On The Row / Cinema

Movies Reviews by Luigi Vitali

The 82nd Venice International Film Festival

Golden Lion for Best Film

FATHER, MOTHER, SISTER, BROTHER

by Jim Jarmusch

Produced by Saint Laurent and Mubi, Jarmusch returns with a decidedly Jarmusch “anti‑action” film: three character‑driven stories about family relationships set in New Jersey, Dublin, and Paris, each with a stellar cast. Built on dialogue, silences, awkward pauses, and the absurdities of everyday life, very little happens on the surface. Yet Jarmusch reminds us that life resides in the small moments and fleeting epiphanies of connection. To capture this, he prepares the setup with care, shapes the dialogues with precision, and frames everything like an experiment, waiting for meaning to emerge.

The three episodes appear disconnected but are bound by one recurring image that crystallises Jarmusch’s philosophical perspective: three teenagers on skateboards, teetering on the edge of their boards yet light in the air, intent on keeping balance as they speed down the street. Each main character notices them in passing—a fleeting glance and nothing more—yet that subtle gesture captures the film’s sense of transitory lightness and freedom, when life briefly lifts from its weight. With small details and echoes returning across episodes, the film moves in a slow, airy rhythm, punctuated with flashes of humour and tenderness. Beneath that lies his familiar haze of nostalgia and sadness, where longing for what’s lost hardens into existential weight, shaping life into a pattern where only rare sparks of joy break through.

“Father” unfolds in the snowy Northeast of the United States. Tom Waits, living alone, is visited by his two children, Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik), after years apart. Their reunion is shaped by appearances, distance, silences, and awkward pauses—he seems to present himself as poorer than he is, as if to win their pity or to fit the image they already hold of him. It is probably the most accomplished and most entertaining episode.

In Dublin, “Mother” follows Charlotte Rampling as a successful writer who hosts her two very different daughters (Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps) for their regular Tuesday afternoon tea. Their connection remains unresolved, circling the question of what is real and genuine beneath the surface act, reopening old wounds that never quite heal.

In Paris, “Sister Brother” follows Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) as siblings driving to their late parents’ old apartment after a fatal plane crash. They want one last encounter with the home of their hippie, semi‑lawless childhood. It becomes a story of co‑dependency—the quiet dysfunction that drains away personal needs and desires. The weight and presence of the mother and father in the first two episodes here give way to their absence. Here too, Jarmusch finds poetry in what is missing, in the voids that shape human lives.

Jarmusch isn’t chasing revelation here so much as atmosphere—a study in time, distance, and the fragile ties that hold people together. The film’s quiet audacity lies in how little it insists on, asking us to sit with silence, to find meaning in hesitation, and to recognise that even in their smallest gestures, these characters carry whole histories of love, regret, and endurance. It is a delicate piece that only a director like Jarmusch could render meaningful: not his brightest film, but one that encapsulates his style, his perspective, and the ongoing work of subtraction that defines this stage of his cinema.

Silver Lion – Grand Jury Prize

THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB

by Kaouther Ben Hania

The Voice of Hind Rajab should have been the 2025 Golden Lion. Not only for its urgency and political weight, reviving cinema as a powerful medium of social consequence, but for the way Kaouther Ben Hania fuses documentary and staging into a unique hybrid that is direct, razor-sharp, factual, heartbreaking, and flawless—devoid of rhetoric, anchored in the raw force of documents and history. The film is built on the unbearable recording of the five-year-old Hind Rajab, fleeing Gaza City in January 2025, with her family when their car was shelled, killing her uncle, aunt, and three cousins. Hind’s cousin called the Palestine Red Crescent Society for help before being killed soon after. Hind stayed on the phone for hours as paramedics awaited military clearance to send an ambulance stationed just eight minutes away; when the ambulance finally received the green light and reached her hours later, it was shelled, killing both rescuers. Hind died shortly after. These events are thoroughly documented, though Israel has denied responsibility to this day, claiming no troops were present. The risks of building a suspense drama on such a tragedy, using the true voice recording, are there, but she achieves a difficult balance with remarkable precision. Even more than in her magnificent Four Daughters, where Ben Hania used staging to amplify documentary truth, here she abandons all formal and narrative devices to reach a crystalline form that strikes and disarms like no other. The entire focus remains on the phone calls and the medics’ exchanges inside the control room of the Palestinian Red Crescent, a single static location where we witness the mounting frustration of the rescue team. We hear throughout Hind’s real voice on the other end of the line—fragile and piercing, a child’s cry carrying the whole weight of grief, politics, and evidence—while genocide unfolds just outside the frame, making the silence beyond the room even more unbearable. In a moment of desperation, the medics consider posting the call on social media to force attention and obtain clearance, only to realize those platforms are already saturated with images of dead children and devastation, numbed by repetition. The film’s power lies here: in focusing on one single documented case among thousands, demanding we look, demanding we feel what is unfolding before the world’s eyes. This is cinema of confrontation at its purest.

Silver Lion – Best Director

SMASHING MACHINE

by  Benny Safdie

The unassuming story of UFC legend Mark Kerr—someone whose legendary status I only grasped from the captions at the end—becomes the ground Benny Safdie, directing solo for the first time, chooses to explore. Kerr, known as “The Smashing Machine,” was a two-time UFC Heavyweight Tournament Champion, a titan of late ’90s MMA whose career was undone by addiction and inner collapse. His life had already been chronicled in the 2002 HBO documentary of the same name, but here Safdie uses it to interrogate and reshape the very form of the biopic.

In A24 fashion, this $40 million production is dressed as indie arthouse, turning the uneventful into something textured and probing. Safdie, working with cinematographer Maceo Bishop on grainy 16mm film and a score by Nala Sinephro, builds a work that looks and feels handmade. He flirts with big themes—the male hunger for violence and domination, toxic relationships, the toll of addiction, the birth of MMA—but never fully commits to any of them. Just when the film seems to settle into a direction, it shifts away, avoiding the usual arcs and moral lessons of standard biopics. Whenever it seems a climax is building, it dissolves into nuance—never reaching peaks, instead sketching the life of a sportsman under pressure, struggling to maintain the appearances of his career and fame in his everyday life. So what are we watching? Where should we put our attention to make of it, if not a tidy lesson, a parable on a bigger theme? 

Its strength lies all in the nuances, especially in the performances. Dwayne Johnson, under layers of prosthetics, delivers what may be the most stripped‑down work of his career, leaving behind blockbuster polish for something fragile and uncertain. Emily Blunt, as Dawn Staples, Kerr’s partner, brings a delicate warmth that grounds the film in uneasy domestic realism. Cameos from fighters like Ryan Bader and Bas Rutten (Kerr’s real coach) add a lived‑in authenticity.

Safdie, who continues to master framing, camera, and atmosphere like few others—the fight sequences are incredibly rendered— isn’t interested in convention and instead deconstructs the biopic form in search of subtlety, nuance, and openings. That makes The Smashing Machine a film of integrity, with flashes of brilliance, but also, at times, oddly pointless. 

Award for Best Screenplay

À PIED D’OEUVRE

by Valérie Donzelli 

The film is about labor exploitation and precariousness 2.0, where the orchestrated simplicity of algorithm-driven platforms fuels a relentless race to the bottom, trading flexibility for precarity stripped of dignity or future. The odd thing is that it’s told through the eyes of a French, white, university-educated man in his forties—a writer who takes odd jobs to preserve time for his art. It’s an annoying crisis-of-privilege movie—some will find it openly insulting. The character claims to embrace “degrowth,” but does so by diving headlong into capitalist exploitation 2.0. He’s almost—but not quite—a real poor man. His exhausting gigs allow him to sublimate the experience into a book for Gallimard. The film is adapted from Franck Courtès’s 2023 autobiographical novel À pied d’œuvre, published by Gallimard. Valérie Donzelli herself co-wrote the screenplay and won the Best Screenplay award at Venice for it.

If the aim is to expose the ruthless terrain of precarious labor, is he the right voice—when France has 11 million poor people, as the film itself reminds us? If the intent was to dissect precarity in cultural work, does it make sense to do it this way? That tension undermines what could have been a sharper premise. Donzelli, born in Épinal in 1973, is a French actress, filmmaker, and screenwriter who studied architecture before turning to film. She first gained acclaim with Declaration of War (2011), a personal, Cannes-honored drama inspired by her own life, and later directed Just the Two of Us (2023), earning a César for Best Adaptation. Her style here is restrained and linear—more minimalist than usual—but that talent still emerges: À pied d’œuvre is a small, heartfelt film that resonates in moments, yet ultimately feels like a privileged confession disguised as social critique that never fully convinces.

Volpi Cup for Best Actor – Toni Servillo

LA GRAZIA

by Paolo Sorrentino

I’ve never fully bought into the myth of Paolo Sorrentino. I surely appreciate his visual and imaginative power, but half the time I’m rolling my eyes at his over-the-top touches. For cinephiles he’s a fraud—remember Cahiers du Cinéma’s infamous tweet, perhaps going too far: “Sorrentino is to cinema what Rondò Veneziano is to music—but worse.”? For the casually educated, he’s a master of inaccessible depth—confusing smoke for meaning—while those willing to play along with his anti-cinematic game see this shimmering haze as an allegory of the Italian grotesque he manages to stage again and again. Personally, the endless aphorisms, eccentric constructions, and banal notebook musings tend to irritate me more than move me, but I find him most compelling in his TV series, where the pacing plays to his strengths, or in his explicitly political films like Il Divo.

So I can only cheer that La grazia indeed returns to that terrain, exploring the fault lines between politics and private life—and that stylistically he chooses restraint over flamboyance, scaling back the baroque eccentricities and overwritten flourishes. Here, his taste for aphorisms and mood-heavy visual tricks is turned down. Less slack, less flourish—just a pared-back rhythm that sharpens focus and brings new clarity to a filmmaker often tangled in his own aesthetic loops. For once, Sorrentino follows a direction, and the film walks it with intention, not indulgence. Which is something new.

In a game of comparisons, one scene says it all: his signature dance sequence. It’s still there, of course—but this time, it’s not a decadent blur of chaotic bodies, nor just a visual touch to add flair to a character. Instead, it becomes a crisp piece of contemporary choreography, projected behind Servillo’s President in one of the film’s most striking and compositionally precise moments. Not chaos, but control—a clean line through the film’s DNA: studied, focused, and in quiet dialogue with its unfolding themes.

At the center is Mariano De Santis, an imagined President of the Republic played by Toni Servillo. Widower, Catholic, former jurist—the distilled image of Christian Democracy, nicknamed “Reinforced Concrete” for his immovability. In the final months of his mandate, he faces three moral knots: two requests for pardon and a bill on euthanasia awaiting his signature. The pardon requests concern a man and a woman who each killed their terminally ill partner. The “grace” (grazia) of the title is not only a virtue of the soul but literally the presidential pardon. The film is inspired by a real case—the clemency granted by President Mattarella to a man who killed his wife suffering from Alzheimer’s—but turns it into a universal story of power, love, and their intertwining. Yes, euthanasia is invoked to speak of political passion, the dignity of the finis vitae, but it is always within a broader frame about love as a force that generates jealousy and tenderness, pain and duty. Did the man seeking pardon truly kill his terminally ill wife to free her from suffering, or out of marital conflict and jealousy over infidelity? Love intertwines with political responsibility and becomes the true terrain of inner conflict. The film probes those blurred lines where love slips into jealousy, possession into adoration.

So even the President’s private obsession with an act of infidelity by his wife forty years earlier bleeds into his public dilemma. In his cerebral posture and rigour, he’s also propelled by impulse—or, more precisely, by the rigid codes of masculinity enforced by power and habit. Love without grace becomes control. The line between compassion and possession, tenderness and duty, marks the core of the film’s emotional battlefield. If there’s a point here, it’s that love can only be enabled by grace—without it, it turns into control.

As in many of his films, this too is a tribute to Italy—here embodied by the only unifying figure broadly regarded as above party lines: the President of the Republic, used here as a symbolic stand-in for national unity. The only other such figure is the Pope, here reimagined as Black, with dreadlocks, riding a scooter (but still against euthanasia). As so often in his work, the subject of Sorrentino’s ode is shaped more by what remains unsaid than by what is explicitly shown. Italian politics is not present: only a fleeting prime minister, no press beyond the director of Vogue Italia, and no Italian public aside from those seen in a prison waiting room or working in the presidential palace. Italy is reduced to the President and his immediate circle. Servillo plays a wise politician—rarely seen today—rooted in the past, yet not closed to the future. His president is fragile, hesitant, and more defined by doubt than authority. He spends much of the film alone in the Quirinale’s hallways and empty rooms, where each decision lands like an irreversible verdict.

La grazia is both political and personal, intimate and institutional. It reflects on authority as compassion, on justice as ambiguity, on clemency as a political message, and on euthanasia as a fundamental right. Sorrentino has never delivered answers, and he’s not starting now. But the questions are clearer, and the lingering weight of doubt is offered here as the film’s most convincing truth.

It’s not a perfect film. But it may be, in a long time, the closest Sorrentino has come to grace.

Special Jury Prize

SOTTO LE NUVOLE

by Gianfranco Rosi

Somewhere between documentary and contemporary art, this film is a poetic portrait of Naples and its surroundings, built on accumulation—of images, history, humanity, objects, timelines, beauty, and sorrow. A mosaic of real life under Vesuvius and its ever-present cloud of ashes. We move from the excavations at Pompeii and their archives, to the logistics centre of local firefighters—where absurd emergency calls add flashes of humour—the work of improvised teachers with local children, Syrian sailors living aboard ships in port, clandestine excavations, deserted cinemas looping Rossellini’s Journey to Italy in ghostly repetition—parallel images that mirror the same city, seen through another lens.. What we glimpse are fragments of a whole, speaking to each other without being forced together, their connections remain evocative. At one point, a Japanese professor tells his students amid the ruins that the Pax Romana (the long period of relative peace across the Roman Empire) was made possible by the grain trade within the empire. In the next scene, dockworkers unload Ukrainian grain arriving from Odessa. Nothing needs to be underlined: the dialogue arises naturally from the accumulation.

The majestic black-and-white cinematography—rendered in every shade from radiant white to mid-grey to deepest black—is breathtaking, as is the poetry of the frames. Two hours of this can be demanding; a quarter of the audience walked out. But for the eyes, it is pure balm. For the ear too, the soundscape is by British composer and artist Daniel Blumberg, winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Brutalist. It’s all very beautiful and powerful, though not for everyone.

DUST FAVOURITE

REMAKE

by Ross McElwee

Remake is Ross McElwee at his most exposed and devastating. The cult documentarian who turned his own life into cinema with Sherman’s March (1986) and Time Indefinite (1993), chronicling his friends, family, and everyday life, returns after a 14‑year pause with a new work confronting the most unfilmable of subjects: the death of his son, Adrian. Adrian died in his parents’ bathroom on 24 December 2016, at the age of 27, from fentanyl. We have seen him grow up in McElwee’s earlier works—Something to Do with the Wall (1991), Bright Leaves (2003), In Paraguay (2008)—and in this new film what begins as an excavation of decades of footage, both McElwee’s reels and Adrian’s own videos, becomes an elegy, less documentary than act of mourning. McElwee speaks directly to Adrian: “You’re alive here in this footage, but you’re no longer alive in the real world.” That paradox is the film’s core, the unbearable overlap of presence and absence.

We are guided through ski trips, awkward family rituals, everyday conversations, intimate father‑and‑son moments, and fragments of a failed Hollywood remake of Sherman’s March, contextualising McElwee’s relationship with work over the years. All this material is retrieved as fragments of memory, reframed by loss—a process of working through grief and trying to make sense of it. Even more than in his previous films, McElwee abandons narrative scaffolding and lets grief itself dictate form, moving back and forth in time to show different moments of Adrian’s life. We cannot help but reflect on the fragility of his path and the struggles that led him into alcohol and drug dependency. As we move through his life, it is terrifying to see how quickly the void can open beneath him. We see him happy, ambitious, sharing joyful family moments, but also spiralling—abandoning college, returning to live with his parents. Adrian’s own videos enter the film, blurring the line between subject and author, father and son, testimony and inheritance.The weight of his young age emerges less from the footage than from McElwee’s own voiceover. Watching his son’s recordings, McElwee wonders whether exposing Adrian so constantly to the camera from an early age may have deepened an already fragile personality. How did he miss the signs—his leanings toward addiction, his hidden struggles? Is this a failure of parenting, of filmmaking, or both? He asks these questions directly, scrutinising the past and his own work, searching for traces of Adrian and some measure of understanding. Editing here is not construction but exhumation, assembling the life of a son already gone.

What remains is raw, direct, unflinching. Remake is memory and grief that refuse to find shape or be made manageable. It leaves you shaken, unmoored, forced to face the impossibility of remaking what has been lost. McElwee’s most painful, and perhaps most necessary, film.

DUST FAVOURITE

L’ÈTRANGER

by Francois Ozon

Bringing Camus’s L’Étranger to the screen is a daunting task, and Ozon spent years convincing producers it wasn’t cinematic suicide. At last he mounted the project through his company FOZ, in collaboration with Gaumont, France 2 Cinéma, Scope Pictures, and Lions Production et Services from Morocco. Against the odds, he delivers something bold: a crisp, almost literal transcription of the text, opening with long silences and blindingly poetic black-and-white frames that flirt with Pasolini’s scorched whites. A stark, high-contrast black and white that reduces the world to opposites—light and darkness, death and life, being and void. His eye for beauty in detail and composition is unmistakable. The first part is beautifully poetic; the second half—the mostly unfilmable stream-of-consciousness trial—drags at times, but Ozon never loses control. He also sharpens the colonial context, making Camus’s Algeria feel urgent rather than nostalgic, with pointed nods to white supremacy and racism that resonate today. And then there’s Benjamin Voisin, giving his best performance yet by doing almost nothing: barely speaking, barely moving, radiating apathy. Too handsome, too present for Meursault? Maybe. But Camus never told us how old—or how attractive—his antihero was. Where the book leaves space for ambiguity, Ozon fills it with his taste and cinematic style, and his gamble works.

Albert Camus’s novel (1942) tells the story of Meursault, an emotionally detached man who kills an Arab on a beach and is condemned as much for his indifference and refusal to play by society’s rules as for the crime itself. A cornerstone of existential literature, it puts under the lens the clash between humanity’s search for meaning and the indifference of the world.

Ozon stays close to the plot’s bare bones but reframes Meursault’s detachment through cinematic language—silences, stark imagery, and a literal transcription of Camus’s sentences into dialogue and voiceover. It’s not the perfect embodiment of Camus’s masterpiece—because such a thing cannot exist—but it stands as a convincing, compelling movie that, through its formalism and evocation of emptiness, manages to confront our own sense of estrangement. As the credits roll, he closes with The Cure’s 1979 post-punk hit Killing an Arab, itself inspired by the book. Ozon’s personal touch is everywhere in this adaptation.

DUST FAVOURITE

BARRIO TRISTE

by STILLZ

STILLZ, the Colombian-American director and photographer best known for his collaborations with Bad Bunny and for shaping a new visual language of Latin trap and reggaeton, makes his feature debut with Barrio triste.  A rare piece of radical experimental cinema. This is a wild found-footage film, a raw VHS-textured trip through 1987 Medellín, where a group of teenage outcasts steals a news camera from a reporter covering strange lights hovering over buildings and sinking into the ground at night. The assault and theft are caught on tape, and from that moment the boys turn the lens on themselves. The stolen camera’s perspective is all we see. It keeps rolling as they forget to switch it off: shots of the ground, their shoes, long stretches of nothing—raw found footage with no filters, becoming the only point of view documenting their lives, their story, their struggle. The boys capture their existence at the margins—robberies, escapes, pointless conversations drifting from the streets to crumbling homes—until the film drifts into abstraction, when one of them takes the camera at night into an abandoned half-built structure on the hill. On the walls appear writings—I see you; We are all children of light—accompanied by shapes and figures like new cave paintings. We encounter mystical visions: a luminous figure that dissolves whoever touches it, and a shadowy creature wandering through the rubble. As to suggest that the way out from this hell can only be absolute, or throught light or trught death, there can’t be easy way out. During the movie the only breaks from this flow are interview-like close-ups, where one boy answers questions from his friend—what is death, what is happiness—laying bare the despair of someone with no chances. What unfolds is dense and emotional, at times almost unbearable to watch, yet deeply poetic—sliding between violence, tenderness, and surreal visions in a feverish rhythm. The lo-fi textures—analogue VHS glitches and shaky framing—become the film’s language: testimony written from below, by those usually erased. That this story is told with a tool of institutional reporting—stolen and repurposed—makes the act itself the film’s meaning. An act of legacy, a fragile affirmation of existence before slipping into the void where society consigns its forgotten.

Working under Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD banner, STILLZ twists hard-edged neorealism into a hallucinatory mode, threading in strange lights and missing children that lend each scene an unsettling charge. Arca’s score is integral, pulsing beneath the images with a devastating urgency—less a soundtrack than the film’s bloodstream, the element that gives the film life and reason to exist.

Barrio triste is raw, sharp-edged, mournful—part confession, part hallucination, part archive—an unclassifiable work, an underground vision haunted by absence yet burning with life.

DUST FAVOURITE

HOUSE OF DYNAMITE

by Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow—the Oscar-winning director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, the first woman ever to win the Academy Award for Best Director, and one of the few to consistently tackle war and geopolitics in a genre still dominated by men—returns with A House of Dynamite, a Netflix-backed thriller built around a 19‑minute window inside the U.S. defence chain of command after an unattributed missile appears headed for Chicago. That 19‑minute countdown rewinds three times from different vantage points—White House, Pentagon, Strategic Command—adding little to the story but showing how fragile deterrence becomes once a single launch sets off the spiral toward extinction. It’s her first feature since Detroit (2017), written by Noah Oppenheim; Idris Elba plays the U.S. president, Rebecca Ferguson the intelligence lead, with Jared Harris and Tracy Letts among the cast.

The theme is urgent, and she sticks to it with precision. This isn’t a disaster movie: the focus is on choices and responsibilities—often in the hands of unprepared presidents, here a Black Democrat, almost Trumpian in his incompetence, even quoting a line of wisdom he says he picked up from a podcast—and on how futile good intentions become when the system is flawed and doomed from the start. Yet the looped structure, while promising a powerful ending, never quite delivers, and perhaps there’s no reason to show more than a seemingly open ending, since destiny feels pre‑written—making its point but frustrating in execution, and keeping it maybe from becoming a truly original take. Adrenaline‑fuelled, cut with Kirk Baxter’s razor editing and shot in Barry Ackroyd’s nervy verité, documentary-like camerawork—though familiar from countless TV series—with an anxious score by Volker Bertelmann, it leans on the usual familiar U.S. patriotism and family tropes while staying sharp. Still, humanity is fucked, and Bigelow knows how to grip an audience. A sharp cautionary film that succeeds on its own terms.

THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN

by Olivier Assayas, written by Assayas and Emmanuel Carrère

The much-anticipated film about Putin’s rise — and never-fall — is hard to place. A well-crafted political thriller, yes, but ultimately pointless, even foolish. Do we really need Jude Law smoothly impersonating Putin in a version meant to be critical yet ending up affirming? The film sets out to dissect and explain the propaganda tricks that turned optics into power and enabled Putin’s autocracy, but ends up doing the opposite: drawing us in, making us “understand” Putin’s vision in the same way a mafia epic pulls us towards its evil boss, right up to the edge of sympathy.

We already know the story of how he rose, how his premodern obsession with strength and ideology fused with postmodern theatre — the internet, spin, staged politics — into a laboratory for modern-day autocracy. The film’s supposed cautionary tale adds little to that picture. Putin won’t be offended; he’ll cheer its clear-eyed rendering of his ruthless worldview. For Trump, it could even serve as inspiration. The frustration is that Olivier Assayas and Emmanuel Carrère (who co-wrote the screenplay) seem intent on doing something urgent and necessary, tracing the genealogy of authoritarianism 2.0, yet in practice they reinforce its aura. This movie is at minimum a decade late, in 2025 it lands tone-deaf. 

If Giuliano da Empoli’s much-praised novel (on which the movie is based) appeared only in 2022, in the three years since, things have changed radically: the mask of Russian aggression has fallen, the game is now something else entirely, and to be sophisticated and nuanced about its nature already feels naïve.

Here the story is filtered through a fictional strategist, Baranov — unmistakably Vladislav Surkov, the shadowy architect who helped engineer Putin’s rise and turned Russian politics into a reality show, an essential figure for understanding Russia. Baranov, a retired Kremlin strategist, recounts his life in one long night to an American journalist — present as a counterpart, but mostly silent. Through flashbacks he narrates the collapse of the USSR and Russia’s turbulent 1990s, when freedom, artistic expression, and market excess gave way to the rise of a strongman able to control and punish. The false-flag bombings in Moscow that opened the Chechen war and paved Putin’s ascent are old news, yet here they come across as an American counter-argument. Baranov also recounts the Orange Revolution as a conspiracy financed by the CIA, George Soros and Russian opposition figures. The American journalist offers only a mild objection: might people simply have been drawn to democracy and the European model? Must the film strike a false balance even here, when people are being killed in their homes every day? This insistence on nuance and balance makes their good faith feel naïve, even enraging. Where the film is sharp is in showing Baranov’s disdain for Russia’s intellectuals, casting himself instead as an artist of power — a manipulator of myths, grievances and public consciousness, shaping reality in service of the state. The film insists that criticism does not matter, that everything is merely a projection of power. So what, then, is this film actually doing? Cynical and calculating, he knows that holding power means harnessing anger and letting extremists sow chaos in the discourse, confusing people and consolidating control. Sound familiar to our current Western predicament? To claim that Russian methods dominate Western politics is to grant them power — and optics of power are all they care about. This movie is neither controversial, nor denunciatory, nor enlightening — it falls into the trap of being useful to the very forces it seeks to critique.

FRANKENSTEIN

by Guillermo del Toro

Del Toro’s Frankenstein is a grand gothic spectacle — imposing sets, heavy costumes, and a mood thick with atmosphere. You can feel the director’s lifelong obsession with the subject, but also that his fevered excitement often drowns out the details. To line up the good aspects first, Jacob Elordi, in an almost unrecognizable form, is excellent — emerging as the film’s emotional anchor, grounding the Creature with a delicate humanity that cuts through the heavy artifice — a performance that outshines Oscar Isaac’s more mannered, uneven performance.

Another strength of the film lies in the themes Del Toro pulls from Mary Shelley’s epic, staging them in full melodramatic flourish: the hubris of mankind and his futile urge to overcome death, the solitude of men and their hunger for connection, the punishing father and the broken child, a cycle of violence we are all victim to and long to escape, the monster created and the monster we become in our shame and guilt. The tale is structured in three parts — the Epilogue, Victor’s version, and the Monster’s version, so we finally experience the tale through his eyes. At its core, this is the story of a creature trying to become better, to live and to be loved. The finale builds with Shakespearean ambition — a man stranded in the endless tragedy of being alive and cast out.

Touching at times, and offering an interesting angle, yet even as a gothic fable with an existential undercurrent, the narrative pact it demands comes at a heavy price. The choices and their development feel sluggish, not fully thought through. You want to surrender to it, but too often you’re left thinking, really? Is this an acceptable narrative solution? Add to this a bombastic production with little refinement in aesthetics, colour, costumes, or set design. To Del Toro’s credit, CGI is used only when needed, with most of the spectacle achieved through practical set building. Still, this is not a meticulously crafted period dream à la Eggers — the lack of refinement shows, and what remains, as a fable, are stretches of writing that feel rushed and unconvincing.

It plays like a Disney-like tale where the monsters have feelings too — but the real monsters are the humans. The film only brushes against that idea, hinting at more than it ever explores. For all its spectacle, the film lands without a heartbeat — dazzling on the surface, overstuffed, and hollow at its core. Even with Netflix branding, you’d expect it to deliver more.

AFTER THE HUNT

by Luca Guadagnino

A complex, slow, dialogue-driven film that feels like a real departure for Guadagnino—no love, sex, or desire to drive the plot this time—as he directs Nora Garrett’s razor-sharp debut screenplay. It zeroes in on the dynamics of elite academia: a Yale philosophy professor specialising in Ethics, is accused of sexual misconduct by her student, forcing a reckoning over what really happened and how liberal institutions and collegues scramble to respond. Diversity, gender, safety, cancel culture, and generational divides collide in a sharp portrait of the “shallow culture we live in now,” as the professor himself puts it. The “woke” students aren’t painted kindly, but neither are the older generations. At heart, it is a film about power and opportunism, and the way they entwine with contemporary ideas of ethics. The suggestion that morality cannot be cleanly separated from opportunism is a bold choice for a cultural context so closely bound to the anxieties of our time. The premise looked promising.

At the centre is Alma Imhoff (Roberts), admired by her wealthy student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), portrayed as a Black queer character whose behaviour often feels performative. Ama’s colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) is both a rival and contender for the same university chair. After a party, Maggie leaves with Hank and later returns with an accusation that shatters Alma’s world, fracturing loyalties, careers, and convictions.

In a black-or-white world, the film insists on the mid-tones. But it also leaves more questions open than answers it’s willing—or brave enough—to provide. The Woody Allen–style opening credits evoke the moral-dilemma films of the cancelled director — starting bold and unafraid of controversy, then shading into nuance. The dive into the politics of accusation, privilege, and power too often gets bogged down in overworked dialogue, clumsy devices, and uneven pacing. It wants to spark debate, to live in the grey areas, but ends up too cautious to land with real force. At the end a second epilogue feels tacked on to soften the blow, as if imposed for safety. There are more promises than it delivers. Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield are both outstanding — and the sophisticated score by regular collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is an unmissable component in a film full of good ideas but unfortunately lacking sharpness. 

ORPHAN

by László Nemes

Orphan continues László Nemes’s exploration of 20th-century history—its traumas and its lingering sense of guilt. After Son of Saul and Sunset, both engaging with monumental history, Nemes leads us instead into the everyday life of 1950s Hungary, in the disillusioned aftermath of the failed 1956 uprising, where past defeated fascism quietly transitions into a slower, more insidious Soviet grip, and the future already feels condemned. In this movie, it’s as if the weight of history had folded into the psyche of a single boy.

The story follows Andor, a lonely teenager living in the shadow of a father who disappeared during the war. His world is destabilised by the arrival of a brutal butcher (a great Grégory Gadebois) who begins to claim a place in his mother’s life and eventually reveals himself to be Andor’s real father. The conflict is both literal and allegorical: a boy caught between the idealised ghost of one father and the suffocating presence of another, just as Hungary finds itself crushed between dreams of independence and Soviet domination. Andor is not technically an orphan, but he might as well be—just like the Hungarians who dreamed of freedom and had to accept submission.

For the entire film we follow Andor’s near-subjective perspective, moving through his rebellions, oedipal urges, discoveries, and childish fantasies. From his gaze, the film distorts reality until the world itself becomes a carnival mirror, which is echoed in the final sequence set in a luna park. Moments of revolt sit alongside tender moments of solitude, like when a water tank in the basement becomes a sacred totem for prayers to a higher entity, where God and his missing Father merge into one. But every aspiration toward identity is crushed by frustration. Andor, like Hungary, must accept his fate.

Nemes doubles down on his unmistakable style: claustrophobic 4:3 framing, 35mm, Mátyás Erdély’s sepia-toned cinematography, and a sound design that turns every breath, footstep, and grunt into a threat. Few directors possess Nemes’s sense of cinema—his control over the form is extraordinarily masterful. Every frame is perfect and loaded with meaning, every camera movement is complex and carefully composed. Also the budget and the large-scale reconstruction of the ruined postwar city are colossal and extensive—shout out to the production designer Márton Ágh and also costumist Andrea Flesch.

The film is intense, absorbing, and sometimes tiring—held back by a style that, instead of lifting it, risks weighing it down. A visually perfect machine that becomes a stylistic exercise, unable to fully take flight. Orphan is not the revelation of Son of Saul, nor the bold provocation of Sunset, where strong ideas were at play. But it is a film that insists on looking at the past through a cracked lens, questioning what it means to grow up under the shadow of absence and domination. Hypnotic, formally ambitious, at times brilliant, but mostly a missed opportunity. 

BUGONIA

by Yorgos Lanthimos

With Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos makes it clear that he’s now making films for pleasure—less interested in massive productions or grand cinema, he’s focused on smaller, weirder projects that revive his passion for movies. Here, with Bugonia, he moves closer to reality. It’s a distorted reality, of course—absurd, amplified—but the kind we already live in: a world of personalised echo chambers and algorithm-fed delusions, but also a world on the edge of ecological disaster. There’s a sense of “realism” here: the allegories shrink, the weirdness softens. The space these characters move through could easily be ours. A fragile edge. And that’s precisely what Lanthimos suggests about our time: “This isn’t the future. It’s our present, just more visible.”

The film opens and closes on close-ups of bees pollinating—fragile symbols of our ecosystem, responsible for 30% of global food production, as our protagonist explains in the opening scene. He also adds, of course, that dark forces are trying to eliminate them to control the food supply.

For much of its runtime, the film plays like a long, slow episode of Kind of Kindness —suspiciously restrained, unusually accessible, linear, with far less humour than the premise suggests. And the premise is wild: two conspiracy theorists abduct the CEO of a pharma-chemical corporation, convinced she’s an alien sent to destroy humanity.

There seems to be a clear attempt to get inside conspiratorial psychology. We’re deep in rural America, where the protagonist spirals into a delusional echo chamber after his mother falls into a coma—triggered by a treatment developed by the company Bugonia, run by Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), a neoliberal progressive executive who’s as invested in ethical optics as she is in aggressive expansion. She becomes the embodied target of his paranoia: responsible for his mother, for the bees, for everything. Alongside his cousin—an autistic young man—he prepares for a mission to “save the world”: they do yoga to strengthen mind and body and begin a body-hacking routine involving chemical castration to sharpen their neural clarity for the sacred task. They mark the date: a few days before a lunar eclipse, when the alien mothership is expected to arrive. A countdown graphic appears onscreen, absurdly overlaid on a flat-Earth diagram—because in their world, obviously the Earth is flat.

They abduct her, chain her in a basement, and what unfolds is a long negotiation, a shifting dynamic of persuasion, manipulation, and absurd intimacy. In their plans—or in the film more broadly—external opposition never arises—this isn’t a thriller about pursuit or escape. There’s no CIA, police intervention, aside from a local officer who appears submissive, and weighed down by guilt—possibly alluding to a sexual abuse suffered by Jesse’s character during his youth. A possible trauma that may have steered him toward delusion—and another thread in the psychological fabric that drives his escape from reality into elaborate, self-justifying fictions. But the further we go, the clearer it becomes that the psychological deep-dive is a red herring—Lanthimos isn’t dissecting trauma, he’s staging its afterimage.

For a while, it feels like the film is circling without landing—edging into Haneke territory: darker, slower, more controlled. Somewhere between horror, torture, absurdity and deadpan humour. You don’t know where it’s heading. And then it hits. Hard. There’s no point in outsmarting conspiracists—what happens when you drop the scepticism and meet them on their level? That’s where Lanthimos lands the blow.

The title Bugonia derives from an ancient mythological belief that bees could be born spontaneously from the carcasses of dead oxen. It’s a symbolically loaded choice for a film that blends paranoia, eco-delirium, and mythologies of rebirth in toxic times. Emma Stone, bald and glacial, is impeccable. Jesse Plemons delivers a visceral performance. At the press conference, Stone also admitted she believes in aliens.

The style is muted on purpose, the staging minimal, the pacing hypnotic. Bugonia isn’t as dazzling as other Lanthimos films, but it’s more urgent, more raw, more alienated. A cynical, disturbing parable about the impossibility of telling delusion from reality—because sometimes, the only way to understand our world is to step fully into its madness.

The 78th Festival de Cannes 2025

– PALME D’OR –

A SIMPLE ACCIDENT

by Jafar Panahi

What would you do, as a young Iranian persecuted by the regime, if you got your hands on one of the Islamic Republic’s secret police torturers? What would be your revenge? That’s the moral—and generational—question at the heart of A Simple Accident, Jafar Panahi’s fierce return to Cannes after years of censorship and imprisonment.

As a portrait of Iranian youth scarred by state violence—subject to censorship, surveillance, and the constant threat of arrest for even the smallest act of dissent—the film follows Vahid, a garage mechanic who recognises a man with a prosthetic leg as the torturer responsible for his own suffering during a previous imprisonment. What begins as a chance encounter quickly escalates into a moral crisis, as Vahid kidnaps the man and seeks confirmation from fellow former prisoners, trying to decide whether to confront him, kill him, or walk away. As more people become entangled in Vahid’s plan, the film confronts us with the raw emotions of Iran’s youth—their fury, trauma, and the desperation that comes from living under the regime. If violence isn’t the answer, and the cycle must be broken, then what? What should be done? How can justice be served under such a system? Is revenge legitimate? Is it an act of resistance? Panahi lays out all the questions but offers no resolution—or if he does, he immediately undermines it, leaving us with an open ending. Is the system always winning? Is violence always prevailing? Or is there still hope that compassion might break the cycle? It’s powerful writing—one that hits deep and stays with you.

Panahi, defying a 20-year ban on filmmaking and international travel imposed in 2010, continued to produce films clandestinely. A Simple Accident was shot entirely in secret with no budget, a skeleton crew, and a handheld camera smuggled through the streets of Tehran. Every location is real. Every risk is real. The film relies on non-professional actors and a discreet team to stay invisible. Co-produced by Iran, France, and Luxembourg, with post-production completed in France, the film’s very existence is a provocation. And yet, even after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Panahi didn’t choose exile—at least not yet. He has said he will return to Iran and keep filming. For him, resistance still means staying.

A Simple Accident is a political statement— a portrait of a generation pushed to the edge, raised under fear, now choosing confrontation over silence. It’s also a reminder that cinema, even stripped of all its tools, can still cut like a blade—especially when it dares to ask questions no one else can.

– JURY PRIZE (EX AEQUO) –

SIRÂT

by Oliver Laxe

Produced by Pedro Almodóvar, this is an intense and unexpectedly bold film. A father searches for his missing daughter from rave to rave across the Moroccan desert, but the narrative quickly unravels into something far from conventional. What begins as a quest—anchored in familial grief—spirals into a mystic-existential descent through a nihilistic space.

Set against the vast, hostile expanse of the Sahara, Sirât blurs the boundary between inner and outer collapse. The techno beat that echoes through the desert—and throughout the film—becomes a compass, an entrancing, primal sound current that drives the characters deeper into an abyss of self-confrontation. All around are traces of a refugee crisis, of armed conflict (possibly WWIII), and a looming sense of catastrophe.

Sergi López is magnetic as Luis, a man who’s learning how to navigate loss. But the film isn’t really about him. Nor about the daughter. Laxe and co-writer Santiago Fillol are after something else: a portrait of grief turned ritual, of spiritual crisis disguised as a road movie. Shot on Super 16mm by Mauro Herce, the imagery is dusty, grainy, often brutal—offering no comfort, only texture. And the soundscape, designed by Kangding Ray, is relentless: not just music, but a sonic pressure system that disorients and becomes visceral. Sirât is a film you don’t just watch—you enter it, and then you get pulled under.

Some of the symbolism may be heavy-handed. The metaphors sometimes announce themselves too loudly. The final act veers into excess. But what lingers is the sensation of being lost. Of walking further, long after you’ve forgotten why. Of hell—not as punishment, but as the endless desert of meaninglessness, where you keep going simply because you can’t stop.

Laxe called it an anti-system ode. It is. It’s also a trance. A collapse. A confrontation with the limits of cinema as narrative, and its rebirth as pure experience. It’s a film that operates on symbolic depth and ultimately captures a spiral journey into what hell might feel like when there’s nothing left to lose.

– JURY PRIZE (EX AEQUO) –

THE SOUND OF FALLING

by Mascha Schilinsk

Sound of Falling is one of the most devastating discoveries at Cannes so far—dense, disorienting, and quietly spellbinding. With no interest in clarity or closure, Mascha Schilinski, in this epic depiction, drifts through four generations of German girlhood in the Altmark region of Est Germany, specifically in a farmhouse near the Elbe River. Through fragmented vignettes—Erika in the 1940s, Alma in the early 1900s, Angelika in the 80’s GDR and Lenka in the present—the movie maps a century of repressed desire, pain, domestic dread, and inherited trauma, as lived through the life of the characters each embodying a different era’s version of the same wound. like a phantom limb, echoing back on itself.

The movie jumps from one timeline to another, not chasing sense, but feelings, following childhood haunted by unspoken traumas and obscure compulsions toward self-erasure. Whether it’s a child playing dead, a teen fantasising about mutilation, a young woman aching under the gaze of others, or women drawning themselves in the river to escape the rapes of the red army. Mascha Schilinski maps these disjointed lives. They happen to live in the same farmhouse, but it’s never made clear whether we’re witnessing a family lineage or something more abstract. what we are seeing is that things stay together not through plot, but through the textures of memory, pain, and longing.

Shot on 16mm with a ghost-like camera that peers through cracks and floorboards, the film moves like memory or better like transgenerational trauma haunting a place, passing unaware from generation to generation. Those subjective shots we start to believe belong to a ghost turing the movie from one moment to another in a ghost story or a horror, are actually there to mark a presence: not of a ghost but of trauma, a silent history of women’s suffering—forgotten, erased by time, yet still present. “I’m living in vain,” repeats a character—an admission that reverberates through them all. and that’s the sense pervading all the characters.

The movie may feel overwhelming, as if it’s trying to carry too much at once. With hundreds of threads—characters, ideas, timelines—perhaps more than it can hold within its formal precision, Sound of Falling isn’t interested in coherence, categorisation, or genre. Instead, it mirrors the shape of trauma—scattered, elusive, unresolved. It drags, confuses, accumulates—moving in waves: heavy, spectral, and impossible to shake off.

– BEST DIRECTOR – BEST ACTOR –

O AGENTE SECRETO

BY Kleber Mendonça Filho

Brazilian cinema is alive and kicking—and confronting its darkest chapters like no one else. O Agente Secreto is a bold, complex, and meticulously staged thriller set in Recife during Carnival week in 1977. Marcelo, a tech expert and widowed academic, returns to the city under a false identity to escape the military regime after opposing a corrupt minister. He seeks refuge in a safehouse run by resistance members while attempting to reconnect with his son and start a new life.

Marcelo ends up working in a government office that makes ID cards—right inside the system he’s trying to escape. While digging through old files to find out what happened to his mother, he’s pulled into a maze of surveillance and danger. Corrupt cops and a hired killer are after him, and all around, the chaos of Carnival hides something much darker rising in the streets.

The film is full of tension—urban legends, eerie images, and the low, creeping fear of authoritarian power run through every scene. Brazil under military rule has rarely been rendered with such precision. The reconstruction of 1970s Recife is massive: wide shots of streets and neighbourhoods, dense with period detail. Surreal and inventive touches—like the urban myth of a severed leg found inside a shark, later reimagined in a campy B-movie insert as it reappears and kills people in a gay cruising area—punctuate the story with moments of absurdity and horror. The film’s aesthetic draws heavily from 1970s cinema, with bold colours, stylised characters, and dark humour giving the story a vivid, unsettling tone. An ambitious international co-production between Brazil, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, it was shot over ten weeks in Recife and São Paulo. It’s slow-burning and heavy, but its stylistic ambition and political depth lift it. A masterstroke of historical cinema—dense, daring, and precise. A new classic.

– CAMÉRA D’OR (BEST FIRST FEATURE) –

-DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT AUDIENCE AWARD –

THE PRESIDENT’S CAKE

by Hasan Hadi

A great debut for Iraqi director Hasan Hadi. Set in 1990s Iraq, the movie follows a girl’s surreal mission to bake a cake for Saddam Hussein’s birthday celebrations at school. But in a country starved by international sanctions—imposed after the invasion of Kuwait—that left even basic supplies scarce—even finding sugar, eggs, and flour becomes an odyssey. As she moves through Baghdad with her classmates, and his pet rooster, the absurd aspects of dictatorship unravel in real time.

The streets are lined with posters of Saddam’s face, and a visit to the local market turns into a tense, coded negotiation for black-market ingredients. The cake becomes more than a cake—it’s a symbol of impossible demands, of coerced celebration in a society where joy must be performed for power.

Shot in 16:9 with long static frames and slow tripod pans, the film resists melodrama. Its quiet pace gives space to the details, but also sometimes clashes with the youthful adventure the movie sets out to tell. It’s all formally rigorous, but it also burns with poetic visions and political rage.

A powerful tale of absurdity under authoritarianism, told through a child’s gaze—one that understands more than it should. It’s a portrait of indoctrination and survival under a regime that weaponised even the smallest gesture. Wouldn’t be surprised to see it go all the way to a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination.

The President’s Cake was shot entirely on location in Iraq—between the streets of Baghdad and the southern marshes. Director Hasan Hadi chose sites deeply tied to Iraq’s past, including the ancient Ziggurat of Ur and a restaurant once visited by Saddam Hussein. Hadi, an Iraqi writer and director now based in New York, grew up in southern Iraq during wartime and later worked in journalism and production. A Sundance Screenwriters Lab Fellow and recipient of the 2022 Sundance Institute/NHK Award, he currently teaches at NYU’s Graduate Film Program.

– UN CERTAIN REGARD : BEST DIRECTORS –

ONCE UPON A TIME IN GAZA

by Ahmad Abou Nasser, Mohammed Abou Nasser

The Nasser twin brothers, Arab and Tarzan, born and raised in Gaza, are back with their most daring film. Set in Gaza City in 2007, the movie follows a group of characters just trying to survive—ordinary lives under extraordinary pressure. The first half follows a student and a falafel seller who hide drugs in sandwiches and get chased by a corrupt cop—until it all goes wrong. In the second half, the student is cast in a propaganda movie called The Rebel, produced by the Ministry of Culture. He’s a terrible actor, the film is even worse—but all he really wants is to avenge his friend.

What’s the point of making a meta-movie satire about Gaza in front of such historical urgency? And yet, this film does—and it feels very alive. Despite the limitations—little budget, no real industry, no local cinematic tradition to lean on—the directors pull off something bold and striking. Shot entirely in Jordan with a mostly non-professional cast, the film blends scripted fiction with real footage from Gaza, including archival images and clips of bombings and protests. The production was supported by international co-producers from France, Palestine, and Tunisia, and edited in Paris.

The film opens with Trump’s speech about turning Gaza into the Middle East’s new Riviera. Never has a title felt more on point—a take on Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time, echoing the mention of “Gazawood” in the movie as a reply to Hollywood, while talking about a place that has been erased, and keeps being erased, in front of the world’s eyes.

Blending thriller, vintage action, and dark humour, the film captures the absurdity and rage of life under siege. There’s no hope here—not in the story, not in the characters. The disillusionment runs deep. It’s not just pressure from outside—things are falling apart inside too. The critique is sharp, and what gives it weight is how it avoids rhetoric and settles into a thin veil of sarcasm—from people who’ve learned to laugh at their own misery. So when the final line appears—it will end—instead of The End, it’s unclear whether it’s a flicker of hope or a dry punchline—one that hits hard—aimed at the world’s indifference.

This is a wild, fierce movie—and totally theirs.

– UN CERTAIN REGARD : BEST SCREENPLAY –

PILLION

by Harry Lighton

Hardcore biker BDSM meets rom-com—who knew it could work? But it actually does. This fearless, razor-sharp debut navigates power, pleasure, self-discovery, and vulnerability with such investment and precision that even its most outrageous moments feel deeply human. Shoutout to the intimacy coordinator, whose job can’t be understated.

Goofy Colin—played by Harry Melling (yes, Dudley from Harry Potter)—goes on dates arranged by his terminally ill mother to find a boyfriend, but instead he bumps into Ray (played by an impressive 48-year-old Alexander Skarsgård), a biker who sees a spark in him—a quiet aptitude for devotion and submission. What follows is his initiation into a BDSM relationship—master and servant—and a deep dive into queer biker culture. Colin is introduced to the gang’s private rituals and dynamics, where dominance and care blur, and every gesture follows a strict code. The tension builds—between control and vulnerability, loyalty and freedom—and Colin is forced to reckon with who he is beneath it all.

It gets funny, very intense, thought-provoking and unexpected, while debut director Harry Lighton explores their chemistry and the complexities of power dynamics. Adapted loosely from Adam Mars-Jones’s novel Box Hill, the film takes the book’s premise—a submissive young man falling under the spell of a charismatic biker—and opens it up into something bolder, more cinematic, and emotionally layered. In the movie there’s something they both need to learn. It’s a training in facing themselves—but who’s brave enough to do that without running away?

Ray, before the film shifts, says, “This is not about love. Love isn’t the point.” And for a while, it works that way—structured, safe, controlled. But Colin learns the hard way: rules and complicity only take you so far. There’s no real devotion—or submission—without love, and no love without learning to live with yourself first. His arc hits like a classic feel-good romantic comedy—and that’s what makes this movie brilliant. An engaging rom-com just with more gagging, gang bangs, and consensual humiliation. Skarsgård is unreal in this filthy, fresh, unmissable ride.

-DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT BEST EUROPEAN FILM-

-DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT BEST FRENCH FILM-

WILD FOXES

by Valéry Carnoy

A stunning debut by Belgian director Valéry Carnoy. A tense, intimate portrait of teenage masculinity set in a Belgian sports boarding school—a lot of bodies, sweat, and genuine male friendships turning toxic. Samuel Kircher is formidable as Camille, a rising boxing talent who survives a near-fatal accident thanks to his best friend Matteo. But as he recovers, his mind reacts—pain with no injury, ache with no name—emotional, physical, or both.

What follows is not a conventional coming-of-age story, but the slow, interior confrontation with a part of himself he doesn’t yet know how to hear. From group leader to outcast, Camille begins to lose his place in the social hierarchy as his vulnerability makes him illegible to those around him. The school becomes a pressure chamber of confused masculinity, where kindness hides behind toughness, and fitting in means following the pack.

Carnoy uses the boxing ring as a stage for friendship, trauma, and fragility—and wild foxes as a metaphor for the boys themselves: elusive, alert, always ready to vanish. The visual style matches the subject—clean, close, observant—refusing to aestheticise pain, but refusing to look away. The film is centered around the search for protection, trust, and understanding in a space that seems to offer none.

This is a striking psychological study of youth that flirts with greatness but ultimately plays it safe, pulling back toward the end into the familiar terrain of character drama—just when it threatens to say something more daring. Still, this Cannes Directors’ Fortnight premiere feels like the beginning of something—a director with a rare sensibility for bodies, silence, and what youth don’t say.

– DUST MAGAZINE FAVORITE –

ENZO

by Robin Campillo

Enzo is a beautiful coming-of-age story steeped in class tension and unspoken desire. A drifting Western teen is mirrored against a Ukrainian peer forced into responsibility. It’s a small, mostly uneventful film, built on very few elements—but Campillo stretches them into a quiet, continuous emotional crescendo. The result is striking. Like Call Me by Your Name, but for those drawn to the quiet ache of understated auteur cinema. And that’s not incidental: the echo is intentional. The names Ennio and Enzo are too close to feel accidental. The age gap, the dynamic, the final emotional phone call—everything suggests a quiet reply. A subtler, more grounded take on youth and desire, passing through the same terrain but refusing its sentimentality.

Robin Campillo co-wrote Enzo with his longtime collaborator Laurent Cantet, who was originally set to direct. But as his health declined, they planned to co-direct. When Cantet passed away in April 2024 before filming began, Campillo completed the movie, honouring their friendship and shared language. This is already the emotional context in which this movie originated.

The story itself is simple. 16-year-old Enzo doesn’t know what he wants, but he knows the bourgeois life of his family isn’t it. He takes a job on a construction site—despite having no skill for it—because, as he says, when everyone is dead, the walls will still be there. He has his confused ideals but beyond that, he can’t explain his choice. He can’t explain much at all. And that’s the point. The film thrives in what goes unsaid. Enzo becomes one of the most precise, effortless portraits of adolescent confusion we’ve seen in years—an age suspended in the fog of indecision, where every impulse feels both urgent and uncertain.

His friendship with a Ukrainian worker, and the unspoken feelings that emerge, sharpen the film’s political edge. Because here adolescence is especially political. These two young men, defined by class and origin, crash into each other. Enzo, French and well-off, drifts through his crisis with the safety of his privileges. Vlad, Ukrainian, carries the weight of a country at war and he can’t afford confusion. There are real differences, and yet, between them, something fragile takes shape—something that both exists and slips away. No declarations, no catharsis, no big lessons—just a soft collision and the many questions that arise. Like all real things, this movie lingers. Grows. Long after the credits fade, it stays with you—like a feeling you can’t quite name.

– DUST MAGAZINE FAVORITE –

LE CITTÁ DI PIANURA (THE LAST ONE FOR THE ROAD)

by Francesco Sossai

This movie is an ode to the drunken heart of the Veneto hinterland—a region in northeastern Italy shaped by heavy industry, deep tradition, and stark economic contrasts. In this story we are told the search for one last drink before going home becomes a philosophy of life, played out across Italy’s most industrialised plain—fractured by economic and cultural decline. A freefall, where the only lifeline is the raw humanity of those you meet along the way. Filippo Scotti plays Giulio, a shy architecture student who, in the middle of the night, meets two charmingly unhinged fiftysomething locals—Carlobianchi and Doriano—drifting from bar to bar, swapping tales of faded glory and booze-fuelled misadventures. What begins as a night out turns into a transformative 36-hour journey.

A surprising feat for an Italian film—bold in identity, brimming with ideas, animated by a hunger to tell the story of a region that becomes existential terrain. It’s a landscape of metaphors and allegories, woven into the architecture, the geography, and the people. At times, its need to tie everything together, to spell out the message or build layers of narrative callbacks, makes the writing feel heavy-handed, and a few transitions drag more than others. But overall, its vision and language remain sharp, inventive, and vital.

Le città di pianura is the second feature by Francesco Sossai, following Other Cannibals (2021), which won Best First Feature at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Born in the Dolomites and trained at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin (DFFB), Sossai brings a poetic yet grounded touch to his exploration of provincial life. Shot across the Veneto region—including Sedico, Feltre, Chioggia, Padua, and the Brion Memorial in Altivole—he turns overlooked landscapes into emotional terrain.

Premiering in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes 2025, Le città di pianura is a wildly original road movie that captures the disillusionment of two generations—the fifty-year-olds whose promises were never kept, and the twenty-somethings already resigned to that truth. Provincial Italy, captured with a rawness and depth rarely seen before. What emerges is a different kind of perspective—one that questions, informs, entertains, and gives real hope for the future of Italian cinema.

ROMERIA

by Carla Simón

Not everybody knows about the Movida Viguesa, the cultural explosion in Vigo during the 1980s, paralleling the more famous Madrid Movida. Vigo, a coastal city in the northwest region of Galicia, Spain, was transformed by this movement. Born out of economic crisis and high youth unemployment, the scene turned the city’s old town into a hub of rebellious creativity in music, nightlife, and fashion.

Romería picks up that thread of Vigo’s identity, digging into the darker side of a scene erased by AIDS and overdoses. Set in 2004, the film follows 18-year-old Marina as she travels to the city searching for the truth about her parents, who died of AIDS after giving her up for adoption. What begins as a bureaucratic quest for university funding becomes a deeply personal excavation of family shame, secrecy, and memory. Through her mother’s diary and stylised flashbacks, Marina pieces together their hidden past. One flashback—set in a smoky, neon-drenched club in late-’80s Vigo—is so vivid, so perfectly crafted, it alone makes the film worth watching.

Behind the camera is Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón, best known for Estiu 1993 and Alcarràs. Romería is the third and final installment in her trilogy on family and memory, drawing inspiration from her own life and her parents’ past in Galicia. Simón conducted extensive research into the subcultural currents of Galicia’s post-Franco youth, using oral histories, punk zines, and family photo albums to reconstruct a world rarely seen on screen. Her eye is intimate, never voyeuristic—less interested in nostalgia than in what lingers, what wounds.

The debut of actress Llúcia Garcia as Marina is impressive, as is that of young rock musician Mitch, who plays both Marina’s cousin Nuno and, in stylised flashbacks, her father—a narrative device that evokes the emotional logic of a teenager. Their hesitant relationship becomes the heart of the film’s present tense, where grief, identity, and lineage blur.

Premiering in competition at Cannes 2025, Romería is a story about social and familial stigma, forgotten lives, and the weight of what’s left unsaid. This is a movie that whispers—whispers things that matter, piecing together something fragile and precise.

ALPHA

by Julia Ducournau

I was sold from the opening scene: a deranged teenage party in slow motion, a passed-out Alpha getting a homemade tattoo filmed in macro, while Portishead’s Roads blasts almost in full. In this wildly dystopic film set in a ’90s-like world, a virus turns people to marble stone. It’s easy to see how Ducournau landed here: Alpha plays like a bold reflection on the recent pandemic and its generational toll, but reframed as a reminder that—despite the widespread claim it was the first pandemic in a century—it wasn’t. A generation ago, at its peak in the ’90s, there was another epidemic—equally devastating and nearly erased from collective memory: AIDS, fused with the shadow of heroin addiction.

The film captures illness, contagion, pain, stigma, family breakdown, and death with a force that few others manage. Though it remains on the level of dystopian allegory, everything points back to that era. The uncle’s addiction, the gay professor caring for his dying partner, the fear of infection from a tattoo or a kiss, the sunken, grey faces, the bruised skin—it all evokes that time, even as the virus remains abstract. At its core, the film suggests one thing: every generation has its trauma. “We were so young also,” says the mother in the final scene, as if to testify that no youth has ever known how to face the world’s horrors except by slowly learning how.

The visual and narrative force of all this is undeniable—bold, committed, and disturbing. But along the way, the film fully derails. Its structure spirals into incoherence. Much of it feels like a mistake—and maybe it is. Ducournau seems unsure of her own terrain. (Also: after an acoustic Mercy Seat by Nick Cave, the next track is Let It Happen by Tame Impala. But weren’t we in the allegorical ’90s?) The plot twists become jarring. You almost want to throw something at the screen. And yet, the film holds its power. Daring to the point of collapse. A full-blown vision of timelines folding into one another, indistinct. The collapse of the present is no different from the collapse of the past. We all turn to dust. No hope, just acceptance. I give her that.

FUORI

BY Mario Martone

Fuori marks the apex of Goliarda Sapienza’s mythologisation—an Italian writer long ignored in her lifetime, rediscovered and canonised in Italy only after France embraced her posthumously with the 2005 publication of The Art of Joy, her magnum opus. Born in Catania in 1924 to a socialist lawyer and a feminist activist, Sapienza grew up in a fiercely anti-fascist, intellectual household. She trained as an actress at Rome’s Academy of Dramatic Arts, worked in theatre and cinema, and published several novels that were largely overlooked until after her death in 1996. The Art of Joy, written between 1967 and 1976, was initially rejected by publishers for its explicit sexuality, anti-clericalism, and radical politics. It was only decades later that her voice began to resonate—first in France, then internationally. The novel has since become a cult classic, and was recently adapted into a television series by Valeria Golino herself.

And yet, Mario Martone’s cinematic instinct—masterful and precise—manages to bypass the reductive, encyclopaedic trap of biopics that try to recount entire lives in 90 minutes. Instead, he zeroes in on a single, well-defined period: the summer of 1980, when Sapienza spent five days in prison, forging friendships with other incarcerated women and engaging with one of the defining themes of her life and work.

But Martone’s rejection of the biopic format doesn’t stop there. He favours atmosphere over plot, relationships over narrative arcs, psychological texture over historical detail, deconstruction over structure—offering an impressionistic rendering of Sapienza’s spirit without explaining, dissecting, or over-narrating. This is the film’s strength—but also its greatest weakness.

The result is a refined, deeply crafted piece of cinema that nonetheless risks floating in a kind of poetic haze—one that, especially for non-Italian viewers or those unfamiliar with Sapienza’s nuances, may feel more alienating than immersive. This is not quite a hagiography, but rather a smoky, almost abstract portrait—shaped by queer undercurrents, radical views, female complicity, visceral intuition, and political resonance. Not to forget: the cinematography is striking, the performances by Valeria Golino, Matilda De Angelis, and Elodie are electrifying, and the reconstruction of 1980s Rome is ambitious and stunning. Martone doesn’t just try to remember Sapienza—he dares to inhabit her. And the result is ours to judge.

NINO

by Pauline Loquès

Pauline Loquès’s debut feature is a quiet success—measured, emotionally intelligent, and more mature than its modest scale might suggest. There’s nothing flashy here, no grand gestures or narrative trickery, just a precise, slow-burning portrait of a young man.

Nino, played by Théodore Pellerin, finds out he has throat cancer caused by an STI—a condition that affects around 5,000 people in France each year but remains largely unspoken. We follow him from the moment he casually learns of it on his birthday, through the three days leading up to his treatment.

Not much happens, yet everything does. As he crosses paths with his mother, his ex, a close friend, and a former classmate, the film avoids melodrama or revelations. Instead, it gently nudges Nino toward awareness. A quiet coming-of-age through illness—modest, familiar, but with a tenderness that feels entirely its own.

Loquès, a former literature and law student turned journalist and screenwriter, brings a distinctive voice to her first feature. Inspired by personal loss, she crafts a narrative that explores the banality of everyday life in extraordinary circumstances.

The film’s supporting cast includes William Lebghil as Sofian, Salomé Dewaels as Zoé, Jeanne Balibar as Nino’s mother, and Camille Rutherford as Camille. Théodore Pellerin received the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award for his portrayal of Nino.

NOUVELLE VAGUE

by Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague plays like a student cinephile daydream—sharp, nostalgic, insightful. Every line is a quote or a declaration, every scene a staged recreation. This bold experiment is a perfectly crafted, scripted, performed, nerdy, documentary-like movie about one of the most impactful movies—and directors—of all time.

The plot? A meta-fictional reenactment of the chaotic summer of 1959, where a a broke and arrogant young Jean-Luc Godard, post-journalism and pre-myth, sets out to shoot Breathless. He has a barely-written script, no permit, but a method he wants to stick to. What unfolds is a feverish chain of conversations, creative blocks, broken rules, and spontaneous inspiration. It’s all very insightful and well describe, but when every cigarette breaks turn into manifestos, and each take into philosophy lessons, it may result a bit heavy to digest. But this is a Wikipedia-page-like movie with Paris becoming a stage for one of cinema’s biggest rewrites. As Godard stitches the film together with jump cuts and contradictions, the movie mirrors the myth being born—one frame at a time.

The cast does a great job channeling icons—down to the lesser-known figures at Cahiers du Cinéma, introduced with freeze-frames and full credits—without ever tipping into parody. Beside Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, Théo Cholbi as Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Alma Jodorowsky in the role of Anne Wiazemsky, we have Louis-Do de Lencquesaing as Jean-Pierre Melville, Vincent Lacoste as François Truffaut, Pablo Pauly as Claude Chabrol, Eric Ruf as Henri Langlois, Laurent Lafitte as André Bazin.

Linklater is clearly in awe, and his reconstruction is meticulous—but too reverent to disrupt anything, unlike the Nouvelle Vague it worships. Still beautiful to watch and to learn from, as long as we accept it’s a love letter trapped in a museum frame.

THE PLAGUE

by Charlie Polinger

Great debut. Charlie Polinger’s The Plague is stylised, brutal, and razor-sharp—a film about how silly and cruel 13-year-olds can be. It explores peer bullying, conformity, and institutional failure with a visual style that is fresh and controlled. At its core is a simple question: how quickly does a rumour become reality if everyone believes it?

It’s 2003. A group of boys spend the summer training at a strict, all-boys water polo boarding school. When one of them breaks out in a rash, a rumour spreads—he has “the plague.” No one questions it. The staff stay silent, the coach looks away, and the accusation sticks. What begins as teasing slowly escalates into exclusion, isolation, and finally punishment. The plague spreads. The violence is subtle, psychological, and casual. A vivid portrayal of internalised bullying and exclusion.

The tone and score echo a horror film—we wait for a twist. But that’s already the twist: the plot is just another summer camp story. It’s the bullying that’s horror, and the film knows it. That’s what makes it land with more force than expected. Joel Edgerton plays the coach, detached and ambivalent, but it’s the kids who carry the film—the bullied, the bully, the reasonable one, those who conform, and those who fight back. The performances are all strong and convincing.

Some say it’s too overpolished for its own emotional stakes, but that’s exactly why it works—Polinger’s vision is clear, bold, and he’s definitely a name to watch.

L’INCONNU DE LA GRANDE ARCHE

by Stéphane Demoustier,

L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche is a good watch—not because it’s unforgettable, but because it’s insightful. A film about power, ego, and architecture, it retraces the true story of Otto von Spreckelsen, a little-known Danish architect and former dean of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, chosen by President Mitterrand in 1983 to design the Grande Arche in Paris.

The commission was part of Mitterrand’s ambitious Grands Projets plan to reshape the capital with bold, modern landmarks. La Grande Arche, launched through an international competition in 1982, was meant to mark the bicentennial of the French Revolution and stand as a monument to humanitarian ideals. Mitterrand personally backed Spreckelsen’s minimalist cube—a radical reinterpretation of the Arc de Triomphe—as the centrepiece of his vision for a forward-looking France. The structure was inaugurated on 14 July 1989. Spreckelsen, however, would not live to see it completed. He resigned in 1986 due to mounting political pressure and health issues, and died later that year. The final stages were overseen by French architect Paul Andreu.

As the film unfolds, we follow a quiet, reluctant figure caught in the storm of political agendas, media scrutiny, and the monumental expectations of a national symbol. Claes Bang leads, and there’s also Xavier Dolan in a secondary role. A well-made and engaging portrait of 1980s French institutional life—even if it never digs much deeper than that.

DOSSIER 137

by Dominik Moll

A sharp procedural from Dominik Moll about restoring truth and justice—a process that is complicated, nuanced, often futile, but still the only way in a state governed by the rule of law. Set during the 2018 Yellow Vest protests—a grassroots movement that erupted across France in response to a proposed fuel tax hike and quickly evolved into a broader revolt against economic inequality, government elitism, and police violence—the film follows Stéphanie Bertrand (Léa Drucker), an IGPN investigator tasked with uncovering the truth behind the serious injury of an unarmed teen hit by a police flash-ball. As she navigates layers of silence, bureaucratic resistance, and ingrained camaraderie within the force, the investigation begins to mirror her own internal struggle—becoming personal when she discovers the victim is from her own hometown.

The compelling question it raises is whether being personally connected to the victim compromises her objectivity—or whether it grants her the moral clarity and human concern needed to pursue a truth that might otherwise be buried in bureaucratic indifference. It’s the same empathy and care the state appears to have long abandoned, and perhaps the very absence that fuels the unrest at the heart of the protests. It’s here that the film touches a nerve.

But overall, the film remains dry, methodical, and didactic, dissecting impunity in contemporary France with surgical precision. Moll avoids dramatics, choosing instead a tone of institutional detachment and protocol. Truth sits at the film’s centre like a quiet obsession—but one that might have cut deeper had it been anchored in a real case rather than a fiction loosely inspired by real events.

Deeply rooted in the sociopolitical tensions of post-2018 France, its specificity may strike a chord with local audiences. But stripped of that context, the film’s impact thins, offering little for international viewers beyond procedural rigor and a muted sense of outrage.

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME

by Wes Anderson

The Phoenician Scheme is Wes Anderson at his most self-referential. An over-the-top, overstuffed, and irresistibly stylised inside joke, it’s fun, clever, and occasionally brilliant—but so wrapped up in its own design and cast that it loses touch with its core and never quite lands. As expected, every frame is a pastel composition, every word a knowing wink; the film is obsessed with its own machinery—a diorama turned inward that entertains, but eventually wears thin.

The cast is predictably packed: Benicio del Toro plays a brooding industrialist named Zsa-Zsa Korda; Mia Threapleton, one of the few fresh sparks, is Sister Liesl, a runaway nun in training. Then follows Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, Hope Davis, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Antonia Desplat, Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, Bill Murray, Truman Hanks, Steve Park, Scott Shepherd, Donald Sumpter, Alex Jennings, Stéphane Bak, Imad Mardnli, Mohamed Chahrour, Max Mauff, Volker Zack. Can you imagine.

The story twists through diplomats, spies, hitmen, improbable businessmen, and a secluded convent. There’s an abundance of characters, timelines, and visual references, but they seem more in service of the cast and cinematic self-reference than of any real narrative drive. The narrative spirals inward, prioritising formal play over emotional stakes. The pleasure is in the details: props arranged like sacred relics, dialogue timed like choreography, colour palettes straight from a museum. It’s a movie about watching a Wes Anderson movie, and that recursive loop is both its strength and its flaw.

You’ll laugh. You’ll admire. You’ll quote lines. By the end, The Phoenician Scheme leaves you impressed, but a little cold—and not entirely sure what any of it was for.

MY FATHER’S SHADOW

By Akinola Davies Jr.

My Father’s Shadow is the first Nigerian film ever to screen at Cannes—a remarkable debut by BAFTA nominee Akinola Davies Jr., produced by Lagos-based Fatherland.

Set on the day of Nigeria’s 1993 presidential election—the country’s first democratic vote since the 1983 military coup—the film unfolds like a fevered memory, filtered through a deeply personal lens. Two brothers accompany their often-absent father on a day-long journey through Lagos to collect his salary. Their route takes them through the busy streets of the city—from government offices to roadside food stalls, bars to mechanic shops—each encounter peeling back layers of their father’s identity. This day is building memories, as the film unfolds like a long, unspoken flashback—its grainy frames resembling old home footage. It feels as if we’re watching recollections take shape, glimpses through which the boys later come to sense their father’s loneliness, his contradictions, and the distance between who he is and who they thought he was. On a plot level, what begins as a mundane errand gradually opens into an atmospheric road movie, where personal discoveries and political events intertwine. The film carries us through the hopeful day of June 12, 1993—Nigeria’s first democratic election in a decade—only for that hope to be shattered when the opposition’s victory is annulled by General Ibrahim Babangida’s military regime. What follows is a growing unrest, with protests and chaos spilling into the streets, while the father and his sons try to find their way home. Off screen, we know what’s coming: another six years of authoritarian rule, until democracy is finally restored in 1999. The broken promise of that day echoes through the film—not just as a national betrayal, but as a reflection of what the boys begin to experience, just as it slips out of reach.

Co-written with his brother Wale Davies, the film is drawn from autobiographical memories and explores themes of fatherhood, distance, and national history. It’s not perfect—some parts feel loose—but the images, the acting, and the atmosphere hold it together. My Father’s Shadow was shot in Lagos and Ibadan with a mostly Nigerian crew, and produced by Fatherland with UK partners including Element Pictures. Its selection at Cannes is a milestone—not just for Nigerian cinema, but for African storytelling.

EDDINGTON

by Ari Aster

Cannes Film Festival 2025 – In Competition

The teaser poster for Eddington shows three buffalo plunging into a ravine. It’s not a film still, but a 1989 artwork by David Wojnarowicz—Untitled (Buffalos)—that became a stark visual symbol of the AIDS epidemic and the American government’s criminal negligence in the face of mass death.

Wojnarowicz took the image from a diorama on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, which depicted a Native American hunting tactic—also known as a buffalo jump—where hunters would surround a group of buffalo and gradually drive them toward a cliff. With no way to retreat, the animals would plunge to their death. This image has been widely recognized for its powerful commentary on governmental inaction and has been used in various contexts, including the cover art for U2’s single “One”.

That same image reappears here, recharged with a new meaning. Ari Aster picks it to talk about another pandemic—COVID—but more than that, he uses it to dive into the psychic unravelling of America in 2020. The year everything broke loose and our worst collective instincts began to push us off the cliff. It’s a reflection on American self-destruction: on the virus of politicisation, the disinformation spiral, and the social feed as a terminal condition—contagious, incurable, and still spreading.

Set in a fictional village in New Mexico in May 2020, the film kicks off with a rift between a local sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and the town’s mayor (Pedro Pascal). The mask mandate is just the spark. One sees it as a lifeline, the other as tyranny. In a town once detached from national noise—and barely touched by the actual virus—the algorithm filtering reality is enough to send local fears into a spiral. Facebook posts, conspiracy theories, livestreamed sermons, TikTok confessions, shitposting, and virtue signalling infect the town more deeply than any virus ever could, to the point of an escalation becoming a national event.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, a frail, increasingly unhinged sheriff. Pedro Pascal’s Mayor Garcia is his polished, hyper-digital opposite. Emma Stone is Joe’s wife, swallowed by paranoia, seduced by a far-right cult led by a preacher turned influencer—Austin Butler—whose hybrid gospel racks up millions of views.

Aster turns the volume up to grotesque. He pulls from psychological thriller, dystopian comedy, revisionist Western, and social horror, with that sarcastic A24-style maximalism that dares you to take it seriously while daring you to laugh. It’s chaotic, brilliant, incoherent, and—somehow—accurate.

At 145 minutes, Eddington is overstuffed, often incoherent, and occasionally brilliant. It won’t be for everyone, but it’s remarkable in its ambition and inventions. You end up asking, what the fuck just happened. But this movie doesn’t just portray 2020—it absorbs it, metabolises it, and throws it back at us as grotesque spectacle. In this dark reflection, the screen becomes the cliff. And like those buffalo, we’re rushing straight toward it—together, scrolling, and already in free fall.

LEAVE ONE DAY (PARTIR UN JOUR)

by Amélie Bonnin

For the first time, the Cannes Film Festival opens with a debut feature by a young French female director—an unusual choice that, at best, feels like virtue signalling or programmatic narcissism. The film itself does little to dispel this impression, despite being a well-made, well-acted production. It’s a crowd-pleasing comedy built around millennial-style musical karaoke interludes, in which a Michelin-starred chef from Paris is forced to return to her childhood village to visit her sick father, where she reconnects with old friends who never really grew up—and with the part of herself she had long left behind.

Everything about it is unmistakably French: the soundtrack, the references, the provincial clichés. She also has bangs and wears stripes. Deep down the storyline pits city against countryside, suggesting that France’s salvation lies in its periphery—in a return to something simple, communal, and humble. Here, the working class ultimately offers the metropolitan elite a path back to its roots—and a way out of its existential impasse.

It’s a film tailor-made for the French mainstream, where food becomes a metaphor for national reconciliation: the idea that a fractured, polarised country can be stitched back together through simplicity, mutual listening, and shared local roots. But even its merits don’t make it a debut worthy of opening an international film festival. So what does? The answer is its undeniable commercial pull in the local market. And no, it’s not virtue signalling. It’s a calculated, confident move. Choosing such a debut feature to open the festival is a clear declaration of intent from an industry that knows how to cultivate its own talent. You want a thriving cinema culture? You invest in it. You give the slot to someone young. You make the future visible. You show creatives they’re not just seen, but backed—that there’s a path, and it can hold. You show audiences that new voices are worth their trust. You show the press how to pay attention. It’s a playbook that repeats across the cultural industries. It holds true for cinema just as much as it does for French fashion. More than anything else, this opening choice felt like a statement about an industrial model for cultural production that, for all we might call it narcissism, actually works.

75th Berlin International Film Festival

DRØMMER

by Dag Johan Haugerud

Drømmer, the third film in Dag Johan Haugerud’s trilogy (Sex, Love, Dreams), is a brilliant, formally inventive work that reshapes cinematic grammar into something fresh, immersive, and incredibly smart.

At its core is Johanne, a 17-year-old girl overwhelmed by an intense desire for her female teacher. She records everything in her diary, and when her mother and grandmother discover it, their initial shock gives way to a debate about whether her beautifully written account should be published. As the film unfolds, the boundaries between dreams, desire, and reality blur, transforming into a bold meditation on longing, identity, and coming of age—but even more so, on the power of storytelling itself.

In this film, Dag Johan Haugerud challenges conventional cinematic techniques, turning form into a statement of intent. Rather than simply immersing us in Johanne’s emotional whirlwind, the film actively operates as a meta-commentary on how cinematic language shapes perspective. Voiceover dominates the first half, with nearly every scene narrated by Johanne as the visuals unfold, following each line of her diary entries. We are entirely inside her head, yet always conscious that this is the perspective of a teenager experiencing first love—one who inflates even the slightest moment into high drama.

The score, heavy with sweeping strings and grand classical compositions, reinforces this intensity as if her internal turmoil were channelling a modern Sorrows of Young Werther. Then comes a shift: when Johanne gathers the courage to go to her teacher’s house and confess her feelings, the story jumps forward a year to when she shares her diary with her family. Other perspectives now begin to shape the narrative. Grand classical music underscores her mother’s initial disoriented reaction until she suddenly says, “Can we turn this music off?” and reaches over to shut off the speaker in the kitchen. It’s a brilliant, self-aware gag that transforms extra-diegetic sound into diegetic, explicitly showcasing how the score is used as a narrative tool and how the entry of a new perspective is now changing the story’s tone.

The film operates through various perspectives to shape its narrative. There’s the story itself (which remains unseen), the way Johanne writes it, how her mother and grandmother interpret it, how her teacher analyses it, and how the director frames it through his own meta-narrative. At its core is Johanne’s dilemma: can something written purely for her diary hold meaning for others? Should they even have access to her personal world? Eventually, her mother and grandmother—an aspiring writer who never realized her ambitions—convince her that it could become a queer awakening bestseller. 

Within this dynamic, we see the female perspective of three generations, engaging in brilliantly witty discussions on feminism, the perception and reversal of abuse, opportunism, the commodification of emotions, the overestimation of one’s children, and the value of personal dreams.

As the film charts a journey of growth, its storytelling unfolds between two opposing scales, using contrast—perhaps—as a guiding force to calibrate a perspective on things. The everyday and the ordinary are elevated into something epic and universal, framing a question of positioning—where Johanne should stand in the space between, and where we, as viewers, should place ourselves.

In this sense, the recurring architectural shots of staircases, apartment steps, and an iron overpass in her neighborhood—wrapped in fog in the opening scene—likely take on symbolic weight, representing transition, elevation, and perhaps a rite of passage. Later, in a dream, Johanne’s grandmother envisions that same overpass as Jacob’s biblical ladder, stretching from earth to heaven, turning a familiar structure into a grand metaphor for dreams, desire, and the search for meaning. Through these constant shifts between the intimate and the monumental, the film finds its rhythm, never confined to a single register but constantly unfolding across multiple layers.

At its core, this is a coming-of-age film—one that, by weaving together these experiences, leads its protagonist toward greater self-awareness and the ability to put things into perspective. After all, growing up is precisely about that. So when the film ends with a new encounter, possibly romantic, instead of sweeping, solemn strings, a lighthearted pop song kicks in—as if, by this point, we as viewers have also learned to put things into perspective and see teenage crushes for what they truly are. This is a film that works seamlessly and is perfectly crafted.

KONTINENATAL 25

by Radu Jude

One of the new geniuses of European cinema, fresh off the breakout success of Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, instead of scaling up—as any director in his position might—strips everything down, shooting in just 10 days on an iPhone 15, with no lights, no grips, no budget. He relies entirely on dialogue and sharp situational humor, crafting another brilliant absurdist comedy-drama infused with his signature sardonic wit, once again dissecting Romania’s contradictions in its uneasy transition from socialism to capitalism—this time through the lens of its housing market and a conflicted middle class caught between past and present. It’s a testament to his ability to create magic on a zero budget, a fascinating experiment that, while more austere than usual, still carries Jude’s razor-sharp commentary and biting satire.

The film opens with long sequences following an elderly homeless man, surviving on scraps, drifting through the city—a classic introduction for a protagonist. But as he returns to the basement he occupies, we meet Orsolya, a former law professor turned bailiff, sent to evict him after the building is purchased by a German firm. The plan is to demolish it and replace it with a sleek, upscale boutique hotel named Kontinental. Hopeless and cornered, Ion ties himself to a radiator and takes his own life.

From here, the focus shifts. Orsolya becomes the protagonist, but that opening sequence makes it clear, Ion—or more precisely, the void he leaves behind—remains the film’s true gravitational pull. His death consumes Orsolya with guilt, sending her into a spiral. Things only worsen when she learns from the media that Ion was once an Olympic athlete, a forgotten national hero. As an ethnic Hungarian in Romania, she quickly becomes an easy target—vilified online as the Hungarian woman who drove a patriotic Romanian icon to his death.

Paralyzed by guilt, Orsolya cancels a planned family vacation and instead roams the city, bouncing between tense, cutting two-shot conversations. She searches for understanding, for someone to validate her remorse, but the more indifferent her listeners are, the less she can absolve herself.

Kontinental ’25 wears its inspiration on its sleeve—its title, the movie poster, its central arc all nod to Rossellini’s Europa ’51. Like Ingrid Bergman’s character, Orsolya is shaken by a personal tragedy, setting off a spiraling search for meaning. In one scene, our protagonist drinks a beer at a bar, with a Europa ’51 poster on the wall—a silent reminder of its main reference.

The dialogues are sharp, darkly funny, and unrelenting, shifting between tragedy and absurdity in a way only Jude can pull off. He dissects European and national idiosyncrasies with his signature bite, exposing the absurdity of nationalism through grotesque irony.

There’s a hyper-local grievance tied to the town and its history, mostly unknown to international audiences, yet Jude renders it so effectively that it feels universal. “Romanians stole Cluj and Transylvania from the Austro-Hungarian Empire,” a character declares, part of an ongoing game of historical rivalry between the two countries. Beyond the online hate messages she receives as an ethnic Hungarian, the protagonist’s mother—an Orbán supporter and proud Hungarian —dismisses Romania’s higher GDP with a sneer: “Civilization isn’t measured by GDP.” Nationalism also takes on a purely utilitarian edge in some of the film’s sharpest moments. A former law student, now a food delivery cyclist, wears a backpack that says “I’m Romanian” as a survival tactic, explaining that drivers will run over Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans without hesitation.

Through these continuous sharp social commentaries, the story follows Orsolya in search of relief. She meets an old friend, donating the money she saved from canceling her holiday to their charity, as if redistributing her privilege might ease her conscience. She gets drunk with her ex-student and ends up having sex with him in a park. She meets a priest, hoping for final moral clarity, but his response is blunt: Suicide is a sin against oneself, and no one bears responsibility but the person who took their own life.s responsibility but the person who took their own life.

Her guilt is real, her motivations sincere, and she tries to do her best—but if no one is responsible, then who is to blame? Kontinental ’25 offers no easy answers. It’s a film about displacement—political, personal, and moral. Orsolya searches for clarity but finds only contradictions. In the end, there’s no catharsis, just a slow sequence of anonymous new buildings under construction—homes for Romania’s emerging middle class. As if the entire film is built around a single lingering question: At what cost?

GIRLS ON WIRES

by Vivian Qu

Vivian Qu’s Girls on Wires wants to be a lot of things—maybe too many—turning into a frustrating, uneven ride.

On the run from ruthless debt collectors trying to settle her addict father’s debts, Tian Tian seeks out her estranged cousin Fang Di (Wen Qi), a stunt double fighting for a future beyond the film industry’s underbelly. Their bond is both a lifeline and a curse—Tian Tian, weighed down by her father’s failures, spirals into self-destruction, while Fang Di risks everything to clear family debts, chasing freedom and independence.

The film explores the complex relationship between two cousins from China’s single-child generation, raised in the shadows of the country’s first wave of business owners in the ’80s and ’90s—a generation that pursued prosperity at any cost, often leaving behind fractured families and buried traumas.

The English title refers to the wires suspending stunt performers midair, much like the wuxia heroines Fang Di plays on set, but also the fragile thread both cousins cling to, one misstep away from falling. The original Chinese title, Girls Who Want to Fly, adds another layer—freedom, both real and imagined, the dream of escape in a world that will never truly let them soar.

The film throws everything into the mix—stunt doubles, junkies, wuxia epics, gangsters, a mob queen, family drama, debts, brutal violence, comedy, hunting sequences, fragmented chronology—Girls on Wires is a chaotic, heady blend of meta-cinema, crime thriller, and dark humor, constantly shifting between happiness, sadness, and pure absurdity. A film about predestination and survival as an endless battle, but one so overloaded with ideas that it struggles to stick the landing.

WHAT MARIELLE KNOWS

by Frédéric Hambalek

This is a brilliant German drama from Frédéric Hambalek—funny, absurd, and surprisingly deep—tackling the theme of honesty in relationships through a highly original and offbeat premise.

The film opens with Kate, a middle-aged corporate manager, sneaking out for a cigarette break with a colleague. What starts as harmless workplace flirting quickly escalates into explicit dirty talk as they vividly imagine having sex on the office table. For Kate, it’s a small, liberating escape from her routine—until she returns home to discover that her teenage daughter, Marielle, has developed telepathic abilities after being slapped by a classmate. Now, she can hear everything her parents say, think, and do.

Her husband, who proudly presents himself as an alpha male among colleagues at the dinner table, is exposed by Marielle as someone easily overruled by everyone around him. Skeptical of her claim, he refuses to believe her, convinced she must be eavesdropping through the phone’s microphone. As the family unravels, a series of increasingly absurd, hilarious, and deeply uncomfortable situations force the couple to confront the fact that their daughter hears every word they say, and every move they make.

What happens when your teenage daughter knows all your secrets? The picture-perfect family begins to crack as her parents struggle with the realization that they must always behave as if they are being judged. The narrative possibilities seem endless, yet Hambalek avoids easy comedic sketches, instead exploring the couple’s reactions in unexpected ways—unraveling their personalities, sense of freedom, identity, and the delicate balance of their relationship.

The narrative arc and development of the film revolve entirely around the parents. Marielle remains a functional figure, speaking little except to relay what she hears, often framed from below with a red filter and imposing string music. Her role is almost mythical, a catalyst for the story, while her own inner turmoil is left unexplored.

The theme of privacy in the age of social media and oversharing has been tackled countless times, but this film digs deeper. Each twist is surprising, and the seamless blend of comedy and drama raises serious moral dilemmas without ever forcing answers. What starts as a simple what if… scenario or a teenage-with-superpowers premise evolves into a sharply executed family drama that subtly explores fundamental philosophical questions. Its modest ambitions and precise execution make it a gem worth applauding.

IF I HAD LEGS, I’D KICK YOU

by Mary Bronstein

The widely praised A24 film If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, directed by Mary Bronstein, made its debut at Sundance before landing in competition at the Berlinale, where anticipation was high. Featuring a stellar cast—including a standout Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, Danielle Macdonald, Lark White, Delaney Quinn, Christian Slater, and A$AP Rocky—the film delivers a masterclass in examining the American psyche, blending exaggeration and unhinged energy with an edge of self-parody, making it an instant cult hit.

The catch? If you don’t fully buy into its attitude and indulgent, freewheeling energy, it risks feeling as banal as it is desperate to be original, twisted, and irreverent. But its value may sits somewhere else.

The story follows a stressed-out mother, overwhelmed by life, whose 5-year-old daughter has a medical condition that requires her to be fed through a machine via a tube. Nothing in her life seems to function, and when a sinkhole opens in the ceiling of their home (a well-worn metaphor and a moment of magical realism seemingly designed to give the film an auteurist edge), she and her daughter are forced to move into a motel. A series of increasingly absurd situations push her to the brink in a spiral that is as darkly funny as it is predictable.

The film’s driving force is its relentless subversion of every role, institution, expectation, and social norm—exposing the contradictions, absurdities, and often murky underbelly of contemporary life. The sense of liberation, if there is any beneath this poignant portrayal of mental exhaustion, seems to come from understanding life as one long cosmic joke, where the void of existence renders society’s perfect-life expectations suffocating, meaningless, and a direct path to a nervous breakdown.

She is a mother who resents her role, crushed by exhausting routines, expectations, sleep deprivation, and everyone around her. We watch her drink motel wine for comfort, attempt to buy cocaine on the dark web, leave her daughter alone to go out at night, and clash with doctors and social workers. By day, she works as a therapist, yet she is no more stable than her patients. She burns bridges with everyone around her—even her own therapist refuses to see her anymore. Every person she interacts with, from the school janitor to the receptionist to her husband (who is always out of town), is equally unhinged, pushing her further toward a spiral of exhaustion and growing despair.

This sharp-edged indie free-for-all (as the title makes abundantly clear) assembles a cast of pop culture figures—from rapper A$AP Rocky to late-night icon Conan O’Brien to ‘90s box office star Christian Slater—for a self-aware, self-ironic industry reunion that doubles as both an urgent social critique and an intimate character study of an America that has long lost its way. The screenplay and direction are fully attuned to the film’s ambitions, and the standout performances push it even further, elevating it beyond the ordinary. Yet, the only question is whether you’re willing to ride along with its over-the-top narration or be left outside the joke.

THE ICE TOWER

by Lucile Hadžihalilović

Sometime in the 1970s, somewhere in the Alps—Jean, a 16-year-old girl, flees her adoptive home in the mountains and heads to the city in the valley. With nowhere to go, she sneaks onto a stage where a film crew is adapting Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen—which also happens to be her favorite story. Spending time on set, she lands a role as an extra, drawing the attention of actress and diva Christine (Marion Cotillard), who doesn’t just play the Snow Queen but seems to embody her.

Jean’s fascination with Christine—her status, her presence, and what she represents—intensifies, pulling her deeper into a world both enchanting and unforgiving, until she is forced to confront its cost. Their relationship becomes the film’s central force, shaping its deeper themes and transforming this layered reinterpretation of the fairy tale into an intense, allegorical clash between innocence and fame, fascination and control. Here, Andersen’s fable—where love and purity triumph over cynicism and evil—is refracted through a colder, darker, and more unsettling lens.

A metafilm about cinema and the seductive pull of fame—not just as status or comfort, but as a frozen, immutable state of being, an icy tower one might willingly sacrifice purity for. How deep does this fascination run, and where does it truly begin?

Jean and Christine mirror each other, reflecting fame as both a coping mechanism for buried traumas and an irresistible force. After a slow start that demands a few leaps of faith, the film unfolds in layers, much like a fairy tale, mythologizing the heroine’s journey into womanhood—where the search for saviors reveals them as villains, and the world of appearances dissolves into a desolate, icy landscape. Like The Snow Queen, Jean risks becoming trapped in a frozen realm, much like the fabled boy lost in the Snow Queen’s palace, piecing together shards of an impossible puzzle.

In Andersen’s tale, the devil, in the form of a troll, creates a magic mirror that distorts everything it reflects. Here, that mirror is replaced by the camera and the silver screen—not as a mere commentary on cinema, but as an allegory of artifice, constructed identities, and the seductive illusion of status.

The film is incredibly rich and visually stunning, with a hypnotic, suspended atmosphere where both actresses deliver remarkable performances—the promising newcomer Clara Pacini (a talent to watch) and the always mesmerizing Oscar-winning Marion Cotillard. Gaspar Noé, married to filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović, also has a role. At times, the movie becomes too heavy, slow, and demanding to fully hold together, occasionally losing itself and dissipating the power its striking imagery and strong ideas had carefully built.

O ÙLTIMO AZUL

by Gabriel Mascaro

Set in a dystopian future in Brazil, where the government forces the elderly into isolated colonies to free up jobs and resources for the young, O Último Azul takes a surprising turn—not into bleak social commentary, but into something vibrant, adventurous, and full of life.

At its center is Tereza (Denise Weinberg), a 77-year-old woman who has spent her life working in a crocodile slaughterhouse, only to be forced into retirement. But she refuses to accept her fate. Instead of surrendering to the system, she escapes, setting off on a journey deep into the Amazon.

Along the way, she meets Cadu (Rodrigo Santoro), a free-spirited sailor who embodies the idea of living untethered, and Roberta (Miriam Socarrás), a woman who challenges her worldview and opens new doors. In this late-in-life coming-of-age road movie, Tereza picks up wisdom at every turn, slowly finding the courage to carve her own path to freedom.

The film’s Amazon setting isn’t just a postcard-perfect backdrop but a living, breathing mirror—a space where forgotten parts of the self resurface. Animals play a key symbolic role in this transformation, first appearing as external figures: subdued crocodiles in the slaughterhouse, a snail she throws out like an ignored call, frozen statues in an abandoned amusement park. But as the story unfolds, they shift from passive presences to allies, guiding the protagonist toward awareness and liberation. She learns to listen, to trust her nature.

The hallucinogenic snails that open gateways to the future, the crocodiles gliding weightlessly through the Rio Grande, the animals at a betting center that “must be looked in the eye until they choose you,” as she is told, and the tropical fish that secure her high-stakes gamble—all come together in a rich tapestry of symbolism. They embody the idea that life truly begins when one stops resisting, trusts their instincts, and embraces the unknown.

Director Gabriel Mascaro weaves together magical realism, social critique, and moments of pure exhilaration, crafting a film that isn’t just about defiance but about embracing life on one’s own terms. With dreamlike visuals and deeply human storytelling, O Último Azul is a bold, poetic reminder that it’s never too late to start over.

REFLET DANS UN DIAMANT MORT

by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani

John (Fabio Testi), a mysterious seventy-something, lingers in a grand but eerily empty hotel on the French Riviera, exuding the effortless cool of a 007-like mythos. When he becomes fixated on the woman next door (Maria de Medeiros), memories of his past resurface—back when he was a deep-cover spy on high-stakes missions, including recovering diamonds from wealthy oil magnates.

But it quickly becomes clear that husband-and-wife directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have no interest in crafting a conventional narrative. Image by image, scene by scene, we’re thrown into a kaleidoscope designed to dismantle anything we might use to construct meaning. Nothing is reliable—not the story, the narration, the symbols, the tone, or even the characters. Even the genre itself collapses, the cinematic form too. The more we try to impose coherence, the more the film pushes us away, finding its sole power and purpose in the raw force of its imagery.

What remains is a head-spinning fever dream, styled as an over-the-top 1960s spy movie—zoom shots, heavy grain, killer gadgets, femmes fatales, splatter bloodbaths, 007-like agents, and comic-book graphics. But far from being just an homage or a nostalgic exercise, it morphs into a hallucinatory, visionary experience designed to obliterate every tool and frame of understanding through sheer maximalism. It’s a meticulously constructed chaos, an intricate operation that mimics logic rather than succumbing to randomness. And in the end, it works, achieving exactly what it sets out to do.

For two hours, we’re never quite sure what we’re watching: a film, a film within a film, a memory, a hallucination, or an allegorical pastiche. Everything is deliberately unreliable, constantly shifting, dismantling any sense of stability. The result is an audacious mindfuck all-consuming reflection on the nature of cinema itself.

ARI

by Léonor Serraille

Ari (Andranic Manet), a 27-year-old primary school teacher in Lille, is quietly unraveling. He isn’t in freefall—just floating, slipping away from work, family, and responsibility with the ease of someone who has never had to fight too hard to stay afloat and far too much time to overthink. He isn’t lost so much as overwhelmed by the small things, watching life happen rather than fully stepping into it.

Director Léonor Serraille, who won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes for Jeune Femme (2017) and later impressed with Mother and Son (2022), is known for her slow, careful exploration of seemingly unremarkable lives. Here, she crafts an intimate psychological portrait of a man caught in indecision, awkward sensitivity, and intellectual detachment—or what could be called the quiet crisis of the privileged.

At first glance, Ari might seem like another exercise in French existential navel-gazing, capturing a generation navigating its own awkwardness, repressed emotions, and the need for release. A generation told they could be anything, yet haunted by the creeping suspicion that they will never be enough—struggling not to disappear into irrelevance while endlessly questioning what they are truly good at.

In fact, the film stems from a unique experiment—an encounter with students from the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Paris, where the screenplay took shape. Serraille brings it to the screen with intimate, precise direction, staying close to her protagonist to capture every subtle shift in mood and hesitation. The result is a quietly affecting meditation on masculinity and the weight of unspoken expectations. It speaks directly to those who know this feeling well, resonates with an introspective audience, and will likely frustrate the rest.

DREAMS

by Michel Franco

Michel Franco’s Dreams stars Jessica Chastain as Jennifer McCarthy, an art patron from a wealthy liberal family in San Francisco whose foundation supports arts and social initiatives in underprivileged regions, with a particular focus on Mexico. While visiting a dance school her foundation funds, she meets Fernando (Isaac Hernández), a gifted ballet student. Their connection quickly turns into a passionate affair, and Fernando decides to cross the border illegally to be with her in San Francisco.

When he arrives in San Francisco, their love affair feels perfect at first, but when Jennifer insists on keeping their relationship a secret, Fernando sees it as a betrayal. Offended, he rejects both her and the privilege she offers, walking away and taking a job as a cleaner. She searches for him, pleading for his return on multiple occasions, and ultimately, he relents after she surprises him with a ticket to the ballet at the opera house.

What first seems like a contrived conflict—an improbable stretch in the screenplay—slowly reveals itself as the film’s central tension: a stark meditation on dignity and the demand for respect and transparency, no matter the disparities in privilege and position.

Michel Franco dissects the unspoken hierarchies that govern intimacy, ultimately questioning whether desire and good intentions can truly bridge the deep divides of age, culture, and, most significantly, social class. He builds a narrative that pushes its premise to its extreme consequences, delivering an unflinching examination of power, love, silent humiliation, compromise, and unbalanced relationships. By tackling the hidden racism within elite arts philanthropy, he exposes the hypocrisy that seems inescapable in a capitalist society. The result is explosive, the message crystal clear, and the powerhouse performances—including Rupert Friend and Marshall Bell—paired with sharp execution, land Franco’s vision like a punch to the gut. A bold, politically charged film destined to make waves.

HOT MILK

by Rebecca Lenkiewicz

“Jellyfish have no brain or memory”, we hear in a documentary watched by Sofia (Emma Mackey, Sex Education, Barbie) as she shares a vacation house with her wheelchair-bound mother, Rose (a great Fiona Shaw), in the sun-bleached isolation of Almería, Spain. But this isn’t a holiday—Rose has gambled their home on a healer, Gómez (Vincent Perez), hoping for a cure to walk again.

Occasionally, the jellyfish return in the story—they sting, they dry on the shore—becoming one of many symbols circling the film’s theme: how the characters confront, suppress, or attempt to escape their memories. Sofia’s resentment bubbles up in impulsive acts, Rose’s psychosomatic illness remains an ambiguous performance of pain, and Ingrid (Vicky Krieps) drifts through polyamorous relationships, perhaps evading the weight of her memories. When she draws Sofia into a passionate love affair, she gifts her a dress with the word beloved embroidered on it—only for Sofia to later realize it actually reads beheaded.

The narrative flourishes with sharp symbolism around repressed feelings, unspoken emotions, and the necessity of confronting what has been buried: a father’s absence, a lifetime of unacknowledged frustration, a desire that resists categorization. Yet while this approach may work in Deborah Levy’s novel, from which the film is adapted, much of its power feels lost in translation to the screen.

This is a slow-burn film that builds like a suffocated breath, waiting for release and resolution that never quite arrives. In her directorial debut, Rebecca Lenkiewicz attempts to navigate this material, but nothing fully convinces. She opts to leave things suspended or merely suggested, yet rather than opening up questions, the result is a film that feels like an undercooked exploration of the very themes it leans on so heavily.

SHENG XI ZHI DI (LIVING THE LAND)

by Huo Meng

In the early 1990s, China’s countryside and peasant population were undergoing a profound transformation. The economic reforms of the late 1970s lifted millions out of poverty, replacing collective farming with family-based land use. But by the early ’90s, rural incomes had stagnated, wealth was increasingly concentrated in cities, and the divide between urban and rural life had deepened. Market reforms prioritized industrial expansion over agriculture, fueling rapid growth in coastal cities and Special Economic Zones like Shenzhen and Guangzhou. As factories multiplied, millions of rural laborers left their villages in search of work, sparking China’s first great wave of internal migration—a shift that would reshape the nation’s economic and social landscape.

Sheng Xi Zhi Di (Living the Land), directed by Huo Meng (b. 1984), unfolds within this context—not just as a backdrop, but as a meticulously crafted portrait of a rural world on the verge of vanishing. The documentary effort is immense, resulting in an insightful viewing experience.

This film is like Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs, set in 1991 China, with one crucial difference: it is emotionally detached. We are never fully drawn into the characters or their struggles with poverty, life, and death. There are occasional moments of humor, but a deliberate distance keeps us at arm’s length, making its 132-minute runtime a challenge to endure at times.

The basic storyline follows a 10-year-old boy left in the care of his uncles as his parents join the wave of rural migrants heading to Shenzhen. But this film isn’t driven by conventional storytelling. Instead, it unfolds as a slow-burning, four-season-spanning portrait of village life—where tradition lingers, progress remains uncertain, and history fades into a mosaic of quiet, everyday moments.

Visually, Sheng Xi Zhi Di (Living the Land) is mesmerizing—its precisely composed frames and immersive sound design pull you into a world that feels both tangible and distant, a hypnotic rendering of rural life on the verge of disappearance. But as the film unfolds, its many characters remain deliberately anonymous, more symbols than fully realized individuals. That detachment may be intentional, reinforcing the idea of the land as the true protagonist and the masses of peasants as transient figures, yet the film lingers in an in-between space, making it feel more observational than immersive. The result is a breathtakingly crafted work of world-building, but one that ultimately risks feeling hollow.

72nd San Sebastian Festival

BOUND IN HEAVEN

by Xin Huo

The directorial debut of screenwriter Xin Huo (Kung Fusion, Yi Chang Feng Hua Xue Yue De Shi) is a visually striking film starring the captivating Ni Ni and Zhou You. It explores complex themes like domestic violence and terminal illness, building tension through sharp contrasts: freedom versus social constraints, love versus abuse, rural versus urban life, and a balance of lyricism, rawness, melodrama, and thriller.

This devastating love story is adapted from Li Xiuwen’s novel, with Xin Huo adding the theme of domestic violence to address an international social issue not present in the original text. The plot follows Xia You (Ni Ni), a successful woman trapped in an abusive relationship with her fiancé (Liao Fan). Her life changes dramatically when she meets Xu Zitai (Zhou You), a rural man living day-to-day in the city. What begins as casual sex transforms into a passionate love that reshapes her world. When Xu Zitai reveals he has a rare, terminal cancer and no desire for treatment, Xia chooses to stay by his side. After a fatal confrontation where her fiancé is killed, they escape, leaving everything behind to embrace their doomed romance, living each day as if it were their last. As long as they have each other, nothing else seems to matter. The narrative trajectory terminates in an inevitable climax—his death and her arrest. (No spoiler here, as the film opens with her police interrogation.)

Xin Huo showcases her talent not only in crafting a compelling narrative but also in delivering visually powerful, meticulously curated images—from costumes and props to carefully designed frames. Her camera movements and cinematography effectively balance scenes between the lyrical and raw, always focusing on striking visuals and beautiful moments. A standout is the final scene: a sweeping drone shot through exploding fireworks as Lights by Archive plays.

Though the film has its flaws, with some moments feeling slightly overdone or forced, Xin Huo’s ambitious direction and the film’s emotional depth make it a strong and promising debut. 

THE LAST SHOW GIRL

by Gia Coppola

With her third film, Gia Coppola tells the story of an ageing, self-deluding Vegas showgirl who continues to love what she does even after the show she’s worked on for over 30 years shuts down. Despite her daughter confronting her with the reality that she’s invested everything into something fruitless, being called mediocre at auditions, and feeling rejected by a world that seems to have no time for older women, she presses on. Coppola uses this exemplary story to explore themes of ageing, identity, and desirability in a patriarchal society where self-worth is usually tied to external validation. The protagonist is a woman fighting alone, against all odds, to prove to herself and others that she still matters. The plot unfolds slowly, with no surprises, remaining within the realm of predictability.

This auteur film wouldn’t be particularly notable without Pamela Anderson’s outstanding, touching, and award-worthy performance. She carries the entire movie on her shoulders making it bright. The project feels entirely built around her—her strength, optimism, and fearlessness. She’s simply incredible. Jamie Lee Curtis also delivers a strong supporting role as a casino waitress forced to sleep in her car after the show closes. Curtis is almost unrecognizable, with a Vegas-tanned face, heavy makeup, and a wig. Her standout scene, where she climbs onto a table to dance to “Total Eclipse of the Heart”—reclaiming her former showgirl self—while casino customers walk by indifferently, is powerful but somewhat predictable.

There are aspects of this 85-minute film that feel underdeveloped, with the focus leaning more toward achieving the indie, contemplative aesthetic than fully developing the story. Still, the film works overall and is worth seeing for Pamela Anderson’s career-defining performance.

HARD TRUTHS

by Mike Leigh

Legendary director Mike Leigh, known for his social and humanistic dramas that capture British life through tragicomic portraits of the working class, returns with a film that feels quintessentially his. At its heart is Marianne Jean-Baptiste, reuniting with Leigh for the first time since Secrets & Lies (1996), where she made history as the first Black British actress nominated for an Oscar.

Set in a quiet, middle-class London suburb within a Black-Jamaican community, the film revolves around Pansy (Jean-Baptiste), a middle-aged woman consumed by bitterness. Her anger—often laced with sharp wit and humour—spills over onto everyone around her, including her passive husband Curtley (David Webber) and introverted son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). In stark contrast, Pansy’s sister Chantelle (Austin), a hairdresser, embraces life’s joys, with her daughters Kayla and Aleisha thriving both personally and professionally. The film delicately explores how each character grapples with their own hard truths, either confronting or escaping them.

As is Leigh’s signature, the film began without a script. Through months of exploratory rehearsals, the actors developed their characters by drawing from real-life inspirations, crafting deeply detailed backstories. This process brings a raw unpredictability and emotional authenticity, with the plot taking a backseat to the nuanced inner lives of its characters—especially Pansy, whose inner turmoil becomes more vivid through her interactions with those around her.

Reflecting on the film’s portrayal of a Black family, Jean-Baptiste observes, “I’m not sure we often get to see stories about Black families that are just about living—not reacting to outside forces or issues.” Leigh’s exploration of contemporary England focuses on internal struggles rather than social ones—those hard truths that slowly shape lives from within.

Although it didn’t make the selection at Cannes or Venice, the film premiered in the main competition at the San Sebastián Film Festivals and Toronto, standing out as another candid and quietly powerful entry in Leigh’s filmography.

THE LAST BREATH

by Costa Gavras

At 91, Costa Gavras, the renowned Greek-French filmmaker, confronts the themes of death, illness, and dignity in end-of-life care with a film that is direct, informative, and honest. This is, in fact, the film’s core: its candid approach to the taboo of death and its exploration of how patients and their families navigate the process of acceptance. As the protagonist says, death is inside all of us, and it is our right to face it with awareness and dignity.

Actor Denis Podalydès, known for his comedic roles, plays Fabrice Toussaint, a philosopher writing on end-of-life care. When palliative care doctor Augustin Masset (Kad Merad) introduces himself as a fan, Fabrice joins him on hospital rounds, meeting patients and their families. What Fabrice doesn’t reveal is that his renewed interest in death stems from a potentially fatal heart condition discovered during an MRI.

The film’s narrative structure is simple and almost literary: a doctor and a philosopher meet various terminally ill patients, discovering their stories, families, and their approach to death. Through this mosaic of encounters, the film offers a thoughtful dialogue, inviting reflection on end-of-life protocols within the healthcare system, transforming it into not only a philosophical and humanist meditation but also a political statement.

Gavras fills this straightforward framework with humanity and dignity, steering away from sentimentality or pity. These stories are viewed through a medical and philosophical lens, leaving the audience with the emotional weight to process. The reflection is on all of us: as the global population ages, how we confront death is a pressing issue for which we are largely unprepared.

This is a simple, precise film. Gavras’ touch is evident in the music, sound, cinematography, and direction. Standout performances from Charlotte Rampling, Hiam Abbass, and Ángela Molina further elevate the work, making it a testament to a director who continues to surprise after 60 years of filmmaking.

ON FALLING

by Laura Carreira

Portuguese director Laura Carreira’s debut, produced by Ken Loach’s company, stands out as a gem of social realism. A genre deeply rooted in British cinema, here pushed further by this young Edinburgh-based filmmaker unafraid to explore its boundaries. The film is far from enjoyable—little happens as we follow a Portuguese expat working as a packer in an Amazon-like logistics centre in Glasgow. Yet, the movie offers a haunting exploration of contemporary alienation and the harsh realities of modern labour.

Time and again, we watch her go through the same soulless daily routine at the factory or mindlessly scroll through her phone, only to realize there is no development, no narrative arc, and nothing to hold onto—just like her own life, lived without direction, purpose, and any sense of when or if things will change.

We learn nothing about the protagonist’s past; she seems to have been dropped into a foreign land that is not hostile to her, much like her colleagues and the workplace environment. Relationships are polite but deeply insignificant. This is not a story of overt suffering or abuse but of a life that’s hollow, alienating, and stripped of any vitality.

The film’s climax comes when, after finally securing a job interview in her search for change, she’s asked, “Tell me about yourself,” and can’t respond—unable to articulate anything about her life. Carreira hints at potential narrative shifts throughout the film, but they never arrive, making this a slow, quiet burn that sinks in deeply and leaves a lingering, unsettling ache.

THE END

by Joshua Oppenheimer

As the world burns, a wealthy family whose fortune comes from fossil fuels has lived in a mansion-bunker for 25 years, clinging to strict protocols and etiquette in a desperate attempt to survive ‘ethically’ within their perfect bubble. Yet things start to change when a stranger appears—a survivor from the outside world—bringing her need for honesty into their carefully fabricated reality built on lies and pretence.

Joshua Oppenheimer, a two-time Oscar nominee who made waves with The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), both of which exposed the horrors of the Indonesian genocide, delivers a debut film that doesn’t hold back and dives straight into the heaviest issues of our time: climate disaster, human extinction, white privilege, whitewashing as a tool of patriarchal power, lies as coping mechanisms, and cultural values used to mask greed and nihilistic individualism. Yet, beyond the grand ambition—bordering on pretentiousness—what’s most puzzling is Oppenheimer decision to make this movie a musical. This stylistic choice does the film no favours, weighing it down even more in a movie already overloaded with symbolism, meaning, and social commentary.

There are many compelling elements, and Oppenheimer’s unflinching examination of human civilization—at the height of its achievements yet headed toward inevitable extinction due to its capitalist, individualistic foundation—raises a host of nuanced, thought-provoking questions. We are confronted with a last-standing family, bound by old-world codes, that, despite the efforts, cannot escape its inherent nihilism. Here, every spiritual impulse is denied, replaced by a pursuit of sterile beauty and a retreat into artistic and cultural values that ultimately feel stripped of meaning and authenticity against the civilization’s collapse.

It’s an ambitious film that provokes reflection on human nature, the failures of past generations, and the redemptive power of human connections rooted in emotional honesty. However, it risks becoming excessive, sometimes like a display of directorial ego, continuously adding new elements rather than focusing and refining its narrative.

The cinematography, set design, and costumes are masterful, as is the outstanding acting from Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, Tim McInnerny, and George MacKay. With its bitter reflections—expansive and often insightful—this film had the potential to be a gem but ultimately fell short, weighed down by its own pretentiousness.

EL LLANTO

by Pedro Martín-Calero

Pedro Martín-Calero, a young director with a background in music videos and advertising, chooses a genre film to bring his visual prowess to his cinematic debut. El Llanto is a horror thriller that skillfully and lightly revisits a genre well-known in Spanish cinema, modernizing and elevating it into a work that aspires to be both complex and visually captivating. The film follows various women from different generations and parts of the world, all haunted by the same dark presence—a man visible only on video, embodying the pervasive evil of familial and collective karma of gender violence passed down from mother to daughter and manifesting as suicidal madness. Ester Expósito leads the episode in present-day Madrid, while Malena Villa and Mathilde Ollivier rein for the 1990s Argentina segments. These talented young actresses form part of the film’s excellent cast.

Martín-Calero shows a certain mastery over the pacing and visual creativity, but what escapes him is narrative coherence, which falters at various points, leaving some elements and logical transitions unjustified, making it harder to immerse in the atmosphere the film strives to create. If the goal was to elevate the genre and present a complex and thought-provoking work addressing contemporary themes like gender violence, intergenerational trauma, and mental health, the film stumbles due to its lack of narrative control, pulling it back into the realm of generic genre filmmaking. Its strong visual appeal remains the only aspect that transcends this. However, some flaws can be forgiven in a debut from a promising and bold director, who may yet deliver something more refined in his future works.

81st Venice International Film Festival

APRIL

by Déa Kulumbegashvili

This is a 2-hour and 15-minute long auteur film about a Georgian obstetrician who provides illegal abortions in rural Georgia. Strongly characterised by a rigorously formalist style with static shots, where nothing seems to happen for up to 10 minutes, and filmed in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, the film is excruciatingly slow but masterfully executed. The long subjective takes, vast landscapes, and extended static frames, where stretched-out dialogues often occur off-screen, have the power to become captivating, hypnotic, and beautiful in a way that only Déa Kulumbegashvili can achieve.

We follow this doctor—who is risking her career and reputation to help young women terminate pregnancies— leading a solitary life between the hospital and remote villages. She has fleeting sexual encounters with local peasants while enduring harassment from male colleagues, mistreatment from surly patients, and the pervasive misogyny and violent masculinity that surrounds her.

The contrast is between her contemporary view and professional life—working in a modern hospital that uses advanced medical techniques and rigorous methods—with a context where outdated male attitudes persist, leaving women’s bodies still at the mercy of men. The character’s struggle is a haunting reflection on sexuality and transgression, as well as a merciless commentary on Georgian society and its incomplete, illusory modernity. In Georgia, while abortion is officially legal, it remains largely out of reach due to deep-rooted religious and cultural stigma, especially in rural areas where the Orthodox Church’s influence prevails. This atmosphere of fear extends to birth control, as highlighted by a scene where a young woman nervously accepts pills in secrecy.

The film’s strength lies in its subject matter, the hostility of its form, and its raw, unflinching, and gruelling content. Though its heavy auteurism can prove demanding, the film undeniably proves Déa Kulumbegashvili’s mastery. The movie is also produced by Luca Guadagnino, who met the director at the San Sebastián Film Festival in 2020. At the time, Guadagnino presided over the jury that awarded all four major prizes, including Best Director and Best Screenplay, to the Georgian filmmaker for her debut, Beginning.

With a film as unapologetically challenging as this, Déa Kulumbegashvili compels us to confront beauty and pain with the same unrelenting intensity and discomfort her protagonist endures. This is a remarkable work, where her unwavering commitment to an uncompromising vision delivers a profoundly powerful experience. This is cinema at its finest.

JOUER AVEC LE FEU (THE QUIET SON)

by Delphine and Muriel Coulin,

This cautionary film delves into far-right radicalism and the difficult choices a father must face when his son falls under the influence of this ideology.

In northeastern France, Pierre, portrayed masterfully by Vincent Lindon, is a 50-year-old widower and railway worker who has raised his two sons on his own, forging a deeply tight bond with them. Louis, the youngest, is about to leave for university in Paris, while Fus, slightly older, grows secretive and detached. Drawn to violence, Fus becomes involved with far-right extremist groups, a direct affront to his father’s values. Love and resentment clash, setting the stage for an inevitable tragedy.

Peculiarly, this film, directed by two women, the sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin, unfolds in an entirely male universe, with no female characters except for a brief appearance made by a judge at the end, delivering the final verdict—likely an intentional statement in itself. This may be the most original aspect of the slow-burning French film, which, while centred around a strong message, fails to explore it in depth. Instead, it leans on the silences between father and son and their unspoken frustrations. It merely depicts situations that can gradually build towards an inevitable conclusion, only to rely on the father’s rhetorical courtroom speech to drive the film’s message home.

Despite a few flaws, the well-acted and well-crafted movie remains a persuasive exploration of a pressing political theme and its intergenerational implications, giving it a sense of urgency and relevance.

QUEER

by Luca Guadagnino

Adapting a William Burroughs book to the screen is a daring and challenging undertaking. And it seems Luca Guadagnino, after his worldwide commercial successes, felt ready to diverge from his recent path and take on the ambition of a difficult, highly auteur-driven and deeply personal film that he had dreamed of bringing to the screen since he first read the book at 17. 

This project is a bold personal gamble that aspires to be a masterpiece, yet may have ultimately slipped through his fingers, and due to its complexity, it is up to each viewer to experience and decide whether it truly convinces.

The story follows Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical book, in which William Lee, the author’s alter ego, takes refuge in Mexico City during the 1950s, drifting from bar to bar in search of homosexual lovers, casual sex, and escape through alcohol and drugs. His life changes when he meets a young man new to the city, Eugene Allerton, with whom he falls in love. Lee ends up in an unbalanced relationship with him and offers, for a fee, to join him on a journey to South America in search of a plant rumoured to enable telepathy. 

At the story’s core is the theme of incompleteness and yearning, expressed through obsessive, unreciprocated passion. This feeling is mainly pursued through control and financial compensation, remaining elusive and destructive yet undeniably rooted in love. William Lee, tormented by lust, uses his refined eloquence to approach, captivate, and win over Eugene, all while secretly longing for a connection without words purely based on intuition and telepathy. He yearns for a soul language that transcends words and barriers, revealing the true essence of the desire that binds them and, ultimately, healing the pain that comes with seeing and feeling too much.

The trajectory of this journey unfolds in three parts, each progressively dissolving into the abstract and intuitive. The first part, set in Mexico City—a postcard-like recreation built at Cinecittà and through CGI—introduces William and Eugene’s relationship. This section maintains a linear narrative, focusing on a psychological exploration of the characters.

In the second part, the film transitions sharply into a lysergic road movie as the characters journey across South America searching for the mysterious medicinal plant, Jade—essentially Ayahuasca. This segment, less successful, aims to reflect the disorienting effects of drugs, with the narrative becoming overly allegorical, fragmented, and detached from linear progression. The storytelling adopts an abstract and challenging approach, possibly indicating Guadagnino’s attempt to communicate through intuition rather than words.

In the epilogue (no worries, it’s not a spoiler), silence prevails. The elderly and dying William collapses on a bed, surrounded by vibrant, magmatic lights that echo the sepia monotone lights of the opening titles but are now vivid and colourful. Although not explicitly stated, we know these lights and their transition symbolise the enduring and redemptive memory of his desire for Eugene, representing the love that illuminated his life and ultimately eased his pain and loneliness. The climax is complete.

Guadagnino likely built this scene to evoke the final words that William Burroughs wrote in his journal before his death in August 1997, at 83 years old: “Love? What is it? The most natural painkiller there is. LOVE.” Or even the last line of his novel, The Western Lands (1987): “The old writer couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words.”

Queer is more than just an adaptation of Burroughs’ early novel—written in 1951 but published only in 1985—it encapsulates his entire body of work and artistic vision. With a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes (Challengers) and made with his usual collaborators (Sayombhu Mukdeeprom on cinematography, Marco Costa on editing, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on music, Stefano Baisi on set design, and Jonathan Anderson for costumes), the film is ambitious in both production—costing over 50 million euros—and style—striving to capture Burroughs’ cut-up technique and conceptual approach visually.

There are some brilliant visual choices in the film: the fading split body of William reaching out to touch Eugene, symbolising his tormented desire, the extended slow-motion sequences, the almost horror-like lysergic embrace between the two during their hallucinogenic trip, and many other scenes that reaffirm Guadagnino as a great visionary director. The powerful sex scenes are particularly striking, and it’s almost regrettable that most were cut in editing—so much so that we might have endured the original three-and-a-half-hour runtime—the final cut is 2 hours and 15 minutes.

Guadagnino’s choice to use modern music in the 1950s Mexican setting is effective, creating timeless moments. The film opens with Sinéad O’Connor covering Nirvana’s “All Apologies” and features Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” during a stunning slow-motion scene of their first meeting. Additionally, we have “Leave Me Alone” by New Order, Prince, and the Italian group Verdena—who make a musical appearance three times in the movie.

The more I write about it, the more I appreciate the film’s ambition as a cerebral, conceptual work that demands a deep exploration as a contemporary art piece. Nevertheless, there remains a lingering sense that the film, as a whole, fails to fully convince while watching it.

Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes mentioned being surprised that, upon re-reading Queer, he found a very straightforward love story compared to Burroughs’ other works.  Perhaps we might have hoped for the film to adhere more closely to this aspect rather than venturing blindly into such challenging and experimental realms, which often slip through the director’s fingers and leave the viewer perplexed. 

Once again, it’s a personal project where the director reflects his savoury tastes, his universe and literary/cinematographic influences as if holding a mirror up to himself and trying to push them further and further away. Ultimately, each viewer must experience the film and draw their own conclusions. Like the drug William Lee seeks in the jungle—and has been warned about—this film, for the director, is ‘a mirror, not a portal, and you might not like what you see.’

VERMIGLIO

by Maura Delpero

Vermiglio is the name of a mountain village, the last municipality in Val di Sole in Trentino. In this film, through the story of a family, the village is portrayed as a microcosm reflecting Italy at the end of World War II. It’s 1944, amidst an economic crisis and social transformations, and a young Sicilian deserter finds refuge in the village. Welcomed with suspicion, he grows close to Lucia, the eldest daughter of a strict local school teacher, and marries her. The other two daughters, Ada and Flavia, represent different aspirations: Ada, eager to continue her studies, is forced to give up her dreams, while the youngest, Flavia, feels the weight of her father’s social expectations. When the war ends, Pietro can return to visit his family in Sicily, but when he does not return, the village’s fragile peace is shattered.

Maura Delpero, an extraordinary Italian director, delivers a masterful film with her second feature. Transcending the legacy of Ermanno Olmi—whom she is often compared to— she creates an authentic, detailed, almost documentary-like portrayal of mountain life. The film spans four seasons, capturing religious festivals, weddings, funerals, and the customs of a bygone era. These are her roots: Vermiglio is her grandfather’s village, the place he grew up and lived in, and which she approaches as a place of the soul. Through a personal, emotional archaeology, Delpero infuses the film with love and attention to the characters and every surrounding detail. This is the film’s strength, drawing viewers into the long, excruciatingly slow-paced two hours, yet keeping them engrossed in the simple lives of this mountain community and the journeys of these young women as they navigate the transition into womanhood. These women, bearers of life, death, desire, and love—the backbone of a community with men at war, yearning for a better future—are the pivot of Delpero’s familial and collective narrative. A film that, while at times slow, is undeniably masterful.

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR

by Pedro Almodóvar

Pedro Almodóvar’s films are consistently political, and this one is no exception, as it address the urgent issue of euthanasia. Although the practice has been legal in Spain since 2021, it remains banned in many other liberal democracies. This is why, for the first time in his career, Almodóvar ventures beyond Spain to America, directing a film in English. This choice also fulfills the film’s secondary aim: to pay tribute to America and the English language, akin to a visitor leaving home for the first time.

The plot unfolds simply: Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a successful writer who has just released a book about her fear of death, visits her old friend Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war correspondent battling cancer. Martha asks Ingrid to stay with her at a house she has rented for her final days, requesting that Ingrid remain in the “room next door” while she takes an euthanasia pill acquired from the dark web. Ingrid eventually agrees.

The theme of the contrast and intersection of life and death permeates the film, which is structured around long, brilliant dialogues between the two protagonists, resembling a theatrical play. The script weaves stories, flashbacks, and literary references into a plot devoid of substantial events, but that builds towards Martha’s final choice. Almodóvar’s signature aesthetic is evident throughout, with saturated colors—green, red, and blue—pervading every frame, alongside his distinctive set design, photography, and editing. However, the most problematic aspect is the film’s reliance on intertextual and cultural references drawn from American and Anglophone culture. These tributes include Hopper’s paintings, Faulkner, Hemingway, Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, and a reimagining of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World in one of the many flashbacks. American culture also influences the story through themes like Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the Vietnam and Iraq wars, and the character of a personal trainer—one of the film’s more successful sketches—amongst other elements included only to emphasise the director’s Anglophone debut. To honour the English language, the movie references Joyce’s Dubliners—its final line repeated three times—Virginia Woolf, her friend, the painter Dora Carrington, and writer Lytton Strachey. However, where previous references in Almodóvar’s films felt organic, here they come across as a patchwork of banal citations as if he felt obliged to pass a test. Similarly, some dialogues, especially those delivered by John Turturro on contemporary issues like climate change, the pandemic, and cancel culture, come across as rather bland. Overall, the movie fails to provide a compelling commentary on current topics or offer an interesting take on American culture.

The film features some exceptional elements, including Julianne Moore’s performance and, especially, Tilda Swinton’s, who delivers one of her finest roles. The tension between their characters—one a novelist who creates literary worlds, the other a war correspondent who reports on real tragedies—their complicity and understanding is remarkable. The cinematography and visual construction are exceptional, as expected. However, despite these strengths and its important message, the film ultimately falls short in certain aspects, weighing down an experience that could have otherwise been flawless.

LEURS ENFANTS APRÈS EUX

by Zoran and Ludovic Boukherma

The twins Zoran and Ludovic Boukherma adapt Nicolas Mathieu’s coming-of-age novel Leurs enfants après eux, which won the Prix Goncourt in 2018, into a challenging two-hour and twenty-minute long film that doesn’t always engage the audience.

It’s August 1992, in the French town of Heillange, the north-east part affected by the steel industry crisis. Fourteen-year-old Anthony spends his summer observing girls by the lake. He meets Steph and attempts to step over social barriers imposed by society by stealing his father’s motorcycle to attend a party hosted by the local bourgeoisie in order to meet her. However, his summer becomes a nightmare when Hacine, a young Maghrebian, ends up stealing the motorcycle. The film follows the intertwined fates of Anthony, Steph, and Hacine over the following four summers, exploring themes of love, rejection, and conflict.

 While the book successfully constructs a vivid portrait of provincial life, raw and socially-significant, the film struggles to focus and effectively convey the essence of the situations depicted. Spanning four summers, including moments of leisure, celebrations, and national unity (such as July 14th and the World Cup), the story introduces themes that the film fails to follow through. Social differences, marginalisation, provincial racism, alcoholic fathers, failed marriages, unemployment, and youthful boredom are addressed without delving into specifics, merely evoking the aimlessness of peripheral lives. Even if this were the directors’ intention, the result feels vague and somewhat lacklustre.

The 90s setting is meticulously and authentically recreated, with accurate depictions of rooms, interiors, streets, and supermarkets, and while the musical choices might be too familiar and clichéd, they appropriately reflect the youth culture portrayed in the film. Standout performances come from Paul Kircher and the new face, Sayyid El Alami. But even here, from the script’s point of view, the potential of this challenging relationship is dissipated.

The conflict between Anthony and Hacine, an immigrant from Morocco living with his elderly father, has the potential to explore the anger of the marginalised, the difficulties of integration, and possible redemption. The two characters embrace while celebrating France’s World Cup semifinal victory in 1998, with their faces painted in the French tricolour. However, the conflict and empathy fail to transcend the specific story and offer a broader discourse. The film doesn’t clearly convey its direction, and in its attempt to navigate complexities, nuances, and ambiguities, it ultimately falls victim to the void it seeks to depict.

AINDA ESTOU AQUI (I’m still here)

by Walter Salles

The film revolves around the arrest and disappearance of former Brazilian Labour Party deputy Rubens Paiva at the hands of the Brazilian military dictatorship and the profound impact this injustice had on his wife, Eunice Paiva—portrayed memorably by Fernanda Torres—and their five children. Their lives were turned upside down, and the mystery of his disappearance would remain unresolved for decades.

In 1971, Rubens Paiva, his wife Eunice, and their daughter Eliana were detained in Rio de Janeiro. He was mistakenly identified as having connections to guerrilla leader Carlos Lamarca, a prominent opponent of the dictatorship. Eliana was released after one day, Eunice was held in isolation for 13 days, while Rubens was never to be seen again. The army denied responsibility, claiming he was never detained in the first place. It wasn’t until 2013 that Brazil’s National Truth Commission confirmed Paiva’s torture and murder, later revealing his body had been thrown into a river. Marcelo Paiva, the son who wrote the book that inspired this film, described the prolonged uncertainty and eventual confirmation of his father’s fate as a “double torture” for the family.

Walter Salles delivers a meticulously crafted historical drama, capturing the anguish of this political persecution through the eyes of a wife and mother left alone to raise her family and seek justice. Eunice is depicted as a stoic, silent heroine, resisting victimhood and refusing to let the power’s injustice steal her spirit. Her pain is deeply internalised, not expressed through expected emotional outbursts or dramatic scenes, as Torres opts for a more restrained yet powerful portrayal. While Eunice anchors the film, the family is the lens through which the narrative unfolds. The home becomes a symbol, transitioning from a place of idyllic family life into one marked by absence, drawing viewers into a well-executed gradual descent from joy to despair.

The film’s first half is flawless, tightly paced, and gripping. However, the second half, which follows the family’s move to São Paulo and includes two epilogues—one in 1996 when Paiva is officially declared dead, and another in 2013 when the truth of his fate is revealed—stretches on, with what feels like false endings that slightly diminish the tension. But Torres remains faithful to the story, capturing the evolution of this family through to the present day. The film is deeply touching and impactful, delivering a powerful political statement that resonates with the need to confront the past and the lingering shadows of authoritarian regimes that still loom over our present.

THE BRUTALIST

by Brady Corbet

The Brutalist, directed by Brady Corbet, stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who studied at Bauhaus Dessau before the persecutions and who emigrated to the United States with his wife, Erzsébet (played by Felicity Jones), after surviving the Holocaust. Facing poverty and humiliation while chasing the American Dream, László is discovered under unusual circumstances by a mysterious, wealthy client, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who revives his career as a brutalist architect. The film ends with a leap forward to 1980, where 79-year-old László is honoured with a retrospective at the first Venice Architecture Biennale.

This monumental film, running 3 hours and 40 minutes with a 15-minute intermission and shot entirely in 70mm—which amounts to 26 reels of film and over a ton in weight—is stunning. It stands as one of the most impressive and well-directed biopics in a long time. But despite the impressive consistency and meticulous attention to detail in depicting what feels like a real life, László Tóth and his story is a fictional creation straight out of Corbet’s imagination. One might question the need for such an effort to portray an entirely made up narrative that neither honors actual individuals or chronicles a specific historical or artistic event. As in his previous works, Corbet’s film operates in the realm of allegory, this time dissecting the act of creation and ambition while drawing sharp parallels between the immigrant journey and the artistic pursuit. At its core, it explores the tension between artistic integrity and financial constraints—a reading that extends into a metafilmic commentary on independent filmmakers versus production studios, particularly given that this film stands as a rare indie historical epic, running three hours and thirty-five minutes and crafted on a modest budget of just $10 million.

More deeply, he tackles the theme of American hypocrisy—the opportunity-rich yet vulgar and cruel nature of American neoliberalism—contrasting, or perhaps continuing, what his protagonist sought to escape in Europe. He delves into the perpetual sense of not fitting in, of never truly belonging, and the resilience of pure artistic sensitivity. While some aspects may feel like stylistic exercises, personal indulgences by the director, or even messy, particularly in the second half, the film’s ambition far outweighs its flaws. This is a work so extraordinary in scope and execution that its imperfections hardly matter.

To note is that each historical period is captured with period-appropriate filming techniques, shot on 70mm and using VistaVision lenses—a higher-resolution 35mm format invented in 1954—with an open aperture that renders much of the imagery slightly out of focus. The cinematography faithfully recreates the era, including the 1980 Venice scenes with saturated and VHS-like graininess. The work and efforts behind this ambitious film are enormous and impressive, with superb acting across the board and not just from the main characters. What undoubtedly makes this movie succeed is Corbet’s overwhelming passion as he delivers an incredibly compelling psychological portrait of a creative genius, exactly as he envisioned it. With this film, he demonstrates that his artistic freedom is as boundless as his ambition, proving that nothing can stand in the way of his vision.

THE ORDER 

by Justin Kurzel

The Order is a Canadian political crime thriller directed by Justin Kurzel, starring Jude Law (who also serves as co-producer), Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, and Jurnee Smollett.

Based on the investigative book The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, the film centers on the true story of Bob Mathews, the charismatic leader of a neo-Nazi white supremacist cult. Between 1983 and 1984, Mathews orchestrated a series of robberies and attacks aiming to ignite a violent revolution against American democracy. The group, known as The Order, drew inspiration from William Luther Pierce’s dystopian novel The Turner Diaries (1978), which describes a six-phase insurgency that overthrows the U.S. government to establish a new social order excluding Jews and non-whites. This text, which is a guide for American far-right extremists, influences events depicted in the film—including the murder of Jewish radio host Alan Berg (which Oliver Stone portrayed in Talk Radio)—have also influenced other assassinations and terrorist attacks like the ones that took place in Oklahoma City and Poway. This book’s influence extends to a larger historical pattern, with the 6th January 2021 marking a recent moment in a continuum of violence and radicalism.

Kurzel frames the story as a manhunt, which he underlines with symbolic scenes of hunter versus prey reminiscent of Cimino’s work. The tale is narrated through a solitary, introverted FBI agent who arrives in Idaho to investigate a series of robberies, only to uncover the existence and plans of the cult. The detective and the terrorist leader, portrayed as contrasting yet mirrored characters, sustain the film’s tension much like any classic American crime drama. However, the film’s potential limitation lies in transforming such a politically relevant and historically charged narrative into a genre film. Despite its strong execution and impressive action scenes, it often feels like it dissipates the political depth it intended to convey.

In the press conference, Justin Kurzel remarked on the film’s origins: “I didn’t know the story. I discovered it through the book about Robert Jay Mathews and his terrorist group, The Order. It’s a little-known story but at the root of the darker side of our world. It’s a ghost that has always been present in American history, much like the Lincoln assassin. But we can change the name and see who today exploits white poverty for anti-government and unconstitutional insurrection… November is now. Mathews died 40 years ago, but Trump’s first presidency and the Capitol attack happened recently.” Rather than being an adrenaline-pumping crime thriller with superb cinematography, the film might have benefited from a deeper exploration of the psychological and profound aspects of the movement. Furthermore, its release in December, just after the final months of the American presidential race, might be too late for it to fully make an impact. Once again, another missed opportunity.

CAMPO DI BATTAGLIA

 by Gianni Amelio

Gianni Amelio’s Campo di battaglia, loosely based on the novel La sfida by physician-writer Carlo Patriarca (2020), starring Alessandro Borghi and Gabriel Montesi, starts with a great premise.

Set in a military hospital in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia mountains towards the end of World War I, the film follows two doctors who, despite being friends, have opposing approaches to treating soldiers. One doctor aims to patch up soldiers and return them to the front, while the other seeks to save lives by deliberately causing injuries that will exempt them from combat. The hospital serves young men from all over Italy, each speaking a different dialect and often treated as mere cannon fodder. Each soldier harbors a desire to escape the brutal realities of the trenches. As the war winds down, a new threat emerges: the Spanish flu, which will eventually claim 50 million lives worldwide. The ‘sabotaging’ doctor is exiled to a quarantine camp in search of a cure, while the military hospital fills with civilians suffering from the flu.

Amelio explores themes of medical ethics, the meaning of bravery versus cowardice in the face of death, and the implications of making the right choice. And while it begins with promising themes, the execution falls short. Plot holes and unclear narrative threads leave the audience confused. For instance, both doctors are romantically interested in the same nurse, but the film fails to clearly develop this subplot. Similarly, the resolution of the main character’s struggle with an experimental pneumonia treatment remains muddled. Something feels off, and one can’t help but wish for a more thorough development of the characters and a more coherent screenplay. The film, which feels more like a television adaptation than a festival historical drama, ultimately fails to live up to its initial promise.

Babygirl

by Halina Reijn

What makes Babygirl a stunning film isn’t just its compelling screenplay, the perfect photography or the unbelievable performances by Nicole Kidman—Antonio Banderas, and Harris Dickinson are also great—nor even the themes of power, submission, and desire it explores. The film’s significance lies in how these themes are handled and, crucially, in the fact that it’s directed by a woman who owns her vision—Dutch filmmaker and actress, Halina Reijn.

Babygirl is an erotic/psychological thriller in the tradition of the best 80s and 90s films. However, this time, the genre is chosen to be deconstructed and reassembled from an entirely different perspective. The genre here serves as the battlefield where the director aims to let the female gaze triumph. The film includes elements of perversion, domination, the secrecy of an extramarital affair—between an intern and her boss—psychological manipulation, and the unsettling intrusion of the lover into her family. The tension is constant, and a sense of disaster looms throughout the story. Halina Reijn plays with these elements, leveraging the viewer’s expectations, and in every directorial choice, she deviates from the genre’s usual coordinates. The female awareness and the exploration of what it means to be a woman change the entire mechanism, leading the film to a resolution that is both different and logical—violence, death, phallocentric punishment, and the typical madness of the female character leaves space to confrontation, acceptance, and growth.

This is the story of a woman, a manager and a mother who heads an automation and logistics company. Her life is calculated, rigid, and methodical until she meets a young intern—played brilliantly by Harris Dickinson—who disarms her certainties, starting a consensual relationship of domination and humiliation. Desire and fantasy take over control and reason, and despite the risk of destroying her family and career, she feels compelled to follow her instincts and the pleasure she has long repressed, surrendering completely to this whirlwind. This could have been the premise of an inevitable tragedy, but Halina Reijn’s skill lies in reclaiming the power of female desire, with the ambition, as she comments, to bridge the “Huge Orgasm Gap” between men and women. In her own words, the film’s protagonist wants to “feel free to let go, to express her inner impulses. There’s nothing wrong with that. But not long ago, all of this was considered a pathological disease.”

The film’s entire conceptual framework, and the contrast between the female and male perspectives, is distilled in the reaction of two colleagues—a man and a woman—upon discovering the secret affair. This is a minor detail and doesn’t spoil anything. The female colleague’s solidarity steers the situation toward a resolution without conflict, while the male colleague’s judgment quickly turns into manipulation, threats, and domination. But fortunately, this is a different kind of film—there’s no room here for such developments or for unwillingly submissive women. This classic erotic thriller trope is dismissed before it can even take root: “I don’t care what you know, get out of my office. If I want to be humiliated by someone, I’ll pay for it.” The awareness not of being wrong or crazy but rather of being in control of oneself, is the key to the entire film.

Babygirl, which received mixed reactions at its Venice premiere, presents a contemporary, female-centric statement that goes beyond current trends in feminist genre revision, and despite the criticism it may receive, stands as a remarkable œuvre.

Trois Amies

by Emmanuel Mouret

Trois Amies revolves around simple questions: can a relationship exist without love, driven only by a sense of security and stability? Is fidelity owed to oneself, to the other person, or to the idea of the couple? Emmanuel Mouret builds a web of friendships, loves, betrayals, and the transformation of his characters around these central questions. By dissecting the lives and relationships of three mature women in present-day Lyon, Mouret explores the meaning of partnership in adult life as if it were a national sport. He brings to the festival an extremely French film, almost to the point of caricature. The references to Rohmer, the intricate comedies, the French-style musical commentary, and the external narrator explaining the events to the audience are all used to recreate a comforting atmosphere and place the film squarely within a clear tradition of French cinema. This is a modest film, without grand ambitions, but it is certainly well-written and well-orchestrated, thanks to a screenplay that works as a precise mechanism with everything developing and resolving with coherence. 

Joan, Alice, and Rebecca are the protagonists, who have been best friends for years. Joan is married to Victor, and they have a young daughter, but realising she no longer loves her husband despite there being no issues, she leaves him—because, for her, love is fundamental. Alice, on the other hand, is with Eric; their relationship works, but not out of love. For her, marriage is a matter of rationality and practicality. Finally, there’s Rebecca, who would do anything for love, even have a secret affair with her best friend’s husband, Eric, without Alice knowing. Everything begins to shift and change when Joan leaves Victor, causing ripples in the lives of her friends and setting events in motion, forcing each to confront the film’s central question in her own way, presenting shades and complexities to a question that every adult couple tries to answer—or prefers to avoid. This is undoubtedly the film’s target audience, and Mouret certainly knows how to please it.

MARIA

by Pablo Lorrain

Biopics are one of the most challenging terrains for a director, often leading to disappointing results. Maria, a film about Maria Callas’ final days in September 1977, is Pablo Larraín’s third biopic, from which the Chilean director emerges almost unscathed. This film marks the final act of a trilogy focused on strong, independent and powerful women: Jackie Kennedy, Lady Diana and Maria Callas. Women that were free and self-determined but crushed by the same power they withheld and the consequential public expectations. Callas, the ultimate diva, represents the pinnacle of this journey.

“We’re lucky, we can go anywhere in the world without problems. But we can never escape” says Callas in a flashback of a conversation with John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Indeed, the fate of the singer’s final years—after her retirement due to the loss of her voice—was to be confined to her home in Paris at 36 Avenue George Mandel, cared for by her loyal aides Bruna and Ferruccio—played impressively by Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher—who are ready to fulfil her every request and shield her from her own mental fragility. The Callas we see is unstable, dependent on medications that give her visions and make it hard for her to distinguish reality from imagination. This is the device that screenwriter Steven Knight uses to portray the rise and fall of Callas: imagined interviews, ghosts from the past, memories that become sharp and tormenting in the confusion of the present. In her loss of lucidity, Maria’s determination is to remain in control of her choices, her reality, and her end, as she walks the edge of her mind, stubbornly trying to reclaim her now-compromised voice.

Some scenes are powerful, visionary and evocative, while others feel forced and didactic. The drama of Callas’ personal decline is visually complex but perhaps a bit emotionally simplistic. Angelina Jolie, hailed as a sure Oscar winner, is actually too calculated and perfect, almost too cold, to capture the light, personality, and charisma of Maria Callas. She spent seven months preparing for the role, working closely with coaches to master a professional singer’s posture, breathing, and movement. She practised singing Italian operas, with her voice recorded to perfect the melodies and pitch. Her performance is undoubtedly a great acting feat but perhaps has little to do with Callas herself. Netflix has already bought the rights for the American distribution, and it may be the right platform for a film that asks many questions but settles for simple answers.

DICIANNOVE

by Giovanni Tortorici

This debut film by young Sicilian director Giovanni Tortorici—produced by Luca Guadagnino—is a small, independent gem. Capturing the complexity of being 19 years old is never easy and often results in one-dimensional portrayals, but this film excels at presenting its characters as believable and authentic in their inconsistencies, clumsiness, and immaturity.

The film’s portrayal of reality stands out for its seemingly inconsequential dialogues, which serve to define the characters and its aimless events that reflect the nature of adolescence. The story follows Leonardo, a young man from Palermo who initially joins his sister to study Business in London but then drops out to study Literature in Siena. Introverted and passionate about pre-19th century literature—when the language was still ‘pure’—Leonardo navigates the typical life of a student: renting small, untidy rooms, experiencing occasional drunkenness, dealing with unexpected sexual tensions, facing early university exams, and struggling to form friendships.

Though nothing significant happens throughout it, the film’s vivid portrayal makes everything feel significant. Everything seems to contribute to reflecting on how it feels to be 19. Despite being a debut, Tortorici handles cinematic language effectively—using shaky, subjective shots to mirror the protagonist’s perspective, along with outdated zoom techniques, still frames, and creative editing. The screenplay is meticulously crafted, leaving many narrative lines unfinished, either abandoned or diverted by the unpredictability of life. It features disconnected situations, characters who appear and disappear without introduction, incomplete thoughts, and jumps through times and places, creating a simple yet authentic realism that is both relatable and endearing.The film remains evasive even when addressing sexual identity. What might initially suggest homoerotic curiosity and development suddenly shifts in direction as the protagonist is seen kissing girls in a club or masturbating, looking at female nudity in Pasolini’s Salò. One may wonder how Tortorici’s ability to weave together coherent circumstances and events without a clear narrative comes from, and the answer is that it is rooted in the film’s autobiographical nature, reflecting his 19-year-old self from the perspective of his current age, 28. Set in 2015—which is shown by the lack of smartphones and omnipresent apps and the protagonist’s search for Justin Bieber’s naked photos recently taken on vacation— place the past close enough for critical and affectionate reflection yet distant enough for thoughtful examination. If this well-crafted screenplay convinced Guadagnino to produce it, the film will likely captivate audiences and draw them further into this young filmmaker’s journey.

EL JOCKEY

by Luis Ortega

Few films blend absurdity, lyricism, and symbolism with such an extravagant and unique flair as El Jockey. Produced, amongst others, by Benicio Del Toro, Luis Ortega’s visionary work debuts as a high-energy comedy with subtle queer undertones (it’s also vying for the Queer Lion) and places Argentina in the competition. Starring Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (120 Beats Per Minute, Persian Lessons) and Ursula Corberó (Casa de Papel, Money Heist), this movie was made to leave a lasting impression. The story goes as follows: Remo Manfredini is a legendary jockey whose self-destructive behaviour and drug use endangers his career and his relationship with his pregnant girlfriend, Abril. On the day of a crucial race that could clear his pending debts with mobster Sirena, a drunken Remo crashes his horse into the hippodrome fence. In a disoriented state, he escapes from the hospital dressed in women’s clothing and roams the streets of Buenos Aires, searching for his true self while being pursued by mobsters. Sport and mobsters aren’t the main focus here. Ortega shifts the attention to larger themes, exploring the fleeting nature of the true self and the clash between our intense inner world and the harsh outer reality. The character, seeking freedom, adopts various identities, yet each one brings him torment. True freedom lies within the shedding of all identities, but the cycle of rebirth continues, repeating delusion and frustration as part of humanity’s collective struggle. This somewhat cynical or factual bottom line is the foundation for the film’s creative ideas and twists.

The character takes on different forms—a man, a woman, a child—and, like everyone else, he never fully understands life’s hidden forces. The world keeps us in the dark, and Ortega suggests that the protagonist’s challenge – or perhaps our own – is to try to remain sane amidst this confusion. 

When discussing the inspiration for his film, Ortega reflects: “When you’re young, you think you’ll eventually understand something about life, but as you get older, you realise you might not understand anything at all. My film is about this: it’s not necessary to know everything; life is a miracle that doesn’t need too many explanations.”

And perhaps it doesn’t, especially as we navigate the film’s ambiguous journey, where every single scene is built around bold ideas and surprises that defy predictability. The movie is dense with stunning visuals, humorous situations, striking costumes, absurd characters, and vivid colours. Ortega uses fixed cameras, long, slow scenes, and close-ups to create a dark yet colourful, twisted, nonsensical world. He takes pleasure in his grotesque portrayal of Buenos Aires’ margins, with the meticulousness of a music video or commercial director, where every detail is thought through to perfection.

Despite its over-the-top style, the film remains firmly grounded in its storyline and original vision. Navigating these 97 minutes of cinematic roller coaster without losing control is no easy feat, but Ortega succeeds. Despite his impressive aesthetics and forms, the film’s absurdity and elusive themes leave some ambiguity about where Ortega indeed aims to land—or if he ever intended to land anywhere at all.

You may recall that shortly after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, his ‘zero tolerance’ migration policy led to hundreds of children being detained in cages at the border. This disturbing practice is the central theme of Separated, Errol Morris’s latest film. With revealing interviews and leaked emails, Morris uncovers how the White House directly engineered this policy, turning around 5,000 migrant children into state-created orphans and political tools.

In the film, Jonathan White, former Deputy Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement under Trump, describes this planned cruelty as “the largest case of child abuse in U.S. history”. The documentary shows how border facilities avoided scrutiny by not keeping records of the separations. And even though a federal judge in California stopped the ‘unconstitutional’ policy and ordered families to be reunited, up to 2,000 children are still unaccounted for because of missing records

Errol Morris revolutionised documentary filmmaking with his genre-bending style, tackling controversial subjects in films like The Thin Blue Line (1988), Mr. Death (1999), and Tabloid (2010). Known for intense interviews with prominent figures, he featured former defence secretaries Robert McNamara in The Fog of War ( Oscar winner for Best Documentary Feature in 2004) and Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known.

Separated, which premiered today at the Venice Film Festival, is undoubtedly one of his most significant works. Based on journalist Jacob Soboroff’s book, the film skillfully blends documentary, journalism, and fictional elements. Morris contrasts stark interviews and leaked emails with striking imagery of a Honduran mother and child being separated at the border. Despite its evocative aesthetics, music, and carefully crafted frames, Morris aims not to persuade but to present the facts and timeline of events in a most compelling way. While the film constitutes a bold attack on Trump’s policies in the final months of the presidential campaign, it also examines how earlier administrations – from Clinton to Obama – laid the groundwork for the harsh immigration enforcement policies that further intensified under Trump. Morris’s commitment is to the subject itself, giving voice to a type of anger that has faded away throughout the years with the shifting of the political rhetoric.

Agnieszka Holland, one of Poland’s leading filmmakers, broke out internationally more than thirty years ago with Europa Europa (1990), the WWII drama about a Jewish boy that won a Golden Globe and earned an Oscar nomination. She followed with In Darkness (2011), another Oscar contender, and Spoor (2017), winner of the Silver Bear in Berlin. In Poland, she’s seen as a national treasure, and this year she returns with Franz, a film about Kafka, chosen as the country’s submission for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. A bold work that finds its charge in the way she approaches the subject: less a retelling of Kafka’s life than an experiment about dismantling of the biopic form. This is not a typical story—linearity is the first thing to go, splintered into a kaleidoscope of choreographed, striking scenes—crash zooms, handheld shots, wide angles, visual stunts—jumping across timelines during Kafka’s life, but also including fragments of today’s Kafka tours in Prague. Impressions, anecdotes, comments, and digressions spin in and out of the story, creating a vortex that, despite the control she has over the subject, never finds a center. The movie is not about Kafka’s creative process, not a deep psychological character study, not even really about his life—which was never eventful enough anyway.

What’s left is an attempt at avoiding the usual biopic traps, reaching for something more elusive, more impressionistic, as a way of circling the subject. And in that sense, it’s a bold, inventive reflection. But beyond the style and the intentions, there isn’t much holding it together.

Here, Kafka becomes just Franz, underscoring the film’s intimist intent: a boy under a domineering father, closest to his sister Ottla, twice breaking off engagements to Felice Bauer, tangled with her friend Grete Bloch, stuck in an alienating insurance job while writing at night, and dying of tuberculosis at 40. We know all this already. Events are rendered without pathos, treated instead as fragments in a puzzle that at times suggest how he was ahead of his time—Kafka debating vegetarianism, foreseeing a connected world, writing endless letters the way we now fire off social media posts (as a museum guide notes).

That’s the film’s spark: setting his unassuming life against the kitschy romanticization of Kafka today, with tourists chasing selfies, buying Kafka burgers, and ticking off the “Kafka Prague” tour. It’s a sharp contrast, a reminder that this is a legacy of a very ordinary life, one that survived only because Max Brod ignored Kafka’s last wish to burn his work and smuggled the manuscripts out of Nazi Europe.

The paradox is clear, but the film doesn’t push it far enough. It leaves us with an experiment that dazzles in form but fades in feeling—an audacious, stylized teardown of the biopic that never quite builds something in its place.