Festival Circuit 2026

[Yakushima]

Stuff I saw at the 2026 Festival du Nouveau Cinema

Thank you for the report, Mr Sausage! Now I hope to catch some of these before too long.

[Matt]

I'm happy to hear the Mandico doesn't veer too far away from his usual outré style. I was worried that stars and a budget might constrain him, but if it has only done so in terms of story and plot, I can live with that.

[Mr Sausage]

It’s clear that no one told Mandico to tone down anything, and the two actresses are nothing if not game. I suspect the problem is that Mandico felt that style alone was enough to transform and elevate the conventions of the basic story, and I didn’t feel he quite managed it the way he did with the adventure story and sci-fi conventions of his first two. Maybe he underestimated just how familiar the trajectory of this kind of story has become? Still, the filmmaking here is absolutely mad.

[rowan9075]

Late to this, but the context matters. The question was framed pretty aggressively, so I doubt any answer would have landed well.

What made it worse was the follow-up. People dug up a 1977 quote where Wenders said every film is political. That made “cinema is not political” look like a dodge, not a principle.

[Mr Sausage]

It’s a good idea to quote what conversation you’re replying to if it happened well upthread.

[Captain Paranoia]

Late to this, but the context matters. The question was framed pretty aggressively, so I doubt any answer would have landed well.

What made it worse was the follow-up. People dug up a 1977 quote where Wenders said every film is political. That made “cinema is not political” look like a dodge, not a principle.

It’s a good idea to quote what conversation you’re replying to if it happened well upthread.

Late response, but I believe he was talking about the whole kerfuffle surrounding Wenders and Berlinale. I think everything worth discussing in that debacle has been said here at this point (and I've expressed my sentiments)

I assume by this point, people have moved on to the stuff surrounding Macklemore and Robert Kraft (I could probably vent about some frustrations I had about the reactions and misplaced focus over that, but it's probably something that belongs in the politics thread than this place), actually now that i think about that whole debacle is a month and a half old so many people have probably moved on from that as well.

[Never Cursed]

Forgot to post this a while back, but my favorite new movies seen at NYFF:



A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra (Jacqueline Lentzou): When people call movies “observational,” they usually mean that the works themselves attend to the particulars of a place, time, context, whatever. In speaking to the day-long awakening of a teenage girl to the sensorial pleasures of life, this film accomplishes that task quite well, but the third act expands its focus beyond the boundaries of that idea, revealing another way that a film can observe or be about observers reading and even interacting with a story. Nothing more ought to be said about the specifics or what the movie does with them (and I’m glad that the online plot summaries don’t spoil the movie’s turns or real-life parallels either), but I will add that it contains some astonishingly beautiful camerawork, both through a number of swooping or soaring long takes and via the ethereal beauty of its effects photography. One of the best films of the year.



Soudain (Ryusuke Hamaguchi): A beautiful, melancholy dream, gracefully sustained across its insufficiently enormous running time by two excellent lead performances and an authentic understanding of the social and political particulars of care work. A less humanistic filmmaker would have made the dull movie that some detractors appear to have seen, but Hamaguchi’s love for his subjects and belief in the spiritual longevity of frail people and ephemeral artistic spaces imbues his work with a real affective power. He illustrates just how it is that someone that enters and exits your life in a very short span of time can profoundly restructure your conception of self and purpose. In some places, the film is blisteringly obvious in and descriptive of its anticapitalist views, but, perceptive of the difference between making an argument and staging a tiresome lecture, Hamaguchi makes the winning decision to both figure out a method by which these sequences can be diegetic to the world of the film (funny, even!) and to build towards a more elaborate and dramatic demonstration of his “outside” and “inside.” Caretakers and patients, actors and recipients, have more in common than they might imagine, he says and then shows, mirroring the porousness of the stage play that eventually merges with and is bolstered by the rituals of care. And surely there’s something to be said for an effective and gentle-hearted call for revolution?



Heil Jupiter! (Carlos Reygadas): I’ve lately been jotting down notes during movies - it’s part-fidget, part-post-hoc-writing-aid - and while they usually tend towards the analytical or critical, most of my scribbles during this thing were attempts to figure out what was happening at that moment. I don’t think this is actually a puzzle film, but it is certainly presented with as much obfuscation as possible, to the point that, even though they share actors/characters and formal elements, I could only see how the film’s scenes were continuous and interrelated once the narrative had progressed a great deal. (And hey, like Inland Empire, a good chunk of it was shot in Poland). Rather than discussing it in terms of its plot or narrative, which I will let alone, I think giving a sense of its structure and place might be a more helpful bridge to understanding. This film is set in a fascist state, administered by an alien artificial intelligence that has banned sex and most other pleasurable activities. Most of the movie’s dialogue is in a dubbed Spanish-sounding gibberish; though the director stated his intention to minimize direct parallels between countries, its events probably take place in Mexico, or what was once Mexico. (A familiarity with Half-Life 2 might help with the adjustment process). The movie’s sequences follow a familiar cyclical structure: some time in a nature, wilderness or abandoned environ clearly ruined by the state; a scene tracking the activities of a hedonistic group of youths, sometimes but not always accompanied by a few other painters; and a sequence depicting either the technofascist state repressing the libertines or else others attempting to cope with its realities. The imagery that most of these sequences exist to serve is enthralling and more than justifies the lengthy detours down strange paths. A few ideas are regrettably gross (and one a shameless ripoff of Uncut Gems), but others are either beautifully disturbing (a Norwegian wildfire consuming an entire hill, dogs storming a ruined pavilion) or else disgusting in a textured way (a scene of pigs being born, an investigation of what the fascist state does with the corpses of its victims that I’ll leave to the reader’s imagination). A recurring theme in this festival’s offerings are obvious diegetic cameras in scenes (also found in the Lentzou and the Lee to varying degrees), but Reygadas is the most ambitious user thereof, whether in an endless long-take tracking a house raid captured through a bodycam or in a trial sequence seen from the view of a court monitor watching seven or eight courtroom feeds simultaneously. Whether because it’s too alienating or because of horrid crimes Reygadas was crediby accused of some time ago, this was rejected by all the other fall festivals and currently lacks any distribution (though some Criterion reps were in the audience - maybe it’ll show up on the Channel?), but I heartily recommend it to adventurous viewers.



Possible Love (Lee Chang-dong): Stately, self-unimpressed drama about the making of documentary that is the latest in a spate of anti-capitalist South Korean imports to resonate with American film-watchers (and -buyers). The first thing Lee explained about the film was why it took so long (eight years) to gestate. He had intended to make a film about a sit-down strike in Korea (the SsangYong Auto strike, itself referenced in fellow Netflix show Squid Game) that was violently repressed by the police, researched and wrote the whole thing, and was in the middle of pre-production when he got cold feet. It seemed he felt his (sympathetic) retelling of the events would simplify them for the bourgeois audiences that mocked and attacked the strikers, and so he retooled the script into this film, which follows Cho Yeo-jeong’s bougie documentary filmmaker gradually inserting herself into the lives of a traumatized victim of the strike and his wife for the ostensible purpose of telling their story. Eager to talk, the wife strikes up an unbalanced friendship with the filmmaker and tries to use the filming of the documentary as a vehicle to get her husband to process his damage. Though the movie is slow and never quite sustains either grace notes or interpersonal conflict (it could have benefitted from stating some of its points - documentary interviews resemble therapeutic attention, the filmmaker feels out-of-touch, her rich husband is bad news - a little less directly), its pessimism towards both the direction in which capitalist labor is heading and the capacity of art and art-making to treat its side effects are quite refreshing. Cho is great in another blinkered-cosmopolitan-elite role (and one that allows her more depth and complexity than in her more famous stab at it), but Jeon Do-yeon’s working class wife carries the film. One of her sideplots, namely, her suspect interactions with Cho’s capitalist husband, could have so easily ruined the film if either Lee or Jeon had flinched and settled for it becoming the flirtation it resembles, but both of them find something more interesting to do with their potential dalliance. I can only imagine this as an awards player if La Bola Negra tanks (and it should), but it deserves more attention than it will probably receive.