New York Film Festival 2026:
A Long Winter
Dir. Andrew Haigh, Canada/U.K., MUBI

In one of her trademark essays, “On Morality,” Joan Didion propounded the impulse to rescue a person’s corpse from scavengers as the most basic unit of human decency, left over from settler times and burned into the ethical psyche of American culture. Following in this tradition, A Long Winter, Andrew Haigh’s first American film since 2017’s Lean on Pete, boils down to a race against the vultures. It is based on Colm Tóibín’s 2006 novella of the same name, but, crucially, not of the same setting, whisked across the Atlantic from post–Civil War Spain to Colorado in the 1950s. Mining the landscape for all its symbolic worth, this snow-swept western charts the irreparable collapse of a sequestered family, and of the brittle ideals that can no longer keep them frozen in place.

This homestead’s self-sustaining seclusion high up in the Rockies––the quixotic fantasy of its patriarch Lester (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a former city kid––is disrupted by two absences. First, the youngest son, Tommy (Kit Connor), enlists in the Korean War, confessing his thirst for metropolitan life and his plan of pursuing it to his older brother Mike (Fred Hechinger) on the eve of his departure. Second, their mother, Louise (Caitriona Balfe), reaches a breaking point in her severe alcoholism after a tactless intervention and wanders off the property in search of a fix––or perhaps just an escape––moments before the winter’s first blizzard envelopes their false Eden.

“It takes a certain type of soul to live this close to heaven,” says Uncle Frank (Martin Freeman), lamenting his sister’s private hell. Mike––loyal, content, and unquestioning––was unaware of any trouble in paradise. His own year-long sojourn working in Idaho shielded him from the knowledge of his mother’s physical and psychological deterioration, rendering him both the odd man out and the center of their world. He is the center of Haigh’s as well; his damaged innocence––searching day after day for a presumed-dead mother he never really knew––goes hand-in-hand with an overturned perception of this pitiless, unchanging, “comfortable” corner of American life, and the man who selfishly contrived to keep his kin wedged within it, forming the film’s dramatic core.These parallel reckonings are, unsurprisingly for Haigh, compounded by Mike’s burgeoning homosexual desires, with two foiled crushes punctuating a tormented coming of age. Hechinger, a born character actor, is an inspired casting choice for a soft-spoken everyman surrounded by larger and more demanding personae, becoming an anchor and a reflective surface for their angst while magnifying his own.

These are the makings of a classically awesome picture, descriptors of tropes, styles, and subversions that my cinephilia naturally gravitates toward. Haigh is a filmmaker I admire––his fluent, unpretentious style and fine-grained sense of physicality having elevated gay slices-of-lives like Weekend (2011) and Looking (2014-16) to canonical classics––working in a largely defunct but iconographically rich genre (the western’s “Northern” cousin) ripe for queer revision. Yet it falls short of its compelling conception and considerable craft. Haigh’s handsome frames––shot on sumptuous 35mm by Xavier Dolan’s favored DP André Turpin––drip with more than enough atmosphere and portent to sustain the film’s tensions; his performers are hard-edged and expressive, externalizing the story’s strains of regret, resentment, and repression; and his digressive approach to psychodrama is rooted in decades of literary and cinematic tradition. This last point reflects the film’s tentative approach to revision, and unlocks its shortcomings. The teasing dramatization of all-American myth and madness rarely strays far from the realm of respectability, pulling punches in the name of austerity.

Considerable emphasis is placed on Louise’s silent suffering, but she is a structuring absence even before her disappearance. Embodied stridently by Balfe, this woman is virtually all interior, a walking signpost of her own disaffection. She has abandoned her family before the film even starts; “I’m sorry I knew any of you,” she spits at her husband and son as soon as Lester dumps her stash. The film admirably avoids making her a perfect victim, and also goes out of its way to shift the blame onto Lester, but its portrayal of a long-festering addiction undermines her misery with a strange mixture of abjection and opacity. This combination is most apparent during the one exception to this film’s principled restraint: “You want to know what your mother would do for a drink?” Lester, asked why he so violently hates their nearest neighbor, rolls the question cruelly in his drunken mouth as Mike looks on, shattered. What Lester describes, on the verge of tears himself, is clearly a sexual assault, but his parlance makes her out to be an erring woman. The scene’s inclusion seems like an attempt to humanize Lester’s all-or-nothing approach to her recovery. It is hatefully empathic, upsetting the film’s tidy morality.

Another important figure in the film’s matrix of gender and sexuality appears to fill the household’s twin voids. Left to their own devices, Lester and Mike squabble over the household chores. Lester goes and hires Jimmy (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), a half-Indigenous man from the next town who has no qualms doing “women’s work.” Relegated to the kitchen on one hand and Tommy’s vacant bed on the other, Jimmy is cornered into maternal and fraternal roles. His repeated harassment and emasculation by Lester run parallel to his sexual tension with Mike. Though their attraction, smartly, remains unconsummated, its proximity to Jimmy’s domestic servitude presents another troubled dynamic. Jimmy, withdrawn but ready to stand up to himself, resists stereotype, but he is pigeonholed by narrative function; he offsets Mike’s first object of desire––a young cop from Louise’s half-hearted search party––and symbolizes his change in sympathies from unfeeling patriarchy to a more tender form of masculinity.

In short, Jimmy facilitates the last leg of Mike’s psychological journey. We’re treated to the young men’s bonding activities: birding, snow angels, boyish games in the snow. The film climaxes with the pointless slaying of a buzzard, who emits a horrible scream, and Mike is shielded from this encounter with death by Jimmy’s silent embrace. Straining for the sort of rough-hewn bleakness endemic to the western’s modern incarnation, A Long Winter instead evokes an arty, elevated sentimentality. For a filmmaker like Haigh, who wields sentiment faithfully and deliberately, perhaps this is unsurprising. After his previous, All of Us Strangers, occasionally leaned into mawkishness in both daring and disastrous ways, A Long Winter reins in such unruly shades of feeling––but they keep spilling out. It is both endearing and frustrating. Caught in this limbo, A Long Winter is strange, beguiling, and thoroughly taxing; it evokes the trammels of its traditions––via culture, genre, gender, race––but repeatedly capitulates to them. Haigh might have been better equipped to subvert this genre by letting his impulses run rampant.

New York Film Festival 2026:
Tender Loving Care
Dir. Mike Leigh, U.K., Bleecker Street

Ordinary people—this could be the title of most of the ten Mike Leigh films that have graced the New York Film Festival. From film to film, and maybe most of all in Tender Loving Care, the faces and bodies of his actors remain staggeringly, beautifully ordinary.

None of his actors have been stars at the outset, but some have created and played star-making roles for him: Lesley Manville in Another Year, David Thewlis in Naked, Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Secrets & Lies, Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky. I don’t know what’s in the professional future for the cast of his latest (and perhaps final) New York Film Festival selection, but Kate O’Flynn, who won an Emmy this year for her role in Widow’s Bay, is clearly on her way. All the same, while Leigh’s films are devoid of glamour, they shine bright, even the gloomy ones (maybe not Naked). None of them are “grand” and “important”; on the contrary, they’re modest and humble—you never feel Leigh reaching. “Slickness” is not in his vocabulary, and there are no easy answers to be found in his films. I’m not sure he’s even asking many questions.

Leigh’s films always seem to be greeted and received with a special feeling by New York Film Festival audiences. Something of this has to do with the England and the singular Englishness he leads the viewer to—not an idealized or cute or confected Englishness, but something as close to the real thing as you can get in cinema, and, without being feel-good, one comforting in its ripples and waves of humanity. The audience counts on Leigh the way they did with Eric Rohmer. They know he’ll lead them to a place inhabited by characters that don’t merely exist in service to a story, they live—and are so dimensional that they are alive before the film begins and live on after the film ends. (This is what all actors lay claim to but seldom achieve.) The glib, inadequate labels for what Leigh does are “slice of life” and “social realism,” and when you read David Thomson’s opinion (in a basically positive evaluation) that Leigh’s films “may come dangerously close to a patronizing attitude” towards “the underclass,” you may want to reach for your gun. “The underclass”? Seriously?

You might have noticed certain patterns in the films Leigh has made since crossing back over to the big screen after ten creatively critical years of television and theater. Only three of his last 14 outings have been centered on men. Also, unlike his earlier films, only three deal with family life—Life Is Sweet, All or Nothing, and the 2018 historical drama Peterloo, which might seem like Leigh’s most “political” film in the most superficial sense of the word, in the manner of Ken Loach perhaps. (None of these were selected by the festival, unhappily.) Leigh’s eight remaining stories are built around the lives of women, either as part of a couple or more often single. Tender Loving Care is the furthest he’s pushed out and away from the precincts of the masculine imperative.

“She’s finally left the bastard,” announces Birdie (Marion Bailey) to her husband, Geoff (Paul Jesson)—she being their daughter, Amy (Kate O’Flynn), a social worker who lives with her BFF colleague Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), who is like a second daughter to Amy’s parents. Said bastard remains pointedly offscreen, as does Rosie’s fireman date. Aside from Geoff, there are only fleeting single-scene appearances by an affable doctor paying a house call (played by six-film Leigh veteran Peter Wight), and, in the course of Amy and Rosie’s casework, a middle-aged hoarder and a youth in foster care. (And there’s one more, more troublesome, but I’ll get to that.) These two pairings form a compact, interconnected four-hander.

Amy and Rosie work in the most demanding, nigh impossible of jobs, even as they contend with the fraying social safety net caused by government cutbacks. As each makes her rounds, she applies her people skills and patience to the full range of human misery in a series of discrete brief encounters. Leigh depicts up close how they make their living through authentic caring and compassion, without exalting them. At the same time, their personal lives entail another set of challenges. What to wear on a third date to convey the right combination of signals? At home or out for tea with Birdie they’re good-humored and their shop talk, inconsequential chat, jokey shared anecdotes are all of a piece. Their sense of humor is unforced and not played up, but it’s vital to who they are and how they cope—and if there’s only a small hint of burnout in Amy’s self-medicating wine consumption, there’s also more than a little disenchantment with men. Asked how her Friday night date went, Rosie firmly replies “Gonna need a drink”—but being stood up is no drama, just another of life’s forgettable letdowns. For the most part Tender Loving Care isn’t intended to be taken as the stuff of either high comedy or melodrama—it’s just an unsentimental look at how people get on with their lives, with what passes for joie de vivre in English terms (the titles say it all: Life Is Sweet, Happy-Go-Lucky). And interestingly, these are characters that have little or no baggage, and no agenda, particularly when compared to Hard Truths, Leigh’s 2024 masterpiece, where the baggage was crushing.

Birdie and Geoff would initially seem to have the least baggage: their office-romance marriage is coming up to its 50th anniversary, and the couple are happily and lovingly retired and keenly attentive to their daughter’s love life. (You can perhaps see where Amy gets her empathy from in a quietly devastating scene in which Birdie and Geoff’s recently widowed friend Josie, played by three-time Leigh veteran Tilly Vosburg, spills out her agonized self-recrimination over her estrangement from her son, a third offscreen man, her face etched with the lines of a life of anguish—in that sitting room Leigh tells an entire story in a single scene.) It comes as a shock when Geoff quite suddenly begins to show signs of dementia, but the drama of his rapid cognitive decline is played with pitch-perfect restraint. In a reproach to the melodramatic treatment of Alzheimer’s in so many of today’s films and TV shows, Geoff’s undiagnosed infirmity is depicted with a calm dignity that’s never maudlin. And it represents an opportunity for a redoubled togetherness, as Amy, Rosie, and Birdie sit at Geoff’s bedside, reminiscing and, in a throwback to the working-class of yore, finding his happy place in singing songs of yesteryear—The Platters’ doo-wop hit “The Great Pretender” and the turn-of-the-century cockney music-hall song “Boiled Beef and Carrots.” (I wondered if the latter was really part of the English collective unconscious, but no, there’s a modern-day performance of it on YouTube.)

Leigh only ever moves the camera in his films when it’s absolutely necessary—and it is, here, when the camera discreetly withdraws from the bedroom and our final glimpse of this foursome. The film is dedicated to Dick Pope, Leigh’s DP for the past 25 years, whose death must have felt like losing an arm (the death of his producer Simon Channing Williams, in 2009, after a ten-film collaboration, surely did as well). Taking over from Pope, Lucy Bristow brings something special to Tender Loving Care: London, shot in a gentle, balmy light, in the film’s frequent establishing shots, has never looked so damn beautiful (again, the beauty in the ordinary). It’s a far cry from Naked or All or Nothing. Gary Yershon’s spare, jaunty marimba score also seems just right for the film’s mood and tenor.

“Everyone’s in their own bubble”—at two points someone makes this comment. One of them refers to Amy’s startled encounter with Brid Brennan’s old lady, lying on her back in a park, “communing with the earth”—while it’s still alive, I guess. At another point Rosie acknowledges that there are “people out there with worse problems.” Tender Loving Care is bookended by one of them, George (three-time Leigh veteran Alan Williams). The film opens with a tight shot on his closed eyes, prone in a hospital bed, less than responsive to Rosie’s questions about his welfare. She sets a date to pay him another visit, and when the day comes, he’s vanished, having checked himself out. In the film’s haunting final shots, Leigh returns to George, sitting on the steps of a building as pedestrians and traffic cross through the frame. In a series of unostentatious jump cuts, the frame closes in to end in silence on a tight shot of the spectral George’s eyes. His story hasn’t been told. It’s a bleak final note in a film that refuses anger or despair (or false hope), and it perhaps puts a pointed accent on the film’s title. If this is to be Leigh’s last word, the political and moral fire that has smoldered throughout his films is still burning.

Minotaur
Dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev, France, Germany, Latvia, MUBI

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur is set in the cushy domestic sphere of the upper class of Russian society, among wealthy business execs who might just take their family on a coastal vacation to escape the bleak mood wafting in from the battlefields of Russia’s war on Ukraine. It’s 2022. At the beginning of the film, middle-aged husband and dad Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) is wrapping up a visit with his mother at the secluded luxury home he shares with his beautiful wife, Galina (Iris Lebedeva), and their teenage son Seriosha (Boris Kudrin) on the outskirts of an unnamed city. Gleb and Seriosha walk Gleb’s mother down the long driveway to the front gate where she can catch a cab, but she’s forgotten her glasses. Gleb returns to the house to retrieve them and stumbles on Galina in the kitchen having a phone conversation that she attempts to conceal. And with this efficient sequence of storytelling, the seed has been planted in Gleb’s mind that his wife is cheating on him.

Gleb and Galina’s marriage is as fragile as the glass walls framing their dining room, which Zvyagintsev and DP Mikhail Krichman shoot from outside and under soft orange light, creating a postcard-perfect image of cozy familial warmth that’s illusory. The dollhouse point-of-view heightens the sense that we’re looking at a mere reproduction of a happy family. The mystery surrounding Galina’s extramarital life drives the film, paralleled by a messy situation Gleb finds himself in at work. As the CEO of a manufacturing company, he and other executives are tasked by the mayor’s office with providing a list of 14 employees to be conscripted to the frontlines of the war. While Gleb struggles with this professional demand, in his personal life he freely abandons any sense of morality or conscience in his dogged pursuit to uncover his wife’s secrets.

This film marks a return for Zvyagintsev after a difficult nine-year hiatus involving his exile to France from his native Russia, as well as a near-death experience with COVID-19. Minotaur, the Grand Prix winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is a gripping continuation of Zvyagintsev’s trademark examinations of the spiritual rot underlying Russia, a symptom of living under stifling authoritarianism. Since his 2003 debut, The Return, the director has used his films, including The Banishment (2007) and Elena (2011) among others, to paint a picture of a society in freefall. His fourth feature, Leviathan, widely lauded in the West, triggered a campaign against him in his home country for its unflattering depiction of Russian life in the provinces. That seems to be the point of the director’s project, to offer a counter to Putin’s propaganda of an orthodox nation filled with happy families hungry for war. In Loveless (2017), Zvyagintsev’s last film before his break, a radio broadcaster discusses a fear of apocalypse pervading the country. In Minotaur, more pointed in light of the ongoing war with Ukraine, the apocalypse is here.

Gleb is a traditional family man with a strong disposition. He’s clean shaven with dark hair and glowering eyes that probe and penetrate from across the dinner table. He doesn’t rule his household with an iron fist, but he’s not passive either. Galina is a pampered housewife. We see her shaving her legs in the shower and moisturizing in the mirror. The couple move around one another silently, harboring more intimacy with their phones than within their marriage. They take their devices into bed and stare into the glow of blue light before sleeping back-to-back. You get the feeling that they’ve been operating under this frosty dynamic for a while, and it’s only once Gleb begins to suspect another man on the end of the phone that he’s suddenly awakened to the idea that his wife might have a complex inner life, or even an outer one.

Early on, Zvyagintsev and co-writer Simon Lyashenko establish Gleb and Galina’s Russia with a scene at a swanky restaurant featuring the couple, two of Gleb’s business world friends, and the friends’ wife and girlfriend. At the table, the unmarried woman, a blonde, dressed more revealingly than the wives, tells a raunchy sex joke that gets the men laughing. Later, the men go outside for a smoke, and the married women excuse themselves to the restroom, leaving the young woman alone at the table blowing cloud plumes from her vape. She’s basically outcast for not having a defined role in the patriarchal structure, neither a man nor a married woman, but as she gazes directly into the camera—one of three formal swings in Minotaur that invite you to pause and reflect—the superficial values and codes of this affluent, degenerate part of society begin to crystallize. Zvyagintsev implicates the viewer in this fabricated world of comfort and provocative dinner games, idle and distracted as the real provocation rages on off-screen.

Outside the restaurant, the men grumble and moan about the war, highlighting a level of cowardice among the business class, who may not jingoistically support Putin’s invasion but decline to resist in any way. In the bathroom mirror, the married women touch up their faces and whisper smugly about marriage. Galina’s friend dispenses some depressing wisdom: “A happy wife knows nothing.” At this level of society, Zvyagintsev seems to say, everyone has their blinders on. The director’s note puts it plainly: “People in Russia today are apathetic, under the yoke of censorship … Everyone tries to close their eyes, because every day that passes only increases the debt to the truth, and looking into her eyes is more and more frightening—Russia now looks like a monster.”

Minotaur is adapted from Claude Chabrol’s 1969 erotic thriller La Femme Infidèle, exchanging Chabrol’s critique of the French bourgeoisie for the Russian oligarchy. Their world is one of luxury modernist architecture (though the film was shot in Latvia) and fine dining that looks indistinguishable from the kinds of places you might find members of the Western elite, despite anti-West attitudes promoted by Putin. Before Russia mobilized in 2022, Gleb might have been considered an ordinary corporate executive, normal in his love for his family, and even in his marital conflicts. Not especially patriotic, or astonishingly evil. But in the current political environment, his class stands apart for one glaring truth: they’re almost completely insulated from the war. It’s at their doorstep but doesn’t breach the threshold. Gleb doesn’t discuss it with his family over dinner, and though he counsels his son about confronting schoolyard bullies, he never mentions the bully in the Kremlin with designs on turning back the clock to the Soviet era. Even as Gleb uncomfortably contends with the government’s orders to supply soldiers from his company, signing them up for, at best, an uncertain future and, at worst, death, he never so much as looks at Seriosha in a way that suggests any apprehension that his son could be next. His privilege protects him from the scale of the grief.

Without the war weighing on his psyche, Gleb is free to burrow deeper into his personal anxieties. And his paranoia is justified. Gleb discovers that Galina’s been having an affair with a 33-year-old photographer named Arthur, who lives in a modest studio apartment in the city. Gleb shows up at Arthur’s apartment, without much of a plan. Hurt more than anything, he almost graciously accepts the tea offered to him by his wife’s lover. It’s only when he thumbs through a stack of photos lying on the coffee table of Galina wrapped in bed sheets that he’s jolted from his confusion into blind rage and bashes Arthur over the head with a film camera, killing him. If the sudden murder could be considered an emotional crime of passion, the deliberate pace of its aftermath, clean-up, and disposal is methodical, which Zvyagintsev lets unfold for almost 20 minutes, in broad daylight, underscoring its depravity and brazenness. In this silent Hitchcockian sequence, recalling Norman Bates’ drawn out clean-up in the aftermath of the killing in Psycho, the director continues his work on the audience. Are we on the edge of our seat now, hoping Gleb will get away with murder?

Minotaur works as a kind of companion piece to Leviathan, released almost prophetically in 2014, the year Russia invaded Crimea, setting this era of Russian imperialism in motion. Leviathan also balances dramatic conflicts of government corruption and infidelity. In that film, a mechanic is pushed out of his family home by a crooked mayor who has it out for him and has the law completely at his disposal. Making matters worse, he catches the lawyer representing his case, a longtime pal, with his wife. In both films, a wife’s betrayal becomes a metaphor for government corruption, and the cuckolding a symbol for the inability to do anything against a dominating authoritarian regime. In Zvyagintsev’s films, what happens in the family is always representative of the afflictions of the country.

La Femme Infidèle ends with the implication that the murderous husband will be brought to justice. Minotaur has no such illusions. After two cops show up at his home, Gleb returns to the mayor’s office to get them off the case, once a cog in the machine, now using the machine in his favor. The same man who earlier in the film showed some apprehension about signing his employees up for war has come up with a list by deceptive means and eagerly adds a name—another sacrifice to the minotaur—to help clean up his mess: the private investigator who discovered his wife’s infidelity.

Many images from this film linger in the mind, including the final one, an extended black-and-white shot of clouds from overhead that could be smoke from the battlefield. But the stickiest may be a portrait of Putin hanging on the wall in the Mayor’s office. There was an identical image in Leviathan, of a corrupt local administrator with the president’s much younger, blonder, picture behind him. In the intervening years between these films, whose director is now in exile, that portrait stays the same. Putin has been in power for more than 25 years. In a Russia whose future feels uncertain, it’s the one thing that remains inevitable.

New York Film Festival 2026:
All of a Sudden
Dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, France/Japan, NEON

No one of moral conscience could argue with this: capitalism, which by definition runs societies on market competition and wage labor, destroys the ability of those societies, fueled by and preoccupied with the success of privately funded, profit-motivated institutions, to adequately care for their citizens. Another irrefutable idea: in caring for the elderly and those with severe memory loss, one should treat the patient like an individual, with care, directness, respect, and gentleness of touch, which is preferable to handling human beings as little more than bodies. Unfortunately, the major costs associated—namely, time and money—make it often unimaginable for such tender, loving care to exist outside of the plushest, most expensive facilities (and even rarely there), leaving its benefits, as with so many of life’s comforts, to those with means.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new film All of a Sudden, unwieldy and aggressively humane, swirls around a lot of ideas and images for its 196 minutes—eldercare, the power of friendship, dubious experimental theater, end-of-life acceptance, spiritual transcendence, foot massages—but the central one it engages with, as expressed above in this review and often in the film, is the virtuous imperative for adequate emotional and physical medical care and the systemic impossibility of capitalist societies to realize it. As a moral fulcrum it’s strong, as a dramatic one it’s fragile.

In materializing these concerns, Hamaguchi’s film mostly tells rather than shows, putting its ideological and ethical commitments into the dialogue of its two main characters: Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira), the head administrator of a Paris nursing home devoted to treating patients with dignity and proselytizing to her staff about it, and Mari (Tao Okamoto), a theater director from Kyoto whose current production Marie-Lou attends one evening. The play centers on a monologue concerning psychiatric care reform in Japan written by a late-middle-aged actor, Goro (Kyôzô Nagatsuka), whose grandson, Tomoki (Kodai Kurosaki), a nonverbal teenager with severe autism, plays a crucial role, his unpredictable reactions and responses creating variable encounters with the otherwise staid theater audience. Marie-Lou is profoundly moved by Mari’s show, and afterwards, the two women embark on an extended walk-and-talk that reveals their spiritual commune and ease of connection: Marie-Lou had studied anthropology in Tokyo and speaks Japanese fluently, while Mari, a philosophy major from the Sorbonne, is proficient in French. The sudden and intensely felt friendship between these similarly named women becomes an intellectual and emotional balm for both. Also, as she reveals, Mari is dying of terminal cancer, making their evolving bond even more urgent, both for the lack of time they have to explore their budding friendship and for their circumscribed ability to provide mutual solace.

Hamaguchi’s film is primarily inspired by an existing methodology of care called “Humanitude,” which was invented in France in the late 1970s specifically for dementia patients. For those of us who have had to endure the pain of a loved one with memory loss languishing in a nursing home and being given the bare minimum attention by nominally paid hospital workers, the tenets of “Humanitude” are refreshing and aspirational: using the principles of gaze, touch, speech, and verticality, one can aim to preserve human dignity in the face of a tragically undignified disease. The human connection between patient and caregiver should ideally improve the ability to perform more basic functions in the former and help mitigate burnout in the latter. By focusing on overall emotional structure rather than the medical symptoms—holistic rather than specific, if you will—behavioral symptoms will ideally have less of effect on those suffering from the disease and those treating it.

All of a Sudden proceeds to narrativize its communiqué for Humanitude in unusually direct ways. Most memorably, in the already beloved/infamous “whiteboard scene,” set in a nursing home break room, Mari diagrams for Marie-Lou, her audience of one, the deleterious effects of late capitalism on society in general, circling around the argument that political systems based on the pursuit of profit create intractable boundaries between inside and outside, institution and nature, caregiver and patient, life and death. The increasingly convoluted diagram is both a gesture of affinity for Marie-Lou and an explication of the difficulty of realizing Humanitude’s positive effects within such political structures. At the same time, Mari’s professed belief in the power and comfort of art produced within late capitalist societies functions as a tacit justification for her own art and, by extension, a defense of the film we’re watching. Well performed by Okamoto, who convincingly plays the lecture as though making it up on the spot and even surprising herself in the process, the scene skirts the line between a rather artless Brechtian direct address and a humane plea couched in behavioral realism—it’s both scattershot and efficient, a bit ridiculous as a scripted dramatic moment, more moving and effective when considered as the film’s clearest realization of Mari’s desire to dissolve boundaries though performance, in this case between audience and character (this lecture is clearly not really for in-the-tank Marie-Lou).

In a more dramatically integrated but no less didactic manner, the film also creates a situation in which Marie-Lou finds herself at odds with members of her staff in promoting this philosophy of care, most specifically Sophie (Marie Bunel), a highly skeptical nurse whose objections represent the burdensome toll Humanitude’s hours and attention would take on labor. Sophie is positioned as Marie-Lou’s primary antagonist, and though Bunel tries to inject the role with nuance and subtle gradations that speak more to a pragmatic weariness than mere obstructionism, Marie-Lou—and Efira’s performance of her—is so beatific and undeniably righteous that Sophie comes off like a straw man for Marie-Lou’s efforts for reform than a genuine figure of debate. (In these scenes, the most conventional in the film, I was reminded of nothing less than Patch Adams.) Rather than provide Marie-Lou with an intellectual sparring partner, as Sophie may have been, the film gives her a kindred spirit with whom she can help refine and build her argument for Humanitude and its real-world application. In short order (things happen all of a sudden here because time is of the essence), Mari becomes Marie-Lou’s support and shadow as she aims to transform the facility, which means also taking inspiration from Mari’s play.

Humanitude is not the only motivation for Hamaguchi’s film, which was also inspired by a 2019 Japanese book consisting of letters between an anthropologist and a philosopher dying of cancer, the title of which roughly translates to “The Illness Suddenly Gets Worse,” also the Japanese title for the film. And indeed Marie-Lou and Mari’s tête-à-têtes, reflecting their mutual growing admiration, are Hamaguchi’s most persuasive element: the women’s therapeutic, teasingly homoerotic bond, an unforeseen human connection between two needy souls, becomes an ethereal expression of pure kinship wholly devoid of conflict that allows the film’s general lack of dramatic tension to feel more like a feature than a bug. The film breathes easiest during an idyll in Kyoto, when Mari takes Marie-Lou back to her hometown, overlooking a hilly expanse of countryside that finally brings us to Mari’s “outside,” a privileged, momentary repose.

At other times, the film’s absence of moral complication (or self-critique) can be perplexing, especially in scenes involving Mari’s play. Tomoki (played by a non-autistic actor, it must be noted) is unquestioningly exploited as an agent of chaos, a known unknown unleashed to interrupt his grandfather’s monologue, his disability deployed as a confrontational theater device and his body a site of rupture. Subsequently, when Marie-Lou later brings Mari’s play to the nursing home, with Goro and Tomoki performing in the courtyard for an audience of dementia patients, Tomoki is again a crucial, interrogatory part of the show. Overall, the film—like Marie-Lou, like Mari, like Goro—feels so confident in its philosophical aims that when the play devolves into a spontaneous, orgiastic foot massage that sees patients and caregivers splayed over the lawn in an extreme expression of Humanitude’s belief in the healing power of touch, this climax, however compellingly absurd, comes across as little more than one final teachable moment. Recalling Mari’s lecture, boundaries have dissolved between patient/caregiver, inside/outside, and audience/performer, yet here the barrier between the screen and this viewer, at least, felt re-fortified by impenetrable conviction.

Hamaguchi’s past films have tended to see identity as mutable and even metaphysical. From Asako I & II to Drive My Car to Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, what characters do and how they manifest are contingent on environment and experience, and personalities shift as easily as the weather; Evil Does Not Exist was the outermost expression of Hamaguchi’s rejection of a socially defined version of selfhood, as its initial realism gave way to a spiritual abstraction that dispersed its characters, hampered by the evils of profit and capital, back to the winds of nature. That film left some viewers scratching their heads (I rewound the end of the film three times to try and fully understand what was happening spatially and narratively); his latest, however, leaves little room for confusion or ambiguity. The film’s various satellite characters exist to reinforce the film’s advocacy and to bolster Marie-Lou and Mari’s certitude: from scowling Sophie, to Goro and Tomoki, to the generalized, nonspecific patients at the nursing home (who might have been given more screen time and context to better elucidate the effects of Humanitude), no one serves to complicate the debates around treatment, which might have made for a more dialectical, dramatic experience.

All of a Sudden is a highly prescriptive movie, in both form and feeling, and the ecstatic response to it leads me to believe that its political directness and its occasionally saccharine emotionality (safely couched in an art-film package) are precisely what many people believe they need at this moment of world collapse and generalized inhumanity. All of a Sudden’s primary aesthetic conceit seems to be its cumbersome, sloping nature—its duration is maddening but also its saving grace: a film about the benefits of Humanitude running half its length might have felt like mere advert, after all. There’s undeniable beauty here, yet it’s the film’s undeniability—its assurance of intent and meaning—that makes it at once powerful and inert. Its final attempts at spiritual transcendence can only remind one of the nagging realities of the bodies—and the entrenched capitalist systems—that keep us all weighted down to earth.

New York Film Festival 2026:
9 Temples to Heaven
Dir. Sompot Chidgasornpongse, Thailand, no distributor

The mystery of karma casts a veil over 9 Temples to Heaven, the fiction feature debut of Thai filmmaker Sompot Chidgasornpongse. When sixty-something businessman Sakol (Surachai Ningsanond) hears an ominous prophecy that his elderly mother will suddenly pass away, he springs into action. Assembling nine members of his family to visit and make merit at nine temples across Thailand in a single day, Sakol hopes for his mother’s health to improve in karmic exchange for his dedication. However, as the extended family’s pilgrimage goes on, tensions slowly simmer as Sakol’s eldest son Tor (Sompop Songkampol) cannot hide his resentment for the family’s superstitious patriarch.

Before making his own films, Chidgasornpongse had worked as an assistant director on various projects by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who is also a producer on 9 Temples to Heaven. Unlike Weerasethakul’s transcendent, spellbinding works, where reality and dream dissolve into one another, Chidgasornpongse’s film is largely grounded and plainspoken. 9 Temples to Heaven spins off from the road-trip genre, delivering a meditative family drama in the process. The central characters’ journey becomes a microcosm of modern Thai society—fraught with conflicts between generations, as well as between secularism and organized religion. The film demonstrates how Buddhism holds significant influence over both the daily lives of Thai people and the country’s politics.

Drawing on the sensibilities of his 2017 documentary Railway Sleepers, Chidgasornpongse embraces a naturalistic and subdued visual language for 9 Temples to Heaven. In contrast to the film’s formal modesty, the Buddhist temples it captures are as lavish as they are monumental, all adorned with richly decorated upturned roofs, gilded ornamentation, and colorful ceramic tiles. The film doubles as a captivating architectural travelogue, showcasing the grandeur of Thailand’s Buddhist structures and, by extension, their enduring authority over the country. Here, Chidgasornpongse, a former architect himself, guides the camera to glide across the prayer halls and traces the intricate murals that embellish the sacred space. Bizarrely, one of the murals depicts a Buddhist deity scrolling through a smartphone. Chidgasornpongse barely lingers on the image, perhaps emphasizing how this seemingly absurd iconography is an ordinary part of modern Thai society.

The documentary-style depiction of the temples is mirrored in the monks’ matter-of-fact dialogues, which often can seem just as strange as a Buddhist deity on a smartphone. A monk recounts the story of a Burmese bodhisattva who died by self-immolation but transcended the pain through meditation, underscoring its supposed cleansing power. The family, however, whisper among themselves that the bodhisattva was actually Vietnamese. Through this inaccuracy, Chidgasornpongse undermines Thai Buddhism’s claim to infallibility and cautions against placing absolute faith in its teachings. The monk, oblivious to his mistake, then advertises the temple’s youth camp, which offers a meditation competition. As the family makes merit at different temples, Chidgasornpongse introduces monks of varying ages and backgrounds, juxtaposing those who offer genuine wisdom with those driven by commercial gains. At one point, the film enters a temple repository, where the excess of devotees’ offerings sitting on tables contradicts the Buddhist teaching of modesty.

Deliberately paced,9 Temples to Heaven patiently peels back the layers of its many characters, revealing their inner lives either through absorbing conversations or quiet but haunting gestures. The cast of mostly first-time actors bring[s] natural charm and chemistry to their performances, convincingly portraying a squabbling but endearing extended family. Ningsanond, an award-winning Elvis Presley impersonator in Thailand, plays Sakol with calm authority, characterizing the patriarch as dedicated but close-minded. Opposite him, Songkampol, also a musician, channels his onstage charisma to play Tor as an arrogant and snarky young man. Despite the laborious efforts to fulfill his filial duty, Sakol rarely checks in on his mother throughout the trip. Tor, by contrast, remains tenderly attentive to his grandmother regardless of his ambivalence about the pilgrimage. When the journey takes its toll on her, Tor and his brother, Koon (Poon Sirapob), recite the Buddhist sutra she once read to them as children. However staunch his rejection of religion, Buddhism remains woven into Tor’s life.

Neither Tor nor his father can escape the karmic cycle. Beginning the pilgrimage to prevent his mother’s prophesied death, Sakol himself suddenly falls ill. Wandering through a temple, Sakol stumbles upon a murky pigpen, a startling sight that evokes Buddhist concepts of reincarnation and karmic rebirth. Releasing animals from slaughterhouses is an act of merit in Buddhism, but are they truly free when remaining confined in dark spaces on temple grounds? 9 Temples to Heaven poses delicate questions, inviting viewers to meditate not for spiritual cleansing, but on Buddhism’s influence over Thailand and the legitimacy of the religion’s moral authority.

New York Film Festival 2026:
I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming
Dir. Isabelle Stever, Germany/Ukraine, no distributor

War as the most extreme expression of masculine power has been a subject of art and literature for millennia, but the fraught gender politics of war have never manifested quite like they do in I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming. The film, the second collaboration between married director Isabelle Stever and screenwriter Anna Melikova, turns the Ukrainian home front of the Russian invasion into a crucible of daunting choices for a transgender man.

At the start of the story, Oleh and Olya (Markus Bright and Tania Myronyshena, both journalists and activists appearing in a film for the first time) have found a pleasant groove. Oleh is well along in his transition, and they live comfortably in Kyiv with a strikingly blue-eyed French bulldog. The Russian invasion spurs them to flee to the countryside to stay with Olya’s parents (who think Oleh is cis), but their attempt to cross the border for safety is stymied by martial law’s prohibition on men aged 18-60 leaving the country.

From there, the couple is trapped in a bureaucratic snare. Many upbraid Oleh for not doing his patriotic duty by enlisting in the army, and if they are aware he’s trans, their contempt is even more poisonous. One harrowing scene has Oleh interrogated by female border guards, who sneer, “You’re man enough to marry, but for your country, you’re a woman?” and “I don’t care what’s in your pants; only on your passport.” His options for avoiding the draft—detransitioning to get past the border or having his dysphoria certified as grounds for a medical exemption—would require him to surrender the legitimacy of his gender. At the same time, despite his fear of combat, he’s nagged by the feeling that joining the army is the right thing to do, both as a “real man” and as a citizen.

This morass of bad options only gets worse as the years trudge by and the war curdles into a stalemate. The narrative sees more ellipses in its back half, with the characters’ living situation changing while the war around them drags on—after one time jump, they have a young boarder with them in her parents’ house, after another, they’re back in their Kyiv apartment, implying that despite the danger, there’s nowhere else to go.

The film explores war as the most extreme rendering of how circumstance can exacerbate a couple’s prior strains. The movie begins in media res with a flash-forward to Oleh and Olya’s low point, an argument in which she says that she was “drafted into a heterosexual relationship against [her] will” by Oleh’s transition. This bracing demonstration of her resentment colors our understanding of their relationship even in the story’s early, apparently idyllic phase, like their somewhat awkward physical intimacy in a sex scene that, ominously, ends with the invasion’s commencement. She suggests that detransitioning and retransitioning in another country would be to “reincarnate again,” as if it’s no great demand. Their big argument plays out in the opening from a distance, shot through a window outside their apartment, their voices muffled. When it’s revisited late in the film, the camera is in the room with them, physically realizing the familiarity it’s built with the characters over time. In both iterations, the sequence closes with the building’s power cutting out.

I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming excels in using little details to contour its nightmare concept. We don’t hear much about Oleh’s relationship with his father, but we know he isn’t out to him because he tries to raise his voice and uses female verb endings when speaking with him on the phone. A sequence tracking a caravan of refugees focuses on the various pets they’ve brought with them, all bathed in red light. It progresses from shots of expected dogs and cats to caged animals like gerbils and birds, driving home the upsettingly uprooted domesticity.

The unresolved status of the war unfortunately bleeds into the film’s difficulty with its ending. Finding a definitive statement within this conceit is an unenviable task, but the film settles on a conclusion that feels pat in its use of the hallmarks of traditional family construction. The arrival of a baby helping to mend a troubled relationship isa dissatisfying resolution even in a heteronormative context; it feels especially reductive in a film about the thorny gender-based contours of a queer relationship. The movie exactingly recreates the circumstances of war, but its attempt to provide a sense of closure is less convincing.

New York Film Festival 2026:
The Day She Returns
Dir. Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, Cinema Guild

Hong Sang-soo’s 34th feature The Day She Returns continues a robust period of autofiction for the filmmaker about aging artists who are more concerned with being true to themselves than being liked. The latter preoccupation often incapacitated the protagonists of Hong’s past films, who whimpered their way into bars and beds to assuage their fear of failure or, even worse, mediocrity. Hong’s contemplative turn from street smarts to aged wisdom now depicts seeking approval as a distraction from more urgent mid- and late-career artistic concerns. The pared-down structure and staging of The Day She Returns give it the appearance of a small aside in a chapter already defined by efficiency. But the film's brevity is the result of careful precision. It is among the director’s best meditations on the artistic process, with an emotional gravity that passes through like a breeze.

Three interviews take place between three young journalists and Jeong-su (Song), a middle-aged actress ending a 12-year hiatus with a role in an independent film. The Gen-Z journalists have little to no knowledge of Jeong-su's catalog or cinema in general, so their lines of questioning careen a little too quickly into the matter of Jeong-su's divorce from two years ago. Jeong-su expresses more interest in probing the minds of the interviewers. Why do they want to talk to her? Is it just because she's famous? What do they think of love, of the future?

The Day She Returns winks at the English title of Hong’s 2011 film The Day He Arrives, which follows a male film professor caught in endless permutations of barhopping and pursuing a woman who looks like another woman he once loved. Perhaps, like myself, the director sees the earlier film as his first successful attempt at constructing a hall of mirrors without any obvious exits or entrances. The structure of The Day She Returns retains its predecessor’s rhyming, but Song has gone from being a figure orbiting men to a central one. And the resignation to the idea that we are condemned to barrel through the same mistakes each day has softened into a sober-minded meditation on a truth chiseled slowly by time and uncovered in increments. It is a moving change from a director whose filmography currently resembles the Ozu approach to artistic growth by returning to and refining previous films.

Jeong-su’s comeback vehicle is by a director of ambiguous repute—all we perceive of him is an off-screen voice offering rides and meals to the young women. The quality of the film, which she claims has an excellent script, and of Jeong-su's performance may be overshadowed by the novelty of her casting. Despite the redundancy of each interview (everyone wants a word of advice for young people), Jeong-su instills her responses with zealous but strategic maneuvers to protect herself, to promote the film, and to offer what she believes to be a good performance. Her experimentation with the elasticity of the truth pokes holes into each conversation as she creates pockets—deviations into the philosophical, questions about the interviewer's love life, an extended explanation of intermittent fasting—into which she might disappear.

Just as he integrated the political activities and theatrical career of actor Kwon Hae-hyo into the plot of last year's By the Stream, Hong sews together elements of his own life with that of Song to create Jeong-su. Like Jeong-su, Song is a prolific television actress and a single mother to a daughter. The character’s foray into independent cinema invokes Song’s collaborations with Hong: Woman on the Beach (2006), On the Beach at Night Alone (2011), and Walk Up (2022). Both the actress and the director have had their fair share of scandals. Song's late husband was murdered by a hitman hired by his cousin in 2017. It has been more than a decade since the extramarital affair between Hong and actress Kim Min-hee on the set of Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) came to light, but its enduring effect on public perception of the two very reasonably remains on the director's mind. The fact that Jeong-su's divorce is already two years in the past has an obvious metatextual connection, but it also serves as a grand metaphor for what one can never accurately describe no matter how many times one tries, especially if the public's interpretation is far beyond one's control.

Save for some vaping breaks in the parking lot and a few walks down the street, the film mostly consists of two-shots which place scene partners in profile and Jeong-su's face in full view. At times she appears to yield to a difficult question, then she retreats and turns the question back to the journalist. She snaps with sarcasm, then shares an anecdote about her ex-husband with tears in her eyes. And after insisting to each interviewer that she isn't much of a drinker, she always gives in to ordering a mug of beer with a big smile. The delayed arrival of alcohol plays a trick on the trained expectation that it would unlock a lower depth of vulnerability, as drunkenness has been wont to do in Hong’s films. But as the mugs come and go, Jeong-su grows increasingly opaque as she becomes more adept at using the drink as a prop and preparing for her next take.

After the interviews, she attends an acting class where she is asked to recall and reenact the interviews as a scene. She finds her memories have faded. What she does remember seems altogether too much, both too revealing and too obscure. It is easier to perform passion for an audience and on behalf of a director. But the command that Jeong-su is given over her own experience draws out an uncertainty that renders her hours-old proclamations about this new chapter in her life porous and complicated. The resulting performance is revelatory because it is totally devoid of charisma. Song enters this final portion with more weight on the shoulders and a dimmer light in her eyes. Her shift in body language is what makes most legible the lesson of this mysterious parable: a truer self makes for a better artist, and it begins with the surrender of the bells and whistles.

Claire Denis once described women as being the true axis of time in Hong's films. I’ve maintained some ambivalence towards this view, admittedly out of fidelity to Korean feminists who decried films like On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (2002) for enshrining a strain of self-deprecating Korean masculinity, bolstered by alcohol and art world hierarchies. (For more on that subject, I redirect everyone to Park Chan-ok's Jealousy Is My Middle Name [2003] and Kim Cho-hee's Lucky Chan-sil [2019]—respectively, Hong’s former assistant director and his former producer.) A clock is important, but it is an object nonetheless. So it is a welcome surprise that The Day She Returns formally concretizes what Hong has gotten right about women before in such masterpieces as The Power of Kangwon Province (1998) and Nobody's Daughter Hae-won (2013). Women are made peripheral by men who fail up, but what they do to survive in a man's world will be executed with grit and aplomb. Even when no one is watching, even in dreams. Crucially, The Day She Returns takes a step further than portraiture. By focusing on the interviews, the structure grounds Jeong-su’s personhood in her own words to describe her desires and goals—being a good mother, being an excellent actress, losing weight, being in a relationship that doesn't feel routine, being happy—and not in terms of who or what she's up against.

I am reminded of the television films Bergman made about actors—The Rite (1969), The Magic Flute (1975), After the Rehearsal (1984)—and how acting’s pleasures derive from a very controlled but intuitive leakage of vulnerability, glimpses of the person behind the mask. Therefore a skillful actor risks forgetting how to be themselves, ironically because they know too well what being oneself looks and feels like. Hong likewise constructs The Day She Returns around the trance the actor falls into and awakens from in order to be someone else, and what it means to merge that other being with oneself. I can’t help but also think of Autumn Sonata (1978), which Bergman made in the aftermath of being charged with tax evasion and his final theatrical release. Similarly stripped down, it is a vulnerable admission to being embarrassed of the human behind the public persona and the artistic mastery. But unlike Bergman and even unlike himself, this time Hong does not conjure a memory, a dream, or the cinema to fill the gaps in our understanding of the present. Instead, he stays committed to today’s banal schedule, with all its unsettling lapses into the unknown. No cuts, no naps, and not enough beer. Only awkward silences and deep breaths before the next repetition.

New York Film Festival 2026:
The Dreamed Adventure
Dir. Valeska Grisebach, Germany/France/Bulgaria/Austria, Janus Films

Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure (2026) opens with the image of Syuleyman Alilov Letifov’s engrossing visage, which one might remember fondly from the director’s previous film, Western. Here, he plays Saïd, headed to Svilengrad, his old stomping ground bordering Greece and Turkey, on a job that we soon learn involves shady diesel trading. Although there are no horses in sight, the borderlands setting suggests that the director is once again returning to a genre best suited for telling frontier stories. What draws her to the western is the mercurial state of being on the edge, where national borders, conflicting allegiances, and distinct ethical codes converge and confront one another. What gradually materializes throughout Grisebach’s new film is less a revisionist take on the western than a consideration of the genre as an epistemic framework applied to the post-Communist economic desperation and social instability that have invariably shaped the lives of Svilengrad residents.

The morning after his arrival in Svilengrad, Saïd wakes up to the rude discovery that his barely functioning sedan has been stolen overnight. Contemplating the next course of action over vending-machine coffee, he runs into old fling Veska (Yana Radeva), an archaeologist back in town to supervise an excavation project at the nearby Matochina Fortress, a relic from the medieval period. The unexpected reunion leads him to the excavation site, where an eclectic group of townspeople has gathered to lend a helping hand. After a lovely dinner with Veska, he abruptly vanishes for a good chunk of the film. Right before this L'Avventura-like exit, a man at a bar confronts Saïd about some sinister affairs he was embroiled in years ago. From there, Veska takes over as the film’s de facto protagonist, and her private investigation into Saïd’s disappearance pulls her back into the criminal network headed by Iliya (Stoicho Kostadinov), with whom she once had a romantic history. In that process, she comes face to face with the unsavory remnants of what Iliya calls “the Golden Age of men”—the decade following the dissolution of the Soviet Union when organized crime became lucrative, and men violated women with total impunity—and a local community still stuck in a social contract with the oppressive kingpin for its survival.

Like its predecessor, The Dreamed Adventure emerged from years of extensive field research and collaborations with the locals, who contributed not only their knowledge and personal histories that shaped the film’s narrative but also their indelible screen presence. Grisebach’s gift for working with nonprofessional actors derives in part from her discerning eye for fascinating faces. Meinhard and Letifov were mesmerizing in Western, and in her latest, we encounter dozens of such characters, with or without spoken lines, whose facial features alone communicate the sheer breadth of their life experiences. Radeva’s is, rather like Letifov’s, engraved with the traces of moral ambiguity, street smarts, and deep kindness that she must have acquired while living through “the Golden Age of men.” In The Dreamed Adventure, the human faces become another frontier at which the battles of wills are fought and the densely layered plot unfolds.

Although there are gunshots and scuffles in this film, its most intense and memorable moments are those of characters in conversations. Spoken words become cinematic gestures, and their often impenetrable countenances make it nearly impossible to predict their next moves. Midway through, Veska is half-pressured into joining a group of small-time crooks for an outdoor booze-up, and they could convincingly be characters in a spaghetti western if dressed in the right attire. As if provoked by the sudden presence of a woman with an unreadable expression, they hurl brazenly misogynistic phrases and probe into her relationship to Iliya. The only action happening in the scene is speech, yet Veska’s stone face and all the guessing games buried underneath the men’s salacious looks render this sequence unpredictable and suspenseful, with the possibility of violent eruptions kept at bay but always palpable. Later in the film, upon Saïd’s unexpected return, we come across a similar moment between him and Iliya as they hash out their dark past. Neither says anything in concrete terms aside from the mob boss’s job proposal involving crossing the Turkish border, but the oppressively tense atmosphere fills the frame due to the absence of clearly defined emotions on their faces. All we can infer from Saïd’s deadpan look is the act of thinking itself.

Curiously, each time we see Saïd drinking coffee, he is deliberating on what choices to make: about the stolen car, the offer from his former partner in crime, and the second reunion with his old flame. More precisely, it is the act of drinking itself—and the duration it takes to complete that act—that embodies the state of suspended potentiality in which Saïd finds himself, pondering the next steps in a place where geographical, temporal, and moral boundaries remain fuzzy. In Grisebach’s hands, this quotidian gesture becomes utterly consequential in a manner reminiscent of John Ford’s oeuvre. In “John Ford, or The Eloquence of Gesture,” a fascinating study on the ubiquity of the act of throwing in the director’s filmography, Japanese critic Shiguéhiko Hasumi points out that this gesture, regardless of the object thrown, often precedes a decisive moment in narrative. A stone thrown into a river in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), for instance, announces the death of the woman Henry Fonda’s character loves. Whenever Saïd drinks something—and let’s not forget that he is seen consuming alcohol right before leaving town—he comes face to face with the ghosts from his sinister past, leaving him with the option to either get sucked right back in or change his ways.

This also holds true of Veska. In addition to the raucous run-in with the group of drunkards, we see her chatting over coffee with a woman associated with Saïd’s previous life. She, too, has to contend with the inglorious history of the town she once left behind. But she realizes it is possible to refuse, as she does when Iliya offers a liquor at a lavish house party. Determined to stop teenaged Maria (Denislava Yordanova) from being taken advantage of by the gangsters like she and countless other women in the town were in the’90s, Veska instead picks up her pistol and escorts the young girl home. Her act of rebellion soon leads her back to Saïd, who says he’s been waiting for her with a cup of coffee in his hand. Grisebach concludes the film with the serene image of the two characters walking to the excavation site. They are still stuck in the ruins of both distant and recent pasts, but all possibilities stay open—after all, they are at the frontier. What awaits them up on that hill may as well turn out to resemble a half-constructed church ground from My Darling Clementine, where, according to Gilberto Perez, “Wyatt Earp will forever dance with Clementine.”

New York Film Festival 2026:
Bitter Christmas
Dir. Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, Sony Pictures Classics

If there is a signature image in Bitter Christmas, the feature by Pedro Almodóvar, it may be an early POV shot of an ailing woman urgently jotting down her thoughts in the margins of a book, which rotates before the camera to accommodate her panicked scribbling. The diarist is Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a director whose first two films were commercial failures that have since gained cult followings but not before propelling her into a lucrative career helming commercials. She is a woman on the verge not of a nervous breakdown but an artistic breakthrough, the protagonist of an ambling, erratic drama set during the 2004 holiday season in Madrid. She is also only partially the product of Almodóvar. Elsa is, as we come to learn, the avatar of his avatar, Raúl Rossetti (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a gay, middle-aged filmmaker of august stature struggling to flesh out his latest screenplay in the present day after a five-year drought. What Elsa and Raúl share, aside from an author and a penchant for buff, adoring younger men, is a willingness to pilfer from the private lives of those closest to them and incorporate sensitive details and fraught dynamics into their scripts.

Bitter Christmas has been regarded as something of a homecoming for Almodóvar after a handful of curious short and feature-length forays into English-language filmmaking. It features all the expected hallmarks of a contemporary Almodóvar production: Chavela Vargas needle-drops, unabashed interior design porn, conspicuous Prada placement, and a saucy, squeal-inducing Rossy de Palma cameo. But it is also one of his more intricately structured and conceptually sound films, an internal auteurist audit that rigorously questions the authenticity of inspiration for not just any aging artist but this particular aging artist, a veritable movement unto himself. (If one counts Folle... Folle... Fólleme Tim!, the undistributed film that Almodóvar shot on Super-8 in 1978, then Bitter Christmas marks the director’s 25th feature.)

Almodóvar is likely aware of the prevailing impression, these days more suggested than stated outright, that he is a visionary still capable of inspired work but coming down from the other side of his creative summit. (At a screening I attended, I sat beside a veteran journalist and infamous Courtney Love defamer who applauded the director’s mononymous title card and proceeded to snooze throughout the movie’s midsection.) Between his momentous reunions with stars such as Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz and his excavations of personal and national histories in Pain and Glory (2019) and Parallel Mothers (2021), legacy has clearly been weighing on the 77-year-old Almodóvar’s mind for quite a while. This preoccupation has taken more oblique forms, too: consider how the single most electrifying moment in The Room Next Door (2024), in which Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton struggled to parlay cumbersome dialogue into an emotional connection, may very well be its prominent interpolation of John Huston’s The Dead (1987), a sublime, mortality-minded swan song made in the final months of its director’s life.

“Cinema can be a bit premonitory,” a spooked Elsa tells her genial boyfriend Beau (Patrick Criado), a firefighter and part-time stripper, from a hospital bed. But Almodóvar is not concerned here about the demise of the body as much as the imagination. Swerving between 2004 and 2025, the film is in large part a series of heart-to-hearts and battles of will between Elsa and her intimates, which mirror and deviate from those transpiring between Raúl and his own. Though dense with incident, the plot is more digressive and peripatetic than labyrinthine, easy enough to follow but devoid of the slippery, coiling pull of Almodóvar’s sturdiest melodramas. Characters keep supplanting each other in importance or, less charitably, utility, and are moved, without explanation, to the narrative’s periphery. Beau—whose meet-cute with Elsa is preceded by a striptease that plays out, as only Almodóvar would allow, to the entirety of Grace Jones’s “I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango)”—is shunted aside in favor of friends whose personal trials become dramatic fodder for the rejuvenated writer-director. Elsa retreats to the volcanic island of Lanzarote for a white wine–soaked, pseudo-Persona sojourn, first with Patricia (Victoria Luengo), a glum, trusted colleague beset by her husband’s philandering, and then with Natalia (Milena Smit), a reclusive model withered to a husk of herself by the accidental death of her young son.

Almodóvar juxtaposes Elsa’s shameless poaching with the relationships in Raúl’s life that are brazenly funneled into an increasingly inconsequential script. The casual discarding of Beau reflects Raúl’s own neglect of a buff, subservient younger boyfriend (Quim Gutiérrez), while Natalia’s sorrow is lifted secondhand from the experiences of Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), his longtime assistant and unofficial script doctor who has recently retired in order to tend to her crisis-stricken partner. It is Raúl’s third-act betrayal of Mónica and her subsequent retaliation that expose the true intent of Bitter Christmas, an astringent meta-text that Almodóvar considered titling The Limits of Self-Critique. Notwithstanding the performance of Lennie, who wears her character’s torment lightly, even sinuously, there is a focus and thus a vivacity fundamentally missing in Elsa’s story. But this lack of concentration, this descent into the prosaic and downright insipid, is exactly the point of Almodóvar’s project, which portrays a filmmaker’s artistic drought in the slyest, ballsiest way possible—by putting an inferior movie on the screen.

The director has described Bitter Christmas as “the film where I’ve been cruelest with myself.” He is indeed brutal in his self-regard, stripping himself for parts and sharpening his scalpel to pierce his beloved persona, never more than in the lengthy confrontation that occurs between Raúl and Mónica in the gardens of Madrid’s El Retiro, where nothing about Almodóvar is deemed off-limits; even his grief over his mother’s passing comes under harsh scrutiny, pinpointed as a maudlin, excessive fixation. Mónica’s argument is aided tremendously by the exemplary performance of Sánchez-Gijón, so fervent in her fury and so bracingly lucid in her outrage that she tips the scale considerably in Mónica’s favor during her final war of words with Raúl. It is his once-selfless helpmate who exposes the hard truth that Raúl’s indiscriminate leeching leads to nothing but lackluster art, for his powers of perception have dimmed, perhaps irretrievably, over time.

The scene abounds with petty put-downs and bloodletting blows, but it pivots around a deeper question of unmistakable import to Almodóvar at this stage of his career: is the drive to create truly genuine or symptomatic of the competitive, insatiable urge to stay relevant and viable amid the evident waning of one’s heyday? Mónica places Raúl, which is to say Almodóvar, in the company of totemic cinema luminaries like Bergman and Fellini when she mentions that he doesn’t need to return to the director’s chair after five years away, that he has given audiences enough major (and minor) work to savor and evaluate for five lifetimes. But something in Raúl, which is to say something in Almodóvar, cannot bring himself to rest, to become the type of celebrity doyen who does little more than accept plaques from indistinguishable LGBTQIA+ organizations and jet to Qatar for money-laundering film festivals, all the while playing the role of the idle, well-compensated éminence grise. No innovator wants to admit that they’re biding their time at the end of the trail they audaciously blazed. Purgatory is presented here as a filmmaker lounging and lunching with his boy toy, too consumed by a conversation about buying a villa with a heated pool to wipe away the crumbs collecting in his beard.

I am not so sure that Almodóvar has to fear a decline. Pain and Glory, released under a decade ago, certainly ranks among his greatest achievements, brimming with the exultant, misty-eyed emotionality that he readily jettisons on this go-around. He remains masterful enough to end Raúl’s story on a wistfully inconclusive note, involving the tabling of a likely inevitable lovers’ parting, spurred by the realization that one’s partner has become one’s hostage. And he is ultimately less invested in resolving the tiresome debate about how much lived experience belongs in fiction than he is in dissecting his late style and interrogating the artistic ambitions that have not slackened whatsoever but instead mutated and metastasized during the so-called winter of his career. Bitter Christmas will be either catnip or anathema to auteurists, but it is above all a reminder of Almodóvar’s own vitalizing acuity, his abiding inclination for audacity and perpetual aversion to the safe bet and the dominant trend. (When all is said and done, he would still rather say something nice about David Cronenberg than sign a development deal with Netflix.)

It is no surprise that his characters have returned time and again for comfort and catharsis to the mighty, leather-tough musicality of Vargas, a queer comrade and eternal influence, whose 2004 corrido “Amarga Navidad” gives the film its title. (Vargas took to calling Almodóvar her “spouse” later in life when he became one of her most ardent champions, eventually arranging her Carnegie Hall debut in 2003.) After an alcoholism-induced absence that lasted for more than 15 years and convinced many devotees that she had died, the Mexican grande dame returned with a vengeance and kept performing until the bitter end, speaking the lyrics that she could no longer sing. She continued to pour all of herself into a voice never lost, only transformed.

New York Film Festival 2026:
Fatherland
Dr. Paweł Pawlikowski, Poland/Germany/Italy/France, MUBI

“Where is home?” Sixteen years after he fled Nazi Germany to settle in the U.S., and four since Hitler killed himself in a bunker, Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) is fielding questions from a phalanx of reporters in downtown Frankfurt. The writer, who received the Nobel in 1929, has returned to his native turf to pick up another award, the Goethe Prize. But the atmosphere inside the cavernous hotel hall where the presser is taking place has turned pugilistic. You’d be forgiven for mistaking the conference for a trial. Opposite the literary titan and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), presently acting as his interpreter, reporters from either side of the Iron Curtain take turns to challenge Mann’s allegiances. There’s the German journalist who asks what he might have to say to the countrymen who viewed his departure in 1933 as a betrayal; a Soviet colleague who wants him to attest to the East’s superiority; an American who wonders if rumors that he may pick up a second Goethe Prize in the DDR are true (they are). But it’s Betty Knox (Anna Madeley), Erika’s partner and fellow war correspondent, who gets to ask the most personal question—curiously, the only one Mann doesn’t know how to answer. “My home now is California, but my heimat, where I belong—that’s a much more difficult question.”

The first time I watched Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, in Cannes, I remember hastily jotting down Mann’s words, convinced that they might serve as a Rosetta Stone to decipher the entire journey. As it turns out, they do. Like Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), the first two instalments in Pawlikowski’s black-and-white postwar trilogy, which this brings to a close, Fatherland follows people fumbling after a sense of belonging in a postwar continent riven by all sorts of divisions, old and new—heimat remains a mirage in all three works. But on my second viewing, another question lingered: How tall is that ceiling?

Now on his third collaboration with cinematographer Łukasz Żal, Pawlikowski’s honed an instantly recognizable aesthetic. Ida, Cold War, and Fatherland all tend to traffic in static shots in which people often appear from the shoulders up but only occupy a small portion of the frame—poking out of the boxy Academy ratio as if from windows. The rest is vertical headroom, plenty of it, a stylistic choice which in Fatherland reaches a kind of apotheosis. Virtually every indoor scene is designed to keep the ceiling out of sight, leaving characters floating in immensely and oppressively spacious rooms. The marbleized conference hall in Frankfurt, where columns jut dizzyingly skyward to dwarf the Manns and their audience; the sinisterly semi-deserted bar in East Germany, the camera perched just far enough from Thomas and Erika so as to turn the place into a cathedral; and the derelict church father and daughter visit in the closing sequence, reminiscent of Cold War’s own coda.

To call that empty space would be both technically correct and somewhat misleading: there is nothing empty about these backgrounds. Thomas and Erika do not hang in a vacuum but move across a string of liminal places—hotels, restaurants, theatres—and it’s a hallmark of the director’s artistry that these do not just stand as inert backdrops, speaking instead to his characters’ mental states. Pawlikowski mines postwar architecture for a pathetic fallacy. His wanderers seem to exist in a molecular relationship with their vacated milieus, which are an extension of their inner lives—a broken world housing broken drifters. This is why all the vertical headroom in Fatherland is no formal gimmick, and why the two questions—the exact location of Mann’s heimat, and the vertiginous size of the locales he roams while searching for it—are intimately connected.

The first person to grace the screen in Fatherland only appears in the opening scene, but his absence haunts the film. On May 21, 1949, early into Mann’s cross-country tour, his son Klaus died from an overdose of sleeping pills while in Cannes. A fellow writer, Klaus was best known for the formidable Mephisto, a scathing, fictional portrait of an actor clawing his way to stardom in Nazi Germany whom authorities deemed too similar to real-life thespian Gustaf Gründgens and banned over a libel dispute. While doctors couldn’t quite agree on whether his death was an accident or a suicide, Pawlikowski’s script irons out all ambiguities. Naked and disheveled, crouched at the foot of his bed in a sombrous hotel room, Klaus (August Diehl) looks and sounds like he’s long lost his will to live. “I can’t remember the last time I felt something,” he murmurs, funereally, to his sister listening in from the family’s California home. But he misses her dearly, and though Diehl and Hüller never share a frame, the distance only makes their bond more vivid and tangible. Erika invites her brother to join their tour; when he doesn’t show up in Frankfurt and news of his passing reaches her, it’s as if all the loneliness the film had surreptitiously accrued until then could finally detonate. Fatherland grows gloomier, the gulf between father and daughter wider. She’s devastated by the loss; he’s so insulted by it that he’d rather travel East to pick up another accolade than attend his own son’s funeral. Neither can muster the right words to process that trauma. “Let us love what is alive and mourn what is dead, but leave it behind us,” says a quote by Goethe that’s particularly dear to Mann; you could read Fatherland as a story about two people trying to live by that maxim, to no avail.

Klaus might be dead, but traces of him still litter the road trip. He’s in Bach’s cantatas—the only music, says Erika, that “almost made him believe in God”—and he’s in the crowds listening in rapt silence to Mann’s speeches about Goethe, love, Germany, the future. Early on, Erika has a vision of her brother looking at her during one such lecture from a gallery on the other side of the theater; when she returns to the venue after everyone’s left, the stalls are vacant, but a high-angle shot makes the entire auditorium look like a whale’s skeleton stranded on a beach, the rows a gigantic ribcage glistening under the sun. Here, as in other moments in which Erika stands as a tiny silhouette in Pawlikowski’s frames, the film’s form suits the story and the emotional void at its center—to borrow from Herzog, these are all “landscapes of the soul.” It’s a beautiful, unfading image, and Fatherland teems with similarly striking compositions. But the source of its arresting power resides in their gradual erosion. Fatherland is more glacial and austere than Cold War. Gone is the jazzy exuberance that billowed from that self-destructive romance; there are no intoxicating dance scenes, and no sinuous camera movements. Only once does Żal forsake the tripod to trail after Erika as she ditches one of her father’s public appearances to seek solace in the shadowy chasm of a nearby garden; only once does she raise her voice at him: “a cold-blooded narcissist” hiding “in a great castle of words.”

Fatherland concerns a father and a daughter trying—and failing—to repress an unspeakable loss, and its aesthetic testifies to that same failure: it thrives on the dissonance between its immaculate, meticulously studied surfaces and all the pain that percolates into them. At 82 minutes, it might register as the work of a miniaturist stripping down his style to conjure something cold and compact, a tale shrouded in caliginous light, almost cool to the touch. But there’s a palpable electricity coursing through it, most of it radiating from the actress at the film’s center. Hüller’s Erika might project an impenetrable façade, but hard as she tries to maintain it, grief still works on her, threatening her composure in myriad tiny ways: a pursed lip, a slight arching of the eyebrows, a thumb nervously rubbing her palm. Hüller communicates tangles of emotion even in repose—that she can convey so much by doing so little is a measure of her genius, and her understated performance is a perfect fit for a work that makes restraint its operating principle.

There are no loud, declamatory scenes here, and Fatherland is all the more lacerating for all that withholding. When catharsis finally comes under the notes of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” the release feels contagious—it’s one of Pawlikowski’s most indelible sequences. As father and daughter sit among the ruins of an abandoned church and Klaus’s favorite music echoes from a battered organ, Fatherland wraps on a life-affirming note: a belief that what is no more is still around us, filling the air we breathe and all the empty space we traverse.

New York Film Festival 2026:
La Libertad Doble
Dir. Lisandro Alonso, Chile/Argentina/Luxembourg/Germany/U.K., no distributor

In 2001, a 25-year-old Lisandro Alonso established himself as one of the most audacious and uncompromising directors of his generation with the premiere of his debut feature La Libertad. Chronicling a day in the life of a woodcutter living alone in the Argentine Pampas, the film opens with a bare-chested Misael (Misael Saavedra) sitting by the fire eating an armadillo, the darkness behind him punctuated by flashes of lightning. The remainder of the film follows as he goes about his daily routine—chopping trees, selling the poles for cash, buying supplies—eventually circling back to that opening image. With La Libertad Doble (Double Freedom), Alonso’s unexpected follow-up to La Libertad, the director returns to that same composition, again opening his film with Misael, bare-chested, by the fire, carving off armadillo meat as lightning flashes in the background. To even speak of the “same” composition, of course, is to raise a whole host of questions. Can Misael really have sustained the same routine over the intervening 9,000 or so days? What has and has not changed in the intervening years? And what then does it mean to re-present, or indeed to recreate, Misael’s routine a quarter-century later?

For a time, La Libertad Doble creates the impression less of a remake than of a sequel—something along the lines of Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998), where one’s attention falls on deviations, large and small, from the original. As before, Misael goes about chopping wood, but when he returns home to wash, for instance, he doesn’t rinse out the basin before filling it with water. Likewise, instead of being shown Misael pausing work to defecate, as in La Libertad, we see him urinate into the brush. Although he still wears a blue New York Yankees cap and interacts with a large white dog, we notice that this could not possibly be the same cap and dog from 25 years ago. As the film unfolds, however, we are gradually confronted with a possibility that La Libertad raised but did not explore—that is, of a dramatic rupture, a decisive break in routine. After being told that he must go and see his sister, Micaela, Misael makes his way to the local asylum, where a doctor informs him that due to budget cuts, the facility is being shut down. Misael must take his sister with him, incorporating her presence into his routine. And after spending the evening on one of the institution’s beds, he does. Unlike La Libertad’s looped structure, La Libertad Doble thus confronts the viewer with the vertiginous prospect of a second day.

Since the appearance of La Libertad, Alonso has been routinely tagged as a “slow cinema” filmmaker. Six features and umpteen cycles of debate later, it has become clear that even if the term correctly encompasses a set of shared techniques (sparse narratives, minimal dialogue, an emphasis on duration and long takes), it does not do much to capture a director’s style, and is unable to distinguish, say, a Tsai Ming-liang from a Béla Tarr, an Apichatpong Weerasethakul from a Lav Diaz. In Alonso’s case, simply naming the cinematic techniques employed in La Libertad and La Libertad Doble fails to convey what makes the paired films so uniquely discombobulating, which is the way they manage not merely to blur the lines between documentary and fiction, as is commonly held, but to interrogate the very grounds of that distinction.

Although filmed on Alonso’s family ranch rather than the Argentine hinterlands, La Libertad was largely based upon the real-life routine of Misael Saavedra, whom the filmmaker observed over several weeks. Described in this way, the film seems hardly distinguishable from Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), which likewise confronts the problem of how to portray an action as typical, habitual, or recurrent. What was and remains unique about Alonso’s experiment, however, is how it continually activates this formal dilemma through canny decisions of framing, cutting, and duration. Early on in La Libertad, Alonso shows Misael stripping the bark from a tree trunk, the sequence filmed in long shot, without a cut, the continuity of the sequence not just attesting to Misael’s expertise at wielding an axe but also allowing us to grasp the spatiotemporal boundaries of the activity and how it fits into his day-to-day. But later, when the film cuts from Misael walking through the brush to a shot of him catching an armadillo, the action taking up only roughly five seconds of screen time, we are confronted with something other than a straightforward documentation of the quotidian. The animal, which we later see killed and prepared in some detail, is real enough. But the truncated presentation of the hunt makes it difficult to grasp how the action slots into his diurnal routine: Does he hunt and eat armadillos every day? How long does the hunt take? And what does Misael do if he comes up empty? Unable as we are to answer these questions, a fictional thread precipitates out of the documentary material—not as absolutely opposed to it, but as differentiated by contrasting demands of presentation.

La Libertad Doble returns to, and in effect reverses, this approach. Whereas La Libertad allows a fictional line to crystallize out of its rigorous documentation of routine, La Libertad Doble begins by establishing a fictional frame that nonetheless allows for the presentation of various recurrent realities. (The most proximate point of reference here may be Jean Eustache’s 1977 mid-length masterpiece Une sale histoire, which follows a “fictional” rendering of an event with a “documentary” recording of it.) Now housed some 800 kilometers away from the filming location, Misael Saavedra was in effect asked to recreate a regimen that no longer exists. Yet despite this fictional foundation, it remains possible to discern those habits and regularities which remain—such as Misael’s know-how with an axe and chainsaw, or the region’s climate and weather and vegetation. Similarly, although Micaela is played by Chilean actress Catalina Saavedra (no relation to Misael Saavedra), her performance as a person with mental illness does not prevent the documentation of various other stabilities—principally those of the natural world. Soon after arriving at Misael’s home in the woods, Micaela wanders off as her brother prepares dinner. And, in one of the film’s most striking moments, a cut takes us from a medium shot of Micaela standing below a tree to a close-up of her hand running across the bark of its trunk, her fingers then reaching up into its leaves as the afternoon light filters through. Here, as elsewhere, Alonso highlights how even the simplest changes in framing can emphasize or suppress the film’s fictional demands.

On the morning of the third day—the last the film presents us with—Micaela wanders from Misael’s home once more. When he awakes, Misael goes in search of her. Unable to find her, he returns to the hut and looks despondently through a plastic bag full of medications that Micaela was meant to take. The image is a sign of the times, indexing not just the closure of the fictional local asylum and its effect on the siblings’ respective lives but also the collapse of various real-life systems of social support in Argentina over the past few decades. The political force of the moment, which accentuates the burden placed on the most vulnerable, is unmistakable. But beyond this, what Alonso shows us here is that to traverse the boundaries of fiction and documentary is not, in the end, to leap over an unbridgeable gulf but simply to exploit the most elemental fact of the cinema—its capacity to modulate our perception of what things change and what stays the same.

New York Film Festival 2026:
Dao
Dir. Alain Gomis, France/Senegal/Guinea-Bissau, Janus Films

Cut down from 200 hours of footage gathered from two extended-family rites staged in Guinea-Bissau and France, Dao is heady and lends itself to discussion along academic lines: postcolonial identity, ritual, patriarchy. But it wears its themes lightly, being largely content to accumulate three-plus hours of bodies in motion and people in conversation. Director Alain Gomis put his mostly nonprofessional cast through character-based rehearsals and created long-form set pieces and roughly scripted scenarios for them to improvise their way through; Dao’s larger structural concerns are simply in the air that the characters breathe, as invisible and ubiquitous as oxygen.

You might characterize Dao as a vérité documentary of fictional circumstances, though it also lays its mechanics bare, in the manner of a hybrid film. In the opening scenes, Gomis auditions a number of middle-aged French women of African descent, sitting them down in front of a white background, explaining the film to them (“You’re going to be a real fake family”), and inviting them into conversations about their lives, their upbringings and struggles, their attitudes to their relatives, and what independence means to them.

The focus soon narrows to Katy Correa, who stands out from the preliminary getting-to-know-you chats for her captivating stillness, and is soon, via the film’s liquid editing rhythms, rehearsing with her scene partners. Then, just as abruptly, she’s found in Guinea-Bissau, where her character, Gloria, was born, and to which she now returns, alongside her now European siblings, to bury her father. With Gloria is her daughter Nour (fellow newcomer D'Johé Kouadio), the child of Katy’s Arab ex-husband. Nour doesn’t speak the local Creole, but is welcomed into the family by her wizened grandmother and other relatives, who share in her excitement over her impending marriage.

Nour’s wedding comprises the other half of the film; Gomis cuts between the twin multi-day ceremonies and celebrations throughout. The single, rather solitary Gloria is ambivalent about her daughter’s romantic inclinations—we initially see Correa and Kouadio rehearsing a conversation in which Gloria, presumably speaking from experience, tries to convince Nour to hold off on committing herself a little longer. But she can’t argue with the bond between Nour and James (Mike Etienne), which develops in rehearsals before a swift cut to the two of them zooming along in a convertible, horn honking, flag-waving bridesmaids and groomsmen trailing in a raucous convoy.

Both the funeral and the wedding are marked by chanting and dances, at once choreographed and euphoric, whether to handmade drums or the Fugees; there is feasting and drinking to excess, and there are secular rituals, such as the slicing of the wedding cake, as well as folk-religious ones involving the veneration of effigies. In such juxtapositions, pointed but not editorialized, Dao reveals itself as a docufictional companion piece to Harun Farocki’s In Comparison, which simply documents the various procedures for manufacturing bricks in the global South and North. Historical flows of capital and people are concentrated into Gomis’s human-scaled compositions: a little girl in a pink dress nodding off at a wedding reception at a French country villa, or an entire African clan wearing heat-pressed t-shirts of their late patriarch’s face as part of a mourning process that also involves butchering goats and cooking them for the entire village. The disparate elements of the film are connected by a languorous Afro-jazz score by Abdullah Ibrahim and Keïta Janota that helps to give Gomis’s long scenes a rhythmic, distended, overflowing texture.

To play multiple generations of characters, Gomis cast many members of his own family, who were given dramatic outlines on set across a shoot split between ten days in Guinea-Bissau and ten in France. (The footage was gathered by three credited cinematographers.) Gomis plants a few experienced film actors among them, including his frequent collaborator Samir Guesmi as Nour’s father and Gloria’s ex; late in the film, the mother and father of the bride share a prickly, rueful conversation about gender roles and expectations, their reflections on the limits of their assimilation clouding their hopes for their daughter.

If you didn’t know which of Correa and Guesmi has been acting in films since the 1980s, you wouldn’t be able to tell. Gloria is a daughter at the funeral and a mother at the wedding; in Africa she is among the ones who left, in Europe she is an immigrant. Correa’s stoic gaze matches her liminal status; her aura of wounded skepticism makes her seem both outsider and insider, observer and participant, and this does much to draw out the dual perspective of Gomis’s film, which is both analytic and experiential.

One preoccupation that emerges through Gloria is a dissatisfaction with codes of masculine behavior on either side of the diaspora. She observes the gendered division of grief work in Guinea-Bissau, which involves the women of the clan sleeping on the floor and serving men as they drink (Zambian Welsh filmmaker Rungano Nyoni examined the darkest implications of this binary in 2024’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, a study of abuse and its enabling). At the wedding, her brothers get into heated, liquor-lubricated disagreements over outdated sexual norms, while a family black sheep raises eyebrows when he arrives late with a heavily pregnant white girlfriend. More than any inciting incident, fights seem to break out when someone peacockishly impedes another’s personal space to demand an apology or offer ostentatious forgiveness for a slight neither party can actually remember (no one is ever mad until well after the shoving starts).

This is a film in which a kids’ soccer game is overtaken by progressively older boys and men—but also one in which Gloria ends up on the pitch as well, the whole wedding party cheering her on as she takes a penalty kick. In its tonal range, Dao has sufficient vitality to live up to its opening epigraph, which defines the title as “a perpetual and circular movement which flows in everything and unites the world.” Another recent film set in Guinea-Bissau, Pedro Pinho’s I Only Rest in the Storm, also sketched an outline of European and African cultures in conversation through its elaborately worked-out background action and long running time. But while that film was more thesis-driven, centering its loose-hanging drama around an oblivious Westerner, Dao is simply an open world. Gomis’s camera wanders through it, at once electrified and relaxed.

New York Film Festival 2026:
Misty Green
Dir. Chris Rock, U.S., A24

[Warning: Spoilers ahead.]

Those who know Chris Rock primarily for his stand-up comedy may be surprised that his latest directorial effort is being released by A24, whose brand retains an imprimatur of cool despite a pivot to the middlebrow. Unlike most movies made by comedians, he’s not the top-billed star, and though there are a handful of jokes, Misty Green is firmly a drama. A study of Rock’s directing filmography reveals a cinephilic strain. I Think I Love My Wife is an adaptation of Chloe in the Afternoon, one of Éric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales. (The morality is largely swapped out for misogyny. More fatally, pre-recession New York just isn’t as stylish as 1970s Paris.) His last movie, 2014’s Top Five, starring Rock as a comedian whose attempt to be taken seriously flops disastrously, is a charming Manhattan walk-and-talk that channels Woody Allen by way of Before Sunrise, even if curdled by a retrograde attitude towards its female characters. A dozen years later, he has taken that film’s scenario not as a cautionary tale but as a personal challenge.

Equally indebted to Magnolia and Dreamgirls, Misty Green strives to be a multi-faceted character study revealing the dark underbelly of Los Angeles, where artistic ambitions run up against financial need. When we first meet Misty Green (Rosalind Eleazar), she’s being kicked out of her Santa Monica condo, which is not really hers. She was seeing a married man who allowed her to live there, but now he’s dead, and his furious widow (Amy Landecker) is ready to sell the apartment. Misty is given a week to move out, and the film largely takes place within these seven days.

Misty is an actress, but at the moment it's more accurate to say that she's unemployed. After winning an Emmy in 2009—for playing “the Black one” on a network television program about flight attendants—she flamed out of the industry, garnering a reputation for on-set clashes and mixing business with pleasure. An exasperated Misty, who is biracial, complains: “I’m too Black to be with Leo, too white to be with Damson,”—the actor best known for playing second fiddle to Brad Pitt in F1 is somehow, in this film’s universe, famous enough to warrant a mononym—“I’m not a nepo baby, I’m not a Brit.” It’s a snappy line, and the way Eleazar, who is British, delivers it comes off as a rehearsed excuse, blaming an industry problem instead of accounting for her own behavior. (Left unsaid, but well understood, is that male actors can get away with being difficult.) She earns a bit of money from recording videos on Cameo and a regular singing gig at the Hollywood Roosevelt, but despite the appearance of success—prolific drug habits, an oft-remarked-upon Birkin bag, that luxury apartment—she’s short on cash.

Pressure keeps on mounting with the re-emergence of Misty’s brother Jay (Daniel Kaluuya), just released from a stint in psychiatric care to treat his bipolar disorder, while her bestie Naomi (Anna Kendrick) copes with a dilemma of love versus lust. Offering temptation is Zach (Adam Driver), a hard-partying friend with benefits who tells Misty that these days, all the action is in Dubai, where she could earn six figures by spending the night with a prince. (Hollywood: Babylon no more.) There’s also a citywide manhunt for the murderer of a USC co-ed; throughout the film we hear reports of police pulling over any man caught driving while Black, and Jay becomes ensnared in this search. (Call it Chekhov’s traffic stop.) This grab bag of social-issue side quests, which makes Misty Green sprawl as much as its setting, cheapens the value of its title character’s hustle: her material goals—fame, a new lease—pale beside the struggles of those around her, relegating Misty to a passenger in what’s supposed to be her own drama.

Rock has worked in entertainment for more than 40 years, and his film is most persuasive when using that experience to examine the mechanics of how celebrity, even at the B-list level, gives Misty protections that others are not afforded. She gets into a car crash, with alcohol, weed, coke, and fentanyl detected in her system. The attending physician doesn’t report this to the police because she grew up watching Misty’s TV show; she instead asks the bruised star for a selfie. Misty is only allowed her seven-day grace period to leave the apartment after the widow realizes who Misty is; she’s also a big fan.

Though mired in a slump, Misty remains confident in her acting abilities, even if oblivious to her diminished standing. After hearing about a Dreamgirls remake in the works, she blithely remarks that “If I’m not Deena,” the ingénue role played by Beyoncé in the 2006 movie, “I’m not doing it.” She doesn’t realize that she's now an Effie (the Jennifer Hudson part), who similarly seeks to resurrect her career. Helming the project is Jordan (Chris Rock), her former director and old fling, who just might be able to offer her the second chance of a lifetime. His anachronistic attire—tilted fedora, waistcoat sans suit jacket—is going for Jamie Foxx in Dreamgirls but comes across as Ne-Yo circa 2008. This is the first time Rock wrote a script that doesn’t feature himself as the lead, though he still can’t help but pull the spotlight towards his character, derailing scenes with a tight 30 seconds of his stand-up shtick. (It’s not unlike Bradley Cooper’s showboating sidekick, a fella named “Balls,” in last year’s Is This Thing On?)

On multiple occasions, someone declares Misty to be a brilliant talent. At the start of a potentially life-changing audition for Dreamgirls, Jordan reassures everyone, “We know Misty can act.” The viewer doesn’t, and we never get to see her fully make use of her powers. This audition scene could have been the prime moment. Misty begins singing a mournful piano arrangement of “One Night Only,” and the camera begins to zoom in on her face. Rock then makes the fatal error of flashing back to events we saw barely an hour ago, not trusting Eleazar to hold our attention when it’s her talent that is never in doubt. Though she’s a veteran of the stage and appeared in various screen projects, it’s her first time leading a movie. Eleazar skillfully navigates Misty’s internal contradictions, adding more depth than what’s on the page. When she steps outside of that audition room into the California sun, she starts dancing, knowing she killed it. It’s a fleeting moment of pure joy, which Eleazar renders as a full-body unburdening.

Misty lands her dream role as Deena (it would have been stronger dramaturgy had she switched to Effie), but the good news comes at the same time her brother has landed in serious legal trouble after a police stop gone wrong. The low pay rate of scale-plus-ten won’t cover what she owes to the lawyer representing Jay, and she’s already pawned off her much-coveted Birkin. Zach’s Dubai offer, once easy to refuse, starts to look like the only sure thing. She skips out on her flight to the Dreamgirls set and hops on a private jet, following her “secure the bag” survival instinct reinforced by L.A. itself: a city of red carpets and homeless encampments, where her borrowed condo affords a view of the Pacific on one side and dumpster divers on the other.

Awaiting Misty in Dubai is a cavalcade of escalating indignities, a superfluous detour in an already overstretched film. Made to wear the stewardess uniform from her old TV show, she is taken to a party where she brawls with women for the cash and Birkin bags thrown into the crowd. The sequence ends with a visit to the prince’s bedroom, the final punishment for her unrepentant hedonism. The specifics of their encounter are mercifully kept off-screen, but Misty’s blank expression on the jet the morning after says enough.

With the same misogynistic streak that plagued his earlier filmography, Rock reduces the film’s two significant female characters to noxious stereotypes, particularly in how their arcs resolve. He makes an earnest effort to paint a portrait of a woman undone by her impulses, but he can’t overcome his own. Naomi weighs her desire for Black men against the financial security her bland white boyfriend can offer, a choice she cements by terminating a pregnancy that resulted from one of her trysts. Misty’s arc, for all its incidents, resolves no differently: only by giving something up does she earn the film’s (and Rock’s) approval. Her decision to trade Deena for Dubai is portrayed as both moral downfall and character growth; it’s the first time Misty puts someone else’s needs before her own, and, tellingly, the only time her choice looks like virtue rather than vice. Agency, for the women in Misty Green, comes with a catch: you can have it if it’s spent on somebody else.

Finally, Rock feels compelled to lighten the mood, veering off into a satirical commercial in which Ice-T pitches luxury tents for the homeless. This coda, two years later, finds Misty teaching fitness classes at an Equinox, still trading on an Emmy she won during Obama’s first term. Jay got a big settlement from his racial profiling suit against the city; the real killer of that USC student, it turns out, was a white guy. By all outward appearances, she’s at peace with being out of the acting game. She got the bag, and the cost was one night only.

New York Film Festival 2026:
Behemoth!
Dir. Tony Gilroy, U.S., Searchlight Pictures

Surprisingly for a movie that turns out to be so gentle on its protagonist, Behemoth! begins where Tár ended. A classical-music star finds himself in straitened circumstances, reduced to playing commercial gigs for new media, beneath his talents and far from any symphony hall. Settling into the Barbra Streisand Scoring Stage on the Sony lot, cellist Alex Serian (Pedro Pascal) is met with vigorous handshakes and incredulity. He’s back; what is he doing here, man; what happened to the Chicago Symphony; where’s his pedigreed cello? The younger woman in the second chair is less happy to see Alex—some sort of reputation precedes him.

Alex has a cover—he’s caring for his sick mother—but the reason his cello is gone is messier, and has to do with the peculiar circumstances of his thief-in-the-night departure from Chicago. One of the stars of the symphony, he had been sleeping with Carol (Olivia Wilde), the wife of its leading donor, possibly hastening his return to Los Angeles. (The symphony fundraiser who reams out Alex for his dalliance with such an important backer is played by the formidable Kate Lyn Sheil, microindie queen of the Obama era, and what a thrill it is to see her onscreen for the first time in three and a half years.) On the soundstage, Alex settles in to play some score cues for a spy film, and this becomes the soundtrack for his Chicago escape, genre music for a genre chase scene in which Alex, eluding the woman scorned via the back stairs, ends up commandeering an off-duty cab and sending the driver into the snowy night, where it’s t-boned at an intersection, costing Alex his instrument and sending him home chastised and scarred.

Back in his hometown, Alex does the rounds of his mother’s nursing home and family storage unit, meeting old acquaintances and reopening old wounds as the movie's hopscotching chronology reassembles the jumbled pieces of his lonely life. A flashback-driven male memory piece, in which a difficult man revisits lost lovers and professional disappointments, Behemoth! could almost be called Tame Strawberries—the mode is therapeutic, and writer-director Tony Gilroy is quite fond of his wandering troubadour.

Romantic entanglements such as Carol, and their risky imbalances of power and position, are part of the pattern of Alex’s life, though her hard feelings, so emphatic in that opening scene, portend no guilt on his part. Wilde, who with her self-amused feline eyes is a naturally predatory screen presence, sports a leopard-print coat when stalking Alex’s apartment, and eventually tracks him down in Los Angeles; he really is her prey. Earlier in the film, when Alex is playing in Dallas, the much younger violinist Natalia (Eva Victor), aware that he slept with her old Juilliard roommate during her conservatory days, flirtatiously chastises him for charming the symphony’s box-tanned society-wife donors: “You’re a monster.” Especially because the line is delivered by Victor, the writer-director of campus #MeToo drama Sorry, Baby, we might expect the irony of this mock-j’accuse to deepen and curdle, but the two fall first into bed and then into a relationship—which she ends, in favor of her own married would-be patron. The most direct blow she can land in an almost incoherent breakup argument is “Fuck you for letting this happen.” (Victor appears in two scenes; in a late-movie montage, we see a shot from what would presumably have been a third, and might have clarified how exactly this character became the one that got away.)

Later in the film, when he rekindles things with an old flame, Alex reveals that he lost his virginity at age 13 to a 20-year-old music teacher. The grooming he was subjected to was not merely sexual: the child of a harpist-heiress (JoBeth Williams) and a resentful career studio musician (Hank Azaria), Alex was destined for the greatness that eluded them both, beginning with a childhood appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson that now embarrasses him. The first sound we hear is the dissonant plucking of a harp, suggestive of his mother’s bitterness and fraying lucidity, and Azaria makes a meal of his sole scene, as a ranting hepcat resentful of the excellence he forced on his son, and which opened a gulf between the two of them. Alex’s brother, Andy (Will Arnett), rebelled in a different way, becoming a rock-and-roller and remaining mired in a perpetual adolescence—I counted at least three chains of distinct precious metals glinting through the unbuttoned collar of his Henley shirt in one scene, and he drives a vintage Alfa Romeo. An earlier bit of character exposition had established that Andy crashed his dad's prized Alfa as a teenager—there is no such thing as a stray line of dialogue in Gilroy’s script.

Michael Clayton, Gilroy’s directorial debut, was a well-made ’70s-throwback paranoid thriller that caught the recessional zeitgeist in 2007, and 2009’s Duplicity was a clever corporate caper, less substantial but intricately plotted. He subsequently directed a Bourne sequel (having cowritten the first three films in the franchise), but his touch has lately been more present on television, as the showrunner of Andor, the Star Wars show that everyone swears is good. Directing his fourth feature, a decade and a half after his third, he takes a renewed pleasure in formal play; he anchors the flashback structure of Behemoth! with Alex in the studio recording disconnected snippets of movie music; the music, which is invariably fluent in Hollywood cliché, seems to conjure the flashback and set its tone. Additionally, Alex is surrounded with music, classical and otherwise; a recording of one of Serian père’s cartoon music cues happens to score a bit of slapstick business with Andy and his angry wife chasing each other around a kitchen table like Tom and Jerry, and a piano performance by an unsullied child prodigy hits Alex like a non-diegetic Oscar-clip swell.

All this is clever, and notionally ironic, but thematically insubstantial. Many of the flashbacks, such as that opening chase, take on a heightened, air-quotes quality, but Alex’s life really is a movie: he wears a tuxedo for work and women throw themselves at him like he’s James Bond. For almost the entire running time, we are waiting for the other shoe to drop, for this hurt person to hurt people, but Alex is guilty of nothing more than bobbing through life, floating on the current. Pascal, his leonine hair windswept or dyed or cropped to keep up with the film’s continuity, is majestically handsome but also sad-eyed and effacing; viewers can and do project onto him, and read bemusement or fondness into his general sympathetic passivity. To those real housewives in Dallas, Alex appears sly and caddish, while to a musical mentee, he’s paternal; he’s equally happy to make a suggestive comment or a dad joke, to let his partner call the tune. Pascal has a Teflon charisma, never causing friction and never allowing anything or anyone to stick to him. Alex is isolated by his talent and closed off to the world by his trauma; the role could be a way for our least problematic leading man to subvert our expectations, to at least madden us with his diffidence as he seems to enrage the thinly written Carol and Natalia, but that’s not the route the movie takes.

Gilroy comes from an artistic family, as well. He and his brothers, including both writer-director Dan and Behemoth!’s editor Jon, are like Alex and Andy following in the footsteps of their father, playwright and screenwriter Frank Gilroy. (One of his memoirs is titled Writing for Love and/or Money, though unlike the Serian patriarch, he was no hack—he won a Pulitzer in 1965.) In its portrait of a talent subject to the whims and manipulations of people and forces beyond his control, Behemoth! seems to be a lament for the permanently conditional status of a professional in the arts. The film knows about postproduction workflows and entertainment-business economics; Spotify is “vapor,” says Andy, whose residuals are drying up, and in a Los Angeles that’s never fully recovered from COVID, studio hands like Alex have to play gender-reveal parties for extra cash. Appropriately, the film premieres against the backdrop of the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger, the looming specter of further dwindling output from consolidating major studios, and more jobs lost once David Ellison forces his AI interests on Hollywood.

But in defiance of the dark clouds spotted on the horizon for the culture industry, Gilroy ultimately plays Alex out on a note of hope. He is deft at the drip-drip of narrative reveals, which clarify key relationships at satisfying moments; the film's climax brings Alex fully into focus, revealing the void at the center of his self even as it fills it. Behemoth! is so well-constructed that this final, hopeful note resonates—Gilroy's classical filmmaking makes for easy listening.

New York Film Festival 2026:
Clarissa
Dir. Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri, Nigeria/U.S., NEON

Virginia Woolf had an immense, perhaps unequaled gift for summoning into being concrete worlds that she then dissolved, right there, before the mind’s eye. Her characters, using memories as conveyances to glide through the stubborn folds of time, give the reader everything and nothing—a wealth of minute, richly sculpted details whose ephemerality only increases the mystery of their being. Literature’s great unknowable extrovert, Mrs. Dalloway makes for a plum movie character, a buzzing queen of hustle-bustle who seems to want to tell us—and everyone around her—everything but betrays little of her heart’s desire, caught up in the regrets of a private, distant past even as she tends to the fancies of a hectic present. In their marvelous new screen adaptation of Woolf’s 1925 novel, Arie and Chuko Esiri allow Clarissa Dalloway to remain an enigma even as they update the sociohistorical context that gives her life.

In setting their story in contemporary Lagos, the Esiri brothers don’t transform so much as enhance and extract from Woolf’s class parable, creating a rich dialogue between post–WWI England and twenty-first-century Nigeria, both countries still rocked by war, which means death-wracked and hollow for those who saw bloodshed, blinkered and safe for anyone sheltered by privilege. Woolf critiqued and satirized her nation’s empire, but it’s still a charged gambit to reapply the themes, characters, and concerns of a cornerstone work of English literature to a country that had been under Great Britain’s colonialist thumb for more than a hundred years, until 1960. Taking place over one day, Woolf’s book, a crisscrossing network of many characters’ internal monologues rich with parallels and echoes, is set amidst the growing chaos of modernity, predominantly toggling between twinned protagonists marked by separate forms of ambivalence: Clarissa, the wealthy party-thrower preparing for an evening shindig at her home, and Septimus, the working-class former soldier, shell-shocked and unable to reintegrate into civilian life. The Esiris’ Clarissa, edited by Blair McClendon (Aftersun) with an astonishing spatial and temporal clarity, exists in its own specific emotional and social maelstrom, moving back and forth between the unsettled mindscapes of its particular incarnations of Dalloway and Septimus, each an emissary of a very different part of a rapidly changing city: Sophie Okonedo’s tightly coiled upper-class wife and mother, and Fortune Nwafor’s traumatized veteran of the Nigerian Army.

Mrs. Dalloway wears the author’s comfortable contempt of British empire as easily as a springtime shawl; early on, Woolf has Clarissa’s eyes scan over a table at an outdoor bazaar to notice “Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all spread open”—the former referring to a series of autobiographical books popular in the twenties, the latter apparently a satirical invention of Woolf’s. Yet when put side by side, both seem intended to poke fun at the named author, the former prime minister’s wife and outspoken opponent of women’s suffrage. By putting Mrs. Asquith next to a book on big game hunting in Nigeria (she was unlikely to ever set foot there, during or after her husband’s reign), Woolf summons a coupled image that feels key to her feelings on the way British aristocracy treated its colonies as sport and leisure. Precisely, one hundred years later, Arie and Chuko Esiri have made independent Nigeria the central concern of a faithful reimagination and reconsideration of Woolf’s book, which Chuko first read and was enraptured by as a teenager in, aptly, a British boarding school.

At the outset, Woolf has Clarissa wander the class-dissolved crossings of Piccadilly in Westminster; the Esiris’ opening credit sequence, set to a cover of the plaintive American folk classic “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” gives a kaleidoscopic view of the streets of contemporary Lagos, teeming with vendors, traffic, and construction. Living on the periphery of the city in a fortress of privileged solitude that’s flanked by both calming bushels of pink blossoms and the rattling skeletons of rising buildings, Okonedo’s Clarissa, a child of generational wealth, starts her long day’s journey into the past before 6 a.m. We gradually get just enough detail about her domestic life to understand the entrenched family dynamics: strained relations with her ramrod, analyst husband Richard (Jude Akuwudike), detachment from her largely invisible grown daughter. Her here-and-now becomes secondary to her long-ago—as the day wears on and she puts the finishing touches on her elaborate party, we come to realize it will be less a normal reunion of friends than an assemblage of ghosts: the potential lover she rejected, Peter (David Oyelowo in the present, Toheeb Jimoh in the past); the one-time lover who was perhaps never meant to be, Sally (Nikki Amuka-Bird and Ayo Edebiri); the sweet-natured boor who provided an essential glue in her long-lost group of friends, Ugo (Danny Sapani and Kehinde Cardoso). Hovering even more ominously amidst all these interwoven characters is Septimus, whose severe post-war social alienation and relationship with his long-suffering wife, the tailor Aisha (Modesinuola Ogundiwin), form a counterposed narrative that is also the film’s spine. As in Woolf’s original vision, these figures drift in and out of the past, each of them somehow central and incidental at once, the narrative genuflecting to the characters’ subjective, timeless experiences, so that the word “flashback” all but loses its meaning in the stew of unbound experience.

Clarissa’s initial obsessive fixation on minutiae—reprimanding a servant for setting out the wrong dishes, arguing with a worker on the placement of a decorative wall mosaic—gives an early impression of imperiousness. Yet Okonedo’s miracle of a performance will short-circuit any easy reading of Clarissa, whose fixation on control is not given any simplistic psychological or even class-bred framework. With her symphony of exquisite pauses, further suspended in time by the muted, single tones of her flowing house dresses and tight, swept-back cornrows, Okonendo is at once meditative and anxious, self-contained and ready to pounce. Her entire bearing gathers up the ghosts, the youthful events we see on screen already playing out on her unsettled face and anticipatory bearing. Refuge and prison, her lovingly appointed home, with its perfectly placed objects captured in hushed cutaways, is itself a family heirloom, an indication of her geographical and emotional remoteness. And it’s here, in this home, both enchanting and stultifying, with its capacious, waterfront backyard and expressive reflective surfaces, that the Esiri brothers, working with cinematographer Jonathan Bloom, are at their most compositionally striking, placing Okonedo in the frame as an ambivalent, swanning spirit.

It’s almost 9:00 a.m. when we meet Septimus, scraping his fingernails with the trusty straight razor he seems to always carry as both warning and comfort. Living in tight quarters with Aisha in a more teeming, working-class, predominantly Muslim section of Lagos, Septimus is, like Clarissa, haunted, yet his apparitions are more recent, violent, and permeable to the fabric of life. Evans, a former Army friend who, as we come to realize, was killed in a terrifying moment of mental breakdown, makes regular visitations. Unable to socially reintegrate from his bouts of depression and PTSD—afflictions he claims not to have to the psychiatrist his increasingly concerned wife escorts him to—Septimus exists in a constant time loop. His experiences with the Nigerian Army in their attempts to “engage and neutralize” the jihadist Islamist extremist group Boko Haram, and the resultant horrors he has seen, have left him a shell. Knowing the sad fate of Woolf’s Septimus, an afflicted World War I veteran, helps ground these parallel sequences, which may seem out of place or disjointed from Clarissa’s “main” narrative (in the most provocative way). Yet the Esiris give these scenes a jolt of contemporary horror, a reminder that Woolf never wrote a simple story about a rich lady throwing a party. Mrs. Dalloway and Clarissa, perhaps the greatest screen adaptation of any Woolf novel, both tell us that modern life is always a constant negotiation of social composure and simmering brutality.

The best kinds of literary adaptations forgo emulative faithfulness in favor of regeneration, drawing on the artist’s own endemic experience and detail. The specificity of the Esiris’ vision comes into focus incrementally, breathing fresh life and giving new shape to the timeless qualities that have made Woolf’s writing transcendent. In reimagining Clarissa, the filmmakers ensure that her relationships to the erstwhile friends and lovers of her past do not exist in a sociohistorical vacuum. One initial fracture in the bond between Clarissa and Peter (played with wonderful youthful anxiety in flashback by India Amarteifio and Jimoh) is that she was critical of his poetry, which takes as its theme the discord that results from colonialism; Clarissa implores Peter not to use the word “primal” in his writing because it’s a loaded term for Black representation and, she says, “words have meaning.” Clarissa’s world is substantially one of young Nigerian artists and intellectuals, spanning the end of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, reckoning with art and politics (Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart is heralded as still being a central national text by Clarissa and Peter at one point) and the legacies of British rule. Throughout the film, Nigeria is referred to as a country defined by dualities—North and South, quiet and noisy, Christian and Muslim, wealthy and poor—a splintered nation that, as Richard’s patron, the rich politician’s wife Lady Maryam insists, “is better as one.” (A political debate over whether Nigeria should split into two religious and geographical factions has been taking place in the country for a good part of this century.) Clarissa is itself too defined by contradictions to plead for simple reconciliation.

These divided worlds bump against each other only once, very briefly. Aisha, accompanied by her loyal Septimus, turns up at Clarissa’s doorstep. In this fleeting moment, we learn that Aisha is Clarissa’s tailor, here to adjust her client’s outfit for the evening. Clarissa and Aisha walk off to her bedroom, leaving Septimus alone in the foyer. Notably incongruous in Clarissa’s cloistered, tranquil world of privilege, Septimus drifts out of frame, leaving the room momentarily uninhabited, a ghost house waiting to be. He wanders back, and against billowing white curtains, retreats into the backyard, a phantomlike window reflection. Waiting for his wife’s return, he takes in the alien environment, which is still being prepared for the night’s elaborate gathering. The Esiris never show us Clarissa and Aisha interacting within the house, kept entirely off-screen as if to underline that theirs isn’t a true moment of connection but a customary, monetary transaction. Instead, we stay on Septimus, the lost soul, always neither here nor there. Later, in the film’s final moments, Clarissa will dance to Sir Victor Uwaifo’s seventies Nigerian pop tune “Happy Day.” The music is upbeat, joyous, but poignant—we will be unable to forget Septimus, the kindred spirit Clarissa will never know.

Bucking Fastard
Dir. Werner Herzog, U.S./Ireland, no distributor

In the history of cinema twins, the image of the Grady sisters standing side-by-side in The Shining is perhaps the most indelible, and so, the most frequently imitated. With their prissy, baby blue frocks and faces of pallid porcelain, they look just like haunted dolls brought to life. “Come and play with us, Danny,” the pair exhort the film’s frightened young protagonist, their plea issued in ominous stereo.

Even Werner Herzog is not above a nod to these sweet little victims of the Overlook Hotel. His quixotically plotted double portrait Bucking Fastard opens on the visages of Kate and Rooney Mara, which come into focus as they murmur, also in unison, about a dream of chirping birds. The characters gazing into the camera are Joan and Jean Holbrooke, mirror images of one another but, like the actresses who play them, “sisters, not twins,” as they later correct a gawker. Like the unfortunate Grady girls, Joan and Jean exhibit a manner of dress that belongs to a prior generation, appearing throughout the film in beautifully layered ensembles that incorporate high necklines, cinched waists, and long, full skirts; Gunne Sax by way of Grey Gardens. The film offers no clear-cut reason for their anachronistic dress—they are not ghosts frozen in the fashion of their day, as in the Kubrick film—but the implication is clear: these are women out of time, out of place. And yet, though there is a spectral air about them, a whiff of something witchy, they are also the film’s heroines: as always in Herzog’s fables, the aberrant occupy the bleakly charmed center.

Uncannily synchronized in speech, movement, and dress, Joan and Jean are no unheimlich fabulation. Rather, they are modeled on Freda and Greta Chaplin, real-life twins, not (just) sisters. The Chaplins were briefly thrust into the public eye in the early ’80s when their neighbor and—as Herzog asserts in the section concerning his own encounters with them in his 2022 autobiography, Every Man for Himself and God Against All—former lover, a truck driver named Ken Iveson, sought a restraining order against them. Iveson had cut off their dalliance after getting married; the Chaplin women had allegedly responded with a colorful campaign of harassment, peaking with them throwing themselves in front of his vehicle. Permitted to take the witness stand together in court, they vehemently and despite considerable evidence refuted Iveson’s claims, in one especially heated moment spitting out the indelible spoonerism that Herzog, decades later, would crib for his film’s title. But first, after the Chaplins lost the case (they were given a suspended jail sentence of one month), the director persuaded them to let him take them out for fish and chips.

There were other symbiotic twins being dissected in the tabloids of the era: in San Diego, there was little Grace and Virginia Kennedy, aka Poto and Cabengo, the subjects of a 1980 documentary by Jean-Pierre Gorin, and in the U.K., sequestered in Broadmoor Hospital, June and Jennifer Gibbons. As fueled by isolation and unhappy circumstances, these girls developed cryptoglossic modes of communication to the point of becoming unintelligible to third parties. But the Chaplins’ double act is uniquely bizarre (if not uniquely unhappy in its origins—Herzog speculates in his book that their father was sexually abusive), suggesting less a pair’s construction of a private world than an attempt to share a single identity between two people.

“You haven’t had any experience until I’ve had it too,” one Jeremy Irons tells another in Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg’s tale of twinned gynecologists with a habit of swapping identities—their duplicitous means of sidestepping unappealing duties and sharing oblivious women. The modus vivendi cultivated by the Chaplins, whose own portion of guile, as showcased in court, is probably best understood as a measure of their naiveté, was not so elegantly conceived. Certain moments in Bucking Fastard—Joan and Jean adjusting their headscarves by gazing at each other instead of a mirror, for instance, or wielding a vacuum between them and becoming distressed when the gap between two armchairs proves too narrow for both to pass through—strike as inspired bits of Herzogian whimsy, but are in fact borrowed directly from the Chaplins; these behaviors are “true” to them in the literal as well as the ecstatic sense.

Human duplicates are wont to stimulate a sort of glitch-in-the-matrix fascination, underlining as they do the material realities of our genetic coding. In Bucking Fastard, Herzog and his long-time cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger consistently balance Joan and Jean in the frame, in effect an extension of Herzog’s description of the Chaplins as “a Rorschach test ready to be folded in two at any moment.” Even scenes concerned with the most banal of actions are thus infused with a lightly surreal quality—but it is a testament to the skill of Kate and Rooney Mara, acting together for the first time, that Joan and Jean don’t come off as just a pantomime act drawn out to the length of a feature film. With an unexpected break in line delivery or a shared conspiratorial smile, they are able to gracefully, synchronously tilt the mood melancholic, then comedic, balancing the inherent contrivance of their roles with a prickly, beguiling dynamism.

Shifting the story from 1980s England to present-day Ireland, Bucking Fastard at first presents itself as a procedural. Speaking to their former lover in court—here, he’s a limo driver by the name of Gareth Mulroney, embodied by a suitably louche and loutish Orlando Bloom—Joan and Jean affirm, girlishly sincere, “You are the love of our lives.” To those gathered in the snug, dark-wood-paneled amphitheater, they entreat, “Is it a crime to love?”

In his six decades of filmmaking, throughout which he has moved fluidly between narrative and non-fiction, Herzog has almost always centered stories of men, and he remains most closely associated with those possessed of a singular, ill-conceived but all-consuming vision. His Joanie and Jeanie prove something like mad dreamers in the mold of Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, or Timothy Treadwell, but the great and impossible thing they are driven to pursue (their El Dorado, their Amazonian opera house) is the love of a man—specifically, Bloom’s drunken and obviously meritless limo driver. This feels a little retrograde, even in an era that has found an aspirational figure in the trad-wife.

At least their pursuit of love is allowed to take on an increasingly subversive and grandiose form, eventually manifesting in an obsessive quest to bore through a mountain by hand. (Never do Joan and Jean sound more like a mouthpiece for Herzog than when they declare that “Everybody should dig a tunnel through a mountain.”) What begins with the sisters enacting vengeful acts of petty arson around the neighborhood culminates in them cavorting in an ancient Slovenian cave garbed in wedding gowns and veils. If that transition—from grounded courtroom dramedy to metaphysical reverie—sounds difficult to pull off, actually watching the film will not convince you otherwise; unfolding in more or less discrete chunks, Bucking Fastard plays like a kind of exquisite corpse, its genus uncertain.

In literal terms, it is by the intercession of a CGI fox—whom Joan and Jean dub Cupid after he falls into their care, by way of a clunky environmental side plot involving a rabies outbreak and toxic gas—that the narrative makes its final swerve. In part because it’s also screening as part of New York Film Festival, the fox’s appearance for me called to mind Gone to Earth, Powell and Pressburger’s gorgeously tragic 1950 melodrama. In that film, Jennifer Jones plays Hazel Woodus, a ravishing but rough-hewn country girl caught between two awful men, her only faithful companion an adopted fox she calls Foxy. Hazel’s primal innocence causes her to chafe against the rules of courtship and matrimony, and the narrative duly punishes her for it. Neither can Joan and Jean flourish in society, where men are capable only of lust and armchairs are always positioned too close together. Herzog spares his heroines the cruel fate dealt Hazel—not to mention so many of his own flawed heroes—but the crystalline idyll he offers in its place feels more purgatorial than transcendent. While Herzog may have softened over the decades, become more tender in the stewarding of his characters, the world itself has not.

New York Film Festival 2026:
La Gradiva
Dir. Marine Atlan, France, 1-2 Special

Wilhelm Jensen’s 1903 novella Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy—or, more precisely, Freud’s 1907 psychoanalytic study of the text—helped establish the literary convention of ancient ruins as dreamscapes, with different fictional figures finding personal meaning in the eerily frozen remains. In the story, an archaeologist’s fixation on a woman depicted in an Ancient Roman relief, whom he names “Gradiva” (she who steps along), is quelled only when it leads him to recognize his love for his childhood friend. Giorgio Albertazzi and Alain Robbe-Grillet have previously adapted the novella into films. With La Gradiva, cinematographer-turned-feature-director Marine Atlan takes a looser approach, centering a troupe of high-schoolers who interface with Pompeii in vastly different ways.

These kids, members of a Latin class on a weeklong school trip to Naples, are nearing graduation and will soon be notified about their college acceptances. That knowledge is in the back of their minds as they tour the city and its archaeological sites, one of many ways the film lays the weight of both history and the future on their shoulders. La Gradiva at first presents itself as unhurried and unstructured, putting different configurations of the teens in various situations to see what their conversations draw out about the issues facing today’s French youth. There are also multiple lectures about Pompeiian art and artifacts. One at the Villa of the Mysteries highlights how consent is front of mind for modern youth, as the kids are perturbed by the apparent distress of the women in the frescoes.

Before Atlan and Anne Brouillet’s script eventually settles into a more conventional narrative, its dialogue style is often at odds with the naturalistic tone. A discussion of teachers’ unions and school standards is particularly broad, and the actors seem stilted by having to work as talking-point delivery systems. (As is often the case with political dialogue, a big issue is that everyone is way more coherent and articulate than most are in reality.) The cast is much more at ease in everyday interactions. The episodic framework gives many of the young actors in the ensemble at least one scene’s spotlight. Atlan cast newcomers as the students, and she gets impressively natural, unpressured performances out of them. As distractingly writerly as the extended conversations may be, they are a convincing social organism—the way they speak, walk, or even just lounge together to take in a lesson as if they’ve all truly known each other for years.

The emphasis is not primarily on the collective, though; every permutation of characters includes at least one of four leads. There’s the teacher, Madame Mercier (Antonia Buresi); burnout troublemaker Toni (Colas Quignard); the quiet and studious Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin); and Toni’s best friend James (Mitia Capellier-Audat), equally marked by his political and restless sexual pursuits. Fictional representations of kids, and especially teenagers, tend to invoke “types.” This is understandable, as young people, still figuring out who they are, tend to sort themselves into different, sometimes overlapping crowds. The problem is that movies and TV shows can be overly broad and several steps behind what real-world students are like. Only in the last decade or so does it feel like American pop culture finally broke away from high school character tropes that had been calcified since the ’80s, for instance. With Toni, Suzanne, and James, Atlan and Brouillet imbue familiar types of teens with much more specificity.

My informal survey of fellow New York Film Festival attendees, with respondents ranging from Generations X through Z, found that many saw themselves as Suzannes in high school. She’s isolated by defensive prickliness as much as by her introversion. James is a darker spin on the golden boy, his popularity rendered via how many other characters are tormented by their desire to fuck him, and how carelessly he treats them. The opening scene is James having sex with Angela (Hadya Fofana), whom he then coldly ghosts for the rest of the story. Toni wants him, as does Suzanne. In an eye-roller of a sequence that comes perilously close to smashing the film’s realism (and tipping it from extremely French to cartoonishly French), he and Madame Mercier, who is otherwise characterized by her professional aloofness from the kids’ immaturity, consider a dalliance.

The film devotes most of its time to Toni, who provides its strongest throughline. He doesn’t act the class clown with any broad pranks, but with myriad snide comments that compound his classmates’ and teacher’s irritation over the course of any given lecture. The authenticity is bracing; we’ve all known kids like this. But the movie also complicates this dynamic, as Madame Mercier is liable to snap only at Toni when another student is equally to blame for an outburst, even outright calling him dumb and publicly announcing she’s giving up on him. A movie rarely depicts how “bad kids” can be made into sin eaters for their peers.

Many of the film’s conversations loop back onto the state of French education, so it makes sense for it to cohere around someone whom that system has failed. In its increasing emphasis on Toni, La Gradiva reveals itself as a tragedy. But when the tragedy arrives, it’s curiously weightless—inevitable and almost perfunctory. For all we get to know about him, he doesn’t feel memorably distinct. He cruises on Grindr, pines after James, and neglects his schoolwork. He’s marked mainly by his fixation on his family’s roots in the area, and the rumor that he comes from fallen wealth. But all these qualities manifest like checklist items to help turn our sympathies toward Toni despite his obnoxious tendencies, instead of making him feel like a fully dimensional person.

The movie excels at showing how kids in general bounce off each other without us getting to know these kids. Atlan, acting as her own cinematographer with Pierre Mazoyer, is adept at watching them, flitting and cutting to capture microexpressions and gestures as they ripple through a group. But dramaturgy proves more difficult. Lacking a way to tie its ideas together, in the end, the film resorts to another format break with an incongruous bit of voiceover narration, culminating in a final line that acts like it’s gained thematic heft from the story but is, in truth, generic in sentiment. Despite having so many genuine moments, the film rarely coheres into a portrait of believable characters. The figures in the Roman frescoes feel more alive.

New York Film Festival 2026:
Once Upon a Time in Harlem
Dir. William Greaves and David Greaves, U.S., NEON

In spring 2024, the Metropolitan Museum of Art curated an exhibition dedicated to the Harlem Renaissance, bringing artworks on loan from historically Black institutions around the country into its cavernous halls, amounting to what was the largest exhibition of its kind in 40 years. I hurried uptown to see it. Titled “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” it featured the photography of James Van Der Zee, work by sculptor Augusta Savage, Jacob Lawrence’s paintings, and much more. After winding through the rooms and reaching the end of the exhibition, I was awed by Romare Bearden’s monumental six-panel collage “The Block” (1971). I first heard some of these names in grade school, during a short lesson on this landmark period in Black visual art, music, and literature. I don’t remember what I felt about these artists back then, beyond a hazy personal pride. Seeing the exhibition at the age of 30, the works stirred deeper, murkier feelings in me, while also transporting me right back to that childlike wonder. There was a certain romance about it, too, and not only because I was at the museum on a promising date. I saw myself reflected in these works, especially Samuel Joseph Brown Jr.’s “Self Portrait” (1941), a deep-blue watercolor of Brown gazing into a mirror. Looking at this painting, I wondered about the artist’s interiority. What did he see when he looked in the mirror? How did he comprehend his place in the world around him?

Once Upon a Time in Harlem brought me as close to answering those questions about the minds behind the Harlem Renaissance as one can possibly get to a movement that happened a century ago. The documentary emerges from the vision of late experimental and nonfiction filmmaker William Greaves (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One) and the cumulative effort of his family to shepherd his footage to screens after his death in 2014. Greaves had the idea to gather the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance to discuss and debate the legacy of the movement. In 1972, he threw and filmed a party at the home of legendary jazz musician Duke Ellington, with about two dozen of these important figures in attendance. Greaves was motivated by a desire to document the significance of an explosive intellectual boom that he felt had been underestimated. If the Met’s highly controversial 1969 exhibition “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America 1900–1968,” which famously didn’t include any paintings or sculptures by Black artists, was any indication, Greaves was right to be concerned about the possibility of erasure. Embarking on this project, then, rhymed with the vision of the time Greaves was reflecting on, a vision of Black thinkers, writers, artists, and musicians, to ignore white society’s weak interpretations and embrace the social responsibility and creative opportunity as the true shapers, storytellers, and historians of modern Black life.

The film opens with the party’s invitation, typed out on letterhead, and then we arrive at the fete in Ellington’s high-ceilinged townhouse on Nicholas Ave. as the guests do. The camera, manned by a crew of four, including Greaves’s son David, moves through the rooms somewhat passively, as an observer, though sometimes directly engaging with its subjects. When the camera stops on someone recognizable, like the heavyset, dark-skinned Van Der Zee, captured earlier at the piano in the opening sequence, the feeling is surreal, as if walking around inside one of his famous black-and-white portraits. The film is alive with historical figures who have long passed on. The specter of death doesn’t hang over the movie so much as suffuse it with a sense of urgency. Names of those who had already died by the time this was shot, like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen, are invoked and rhapsodized about, ensuring that their contributions wouldn’t be diminished, reflecting the seriousness with which the partygoers took Greaves’s mission to develop an oral history in real time.

So, what exactly do we mean when we talk about The Harlem Renaissance? It’s a fair question, considering that the term captures an idea more than represents what was happening in a literal sense; it only became known as the Harlem Renaissance after it was over. What it is, though, is an interdisciplinary creative movement spanning the 1920s to 1940s, in which Black modern art began to take shape. At the time, it was called the New Negro movement, coined by the writer and philosopher Alain Locke, who alongside W. E. B. Dubois was one of the most influential thinkers of the period. In 1925, Locke published the anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, and in the title essay he wrote of a burgeoning “spiritual emancipation” occurring under the noses of those driving the conversations surrounding racial progress, as the Great Migration brought Black people from the South into cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City, creating Black neighborhoods and cultural centers like Harlem. This “New Negro,” as Locke put it, was no longer creating art with the burden of kowtowing to racial stereotypes or even refuting them. The modern Black artist was determined to find and define himself, as in Brown’s “Self Portrait” painting, which has been described as a reflection of Dubois’s theory of double consciousness, or the idea that undergirding Black consciousness is a maddening collision of the perception of self with the ever-present awareness of the white gaze. Something expansive was waking up in Black people, Locke argued, and the evidence was in the art being made at the time.

Greaves’s documentary might be richer for an audience coming to the film with a few of these historical details already in tow. For example, I am kind of stunned, in retrospect, at the presence of conservative Black journalist George Schuyler—who sat cooly on the couch during the party as much of the conversation flew around him—once I went home and read his 1926 essay “The Negro-Art Hokum,” wherein he challenges the entire concept of Black art. In his view, African Americans can only produce European-influenced American art, and there are no distinguishing characteristics of Black art that can’t be explained away by regional conditions and historical circumstances. “Any group under similar circumstances would have produced something similar,” he wrote. At the party, Schuyler dismisses Langston Hughes’s rebuttal, “The Racial Mountain.” Using the example of a Black poet who yearns to be described as simply a “poet,” Hughes argued that perspectives like Schuyler’s, which seek to undermine the existence of a Black experience, conceal a bleaker truth: an implicit desire to be white.

One could imagine that at a party among his contemporaries, artists whose very careers proved Schuyler wrong, there’d be some gloating or simmering resentment, but if there was, it doesn’t appear in the film. After learning of that potent debate between Schuyler and Hughes, I wished it had been addressed more directly in the doc, which is to say that one limiting product of Greaves’s fly-on-the-wall conceit is that context is at times absent where it would have enriched understanding. Relatedly, after I later learned that the painter Richard Bruce Nugent, a big personality in a red turtleneck who leaps off the screen, was one of the few openly gay artists of the Renaissance, his presence at the party carried even more meaning. His queerness doesn’t come up in the film, though, nor does the important queer history of the period (Locke himself was gay). In that way, the artists and thinkers represented, seemingly closer than ever, still remain at a remove. In trying to wrap their arms around an entire era, the filmmakers occasionally sublimate individual histories and experiences.

There’s a convivial home video-like quality to the film, but the visuals themselves are purely cinematic. Shot on color 16mm and seemingly layered with a warm sepia filter, the film is made even more beautiful by the elegant threads of the ’70s, cast against a backdrop of exquisite interior architecture and design afforded by Ellington’s home. Her face framed by her spiky grey hair, Ida Mae Cullen, widow of the poet Countee Cullen and one of the most energetic speakers, wore a silver bracelet with spikes and a kente cloth across her body. Magazine editor Gerri Major wore both pearls and gold around her neck, and bracelets up to her elbows, bulbous rocks on her fingers. The men wore impeccably tailored suits with ties of polka dots, stripes, and paisley. The actor Leigh Whipper, in his late nineties, treated by the group with a reverence befitting his status as an elder, wore an overly baggy light brown suit with drooping lapels and a long cowboy bowtie. They sat and stood in a collegiate-looking sitting room with teal velvet drapes and certificates crawling up the wall, surrounding a dark mahogany mantel. Arguing, shouting, talking over one another, clutching cocktails that threatened to spill over, they discussed and debated the impact of the Harlem Renaissance, returning again and again to the relationship of art development and political struggle, as if orbiting around the topic might pull them closer to a definitive truth hovering just out of reach, something they might all agree on.

Greaves invited some of the guests to return to the house the next day, wearing the same clothing, and conducted one-on-one interviews. These are edited into the flow of the film, along with photography stills often deployed with split-screens. Greaves sat on this footage for a long time, returning to it over the course of his life. After his death, his wife and creative partner, Louise, revived the project, securing restoration funding from the Ford Foundation, and bringing in editor and producer Anne de Mare and archival producer Matt Hoffman. Louise died in 2023, at which point she passed the torch down to their granddaughter, Liani, to be the custodian of the post-production process. In the end, the final product of the film was just as much about remembering the Renaissance as it was about remembering Greaves, a beloved husband, father, and grandfather—a labor of love in the truest sense.

The film ends when the party does, as guests file out of the door and spill onto the street, the camera following them a short way, before cutting to shots of children around the neighborhood, on their stoops or walking down the sidewalk. It’s these children Greaves had in mind when setting out to make this film—not only as the future of Harlem but also as the recipients of history. In these final images, I was reminded of my own childhood encounter with these luminaries, whom I found hard to imagine as real embodied people, inspiring though their accomplishments were. I also thought, of course, of my day at the museum, two years ago, seeing their art production in full relief for the first time. Now this film has put living, vibrant faces and humanity to the venerated names, keeping their legacy alive and offering a new generation an opportunity to connect with a time that deserves to be endlessly reckoned with.

New York Film Festival 2026:
London
Dir. Sebastian Brameshuber, Austria, no distributor

Though it’s named after a place, Sebastian Brameshuber’s London is, first and foremost, a film about its lead actor, Bobby Sommer. He first appeared in a feature film as one of two leads in Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours (2012), playing a pension-aged former punk band manager working as a guard at an art museum in Vienna. Here as there, his worn, elegant face seems capable of listening with an almost superhuman patience; his Viennese German is supremely polite without a note of pretension. He seems wise, like he has everyone else’s best interests at heart, though there’s only so much he can do.

In London, Sommer (as “Bobby”) drives the West Autobahn between Vienna and Salzburg, picking up strangers for company and gas money along the way, facilitated by an unnamed rideshare app. The film’s opening beats are spent looking out the windshield from a fixed camera position. His first passenger hops in with McDonald’s in hand; he is a military conscript, we learn, on leave from Austria’s famed Gardebataillon. With the quick intimacy borne of a long car trip, he swiftly confesses his PTSD to Bobby, along with his skepticism of the Austrian army. The scene cuts between three angles: the windshield from a middle perspective, Bobby from the passenger’s perspective, and the passenger from Bobby’s perspective. It ends before the soldier is dropped off. There’s a pleasing simplicity to this structure. Rather like Sommer, it seems lab-designed for the best possible listening experience.

Though it henceforth cuts to rides in progress, London repeats the opening scene’s basic structure ten times. Not satisfied with the premium listening conditions of an extended car ride, Brameshuber opted to do away with surrounding traffic noise by shooting the film almost entirely in a studio, with carefully concealed rear projection plates of the Autobahn covering the three camera positions. For the most part, the production consisted of bringing actors—many, but not all, sourced from an open call—into the stationary car with Sommer, where they would have filmed conversations, usually taking from their own biography. In place of written dialogue, Sommer had only a few details about his character to work with, as was the case for one or two passengers, such as the conscript. Between each ride, we depart from the studio-bound Land Rover to watch Bobby pee, fill up his car, or sip coffee. These spare moments are shot handheld, giving the impression of someone popping a hole in a vacuum-sealed bag.

London exercises maximum restraint in the dispensation of details about Bobby. Every conversation starts from scratch, and Bobby is more comfortable listening than speaking about himself. Iteratively, we learn that he is traveling to visit a friend in Salzburg; his friend is in the hospital; his friend is named Arthur; Arthur had a stroke and has not woken up; Arthur and he played rock music together, decades prior, in London (hence the title). The backstories of his passengers are mostly organized around themes of migration and war, with two mildly funny cameos from a young person monologuing about the unintentional anticolonial masterpiece that is Avatar (2009) and experimental filmmaker Ted Fendt as a rather grating version of himself, hitching a ride to a spot on the Autobahn to photograph Nazi-era columns being torn down. Bobby listens, offering morsels of his own history every 15 minutes or so, edging us toward the full poignant reality of his situation.

The film lives and dies in these conversations, which are so unanimously tender and moving as to suggest a rideshare app that filters for conviviality and interesting family background. A long chat with a young Ukrainian woman lingers on the question of a lover Bobby left long ago when concerned for his independence. “And what have you done with your freedom?” she asks. “I still have it,” he responds after a beat. Later, speaking to a queer activist estranged from her family, he reflects on his relationship to aging: “It is not endless, this life….” The film conjures the magical highway consciousness of a thousand unknowable stories running parallel to one another, heartbreakingly circumscribed by the Autobahn lanes, and, here, the rigid camera angles and disciplined structural approach.

At the same time, the tasteful humanity and guarded exchange of vulnerabilities threaten to become oppressive, the intervals by which the film lets down its guard a touch too calculated. When Brameshuber uncorks the emotion, breaking his abstemious structure for a short musical reverie with “Pale Blue Eyes” (one of the Velvets’ most restrained songs), he hastens to cut the track short. London operates in a register of cultivated moderation particular to arthouse drama films and Germanic-speaking peoples. Its improvisations feel safe, minus any sense of potential hazard associated with picking up strangers. A Romanian passenger with whom Bobby doesn’t share a language arrives as a welcome rupture in the relentlessly affecting series of dialogues. To cast back to another melancholic road movie, Two Lane Blacktop (1971), one longs for Warren Oates to hail a ride and shake things up with a sense of mystery capable of being threatening or abrasive, rather than merely heartbreaking, but there are few surprises lurking on the roadside of Brameshuber’s pre-filmed highway.

London flirts with docufiction, but the proportion of reality it is able to admit is relatively small, by invitation only into Brameshuber’s studio, minus the risk of the open road. Fendt’s character introduces a sense of history, but the film demonstrates little interest in contemporary Austria. It feels convenient for the film’s tonal register that Bobby encounters only people with either sympathetic or unspoken political leanings, especially given the severe political polarization in the country. It is also odd that none of his riders, nor Bobby himself, ever openly discuss the gig economy in a film that is both concerned with migration and structurally dependent on a rideshare app. Indeed, clues about the driver’s economic situation are few and far between. Considering his relatively new Land Rover, it seems entirely possible that his incentive is less gas money than conversation, and the film shares this sense of humanism detached from material realities. Though you wouldn’t know it from watching London, traffic is loud, gas is expensive, and strangers can be dangerous—a film about the importance of listening feels bereft without a little noise.

New York Film Festival 2026:
Rose
Dir. Markus Schleinzer, Austria/Germany, MUBI

Some screen actors thrive on boundless transparency, while others excel at a reticence so abstruse that one might question whether their approach rightfully counts as acting. (For every Juliette Binoche, a Catherine Deneuve, if you will.) But what of the actor who uses clarity to conceal, who seems to lay it all bare in role after role, but whose directness is itself a smokescreen, a welcome mat leading to a home whose every door is locked? Behind each of Sandra Hüller’s most entrancing and indelible performances is a shadow performance, an inner sanctum of thought and feeling that belies her straight-shooting accessibility.

The brilliance of Hüller’s work in Anatomy of a Fall lies in her deliberate eschewal of mystery, a decision that troubles the film’s central question of whether a garrulous, open-faced, and temperamentally unmysterious protagonist might be hiding nothing save for mariticide. Entire dialogues play out in Toni Erdmann wherein Hüller’s corporate invader speaks as much as her scene partner yet all the while impishly weighing a vague idea, left unspoken. Since her breakthrough role as a pious and possibly possessed woman in Requiem, a devastating tour de force that suggested Carrie White as played by Harriet Andersson, Hüller has earned her place on a singlehanded shortlist of our greatest working actors. But she has primarily done this by foregrounding a legibility of fathomless, often isolated depths. One never loses the sense that each of her characters is the bearer and nurturer of a secret that belongs to Hüller and Hüller alone.

This makes the actress an exceedingly apt choice for the starring role in Markus Schleinzer’s historical drama Rose. Hüller plays the title character, a woman living as a man in 17th-century Germany at the tail-end of the Thirty Years’ War. At the film’s outset, Rose staggers off the battlefield where she fought alongside her countrymen and wanders into a sleepy protestant village, curiously possessing the deed to a long-unoccupied farmstead of which she quickly assumes ownership. Combat has made her a sight to behold: the right side of her face appears to be partially paralyzed and bears a crudely mended scar along the cheek, the result of a bullet taken on the frontlines. Rose wears the bullet on a chain around her neck, habitually chewing on this token of valor that serves as irrefutable proof of her masculine bona fides to her farmhands and neighbors. One of these neighbors, a forbidding elder patriarch (Godehard Giese), shakes up Rose’s solitary domesticity by giving her Suzanna (Caro Braun), his credulous adult daughter, as a wife in exchange for use of his land. Rose forges an awkward yet peaceable existence with Suzanna, even fulfilling his breeding obligations with a homemade strap-on that, to no one’s surprise but Rose’s, produces a son. But Rose buries her bafflement. Her work on the farm and in the community is fulfilling, her reputation unblemished, and her deception entirely unsuspected—until, at last, it isn’t.

Rose marks its writer-director’s first film in eight years following Angelo, a biographical drama about the Nigerian-born Angelo Soliman, who was carried off to Austria as an enslaved child and ascended the ranks of Viennese high society as both a Freemason and a kind of human pet. (The film never obtained stateside distribution.) Schleinzer started as a casting director, most notably for Michael Haneke, who put him in charge of selecting the child actors in The White Ribbon and directing their performances once on set. Two years later, his debut feature, Michael, premiered in competition at Cannes and set off a short-lived firestorm for its depiction of a pedophile’s abduction and abuse of a 10-year-old boy, a premise that even Lars Von Trier might deem beyond the pale. His latest work is the culmination of an extensive research project that began when a historian friend told him about a 1721 German court case in which a woman was executed for committing the crime of sodomy while living as a man. In collaboration with his Angelo cowriter Alexander Brom, Schleinzer immersed himself in hundreds of known instances across centuries in which women became men for any number of reasons. The character of Rose is thus a composite figure, borne of this exploratory process but not beholden to the facts and figures of a single history.

From this foundation, Hüller crafts one of her most expressively fine-tuned and fully realized characters, a Teutonic cowboy of square shoulders, low-pitched voice, and steady, sharpshooting gaze. Although she has cited the inane Glenn Close vehicle Albert Nobbs as part of her preparation for the part, Hüller refrains from parody or mimicry, refusing to put too much stock in appearances. Maintaining the mischievous ease that is one of her trademarks, the actress does not undergo a radical physical transformation but instead submerges herself so deeply into the character that she seems to create a new soul entirely. She gives her performance and, in turn, the character the space to breathe and blossom, even when the film itself could stand to focus more intently on the flesh-and-blood being at its center.

Rather than let Rose speak for herself, Schleinzer and Brom insist on relaying her backstory and contemplating her successive exploits through intrusive, rococo narration recited with witchy relish by the actress Marisa Growaldt. The overindulgent recourse to voiceover certifies the film’s folkloric charm, but it also suggests a filmmaker who does not consistently trust his actors or his austere, elemental images (elegantly shot in black-and-white by his longtime DP Gerald Kerkletz) to speak for themselves. At a critical point in Rose and Suzanna’s marriage, Schleinzer opts to have Growaldt hazily describe the former’s confession and the catharsis that follows as the pair strolls in the countryside. There is a richer, churning realm of interiority too conveniently elided here, an occasional settling for surfaces that makes its earliest passages feel less dramatic than wispily expositional.

The film finds its footing in the wry, tragic union of Rose and Suzanna. In swift strokes, Schleinzer and his actresses delineate an astute and unsentimental portrait of a marriage between eventual co-conspirators, joined by circumstance but bonded by dawning respect, a hint of affection, and the mutual recognition that they are each other’s lone hope of leading autonomous, mobile lives then unattainable to others of their sex. “You don’t belong to yourself,” Rose tells her newly haughty wife in the sole scene where female subjugation is frankly acknowledged, drawing her attention to a deceiving sense of agency that stretches no farther than the farm they inhabit. As Suzanna comes to understand, belonging to Rose might at least allow her a measured independence in the guise of wedded orthodoxy. Hüller’s performance, which earned her a Silver Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, is undoubtedly the main show, but Braun proves every bit the capable partner. In her first feature-length role, the actress traces Suzanna’s abbreviated arc with the lightest of comic touches, moving from docile meekness to frisky, forthright maturity.

There is to be no happy ending for Rose and Suzanna. The film’s final act is a formidable chamber piece unto itself, transpiring primarily in a courtroom and a penitentiary and mounted with clear, calm conviction. Rose’s history comes into full view, but so, too, does a more nuanced examination of gender roles, as we learn that Rose has not only endured but committed sexual violence, the latter inflicted as a spoil of war. Hüller’s pure, direct approach reaches its apotheosis in these scenes, endowing the film with a quaking power that refocuses our attention fixedly, reverently in her direction. She lunges not for pathos but imperturbability. Her piercing, determined gaze, stripped of romance or preciousness, will surely conjure Renée Maria Falconetti in the minds of some viewers, but it is through the composed tones of speech that the actress makes her most commanding impression. As Rose anxiously awaits the executioner’s blow, she reasserts an authority over her short existence of which no country, creed, or god can dispossess her. In death as in life, she shall remain her own maker.