TIME • 6 August 2026

The True Story Behind 'Monsters of God'

As a lifelong lover of reptiles, Eric Goode has known about the world of exotic reptile smuggling for decades. “I didn't become acutely aware of the criminality of it until probably into the late ‘80s,” says the director of Tiger King and Chimp Crazy ahead of his latest documentary, another foray into wildlife crime, Monsters of God. The five-episode HBO series is Goode’s most ambitious project to date, surveying the explosion of endangered reptiles trafficked into the country in Florida from th...

Men's Health • 23 July 2026

You Loved ‘The Odyssey.’ You’ll Love These 10 Action Epics Too.

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S THE Odyssey is upon us, in all its prestige format rollout glory. The significance of a $250 million adaptation of Homer’s epic poem cannot be overstated: this is the first Odyssey blockbuster, and while the story of Ithaca’s king wandering across high seas and strange lands for ten years has influenced plenty of canonized works of literature and beloved media (like Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? and, if you squint, Star Trek: Voyager). But ancient historica...

AnOther • 22 July 2026

A Guide to the Spectral Films of Andrei Tarkovsky

Beginning with his Great Patriotic War-set Ivan’s Childhood, auteur Andrei Tarkovsky made just seven features over the span of 24 years. But despite the restrictive creative conditions of the Soviet Union’s Brezhnev era – a saga of censorship that led to the filmmaker leaving his homeland for the final years of his life – all of his films feel completely uncompromised. In his dedication to foregrounding philosophy, art and poetry (Tarkovsky references his poet father, Arseny, in multiple films),...

AV Club • 22 July 2026

"I'd been given this gift of dying": Nicolas Winding Refn on his operatic return to the big screen

Contrary to the internet’s belief, filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn’s career did not begin with 2011’s Drive, the Los Angeles getaway driver thriller starring Ryan Gosling as an asocial aura-farming antihero. In truth, Drive marked the halfway point of Refn’s career; the Danish provocateur had already explored the dark psychological side of Copenhagen crime in his Pusher trilogy, given Tom Hardy his breakout role as England’s most violent offender in Bronson, and even tried to capitalize on the se...

Inverse • 18 July 2026

25 Years Later, The Most Unfairly Maligned Jurassic Park Sequel Is Better Than You Remember

There have been six sequels to Jurassic Park — one trilogy, one reboot trilogy, and one reboot of the reboot — but none of them come close to the excitement and suspense of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original. Jurassic Park’s magic is deeply connected to its sense of discovery — even if you’ve seen the dinosaur romp a dozen times, the alchemy of John Williams’ score, Industrial Light and Magic’s effects, and Spielberg’s sharp direction of a stellar cast always makes it feel like we’re encountering...

AV Club • 16 July 2026

The best Odyssey films adapt the epic in unheroic terms

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns—preferably in a four-quadrant movie format. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey is, according to the director himself, the most challenging film he’s made, filmed across six countries, often on terrain hostile to blockbuster film crews, with a massive A-lister cast and a degree of grit and realism typical to Nolan’s filmed versions of heightened material. But while The Odyssey‘s press run has supplied enough anecdotes of...

AV Club • 3 July 2026

Bicentennial cinema shattered the myth of America

There were plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the Bicentennial celebrations in 1976. How to mark the 200th anniversary of the Declaration Of Independence was debated for years, all while the country was rocked with a series of tough truths and scandals. The end of the Vietnam War, a major recession with millions unemployed, and the 1974 resignation of President Nixon—this all felt at odds with an expensive celebration of American pride and legacy. Surely a new legacy was being formed in real t...

Inverse • 27 June 2026

In The Hand Of Dante Is A Heady, Ridiculous Art Heist Film About Gangsters And Poetry

Two authors, both alike in dignity (and both played by Oscar Isaac), stand at the center of In the Hand of Dante. The first is Dante Alighieri, the revered Italian poet who penned the Divine Comedy in the 14th century — the epic poem depicting his journey through the circles of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The second is Nick Tosches, a frustrated and principled New Jerseyan author at the turn of the new millennium.Don’t let the film’s fluid, handheld cinematography, ambitious dual lead perform...

AV Club • 15 June 2026

Spoiler Space: Disclosure Day is Spielberg's riskiest finale yet

At the end of Disclosure Day‘s first act, director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp confirm the ominous, seismic stakes of their sci-fi conspiracy film. Whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) has escaped the custody of his former clandestine employer Wardex and holed up in a middle America farmho...

Men's Health • 2 June 2026

Guy Ritchie Has Made a Lot of Movies. We Ranked Them All.

FANCY ENTERING A world of smarmy mercenaries, expert street fighters, and both-sides-playing gangsters? It's impressive how much director Guy Ritchie insists on filling his work with his favorite tropes and stylistic flourishes from the action and crime worlds. Ever since his debut with the savvy 1998 gangster flick Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels—the influence of which can still be felt on British crime media today—Ritchie has been telling stories that are as aggressive as they are playful...

BFI • 26 May 2026

11 discoveries from Cannes 2026

Winner of the Camera d’Or for Best First Feature Film, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s reckoning with the 1994 Rwandan genocide is a feat of cinematic wonder and community collaboration. A decade of research and the involvement of survivors, who deliver moving testimonies during group scenes, is threaded through a taut dramatic concept. Tutsi survivor Vénéranda (Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi) is a group leader at the Kibeho chapter of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, initiating dialo...

AnOther • 26 May 2026

An Interview With Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan’s Master of Existential Cinema

Forty years and dozens of films since Kiyoshi Kurosawa began his career, the exceptional Japanese director of chilling, comfort-shattering horror films has made a samurai film. Just don’t expect Seven Samurai or Lone Wolf and Cub – based on the prize-winning novel by Honobu Yonezawa, The Samurai and the Prisoner is an absorbing, detailed mystery drama, a fictionalised account of Lord Murashige Araki (Masahiro Motoki) and the enemy strategist Kanbei Kuroda (Masaki Suda) locked up in the castle du...

AV Club • 22 May 2026

Kiyoshi Kurosawa stages a delightful samurai Columbo with The Samurai And The Prisoner

Murashige Araki (Masahiro Motoki) is a rare lord in Japan’s Sengoku period. The Samurai And The Prisoner—Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s first samurai film—begins in 1578, deep in the pre-Edo “Warring States” period, and ruthlessness does not come to Murashige easily. This is making his betrayal of the far more powerful warlord Nobunaga Oba (Bando Shingo) and the impending siege of Arioka Castle a pressing concern. When envoy Kanbei Kuroda (Cloud‘s Musaki Suda) visits to warn the lord about his dismal odds,...

AV Club • 22 May 2026

Pedro Almodóvar regifts his own pithy, self-critical autofiction in Bitter Christmas

How do you respond when a filmmaker announces to the audience that his latest film is a minor work? In the case of Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas, this self-critique comes late in the game through the dramatic avatars of a very Almodóvar-styled director, Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) and his no-bullshit agent Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), who are locked in a fierce debate about whether Raúl has total freedom to crib the painful experiences of his close circle, or if he’s just bring a prick. Mor...

A Rabbit's Foot • 22 May 2026

Palme frontrunner Minotaur gets to the corrupt (and cuckholded) heart of Russia - A Rabbit's Foot

“What do you want to endure?” is a throwaway question in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, a pithy insult in a major argument between a rich Russian husband and wife. Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is drunk and upset about the uselessness of being the neglected wife of a wealthy CEO, Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov)—she wants to live, to endure, but her clumsy cries for a richer, grander experience fail to convince. Neither of them mention the elephant in the room—Galina’s young, hot lover Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk),...

AnOther • 21 May 2026

The Man I Love: Ira Sachs’ Soulful and Transcendent Musical Drama

Performance seeps into nearly every scene of The Man I Love, Ira Sachs’ frank romantic drama about the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS on New York’s gay community and downtown theatre scene. Our subject is Jimmy (Rami Malek), a minor, localised theatre celebrity on the mend from a debilitating bout of AIDS-related illness, cared for by his non-performer partner, Dennis (Tom Sturridge). He’s excited about his new starring role to focus on. But outside of rehearsals, performance is the principle me...

AnOther • 18 May 2026

Harry Melling on His Intimate and Reckless Role in Butterfly Jam

One year after the world premiere of Pillion, Harry Melling has returned to Cannes in Kantemir Balagov’s new film, the chaotic and dangerous immigrant family drama Butterfly Jam. “Two years in a row is not bad,” the actor jovially agrees, speaking to AnOther on the rooftop terrace of the glamorous JW Marriott Cannes – on what will undoubtedly be the windiest day of the festival. Furniture is being hastily rearranged to protect audio levels when Melling arrives; he rallies his interviewer to take...

A Rabbit's Foot • 16 May 2026

Sandra Hüller is magnetic in Pawlikowski's muted portrait of post-war Germany - A Rabbit's Foot

In Mephisto, both the novel by anti-fascist writer Klaus Mann and its Academy Award-winning 1981 film adaptation, a German stage actor achieves his dreams of stardom by acquiescing to the demands of the Nazi regime, unaware he’s accepted a Faustian deal even as he performs in Goethe’s celebrated play. In Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, the same barbed questions of compromising artistic integrity to support building a national consciousness are present, but they have a new emotional timbre: muted...

Inverse • 14 May 2026

78 Years Later, The Most Surreal Sci-Fi Noir You've Never Seen Just Got A Huge Upgrade

Don’t underestimate the significance of Czech science-fiction — the word “robot” is a Czech invention, coined by author Karel Čapek for his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). Four years later, Čapek published the novel Krakatit, a prescient cautionary tale about a scientist who creates a seismic explosive and realizes just how hellish its impact on mankind will be. A film adaptation was produced over 20 years later, when Czech director Otakar Vávra used the precarity of post-war Europ...

AnOther • 11 May 2026

A Guide to Kabuki Theatre in Film

When Kokuho picked up a single nomination – for best hair and make-up – at this year’s Academy Awards, it was a surprise. But the Japanese epic, which follows the coming-of-age and career of a fictional actor (Ryo Yoshizawa) adopted by a legendary theatre star (Ken Watanabe) after his father was killed by rival yakuza, had already become the highest-grossing live-action film of all time in Japan. It's easy to see how a story of fraternal rivalry, betrayal and redemption set in the highest echelo...

The Guardian • 2 May 2026

Strength in numbers: what have 50 years of labor union documentaries shown us?

“We better start pulling together or, by God, they’re going to bury us,” says a meat packer during a union meeting in Barbara Kopple’s 1990 documentary American Dream. It’s a desperate plea for survival; “they” are the Hormel Foods Corporation, who took advantage of union disorder to replace a huge portion of their workforce during a costly strike. American Dream sees the 1985-86 labor crisis in Austin, Minnesota, as symbolic of the state of organized labor in the United States – call it an alte...

Inverse • 30 April 2026

Netflix's 'Man on Fire' Is A Dimmer Remake Of A Tony Scott Classic

John Creasy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is in dire need of a lifeline. Once an incredibly skilled Special Forces Mercenary, Creasy lost his entire team on a risky mission in Mexico City, and their deaths weigh heavily on his conscience — the intensity of his PTSD makes him sleep with a bag on his head, as if to deny the senses and memory of the world around him. Since the publication of A.Q. Quinnell’s 1980 thriller novel, John Creasy has been the “man on fire,” but before he’s thrust back into the...

Glasgow Film Theatre • 27 April 2026

Programme Notes: Rose of Nevada

The first minute of Rose of Nevada (Dir. Mark Jenkin, 2025) doesn’t feel like it reveals a lot, but it is rich with detail. Jenkin, who shot and edited the film, in addition to writing and directing it, cuts between close-ups of fishing dock detritus – limp, rusted, and chipped objects each sporting a unique sense of abandonment. We are in an unnamed Cornish town that is unmistakably on its last legs; as we learn from scenes beyond these up-close-and-personal looks at coastal artefacts, the post office is now a boarded-up food bank, the lone pub is eerily, depressingly quiet, and the docks see absolutely no fishing business.

AnOther • 16 April 2026

Five Groundbreaking Dream Sequences From Silent Cinema

When Gerald Fox attended a film studies course taught by renowned scholar Vlada Petrić, he was struck by the late Harvard professor’s essay Film & Dreams. The essay offered a survey of the “oneiric style” – a style that evoked the sensation and substance of dreams – that flourished in silent cinema. Decades’ worth of early 20th century films were analysed through “the prism of dreams”. As surrealist master Luis Buñuel put it, “Dreams are the first cinema invented by mankind.”
Later in his career...