The Films of 2026

[Noiretirc]

An absolutely brutal interview with Melania cinematographer Dante Spinotti

It's sad when some people "lose it" in their 80s. Spinotti clearly sees things through a straw now.

[Mr Sausage]

Wait, this doc was shot by Dante Spinotti and Jeff Cronenweth? Jeez.

[tenia]

An absolutely brutal interview with Melania cinematographer Dante Spinotti

Oh wow, it's almost elder abuse at this level.

[Brian C]

An absolutely brutal interview with Melania cinematographer Dante Spinotti

It's sad when some people "lose it" in their 80s. Spinotti clearly sees things through a straw now.

Spinotti comes off better in that interview than Chotiner, IMO. A bunch of smarmy leading questions, obviously he came into it with the agenda of trying to make Spinotti look bad.

Certainly I don’t see any sign that he’s “lost it.” He’s at least sharp enough to know he’s being ambushed and tries to be reasonable anyway.

At root, it seems ridiculous to go after the cinematographer on a movie like this. Go hard at the producers or Amazon or the members of the administration who are involved in this farce. But the cinematographer, whatever their motives may be, is still just a craftsman working a gig.

But Chotiner is even smarmy about Spinotti not making Melania look bad on purpose! Which is a cinematographer’s job! Just fatuous “journalism.”

[DarkImbecile]

The first destroyed bodies of children you see in Poh Si Teng's Sundance documentary American Doctor appear in the opening few minutes, after an on-screen debate between one of the three titular subjects of the film (one Jewish, one Muslim of Palestinian descent, and one second-generation Pakistani from a Zoroastrian background) and the director herself about the ethics of putting such an image on-screen. Mark Perlmutter, in his North Carolina home, insists upon the importance of showing the world the same things he's seen while providing medical support in a Gaza hospital, and so Teng eventually gives in. This is the first of the searing footage of the dead and maimed that make up only a few minutes in total of the runtime of the film but whose disproportionate psychological weight overwhelms the rest of the film.

The focus of the doc turns out to be less the actual medical work the doctors do — attempting to save the limbs of a young girl hit multiple times by rounds from an Apache gunship, for example — than their efforts to bring awareness of the visceral reality of the situation on the ground in Gaza to Western audiences, in combative spots on cable news shows, op-eds in major newspapers, or panels at conferences. I'm not totally sure if it's reflective of problems with the filmmaking or an inevitable result of being juxtaposed with truly shocking images of slaughtered human beings (and I've seen more than my share of similar images over the last 25 years), but these scenes of activism and sketches of the doctors' personal lives too often felt jarringly inessential next to the immediacy of the scenes in the hospital.

As often happens with documentaries these days, there's little doubt on my part that the subject matter is powerful and necessary, but I also can't fully endorse the heavy-handedness of the filmmaking here, no matter how effective it is at imprinting itself upon one's brain. One of the film's final scenes closes on a quiet, poetic note of the sun slowly setting behind the hills of Israel and Palestine — and then suddenly transitions into a loud, electric-guitar-scored montage of Free Palestine activism and murderous Israeli strikes on Nasser Hospital just weeks after our protagonists have left that turn a stairwell into an abattoir. Unforgettable, but not exactly recommended without caveats and warnings.

[thirtyframesasecond]

An absolutely brutal interview with Melania cinematographer Dante Spinotti

It's sad when some people "lose it" in their 80s. Spinotti clearly sees things through a straw now.

TBF, he shot Hudson Hawk three decades ago.

[Noiretirc]

An absolutely brutal interview with Melania cinematographer Dante Spinotti

It's sad when some people "lose it" in their 80s. Spinotti clearly sees things through a straw now.

Spinotti comes off better in that interview than Chotiner, IMO. A bunch of smarmy leading questions, obviously he came into it with the agenda of trying to make Spinotti look bad.

Certainly I don’t see any sign that he’s “lost it.” He’s at least sharp enough to know he’s being ambushed and tries to be reasonable anyway.

At root, it seems ridiculous to go after the cinematographer on a movie like this. Go hard at the producers or Amazon or the members of the administration who are involved in this farce. But the cinematographer, whatever their motives may be, is still just a craftsman working a gig.

But Chotiner is even smarmy about Spinotti not making Melania look bad on purpose! Which is a cinematographer’s job! Just fatuous “journalism.”

It's just a gig for the cinematographer? The other people involved and the subject matter are of no concern?

Sorry - no! I'm not buying that at all.

[Brian C]

It's just a gig for the cinematographer? The other people involved and the subject matter are of no concern?

Sorry - no! I'm not buying that at all.

Obviously, “the other people involved and the subject matter” are addressed, for better or worse, in the interview.

But a cinematographer is sort of inherently a job-for-hire, isn’t it? No matter how much they’re personally passionate about the subject matter or enjoy working with the other filmmakers … they’re simply not the driving force behind a movie being made. It’s just a gig, even if it’s one they really enjoy.

My point is simply that this movie may be a complete disgrace, but getting mad at the cinematographer for the seedy ways it was funded and released is pointless.

[Altair]

The deeper tragedy here is that Dante Spinotti is an incredible cinematographer: his work for Michael Mann, Paul Schrader, and Curtis Hanson was glorious. I hadn't realised, looking back over his filmographry though, that he has shot five previous Brett Ratner films, and clearly over the past decade he has prioritised 'paycheck' jobs (Ant-Man and the Wasp!).

[Noiretirc]

It's just a gig for the cinematographer? The other people involved and the subject matter are of no concern?

Sorry - no! I'm not buying that at all.

Obviously, “the other people involved and the subject matter” are addressed, for better or worse, in the interview.

But a cinematographer is sort of inherently a job-for-hire, isn’t it? No matter how much they’re personally passionate about the subject matter or enjoy working with the other filmmakers … they’re simply not the driving force behind a movie being made. It’s just a gig, even if it’s one they really enjoy.

My point is simply that this movie may be a complete disgrace, but getting mad at the cinematographer for the seedy ways it was funded and released is pointless.

(I know...I know...I said I was done with this...sigh...)

I'm not mad at him for "the seedy ways it was funded and released". I'm mad at him for wilfully getting into bed with these people! ie This Director, this Subject, this backer, this world. He made this choice. The Director is also a job for hire. Why are we now trying to minimize the cinematographer? Oh, I know why: Because he got (rightfully) beat up in that interview. (It's nice to see an interviewer with some balls in 2026. There's still a few around.)

A pox on all of them!

[Noiretirc]

The first destroyed bodies of children you see in Poh Si Teng's Sundance documentary American Doctor appear in the opening few minutes, after an on-screen debate between one of the three titular subjects of the film (one Jewish, one Muslim of Palestinian descent, and one second-generation Pakistani from a Zoroastrian background) and the director herself about the ethics of putting such an image on-screen. Mark Perlmutter, in his North Carolina home, insists upon the importance of showing the world the same things he's seen while providing medical support in a Gaza hospital, and so Teng eventually gives in. This is the first of the searing footage of the dead and maimed that make up only a few minutes in total of the runtime of the film but whose disproportionate psychological weight overwhelms the rest of the film.

The focus of the doc turns out to be less the actual medical work the doctors do — attempting to save the limbs of a young girl hit multiple times by rounds from an Apache gunship, for example — than their efforts to bring awareness of the visceral reality of the situation on the ground in Gaza to Western audiences, in combative spots on cable news shows, op-eds in major newspapers, or panels at conferences. I'm not totally sure if it's reflective of problems with the filmmaking or an inevitable result of being juxtaposed with truly shocking images of slaughtered human beings (and I've seen more than my share of similar images over the last 25 years), but these scenes of activism and sketches of the doctors' personal lives too often felt jarringly inessential next to the immediacy of the scenes in the hospital.

As often happens with documentaries these days, there's little doubt on my part that the subject matter is powerful and necessary, but I also can't fully endorse the heavy-handedness of the filmmaking here, no matter how effective it is at imprinting itself upon one's brain. One of the film's final scenes closes on a quiet, poetic note of the sun slowly setting behind the hills of Israel and Palestine — and then suddenly transitions into a loud, electric-guitar scored montage of Free Palestine activism and murderous Israeli strikes on Nasser Hospital just weeks after our protagonists have left that turn a stairwell into an abattoir. Unforgettable, but not exactly recommended without caveats and warnings.

DarkImbecile, I'm worried that your excellent post might get drowned out by this Melania swamp. My apologies for my part in it.

[Never Cursed]

But a cinematographer is sort of inherently a job-for-hire, isn’t it? No matter how much they’re personally passionate about the subject matter or enjoy working with the other filmmakers … they’re simply not the driving force behind a movie being made. It’s just a gig, even if it’s one they really enjoy.

Infamously so, and dating back in a way to the studio era, where incredible talents like John Alton would get assigned random crap in between huge movies. (One of the funniest examples of this: if you don't know it off the top of your head, go look up who shot the early 2000s The Cat in the Hat film).

All that said, there's no reason why shooting a film for the money is any more justified if it's morally reprehensible. Spinotti doesn't deserve to be treated as though he was responsible for the project, but he is a moving part that took a paycheck in what appears to be a $75 million bribe. Helping make propaganda "for the money" is still helping make propaganda, whatever the message

[Noiretirc]

But surely Cat In The Hat (2003) is in the so bad that it's good camp*? Can Melania attain such lofty heights?

*Edit: It's a thing! https://www.reddit.com/r/Letterboxd/com ... ictionary/

[Noiretirc]

PTA and Jonny Greenwood are not happy:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/f ... tom-thread

[bearcuborg]

5 part documentary on Jeff Smith, The Frugal Gourmet, I Bid You Peace is available for purchase at the filmmakers website. $20 for 5hrs.

I bought it because I grew up watching this show as a kid in the Chicagoland area in the 80s…and then one day he was gone, and Food Network came.

This documentary not only covers his rise to fame, and his downfall-but features some CRUSHING testimony from his victims via court transcripts that offer some of the most brutal examples of grooming.

[hearthesilence]

James Benning’s EIGHT BRIDGES had its North American premiere on Sunday at MoMA and will screen one more time “tomorrow” (Wednesday) in the late afternoon.

The process of making this was even more minimal than expected despite the advantage of shooting with a digital camera rather than a 16mm Bolex. (As you probably know, Benning used to shoot an entire reel of film and that would constitute a “take.”) FWIW he shot with an HD camera (Sony PMW-EX3) because he dislikes the look of 4K camera footage.

After selecting eight bridges, he shot the bookends first, then shot bridges #2-7 in the order they appeared in the film. The opening bridge was the only one where he shot more than one take (three to be exact) but he stuck with the first and discarded the other two.

He said if anything hadn’t worked during the process of making this film, including the sequence, he would have made a change, “but sometimes you get lucky.”

Some bridges had personal or political associations that may not be apparent. For example, Edmund Pettus Bridge (completed in 1940) was a celebration of Edmund Pettus, a former Confederate brigadier general, U.S. senator, and Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. Twenty-five years later on March 7, 1965, it became a pivotal site in the Civil Rights movement when state troopers brutally attacked peaceful voting rights marchers on what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”

Then, per Benning in the above link:

I have personal connections to some of the bridges. I first saw the bridge in Astoria in the summer of 1972, when Libby Taylor and I visited Astoria. Libby lived there as a teenager. At the time we visited, we were married and Libby was unknowingly pregnant with our daughter Sadie. I visited the Florida Keys with Bette Gordon in 1975 when the older Seven Mile Bridge was still in use. That’s the one you see in EIGHT BRIDGES—in my shot the newer bridge is hidden by the older bridge, although the trucks on the newer bridge can be seen and you can hear the traffic. The older bridge is used only for fishing now.

Even if these details are completely lost on the viewer, which is very possible, it remains a powerful meditation on co-existence, richly textured in both visuals and sound (and in this case, the entire soundtrack consists of location sync sound with no added music - it is highly effective even if it may have been simply “captured”). And there is a wonderful arc that builds around a give-and-take dynamic that shifts in the midpoint towards exploitation and metastasis before shifting towards some kind of peaceful (but still uneasy) coexistence in the final bridge. Just before that point though, a railroad bridge brings to mind Orson Welles’s Chartres monologue, except not so much as a testament to humanity as the strange remains of their now-vanished presence, one that may not be mourned and doesn’t appear to be needed for life on earth to continue.

[beamish14]

Shinya Tsukamoto has his first film in English out this year, and it co-stars Geoffrey Rush

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

I know it's not terribly well-regarded, but Tetsuo: The Bullet Man was in English.

[Mr Sausage]

Alpha (Julia Ducournau)

I haven't seen any of Ducournau's other films, but she's a talented director. The style here is heavy and sludgy, but it kept hold of me, and the aesthetic experience was arresting. And the performances are superb--lived in, wrenching, ably handling very tough drama. But the movie's a mess. What's odd is that it's an AIDS allegory in 2026, but it's allegorizing AIDS from the perspective of the 80s, when it was emerging. The reality of HIV infection now is nothing like how the mystery disease as portrayed in the movie. The allegory is poignant, but the referent is oddly out of date. Why approach a historical situation through the lense of allegory like this, as tho' such a known element needed mediation? Also, AIDS is represented allegorically, but is also itself being used as an allegory for other things, so the movie's fictional mystery disease is an allegory of an allegory (for drug addiction, but also racism and cultural displacement and mental illness and growing pains and society breakdown...jeez, practically everything). The movie is stuffed to the gills with themes, all treated with poetic insistence. Disentangling the mesh is probably impossible, tho' I can't say that the movie isn't more effective for the confusions. I understand Ducournau's previous movies were anchoring their themes in genre, and I suspect that letting go of that anchoring element has left this movie adrift in itself, accruing significance after significance without direction or resolution. A striking movie, but not wholly satisfying.

[cantinflas]

Shape of Dreams — a Spike Jonze ad starring Zendaya

[hearthesilence]

I wasn't expecting Michael to get a rousing reception, and I'm not surprised his diehard fans are proclaiming it as some kind of masterpiece, but I am surprised to see Owen Gleiberman and Questlove lavishing so much praise on it while brushing aside the elephant in the room.

[Never Cursed]

Seems very much like the people who were involved in the movie/friends with the filmmakers did not anticipate how distasteful it would (not unreasonably) come off to critics. It’s not often that I hope a film fails, but if this could bomb and end musical-artist biopics as a genre…

[tenia]

I wasn't expecting Michael to get a rousing reception, and I'm not surprised his diehard fans are proclaiming it as some kind of masterpiece, but I am surprised to see Owen Gleiberman and Questlove lavishing so much praise on it while brushing aside the elephant in the room.

BUT THE SOUL OF THE HUMAN BEING

(I read Questlove's feedback, and it's... interesting)

[MichaelB]

TBF, he shot Hudson Hawk three decades ago.

...not long after Vittorio Storaro shot Ishtar.

Given both films' budgets, I daresay the cinematographer's fee was pretty hefty.

[Zot!]

I wasn't expecting Michael to get a rousing reception, and I'm not surprised his diehard fans are proclaiming it as some kind of masterpiece, but I am surprised to see Owen Gleiberman and Questlove lavishing so much praise on it while brushing aside the elephant in the room.

Supposedly there are like 2 hours of footage laying about focusing on the later years that was cut. I think a fun project with any of these dreadfully boring music biopics would be a yin/yang two parter. Part 1 (Art) is a fawning hagiography focusing on why we love them. Part 2 (Artist) is a ruthless hit-piece exposing their vanity and misdeeds.