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

[Never Cursed]

Venice awards:

Golden Lion: Woman Unknown (May el-Toukhy)
Grand Jury Prize: Possible Love (Lee Chang-dong)
Special Jury Prize: NAZA (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor)
Best Director: Ilya Khrzhanovsky for DAU
Best Actress: Mathilde Arcel for Woman Unknown
Best Actor: John Malkovich for Wild Horse Nine
Best Screenplay: Coralie Amedeo, Stéphane Brizé and Olivier Gorce for A Good Little Soldier
Best Emerging Actor (Marcello Mastroianni Award): Malou Khebizi for A Place to Heal

Kind of shocked by the el-Toukhy winning, as it didn't seem like it was on anyone's radars as a big contender (I honestly thought it would go to NAZA, but maybe the jury didn't want to incur criticism by awarding it the top prize after the previous one relegated The Voice of Hind Rajab to the Jury Prize as well). And the award for Khrzhanovsky is hilarious. I salute the jury's commitment to offending basically everyone who was following/talking about his insane experiment for the past decade by giving him a prize for it, and I look forward to seeing the film.

[Never Cursed]

Zack Snyder's The Last Photograph appears to have been received terribly at TIFF. Premiering there is already getting graded on a curve, so people calling it the "worst film they've ever seen at a festival" is a pretty bad sign

[hearthesilence]

Anyone else think the documentaries have been by far the biggest thing at the NYFF this year? For whatever reason, tickets have been especially hard to come by this year, but I heard the standby lines for You Can See Everything have been insane, and it sounds like NAZA has been in high demand as well (not to mention the expected protests and counter-protests which made it to national news - I think you have to go back to The Last Temptation of Christ to find a protest against a specific film that big, and likewise it's another case where likely none of the protesters have even seen the film).

[Never Cursed]

Anyone else think the documentaries have been by far the biggest thing at the NYFF this year? For whatever reason, tickets have been especially hard to come by this year, but I heard the standby lines for You Can See Everything have been insane, and it sounds like NAZA has been in high demand as well (not to mention the expected protests and counter-protests which made it to national news - I think you have to go back to The Last Temptation of Christ to find a protest against a specific film that big, and likewise it's another case where likely none of the protesters have even seen the film).

I didn't see NAZA, but I was there that weekend and saw the protests. They were wildly overexaggerated in news coverage - there were only a few pro-Israeli protesters when I observed them, and there were easily more (though not many) counter-protestors in support of the film. But because Reuters showed up and filmed them for a few minutes, there's widely available news footage that makes them look more imposing than they were.

It's only the controversial or buzzy docs that are getting the attention - peruse the NYFF Discord and you'll find dozens of tickets for Ava DuVernay's 14th going begging. (This is telling.) The other most demanded titles make more sense as presumed awards-season spectacles - Guadagnino, Eisenberg, Lee, Gilroy, Mungiu. People were complaining about La Bola Negra not making the main slate lineup for this exact reason - perish the thought that they'd have to wait a whole week to see it at the Paris! And my assumption is that tickets are only going to get more and more difficult to get as the years go on - it's not that expensive to pay your way into the fest (hell, I do it) and as such the competition for them is crazy. On the subreddit for the festival (as with the Discord, principally a place for gawking), when the Fielder/Oppenheim doc was announced in the middle of pre-sales, someone who had already redeemed all their tickets freaked out and started telling people to try to get their credit card companies to refund the passes if they couldn't "exchange" for the new announcement.

[hearthesilence]

That's a pretty amazing report - the news coverage I've seen claims the counter protests were smaller, but I guess they had yet to grow to their full size. That's a pretty big difference and as you pointed out, Reuters' reporting is what's been picked up by a lot of outlets, so it definitely skews what's reality.

Re: ticket sales, I guess it can only be good for arthouse cinema - IIRC there had been past concerns that their core audience was aging, and these last few years have reversed that tremendously, fueled by a younger enthusiasm that's greater than anything I can remember since moving here, so this is pretty much what Lincoln Center was hoping for. And IIRC the original point of rush tickets was to make all the films available to young students, but that was decades ago and I get the impression the high demand has been amplified by film students (even screenings during normal business hours have been selling out).

[therewillbeblus]

IFF Boston full schedule announced - tickets go on sale tomorrow for non-members, it's currently live for members

[thirtyframesasecond]

Because it’s greatness is so self evident?

I think it is a very good film though maybe Human Resources should have been the Golden Palm winner!!

[Mr Sausage]

Stuff I saw at the 2026 Festival du Nouveau Cinema


Great

Fatherland (Paweł Pawlikowski): Maybe the most difficult film of Pawlikowski’s loose trilogy about homeland, history, and totalitarianism. The emotional handholds here are smaller, the central figures held even more at a distance, and in a reversal of the sweep of Cold War, the narrative technique is: compression. An enormous amount of overlapping material concerning history, culture, art, literature, music (especially), language, ideology, and family is compressed into a tight, efficient 82 minutes, and this is to say nothing of the allusions to both film (eg. Wild Strawberries) and the real lives of its principal characters. I’m an enormous fan of the film’s subject, Thomas Mann, so I’m hardly objective, but certainly the more you know about Mann and his family, the deeper the reverberations here. The characters are withdrawn, internalized people, and their conversations suggest a whole weight of history whose depth is more keen the more you know about their real lives. The absent figures of Klaus and, to a lesser extent, Heinrich Mann take on considerable weight if you know their deep divisions and arguments with Thomas, and how those divisions feed into all the socio-political divisions present in the film. You don’t need to know any of this to enjoy the family drama onscreen—this is just to say how the film rests on considerable contextual knowledge to accomplish its compression. Mann was famously an ironist who mined the ambiguities, and the film takes inspiration from that to present a looming central figure whose language, whose homeland, and whose role as a public intellectual are difficult to pin down, and whose ambiguities affect the family members who travel in his shadow. The movie rewards careful unpacking. Quiet, dense, and moving, but unlikely to be anyone’s favourite of the trilogy, tho’ it may turn out to be mine.

Chronovisor (Kevin Walker & Jack Auen): Accomplishes an incredible feat: this is the most exciting movie of the year, and you spend 90% of it reading on-screen text. Seriously, the filmmakers have created an entrancing film out of objectively boring material. The film is imbued with the quiet thrill of scholarship, of hours spent in a library chasing down disparate details that, slowly, tantalizingly, slot together to tell a story. The thing has a sensuous fixation on analog technology: print and paper, VHS, cassette tape, microfiche, and pairs the tangible reality they suggest with the intangibility of the spiritual: the need to ground an essentially spiritual search in the physical particulars of history as represented by its technology--an analogy for the spirit of scholarly inquiry itself. The story is capped by an oppressive final ten minutes where, in stark contrast to films like Ring or Cigarette Burns, the film conjures an actual stomach-pit anxiety that you're watching something you should not be watching. Thanks to Never Cursed for pointing this one out!

Look Back (Hirokazu Kore-eda): A conventional crowd-pleaser, and yet an enchanting one, a warm, vibrant story told with pitch-perfect control. This is adapted from a manga and anime, so there is an amplified, near-sentimental set of effects you'll recognize from anime especially, and yet the artistry is so delicate and beautiful that I was won over by all its choices. The movie's handling of the passing of time is especially sophisticated. There's a transition carried off with a single cherry blossom blown in through a window that is sublime, and the careful attention to the tools and techniques of drawing allows us to chart character and time progression simultaneously through purely visual means. And while the film pushes after larger effects, it also knows just when to to be quiet and still. A simple, direct story told with complex artistry.


Good

Diary of a Chambermaid (Radu Jude): Not an adaptation of the source novel or Bunuel’s film, but a riff on the class satire of the source material using Jude’s usual material. The titular Chambermaid, a Romanian immigrant working as a nanny to a wealthy Parisian couple, does star in a stage adaptation of Mirbeau’s novel, so I guess the movie is in part a direct adaptation of the source. Jude uses the diary conceit to present a discontinuous narrative of scenes and set pieces linked more by theme than story, all time stamped as tho’ each scene were a diary entry (and some just brief, oddly funny shots of the landscape). The theme is insular bourgeois Europe in confrontation with socio-political issues like immigration and homelessness, which serves for countless jokes and sharp observations while avoiding the lecture or the sermon, the kiss of death for a satire like this. The movie is increasingly and hysterically funny--increasingly because a lot of the humour comes from the repetition of similar absurd situations until you can’t help but laugh. The movie is also a great example of how direct, unsubtle satire can be both successful and sit alongside more subtle, complex satire to make for a fun but complicated experience.

A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra (Jacqueline Lentzou): a persuasive slice-of-life drama with a beguiling, sublime meta-physical/-textual denouement. Any interesting comments I might have to make would spoil the thing, so I'll praise what I can: the impressive naturalism accomplished by understated acting and an immediate, tangible visual style that places the camera right within each moment. There's a lot going on involving music as well. Understanding recent Greek society/history would undoutably help understand what happens here, but there's a lot that Americans will find easy to recognize.

Minotaur (Andrey Zvyagintsev): My strongest impression is that the movie was very crisp. Crisp photography, crisp compositions, crisp acting, crisp storytelling. It all seemed keen, delineated, which is odd as the story is plainly a morass both morally and politically. Just look at the title, the Minotaur, a monster that demands human sacrifices, but is itself trapped in a labyrinth. I guess I felt Zvyagintsev was seeing things very clearly, even if what he was seeing was a total mess. The movie adapts a melodrama, but adapts it with sober realism, and then sets it within a political context that transforms the melodrama into a comment on wartime Russia more widely. The social commentary here is both direct and oblique—direct in some of the plot details, but oblique in how the main drama relates to and transforms those details.

Grand-Guignol & Early Cine-Macabre (Various): Fourteen early silent films from Severin's upcoming boxset. These range from essentially stage-bound magic shows to sophisticated narratives. For me there was more historical interest than any special interest in the films as films, but I'm happy to've seen them all on the big screen, and in particularly fine restorations. Mostly hated the new music, tho'. I'm pretty sure I've seen some of these before, years ago, but it's hard to confirm.


Fine

Roma Elastica (Bertrand Mandico): Mandico transfers his outrageous visual style from gender fantasias to the glitz and glamour of the film world, to mixed results. There is so much visual pleasure here: the bulk of the movie is just Marion Cotillard and Noemie Merlant sauntering around in sunglasses, bored, smoking cigarettes, and it's as wonderful as it sounds. When the pair are not doing that, they're engaged in utterly outrageous stuff like an orgy with the Rambaldi creature from Possession. The direct reference point is 8 1/2 in the way Cotillard is pushed and pulled about as Italians from the film world hem her in, chattering in her ear in endless succession about what she should do, where she should go, etc. But Mandico pushes the phantasmagoric energy well beyond Fellini to crazed, wonderful places. Sadly, the basic story, a dying actress trying for one last bit of meaning in an industry intent on sucking her dry, is so dull and overplayed, with the tone frequently arch and flat in an irritating way. There's also a weird cloacal fixation that annoyed me. I'm a big fan of Mandico's first two features (I'll get to She is Conann eventually!), and many of their pleasures are here, often in undiluted form. I just don't think this one found the proper material for what it wanted to do. A wonderful bit of style, tho', no question.

Butterfly Jam (Kantemir Balagov): I saw Beanpole and Portrait of a Lady on Fire on successive days, and then lockdown hit. I didn't see another film in theatres for three years. So I have a special fondness for both those movies, my unwitting farewells to theatre-going being maybe the two best things I'd seen in theatres that year. Butterfly Jam is a slice-of-life immigrant drama about the Circassian community in New Jersey, with terrific acting from both the established cast and the unknowns. There was a lot of energetic, authentic-feeling scenes and low-stakes drama in this ambling, charming, unambitious story. And then the third act upends everything in bizarre and admittedly interesting ways, becoming a weird, poorly established fairy tale about redemption and toxic masculinity. I...don't think the film even tries to pull this off properly. There's the whiplash, and also the absence of proper narrative closure. There is a kind of thematic closure, a magic trick that almost kinda works in spite of itself. I did enjoy watching the movie, but if any of it actually hangs together, it's going to take a very careful rewatch to prove. That I can't even seem to write a coherent capsule tells you how little I know what to do with this film.