Jason Momoa as Lobo: "Momoa, mo' problems"

Supergirl (2026)

Posted in2026, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Milly Alcock, Matthias Schoenaerts, Eve Ridley, Jason Momoa
written by Ana Nogueira
directed by Craig Gillespie

by Walter Chaw Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl is mean. It’s so easy to be mean. That’s the message of James Gunn’s Superman, isn’t it? It’s certainly the message, as I understand it, of the Superman character: What’s powerful and truly rare is kindness, especially in the face of great evil. Early on in Supergirl, Supergirl (Milly Alcock) breaks an alien’s arm in a nasty sequence that feels like the truck-stop epilogue to Richard Donner’s/Lester’s Superman II, in which Superman (Christopher Reeve) reveals a real pettiness that feels cathartic in the moment but leaves a bitter aftertaste. I don’t want another small, bullying despot. It isn’t edgy. The world is full to bursting with paper tigers and tinpot dictators–amoral strongmen enforcing their will through violence. The world is on fire; rage is the match. It doesn’t change anything for me that the antihero is a woman in this incarnation. Your mileage may vary, but aren’t you tired? This Supergirl also declines to show mercy in a vicious sequence involving a felled enemy, helpless before her summary judgment. I don’t know this character as well as I know Superman, though I did read Tom King’s elegiac, thoughtful Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, upon which Gillespie’s film is ostensibly based. Supergirl doesn’t understand the text. And to the extent it does, it betrays it.

The Jackass 5 crew in lab coats, though two heavy-set men are bare-chested; all are smiling for the camera: "The Squad 2.0 is coming, Hakeem!"

Jackass: Best and Last (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Documentary, Esoterica, Theatrical

***/****
starring Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Jason Acuña
directed by Jeff Tremaine

by Angelo Muredda “Did we get it, Jeff?” a battered Johnny Knoxville, reviving after a run-in with a bull that gave him a brain hemorrhage, mutters to director Jeff Tremaine late in Jackass Forever, the penultimate entry in the bawdy series. The Jackass ringleader, who’s gone from puckish to avuncular over the twenty-some years of the franchise, revisits the stunt that nearly killed him in Jackass: Best and Last, where we learn that the goring we saw was actually the second take, after the first lacked a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. The behind-the-scenes commentary and B-roll about Knoxville’s commitment to the bit–which echoes a moment from Jackass Number Two where he convinces himself to go through with a stunt by saying it’s “just footage”–raise a fundamental question about the series’ miraculous 25-year run: Are Knoxville and the gang merely mining their bodies for views, like forefathers to the content-pilled influencers of today, or are they putting their bodies on the line for their art like consummate performers? And does it matter if they’re going the distance to give us a good time?

Woody and co. watching Bonnie read her tablet under the covers in spooky silhouette: "In this one, they find the Backrooms"

Toy Story 5 (2026)

Posted in2026, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Pixar, Theatrical

*/****
screenplay by Andrew Stanton & McKenna Harris
directed by Andrew Stanton (co-directed by McKenna Harris)

by Walter Chaw Toy Story 5 is the fifth film in a 31-year-old franchise, and it’s exhausted as fuck and fuck it’s exhausting, but that’s okay since it’s just for kids. When the first one was released, its main selling point was the leap it represented in computer animation–a sour film with a clever (if travel-worn) premise that essentially made Pixar the 600-lb gorilla. And for a while, they delivered, cranking out masterpieces like an all-digital Studio Ghibli, pushing the technological envelope a little further each time. I remember Monsters, Inc. being sold in part on the skill and time invested in making Sulley’s shag pelt move realistically, and the later Finding Nemo breaking new ground in CGI water. So, naturally, Toy Story 5 is about how technology is destroying a child’s imagination by changing how they engage with the world–just like how in Toy Story, Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) initially hated his eventual best friend Buzz (Tim Allen) for changing the way their child master played with him, leading him to trick the dimwitted Buzz into getting dangerously lost before growing a conscience under threat from his other friends. I don’t disagree that unleashing the Internet on the world was like giving automatic rifles to chimps, but there must be more to say about it than “haha, whoops.” But, look, it doesn’t matter if waves of black irony roil off every immaculately, impressively computer-generated frame of this death march. Show it to your kids. They’ll like it. Feed them deep-fried butter. They’ll like that, too. Teach them to smoke. Mmmmm, heroin.

Disclosure Day (2026)

Disclosure Day (2026)

Posted in2026, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Mystery, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Disclosure Day is Steven Spielberg’s Megalopolis: a cri de cœur from an old man using the entirety of his bag of tricks to persuade, to incense, to cajole a stunned generation into collective action. The villains of both films are billionaires with secrets and outsized influence in government, while the heroes are visionaries, truth-tellers, products of trauma, struggling to wake from the nightmare of the last twenty years. My fear is that Spielberg has overestimated his influence, as Coppola did–that he believes his passion will peanut-butter over the cracks in this narrative; that he’s unaware, perhaps, of how elderly–how frightened and out-of-touch–he sounds when ripping from the headlines. Spielberg’s singular importance to the formation of modern film history does nothing to keep him from aging out of the cultural moment. But he has been singular. Indeed, although he may have equals in his technical mastery of the medium, no one has ever been his superior.

Backrooms' Renate Reinsve in the basement of a furniture store: "The Worst Person in the Raymour & Flanigan"

Backrooms (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Esoterica, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett
written by Will Soodik
directed by Kane Parsons

by Walter Chaw There are a couple of ways to approach Kane Parsons’s Backrooms, the latest addition to the Naïve Wave of films made by filmmakers raised on new media in online spaces. The first is to acknowledge that we’ve had a revolution like this before, when the film brats at the end of the ’60s emerged as the first generation of directors primarily reared on cinema instead of literature and theatre, so even this shift–though it seems retrograde for some of the oldsters in the room (okay, me)–is not the end of the world. It may, however, be the end of understanding movies as a product of tutelage in the language of film. Editing, cinematography, screenwriting–all of that has changed and will continue to evolve. Of course, one of the things to love about film as a medium is its elasticity, isn’t it? It makes perfect sense that the rumblings of revolution are happening in horror, that most flexible and reactive of genres.

Mando and Grogu flying: "Yoicks, and away!"

The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)

Posted in2026, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Theatrical

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
½*/****
starring Pedro Pascal, Jeremy Allen White, Sigourney Weaver
written by Jon Favreau & Dave Filoni & Noah Kloor
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw The Mandalorian and Grogu (hereafter ManGro) is awful. Was a time I would’ve simply ripped this movie apart, but there’s no real sport in it. It wouldn’t feel cathartic, just mean. If I spent much time talking about how ugly it looks, how poorly it’s written, how boring it is, I would be picking on something that couldn’t defend itself. Everyone sees that. The people who like it see that. It will have its admirers, because this product has been extruded for the maximum, frictionless comfort of its most vocal defenders. The ones who demand their entertainment validate their sense of who they are. If ManGro were a bath, the water would be body temperature; you’d scarcely feel it. What’s the point of picking on it? I figure if you’re watching this film, that’s two hours and change that I don’t have to worry about running into you. The problem for me, and it may be no problem at all, is that Star Wars is suddenly synonymous with those labels in our culture for things that are beneath contempt, as unworthy of respect as its naysayers have always insisted. It is the appendix in the body politic. The coccyx. They shout, “It’s for kids!” when a movie is unwatchable. There’s almost no way to be more dismissive in our culture. Now we can say, “It’s just a Star War” when a show is made for a niche audience of the pathetic and emotionally stunted. I still remember how angry I was after George Lucas came out in defense of his prequels, saying these movies were always “just for kids.” I’ve come to realize I was angry because I was afraid he was right.

Saccharine's Midori Francis lying on a table in stark black and white with tinges of blue. A red stripe covers her eyes, over which is the title "Body and Soul by Walter Chaw" in bloody letters, the words alternating in black and white

Body and Soul: FFC Interviews Natalie Erika James

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw

by Walter Chaw Natalie Erika James doesn’t have a filter between herself and what she makes. She’s an artist. She’s working through the contents of her shadow with a palette of indelible images. She’s telling the history of her pain in passages that are often wordless, mapping the geography of trauma with a vocabulary of archetype. All of her work to date involves daughters lost and wayward, disappointments to themselves and their mothers. All of it is a cry to be seen without judgment in a culture where judgment is the only thing guaranteed young women. With just three features under her belt–her claustrophobic 2020 debut Relic, the Rosemary’s Baby prequel Apartment 7A, and her raw body-image/self-loathing treatise Saccharine–James has quickly become one of my favourite living directors. Not merely for the tightly-crafted scripts (which she also writes) or the technical beauty of her films, but for her unwavering determination to communicate an uncomfortably personal, uncompromisingly feminine, unapologetically other vision.

Midori Francis staring at a spoon in Saccharine: "Uri Geller, don't fail me now"

Saccharine (2026)

Posted in2026, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden, Robert Taylor
written and directed by Natalie Erika James

by Walter Chaw The bad guy in Natalie Erika James’s Saccharine is self-loathing. Self-loathing the ego-killer, the murderer of confidence, the enemy of joy. Saccharine completes a loose trilogy for James, with each entry to some extent exploring the monstrous mutation of self-hate under the tectonic effort required to repress it. It is a fog and the fire in which we burn. Relic detailed the guilt of a daughter who has lost sight of her dementia-ridden mother. Apartment 7A dealt with a young woman who has made socially unacceptable choices to achieve fame (recontextualizing Rosemary’s Baby, and Roman Polanski, in the process). Now Saccharine puts body image under the microscope. Her films are blueprints of the bans imposed on women by multiple, often conflicting (if uniformly brutal), cultural standards. Over three films, James has shown herself to be blunt but not didactic–a trick that’s harder to pull off than it seems. Hers is a voice for any person trapped in a liminal space between communities that would reject them. She’s a mixed-race person living in a predominantly white country (Australia). She’s a woman in a male-dominated industry who has, so far, only helmed projects centring women. With her third film, she’s taking on queer desire, the Asian diaspora, and what it feels like to be trapped in a body that doesn’t align with how you’ve been programmed to perceive yourself. The pain of dislocation in Relic, Apartment 7A, and Saccharine is crystalline and pure, aided by lead performances from Emily Mortimer, Julia Garner, and Midori Francis, respectively, that are naked, ugly, and raw. James is an artist. I feel seen by her work.

Little Sasha standing over a horizontal Jeremy in front of a house in Blue Heron: "O Brother, When Art Thou?"

Blue Heron (2026)

Posted in****/****, 2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Hungary, Theatrical

****/****
starring Eylul Guven, Iringó Réti, Ádám Tompa, Amy Zimmer
written and directed by Sophy Romvari

by Walter Chaw I don’t know if others will talk about it this way, but Blue Heron, the debut feature of writer-director Sophy Romvari, is the finest, most subtle, most incisive horror film I’ve seen this year. Watching it gave me the same feeling as watching The Exorcist as an old man who has had children and still wakes up in a cold sweat thinking of those times when the kids were sick and I didn’t know why, or in trouble and there was nothing I could do. It’s horror not as jumps and gross-outs (those things don’t really work on me anymore), but as existential helplessness to slow entropy as it claims us and shapes us. The scariest scene in The Exorcist for me now is when a little girl is subjected to a series of medical tests that feel to the worried parent like an inquisitor’s panel of torture devices: useless, sadistic, based on faith in a flawed and fanatical belief system. Love is limited in its ability to heal, see. Having children is reckless. It’s madness. It’s an investment in a mortal commodity that will break you, should it predecease you. It can be a responsibility trap, too, tethering you to this earth when you’d rather cut the straps and float into the sweet, insensible black. My kids are the greatest thing in my life, the only significant contribution I have ever made to a world that doesn’t deserve them. Sometimes it feels like it was a selfish act. Sometimes, when I see them express compassion and kindness to others, it feels like a generous one.

A shark fin poking out of the water, a plane about to crash: "Here comes my DoorDash, right on time."

Thrash (2026) + Deep Water (2026)

Posted in2026, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, Horror, New Zealand, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller

THRASH
*/****
starring Phoebe Dynevor, Whitney Peak, Djimon Hounsou
written and directed by Tommy Wirkola

DEEP WATER
***/****
starring Aaron Eckhart, Angus Sampson, Molly Belle Wright, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Pete Bridges and Shayne Armstrong & SP Krause and Damien Power
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw If the first stories we told each other in those caves were warnings–horror by any other name–then it’s a good idea to wonder what kind of warning our horror entertainments are desperate to communicate. Since they’re expressions of the subconscious surfing the (literally) bleeding edge of the zeitgeist, they must reveal something about our common fears. Why was The Exorcist a box-office phenomenon? Or The Blair Witch Project? We think it’s our choice, what we make and what we want to see, but it’s not. Not entirely. When we speak of the scale of time in human evolution, we are after all just a flicker of an eyeblink removed from hunting and gathering in a primal night. That being said, monsters in movies are reliable bellwethers indicating a specific pollutant in the collective swamp, and the classic ones resurface when the environment is most conducive to their survival. The latest Frankenstein riffs reframe Mary Shelley’s story as the first salvo against the hubris-driven creation of artificial intelligences. Recent adaptations of Dracula couldn’t help but be allegories for evil foreigners buying up real estate and perving on our women. Now, a couple of new films join last year’s Dangerous Animals, the upcoming Chum, the deathless Sharknado franchise, and still others in asking the question: why have so many shark movies arrived in a toothy school all at once?

Qwaxw in Ceremony

Hot Docs ’26: Ceremony

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by Banchi Hanuse

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Following the encore screening of Banchi Hanuse’s Ceremony at this year’s Hot Docs, an audience member chimed in to remark that as a Palestinian woman who has seen her share of colonial aggression, she was struck by how similar the tools and logics of different settler states are when it comes to treating contested territory as unoccupied and without history, thus perfect for relocation. Perhaps even more striking than that observation–or the moderator’s decision to thank the audience member for her comment but quickly punt to the next one without letting the filmmaker and her cast of Nuxalk creators and activists respond–is Hanuse’s documentation of the myriad ways in which Indigenous people have responded to those familiar efforts to stamp out their civilizations, from keeping the language alive through their own alternative schools to broadcasting their culture on community radio to documenting their own histories and staging ritual performances of their traditions. Winner of the festival’s DGC Special Jury Prize for Canadian Feature Documentary, Ceremony is an evocative, engaging, and refreshingly talking-head and infographic-free film about how the Nuxalk Nation finds hope for resistance and renewal through these deliberate practices in the face of the broader nation-state’s violent, centuries-long effort to fold them into the Canadian colonial project.

The Harlem Park Three now in When a Witness Recants

Hot Docs ’26: When a Witness Recants

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Prison

**½/****
directed by Dawn Porter

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda The moment from their railroading that most seems to haunt Andrew Stewart, Ransom Watkins, and Alfred Chestnut in Dawn Porter’s When a Witness Recants, which picks up with the Harlem Park Three after they’ve been freed from 36 years in prison for a murder they didn’t commit, is when the judge first addressed them, his voice dripping with disdain “like we shouldn’t be breathing,” as Alfred remembers it. Raised with love and affection as Black youth with bright futures in their West Baltimore community, only to be falsely accused and convicted of the murder of local student DeWitt Duckett on the basis of coerced witness statements, the men are struck in their retelling of events by how quickly the legal system rendered them null and void, depriving them of the future they were on track for as teenagers, as men, and eventually as fathers.

Amy Goodman broadcasting from a protest against the Death Penalty in Steal This Story, Please!

Hot Docs ’26: Steal This Story, Please!

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Nigeria

**½/****
directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda The picaresque life of Democracy Now! founder and host Amy Goodman gets the Forrest Gump treatment in Steal This Story, Please!, Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s polished and accessible documentary profiling the firebrand–still one of the most trusted sources in leftist media–over the course of a nearly forty-year career. By embracing that montage-heavy, stone-skipping approach to a life on the front lines of direct action, they sometimes skirt a deeper exploration of the stories that have animated Goodman’s career. At the same time, the film positions her dogged independent journalism as the conscience of an often conscienceless country while successfully articulating her ethos that “We will not be silent” is the Hippocratic Oath of the press, whose reporting should be a form of public service that supersedes toadying and sucking up to power.

Abd Alkader Habak and Janay Boulos in Birds of War

Hot Docs ’26: Birds of War

Posted in2026, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Lebanon, Syria, UK

***/****
directed by Janay Boulos & Abd Alkader Habak

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers It’s 2016. Aleppo is under siege. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has banned journalists to stymie coverage of his atrocities, so BBC reporter Janay Boulos, a London transplant from Lebanon, contacts Syrian videographer Abd Alkader, a.k.a. Habak, for boots-on-the-ground footage. The fomenting Syrian revolution inspired Habak to pick up a camera and document what he was seeing in the early 2010s. Branded an activist, he fled his humble village in Idlib for the ostensible security of Aleppo, which soon came under attack from Russian and Syrian forces. Habak resumed filming. Janay hears a rumour that Aleppo residents are growing food on their rooftops. Habak gets her video proving it, and the BBC posts it on their website. Eventually, Eastern Aleppo is evacuated. Habak returns to Idlib, another war zone. He reaches out to Janay, pitching her ideas for other human interest stories that highlight Syrian resilience.

Jaafar Jackson as Michael Jackson as a zombie in Thriller in Michael: "Yeah, you can totally tell he's had work done"

Michael (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jaafar Jackson, Nia Long, Miles Teller, Colman Domingo
written by John Logan
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw I didn’t want to review Michael because talking about this film recognizes this film. I wonder, though, if not talking about it also validates it, in the way you’re trained to be quiet about uncomfortable things when you’re a minority. It’s a tough position to be put in, particularly because the people putting others in this position are the ones who should be called to the carpet for their lazy ignorance and/or malicious bad faith. Shitty, broken people have a habit of scrambling the basic morality of everyone in their orbit. I’m speaking not of whether Michael Jackson was a serial predator who targeted young boys–a charge that dogged him for the last decades of his life, leading to a string of settlements and a highly publicized and scatalogically intimate trial–but rather of the dishonesty involved in creating a hagiography for one of the most galvanizing, indeed polarizing, figures in pop-cultural history by pretending none of that happened. That he was a transformative figure is undeniable, a transcendent talent who spent much of his social capital on songs that yearned to heal rifts between the races. He was one of one. That his legacy is tainted is similarly undeniable. If director Antoine Fuqua’s focus were Bill Cosby, this film would be about his success as the “I Spy” hero, kid-show icon, and pudding salesman and end right when the curtain rises on that first episode of “The Cosby Show”. If it were about Polanski, it’d stop at the premiere of Rosemary’s Baby.

Black Zombie still featuring a Black man in white drawing circles in chalk on the floor of a dark, cavernous room

Hot Docs ’26: Black Zombie

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by Maya Annik Bedward

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Late in Maya Annik Bedward’s Black Zombie, a cross-cultural survey of the zombie in Haitian folklore and horror cinema, a Vodou priest who’s served as an authenticity expert throughout the film derisively summarizes Western imaginations of West African culture as a history of voyeurism. “I hope this isn’t that,” he says of Bedward’s documentary, whose title explicitly subverts Victor Halperin’s 1932 pre-code horror film White Zombie, a foundational colonial narrative of white innocence besieged by the ostensibly monstrous threat of Blackness, and whose intellectual project seeks to dismantle that film’s corrosive source text, William Seabrook’s Haitian travelogue The Magic Island, which exported the zombie and Vodou to the West as figures of exotic superstition. A rigorous if somewhat segmented essay on the colonial violence inherent in the horror genre’s extraction of West African beliefs, Bedward’s work easily clears this admittedly modest bar. Though it will read a bit introductory for historians of the Haitian resistance movement, French colonialism, and genre cinema, it’s nevertheless a formally engaging and provocative piece that effectively re-situates the zombie in the context from which it’s been extracted: the belief among enslaved Haitian plantation workers that death might return their spirits to their ancestral home in Ghana, while further violence at the hands of colonial administrators and their proxies might render them zombies, undead and hopelessly rooted on the colony for the rest of their days.

Picture of a sarcophagus: "If Lee Cronin's The Mummy, who's the Daddy?"

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Ireland, Spain, Theatrical

The Mummy
***½/****
starring Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace
written and directed by Lee Cronin

by Walter Chaw Lee Cronin’s The Mummy feels like a lost Chicho Ibáñez Serrador joint, the completion of a loose trilogy (with Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child? and The House That Screamed) comprising tough, thorny horrors centred on irresolvable grief and the excruciating suffering of children. The bulk of it even takes place in an old dark house like the one in The House That Screamed, and features one of Serrador’s countrywomen, Spanish actor Laia Costa, as half of an expat couple living in Cairo. Costa’s Larissa is pregnant. Her husband Charlie (Jack Reynor) is a journalist. They’ve been in the country for five months with their offspring, Katie (Emily Mitchell, then Natalie Grace as the older version (both are phenomenal)) and Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams, then Shylo Molina)–still resident aliens at a stressful moment in their lives. The theme of familial upheaval and unrest is the first of many teeming anthills The Mummy kicks over. (I almost want to say “literal cans of worms,” because the picture’s so overstuffed with disgusting images.) Another is the strain on a marriage when a child is lost, and the similarly unique strain when that child is recovered and requires constant supervision and care. Katie, see, is abducted. She’s the princess fair, the quarry of an evil witch. She’s spirited away through crowded city streets as her father gives chase. But Charlie’s hampered by supernatural interference. His vision narrows and he gets confused. And just like that, Katie’s gone.

Larry Fessenden glowering at us in a leather jacket: "Larry stories to tell in the dark"

Trauma or, Monsters All (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Horror, Theatrical, Vampire, Werewolf

***½/****
starring Laëtitia Hollard, Aitana Doyle, Addison Timlin, James Le Gros
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

by Walter Chaw There’s an immediacy to Larry Fessenden’s films, a lack of any intermediary between his characters and the viewer that can be exquisitely uncomfortable. Stories told through peepholes, they can feel like plays performed in a small venue, an intimate encounter ever threatening to spill over into the crowd. Credit his immersive, often suffocating sound design, an expertise demonstrated lately in his radio side project, “Tales from Beyond the Pale.” (I first saw Fessenden’s Habit on VHS, and the audio on its recent 4K upgrade is a revelation.) Credit also, of course, his sober, mature scripts, which deal with childhood, memory, and fear through the prism of fully formed, imperfect characters trapped in the amber of trauma that can’t be exorcised. For Fessenden, horror exists at the place where the visceral intersects with the philosophical–where the meat meets the mind. What happens to one when the other begins to develop fissures? When hairline cracks develop and let the sadness in? Consider the little boy (Erik Per Sullivan) in Fessenden’s masterful Wendigo, who learns one terrible winter that the shadow at the bottom of the stairs sometimes sees you even if you leap quietly, so quietly, across the top, where the light from the entryway paints a white square like a lepidopterist’s frame. Fessenden’s films are all variations on that species of terror, that variety of loneliness: its beginnings and endings and the long half-life in between, where fear metastasizes in unpredictable ways. He is a poet of the hard truth that being by yourself is the essential human condition.

Coel and McKellen in a cozy little room, McKellen standing in a doorway wearing a jean jacket: "Now I’m Gandalf the Denim."

The Christophers (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, UK

***/****
starring Ian McKellen, Michaela Coel, James Corden, Jessica Gunning
written by Ed Solomon
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda “It wasn’t very good, that last one,” retired octogenarian visual artist Julian Sklar says of his most recent piece in Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers. It’s tempting to read the self-deprecating remark, written by Ed Solomon and delivered with caustic wit by the 86-year-old Ian McKellen (here embracing his irascible old icon era in a role purpose-built for him), as a pithy meta-commentary on Soderbergh’s own low-stakes late period. Whatever one thinks of the video gamey perspective-play horror of Presence or the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-inflected couples spy therapy of Black Bag, Soderbergh needn’t make any excuses for The Christophers. It’s a puckish, intellectually rigorous two-hander about art, criticism, and influence that goes down as easily as his pop hits but lingers in the rearview like his deeper dramatic experiments. 

Jeremy Irons smoking and looking officious in Palestine '36: "An Irons curtain has descended across the continent"

Palestine ’36 (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Denmark, Drama, France, Jordan, Norway, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UK, War

***/****
starring Hiam Abbas, Karim Daoud Anaya, Yasmine Al Massri, Jeremy Irons
written and directed by Annemarie Jacir

by Angelo Muredda “A new page in history is written today,” a stodgy Englishman pronounces at a launch for the first state-sponsored radio broadcast in so-called Mandatory Palestine early on in Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine ’36. Although the boast is met with eye-rolls from the few well-to-do Palestinians in the mostly colonial British audience, one of whom jokes to her partner that “this is the part where they elevate us,” the line ironically serves as a good encapsulation of Jacir’s project to make something significant and new out of a familiar form. A mainstream historical epic that hits its dramatic beats with energy if not freshness, and which demonstrates classical filmmaking chops if not revolutionary aesthetics, Palestine ’36 can’t help but feel like a turning of the page in spite of its modest aesthetic choices. In the frankness with which it dramatizes the Great Revolt of the late 1930s against the British occupation and its military support for the Zionist project, the film is a rebuke to the representational lacunae that make up Western depictions of the history of the Middle East and the Palestinian liberation movement, which usually gets barely named at all.