Reviews
Ken Jacobs turned daily life into mind-expanding perceptual adventures. It is fitting that his final long-form work is a record of his own haircut in Chinatown by his favorite barber, Shirley, at the V1 Hair Salon on 50 Bayard Street.
While expanding consciousness can be generative, it can also be discomforting, as the First Look 2026 avant-garde shorts program “Little Stabs” suggests. Deriving its name from Jacobs’s Little Stabs at Happiness (1960), these twelve films encapsulate Jacobs’s “expansion of consciousness.”
In a perfect world, every family would have its own version of It Goes That Quick. This tender film from Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus captures the banality and the beauty of family with a cinematic flair that adds a distinct structural and artistic dimension to everyday conversations and events.
The second of the Five Precepts in Tibetan Buddhism addresses stealing, advising practitioners not to take what has not been given. 100 Sunset is a wintry work of slow cinema, is a meditation on what is taken, what is freely given, and what cannot be returned.
It is impossible to imagine the film being made with live actors; if it were, it would lose a crucial source of tension. As so many key conversations in the film swirl around authenticity in artmaking and identity, it’s pointed for the film’s visuals to encourage you to question everything you are watching.
These explorations of the psychological effects of fame are mostly decorative, frequently splitting the difference between timeless and timeworn.
This humbling and quietly awe-inspiring first feature from Sophy Romvari could only half-accurately be described as an autobiographical coming-of-age drama . . . Her practice is grounded in the understanding that the real and the merely remembered are separated by the finest and slipperiest of lines.
The debut feature by Bronx native Joel Alfonso Vargas is an instant-classic New York Movie and a lively, sophisticated study of the interrelated imperatives of masculinity and money, grounded in the specifics of a Dominican family in an unaffordable city.
Working with Riz Ahmed, screenwriter Michael Lesslie reimagines Hamlet in a present-day multicultural London that allows for new layers to emerge: questions of agency and belonging in a society that, as you come of age, reveals itself to be more sinister than you had grown up thinking.
This inciting incident enables all manner of eccentric gags throughout The Drama, but little else. As with the Borgli cancel culture satire Dream Scenario (2023), a high-concept hook is aimed at a pressure point in the American zeitgeist and struggles to find purchase.
His films tend to observe this kind of context collapse as people, groups, communities, or even the entire world spiral. Think of the seeming imminent apocalypse of Cure, the suggested one of Charisma, or the fully realized one of Pulse. Chime fits this full arc into a mere 45 minutes.
For these characters, the past and the faraway become convenient displacements for their surrounding horrors. They ramble incoherently about Stalin and Putin, but they cannot seem to face their own regime—not even rhetorically.
Faces are difficult, if not impossible to make out; human and animal figures frequently blend into the background; ordinary spatial relations are distorted to the point of incomprehensibility. At times recalling the impasto intensity of late Godard, its images are vibrant and smeary and altogether beautiful.
By flattening her bitterness and vengeful desire into an ahistorical and essentialized feminine disposition, Gyllenhaal’s portrayal of Shelley at once diminishes the author’s stature in literary history and fails to address any of the documented ways in which she has been wronged.