretty big production company that green-lit it, contingent on casting an A-list actor for Juliette’s role. They had a list of people that they would accept. I didn’t want to cast any of the people on the list. I panicked about it. This was before Juliette was on board.

And the script wasn’t ready. I needed to do more work on it. I usually take a long time. While I kept working it just fell apart with them. 

I took the script, scraped it off the ground, and put it back together again with another great production company, one more aligned with my creative thinking. They ended up folding. So I lost the project again. That’s when I said, “I’m just going to go to Juliette Binoche because she’s the right person.” I realized the part doesn’t have to be American, you know? I gave it to the person I really wanted to do the role, someone I really loved, and she said yes right away. 

That’s when the project became a totally different animal. Juliette became a producer, a very tenacious and committed one. She helped attract attention for the third go-round. She was involved through several years of false starts, resurrecting it, picking up all the pieces, putting them back together. 

Then I went to Tom Courtenay because, okay, I don’t care where it’s shot. I love Tom, I want him to do the role, so let’s shoot it in London. I don’t care what Tom’s box-office value is, I’m not even thinking that way anymore.

I know this will be a small film. I’ll reduce the budget to make it with these two actors. I got in touch with Tristan Goligher with The Bureau, a production company. Suddenly it became a real thing. Tom liked the script, but he was also interested because of Juliette. And he had done 45 Years with Tristan. So that’s how we did it, but it took ten years or so.

Lance Hammer. Courtesy of Berlinale.

You start with a pretty incendiary scene of your two stars having sex.

In basic dramaturgy, that’s the inciting incident. Your story is everything that happens after that. I liked the economy and logic of starting with that. No wasting time showing context or developing the characters’ backgrounds—that’s pointless. What I would rather do is have you enter a situation with confusion and disorientation as happens in life when you encounter a new person and you see something on the street happen. You don’t know anything about their lives, but you have to learn that through discovery.

There’s another element. Seeing the sexual act between elderly people somehow feels taboo. It shouldn’t be. Why is it taboo? When you see young people having sex, it’s glorified, it’s celebrated, we vicariously live through it, and it speaks of new life and creation. Everything is hopeful and possible. Everything is in the future.

End-of-life sex, it’s like a cognitive dissonance. You’re seeing people doing things we reserve for youth, but now in old bodies. I wanted to show the act as a very banal, simple, boring type of sex. I didn’t want to titillate or provoke. I just wanted the simplest, most boring presentation.

I understood that this would be disturbing. I’m also a victim of ageist prejudice, you know? Because I’m afraid of dying. When we see older people having sex, it gives us a too-close-to-the-bone awareness of our own mortality.

Did you have a personal interest in dementia?

When I first started to outline a script, it’s like a radar was attracting all these stories about dementia. Lots of articles in the news. My father is Tom Courtenay’s age, and he has friends who were experiencing similar sexual situations. I read about the moral dilemmas facing the elderly. This all became a kind of a composite that fed the premise of the story of agency and consent.

I’m uncertain where I stand morally on this, and I bet you I’m not the only person who feels this way. I feel a great way to make a film is to start from a place of uncertainty and not try to insist on a moral position. 

For example, I have a simple moral position. Tom, or Martin as he is played, should not be having sex with Leslie. If there is any uncertainty at all about her consent, if sex may be causing her harm, if she can’t communicate adequately, he needs to stop. 

I also understand how a man who’s been in a marriage for 18 years, one with an ongoing, meaningful sexual relationship, one where she’s given consent in the past and apparently is continuing to do so—I can understand that he may no longer understand there is a line he can’t cross. He doesn’t know where the line is if she is no longer cognitively capable of giving consent. People don’t want to talk about it. 

Can you talk about your visual approach?

My aesthetic nature is very reductionist. I was an art director on films for a while, and an architect before that. Once you study architecture, it’s forever in you. It’s a curse. So my approach is very minimal. I start with a maximalist field of possibilities, explore those ideas, then methodically reduce, reduce, reduce to its essence. The things you’ve cut away are still contained in the thing you keep. They have a ghostly or erratic presence in them. The ghost of what’s been removed is still present in the thing you keep.

I wouldn’t call myself a brutalist. That’s from a very different time. But the ethos behind brutalism, I am that.

Can you talk about working with cinematographer Adolpho Veloso?

Our overall visual strategy was to use all static shots locked off in the house. With the teenagers, necessarily, all the shots had to be handheld because those are totally improvised scenes. We couldn’t set up a shot and have them conform to the camera. It had to be the other way around.

With Juliette’s story, we used a mixture of the two. So Juliette or the Amanda and Sara (Florence Hunt) characters interact as mother and child together in scenes. Some of them are locked off, some of them are handheld.

When the grandmother is being examined in the medical office, when does the camera move? When does Veloso rack focus to other characters? Is that a consensus between the two of you?

We wanted to show urgency, restlessness, and anxiety. Not with a shaky camera, but hold it as still as humanly possible. But the camera also has to be able to move freely. In those scenes, Adolpho is totally on his own. My role is really to talk to him about what he’s going to be doing. But my main job is with the actors and the set, which was a real examination room.

The timings and the performances, Adolpho is documenting them. It’s entirely his amazing, compassionate eye, his instinct to follow, that I needed there. 

What I learned with Adolpho very early on was that we had identical ideas about how to shoot this film. We did a month of workshopping and rehearsals in a lot of the locations. Adolpho was part of that workshopping. I’d be focusing on the actors, but also thinking about camera and composition. I’d see Adolfo thinking, and I’d say, “Hey, I think the coverage for this should be…” And he’d cut me off and have exactly the same thought. 

We rehearsed a lot. I told him when I need to be in focus here, when I need to rack to there. I would discuss with him when I think you need to be on this side, when it has to be a frontal approach, how to get from here to there at a certain moment. 

It was uncanny how often we had exactly the same idea, which was great because then I could just let go. Adolpho took this huge load off my shoulders, and he did it extraordinarily well, I think. But it could only work because we were totally in step with each other. 

Did the story change or evolve during editing?

Strangely, this one stayed pretty close to the script. Because we workshopped it so much, that’s when the changes occurred. When I was writing, the script evolved as I received information from advisors and consultants. Once the script was done and the actors came in, I got new professional consultants for advice specific to UK legal and health systems. The script changed radically then. When I started working with the actors, the scenes changed again. 

By the time we started shooting, we’d figured it all out. The edit on this one took a long time, but it wasn’t because I was trying to change the story. That had already been done in the workshopping. You could call it a kind of pre-editing with the actors. A collaborative edit. 

I did delete a lot. I cut a lot of stuff, which is normal.

Queen at Sea opens in theaters on Friday, October 30.