Ahoy, mateys! And welcome to another life-altering edition of "In Review," your biweekly reminder that I don't have a Substack.
This Week…
- The 20 Best Movies of 2026 (So Far)
- Reviews of:
- "Michael"
- "Desert Warrior"
- "Apex"
2026 won't reach its midpoint for another two months, but the summer movie season starts next Friday whether we like it or not, and so — seasonally speaking, at least — that means the film year is already halfway over. Frightening! Illogical, but frightening.
The good news is that winter and spring were full of surprises, even if the majority of their best new releases invariably premiered on the festival circuit last year (including "Pillion," "My Father's Shadow," and a variety of other major standouts that qualified for our 2025 lists because of awards season mishegoss). Nia DaCosta's sublimely warped "28 Years Later: The Bone Temple" kicked things off, and set a very high bar for the year's studio fare, by iterating on its predecessor in devious and unexpected ways, while Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's dazzling "Project Hail Mary" offered us a heroic respite from the "are movie theaters dying?" conversation for the last two months.
On the boutique front, we already knew that A24 and NEON were going to begin the year on a high, but the previously unscreened likes of "The Drama" and "Mother Mary" both delivered the kind of daring and provocative experiences that mainstream audiences are typically starved for at this point on the calendar, while holdovers like "The Christophers," "Exit 8," and "Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie" popped off in a way that made us appreciate them even more than we already did.
But the lion's share of the riches have belonged to the more definitively arthouse space; Sophy Romvari's shattering "Blue Heron" is a debut for the ages, Sho Miyake's "Two Seasons, Two Strangers" confirmed the arrival of a major new voice in Japanese cinema, and Nadav Lapid's singular, splenetic "Yes" spoke to the insanity of the Gaza genocide with the clarity that only pure madness can provide. Also Charli xcx is a movie star now and "Faces of Death," once synonymous with mondo schlock, has been retconned as a cerebral response to the inescapability of modern horror. Try to keep up.
Here are the 20 best movies of 2026 so far, as determined by IndieWire's critics.
Kate Erbland, Ryan Lattanzio, Blake Simons, Josh Slater-Williams, and Christian Zilko contributed to this post.
"28 Years Later: The Bone Temple"
The most rewardingly cerebral zombie franchise this side of George Romero evolves once more with an exquisite corpse of a new chapter that picks up where last summer’s “28 Years Later” left off — both in regards to its plot, and also to its abstract focus on the philosophical aspects of post-apocalyptic life — while simultaneously pivoting away from the glitchy sense of grief that settled over the previous film like a burial shroud. Where Danny Boyle’s long-awaited sequel was held taut by the braided relationship between death and denial, Nia DaCosta’s almost immediate follow-up refracts the same existentialist streak into a very different meditation on the search for something to live for.
A strange, hysterical, and thrillingly audacious continuation of a saga about the nature of faith in a godless world, “The Bone Temple” might appear to be a more traditional genre offering than its immediate predecessor, but don’t be fooled by the fact that it wasn’t shot on an iPhone: This is very much the part two that 2025’s smartest and most humane studio horror movie deserves. —DE
"Blue Heron"
Sophy Romvari’s “Blue Heron” follows a protagonist as she navigates her pre-millennial childhood memories through a sea of camcorder clips and hazy recollections. But it would be reductive to belabor the comparisons any further than that, as the Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker’s extraordinary debut feature defies any clear precedent or easy categorization as it ventures down structurally exciting and unexpected paths.
While “Blue Heron” is a drama that works without any knowledge of the filmmaker’s history, Romvari’s feature is also the culmination of a decade-long journey. An international festival favorite since the mid-2010s, her acclaimed shorts regularly fall somewhere between fiction and autobiography, the latter to varying levels of overtness. In the likes of “Still Processing,” Romvari herself is the primary onscreen presence. That particular short from 2020, which grappled with the loss of her brothers by sifting through a box of family photos that had been unseen for decades, shares the most DNA with “Blue Heron,” though Romvari is strictly behind the camera this time.
For her fiction feature, she deploys an onscreen avatar. Or two. Possibly three, depending on how you interpret one specific dramatic set piece. It’s a thrilling formal expansion for a filmmaker who’s already so sharp in examining fragmented identities, and how they might be restored with a greater understanding of how the cracks came to be — even if restoration can be an incomplete process, and “greater” often means that a considerable amount of explanation and potential catharsis remain out of reach. —JSW
"The Blue Trail"
“Gloria Bell” meets “Children of Men” is an odd elevator pitch for any movie, but Gabriel Mascaro’s latest mind-bending trip out of Brazil might fit the bill. “The Blue Trail” is one of those near-future-set films with trappings recognizable to our own present, where the dystopian technology is only a slight update to our own. The porta-potties have a just-so different color. There’s a satellite placed here or there around otherwise underdeveloped surroundings. Told with the economy in the same number of minutes as the years this character has been alive, Mascaro’s short, sharp wonder of a fourth feature after films including “Neon Bull” and “Divine Love” is an enormously moving exploration of the last chapter in a woman’s life. A woman who wants nothing to do with the daughter who’s been assigned to take care of her and send her off into parts unknown. An older woman whose only dream is only, at last, to fly in an airplane.
Mascaro’s wry and witty new film will remind savvy audiences of bleak apocalyptic films about humanity’s potential loss of feeling against technologies that crush them, like “Children of Men” and “The Beast,” where the small perturbations that amount to dystopia register in things like satellites affixed to nearby huts, or plumes of red smoke bursting into the sky above an otherwise tranquil Amazonian journey. What helps make this “Blue Trail” soar beyond its roots are Guillermo Garza’s vivid, Academy-ratio cinematography and Memo Guerra’s hauntingly wounded woodwind score. Basically, you can’t tell the difference between our now and this movie’s present. —RL
"The Christophers"
Ian McKellen stars as the fading artist formerly known as Julian Sklar, a once-revered painter who peaked in the ’90s with a series of portraits of his ex-lover — the titular Christopher — before losing his luster, becoming the Simon Cowell of a ludicrous reality competition show, and finding himself on the wrong side of “cancel culture” for unspecified reasons. Now supposedly dying from some terminal illness, Julian has gone total hermit mode inside of his cluttered London apartment, where the walls are festooned with the relics of his success and the backrooms are a junk pile of painful memories.
His grubby adult kids (James Corden and Jessica Gunning) — still stinging from the casual cruelty he inflicted upon them as children, and well-aware that Julian’s withholding nature will extend to their inheritance — would sure love it if they found a previously unknown trove of three million dollar paintings among their father’s stuff when he died, and so they hire the best art forger in Britain (Michaela Coel) to apply for an assistant job in the hopes that she can nick the old man's unfinished masterpieces and complete them with Julian’s original materials (thus making it impossible to identify them as fakes). Would that it were so simple.
If nothing else, it’s always wonderful to see a new Steven Soderbergh movie with some actual life in its bones. After the airless spy games of “Black Bag,” the postmortem gimmickry of “Presence,” and the limp gyrations of “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” the prolific filmmaker’s run of small and increasingly sterile genre exercises was starting to feel like a waste of his un-retirement. I never would have guessed that the answer to Soderbergh’s listlessness might be an 86-year-old man, but Ian McKellen — delivering what’s easily his most essential screen performance since “The Lord of the Rings” — is so full of vim and vigor in “The Christophers” that he threatens to revitalize his director by osmosis. —DE
"The Drama"
Imagine that you’re about to marry Zendaya, or at least a bookstore clerk who looks just like her. Imagine that you met her at a Boston coffee shop a few years earlier (where you clumsily — maybe even sleazily — schemed to make an introduction), embarked upon a storybook romance, and eventually began to live together in a leafy studio apartment with one of those adorable corkscrew staircases that scream “we’re not even thinking about children yet.” Imagine that you know everything you could ever think to ask about this kind, radiant, and loving fantasy of a forever partner. And then imagine what she could possibly let slip just a few days before the ceremony that would cause you to think about crashing out of the relationship altogether.
Needless to say, there are very, very few things that could even semi-plausibly sour that dream into a nightmare with a single turn of phrase, and the wild secret that Emma (Zendaya) reveals to Charlie (Robert Pattinson) during an impromptu game of “What’s the Worst Thing You’ve Ever Done?” at a last-minute menu tasting is — upon first bite — indeed harder to swallow than even the driest of wedding cakes. But the brilliance of Kristoffer Borgli’s “The Drama,” or at least the brilliance of the sketch comedy-adjacent conceit that it exploits to mixed results, is rooted in the fact that Emma’s confession is impossible to laugh off completely.
Like the impish anti-romance that crumbles around it, the movie’s twist is both transgressive enough to be pleased with itself and also rooted in a reality that refuses to be dismissed as a bad joke. It’s shocking, yes, but mostly because it’s rare to see a mainstream film so eager to stick out its tongue and lick one of the last genuine third rails of American discourse. —DE
"Dreams"
Michel Franco is back in a pissed-off register about the world we live in with his crisply directed class critique “Dreams,” where the Mexican writer/director rails into the limousine liberal American one-percent identity with all the subtlety of a power drill. But the film’s quietly disturbing power lies in how Franco packages his U.S.-Mexico border metaphor — with rich philanthropist Jennifer (Jessica Chastain) and her young ballerina lover Fernando (Isaac Hernández, in a striking newcomer performance) standing in for each — into an addictive and destructive love story as sharply wrought as the movie’s grander political concerns.
Chastain gives her riskiest performance in some time as a rich arts patron who encourages Fernando to cross the border illegally in order for her foundation to give an American showcase of his art. Many of Chastain’s recent movies, including her Oscar-winning “Eyes of Tammy Faye” and even Franco’s own bittersweet dementia romance “Memory,” have a feminist or at least redemptive streak. Not so with her turn in “Dreams” as a woman who invites little sympathy — until she does in the film’s harrowing conclusion — even while she’s being played like a marionette by her father (Marshall Bell) and brother (Rupert Friend). —RL
"Erupcja"
A 71-minute wisp of a film that moves and sounds like a cartoon wind curlicue, Pete Ohs’ “Erupcja” — the Polish word for “eruption” — was (clearly) shot with half an outline and scripted on the fly, to the point that all four of its main actors are credited as co-writers as well. Here, that approach proves a bit more pointed than it did in the director’s previous “Jethica” and “The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick,” as its elevated mumblecore energy suits the unformed and searching nature of a wherever you go, there you are story about the ways that people try to make sense of the world around them in real-time.
People like Bethany (Charli xcx, a sly and natural screen presence), a British girl who’s convinced that a volcano explodes whenever she blows up her life for a biannual fling with flower shop owner Nel (Lena Góra) in Warsaw. Her puppy dog-like boyfriend Rob (Will Madden) wanted to propose to her in Paris, but when Bethany suggested they go to Poland instead — and not even Kraków, with all of its historic charm — some part of her was expecting the planet to crack open when they got there, as if the Earth itself were responding to her fears of heteronormative complacency.
Ohs, who recently moved to Poland himself, is fascinated by the transformative power of being in a foreign space, and by the process through which people — be they transplants or just tourists — try to reconcile who they are to the new reality around them, and “Erupcja” drifts along with the detachedness of an out-of-body experience. Claude (Jeremy O. Harris as an extroverted American painter who meets Bethany and Rob by chance at a sushi restaurant) is probably the closest thing the director has to a surrogate in this story, and at one point the camera finds him pontificating about how “Being immersed in a culture so different from my own helps me turn my brain off so I can enter a dream state more naturally.” Slight as it is, “Erupcja” crystallizes that condition to a tee. —DE
"Exit 8"
Ask anyone — it’s easy to get lost in the Tokyo subway. The city’s underground boasts ample signposting to guide commuters and tourists — but there’s so much of it, the passageways and stairways all look alike, and oh, we’re right back where we started. Genki Kawamura’s delightful blockbuster provocation “Exit 8” understands and exploits these frustrations, transforming these claustrophobic corridors into a site of psychological exploration, personal choice, and national anxieties.
Arashi superstar Kazunari Ninomiya is The Lost Man, a backpack-clad commuter seeking a way out of the underground and back to the light of day — where his once-girlfriend is waiting to hear his decision on whether he wants to keep the baby that she’s carrying. Initially distracted by his playlist and a phone call, he soon realizes that the passageways are looping, a situation that he quickly and pragmatically adapts to. Toho’s big-screen adaptation offers a remarkably faithful translation of its video game namesake, one-to-one in its central environment and signage, to the point that the film at first feels like an FMV transmedia advertisement for its source material. But the core concept has been expanded in smart and surprisingly thrilling ways. —BS
"Faces of Death"
It’s a shame the “Scream” franchise has already bled out everywhere but the box office, because Daniel Goldhaber’s similarly meta “Faces of Death” is sharp enough to have cut that self-cannibalizing shibboleth down to size on its own. Much uglier and more pointed than Paramount’s stab-happy ATM of a movie franchise, this similarly meta reflection on media consumption — on the “rules” of the game, and our detached relationship to ubiquitous scenes of violence — exhumes one of the most notorious horror movies ever made in order to shudder at the banality that snuff films have come to assume in the age of social media. Here is a smart, fun, and deeply unsettling post-modern slasher that know it can’t manufacture anything scarier than what people scroll past on their phones every day, and leverages that awareness into a multiplex-ready meditation on the terror of living in a world where even the worst atrocities have been flattened into digital wallpaper. —DE
"Fantasy Life"
A once-promising law student whose crippling anxiety has slowed his legal career, Sam (Matthew Shear) finds himself laid off from a firm that was already asking him to do little more than alphabetize long-obsolete boxes of files. With bills piling up and a deep sense of purposelessness that hasn’t improved since he took a mental health break from Fordham Law School nearly a decade ago, an offer to babysit his shrink’s three granddaughters while their dad plays bass with Gov’t Mule seems like an opportunity that’s depressingly worthy of his time.
Watching the three daughters is a manageable task, but Sam’s real challenge is navigating the complex relationship between his two employers, David and his wife Dianne (Amanda Peet). A beanie-loving rocker, David thinks that his life of lavish domesticity is keeping him from the life of hedonistic adventure he craves. Dianne sees him as inadequately sympathetic to the sense of purposeless that she feels after her acting career took a backseat to motherhood. Their marriage is a tinderbox, and Sam turns out to be the anxious, people-pleasing spark that lights the entire thing aflame.
A first-time writer-director, Shear has previously appeared in four Noah Baumbach movies (“Marriage Story,” “The Meyerowitz Stories,” “Mistress America,” and “While We’re Young”). And “Fantasy Life” wears that influence on its sleeve. A neurotic portrait of creative class New Yorkers who do everything in their power to drown out their own privilege with self-inflicted problems, “Fantasy Life” pulls from Baumbach as liberally as Baumbach pulled from Woody Allen. It doesn’t get any points for originality, but "Fantasy Life" follows in the footsteps of artists who made careers out of anxious protagonists, and its portrayal of anxiety demonstrates an understanding of the disorder that feels more modern than its predecessors. —CZ
"Kontinental 25"
Shot on an iPhone with the same crew that Radu Jude had already collected for “Dracula,” “Kontinental ’25” naturally feels like the scrappy and scabrous B-side to a larger project about Transylvanian self-identity. Its moral dimensions are more straightforward than those in Jude’s previous work (and its form much simpler in kind), but only because their practical applications are that much knottier in return. Where “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” and “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” scaled their characters’ personal depravities against sprawling backdrops of systemic abuse, the far more intimate — and less uproarious — “Kontinental ’25” filters the perversity of neoliberalism through the eyes of a well-meaning woman’s attempt to do the right thing.
Alas, a bold act of kindness can be a terrible cross to bear in a culture that’s sustained by ambient cruelties. The woman’s name is Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), and she’s a middle-aged, upper-middle-class bailiff who was born in Hungary before she moved to the rapidly gentrifying Romanian city of Cluj — or at least to a hilly suburb on the outskirts of town, where she lives with her husband and their two kids in the kind of house that likely priced out the local population and paved over generations of personal history. Consciously or not, Orsolya has played an active role in such urban growth; her job is to evict people from the lots that have been gobbled up by the government and/or greedy real estate developers who want to turn them into condos, chain stores, and luxury hotels. It’s a job that she tries to perform humanely, though a cynic might say that she only does so in order to live with the fact that the job itself is inhumane. —DE
"Mad Bills to Pay"
There’s something deeply comedic about hearing the word “nutty” repeatedly come up in a serious conversation about finances. Nutcrackers, as they’re formally called, are homemade cocktails of sugary fruit drinks and cheap liquor that daydrinkers hide in plastic bottles for beach consumption. They’re also the bedrock of Rico’s (Juan Collado) burgeoning underground beverage empire. The 19-year-old Bronx resident spends his summer days combing beaches with a cooler full of nutties, selling flavors like the lemon-flavored Pikachu and the pink Kirby Punch for $15, two for $10, or if a customer is pretty enough, an Instagram follow. He’s convinced that the hustle will snowball into a business that affords him a house and a car in no time at all. His looming success is such an inevitability that the details are irrelevant to him.
Rico’s blind self-confidence imbues him with some all-American charm, but the three women in his life aren’t so bullish on his career. He has quite a few problems that can’t be solved with nutties — namely a baby due in seven months with his 16-year-old girlfriend Destiny (Destiny Checo). The couple still live with Rico’s Mami (Yohanna Florentino) and younger sister Sally (Nathaly Navarro), both of whom are determined to make Rico understand the massive responsibilities that are coming his way. That juxtaposition between idyllic summer hijinx and adult responsibilities forms the backdrop of “Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo).”
Joel Alfonso Vargas’ feature directorial debut is a vibrant tableau of life in the tight-knit Dominican communities of The Bronx, capturing the joys and tragedies of Rico’s life with such specificity that they eventually become impossible to separate from one another. Vargas and cinematographer Rufai Alaja deploy a 4:3 aspect ratio to create a square frame that invokes the warm feeling of flipping through old Polaroids. As the young entrepreneur meanders through life, hawking nutties and trying to pick up girls when he forgets that he’s spoken for, it feels like we’re looking back on the final summer of his youth with the benefit of hindsight from an inevitable future that hasn’t happened yet. —CZ
"Mile End Kicks"
Much like her feature directorial debut, the winning “I Like Movies,” “Mile End Kicks” is based on filmmaker Chandler Levack’s own experiences. Set in 2011, the film follows budding music critic Grace (a delightful Barbie Ferreira) as she embarks on a summer in Montreal. She’s hoping to meet and write about rising bands in the city’s vibrant music scene, while also working on a bigger project very close to her heart. Along the way, she deals with life, love (including a pair of paramours from the same band), professional disappointments, and the fallout of a horrible experience from her past.
Part rom-com, part coming-of-age tale, the film is bright and funny and sexy and sad, the sort of thing that could only be made by someone who lived through so much of what her heroine encounters. The film establishes Levack as a budding chronicler of coming-of-age in all its forms and also makes clear how much range Ferreira possesses. —KE
"Miroirs No. 3"
Christian Petzold‘s gossamer latest film, “Miroirs No. 3,” is as compact as a novella, as ephemeral in its emotion, as delicate in register as one of the Chopin or Ravel pieces that float through it. A mystery woman, standing on a bridge, lost in thought. An amnesiac looking for respite. A car flipped upside down, its driver’s brains spilled onto the road while its passenger stares on, unharmed. Later, she eats apples in a bed that belongs to another woman, in clothes that belong to that woman’s daughter, trying on another life almost as a lark.
This is a minor-key drama, which burrows into the psyche despite its slim running time and almost perverse refusal to explain itself or the shapes its narrative takes. The title comes from a piece written by Ravel — yes, that one you probably know from the trailer for “Call Me By Your Name,” but the affiliations with the idylls of summer love and coming-of-age end right there. Writing and directing a script that evolved during the making of his last feature, “Afire,” Petzold has never been less forthcoming, the images from cinematographer Hans Fromm never overstating themselves. Nor does Petzold’s regular collaborator Paula Beer, who shifts with silvery, slippery ease between states of bemusement and shock. “Miroirs” is another gorgeous showcase for what makes her alchemy with Petzold succeed so well. —RL
"Mother Mary"
David Lowery describes his magnificently strange “Mother Mary” as a film about “how art can take something terrible and turn it into something beautiful,” and he would know. The writer-director may have made a name for himself with scrappy indies (“Ain’t them Bodies Saints”) and esoteric genre experiments (“A Ghost Story”), but he built a career for himself with the likes of “Pete’s Dragon” and “Peter Pan & Wendy” — with movies that rescued something poignant and real from the creative abyss that is Disney’s live-action remake culture, a magic trick so ineffable that it amounts to a corporate act of transubstantiation.
At once both Lowery’s sparkliest and most inscrutable film “Mother Mary” — about a delicate pop star who begs her spurned former designer for a dress — doesn’t just represent his overt attempt to reconcile and confuse those two modes, it also offers a thrilling opportunity to plunge us into the liminal space that separates them from each other. To crystallize the volatile, even violent, energy that binds artistic connections across space and time. A singular, hypnotic, and formally unbound psychodrama that’s staged between a Lady Gaga-like diva (Anne Hathaway) and the only person who might be able to quiet her demons (Michaela Coel), this talky chamberpiece of a film is almost entirely confined to an unheated barn somewhere outside of London, and yet it grows to feel as vast as the synaptic gap that stretches between literalness and metaphor. A wound and its memory. A pop song and the person who wrote it. Indie movies and Disney fare. And good God is the soundtrack full of bangers. —DE
"Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie"
For the uninitiated, Nirvanna the Band couldn’t have less to do with Kurt Cobain. Launched as a webseries in 2008, the ongoing comedy project stars Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol as fictional versions of themselves who are dying to break into the Toronto music scene. Specifically, they’re dying to play a show at a legendary club known as the Rivoli. The duo is so focused on landing a gig that they don’t have time to practice music. Instead, they spend every day engaging in complex publicity stunts that demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of the music industry and often end up mirroring tropes from classic films.
The scale of the project has gradually expanded as it morphed from a DIY webseries to a Viceland show to the feature film that premiered this week, but the format remains the same. The two friends start their day sitting around a piano and brainstorming an idea for a scheme to play the Rivoli. A documentary crew then follows them as they try and execute their plan on the streets of Toronto, utilizing unknowing actors in a format that might be described as “Nathan for You” meets “This Is Spinal Tap.” The joke only gets funnier the longer they remain unsuccessful. Here, it's stretched to truly mind-bending — and questionably legal — proportions. —CZ
"Project Hail Mary"
When he wakes up on an empty spaceship hurtling away from the sun (and thus Earth and everyone and everything he knows), temporarily amnesiac Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) has such little handle on his situation and his place within it that he takes to a dry-erase board to sort his thoughts and questions. “WHO AM I?” is top of the list. (Later, he will note that he is “OK with cilantro.”) Those three words could just as easily function as the overall theme of Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s marvelously entertaining and deep-feeling “Project Hail Mary.” And, before you balk at the ol’ important-questions-on-a-dry-erase-board gambit (sorry to “A Quiet Place,” we love you, but that dry-erase board has got to go), know this: The dazzling "Project Hail Mary" earns such a heady question over the course of its adorably epic space odyssey. It even answers it.
Based on Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, the film’s comparisons to Ridley Scott’s own Weir adaptation “The Martian” are certainly fitting, but Lord and Miller’s first directorial outing in more than a decade also weaves in shades of everything from “Cast Away” to “E.T.” and just about every (good) film about unlikely friendship you could possibly name. It's everything you could ask for in a blockbuster these days. —KE
"Two Seasons, Two Strangers"
Sho Miyake (“Small, Slow but Steady”) is one of the finest, most soulful Japanese filmmakers of his generation. His patient dramas favor characters who struggle with loneliness, often withdrawing from engaging with people much at all due to factors that make human connection harder for them. In his latest tender, beautifully textured feature, the main character’s tendency to say very little is rooted in a creative slump, intertwined with cultural isolation.
Li (Shim Eun-kyung, “Train to Busan”) is a Korean screenwriter who’s experiencing writer’s block and struggling to still connect to her surroundings in Japan, where she’s been based for years. At a Q&A session, she seems scared to answer the first question, suggesting that her main takeaway from watching her own work is that she doesn’t have much talent. Within her own mind, she’s a little more articulate. Japanese is the only language that leaves Li’s mouth, but her occasional inner monologues are in her mother tongue, the most crucial example expressing her growing conflict with the very act of writing itself.
Loosely adapting two specific manga short stories by Yoshiharu Tsuge, “Two Seasons, Two Strangers” is a finely wrought film about the process of getting out of our own heads to more properly appreciate the possibilities before us — instead of vocalizing our worries and doubts to the point of blocking our progress. To nod to a famous song that, like Miyake’s filmmaking, suggests enjoying the silence where possible, sometimes words are very unnecessary. —JSW
"A Useful Ghost"
March (Witsarut Himmarat) runs a successful vacuum cleaner factory in Thailand. It’s a largely uneventful life, save for the occasional encounters with ghosts that haunt his place of business. But everything changes when his beautiful, loving wife Nat (Davika Hoorne) dies after being poisoned by dust in his factory. Much like “Titane” before it, the early discourse around “A Useful Ghost” might revolve around an intimate love scene between a Thai man and a Shop-Vac that’s possessed by the ghost of his late wife. But like Julia Ducournau, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke has made a darkly hilarious film that deserves to be remembered for much more than its shock value.
The backbone of March’s young family and an incredible mother to their son Dot, Nat is gone but not forgotten. And she’s not even gone for that long. She soon returns as a ghost and assumes the body of one of March’s vacuums. The husband and wife resume their emotional and carnal relationship, but it’s clear she came back for a very specific reason: to clean the factory and prevent her child from being exposed to the particles that killed her. But her arrival poses a major emotional roadblock to March’s traditional family, who are jaded from a bad experience when a dead employee returned as a vacuum and threw a metaphorical wrench into their business. Plus, they’ve barely been able to wrap their minds around the fact that his older brother is gay.
Welcoming a human-vacuum relationship into the family is a tougher proposition. “A Useful Ghost” masterfully blends deadpan lines like “I’m less worried about the fever than the fact that he made out with a vacuum cleaner” with a sincere story about the invisible workers we choose to ignore and love that doesn’t waver in the face of family disapproval. —CZ
"Yes"
Horrified by the country of his birth and heavy with the weight of its sins, Nadav Lapid has created modern cinema’s most splenetic filmography by fighting his Israeliness as if it were an incurable virus infecting his body of work. That trend continues with the deliriously provocative “Yes,” a veritable orgy of self-loathing surrender that reaffirms Lapid as the world’s most visceral director on a shot-by-shot basis. In a movie that unfolds like an Ecstasy-addled cross between Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom” and the Jim Carrey comedy “Yes Man,” Lapid doubles down on the frenzied violence of his filmmaking at the same time as he fully embraces his growing appetite for submission.
Telling the story of a struggling jazz musician and his dancer wife who afford a life for their newborn by acquiescing to every demand made of their talent and bodies by Tel Aviv’s militaristic ruling class, Lapid doesn’t rage against the worst monstrousness of the modern age by speaking truth to power, but rather by volunteering his characters to get crushed under the heel of its boot. And then — with a literalness no one else would dare — by forcing them to lick that boot so clean the whole world can see the dehumanizing nature of Israel’s crimes reflected in its leather. Needless to say, the underside of its sole leaves a memorable impression. —DE
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