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...

TIME • 14 April 2026

The True Story Behind #Skyking and the Airline Worker Who Flew a Stolen Plane Over the Pacific Northwest

As a ground service agent, the 28-year-old had neither a pilot’s license nor any flying experience or training. He was not a domestic terrorist, didn’t plan to use the aircraft to cause civilian casualties, and had no political agenda. As Russell says in the final section of the ATC recording, he was “just a broken guy, got a few screws loose, I guess.” As explored in the new documentary, now streaming on Hulu after premiering at the South by Southwest Film Festival last month, Russell, who suff...

Inverse • 10 April 2026

45 Years Ago, A Polarizing Director Revived His Career With An All-Time Fantasy Epic Classic

By 1981, John Boorman was in dire need of creative rebirth. The British director had made a name for himself first with the stylish revenge thriller Point Blank, and then especially with Deliverance, a thriller set in the dangerous Georgian wilderness that was a major box office success and picked up three Academy Award nominations. The rest of the 1970s wasn’t so hot — after a failed attempt to adapt Lord of the Rings, Boorman made the Sean Connery-starring post-apocalyptic fantasy Zardoz, whic...

Letterboxd • 10 April 2026

Run the Story: 50 years of All the President’s Men, the undefeated journalism thriller • Journal • A Letterboxd Magazine

All the President’s Men opens with perhaps the most aggressive use of a typewriter in cinematic history, an extreme close-up of ink being stamped onto flecked carbon paper to establish the date: “June 1, 1972.”
Watergate, the soon-to-become-infamous incident in which five men were arrested after attempting to wiretap the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., wouldn’t take place until June 17—just over two weeks later. But the intensity of...

TIME • 7 April 2026

The True Story Behind 'Untold: Chess Mates'

But as revealed in Chess Mates—the latest installment in Netflix’s Untold anthology docuseries about scandals and wild stories in sports—things have changed significantly since the days of Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. The documentary unpacks the rivalry between Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, who for 15 years has been ranked No. 1 in the world (but who has not competed in the World Chess Championship since 2022), and Hans Niemann, a young American player considered an outsider who achi...

Inverse • 1 April 2026

47 Years Later, One Ambitious Stephen King Thriller Just Got A Huge Upgrade

Stephen King’s first novel is only around 200 pages; his follow-up Salem’s Lot is closer to 500. King’s sophomore novel, about a writer returning to a small Maine town from his childhood only to discover the townspeople are turning into vampires, is by no means his longest effort (hello, It and The Stand), but it was long enough that producer Richard Kobritz smartly decided to adapt it as a miniseries rather than a straightforward film, like director Brian De Palma did with Carrie in 1976.In rec...

AnOther • 18 March 2026

La Grazia, a Sentimental Political Drama from Paolo Sorrentino

Neapolitan filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino has many recurring themes and motifs – beauty, loneliness, tradition, electronic music, sensuality as a window into the soul, often all bound up within a single protagonist. But he has one true acting muse – Toni Servillo, who shares with Sorrentino a Naples birthplace and a fascination with the conscience of powerful Italian men.
“[Sorrentino] gave me a real present [of] seven beautiful, wonderful characters,” says Servillo. It’s the day after the Venice Fi...

TIME • 7 March 2026

The Surprising History Behind The Bride!

“I am alone, and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects. This being you must create.”So commands the Creature to his creator Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel. The Creature thinks his suffering can only cease if it is replicated in another, and expresses this desire through possessive, dehumanizing language. His companion must be female becaus...

AV Club • 5 March 2026

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man fast-forwards to WWII for a superfluous finale

At the end of Peaky Blinders‘ sixth season, Birmingham gangster Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) finally found grace. Not to be confused with his late wife and lost love Grace (Annabelle Wallis) from the first three seasons—rather, in the most recent moments of the BBC series, it seemed Tommy had stumbled onto inner peace. He’s about to commit one more murder when he hears the bells tolling to mark the eleventh hour on Armistice Day. “Peace at last,” he says. For a traumatized veteran of the First...

Inverse • 5 March 2026

One Forgotten Japanese Sci-Fi Movie Predated A Beloved Anime Adaptation By Decades

The films of Nobuhiko Obayashi are a particularly satisfying and surprising niche in Japanese cinema. His filmography is bookended with dazzling works that combine the exuberance of adolescence with discoveries of historic suffering — beginning with House in 1977, and concluding with Hanagatami in 2017 and Labyrinth of Cinema, which released months after the director’s demise in 2020.During the 1980s, Obayashi directed several adaptations of sci-fi books and travelogues for entertainment conglom...

AV Club • 3 March 2026

When Pixar filmmakers venture into live-action, the Brain Trust goes bust

In the years that the filmgoing world has tried to pin down the secret to animation giant Pixar’s success, a few frontrunners have emerged as possibilities. First, there’s the Brain Trust, the company’s collaborative, rigorous development process that lets senior creatives periodically contribute to their peers’ ongoing projects. Next, there are its 22 Rules For Storytelling, each one a satisfying and sensible maxim for narrative design that helps partially explain why Pixar’s first run of films...

BFI • 24 February 2026

Zi review: Kogonada’s return to indie filmmaking

A Hong Kong violinist grapples with visions of her future self in a meandering drama where resonant moments are few and far between.Kogonada’s zi is light on its feet and unbound by narrative convention, a film that feels like a direct reaction to the director’s most recent film, the earnest, studio-funded A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025), which was widely panned by critics upon release last year. The former video essayist filmmaker renders Hong Kong as a site of almost sublime anonymity, whe...

AnOther • 19 February 2026

Wagner Moura Is Making Oscars History with The Secret Agent

Wagner Moura makes no bones about what in the world makes him angry. The star of The Secret Agent, and first Brazilian to be nominated for a best actor Academy award, is the face of the fury and compassion coursing through the simmering political thriller from Kleber Mendonça Filho, set amid the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1970s.
“My temperature in life is more explosive when it’s about injustice,” Moura tells me when we sit down to talk at the London Film Festival in October, months...