Festival Circuit 2026

[Never Cursed]

How exactly did the jury bungle things in 2022?

They gave a bunch of bad movies awards. Stars at Noon, Close, and Broker were among the worst movies I saw that year, and I didn't like the Palme winner much better. (I liked Decision to Leave, EO, and The Eight Mountains, though).

[rrenault]

With Stars at Noon they were probably trying to compensate Claire Denis who was "overdue". I agree about EO and Decision to Leave being the best of the lot.

I'd probably include EO in my top ten of the 2020s.

[Ribs]

I don’t think that was the narrative - it was only her second film in Competition!

[rrenault]

Also, Vincent Lindon seems like an odd choice for jury president. He doesn't carry much international gravitas the way your typical Cannes jury president does.

On the other hand, I'd say it's pretty much inevitable Lea Seydoux will be jury president at some point in her lifetime. Among film directors, I could see Celine Sciamma being president at some point, and maybe PTA.

[The Narrator Returns]

Stars at Noon is so good, very close to my favorite Denis. I haven’t seen Holy Spider but I would be surprised if I agreed with that, or anything/one else that year, winning Actress over Margaret Qualley.

[domino harvey]

And I assume the Rohmer/Pialat thing is just due to availability? Like, the only Pialat that I've seen is La maison des bois, and only because the restoration was touring.

Pialat is a great example of how a well timed home media release can influence/inform general tastes. You saw Pialat being invoked far more here and elsewhere after the sextet of Masters of Cinema releases of his films in definitive editions. But a decade later Cohen’s overpriced and comparatively lackluster releases on Blu here in the states did absolutely nothing for his rep and he’s gone back to quasi obscurity

And Pialat’s win was considered at the time one of the worst Cannes wins ever (a position some still hold, like the author of that awful book on Cahiers du Cinema), which like audiences booing L’avventura is an unknowable and impossible to understand lapse of taste on a cosmic scale

[rrenault]

I'm surprised Janus haven't tried to gobble up the bulk of his filmography at this point, considering the Cohen releases are long out of print. We Won't Grow Old Together still appears to be with Kino though, and Police is with Olive (or was, so I'm not sure what the present situation would be).

[nitin]

Stars at Noon is so good, very close to my favorite Denis. I haven’t seen Holy Spider but I would be surprised if I agreed with that, or anything/one else that year, winning Actress over Margaret Qualley.

Although I dont like film that much, Zahra Ebrahimi was quite good in it. But agree re Qualley's work in Stars at Noon, also agree it's one of Denis' best along with another recent one, High Life.

The split jury prize last year for Sirat and Sound of Falling was also for two sui generis films, whether one liked them or not.

[Never Cursed]

And I assume the Rohmer/Pialat thing is just due to availability? Like, the only Pialat that I've seen is La maison des bois, and only because the restoration was touring.

Pialat is a great example of how a well timed home media release can influence/inform general tastes. You saw Pialat being invoked far more here and elsewhere after the sextet of Masters of Cinema releases of his films in definitive editions. But a decade later Cohen’s overpriced and comparatively lackluster releases on Blu here in the states did absolutely nothing for his rep and he’s gone back to quasi obscurity

And Pialat’s win was considered at the time one of the worst Cannes wins ever (a position some still hold, like the author of that awful book on Cahiers du Cinema), which like audiences booing L’avventura is an unknowable and impossible to understand lapse of taste on a cosmic scale

Glad you chimed in, because my follow-up question was going to be: which Pialats should I seek out next? Is Sous le soleil de Satan his best feature, or is there something else I should watch first?

And also I assume the reasoning you describe is why most of the Rohmers people have seen are those in the two Criterion boxes

[therewillbeblus]

À Nos Amours should probably be where you start, as it's also one of his best and most popular. But I love Sous le soleil de Satan to death. I'm pretty sure no one else shared my reading of it as a horror film, though!

[domino harvey]

Yes those two plus Police are my favorites. I’m due to revisit all of them though. I know they’re DVDs (except Van Gogh) but the MoC editions of Pialat’s films are incredible resources in terms of extras both on disc and in booklets, if you can find cheap copies on eBay

[Never Cursed]

Thanks, will try and track those down

[knives]

I really adore The Mouth Agape as well though that is a much tougher watch. His first is also excellent.

[domino harvey]

That one is my least favorite of his features and I already have it on Blu in the Cohen set but I recently bought the MoC for the nine (!) shorts included. FYI first come first serve there’s a like new copy up for $20 right now on eBay, considerably cheaper than I’ve seen in the past

And I got it wrong in my memory: the initial MoC lineup was a septet not a sextet and then the 8th was Van Gogh later on down the line. The booklets alone must be near 400 pages total across the releases

[dwk]

I'm surprised Janus haven't tried to gobble up the bulk of his filmography at this point, considering the Cohen releases are long out of print. We Won't Grow Old Together still appears to be with Kino though, and Police is with Olive (or was, so I'm not sure what the present situation would be).

Me too. Someone at Criterion/Janus clearly loves Pialat's films, because the Channel has had 2 separate runs featuring the bulk of his filmography. But, I think Cohen probably still has the rights to the films, even if they are currently OOP on disc. (as for Police, that one wasn't in the most recent collection on the Channel, which I assume means it is still tied up in the wreckage of Olive.)

[Mr Sausage]

Fantasia Film Festival 2025

Here's what I saw at this year's festival. As usual, Hong Kong viewings over here.

Great:

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun): With a film pitched like this, even one small misstep will make the whole thing collapse in on itself. Schoenbrun has one of the steadiest hands in current cinema, evidently. A wonderful mixture of tones, moods, and ideas.

Sour Minnows (Harrison Atkins): I don't think I could defend the film or convince anyone else to like it, but its mixture of surrealism, absurdity, and mumblecore aesthetics (tho' if you told me the mumblecore dialogue was fully scripted, I'd believe you, it's delivered with such comedic timing) was pure pleasure for me. Two guys walking home discover a bunch of people all furiously licking the concrete, and reality comes apart from then on. Indescribable.


Good:

The Samurai and the Prisoner (Kiyoshi Kurosawa): See here.

Tunnels: Sun in the Dark (Bùi Thạc Chuyên): a Vietnam war film told from the Vietnamese perspective, set primarily in the tunnel systems, showing how they worked, who peopled them, and how one carries out a guerrilla war against a vastly more powerful opponent all while living underground. The film's best aspects are its documentary appeal as well as an absence of propaganda or flag waving. Much of the interpersonal stories are conventional and at times sentimental, and the characters are thinly sketched. But the filmmaking is often thrilling and, at numerous points, anxiety provoking with its claustrophobia.

Gozu (Takashi Miike): Touted as a new restoration, but the thing still looked like shit to me, probably a result of its shot-on-video budget and equipment. A wonderfully absurd, surreal nightmare, one of the most original gangster movies ever made. Its biggest flaw is its slow pacing, which draws the movie out and contributes to its excessive length.



Fine:

Colony (Yeon Sang-ho): another zombies-in-a-limited-environment film from the director of Train to Busan. Some novelty in how the zombies, er, infected 'upgrade' themselves via telepathic communication, but not enough creative avenues are exploited, and so much of the plot relies on contrivances, like the hero who always knows just the right thing to do at every moment, or the asshole who always makes the one stupid choice that'll endanger everyone. Plus a scenario founded on problem solving where no one solve obvious problems (don't want the bad guy to hear your plans, don't text each other, stuff his fucking ears!). A lot of great action and a certain amount of irritation.

Village of Eight Gravestones (Takashi Shimizu): adapts a novel from a very popular long-running detective series from Japan. I could tell, as I felt like I'd seen this exact movie many times before. No surprises, just a genial gothic mystery mostly well told and easy to forget.

Hot Spot (Agnieszka Smoczyńska): Um...a sci fi movie set in a post apocalypse where everyone's hooked up to an AI system, but also everyone loves the 80s, so they drive 80s cars, wear 80s clothing, and listen to The Final Countdown. It doesn't work and the plot is incoherent, but the loonier it got the more fun I had.

Ferine (Andrea Corsini): One of two movies I saw back to back centring on motherhood where a woman goes feral and starts eating people. Touted as a return to the savage, weird horror of Italy's heyday, but only resembled classic Italian horror in its inability to tell a comprehensible story. A mother whose baby born via surrogate is eaten by an escaped jaguar becomes a man-eating animal in turn. The plot makes no sense, is told incomprehensibly on top of that, and no one resembles a real human being. But the wildness and the willingness to follow this story wherever its scant logic took it was commendable.

Nightborn (Hanna Bergholm): The second of the two. This one's set in Finland, where a woman believes her baby to be some kind of forest spirit, a fact the woman's conventional British husband refuses to accept. This is meant to be an allegory for the difficulties new mothers face, but the allegory ultimately breaks down under the story's literalism. The film's bog standard second-wave feminist arguments are so easy to predict that the movie is emptied of excitement. There's also a 'men are evil' trajectory here that's hard to know what to do with given that Rupert Grint's obtuse father isn't appreciably evil in any way. In fact his behaviour and actions are technically rational and reasonable if you assume his baby is not, in fact, feral and shouldn't be fed cow's blood and raw meat. I think the movie's going for a 'believe women' statement, but that statement is technically 'believe women, including when they make claims absurd on the face of it'. Which I guess makes sense in a world with genuine supernatural entities, but I don't know how one would even begin to apply that argument to our own reality. So I didn't really know how to take this movie--I thought all the characters were treating each other unfairly, but that the movie rarely recognized the unfairness outside of its main character.

Ancestral Beasts (Tim Riedel): a horror film about family trauma set among the Métis in Manitoba. A lot of indigenous artists have made this exact story, and the amateurish acting did not help. But the lead actress delivered an excellent performance, especially in a couple of tough emotional scenes that she made fell very authentic. And the monster's design was novel.

[Never Cursed]

Hot Spot (Agnieszka Smoczyńska): Um...a sci fi movie set in a post apocalypse where everyone's hooked up to an AI system, but also everyone loves the 80s, so they drive 80s cars, wear 80s clothing, and listen to The Final Countdown. It doesn't work and the plot is incoherent, but the loonier it got the more fun I had.

Knew before even double-checking the director's name that it was the same filmmaker who had done The Lure