Film
I first met director Ben Mullinkosson when I interviewed him for The Last Year of Darkness (2023), his intimate, fluorescent documentary about the underground club scene in Chengdu, China—my hometown. He has always struck me as someone who meets life where it is, with equal parts determination and whimsy.
In March, I attended the US premiere of director Pete Ohs and writer Jeremy O. Harris’s Erupcja at SXSW. It stars Charli XCX as the wayward heroine Bethany, who gets stranded in Warsaw, Poland with her smitten boyfriend as a volcano is about to erupt. A month later, I returned to those nebulous feelings and finally had a proper conversation with the director. Ohs opened up about his process, rooted in intuition, presence, and a willingness to follow coincidence wherever it leads. Harris, sharp and electric, joined in as well, infusing the interview with the wit and prose that characterize the film.
Just as the daylight hours begin their creeping journey from their midsummer zenith back towards the shadows of fall, a selection of Canadian thaumaturgist Guy Maddin’s most oneiric films will haunt the halls of Film Forum.
Starting June 5, Shunji Iwai will grace Metrograph with a retrospective of his work to mark the new 4K restoration of his debut feature, Love Letter (1995), an exquisitely tender exploration of love, memory, and grief.
On June 18th, Anthology Film Archives will present Horny Shorts for Intellectual Perverts, an expansive and seductive program curated by Angelo Madsen for Folsom Street East, the longest-running and largest kink and fetish festival on the East Coast.
In director Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend (2025), a ginkgo tree becomes both witness and participant in a century-spanning triptych unfolding at a university in Marburg, Germany.
Peter Asher: Everywhere Man weaves scenes from Asher’s “musical memoir” cabaret show, archival footage of the London scene of the 1960s and Los Angeles of the 1970s with present-day interviews with Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Carole King, Kate Taylor, Natalie Merchant, Lyle Lovett, Steve Martin, Eric Idle, Jane Asher, Twiggy, and Marianne Faithfull, among others.
The tension between the articulation of craft and the protocol of commerce is one that every filmmaker must navigate, and Isiah Medina, whose films seem to answer to no one, does so with exceptional integrity.
The three central protagonists differ significantly in temperament and trajectory, from the two roguish and affable middle-aged men, Carlobianchi and Doriano, to Giulio, the Neapolitan architectural student whom they befriend and help to “come of age” with encouragement both sentimental and sexual. By turns hard-bitten and caricatural, the lessons they teach their young charge occasionally brush up against the cliché. Yet the film’s peculiar mix of cynicism and insouciance, along with some striking cinematography, rescue it from platitude.
Rose of Nevada prioritizes the sentiment of its characters while never succumbing to being a movie that wants its viewers to “solve” its puzzle. In that way, the film’s lo-fi science-fiction plot takes one by surprise. While the premise of the film suggests a mainstream, time-traveling, ghost-ship movie that leads its central character to a reckoning with himself, what Jenkin concocts is much more elusive and uncompromising.
Julie Rubio’s film, The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & The Art of Survival breaks through to tell the unlikely success story of an artist Rubio asserts was one of the early twentieth century’s most important, if underappreciated, female painters. In her portrait of the titular Polish-born painter, Rubio traces an art-making practice that combined Mannerism, Futurism, and a healthy dose of Cubism, leading Lempicka to create images that have managed to remain popular for close to a century, even as she faded into obscurity.
The Christophers arrives at a moment when these questions feel newly urgent, as fears around the implications of AI continue to escalate. Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) is recruited to complete once-famous painter Julian Sklar’s (Ian McKellen) unfinished—and therefore mysterious and lucrative—Christopher portrait series.
Two films imagine life on the LES, past and present, drawing on Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht. They build on Beloff’s longstanding collaboration with Wooster Group performers like Kate Valk. Together, the films query the relation of art and politics—how art can replenish community life, but also distract us and put us at odds with one another.
The premise is tantalizing: a French philosophy academic comes across the decades-old records of a Benedictine monk who thought that he had discovered a device that could relay any moment in history through a television set. What emerges in Walker and Auen's film is a treatment of the archives as a hall of mirrors, with dense tangles of reflections between fiction and a disconcerting proportion of fact.
Jude’s dark and critical humor thrives on a diet of such fatal irony and the seemingly innocent ways in which words contradict actions and values. In his latest feature, a municipal worker, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), must evict a homeless man (Gabriel Spahiu) from the boiler room of a building slated for demolition to make way for a new hotel.
Built from more than a thousand hours of archival footage—over four-hundred of which were never-before-seen—Ian Bell’s film is a revelation.
Weiting Liu interviews German director Christian Petzold on the topic of his latest feature, Miroirs No. 3.
Ducournau’s adroit play with ambiguity previously earned her the Palme d’or for Titane in 2021. Here, though, she’s succumbed to her worst impulses. Wildly over-burdened with meaning while simultaneously leaning far too heavily on the concept of ambiguity, Alpha finds itself infected by its own contradictions, its promise utterly hijacked by its commitment to the systems of meaning it ostensibly seeks to collapse.
Brian Karl reflects on the impact of visionary experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs.
Panahi’s latest film is most honest with its declaration that ethics offers neither redemption nor security. The film is nominated for Best International Feature Film and Best Screenplay at the 2026 Oscars.
In six rooms at Prada, Iñárritu arranged anywhere from one to three 35-millimeter film projectors, running footage he had spliced together and given new soundtracks, often ambient or other soundscapes.
In Doors, each passage through a door opens onto a new narrative, with the editing forging a perceptual link between otherwise unrelated spaces. This motif of ceaseless metamorphosis functions as an analogy for cinema itself, where the actor or star figure bears a sense of biographical continuity that stitches together multiple worlds.
Stocked with a rotating cast of mock-Middle Eastern actors, the simulated villages stage “live-play scenarios” for soldiers on the ground: chief among them, locals recusant in language, cooperation, and attitude. It is in one such faux village, named Medina Wasl, that Atropia is set.
Our greatest hits this year include food monsters, three-and-a-half-hours on the dance floor, special effects lost to time, legendary films never made, and more.
The dynamic and distinct experience of becoming an adult child is Jarmusch’s Crimean War.
Newsreel embodies a genuinely counter-hegemonic method of financing, filming, and distribution that moved beyond revolutionary aesthetics.
Hamrah releases two books in one month: for n+1, Algorithm of the Night, a collection sequel spanning the chaotic years from 2019 to 2025; and for Semiotext(e), Last Week in End Times Cinema, a tragicomic compilation of movie-related news items chronicling one year (March 2024 to March 2025) of Hollywood’s uncanny business acumen for stupidity.
Julian Schnabel’s empathy is melancholic and metatextual: he invites us to experience the world as his subjects once experienced it, to sense the nearness of those they loved, and to relive the delicate joys that sustained them. It is through this lineage of shared visions and refracted selves that In the Hand of Dante culminates, unfurling from the canonical poet’s inner reveries into a sweeping mythos.
In La Grazia, Mariano De Santis, the fictional president of Italy has rescued his country from buffoonish past rulers, and now, eight years after his wife’s death and seven years into his presidency, he is facing the end of his term and old age. Three fateful decisions remain on De Santis’s desk: two pardons for murderous crimes of passion and a bill supporting the legalization of euthanasia.
María Sabina, mujer espíritu—with its techniques of embeddedness and observation, and long takes of unscripted events—is an ethnographic film, a genre problematic due to its origins in anthropology’s colonial gaze.
Covering our favorite dystopian metaphors in 1984 and Dracula, filmmakers, like Raoul Peck and Radu Jude, grapple with how art can take a stand against injustice. I recently caught a few films that grapple with the global political slant toward radical conservative ideology.
Acclaimed director Gianfranco Rosi returns with Below the Clouds, his cinematic exploration of Naples. At the center of the documentary, history and present converge in different slices of life and time: archaeologists and artists, firefighters and scientists. Different stories, one film.