The family in The End of Oak Street with their legs in potato sacks. Patriarch Ewan McGregor tells them: "“George Lucas used to make us do potato-sack races at gunpoint!”

The End of Oak Street (2026)

Posted in2026, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical Release, Thriller

***/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery
written and directed by David Robert Mitchell

by Walter Chaw David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street feels like a lost Spielberg film. There’s a two-year gap in Steven Spielberg’s filmography between 1941 (1979) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and that’s the slot in which this most slavishly Spielbergian film since J.J. Abrams’s Super 8 belongs. It’s the space where Spielberg was reeling from his first commercial and critical failure–where he might have been taking stock of what it was that really worked about Jaws and Close Encounters of the First Kind. Mitchell’s film is essentially an amalgam of the pedal-to-the-floor set-piece structure of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the suburban idealization of its follow-up, E.T.–the birth moment of a style so distinctive, it will be the first thing even non-cinephiles notice about this film. “I’ve been here before…” they will think. Collective cinematic hiraeth: if you were raised in this culture, this is the childhood you remember. Period-appropriate mom jeans and dad workout shorts with tube socks? Check. Squabbling tween siblings? Check, check. Suburban milieu patrolled by adorable dogs and kids on Schwinns? Man, you know that’s a Roger. There’s also a lovely moment early on where a young woman’s head is framed so perfectly by a lens flare (a quintessential Spielberg visual hallmark that works like an artist’s signature now) that she looks, appropriately, like a sacred Giotto illumination, complete with glorious harp arpeggios on the soundtrack. Many will call The End of Oak Street a spiritual sequel to Jurassic Park, but it’s more a Spielbergian take on Stephen King’s novella The Mist, except instead of fucked-up other-dimensional monsters, the beasties invading the aggressively WASPy middle-class enclave of the title are Late Cretaceous dinosaurs. It’s everything you’d want from a movie. Even my favourite dinosaur, Isaac from “The Love Boat”, makes a cameo on a television running in the background of a Spielberg™ family dinner scene.

Einbinder and Anderson in a movie theatre, projector light behind them: "Somehow, watching teenagers get impaled feels good in a place like this"

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Romance, Theatrical Release, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven, Patrick Fischler
written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun

by Angelo Muredda “You talk about it so academically,” reclusive actress Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) chides filmmaker Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) about her pitch to revive the slasher series the former anchored in her youth early on in Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Rather than being about gender trouble, the pleasure principle, and whatever other high concepts the millennial theory kid Kris might bring to her meta reboot of the not-so-storied Camp Miasma franchise, the actual films, Billy insists, are about something concrete: “flesh and fluids.” Schoenbrun, a neurotic queer filmmaker with an abiding love for genre and a knack for mediating that love through smart metafictional narratives about trans and nonbinary identity, could certainly do worse for an authorial self-insert than Einbinder, whose sexually stunted, voraciously consuming (both movies and candy) Sundance wunderkind Kris is lovably guileless. But preemptively owning up to their own tendency to intellectualize the base pleasures of pulp art doesn’t fully take the sting out of Billy’s criticism, as far as Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma itself is concerned. At once an agreeably campy horror-comedy, an arch portrait of the creative compromises of queer mid-budget filmmaking, and a subtextually ripe queer coming-of-age melodrama-cum-slasher about a fictional trans killer resolving an aloof artist’s hangups about sex and death, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is as baroque as its ostentatious title suggests. If it’s ultimately less than the sum of its parts, and not as emotionally gratifying as Schoenbrun’s previous two features, then at least there’s plenty of flesh and fluid behind its more inspired elements.

Tirion Healy peering out from behind a wall in Insectasy

Fantasia Festival ’26: Home Bodies; Godhead; Insectasy

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

HOME BODIES
*/****
starring Emma Ho, Ian Ho, Ess Hödlmoser
written by Adrian Murray, Marcus Sullivan
directed by Casey Walker

GODHEAD
**½/****
starring Sarah Coffey, Kimball Farley, Luke Speakman, Al Warren
written and directed by Mark H. Rapaport

INSECTASY
***½/****
starring Sadie Healy, Lyndall Huber, Jan Roeth, Emmett Roiko
written and directed by Angus Silver

by Walter Chaw Casey Walker, producer of 2024’s breakout arthouse slasher In a Violent Nature, directs Home Bodies, a William Sleator-inflected two-hander starring real-life brother and sister Ian and Emma Ho. They play “Blue” and “Red,” respectively (their names also the colours of their respective jumpsuits), siblings holed up in a well-appointed, multi-room apartment with only each other and a CRT television that’s always broadcasting a puppet-based kids’ show as diversion. Is there any significance to the colours beyond their gendered connotation? Not that I could tell. Blue and Red have a “father” (voiced by Walker) who is a light in a closet that talks to them, and to whom they report their moods and activities now and then. And for a while, they have a mute “friend” called Pal (Ess Hödlmoser), who moves around like a person pretending to be a creepy robot. Is Pal a robot? Doesn’t seem to matter. One day, over a game of “hide and find,” Blue does an awful thing that makes Father angry with them, meaning he stops feeding them and (invisibly) maintaining their environment. Really, what Blue does is not that awful, relative to our understanding of this game’s poorly established rules.

The eponymous Samurai and the Prisoner talking privately: "And you say this “sex purge” is for one night only?"

The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Japan, Mystery, Theatrical Release, Thriller, War

黒牢城
***½/****
starring Masahiro Motoki, Masaki Suda, Yuriko Yoshitaka
written by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, based on the novel by Honobu Yonezawa
directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Angelo Muredda The obscure motive behind samurai Araki Murashige’s decision to abandon his besieged castle is the first puzzle of many for us to work through in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s pleasantly twisty The Samurai and the Prisoner. Adapted from the prize-winning 2021 novel by Honobu Yonezawa, the film marks a number of firsts for the master of modern urban alienation, despite the familiar hook of an unsolved mystery. The dense, knotty text finds Kurosawa transplanting something of the creeping gloom of works like Charisma and Pulse onto a period drama that is atypically centred not on humble citizens like low-level yakuza (Serpent’s Path), factory workers (Bright Future), or police officers (Cure and Retribution), but on real historical figures of power and consequence. Though it’s as stately and poised as his contemporary work, Kurosawa’s rare period piece is also an uncharacteristically loquacious affair for him, successfully splitting the difference between a traditional jidaigeki–a dialogue-heavy costume drama set in feudal Japan–and a season of “Columbo”, complete with talking killers and shrewd detectives playing dumb to solicit confessions.

A stoic Jun Ji-hyun surrounded by zombies

Fantasia Festival ’26: Colony

Posted in2026, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Disability, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Thriller, Zombie

군체
Gunche
***½/****
starring Jun Ji-hyun, Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Kim Shin-rok
written by Yeon Sang-ho, Choi Gyu-seok
directed by Yeon Sang-ho

by Walter Chaw Colony is Yeon Sang-ho’s return to the zombie feature (after Train to Busan and its animated sequel, Peninsula), a rip-roaring, often fascinating treatise on tech bros, social media, and the dangerous resolve of the mob. Per its name, Yeon’s zombies are hive animals–like ants, for instance, or bees–who gain a communal intelligence through an invisible, scent-based or possibly mycelial network. Using it, they learn from one another how to be better hunters and better evangelists for their “eat of my body, drink of my blood” contagion. They have done what Catholics once feared film could do. Colony‘s BigBad, in the final analysis, is the dangerous ability to connect with a group of people scattered around the world who agree with your worst ideas. When you were a lunatic incel moron creep in the pre-Internet era, you were shunned and disgraced. As it should be. Now? Now if you’re a deranged, flat-earthing, creationist Christian Scientist weirdo, you buy a red hat and join your fuckwit brethren looking for a golden idol who will piss on your adoring, upturned face. Consider how LLM chatbots are merely the poison of external validation mechanized for inhuman efficiency. People will still get tired of you, no matter how proudly you wear your prejudice and ignorance as a personality. An LLM will never get sick of your stupid, violent, grandiose delusions. Yeah, we’re double-fucked.

Rupert Grint look down through a large hole in his floor

Fantasia Festival ’26: Nightborn

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Finland, France, Horror, Lithuania, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Seidi Haarla, Rupert Grint, Pamela Tola, Pirkko Saisio
written by Hannah Bergholm, Ilja Rautsi
directed by Hannah Bergholm

by Walter Chaw I wanted to like Hannah Bergholm’s crimson-spattered folk horror Nightborn more than I did. It is, after all, the kind of thing I like: a Finnish changeling fable that leans heavily into the Czech otesánek fairytale (memorably immortalized by Jan Švankmajer via his freakout masterpiece Little Otik), with a heavy dose of Rosemary’s Baby to spice the hunter’s stew of it. It joins Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love as another stunning essay on post-partum marriage and navigating the shock and condemnation new mothers face when they don’t behave the way they should, and it boasts a monstrous child who conjures up memories for me of reading Ray Bradbury’s “Small Assassin” as a kid myself. Both Nightborn and Die My Love–not to mention Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You–are portraits of “difficult” women taken for granted, despised and ignored, by the people who should love them most. If Nightborn hums with the same ferocious, infernal energy as those films, it ultimately falls short by not putting enough faith in subtext. Its richness is in the complexity of its metaphor; why not leave it as metaphor? Trust in the audience’s ability to accept ambiguity marks the difference between a neat little exercise and a haunting masterwork.

Kristine Froseth taking a selfie in a luxury space

Fantasia Festival ’26: Her Private Hell

Posted in****/****, 2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, Dougray Scott
written by Nicolas Winding Refn and Esti Giordani
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

by Walter Chaw Fantasia 2026 opens with another gauzy, roiling, Tsai Ming-liang via Mario Bava psychosexual dreamscape from Nicolas Winding Refn. Her Private Hell, Refn’s first feature since 2016’s The Neon Demon, plays in the same sandbox: It’s easy to imagine the gamine, fledgling model played by a blonde Elle Fanning in that film evolving into Her Private Hell‘s brunette “Elle” (Sophie Thatcher), a filmmaker burning through a variety of gaudy facial accessories that hide the essential emptiness of her expression. Her Private Hell is no less stunned, soporific–a feature-length version of the rhapsodic shower sequences from Brian De Palma’s Carrie and Dressed to Kill. Given that composer Pino Donaggio has been recruited to provide the film with a swooning score dripping with harp arpeggios and syrupy strings, I suspect the comparison to De Palma’s oeuvre is more artifact than accident.

Trojans pulling the Trojan horse out of the sand: "Help, Wilbur! I'm stuck!"

The Odyssey (2026)

Posted in****/****, 2026, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical Release, UK

****/****
starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron
screenplay by Christopher Nolan, based on the epic poem by Homer
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw The bookshelf of my childhood includes The Chronicles of Narnia, Edward Ormondroyd’s David and the Phoenix, Ray Bradbury’s short stories, Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat series, Robert Lynn Asprin’s MythAdventures, a whole lot of Asimov and Ellison, Piers Anthony’s Xanth and “Incarnations of Immortality” series, William Sleator’s House of Stairs, a Chinese manga of Journey to the West, and Bernard Evslin’s The Adventures of Ulysses. I read each of these volumes multiple times and draw from them still when I’m trying to reverse-engineer a familiar sensation I get from new creations. They’re my first connection with the collective, this shelf of pre-YA and YA treasures–and, aside from the Xanth books (which have aged poorly), they’re what I encouraged my children to read as they were finding their way from childhood to experience. I pushed The Adventures of Ulysses especially hard and, later, Richard Lattimore’s scholarly, ethical translations of Homer’s 12,000-line poem, split into 24 books for ease of study and presented as what a close friend and mentor once called one of the only two stories that comprise the Western canon. The other? The Crucifixion.

Smiling woman's severed head lying on the dirt ground: "Looks like the coin toss came up heads!"

Evil Dead Burn (2026)

Posted in****/****, 2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, New Zealand, Theatrical Release

****/****
starring Souheila Yacoub, Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan
written by Sébastien Vaniček & Florent Bernard
directed by Sébastien Vaniček

by Walter Chaw The day my dad died, I was unavailable by phone until evening. My voicemail was full of messages to go to the hospital–there’d been another heart attack and where was I? Hurry. Hurry. When I finally got there, I was directed to a waiting area, where my mom was already camped out with other members of her cult. She pointed to a door. I went through it to find my dad on a gurney, in a shiny black body bag. Eventually, someone came in and unzipped it so I could look at him: blue and ashen and cold. When I returned to the waiting area, I offered my mother a hug, but she pushed me away and turned back to the coterie of strangers collected there, measuring me. I measured them back. A few days later, at the funeral that my dad didn’t want, one of them blamed me for his death. At the unwanted funeral where I was forced to genuflect before an open casket my father definitely did not want, I was confronted with the sight of him now rouged to a garish purple because white morticians don’t know what to do with yellow skin, his blood replaced by a humectant to keep him moist amid our arid environment. Just for a while, you know, until we incinerated him and swept his ashes into a cardboard box we kept in a drawer for years before dumping them out into a lake.

Polaroid of the CAMP cast against green velvet that suggests the woods. Pink, fuzzy, embossed letters: "Fast Times at Camp Girl Horror." By Walter Chaw in white letters underneath.

Fast Times at Camp Girl Horror: FFC Interviews Avalon Fast

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Interviews

by Walter Chaw A new wave of filmmakers has arrived, born and raised in the Internet age without parents capable of warning them there are wolves lurking in the digital forest. I think I only implanted in my children a general dread, a non-specific “be careful” with no strategy for survival. Didn’t it used to be easier? Don’t go into the candy house. Don’t accept rides from strangers. How do I protect my kids from the dangers of a place I don’t really know how to navigate, full of traps I myself can neither identify nor defeat? They were brought up in an environment of instant feedback, of virtual friends, of communities formed by shared niche interests. In my lifetime, I have seen the bullied become the captains of industry and entertainment. I’ve lived long enough to watch nerds not only gain their revenge but become the bullies themselves.

The young women of CAMP in the woods at night: "Camp? You call this a camp? This is a damn outdoor jail!"

Camp (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Theatrical Release
***½/****starring Zola Grimmer, Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moorewritten and directed by Avalon Fast by Walter Chaw I'm thinking of an Ani DiFranco song--a fragment, really--called "Hide and Seek" that she's only released as a live cut. You can find it on her 1997 album Living in Clip. It's a spooky tune, just a bass riff on a loop with lyrics about a little girl learning of the hell that is the transition from innocence to experience. I listened to it obsessively in the miserable year before I met the woman who would be my wife: struggling through a series of doomed…
Jason Momoa as Lobo: "Momoa, mo' problems"

Supergirl (2026)

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

*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 Release

***/****
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 Release

*/****
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 Release, 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 Release, 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 Release

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 Release

***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 Release

****/****
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.