Reviews and coverage from major film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, SIFF, TIFF, and Cannes— the best and the rest of festival cinema.
There are movies that unfold according to a plan, each scene carefully advancing a story toward a predetermined destination. Then there are movies like Summer War, where every scene feels as though it might wander off in an entirely unexpected direction. Writer-director Alicia Scherson’s adaptation of Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Third Reich is messy, strange,...
A bundle of sage burns inconspicuously in an apartment window. A plate is shattered. A woman weeps in the shower. Jane has just been dumped. These are the opening moments of Matt Eames’ Deepfake, a satire about influencer culture, loneliness, and the increasingly transactional nature of modern relationships that never manages to dig much deeper...
When orphaned Māori woman Mary (Ariāna Osborne) travels to Victorian England in the 1800s to uncover the identities of the parents she never knew, she instead unearths heinous secrets with far-reaching implications for her family tree. Mārama, the New Zealand gothic horror film from director Taratoa Stappard, folds cultural appropriation and colonial violence into a...
The Ascent, directed by Francis Cronin, Edward Drake, and Scott Veltri, is a climbing documentary–true crime hybrid following bilateral amputee Mandy Horvath’s attempt to quite literally crawl up Mt. Kilimanjaro using only her hands and a whole lot of gumption. It’s a captivating stranger-than-fiction account that resists easy categorization, the film ably exploring Mandy’s difficult...
The Friend’s House is Here, written, directed, and produced by Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei, is a slice-of-life Iranian drama following two close friends navigating Tehran’s underground art world, where they risk staging performances featuring women without hijabs or dancing ever-so-slightly provocatively on social media, in defiance of state censorship. The film is an intimate,...
Sundance 2026 delivered one last cinematic dump (in a good way, like powder on a snow-barren mountain) before packing up and leaving Park City for good. From chilling headphone horror to sex comedies with emotional rot, audacious midnight freakouts to quietly devastating documentaries, this year’s lineup proved that the festival still has what it takes...
Joe and Angela’s relationship is in the dumps. The second Joe returns home from his mediocre job at a middling music conservatory, their bickering begins. Taking shoes off at the door, neglecting to pick up a bottle of wine, forgetting about plans — all seem like ripe opportunities to launch a new feud. Their married-couple’s...
Frank (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is up for parole soon, serving a long sentence in a maximum security prison. Years ago, he killed a man, but now considers himself changed. We’re not so convinced. Yes, Frank can be patient and carries himself with a calm stillness, but there’s a rage inside him that boils over when no...
Grounded in a lived-in addict experience, Union County, written and directed by Adam Meeks, is a stripped-down recovery drama anchored by a soft-spoken, quietly emotive performance from Will Poulter. Set in rural Ohio, where the opioid epidemic has left deep scars, Meeks draws from personal history, using his own hometown of Bellefontaine to portray the...
This is not a story of extinction. If Cocaine Bear (also “based on a true story”) gives us a deranged cautionary tale about mankind’s reckless interference with animal instincts, Nuisance Bear offers the quieter, more unsettling counterpoint: what happens when animals start showing up in human spaces not out of curiosity, but desperation.