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...

Inverse • 13 February 2026

The Legendary Epic That Inspired 'Dune' Just Got A Huge Upgrade

The truest, purest way to watch Lawrence of Arabia — David Lean’s historical epic about British officer T.E. Lawrence fighting in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire — is projected on 70mm. The landscapes, the colors, and the striking intimacy of tortured souls against a backdrop of tremendous desert beauty are what the large-format film gauge is best at. But as we’re not all lucky enough to know a guy who can project it for us whenever we feel like it, a 4K Blu-ray is the next best thing...

In Review Online • 10 February 2026

Everybody to Kenmure Street — Felipe Bustos Sierra [Sundance '26 Review] | In Review Online

In 2021, a residential area in the southside of Glasgow, Scotland, exploded into an impromptu stand-off against police and deportation officers. Early on May 13, a unit from the UK Home Office’s immigration enforcement taskforce staged a dawn raid on Kenmure Street that abducted two Sikh men — longtime residents of the area — and ferried them into their van. This is as far as the “prisoner removal service” ever got, as locals quickly milled onto the street to livestream and protest the deportati...

In Review Online • 4 February 2026

Ghost in the Machine — Valerie Veatch [Sundance '26 Review] | In Review Online

Every threat to a sane and healthy life posed by AI is a continuation of some already existing social and political deterioration. Our societal tipping point from AI skepticism to acceptance (or, helplessness) was only fluid because our lives have already become so siloed, automated, and precarious. Technocapitalism decided humans are most valuable as a mass expression of processed, packaged, sellable data, a sea of targets for gambling ads and unmanned drones alike; everything deplorable about...

BFI • 2 February 2026

10 great British heist films

As the Scorsese and Tarantino-endorsed British crime thriller Strongroom is re-released in cinemas, we break open the history of the British heist film and make off with the goods.A Saturday shift at a suburban English bank draws to a close. The bank manager and cashier are surprised by robbers, their features contorted and smeared by tights pulled over their heads. They break into the strongroom, nicking the loot and locking the two bystanders inside. The bank won’t reopen until Tuesday, but th...

AnOther • 30 January 2026

A Guide to the Searching Cinema of Richard Linklater

It’s been 40 years since Richard Linklater founded the Austin Film Society, beginning his crusade to make scrappy, personal, romantic and boisterous cinema. It’s fitting for a director who first broke out in the 1990s “Indiewood” boom that his latest film, Nouvelle Vague, is an origin story of cinema’s enfant terrible par excellence, Jean-Luc Godard, mounting his iconic debut film Breathless. As Linklater’s first non-English film, Nouvelle Vague feels like a film fanatic has staged and animated...

TIME • 26 January 2026

The True Story Behind 'The Big Fake'

At the start of The Big Fake, a Netflix dramatization of one criminal’s involvement in the most tumultuous events in post-war Italy, Toni Chichiarelli (Pietro Castellitto) is a talented painter living hand-to-mouth as a portrait artist on the streets of Rome. It’s the 1970s, deep in Italy’s “Years of Lead," an era of turmoil marked by political terrorism by neo-fascists and far-left militants like the “Red Brigades,” not to mention interference from the Italian state and profiteering from organi...

AV Club • 20 January 2026

The Bone Temple's villain makes an existential struggle for survival blandly literal

Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) arrived in a postscript cliffhanger to last summer‘s 28 Years Later dressed in the tacky, eyesore garb—tracksuit, wig, and plastic jewelry—instantly recognizable to British audiences as an homage to Jimmy Savile, the media personality and philanthropist who was exposed as one of Britain’s most prolific sexual predators after his death in 2011. This completely unpredictable coda—a promise of what was to come in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple—triggered a fl...

AnOther • 19 December 2025

Cover-Up: Laura Poitras on her Spiky Love Letter to a Journalistic Hero

The opening seconds of Cover-Up show footage from a 1968 news report in Utah, after a US Army nerve agent killed thousands of sheep at the Dugway Proving Ground. Institutional recklessness and an absence of accountability haunts the scene, themes that recur throughout the film – a thorough and occasionally spiky profile of investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. 
In addition to exposing America’s chemical and biological weapon programmes, Hersh was responsible for several pivotal feats of journali...

BFI • 15 December 2025

Noah Baumbach on his portrait of a movie star, Jay Kelly: “It’s part of the culture in America that no-one ages”

With Jay Kelly, the director of Frances Ha and Marriage Story turns his lens on the fragility of fame, following George Clooney as an ageing movie star reckoning with his past. In this conversation, Baumbach explores why Hollywood icons make the perfect mirror for our own vulnerabilities.Each Noah Baumbach film feels in some way distinct from the one before. After breaking out with neurotic, dysfunctional dramedies in the 2000s, Noah Baumbach embraced a freer comedic style with Frances Ha (2012)...

AnOther • 10 December 2025

10 Intimate Winter Films to Add to Your Watchlist This Season

Nearly every Christmas film hinges on a seasonal, often kitschy surge of sentimentality in the final act. But for all the reunions, reconciliations and promises of renewal that occur at the end of the year, there is something to be said for the filmmakers who tap the rest of the winter months’ potential as a backdrop for introspective, humanist storytelling.
Winter is a deceptively intimate time of year. It brings a heightened awareness of nature’s harshness and the contrast of warm, manmade hea...

Inverse • 21 November 2025

The Coolest Stuff We Found (And Bought) in 2025

During the holiday season, it becomes all the more apparent that we are all awash in useless stuff. From the once-a-year seasonal outfit to ornaments without sentiment, trinkets we soon discard, and gag gifts that don’t make it past opening day, the world pushes us to buy more of it all — stuff that we don’t need and, frankly, don’t really want. This puts us collectors in a troubling spot. Those of us who seek out carefully crafted figures and worthy vinyl, special edition DVDs, and signed movie...

AnOther • 6 November 2025

A Guide to the Feral, Fugitive Cinema of Lynne Ramsay

Although she has only directed five feature films in a quarter-century career, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s influence can be felt throughout British cinema today – blending an immediate, sometimes painful naturalism with the impressionistic qualities of photography. Watching her social-realist drama Ratcatcher, set in an impoverished burgh in Glasgow during the 1973 refuse strikes, or Morvern Callar, about a woman fleeing her boyfriend’s suicide from Scotland to Spain, you can track the subj...

Vulture • 20 October 2025

20 Frankensteins From (Nearly) a Century of Cinema, Ranked

Almost 100 years ago, Frankenstein (the man, not the monster) declared an ecstatic, revelatory victory over scientific dogma: “It’s alive!” He had imbued life into a body constructed from dead human tissue and, in the process, kick-started a cinematic tradition that nearly every film featuring a mad scientist has been indebted to. In Universal’s Frankenstein, directed by British filmmaker James Whale in 1931, Mary Shelley’s powerhouse gothic text was truncated to a compromised 70-minute version...

Paste Magazine • 14 October 2025

It Was Just an Accident Is Jafar Panahi's Suspenseful and Human Search for Answers

For more than six months across 2022 and 2023, director Jafar Panahi was imprisoned in Iran. The filmmaker, who began as a protege of Abbas Kiarostami, was originally sentenced in 2010 for his support of the Iranian Green Movement – although he would not go to prison for a dozen years after sentencing, the Islamic Republic of Iran banned him from filmmaking, traveling, and speaking to the international press for 20 years, effectively immediately.Since then, Panahi’s films have been made in secre...

Men's Health • 7 October 2025

The Rock Is Wrestling With Himself in 'The Smashing Machine'

BEFORE ONE OF the big fights in the mixed martial arts biopic The Smashing Machine, prize fighter Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) is arguing with his girlfriend Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt). The heavyweight wrestler was an emerging talent in the late 1990s, before MMA was a billion-dollar industry, and in this specific scene, he's high on painkillers. He feels defensive when his girlfriend calls him out for it, which leads him to accuse her of being out of control. Johnson delivers the line with so muc...