A stoic Jun Ji-hyun surrounded by zombies

Fantasia Festival ’26: Colony

Posted in2026, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Disability, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Thriller, Zombie

군체
Gunche
***½/****
starring Jun Ji-hyun, Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Kim Shin-rok
written by Yeon Sang-ho, Choi Gyu-seok
directed by Yeon Sang-ho

by Walter Chaw Colony is Yeon Sang-ho’s return to the zombie feature (after Train to Busan and its animated sequel, Peninsula), a rip-roaring, often fascinating treatise on tech bros, social media, and the dangerous resolve of the mob. Per its name, Yeon’s zombies are hive animals–like ants, for instance, or bees–who gain a communal intelligence through an invisible, scent-based or possibly mycelial network. Using it, they learn from one another how to be better hunters and better evangelists for their “eat of my body, drink of my blood” contagion. They have done what Catholics once feared film could do. Colony‘s BigBad, in the final analysis, is the dangerous ability to connect with a group of people scattered around the world who agree with your worst ideas. When you were a lunatic incel moron creep in the pre-Internet era, you were shunned and disgraced. As it should be. Now? Now if you’re a deranged, flat-earthing, creationist Christian Scientist weirdo, you buy a red hat and join your fuckwit brethren looking for a golden idol who will piss on your adoring, upturned face. Consider how LLM chatbots are merely the poison of external validation mechanized for inhuman efficiency. People will still get tired of you, no matter how proudly you wear your prejudice and ignorance as a personality. An LLM will never get sick of your stupid, violent, grandiose delusions. Yeah, we’re double-fucked.

Rupert Grint look down through a large hole in his floor

Fantasia Festival ’26: Nightborn

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Finland, France, Horror, Lithuania, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Seidi Haarla, Rupert Grint, Pamela Tola, Pirkko Saisio
written by Hannah Bergholm, Ilja Rautsi
directed by Hannah Bergholm

by Walter Chaw I wanted to like Hannah Bergholm’s crimson-spattered folk horror Nightborn more than I did. It is, after all, the kind of thing I like: a Finnish changeling fable that leans heavily into the Czech otesánek fairytale (memorably immortalized by Jan Švankmajer via his freakout masterpiece Little Otik), with a heavy dose of Rosemary’s Baby to spice the hunter’s stew of it. It joins Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love as another stunning essay on post-partum marriage and navigating the shock and condemnation new mothers face when they don’t behave the way they should, and it boasts a monstrous child who conjures up memories for me of reading Ray Bradbury’s “Small Assassin” as a kid myself. Both Nightborn and Die My Love–not to mention Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You–are portraits of “difficult” women taken for granted, despised and ignored, by the people who should love them most. If Nightborn hums with the same ferocious, infernal energy as those films, it ultimately falls short by not putting enough faith in subtext. Its richness is in the complexity of its metaphor; why not leave it as metaphor? Trust in the audience’s ability to accept ambiguity marks the difference between a neat little exercise and a haunting masterwork.

Kristine Froseth taking a selfie in a luxury space

Fantasia Festival ’26: Her Private Hell

Posted in****/****, 2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, Dougray Scott
written by Nicolas Winding Refn and Esti Giordani
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

by Walter Chaw Fantasia 2026 opens with another gauzy, roiling, Tsai Ming-liang via Mario Bava psychosexual dreamscape from Nicolas Winding Refn. Her Private Hell, Refn’s first feature since 2016’s The Neon Demon, plays in the same sandbox: It’s easy to imagine the gamine, fledgling model played by a blonde Elle Fanning in that film evolving into Her Private Hell‘s brunette “Elle” (Sophie Thatcher), a filmmaker burning through a variety of gaudy facial accessories that hide the essential emptiness of her expression. Her Private Hell is no less stunned, soporific–a feature-length version of the rhapsodic shower sequences from Brian De Palma’s Carrie and Dressed to Kill. Given that composer Pino Donaggio has been recruited to provide the film with a swooning score dripping with harp arpeggios and syrupy strings, I suspect the comparison to De Palma’s oeuvre is more artifact than accident.

Qwaxw in Ceremony

Hot Docs ’26: Ceremony

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by Banchi Hanuse

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Following the encore screening of Banchi Hanuse’s Ceremony at this year’s Hot Docs, an audience member chimed in to remark that as a Palestinian woman who has seen her share of colonial aggression, she was struck by how similar the tools and logics of different settler states are when it comes to treating contested territory as unoccupied and without history, thus perfect for relocation. Perhaps even more striking than that observation–or the moderator’s decision to thank the audience member for her comment but quickly punt to the next one without letting the filmmaker and her cast of Nuxalk creators and activists respond–is Hanuse’s documentation of the myriad ways in which Indigenous people have responded to those familiar efforts to stamp out their civilizations, from keeping the language alive through their own alternative schools to broadcasting their culture on community radio to documenting their own histories and staging ritual performances of their traditions. Winner of the festival’s DGC Special Jury Prize for Canadian Feature Documentary, Ceremony is an evocative, engaging, and refreshingly talking-head and infographic-free film about how the Nuxalk Nation finds hope for resistance and renewal through these deliberate practices in the face of the broader nation-state’s violent, centuries-long effort to fold them into the Canadian colonial project.

The Harlem Park Three now in When a Witness Recants

Hot Docs ’26: When a Witness Recants

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Prison

**½/****
directed by Dawn Porter

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda The moment from their railroading that most seems to haunt Andrew Stewart, Ransom Watkins, and Alfred Chestnut in Dawn Porter’s When a Witness Recants, which picks up with the Harlem Park Three after they’ve been freed from 36 years in prison for a murder they didn’t commit, is when the judge first addressed them, his voice dripping with disdain “like we shouldn’t be breathing,” as Alfred remembers it. Raised with love and affection as Black youth with bright futures in their West Baltimore community, only to be falsely accused and convicted of the murder of local student DeWitt Duckett on the basis of coerced witness statements, the men are struck in their retelling of events by how quickly the legal system rendered them null and void, depriving them of the future they were on track for as teenagers, as men, and eventually as fathers.

Amy Goodman broadcasting from a protest against the Death Penalty in Steal This Story, Please!

Hot Docs ’26: Steal This Story, Please!

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Nigeria

**½/****
directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda The picaresque life of Democracy Now! founder and host Amy Goodman gets the Forrest Gump treatment in Steal This Story, Please!, Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s polished and accessible documentary profiling the firebrand–still one of the most trusted sources in leftist media–over the course of a nearly forty-year career. By embracing that montage-heavy, stone-skipping approach to a life on the front lines of direct action, they sometimes skirt a deeper exploration of the stories that have animated Goodman’s career. At the same time, the film positions her dogged independent journalism as the conscience of an often conscienceless country while successfully articulating her ethos that “We will not be silent” is the Hippocratic Oath of the press, whose reporting should be a form of public service that supersedes toadying and sucking up to power.

Abd Alkader Habak and Janay Boulos in Birds of War

Hot Docs ’26: Birds of War

Posted in2026, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Lebanon, Syria, UK

***/****
directed by Janay Boulos & Abd Alkader Habak

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers It’s 2016. Aleppo is under siege. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has banned journalists to stymie coverage of his atrocities, so BBC reporter Janay Boulos, a London transplant from Lebanon, contacts Syrian videographer Abd Alkader, a.k.a. Habak, for boots-on-the-ground footage. The fomenting Syrian revolution inspired Habak to pick up a camera and document what he was seeing in the early 2010s. Branded an activist, he fled his humble village in Idlib for the ostensible security of Aleppo, which soon came under attack from Russian and Syrian forces. Habak resumed filming. Janay hears a rumour that Aleppo residents are growing food on their rooftops. Habak gets her video proving it, and the BBC posts it on their website. Eventually, Eastern Aleppo is evacuated. Habak returns to Idlib, another war zone. He reaches out to Janay, pitching her ideas for other human interest stories that highlight Syrian resilience.

Black Zombie still featuring a Black man in white drawing circles in chalk on the floor of a dark, cavernous room

Hot Docs ’26: Black Zombie

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by Maya Annik Bedward

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23 to May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Late in Maya Annik Bedward’s Black Zombie, a cross-cultural survey of the zombie in Haitian folklore and horror cinema, a Vodou priest who’s served as an authenticity expert throughout the film derisively summarizes Western imaginations of West African culture as a history of voyeurism. “I hope this isn’t that,” he says of Bedward’s documentary, whose title explicitly subverts Victor Halperin’s 1932 pre-code horror film White Zombie, a foundational colonial narrative of white innocence besieged by the ostensibly monstrous threat of Blackness, and whose intellectual project seeks to dismantle that film’s corrosive source text, William Seabrook’s Haitian travelogue The Magic Island, which exported the zombie and Vodou to the West as figures of exotic superstition. A rigorous if somewhat segmented essay on the colonial violence inherent in the horror genre’s extraction of West African beliefs, Bedward’s work easily clears this admittedly modest bar. Though it will read a bit introductory for historians of the Haitian resistance movement, French colonialism, and genre cinema, it’s nevertheless a formally engaging and provocative piece that effectively re-situates the zombie in the context from which it’s been extracted: the belief among enslaved Haitian plantation workers that death might return their spirits to their ancestral home in Ghana, while further violence at the hands of colonial administrators and their proxies might render them zombies, undead and hopelessly rooted on the colony for the rest of their days.

Larry Fessenden glowering at us in a leather jacket: "Larry stories to tell in the dark"

Trauma or, Monsters All (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Horror, Theatrical, Vampire, Werewolf

***½/****
starring Laëtitia Hollard, Aitana Doyle, Addison Timlin, James Le Gros
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

by Walter Chaw There’s an immediacy to Larry Fessenden’s films, a lack of any intermediary between his characters and the viewer that can be exquisitely uncomfortable. Stories told through peepholes, they can feel like plays performed in a small venue, an intimate encounter ever threatening to spill over into the crowd. Credit his immersive, often suffocating sound design, an expertise demonstrated lately in his radio side project, “Tales from Beyond the Pale.” (I first saw Fessenden’s Habit on VHS, and the audio on its recent 4K upgrade is a revelation.) Credit also, of course, his sober, mature scripts, which deal with childhood, memory, and fear through the prism of fully formed, imperfect characters trapped in the amber of trauma that can’t be exorcised. For Fessenden, horror exists at the place where the visceral intersects with the philosophical–where the meat meets the mind. What happens to one when the other begins to develop fissures? When hairline cracks develop and let the sadness in? Consider the little boy (Erik Per Sullivan) in Fessenden’s masterful Wendigo, who learns one terrible winter that the shadow at the bottom of the stairs sometimes sees you even if you leap quietly, so quietly, across the top, where the light from the entryway paints a white square like a lepidopterist’s frame. Fessenden’s films are all variations on that species of terror, that variety of loneliness: its beginnings and endings and the long half-life in between, where fear metastasizes in unpredictable ways. He is a poet of the hard truth that being by yourself is the essential human condition.

Colman Domingo in Dead Man's Wire/Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen in Eternity

TIFF ’25: Dead Man’s Wire + Eternity

Posted in2025, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

DEAD MAN’S WIRE
**/****
starring Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery, Cary Elwes, Al Pacino
written by Austin Kolodney
directed by Gus Van Sant

ETERNITY
*½/****
starring Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen, Callum Turner, Da’Vine Joy Randolph
written by Patrick Cunnae & David Freyne
directed by David Freyne

by Bill Chambers Bill Skarsgård finally butts up against the limits of his versatility as he lamely channels Michael Shannon in Dead Man’s Wire, Gus Van Sant’s first feature since 2018’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. (Most recently, he worked on Ryan Murphy’s “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans”, directing six of its eight episodes.) Both are based on true stories, an enduring kink of Van Sant’s going back to 1995’s To Die For, which riffed on the Pamela Smart case with a satirical bent that hasn’t really resurfaced in his docudramas since. But when, late in the game, Dead Man’s Wire develops something like a comic edge, it feels like Van Sant might be heckling the material out of boredom, if not something more problematic. The film dramatizes the 1977 kidnapping of mortgage broker Dick Hall (Dacre Montgomery) by Skarsgård’s Tony Kiritsis, who tied a 12-gauge shotgun to Dick’s neck and held him hostage for three days at his rathole apartment in Indianapolis. He believed that Dick and his wealthy father, M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), were waiting for him to fall behind on his mortgage payments so they could poach a valuable piece of property he owned, and he demanded the Halls give him $5 million in damages as well as–and this was the sticking point, according to the film–a full-throated apology in exchange for Dick’s life.

The Ugly/The Furious

TIFF ’25: The Ugly + The Furious

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, China, Crime, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

THE UGLY
*½/****
starring Park Jeong-min, Kwon Hae-hyo, Han Ji-hyeon, Shin Hyeon-bin
written by Yeon Sang-ho, based on his graphic novel Face
directed by Yeon Sang-ho

火遮眼
**½/****
starring Xie Miao, Joe Taslim, Yang Enyou, Brian Le
written by Frank Hui, Lei Zhilong, Tin Shu Mak, Kwan-Sin Shum, Aidan Parker
directed by Kenji Tanigaki

by Angelo Muredda In his 2007 book Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, Ato Quayson suggests that disability “short-circuits” the protocols of representation, throwing into crisis all kinds of formal and thematic properties as a text struggles to account for its disruptiveness. If there’s a prize for the most aesthetic nervousness, or for a text whose nervousness about how to depict disability all but causes it to self-destruct, it ought to go to Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho’s dispiriting The Ugly. A slow-burn procedural mystery-thriller about a documentary crew and a son in arrested development getting to the bottom of a historical murder, The Ugly is thrown into a full-blown panic attack by the aesthetic challenge posed by something as simple as depicting its disabled characters moving through the world.

Paula Beers in a red convertible, looking skeptical

TIFF ’25: Miroirs No. 3

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

Mirrors No. 3
***/****
starring Paula Beer, Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, Enno Trebs
written and directed by Christian Petzold

by Angelo Muredda Not content to have already put his stamp on Vertigo with 2014’s postwar noir Phoenix, where an Auschwitz camp survivor and cabaret performer who’s undergone facial reconstruction surgery finds herself remade into the image of her former self by the scoundrel husband who sold her out to the Nazis, Mirrors No. 3 sees Christian Petzold delivering a lower-key riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s masterwork. An uncanny, tragicomic European idyll that improbably takes equal inspiration from Vertigo, Final Destination, Mulholland Drive, and Hansel and Gretel despite largely being set on sun-kissed porches and in open garages, Mirrors No. 3 is a beguiling, singularly strange picture that could only have been made by the simultaneously heady and easygoing German auteur.

Xin in The Sun Rises on Us All, Johnston in Obsession

TIFF ’25: The Sun Rises on Us All + Obsession

Posted in2025, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF

日掛中天
***½/****
starring Zhilei Xin, Songwen Zhang, Shaofeng Feng
written by Shangjun Cai, Nianjin Han
directed by Shangjun Cai

OBSESSION
***/****
starring Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless
written and directed by Curry Barker

by Bill Chambers In Shangjun Cai’s masterful The Sun Rises on Us All, Meiyun (Zhilei Xin, deservedly feted at the recent Venice Film Festival) is a wannabe influencer who sells dropship clothing out of a crappy little outlet in a Guangzhou mall. Newly pregnant by her married boyfriend Qifeng (Shaofeng Feng), she’s a woman in her late thirties with the lifestyle of someone considerably younger, suggesting an interruption in the past that will soon be confirmed. While at the hospital for a prenatal checkup, Meiyun spots a man she recognizes, Baoshu (Songwen Zhang), who’s recovering from gastrointestinal surgery after being diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer. There is palpable tension between them, but Meiyun cares about him, and as he needs somewhere to convalesce, she makes room for his dour ass in her cramped one-bedroom. He’s such an unpleasant guest that it’s easy to feel sorry for Meiyun, whose romance with Qifeng is complicated enough. Indeed, you could go so far as to call Baoshu and Meiyun’s on-screen dynamic S&M, although it’s not always him doing the S and her doing the M. (When Baoshu goes on a mini-hunger strike, for instance, Meiyun literally slaps sense into him.) But as the details of their shared history come to light, our sympathies begin to shift–or, more to the point, even out.

Bald white Emma Stone leashed around the neck and wrists

Telluride ’25: Bugonia

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Ireland, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Telluride, UK

**½/****
starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Alicia Silverstone
screenplay by Will Tracy, based on the screenplay by Jang Joon-hwan
directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

by Walter Chaw I don’t know what it’s like to come to Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia fresh, given that it’s a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s gonzo, lacerating Save the Green Planet!, a film about wild conspiracy theories and the people who drink deep from them that seemed considerably more novel in 2003 than it does in 2025. Now, some pathetic incel white supremacist dufus doing a terrorism is a weekly–soon to be daily–occurrence, making Bugonia a lot like Ari Aster’s Eddington: too late to be a warning and too directionless to offer solutions. What is it, then? Well, it’s sort of like Idiocracy, if Idiocracy came out today instead of 20 years ago, when it was a terrifying prophecy of unusual prescience. I guess the proper term for this exercise would be “past its sell-by date,” but what I think it is, mostly, is a very fine vehicle for Jessie Plemons and possibly a test of how close we are to Lanthimos and Emma Stone finally pushing their luck a little too far and launching themselves into the land of the terminally overexposed. I love that they continue to inspire each other and stuff, though their collaboration is starting to feel like a party where everyone else has left and I have to work in the morning, you guys, please.

Tall Margaret Qualley holding flowers and short Ethan Hawke holding court in Blue Moon

TIFF ’25: Blue Moon

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Film Festivals, Ireland, Music, Romance, TIFF

***½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott
written by Robert Kaplow, inspired by the writings of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland
directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda Contrasting epitaphs set the tone for Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a melancholy tribute to the self-destructive genius of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, a not especially handsome guy played by Linklater’s decidedly handsome long-time muse, Ethan Hawke. Moments before we see the man’s lonesome onscreen death from pneumonia on a rainy street, a title card offers Hart’s posthumous characterization from a pair of observers: his contemporary Oscar Hammerstein II, who hails him as “alert and dynamic and fun to be around,” and cabaret performer Mabel Mercer, who pronounces him “the saddest man I ever knew.” Hawke’s Hart is both–a charming but embittered barfly in a personal and professional crisis who loves conversation as much as he resents having to make it with perceived dullards like Hammerstein, who, in the film’s timeline, has just replaced him as Richard Rodgers’s creative partner on the verge of their major commercial breakthrough, Oklahoma!.

Christoph Waltz in a top hat in Frankenstein

Telluride ’25: Frankenstein

Posted in****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mexico, Telluride

****/****
starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro, based on the book Frankenstein; or: The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw The poetry lives in the father. Do I mean the poetry? I’m not sure. No, I mean the place where this piece breathes and has always breathed is the father. The fathers. I say “poetry” because it’s a term that covers a lot of ground for me. Poetry is something that is ineffable, ephemeral, inexplicably alive. It is ageless and immortal. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is about his father and Our Father. Fathers is where the poetry of it lives. It is, itself, poetry. My God, it’s beautiful. Let me explain.

Emily Blunt and The Rock taking a nighttime stroll in The Smashing Machine

TIFF ’25: The Smashing Machine

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Canada, Film Festivals, Japan, Sports, TIFF

**/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten
written and directed by Benny Safdie

by Angelo Muredda The early narrative on Dwayne Johnson’s starring role as veteran mixed-martial artist Mark Kerr in Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine was that it was sure to mark an overdue career reinvention for the wrestler turned actor turned annoying social-media poster. After years of his star power waning in terms of prestige as well as audience appeal–the decline measured in cringe posts about how the “hierarchy of power in the DC universe is about to change” thanks to his appearance in Black Adam (which bombed) and unflattering headlines about how his character in the Fast & Furious franchise was contractually forbidden from losing a fight onscreen (which made him seem not invulnerable but narcissistic)–finally Johnson would develop both the deft comic touch and dramatic depth he’d shown in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales and Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. That Johnson is every bit as good as was promised by the PR campaign, as vulnerable and bruised onscreen as he has been aloof and guarded in real life, comes as something of a monkey’s paw situation, given that his fluid and charming performance is one of the only things worth unreservedly recommending in the otherwise fairly standard film. Despite the outcome at the Venice Film Festival, which saw Johnson go home critically lauded but empty-handed while Safdie took the Best Director prize, Johnson’s ascent comes at the expense of his director’s first real draw as an artist–a slightly spiky but mostly unremarkable sports biopic worthy of being in the awards conversation, in the derogatory sense.

Amanda Seyfried, arms spread wide in ecstasy amid a crowd of followers

TIFF ’25: The Testament of Ann Lee

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, TIFF, UK

Ann Lee
***/****
starring Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Tim Blake Nelson, Christopher Abbott
written by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet
directed by Mona Fastvold

by Angelo Muredda Speaking at the press conference following the Venice world premiere of Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, co-writer and second-unit director Brady Corbet, Fastvold’s husband, illuminated the couple’s fruitful creative partnership, which also yielded their co-screenwriting duties on 2024’s The Brutalist. “We firmly believe,” he said, pointing to Fastvold’s ownership of and final cut on the film, “that you can only serve one master at a time.” To say nothing of the film’s numerous aesthetic and thematic echoes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, not to mention those of their previous project, Corbet’s comment is an interesting critical pathway into an often impenetrably busy, ambitious work that, when one breaks it down, is about both a marriage in tension and a husband working in service–far more glumly than the gregarious Corbet–to his spouse’s singular vision of the world. Pricklier than the more awards-friendly The Brutalist, though vulnerable to the same structural imbalances and ambiguity, The Testament of Ann Lee is a pleasantly odd text: a rich, overstuffed period musical that makes a grand figure of its impossibly marginal fringe subject.

Adult sisters lying on bed in an emotional embrace

Telluride ’25: Sentimental Value

Posted in****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Telluride, Turkey, UK

Affeksjonsverdi
****/****
starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning
written by Eskil Vogt
directed by Joachim Trier

by Walter Chaw Joachim Trier is my favourite living director. Through his work, I’m seen, and in being seen, I am less lonesome, less self-loathing. For a while, anyway. When he finds value in the melancholy heroes of his films, riddled though they may be with depression, prone to stupid mistakes and debilitating anxiety though they are, he finds value, somehow, in me. The first movie of his I saw was Oslo, August 31st, which opens with druggie-in-recovery Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) filling his pockets with rocks like a Danish Virginia Woolf and, on the first night of a day trip away from rehab, walking into a lake. He fails to kill himself, however, as he’s failed at everything else. I’ve failed in the same way. It’s hard to explain what that feels like if you haven’t experienced it. He’s 34. An old friend tells him he’s got a fresh start and should make the most of it, but he tells her it’s too late. All of his friends have transitioned into the next part of their lives while he’s been stuck in place with his addiction, anchored down by the dead, flat weight of his unmet potential. What kind of life is left for someone who was only ever really good at self-sabotage? What kind of next step is there for someone afraid to take the first one? Oslo, August 31st is one of the very few movies ever to nail what depression feels like. Sadness? Sadness is easy. Despair is easy. Hard is feeling like you’ve disappointed everyone who ever believed in you. Or they will be disappointed, given enough time. Hard is knowing you’re the problem. It’s the last day of summer. I’ve never felt so old.

Linda Schuyler in a chair in a nicely appointed living room being interviewed

TIFF ’25: Degrassi: Whatever It Takes

Posted in2025, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
directed by Lisa Rideout

by Bill Chambers For my brother’s birthday a couple of years ago, I bought him an officially licensed novelty T-shirt for The Zit Remedy‘s “Everybody Wants Something Tour” that he continues to wear proudly for the, well, novelty factor. Talk about kitsch heaven, if you’re a Canadian of a certain age. But as I watched Degrassi: Whatever It Takes, Lisa Rideout’s new and decidedly uneven documentary about the television institution that spawned The Zit Remedy (among other fictional acts, including Drake), I began to worry I’d erred in giving money to the Degrassi Industrial Complex, whose genesis dates back to 1979, when Linda Schuyler adapted the children’s book Ida Makes a Movie into a short subject that was shot on, dun dun dunnn, De Grassi Street in Toronto. Ida Makes a Movie later became the retroactive pilot for “The Kids of Degrassi Street”–itself a dry run for “Degrassi Junior High”, which is when Schuyler’s dogged vision of a TV show that’s all Afterschool Specials finally hooked the zeitgeist. Everybody wants something they’ll never give up, indeed.