The family-friendly noir pastiche is now just as much of a throwback as Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was to the genre’s old Hollywood heyday, and the spirit of Robert Zemeckis’ madcap riff on that hard-boiled style is alive and well in the year’s best animated films. First there was Coyote vs. Acme, the Looney Tunes legal conspiracy thriller that bore more similarities to the Zemeckis classic than simply featuring a roll call of cartoon icons, updating its mystery narrative with a darker satirical bent against late-capitalist America that ensured it couldn’t be seen as a cozy echo of an earlier canonized blockbuster. Now we have Brad Bird’s decades-in-the-making passion project Ray Gunn, a private-detective adventure set in a retrofuturistic metropolis where humans and aliens co-exist, flying cars and Blade Runner-style holograms sit alongside Art Deco skyscrapers, and a stinging rebuke of our current age of tech hides in plain sight.

After the big-budget whiff of Tomorrowland and hugely successful but underwhelming Incredibles sequel, Bird’s latest is a return to the inventive, hilarious form of his first three animated efforts, albeit with some distracting narrative decisions along the way that undermine the intelligence of his family audience. For example: it takes an hour to reveal one character has a dual identity, which anybody can immediately work out from the famous, distinct voice two characters share, but is staged as something of a grand reveal. The film doesn’t have the number of twists and double-crosses the most stereotypical noir would, and that’s the most glaring of several plot beats that feel like an unwarranted concession to the genre’s reliance on shocks and rug pulls.

With that one quibble noted, Bird and co-screenwriter Matthew Robbins––a veteran collaborator of Steven Spielberg––have otherwise crafted an impeccable script, the kind where every small world-building detail they introduce pays off by the finale, with the relentless, chaotic energy of the story hiding just how neatly, meticulously constructed it all is. Sam Rockwell voices the titular private detective, one of the least-grizzled gumshoes to ever appear onscreen; he’s racked with debts so can’t pay his only employee (the alien Eyera, voiced by Tom Waits), but has an aversion to playing dirty to make those ends meet. He hates violence, and will return any cash he makes if he discovers he was hired for a sinister motive. Most movie PIs are haunted by their troubled past; he seems overly cautious to avoid making any trouble for himself to start with. It’s an effective, against-type use of Rockwell, allowing him the rare chance to excel as the straight man in a filmography where his best-known roles are violent, eccentric, or both.

Ray and Eyera get their most high-profile gig yet when hired by Arnold (Bobby Cannavale), the fourth husband of pop superstar Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), who is worried that she’s having an affair. The pair soon discover it was all a ruse so he had a reason to divorce her on the eve of a new album tracking to flop; this puts them in touch with her manager Barry Vogel (Alan Tudyk), who hires them with the simple assignment of watching over the star for the rest of her release week. She’s a high-tempered tabloid fixture with a tendency to overshadow her album rollouts with relationship breakdowns and self-inflicted controversy. All they need to do is ensure she remains safe and out of the spotlight for another day. Unfortunately, they soon discover she’s being blackmailed over a potentially career-ruining secret by a kingpin in the alien underworld (Matt Berry), and various people from her personal life start winding up dead: staying out of trouble stops being an available option.

Although he’s rebuked the criticism several times, there is ammunition within Ray Gunn for anybody looking for further evidence Bird shares the objectivist sympathies of Ayn Rand. This time, however, the director seems conscious of this, and Nova’s character arc appears to be in direct conversation with this very idea; she’s a superstar with a very distinct persona, yet her fame has hidden her “true voice” from the public, her art all compromised and impersonal. Bird’s prior movies have focused on characters forced to hide their identities to conform, but the arguments they shared were considered Randian because their talents were for society’s greater good, and that they were held back from utilizing them. 

Nova, on the other hand, already has a platform she doesn’t want if it means maintaining a lack of authenticity, which complicates the idea that Bird is singularly fixated on protagonists who are held back by ungrateful bureaucracy and creates a fascinating tension. The movie doesn’t fully rebuke the criticisms of this storytelling preoccupation, but does succeed in complicating them, which adds greater intrigue to an adventure that’s already plenty of fun on its surface. 

It’s further complicated by how this clashes with timely themes designed as overt allegories for our current world of tech intrusion, with later stages of the movie presenting ideas of a surveillance state being weaponized for marketing, and the replacement of artists with AI—all of which are natural to criticize, yet when contextualized in this director’s work, criticizing them starts to line up comfortably with the broadest Randian sympathies. Think real human artists should be elevated instead of computer-programmed mediocrity, and you should be able to live free of constant oversight from devices that monitor your every conversation? Of course you do, and Bird subtly twists the knife on his critics by introducing perhaps the only progressive ideas that align with the author’s worldview into the core of his story. The movie ending with a “Produced by David Ellison” credit does, admittedly, make it a little harder to give him the benefit of the doubt on the movie’s political leanings, but we may have to start getting used to overlooking that insidious billionaire’s involvement in many great films for years to come.

The fact that a throwback adventure like Ray Gunn can inspire this level of internal debate should hopefully convince you that this is Bird back at his best, with rich and thorny ideas hidden beneath a joyously crowd-pleasing adventure. Any debate it causes will struggle to overshadow just how much fun it is.

Ray Gunn premiered at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival and will open in theaters on December 4 and arrive on Netflix on December 18.

In a city like New York, what’s another film festival? When one can crop up in any neighborhood, keeping track is neither possible nor desirable. So if I might’ve accordingly raised an eyebrow to hear of the Downtown Festival upon its appearance in 2024, allow me a moment of judging a book by its cover.

Coming to know the festival and its founder, Rebekah Sherman-Myntti, has disavowed any wonky feelings. Downtown, now in its third year, is further and further proving itself a valuable companion to New York’s larger festivals: a repository for debut filmmakers, low-budget fare, or (speaking for myself and a small group of friends) an undistributed TV pilot that was shot in our apartments and serves as something of an all-male Girls riff. It’s a place that makes artists feel welcome and comfortable, allowing them to tailor a world premiere to their desires without excluding them from a larger flux.

Sherman-Myntti and I spoke about Downtown’s third year, which commences tonight with Paul Schrader’s The Basics of Philosophy, a film she says exemplifies the festival’s balance between legacy and discovery.

Let’s start with a basic question: can you tell me how the third edition of The Downtown Festival separates itself from predecessors?

I think this year feels quite a bit different. The first two editions were really about establishing the festival’s identity and proving the concept. In 2024, I wanted to see if this seemingly crazy idea could actually work and be pulled off. In 2025, it was really about realizing how much of an appetite there was for something like this to exist, which was super exciting. With the third edition this year, the scale is much bigger, the program is more ambitious, and the relationships between film, music, artist talks, and nightlife feel way more intertwined.

At the same time, the core idea of the festival hasn’t changed. It’s still artists-for-artists, deeply rooted in discovery, and focused on creating real exchanges between filmmakers, musicians, and various other disciplines. I’m always thinking about the kind of festival experience I’d genuinely want as a filmmaker… one where people feel supported, connected to their fellow artists as well as audiences, and part of something that can continue beyond a single event. We haven’t even announced half of our non-film programming yet! So stay tuned.

The Story of Eve by Alexandra Cabral

The program is impressive, albeit not comprising much that is even the least-bit known. I’m curious, also, about the distinction between programming a number of first-time filmmakers—exactly the kind of group that would struggle to be prioritized by programmers—and films that are plainly worthwhile, regardless of author. Do you see yourself prioritizing one while still hoping to serve another?

I definitely don’t prioritize first-time filmmakers just because they’re first-time filmmakers. I like to prioritize work that feels incredibly specific and like it has a real point of view. There has to be a certain aliveness to it. With films, we’re always looking for ones that feel deeply personal, where you can really sense that the filmmaker had to make this film in this way. Rather than something that could have been made by anyone or that feels like it’s trying to fit into an existing mold.

That said: I do feel really strongly about making space for artists who haven’t already been “validated” by the usual systems. If someone has made something amazing and doesn’t yet have representation, press, institutional support, or a recognizable name attached to them, that makes me more interested. I think festivals can play a meaningful role in helping people discover work they might not otherwise know about and in giving that work a context that helps audiences understand why it’s cool or important. 

At the Downtown Festival, you can have a true legend like Paul Schrader showing work alongside a visual artist making her first feature, like Ondine Viñao, and have both works taken equally seriously. You can also have someone like Paul Tschinkel, whose work is so beautifully tied to an older New York art world and to documenting artists from that era, sitting alongside much newer and younger voices. I love those kinds of juxtapositions because they break down the hierarchy a bit. The work gets to speak for itself and our audience can experience someone they already know alongside someone they may be discovering for the very first time. That tension between legacy and discovery is super fascinating to me and it’s a huge part of what makes programming exciting and fun for me and Briana. There’s so much value in putting artists who helped shape a particular cultural moment in direct conversation with people who are reinterpreting or challenging it now.

How much do you see yourself as separate from the elite New York pack of ND/NF, Tribeca, and NYFF? Is there anything you actively seek to do differently?

I definitely see us as separate, but not in an antagonistic way. Those festivals have their own incredible histories, scales, and institutional roles. I really enjoy going to screenings at them. I would say that The Downtown Festival is something very different! The biggest differentiating factor is probably that we are truly multidisciplinary. Film is a huge part of it, but it exists alongside music, artist talks, performances, and other one-night-only events. I’m interested in what happens when all of those worlds actually overlap rather than being treated as separate cultural lanes. The festival is also very multigenerational and very explicitly artists-for-artists. I want somebody making their first film to feel as meaningfully included as somebody who has been making work for forty years. We’re much less interested in reinforcing traditional hierarchies around who is already considered “important” enough to deserve attention. 

And structurally, we’re an extremely tiny team and we don’t have a huge institution or infrastructure behind us. That limitation has actually shaped the festival in a way I really value because it keeps things super personal and close to the artists. I also like the flexibility and organized chaos because with that comes the freedom of spontaneity! It’s great to have the independence to occasionally make decisions quickly or very last-minute and sometimes build programs around conversations and relationships rather than around a preexisting institutional framework or schedule. 

With our film program, we’re interested not only in the film and the screening itself, but in everything that forms around it: who is in the room, who engages with the work, artists meeting each other, what conversations continue afterward, and what kinds of relationships or collaborations might emerge from that experience. For me, the festival is as much about creating the conditions for genuine artistic exchange as it is about presenting a slate of films.

It’s notable that this is not The Downtown Film Festival. You have a music showcase and events sponsored by MFNY. Do you see these as in any way linked to cinema? I won’t try to force some idea of “live concerts are actually cinema,” but there’s an interesting intersection of a communal vibe to screenings and actual communal events that aren’t screenings.

Very much so. The point was never to build a film festival that just happened to have a few side events. The multidisciplinary aspect is fundamental to what The Downtown Festival is, and for me, the connective tissue is the artists and the audience. Film, music, art, performance, and nightlife all create communal experiences in different ways, and I love what happens when those artists and audiences collide. Historically, downtown New York culture wasn’t neatly divided into disciplines. Filmmakers were hanging out with musicians, visual artists were acting in and making films, musicians were making movies, and everyone was ending up in the same clubs. There was a real fluidity to it.

I’m much more interested in that kind of cross-pollination than keeping everything professionally siloed, which I think happens far too often now. Especially in a festival context. I really don’t believe in “staying in your lane.” The festival is about creating a space where those different worlds can come together naturally. And a big shoutout to MFNY for supporting that vision this year!

Without asking you to give away too much, what do you see as an expansion in future years?

I’d love for The Downtown Festival to become a true home base for artists from around the world who are making work that doesn’t fit into established categories and who are looking for a genuine community around what they make. A huge part of that is continuing to bring different generations into direct conversation with one another. I want artists to be able to show work alongside people they might never otherwise be programmed with—for those combinations to create unexpected connections between the work, the artists, and our audience. I also want to expand the festival’s footprint across downtown New York, taking over more spaces and neighborhoods all throughout Lower Manhattan. Ultimately, I see the festival as part of a much larger artistic ecosystem. I’m also a filmmaker and producer working on a few projects that connect to that broader “Downtown” world. I can’t say too much yet but there’s more coming soon.

Do you prioritize anything in particular when programming short films and music videos? Or, say, a TV pilot?

Point of view above everything. With shorts especially, I’m very resistant to the idea that they’re simply calling cards or proof-of-concepts for features. A short should justify its own form, you know? It should feel like the artist chose that length because it was exactly the right container for the idea. With a TV pilot, I’m looking for the same thing: specificity, meaning, and whether the work creates a world I want to spend time in, or at least one that feels unmistakably its own. In the case of Fellas, you guys created a world that genuinely makes me laugh, but also has a lot of heart. I’m so excited for you to share it with our audience.

Fellas by Matthew Danger Lippman

The Roxy is an interesting space to hold a festival. As a single-screen theater, there’s a big bleed-through of the crowd for something that just ended and something that’s just beginning—you genuinely can’t tell who’s who. I fear I’m answering my own question, but can you tell me what you especially like about hosting a festival there?

They have been incredible hosts of The Downtown Festival’s film program! And after a few days, Roxy Cinema starts to feel like our little clubhouse—it’s the best. I love the setup and energy there because there’s so much natural crossover. People come out of one screening and run into someone arriving for the next, filmmakers stay for other films. Everyone ends up catching up in the lobby or green room. I’ve seen real deals get made and really awesome collaborations begin there. Remind me to tell you the story about Abel [Ferrara] yelling to Susan Seidelman’s husband from inside the cinema because he wanted to stay for Abel’s film but Susan had made a dinner reservation and they needed to leave ASAP. Hilarious.

Illyse Singer, the cinema’s director, has been incredibly, incredibly supportive of me on the filmmaking side of things as well as with the festival. I love her very much. The cinema’s projectionists Mitchell [Mailloux Glidden] and Dillon [Friend] really hold it down with all of the files (a massive undertaking) and the rest of the staff are amazing. It’s also just a beautiful place to watch a movie—like watching a film inside a jewel box. It’s a very intimate setting, which is different from some larger festivals where you’re in a massive theater watching a filmmaker speak on a stage that feels very far away—physically and emotionally!

Like any proper festival director, you have a great sense of style. What do you prioritize for Downtown fits?

[Laughs] That’s really nice of you. My go-to is sequins and leather pants—I basically spend the entire festival running around dressed like Michael Jackson.

The Downtown Festival is now underway.

There’s a lot going on in the opening scene of Everything Else is Noise, but director Nicolás Pereda hardly has to move his camera. It just sits there, gazing out the window and onto a Mexico City intersection as a traffic jam forms from construction. In one long, continuous shot, vehicles accumulate and block the box, forcing oncoming drivers to make dangerous maneuvers that instigate horns and sirens—a soundtrack supplemented by the sustained notes of a cello coming from inside. The cacophony of noise is enough for a new father downstairs to knock on the door and ask his cellist neighbor, Tere (Teresita Sanchez), to quiet down. She’s already made a similar pact with another bothered tenant, but this request seems absurd considering the blaring noise outside. As Tere will be reminded throughout the rest of this wry, knowing, minimalist comedy of manners, she’s always at the mercy of other men’s schedules, preferences, and selective ears. 

Pereda (Lazaro at Night), a veteran Mexican filmmaker whose films frequently dabble between fantasy and reality, stays inside Tere’s plant-filled apartment for the rest of the movie. There’s too much activity to leave, anyway. On this loud morning, Tere has lent her living space to her friend Rosa (Rosa Estela Juárez Vargas), another cellist and fellow composer, so she can film a cable-television interview about her craft. When the interviewer Lázaro (Lázaro G. Rodríguez, Pereda’s longtime collaborator), and his cameraman, Paco (Francisco Barreiro), show up to record, the power shuts off, the camera’s audio malfunctions, and the next-door dog won’t stop barking—among several hiccups that turn this shoot into a cursed, comical experience. 

Between the humorous fits and starts, the pair interrogate Rosa with some basic questions that she entertains in short, slightly stubborn answers. The stilted rapport builds a stuffy atmosphere, and at times it seems Lázaro and Paco are mailing in their questions like a group homework project. This gives Tere—and later, her daughter Luisa (Luisa Pardo), lurking in the corner of the room—a chance to interject with her own answers (and force Paco to mic her up) about the trio’s work in a male-dominated field, even relaying a fantastical story about how the scent of rat influenced her to become a composer. Lázaro can’t tell she’s fibbing (or, at least, partially fibbing) and proceeds to take her seriously, yet asks none of the follow-up questions that such a revelation would warrant. He’s just there to collect material he needs. 

About halfway through Noise, Pereda adds some stylistic flourishes that don’t announce themselves so much as sneak up on you. When Lázaro and Paco step outside, waiting for the power to return, Pereda stays keyed into their conversation while the camera remains on the three women. It’s an eerie, effective juxtaposition, like you’re eavesdropping without any visual reference. The pair exchange small talk until Lázaro explains that this messy, all-day interview might have real merit only because of the fact that Luisa’s father (and Tere’s one-time lover) is the legendary composer Estevez (José Rodríguez López). Upon their return, Lázaro brings up the maestro and recedes into an easy corner of questioning. “What was his influence on you?” he asks Rosa, as though nobody in the room might have their own source of inspiration. 

Pereda and his co-writer Juan Francisco Maldonado nestle into this subtly ingrained groove of sexism (including an awkward scene in which Paco attempts to ascertain Lusia’s number for a movie he’s directing) throughout the rest of the 70 minutes, a runtime that cuts off opportunity for a deeper examination of the complicated family dynamics at its core—namely the relationship between Tere and Luisa, which boils into a frustrated third-person conversation about their generational insecurities. Still, there’s enough to infer in the way Luisa spats about her mother having her at 18 and losing her independence or Tere believing her daughter hasn’t to terms with her lack of vocation. They have history and musical gifts and a shared understanding that will never be given due credit. 

What binds them is the patriarch, the maestro that Lázaro seems to care more about anyway—all the more evident when Estevez stops by at night and captures the interviewer’s full attention. As they rabble under candlelight, Tere and Luisa listen to his self-congratulatory list of accomplishments and projects and the predicted talking points that never change. They can’t handle the reality of this chaotic day and this secondary existence, but can at least indulge in its preposterousness. “You’ve spent your whole life doing what other people want,” Luisa advises her mother. “Stop caring so much.” What better way than to laugh?

Everything Else is Noise screened at the 64th New York Film Festival and will be released by Pragda.

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.

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.”

Chronovisor (Kevin Walker and Jack Auen)

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

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)

Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! (Josef Kubota Wladyka)

One of the breakouts of the Sundance Film Festival this year, where it picked up the U.S. Dramatic Directing award, Josef Kubota Wladyka’s stylish and moving Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! is coming this fall. Blake Simons said in his review, “In dance, you have to lead with confidence. Your partner looks to you for guidance, and they require you to look back at them responsively, to move instinctually without faltering. There’s need for surefootedness, consistency, and impeccable timing. Luckily for us, Josef Kubota Wladyka’s fun and deceptively frothy third feature Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! has all of these qualities in spades.”

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)

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.”

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)

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)

The Scout (Paula González-Nasser)

Premiering at last year’s Tribeca Festival to much acclaim, Paula González-Nasser’s debut The Scout follows a day in the life of an NYC location scout. Michael Frank said in his Tribeca review, “González-Nasser invites an openness from these characters, each given one scene with Sofia, to banter with her, make her uncomfortable, or some combination of the two. And the young location scout just takes it all in stride, as though she’s been in these situations countless times, as each apartment is a part of her job she doesn’t love, but also doesn’t mind. She might even relish it on one or two occasions, the opportunity to sit on someone’s couch and hear their story or to find a new hack to delete her mountain of parking tickets.”

The Weight (Padraic McKinley)

Gold is such an apt metaphor for greed. It’s shiny, it’s heavy, it’s superficial, and it’s obtained through someone’s hard labor. That labor is carried on the backs of the downtrodden and desperate while its benefactors maintain a comfortable distance. Gold prices are currently at an all-time high, a testament to the timelessness of its corrupting allure, while life isn’t getting any easier for those on the bottom of the economic totem pole. Every day, we see news stories about more people struggling to make ends meet or afford healthcare. It’s a devastating sign of the times which director Padraic McKinley taps into in his debut feature, The Weight. – Kent M. W. (full 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

• Atonement
• Digger
• Hope
• The Incomer
• Misty Green
• Take Me Home

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 Cannes coverage. The film opens in theaters on October 9.

A soft upright piano playing “Amazing Grace” drapes in warmly over the opening image of Fjord: a powder-blue-hued glacial mountain towering over the glistening Norwegian fjord around which Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) and Mihai Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan) have resettled their seven-person family. Lisbet, a Norwegian nurse, and Mihai, a Romanian aeronautical engineer, just moved to the idyllic seaside village in Norway from Bucharest, where their devout evangelical Christian faith held a much better reputation in the conservative home country of writer-director Cristian Mungiu, who’s aimed his last two features (Graduation, R.M.N.) at the pitfalls of its uber-traditional society. 

The Gheorghius don’t necessarily come across as a good hang. They spend all their free time singing worship songs and reading scripture, and insist their children do the same. The two teenage eldest of the five, chronic rule-followers Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Emmanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu), have no access to the internet, much less YouTube. When she sees an electric piano at school, Elia can’t help but play a hymn, just like her father did when he was touring the campus. Both are lightly reprimanded by the Norwegians near them. “We don’t do evangelism at school,” Mats, their neighbor, tells Elia with a smile. Even their outfits are conservative: long, unflattering grey skirts and Mennonite-esque hair tied up for Lisbet, turtlenecks and blazers for Mihai.   

Their poised stance against homosexuality is abominable, their casual tendency to spank their children a reprehensible relic of generations past. Both are anachronisms in a modern global age that sees the backwards ideological strongholds as thought crimes—in Norway, actual crimes. So much so that, in the middle of the afternoon, after a teacher develops reason to believe they’ve been spanked, Child Protective Services arrive unannounced to take the children into custody while they investigate the situation. But, like anyone else, the Gheorghius deserve their liberties and a proper defense in court from the iron-fisted Norwegian powers that have gone so far left that they’ve come back around to the right—flown the country so close to the sun of liberalism that they’ve begun to burn the minorities who live there. (“They never had communism,” Mihai remarks critically.)

Several key questions run through the veins of Fjord. The first is whether or not the Gheorghius are physically abusing their children. But when they openly admit to occasionally spanking them, and the children say the same, the question transforms: should parents be allowed to do this? If not, what should be the punishment for parents? Should their children be legally seized for the remainder of their youth? Another question, one the film refuses to weigh in on for its audience, hangs in the balance: at what point does spanking become beating or physical abuse?

Civil and criminal trials hang over Lisbet and Mihai’s baffled heads like a spectre of familial death as they prepare for their internationally publicized civil trial, which CPS keeps postponing in hopes of the criminal trial taking place first—one that will almost certainly find the Gheorghius guilty per Norwegian legislation. In a culture-versus-law showdown for the ages, the Gheorghius ask Mia (Lisa Carlehed)—a liberal atheist neighbor whose wrist-cutting, fuck-saying, and rule-breaking daughter becomes an influence on Elia and Emmanuel—to represent them. Mia agrees, finding the state’s stance harsh and damaging to the children in light of something as minor as spanking when the kids want to go home, the Gheorghius have promised never to do it again, and they clearly didn’t know they were committing a crime in the first place. Together, they take a religious-persecution angle that suggests the Gheorghius are facing discrimination.   

Avalanches cascade in the background of the western Norwegian port town, a visual metaphor for the impenetrable layers of icy, inhuman behavior that characterizes most Norwegians in the film (save Mia, who considers the situation with reason and beyond its legal precedent). The CPS representative who first tells Lisbet what’s going on is so clinical in her responses that it’s as if they were programmed ahead of time, not an ounce of empathy or discerning logic in her bones. Yet she acts on behalf of the state, in the name of principles with which almost anyone would agree. Among them: “You shouldn’t hit your kids.”

The original lawyer who represents them takes on the same unblinking, robotic tone before she bails on them as calmly as she signed up simply because they’re upset. There’s an irony to a rationalism that doesn’t consider the human soul. Take, for instance, a CPS representative insisting there’s no evidence that suggests children are better off with non-abusive biological parents than a set of foster parents if the kids and new parents get along—an idea that requires no research to debunk.

Up against the cold, overbearing, soulless characterization of a Norwegian CPS operating in the name of reducing risk, the Gheorghius’ strict, silly rules for their children come across as something they’ll merely have to mature past when they’re older and opposed to something that will ruin their lives. Mungiu accentuates the lack of rigidity by showing how easy it is for Elia and Emmanuel to break their parents’ rules when peer-pressured by Noora (Henrikke Lund Olsen), a reality anyone who grew up in a religious home knows is true. 

As progressive as Norway’s ideals may be, and however much one might agree with them on paper, Mungiu draws out the maltreatment in forcing someone to conform to laws of a society that are against their relatively harmless beliefs. The one thing the Norwegian state does have is an absolutely gobstopping courtroom that hovers over the fjord with floor-to-ceiling windows brandishing the celestial glow of the mountainous region in the background of every shot.

Cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru and colorist Andu Radu once again wed their efforts to create the most aesthetically pleasing film of Cannes thus far, as they did with R.M.N. in 2022—a chilly sky blue masks the region in a beauty that’s hard to appreciate amidst the operation of its society. Reinsve and Stan are terrific, playing the conservative matriarch and patriarch with a gentle, hushed desperation, quaking in the wake of losing their five children forever as if they already have.

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. 

Fjord premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will be released by NEON.

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2026 Venice coverage. The film opens in theaters on October 9.

Day 1,645 of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine also brings us the world premiere of Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile, the follow-up to My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow (2024). War time is even more elastic than peace time, even though it’s only accessible to those living through it. For us, viewers huddled in the screening rooms or hunched over the laptops if we’re streaming, this concept remains abstract. Instead we count film time in hours and minutes, the only measure we can access directly: Last Air in Moscow clocked in at 324 minutes, and Exile is longer at 355. But how precious is our viewing time, really, in comparison to what the total 12 hours of My Undesirable Friends depicts, the fascistic suffocation of truth in real time?

The first film began in autumn 2021, when independent journalists—our protagonists—were being declared “foreign agents” by Putin’s regime. In four months’ time they were fleeing the country as Russia started a full-scale war in Ukraine, making their journalistic work punishable with jail time. Exile starts only two days after the events depicted in Last Air in Moscow, circa March 2022, providing the continuity we need for history to make sense. There is no gap between Parts I and II, yet they are worlds apart—for those we see onscreen and us watching real time unfold with a three-year delay.

What we’re seeing are brave, resourceful young women who are no less scared, shocked, and trying to plan their next move out of Russia. However, it’s a relief to see all of them alive and well. Regardless of whether or not you’ve already spent hours with Anya (Anna Nemzer, credited as co-director), Lera (Valeria Ratnikova), Ksyusha (Ksenia Mironova), Lena (Elena Kostyucheko), Ira (Irina Dolinina), Alesya (Marokhovskaya), and Sonya (Groysman), Loktev’s affection is palpable from behind the camera. Shooting on an iPhone allows her, like in Part I, to stay close and bottle the intimacy shared, which in this case it feels even more precious to preserve. 

When Last Air in Moscow premiered, critics remarked on Loktev’s transition from fiction to documentary as a novelty, yet were somewhat unsurprised to find the same delicate framing and attention to faces, flushed with emotion, one sees in the director’s works of fiction. A nimble camera staying close by, attending to every word each of the film’s multiple protagonists utters, taking in the surroundings as the final glimpses of Moscow for each and every one of them—streets, apartments, workplaces. Stylistically, Exile is no different, but watching it feels more claustrophobic, the camerawork more propulsive and shaky, as if it too is trying to make sense of that new, exilic reality. All those who worked together at TV Rain as one of the last (and very few) oppositional media in Russia have scattered—some fled to Europe via Turkey, others to Georgia—and splintered. Now that the media has shut down, it’s Loktev and her film keeping them close. But that uniting role is neither overstated nor forced. It’s welcome, and the trust between filmmaker and subjects is clearly felt in every second of screen time—including the “new faces” like Yana (Kuchina, partner of Lena) and the Ukrainian-Russian journalist couple Peter Ruzavin and Nataliya Gumenyuk, who also fit right in the constellation of fearless protagonists with their impressive work and sweet humor.

Like its predecessor, My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile shows history in the making by documenting fragments of its peoples’ lives, reflections, and struggles against the authoritarian state, but also exceeds the expectations of your regular observational documentary. Loktev has described the approach as a “fly in the soup” more than “fly on the wall,” but by staying with her protagonists, she extends the act of care so crucial for the genre beyond any time and space of shooting. She translates her care to the audience as one of bearing witness, actively with her own voice in dialogue with a protagonist, or more discreetly by just being there. Unlike them, Loktev may be free to travel, but that asymmetry doesn’t make her presence any less reassuring—filming, as an act and a process, becomes the only source of stability for all, it seems.

Exile also crystallizes history’s relationship to the present tense and time in general. Despite offering clear timestamps and contextual information in the inter-titles, the film inadvertently places viewers in a state of dissonance. Not a cognitive one, but temporal—and by extension, mnemonic—dissonance where the present is past, yet still present. While there is a chronological narrative of sorts, moving from March 2022 to early 2026, the emotional timeline is anything but linear. Loktev’s editing bookends every scene with a black frame and inter-titles containing a place, time, and protagonist, yet the mosaic of trauma and resistance defies the sense of linear time. We, as viewers, get to experience again the first news of Bucha, Irpin, and Mariupol, mass graves, and accounts of torture by the Russian army—all squashed in our memory by the innumerable atrocities of war committed ever since.

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.

My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival and opens on October 9.

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.

Barrio Triste (Stillz)

At barely two years old, Harmony Korine’s “post-cinema” company EDGLRD is already branching out. After directing AGGRO DR1FT and Baby Invasion, Korine takes on a producer role for Barrio Triste, the feature debut of Colombian-American artist Stillz. It’s a good match of talents, given Stillz’s background as a music video director for artists like Bad Bunny and Rosalia, and while Barrio Triste takes a vibes-based approach à la Korine’s last two features it’s an entirely different beast. Exhilarating, tense, personal, and enigmatic, Barrio Triste is a compelling look at a lost generation in search of salvation, and among this year’s best first features. – C.J. P. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Colony (Yeon Sang-ho)

Ten years ago, Train to Busan pitted passengers against zombies on high-speed rails. Driven by a canny script and propulsive editing, Yeon Sang-ho’s film became a worldwide hit. In Yeon’s latest, Colony, an experimental serum unleashes hordes of zombies into a downtown Seoul office complex. The difference this time is that they can communicate instantaneously, evolving in a sort of hive mentality. Helped by Jun Ji-hyun in her first screen role in over a decade, Colony was a box-office hit when it opened this May in South Korea. Along with The King’s Warden, Yeon’s movie helped resurrect Korean moviegoing after a long, fallow stretch. I spoke with Yeon and Jun at the New York Asian Film Festival for the North American premiere of Colony. Read the full interview. – Daniel E.

Where to Stream: VOD

Disclosure Day (Steven Spielberg)

Certain beliefs unite all of humanity. Take, for example, the idea that the extraordinary is possible. Or, even more, that the impossible is possible. Steven Spielberg isn’t shy about believing in extraterrestrial life, and he doesn’t think you should be either. He’s so sincere about this aloof-yet-sky-high-stakes concept that he’s returning to it again with a very simple profundity in tow: “Empathy is the core of animate existence–our evolutionary advantage.” And he intends to remind us of our capacity for such. – Luke H. (full review)

Where to Stream: Peacock

Late Fame (Kent Jones)

It is early into Kent Jones’ Late Fame when Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) joins a coterie of twenty-something wannabe intellectuals for a drink in the Village. This is Saxberger’s scene––better yet, was. A one-time poet, he hasn’t written anything after his first and only book came out in the late 1970s, whereupon he retreated into anonymity, serving as a different man of letters at NYC’s post office for almost 40 years. But when a budding writer one-third his age shows up at his doorstep to beat the drum for his forgotten literary endeavor, Way Past Go, Ed doesn’t quite know how to react. “It’s as if the poems were written yesterday,” Meyers (Edmund Donovan) croons, before inviting the grizzled bard to a drink with his new fans (a token of “inspirationally motivated gratitude”). Ed hesitates; when he finally caves, Jones lingers on Dafoe’s face as the meeting with a rapt audience rekindles something in him. Call that a re-self-discovery: surrounded by a gaggle of youngsters who treat him with reverential respect, Ed is suddenly reminded of who he was, who he still is. Stunned by this epiphany, Dafoe smiles, and the film smiles with him. – Leonardo G. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger (Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern)

Directed by Meet Me in the Bathroom documentarians Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern and written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, Don’t Look Back in Anger offers something quite unique in the music documentary genre: a literal backstage / rehearsal-room glimpse of a musical reunion. We’ve witnessed endings in films such as The Last Waltz and Let It Be. To see a band reunite—two brothers, no less—is a far different experience. There have certainly been other shocking musical reunions; the Eagles called their mid-90s tour “Hell Freezes Over” for a reason, while individuals as combative as the members of Guns N’ Roses, Simon and Garfunkel, and Fleetwood Mac have managed to reconnect for hefty paydays. Sometimes these reformations sputter out (see: Jane’s Addiction). And occasionally the result is literally a one-time deal, like Pink Floyd at Live 8 or Led Zeppelin’s 2007 London performance.  – Christopher S. (full review)

Where to Stream: Disney+, Hulu

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun)

Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow follow-up Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a wildly entertaining exploration of the slasher film, erotic pleasure, and everything in between. Led by Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, Rory O’Connor said in his Critic’s Pick review from Cannes, “Shot masterfully by their regular cinematographer Eric Yue (Alex G also makes a welcome return as composer), the movie-within-the-movie’s formative kill scene is so mesmerizing that you’ll welcome Schoenbrun’s decision to play it again and again––all the better to get a feel for how Kris’ obsessions have led them to the movie’s climax, and perhaps their own. Yue and Schoenbrun’s approaches also perfectly align when capturing actresses’ faces, often in achingly beautiful close-ups that only occasionally allow for a flicker of menace. ‘There’s a hole at the bottom of the lake,’ Billy explains to Kris in one of those moments, setting off a sequence that is quickly becoming Schoenbrun’s signature—that churning sense of movie spiraling a drain as it drags you down with it.”

Where to Stream: MUBI

Also New to Streaming

Hulu

Olmo

Kino Film Collection

Death Ship
Terror Train

MUBI

Bonjour Tristesse
Bunnylovr
The Quiet Earth
Rapture
Ring
Season of the Witch

Netflix

Animals

VOD

Onslaught

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2026 NYFF coverage. The film opens in theaters on October 9.

Misty Green is a disaster on all fronts. It’s a film that seems to hate its characters, the audience, and Black cinema in general. It’s a Hollywood satire with no insight. It’s a character study with no character. It’s a drama uninterested in its own stakes. It’s a comedy unconcerned with making us laugh. The longer you watch it, the more it seems to only exist as a platform for writer-director Chris Rock’s most hateful impulses. The titular actress is a cipher, shepherded from scene to scene by plot mechanisms alone. Rosalind Eleazar plays Misty Green with energy and commitment, but the narrative has no real respect for her as a woman. The real star of the film is Rock himself, who plays a hapless director mysteriously named Jordan Green. He even shares his name with Misty’s mentally ill brother, referred to as Jay presumably to lesson confusion. But like most of the problems in the film, this needless misunderstanding can be attributed to Rock’s shocking lack of imagination. Going by Rock’s script, the most important thing to know about Misty Green is that she lets men down.

But who is Misty? The film never tells us, but it does provide some first-draft details. She grew up with a white mother and absent Black father. Her brother Jay (Daniel Kaluuya) isn’t her mother’s son, but she took him in anyway, and the three lived together unhappily. Misty has an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama for her role in Red Eye, a fictional Shondaland series that used to come on after Scandal in the 2010s. Since then she has been financially supporting her brother while (presumably) spending the rest of her network checks on clothes, shoes, bags, and partying. When we meet her, she’s living in an apartment bought for her by a married man. It’s a year after his death and the widow (Amy Landecker) has come to seize the property. This dilemma gives Misty a ticking clock that she immediately ignores, partying with Zach (Adam Driver) the night before her audition. When she arrives late and unprepared the next morning, she ducks into a bathroom for a bump. 

Making this situation all the more bleak is that Misty seems, at no point, to ever have any fun in her wild life. Everything she does is framed as a form of self-harm. Her only sex scene—with Zach—is passionless, her eyes looking forward as he hammers into her. She’s a lonely, pathetic character for seemingly no other reason than Rock needing her to be. It’s as if she’s based on a woman Rock fell for years ago but never really got to know. Perhaps he, like his director avatar, sees himself as a good man constantly set aside for reasons he’ll never fully understand. Regardless of how little Rock knows Misty, he knows her well enough to believe she should be punished. His film is the chronicle of a downfall unmotivated by any narrative truth beyond the fact that it’s what he wanted to film. 

Throughout Misty Green, people ask Eleazar’s character if she knows any personal details about the people she considers friends. These repeated exchanges are meant to illustrate that Misty is a brat who only cares about herself. She struts through life in sexy clothes, Birkin bag in hand, with big eyes that always seem to be asking for a favor. She drinks only to get drunk. Her energy seems to come solely from cocaine. She smokes weed and cigarettes, rarely eats, and never seems to get enough sleep. The only healthy practice Misty manages to keep up with is going to her local gym with her best friend Naomi (Anna Kendrick). But even that is framed as an extension of Misty’s constant pursuit of unbridled vanity. Rock structures her story as a grim procession of humbling encounters, meant to bring her back down to Earth. It’s made all the more obvious by Rock’s constant onscreen presence, his character functioning as both a love interest and paternal figure. Misty Green is a woman’s story told entirely in a man’s voice, and that voice seems to hate her on a level that feels intensely personal and perverse.

Misty Green has no interest in the plight of Black women in Hollywood or their work, handwaving sexism and racism as if they’re both beside the point. This is also exemplified in the roles we see Misty read for and discuss. She is, for some reason, auditioning for the role played by N’Bushe Wright in the 1994 crime film Fresh. The sides she reads are direct quotes. If it were a reboot, why is the script the same? Later, we see an old clip of Misty reading for Anne Hathaway’s role in The Devil Wears Prada, which seems unrealistic based on her fame level. Throughout the journey we also hear about an ill-fated Cinderella reboot that brings to mind the 1997 version with Brandy Norwood and the late Whitney Houston. Then we hear about Misty being in Shaft—presumably the 2019 version, based on her age. But the biggest indication of Rock’s limited knowledge of recent roles for Black women is the part Misty chases the most throughout the film: Deena in Dreamgirls, last played in the 2006 film by Beyoncé. Though it is normal to reboot a film 20 years later, it seems unlikely that a television actress would be reading for a role previously played by one of the biggest singers on the planet. 

If this suggests nitpicking, the laziness is distracting. The film’s one true invention, Red Eye, is a show no one takes the time to describe. Did Rock choose a title and immediately move on? Misty has an Emmy for playing a popular character, but no one mentions who that character was or even what she did on the show. The film is more concerned with the men in Misty’s life—especially her brother—and the many ways she has let them all down. As Misty’s life implodes around her, Rock pulls focus towards the unhoused residents of Los Angeles. Characters express disgust at having to see them on a constant basis, living in tents and asking for change. These moments, coupled with Misty’s money troubles, seem to function as a narrative threat. It’s as if Rock is saying that holding onto money is everything, and if you lose it, you become a nuisance and drain on society. The ending is especially tasteless in that regard. But perhaps California Governor Gavin Newsom will enjoy it.

Many will laud the work of Eleazar, who simply isn’t given a real character to play here. We never get into Misty’s head beyond flashbacks involving her brother. She often looks at a framed photograph of them with her mother, each close-up emptier than the last. Eleazar moves through every scene stiffly, her clothes fitting perfectly, her hair thick and luminous, her eyes begging for one more shot. But she never seems comfortable in the role, delivering her lines unconvincingly; audition and performance scenes are distinctly unnatural. This becomes especially clear in her scenes with Kendrick, who makes a meal out of a deeply troubled, darkly funny character. As for Kaluuya: he does the best he can with a poorly written role that turns him into a walking plot device. But it’s Rock’s performance as a scumbag deluded enough to think he’s a good guy that truly dooms the film. There is no good here. Misty Green is a black hole.

Misty Green screened at the 64th New York Film Festival and opens in theaters on October 9.

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

Film at Lincoln Center
NYFF Revivals closes with a restoration of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye and a 16mm print of Fred Camper’s Suicide Note.

Roxy Cinema
A 25th-anniversary screening of L.I.E. and restoration of Henry Jaglom’s Sitting Ducks show on Saturday and Sunday, respectively, with Q&As.

Museum of Modern Art
A Yuen Woo-ping series continues, featuring two by the man himself and prints of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2; films by Chantal Akerman and Wang Bing screen in a Claire Atherton retrospective.

Film Forum
An Andrzej Wajda series continues; The Princess Bride shows on Sunday.

Anthology Film Archives
Women in Animation and The Cinema of Gender Transgression begin.

Museum of the Moving Image
In the Mouth of Madness and The Adventures of Prince Achmed screen on 35mm this Saturday; Peeping Tom and a print of Southland Tales are presented by J. Hoberman on Sunday.

IFC Center
All About Lily Chou-Chou, Crimes of Passion, Evil Dead 2, and The Exorcist play late.

Nitehawk Prospect Park
The Others and a print of Little Shop of Horrors screen early on Saturday and Sunday.

Metrograph
Antigone, Brief Encounter, High and Low, and Earth show on 35mm; Oleksandr Dovzhenko and Winona Ryder start while Composed by Jang Young Gyu, Trains: Local Routes, A Cyberpunk Canon, Classical Cinema, and Darius Khondji continue.

Winner of the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, J.M. Harper’s Soul Patrol tells the story of the Vietnam War’s first Black special operations team as they reunite to dig up the past. Ahead of a November 6 release from Kino Lorber, the first trailer has now arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “SOUL PATROL uncovers a hidden chapter of American military history by focusing on the Vietnam War’s first Black special ops team, an elite unit operating deep behind enemy lines. With unprecedented access to this once-secretive group of African-American veterans, director J.M. Harper reconstructs their journey with an immediacy rarely seen in Vietnam War storytelling, using raw Super 8 footage, photographs, and audio recordings from their personal archives. Opening on the war’s 50th anniversary, the surviving members reunite in a hotel that becomes a surreal liminal space, where memory, brotherhood, and unresolved trauma collide. As the men reflect on their experiences, the film interrogates the contradictions of fighting for freedom abroad while facing inequality at home.”

Dan Mecca said in his review, “J.M. Harper’s Soul Patrol is a compelling account of the Vietnam War’s first Black special operations team, told 50 years later. An onslaught of mixed mediums, it is fascinatingly incomplete in certain moments, fully realized in others. The survivors reunite and reminisce, brought together by fellow member and author Ed Emanuel, who wrote the 2003 book Soul Patrol: The Riveting True Story of the First African American LRRP Team in Vietnam. “We survived the war, but there was no peace,” Emanuel says at one point. In another scene, one veteran reflects on the soldiers taking leave in Thailand at a hotel with a pool. He recalls swimming in the water and “trying to wash Vietnam off of my body.”

See the trailer below.

Aiming to bring neophytes up to date without frustrating experts who could probably complete the interview footage’s sentences, Maiken Baird’s Edward Said: Between Worlds is a concise primer on one of the most consequential academic thinkers of the late 20th century, and arrives to audiences more sensitized than ever to the Palestinian cause. Born in Jerusalem in 1935, Said and his family were forced into exile as the Nakba commenced and the state of Israel was established, and whilst his initial specialism was English literature, he found fame as a public intellectual expounding on the Palestinian struggle from afar—an identity he embraced, but which still fails to encapsulate him. 

Known for accessible biographical documentaries, such as Venus and Serena and the Oscar-winning Icarus, which she produced, Baird creditably limits the narration to interview recordings with Said, the most notable being a 1986 televised discussion with Salman Rushdie, and a more extensive one in 2002 which eventually became the film Edward Said: The Last Interview. Although the final result remains quite impersonal on her part, she understandably takes advantage of her own long-term association with Said as a family friend and then student of his: the visual make-up of this film, especially in its early passages, derives from family archives and 8mm home movies to which she and her team had exclusive access. Later on, more easily sourced historical footage is intertwined with choice snippets from his on-camera interviews.

The film is at its most effective when visually expanding on episodes from his 1999 memoir Out of Place, especially as it recounts an upbringing and coming-of-age, which don’t necessarily foreshadow his destiny as a political firebrand. The son of an entrepreneur specializing in office supplies and stationary for the region, with British colonial administrators as major clients, he was educated first at the Victoria School in Alexandria, Egypt—known then as the “Eton of the Middle East”—and then at a Massachusetts boarding school from which he went to Princeton. Noting canonical English literature and classical music (which he was proficiently trained in) as his escape and sanctuary, he both neglected and couldn’t truly unearth a Palestinian identity until his political conscience was partially awoken by 1967’s Six-Day War. We’re granted a lesser-known snapshot of that time, learning of his disdain of the mass celebrations in New York for Israel’s victory, having just established a teaching career at Columbia.

Baird carefully conveys Said’s solidarity and direct involvement with the Palestinian cause in the ’70s, Beirut being an existential ground zero where he reconnected with a mother who’d settled there. He would introduce his children to their heritage and make contact and exchange intel with key PLO leaders headquartered in the city. Of course, this era marked the publication of the pathbreaking Orientalism (1978), which identified the distortions in Western perspectives and scholarship on the Middle East, and in that same year The Question of Palestine, which set out a potential origin myth for Palestinian statehood to counter Israel’s erasure and colonization. Unfortunately, it’s here that Baird neglects an opportunity to provide more substance to her filmmaking: you could say Said is respected as a media pundit but revered as a thinker, and the film steps back from probing this, fearful at detours which could take us into the textual thickets of Orientalism, which is staggering in its erudition, and in synthezising and repudiating so many past dubious analyses of the Middle East and its representation. To be timely regarding this year’s festival circuit, an ideal film manifestation of Said would have the ambition of Mariano Llinás’s Life of Jorge Luis Borges or John Berger’s Ways of Seeing program—incidentally co-created by Mike Dibb, who later directed Edward Said: The Last Interview. 

Said died in 2003, too soon to see the development of America’s War on Terror and the Second Intifada. If it’s overly speculative to predict his conclusions on the genocide in Gaza and further Palestinian liberation, being so ahead of his time has made today’s most trenchant commentators—on the Israeli and Jewish side, also—true followers in his wake.

Edward Said: Between Worlds screened at the 64th New York Film Festival.

Palme d’Or winner Fjord is a prickly film. The new feature from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu became a talking point during the festival circuit, both left- and right-wing supporters and detractors sprouting up. The film follows a Romanian family settling into a small Norwegian town after a death in the family. When one of the daughters shows up to school with bruises, child services gets involved, a court case begins, and a custody battle ensues. 

For Mungiu, it’s a tale of contrasting ideologies, a radicalization on each side of the aisle. The Romanian family, led by Sebastian Stan and Renata Reinsve, is religious, conservative, traditional. They are the winter lamb of a town in which progressive values reign. Mungiu’s interest is in this dichotomy of a conservative minority, and this imposition of values, both just and unjust, on one another. 

Whatever its lack of settings—primarily the family home, the school, and the local courthouse—Fjord shifts gears often. The drama wants to play like a thriller, but thrives when it’s quiet, when it’s taut. People rarely shout, and the seen acts of violence come from the progressive families as Mungiu attempts to flip perception and start dialogue. 

I talked to Mungiu about challenging audiences, an increase in right-wing fundamentalism, and Hollywood playing it safe—a wide-ranging conversation on life, society, politics, and art. 

The Film Stage: How has the press circuit been so far?

Cristian Mungiu: It’s been very interesting because people are very passionate about their own opinion. There are a lot of different interpretations. But the best thing so far is that it’s a film that makes people want to have an opinion and to express an opinion, which is very seldom.

I’ve read that you were working on this project for 10 years. In that time, how has it changed? Have you attempted to make it more relevant to today’s sociopolitical climate?

Honestly, it’s too much to say that I have been working for 10 years. I started being interested in the original story some 10 years ago when it was so popular in the press that you couldn’t not notice it. I somehow remained attached to it ever since, trying to see the evolution of the case because they’ve had a lot of stages. And little by little, I started investigating a lot of other such cases until I learned that they are part of some sort of a model. And it wasn’t until, let’s say, two, three years ago, when I decided to tackle this as a starting point of a film that could be speaking about this radicalization of the society in which we live today, and about this clash between very different values, and about what happens when a family coming from a more conservative part of the world moves over to live in the middle of a more liberal, progressive society.

I thought that it’s interesting to see what happens when you change this paradigm, because I was doing this film called R.M.N. before, in which I was talking a lot about how the majority behaves and how tolerant, or rather intolerant, they tend to be whenever different people than them come over, and I wanted to tell this other story about what happens when all of a sudden conservatives are a minority, and the society is liberal and progressive. Is there a change in the way they behave as a majority?

Photo by Sean Diserio, courtesy of New York Film Festival.

What do you ascribe to that increase in radicalization or fundamentalism? And why did you then decide to focus on it for this film?

After thinking a little bit about why this was happening, I thought that—besides the fact that we might be inclined to radicalization as people in general—we have seen the world becoming less liberal in these 10, 15 years, and I think that this could also be from the way in which we were trying to implement these very liberal and progressive ideas to the rest of the society who was not sharing them. Instead of making the society more liberal, I think that, by trying to enforce them in a very authoritarian way, we rather created the countereffect, and we ended up bringing a lot of popularity to these regimes because you need to convince people, and I don’t think it’s good to answer radicalization on the right wing with this kind of radicalization for other values.

I think that the answer needs to be different, because if you pass this message that once you have a majority you can impose your point of view to the others, this is very dangerous as a message because you might discover that soon these people will have the majority based on a very democratic process. They will try to enforce their values on you. So maybe the answer is not that simple. Maybe when you have a majority in a liberal society, you should try to have a more balanced position in which you should communicate to people that, because you belong to this educated part of the society and you try to be more inclusive. Not only to claim that you are inclusive, but be more inclusive with these people whose values you can’t share, but you want to convince them. You want to educate the next generation so that they really change their opinions, not to forbid people to express what they feel.

It’s bringing a lot of frustration, and the only thing that matters is that political correctness of telling people, “Hey, you are not allowed to say what you think, and if you say what you think and it doesn’t correspond to our ideology, you are just going to be canceled.” Well, the result was this. This brought a lot of frustration, and once these people voted, we were surprised to see how this right wing became so popular. But we need to take some responsibility—not about the values, the values are right, but the way we try to implement them. Maybe we learn something from the past and we understand that, unless you’re trying to communicate with these people, the situation is not going to get better.

In this film and your previous ones, there’s this idea that no character is good or evil. There is no clear good vs. bad. How do you attempt to find this balance and not support one ideology over another?  

I don’t think that complete objectivity exists, and of course I was aware that there is this danger that the film is going to be misinterpreted or rather misused as a tool for promoting the values of either of these two ideologies. But this is not something that you can control up to the end of it. Once you decide to make this film and to communicate it to the audience, the first reflex of all the people radicalized with their ideas is to recognize their ideas in the film. Because I quote these two bubbles, so my position from the beginning is to make the other bubble listen to arguments that they never want to listen to. The only position that I could have is this one of trying to be the moderator in this conversation that nobody wants to have because I think there is no other way but to listen and to start having this conversation. 

If you make a film in which you take sides, that’s just going to be propaganda for people who are already convinced that your ideas are good. And we have a lot of films done already like this, and a lot of directors who are on the safe side of things—making once again a film with good people, bad people, and assuring you that you are having the right values—but they are not generating any kind of dialogue because they don’t address the other side. The need that we have in society today, even if it’s difficult, is to try to fix this relationship and to understand that as long as we believe that there is just one truth, it belongs to us. This is not going to fix the world.

I think that we can ask more from the part of the society who is educated and has these inclusive values. They need to be initiating this dialogue. Behave as an adult and don’t position yourself with the same radicalism as trying to convince them that they should be more inclusive. And actually, this is what happens a little bit in the story of Fjord. I was curious to understand what happens when the conservatives, which we all know tend not to be very respectful with minorities, become a minority in a society like the Scandinavian ones, where the progressive ideas are the majority. Will that society be more inclusive with the conservative values? Actually, it is not. Actually, they tend to act more from the reflex of being a majority than to being more inclusive, and I don’t think this is the right signal, answer, feedback to send. 

You mentioned there are a lot of films and directors that play it safer, that have clear lines of good and evil. Do you think there has been an increase in these kinds of movies, and why do you think directors are happy to play it safe in this way? 

I can’t say that they do it out of some sort of a selfish purpose. It’s just sometimes more natural to feel on the safe side of things, and it’s normal to wish to be liked. But at the same time, I think it’s more important to understand that you have a responsibility as a storyteller. You have a voice, and somebody in the classroom needs to be the responsible voice saying, “Well, you know, I’m giving you this news, which is not maybe the nicest to hear, but the society next to us is collapsing.” Instead of just having the same stories about how we are on the good side of things and that we all share the same values in our bubble. It’s good to speak about the danger which is out there. There are as many people not sharing our values, so shouldn’t we be thinking about knowing some solution but getting into a dialogue with them.

There is so much hatred and aggression in our society today, and the next step could be very violent. I think we should act now while we still can, and I think this is the mature attitude and the responsible attitude that you can have. It’s like in a country where you have a populist party that always tries to speculate this for their own popularity, and all of a sudden you have a party that risks being unpopular for speaking up the truth. This is the side that I wanted to take into telling people that you might not like what I’m telling you, but actually let’s change a little bit of our mindset because if we keep on believing that we have just one truth belonging to us, we are not so different from these people that we are criticizing.

How do you direct the actors themselves to have such staunch beliefs and have this radicalization? Especially in a film that itself is attempting to be morally grey. 

The idea is that, as an actor, you shouldn’t mix your opinions as citizens with the opinions of the character that you are interpreting. If you are interpreting the meaning of the film or if you pollute the arguments of your character with your own views, then you’re not a good actor. This is not something that you can do. If you have an ethical problem with supporting that point of view, you don’t have to accept the part. But what makes you a good actor is that you can interpret even people whose views you’re not sharing. That makes you a good actor because, actually, your duty as an actor is to be truthful to the role that you were entrusted with, and I made it possible to talk to them, to bring them to these sermons, to talk to these people, to explain to them a little bit how these people are thinking so that they can interpret in a very honest way. It doesn’t mean what you see in the film is not my point of view or their point of view. It’s not even the truth as people believe.

The arguments that people bring into a film are not the truth. It’s just what people say, and characters in a film lie, and they are as manipulative as people in real life. So they don’t take for granted that what they say is the truth, but the other thing is that, on the set, I am always asking actors just to focus on the truthfulness of that moment. Don’t interpret the sense and the meaning of the film. You are a father. You lost your children. You see things from your perspective. You want them back. There is no good or bad or ethical beliefs. You react to the situation. Don’t complicate it. And if you advance like this in the film into trying to be more truthful to the feelings and to the beliefs of these characters, you’re just going to be truthful to your character. The danger is, and it happens already, that people tend to keep the side of the family more because of these lovely actors that I have cast.

If you let yourself be manipulated, be manipulated by the fact that you love these actors. This is your problem. This is not my problem. I try to cast as good of actors as I could for all the parts. I try to make Sebastian look as little as the lovely hero that he is in the other films. If you are falling for the way they manipulate you in the film, that’s your problem. Don’t tell me this. I judge the film based on the arguments and on the facts. I think that 90% of the people just come to watch it so that their ideas are confirmed, but there is a percentage of people who are much more inclined to self analysis, and they are going to deliver the right beginning of this conversation.

I think it’s so difficult today, in a world of mainstream cinema in which people watch nice films and then they go to sleep, to have a film that generates any kind of reaction. It’s a victory in itself to make people reactive again to any kind of questions coming from fiction, from a fictional film, and I’m very happy whenever the film manages to reach this purpose of being the trigger for social conversations that we need to have.

Can you talk to me a little bit more about challenging audiences? What do you think has changed with the viewing public during your career?

I think that people are educated and used to seeing cinema as mostly entertainment, because this is what happened in the last 10, 20, 30 years. Just think a little bit about how the American cinema of the ’70s or ’80s differs from what you see today. Sorry to say this, but a lot of the mainstream films started looking like the animations that were in the ’80s. You see the ideology behind it. You see that everything is balanced so that everything corresponds to these values of today and nobody feels offended and nobody feels challenged and actually nobody doubts that there is just one truth. We reach this level of social development in which we have the truth; it belongs to us, so let’s pass it to the next generation. Also, through these films—which are very inclusive, and I’m not saying that these films haven’t got their role into popularizing the right values—it’s always good to have some sort of a doubtful, critical attitude in society. 

The same goes for art. Neither literature nor film were designed to just be entertainment. They are also designed and meant to make you think, consider, believe, doubt. People were having the same beliefs that they have reached the truth all along history, even in the periods when they were having slaves and the periods when they were burning witches. So don’t be so sure that you got to the final wisdom. At the same time, if you are so sure that the truth belongs to you, why do you share the same mindset as these people that you are criticizing? Why are you so convinced that there’s nothing to change? There’s one truth. It belongs to you, and there’s no need of entering a conversation with this other side of the society. How do you expect that some social peace would get back? And this is why I think that, even if there is a great risk—because there is a great risk for this film—if we didn’t have the chance to get the Palme d’Or, I don’t know if we would be talking now. I think that this is what saved our ass, if I can talk not academically for a second.

Because, all of a sudden, this forced people to talk about this film, and there were a lot of comments from the beginning about this film. The most interesting ones were those who were very radical for or against the film in Cannes before the film was screened. Do you want me to talk to you while you are having an opinion about something that I haven’t yet communicated? What kind of a rational decision is this? How can we get on terms if you have firm opinions about something that you don’t know yet? There were arguments for or against the film with the same passion, and this is why I don’t think that the mindset is so different. It’s the same radicalized way and fundamentalist way of thinking. I don’t think that this part of the society, which is you know more educated, should try to fight against the radicalization of the other by becoming as radicalized. That shouldn’t be the answer.

Well, I found the film to be —

Please don’t say “challenging.”

I was going to say “engaging.”

This is an important message for me. This kind of cinema shouldn’t be neither preachy nor didactic. I make the effort of having the form of the film as enjoyable as possible. It looks like a thriller. There’s a lot of tension. It’s just that I’m using the material of everyday life to tell you this thrilling story because I believe that the most important answers that you need to find out regarding your life and your relationship to the society are right next to you. I don’t have anything against enjoying The Odyssey on Friday evening, but you won’t necessarily get more answers about how to fix the society of today. So it’s good to have some sort of diversity, and I count on you telling people that I’m not defending any ideology in particular.

Fjord screened at the 64th New York Film Festival and opens on October 9.