Jordan Firstman directs his debut feature, Club Kid, starring himself, Reggie Absolom, Cara Delevingne and Diego Calva, which screened at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival.

The Review

Club Kid is probably the most laugh-out-loud hilarious film of the year. Its third act reaches for a much more poignant emotional register, and while it mostly works, it doesn’t hit home as well as the raucous, adrenaline-fueled, frenetically-paced first two, which are jam-packed with one hilarious scene after another. What begins as a film about one man’s club-life experience as a queer New Yorker living a worthless, albeit fun, life ultimately ends up resonating as one lost soul’s journey towards a life worth living.

The parade of colorful characters, starting with Peter himself who is very easy to love right off the bat because of his kind nature and quick wit, but also his Azerbaijani roommate Nicky (Eldar Isgandarov), a self described aspiring queer philosopher, Sophie (Delevingne) a coke-head friend and business partner Peter has a falling out with, and the entire host of personalities each representing at least one letter in the LGBTQ+ alphabet that is in Peter’s party circle, all add to the mad vibe that sweeps you off your feet and whisks you away into that magical land of irresponsible revelry.

When young Arlo (Absolom) enters the picture, the film starts to take a whole new shape and it becomes a Big Daddy (1999) meets Kramer v. Kramer (1979) in New York, viewed through a queer lens, without the goofiness of Adam Sandler or the acting masterclass of Dustin Hoffman. Given that he’s also directing the film, Firstman does a first-rate job as Peter, only failing to convince in a few big emotional scenes. He comes off as genuine (and genuinely funny), and that’s what ultimately counts and captures your heart. Absolom is a future star as well, he more than holds his own, playing a wise-beyond-his-years 10-year-old with just the right balance of adorable dignity.

This is one of those movies that shines in festivals because the expectations are practically non-existent but the delivery is a knock-out punch. A razor-sharp screenplay (which is by far the strongest element in the film and should be up for all the awards under the sun), some fantastic pacing and a committed ensemble of great performances make you quickly forgive some of the clichéd characters, hokey plot beats and the slightly rushed ending.

Once the end credits do start to roll, the lingering feeling is a very positive one; like a smooth and tranquil comedown from an exhilarating high.

More from LFF 2026

• Fjord - LFF 2026 Review

• Tender Loving Care - LFF 2026 Review

• A Good Little Soldier - LFF 2026 Review

Cristian Mungiu returns triumphant with Fjord, starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, as screened at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival. It’s another controversial Palme d’Or winner, and I have nothing but deep reverence for it.

The Review

Romanian master of brooding cinema is back with his most controversial film to date. Putting a deeply religious, conservative family at the centre of attention, and asking the audience to decide whether they are heroes or anti-heroes, offenders or victims, is a pretty courageous thing to do in this day and age. In film culture, certainly in Western film culture, progressive and liberal values are self-evident moral truths. Conservatism, traditionalism - almost always depicted in a religious framework, and most especially a Christian one - are at best inherently suspect and at worst straight up evil.

What makes Fjord such a fascinating viewing experience is how Mungiu inverses this axiom and presents two sides of an argument where he dares the audience to see things from the point of view of the conservative, deeply Christian, traditional family. They’re not evil people, caricatures or stereotypes. The fact that they’re portrayed by two serious, famous actors - Sebastian Stan of Captain America fame and the ineffable Renate Reinsve whose star has shot up more than most in recent years - only adds to the inversion. Both performances are exceptional, nuanced and natural; the direct opposite of Hollywood showboating.

The sun continues not to shine in Mungiu’s cinema, but that’s not to say that there isn’t beauty in this world. There are more than a few wide landscape shots of cosmic power, with Norway’s wintery beauty of the fjords, its icy waters and frequent avalanches, adding a remarkable presence of ominous dread to the atmosphere that locks the viewer in even further. The camera, with some imperceptibly long takes, alongside exceptional blocking for interior compositions, also does wonders to paint a compelling world of human pieces on life’s chessboard.

Watching the incident spiral, escalate and finally conclude makes for one of the most edge-of-your-seat experiences I’ve had in the cinema all year. Adding to the layers of this complex fable about parenting, ethics, freedoms, values and beliefs, are two subplots: a friendship between the teenager daughter Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and her neighbor and schoolmate Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), and another around Noora’s aging grandfather who suffered a stroke, Åke (Øyvind Venstad Kjeksrud). These appear as tangents at first, but are relevant on a cerebral level, adding a few extra dimensions.

Thought we get to see the film from the POV of the family, Mungiu sprinkles enough intrigue around what happens off-screen to make the audience really ponder the film as an ethical thought experiment with two equally strong sides on either end of the debate. By and large, it is one of the most impressive films of the year, and the fact that it’s a Palme d’Or winner gives it an air of prestige and importance that it absolutely deserves.

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• Tender Loving Care - LFF 2026 Review

• A Good Little Soldier - LFF 2026 Review

• Woman Unknown - LFF 2026 Review

Mike Leigh is back after one year with Tender Loving Care, the film he says is most likely his last. Starring Kate O’Flynn, Marion Bailey, Alison Bailey Johnson and Paul Jesson, and screened at the BFI 2026 London Film Festival.

Read more

Stéphane Brizé directs A Good Little Soldier, starring Alba Rohrwacher and Vincent Lindon, screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival. This one hits close to home and hits all the right notes so I can’t see how it doesn’t end up being one of my favorite films of 2026.

The Review

It’s a rare feat for a film to work on as many levels and layers that A Good Little Soldier works on. It’s observational workplace comedy meets slice-of-life corporate nightmare, it’ll have audiences doing belly laughs one moment and digging their fingernails into their seat a few scenes later.

This is a film that cuts deep for anyone who has experienced a corporate environment, the toxic politics that bubbles underneath, the relentless pressure to overachieve, the board meetings where you feel like you have to agree with the most ridiculous things, the hypocrisy of it all. Brizé nails so much of what office life is like, and he captures all of this in such a compelling way, that every scene in A Good Little Soldier is packed with purposeful energy and momentum. It’s absurdly gripping.

The tonal notes of the film are also a marvelous balancing act. It’s filled with the kind of laugh-out-loud humor that comes with cringe comedic satire of The Office, until it naturally devolves into a genuine crisis. Once Carla is confronted with this scenario which is best left unspoiled, the scenes that follow in her office with the parties involved are some of the most intense and bone-chilling interactions of any on screen all year. Watching Clara navigate through all of this, and slowly eat herself from the inside in the process, is one of the most savage character studies I’ve seen in a long time.

Apart from the brilliant screenplay, which deservedly won the Venice prize, the film wouldn’t have worked without the commanding performance from Rohrwacher. She phenomenally conveys the delicate predicament of a woman stuck between needing to be a cutthroat executive that’s all business, an HR director who genuinely cares about the employees of the company but also someone who has her own KPIs, and a mom trying to be present in her son’s life.

Vincent Lindon is also pretty much perfect as the no-nonsense CEO, who provides much of the comedy in the first half of the film, but then becomes something quite else in the second. Not a lot of actors can pull off both of these registers within the same performance but Lindon hits it out of the park.

Everything - from the music, to the editing, to all the other elements that work together to make something cinematic - is in perfect sync to create an atmosphere of corporate dread, despair and loneliness. Carla’s isolation, from her family, from her colleagues, from everyone who takes the public transport with her every day, is captured with a scary precision.

Find a way to watch this movie, in cinemas if you can, as soon as possible. You won’t regret it.

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• Woman Unknown - LFF 2026 Review

• Artificial - LFF 2026 Review

• Primetime - LFF 2026 Review

May el-Toukhy directs Woman Unknown, starring Mathilde Arcel, screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival. A compelling and quiet evisceration of post-war Danish society, exquisitely shot, that will stay with me for a long time.

The Review

How far will you go to protect yourself? The simple question that hangs in the air of this elegantly composed Danish period drama, and nips at the tension of some of the film’s many long silences. The formality of the compositions, the tidiness of the mise-en-scene, the meditative calmness that demands patience from the audience; this sophisticated and polished surface masks something undeniably rotten at the core of the society on display. Patience is rewarded with Woman Unknown as it builds up gradually towards a quietly devastating conclusion, revealing an extraordinarily mature and cinematically rich film.

It won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and Mathilde Arcel picked up Best Actress, which immediately put this otherwise unknown entity on my radar. And now I’ll be following the careers of director el-Toukhy, lead actress Arcel, and cinematographer Jasper Spanning with a keen eye. The direction is fluid, with the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and the atmosphere of guilt and shame and wanting to “set things right”, captured perfectly in a show-don’t’-tell masterclass of composure. One particular scene towards the end, a single shot of a nameless woman, will haunt me for quite some time.

Arcel’s performance is an internal storm, a tempest brewing with guilt and survival instinct; she conveys so much with only her eyes. The cinematography is also some of the best of the year, with some of the shots and framing involving mirrors, reflections, and figures distorted behind textured glass, so striking that they wouldn’t feel out of place in a Johannes Vermeer exhibition.

The most potent aspect of Woman Unknown, though, is the story itself. Told very much from the perspective of the female gaze, and yet dealing with the universal, gender-less, theme of retribution, shame, guilt and survival. Once Marie finds herself in the critical predicament, the second half is filled with so much tension and a multitude of powerful thematic undercurrents. It is truly exceptional storytelling, with one wallop of a twist that’s impossible to see coming.

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• Artificial - LFF 2026 Review

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Luca Guadagnino directs Artificial, starring Yura Borisov, Andrew Garfield and Monica Barbaro, screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival. The prolific Italian direction has fully redeemed himself by setting the standard for AI doomerism on screen.

For someone as prolific as Guadagnino, his movies are bound to be hit or miss. Last year’s After the Hunt was one of the worst misses I’ve seen in recent times while Challengers ended up in my Top 10 of 2024. So walking into a new Guadagnino movie is like walking into a casino. It’s always a roll of a dice.

Happily, Artificial is a gamble that pays off in spades. As a searing caricature of the Silicon Valley tech bro think tank, the film takes its biggest shots at the most prolific poster boys of the AI age — Sam Altman and Elon Musk — and it does not miss. Garfield delivers one of the performances of his career as Altman, fully committed in his portrayal of a slimy narcissistic weasel whose nature is as fake as ChatGPT’s. Musk (hilariously impersonated by Ike Barinholtz) is more on the periphery of the story but pretty much every time he appears on screen it’s a riot. One scene on his private jet involving a ketchup bottle is a particularly priceless roast.

The heart of the film, though, and the lead both in the real life story of the birth of OpenAI and in the film, is Ilya Sutskever. He is the anchor of the story, and the key to why Artificial resonates on an emotional level. Played with near-pathological reverence by the endearing Borisov, it’s Ilya’s journey we are attached to from start to finish; Guadagnino and his screenwriter Simon Rich bookend this arc with powerful opening and closing shots that make for a heartbreaking mirror of themselves.

Guadagnino’s directorial flourishes and at times showboating with the camera and editing fits the self-important and obnoxious community of tech bros very well. That’s also why it was vital to anchor the story around Ilya, whose idealism clashes with the short-term profiteering of the American tech fraternity he found himself in.

How much of any of this is fact or dramatization for the screen is a good question but not one that I’m particularly interested in seeking out an answer to. The film achieves what it sets out to do — it exposes the self-proclaimed altruism of these megalomaniacs for the greedy frauds that they are, keeps the human element centre stage, and delivers one helluva entertaining movie that’s vital for our times, never boring, often funny and profound on a very human level.

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Lance Oppenheim’s first narrative fiction film, Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson, Merritt Weaver and Skyler Gisondo, screened at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival. For a movie this accomplished, I’m not entirely sure what it ultimately accomplishes.

The Review

The first thing that needs to be underlined is that Primetime is not a movie about catching predators. It’s a movie about the NBC Dateline show To Catch a Predator. It’s important to make that distinction because in going behind the scenes of the cut-throat world of cable TV in the naughties, the race of chasing ratings, and the constant hunt for entertainment value, the people behind the show start looking a little more monstrous and predacious than the people they’re catching.

To be clear, the people they’re catching are perverts who want to, and in most cases were just about to, have sex with little kids. This twisted inversion, where the confused, doe-eyed pedophiles are positioned under Oppenheim’s directions as victims compared to the people who are hellbent on catching them for their show, has to be done with a high dose of artistic irony, I hope.

The world of cable television is soul-devouring, and regardless of how ambiguous some of its morals are, it’s unquestionable that the film is technically accomplished and extremely well made when it comes to exposing the soulless wretchedness of it all. Squeezed into a 4:3 television-box format, shot with what looks like an unclean filter on the camera lens throughout, preformed furiously by an amped up cast and edited with high-octane energy; Primetime does not lack in momentum. It’s also disturbingly funny, even in moments when it feels like it shouldn’t be, which adds to the film’s entertainment value but also naturally makes you squirm in your seat with discomfort.

Most of the credit for the laughs, the discomfort, the amorality of it all, has to go to Robert Pattinson, who carries the film from start to finish. As the rapacious Chris Hansen, Pattinson notches a new level of his ever-expanding acting career in one of his most expressive roles. It is surely one of his best performances, and if it’s hard to understand Oppenheim’s or A24’s motives - though the film is very much in keeping with the studio’s nihilistic sensibilities - it’s easy to understand why Pattinson got on board. As a character study of television host, the film is a towering acting showcase.

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• Ray Gunn - LFF 2026 Review

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Genius animation director Brad Bird is back with his highly anticipated passion project, Ray Gunn, featuring a voice cast of Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Waits, screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival. My high expectations have been met and then some with this thrilling endlessly watchable animated spectacle.

The Review

It’s been almost 10 years since we’ve had a Brad Bird movie. The Incredibles 2 feels like a lifetime ago, and the last original animated film by Bird is almost two decades old (2007’s brilliant Ratatouille). Needless to say, the man’s cartoon talents have been sorely missed. The passion project that he’s been work on all for most of that time away has now finally been unveiled and I’m elated to report that it is an absolute banger.

What instantly takes your breath away from the opening shot of Ray Gunn, and will continue to do so until the last frame, is the movie’s wildly imaginative world. It’s The Fifth Element meets The Maltese Falcon in both design and spirit, the concrete jungle of a megalopolis suspended in the sky with futuristic inventions, holograms, flying cars, jetpacks, and all sorts of other technological gadgets filling practically every bit of real estate in the frame. Making the world that much more interesting is that it’s a galactic melting pot of alien and human culture; an endlessly fascinating diverse world. We are kids in Bird’s visual-eye candy store and it’s impossible to get enough.

The style of animation has an old school, unrefined, hand-drawn vibe to it, very Incredibles-like, which is a perfect throwback for the film’s 1950s film noir characters and narrative. The look of the film grips you, but the genre’s idiosyncratic tropes and flourishes keep you in place. There’s the gumshoe PI with a working moral compass in a world drowning in moral ambiguity, the attractive femme fatale with secrets of her own, a murder mystery implicating multiple suspects, foreboding gangsters and low IQ goons, shady side-characters, ulterior motives and even the dramatic shadows and expressive lighting that make up the signature look of film noir.

The world of Blade Runner immediately springs to mind, with building-sized hologram ads giving the sci-fi classic a direct nod, but Bird found a way to mix all of his sci-fi and film noir inspirations into something that stands out all on its own. It helps having a watertight screenplay that perfectly balances the business of human emotions with the pleasure of having a laugh-out-loud blast. There’s even room for some social commentary on racism, surveillance and the cruel world of showbusiness that will fly over a lot kids’ heads but should be appreciated by most adults.

In order to make the magic really work, Bird needed the perfect voice cast ensemble and that’s exactly what he got, led by Rockwell, Johansson and Waits who all do stellar work. Ray, Venus and Eye-Ra are well-rounded characters who fit classic stereotypes with just enough variety to be interesting and get the audience fully engaged in their respective predicaments. Brad Bird is back baby!

Next to All of a Sudden, this is the first film I’m aching to watch again.

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• Paper Tiger - LFF 2026 Review

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James Gray treads familiar territory of family ties, fatherhood and the Russian mob with Paper Tiger, starring Miles Teller, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival. A beautiful film with fantastic atmosphere, hurt by a noticeably weak link.

The Review

In my review of The Dreamed Adventure, I mentioned the importance of having a strong visual language and how the film drags when it lacks that — even if the storytelling core is strong. James Gray’s latest family crime drama is almost the complete inverse of that. He has a very established visual language, and it’s one which I could sit in for days without feeling an ounce of boredom. The man could direct a shampoo commercial, and if it had the kind of butter-smooth scene transitions and intimate warm white cinematography that’s part of Gray’s visual signature, I’d be totally absorbed.

And absorbed I was from start to finish with Paper Tiger. The 1980s Queens setting, during the twilight years of the Cold War period, is meticulously recreated in the design. It’s instant transportation. The director of photography, Joaquín Baca-Asay, who worked with Gray twice before, on We Own The Night (2007) - a crime drama pitting one family against the Russian Mafia in New York… sound familiar? - and Two Lovers (2008) - Gray’s most romantic and intimate film - is well-versed with the look and feel Gray is going for, and the result is a spectacular, vintage palette. As if filtered through both personal and film history nostalgia; one scene in particular when Irwin’s home is broken into in the middle of the night features some of the most visually striking play with light and shadow I’ve seen in years.

The acting from Teller and Driver is exceptional, believable and authentic to the core; you buy them as brothers living in the 1980s hook, line and sinker. The two young boys who play Irwin’s sons are also superb, as if plucked from exactly that time period. Scarlett Johansson, unfortunately, ends up being the most noticeable of weakest links. Her Linda is not in sync with the film’s tone and timbre, and as a character who is the center of the film’s subplot that makes some eyebrow-raising choices, it’s a combination of bad writing and a performance so hammy it borders on cringe.

Johansson’s inauthentic performance aside, there’s more than enough in Paper Tiger that’ll satisfy James Gray fans. The foreboding atmosphere builds with tension wonderfully, and there’s a raw emotional undercurrent of power in the final scene that puts the entire film into a perspective in a way that only cinema can.

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Martin McDonagh returns after four years with Wild Horse Nine, starring John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell and Steve Buscemi, screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival. A perfect trio of actors and McDonagh’s usual writing wit are not enough to put this in the same league as The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) or Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017).

The Review

Having had his start as a playwright, it’s no surprise that the screenplay is the bedrock of Martin McDonagh film and Wild Horse Nine is no exception. Out of this source springs the entire fountain. And because McDonagh is a master scribe and a brilliant writer of dialogue, his movies are mostly carried by the actors; the more solid the script, the more solid the performances. That’s why his actors often shine in ways that end up on career highlight reels. John Malkovich now joins the likes of Sam Rockwell (as seen in Three Billboards), Frances McDormand (Three Billboards) and Colin Farrell (Banshees of Inisherin) in the category of having a role-of-a-lifetime written that only they could bring to life on screen.

Watching Malkovich chew up the scenery with McDonagh’s dialogue as a weary CIA veteran who’s seen too much and killed too many is an endless delight. He practically steals every scene he’s in, which is saying something because Rockwell is equally excellent as the conflicted and confused Lee Chesterfield. It’s difficult to pick just one scene that stands out but a conversation at breakfast in which Chris describes the correlation between gays and cheese in Western democracies is especially outrageous and hilarious. Buscemi completes the triangle as the cantankerous station chief who hates Chris’s guts (the feeling, of course, is mutual).

Wild Horse Nine also uses its unique setting of Easter Island well. With its monolithic figurehead statues and beautiful wild horses that become a fixation for Chris as the twilight of his life fast approaches, the opportunity for beautiful compositions and frames isn’t wasted. That alone, next to Malkovich, is worth the price of admission to catch this film on the biggest screen you can find.

There is, however, something of a bad aftertaste underneath all the sardonic wit and wink-wink-nudge-nudge playfulness with these characters. I got the feeling that the attitude to the general role of the CIA as democracy-destabilizer, and the more specific role of the biggest conspiracy of the 20th century which becomes pivotal to the story, was pretty flippant. And that flattened the whole experience for me.

There’s another thing that’s sorely missing from this story compared to McDonagh’s more accomplished films. I had a hard time caring for these characters. Yes, they’re funny and fascinating, but they’re not good people. And even with Chris, the film’s emotional epicenter, I struggled to find the empathy that was necessary for the story to fully resonate.

So it’s with a heavy heart as a big McDonagh fan that I proclaim Wild Horse Nine a mixed bag in the grand scheme of things, even though it’s A+ in the shits and giggles department.

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• All of a Sudden - LFF 2026 Review

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Ryūsuke Hamaguchi continues his tremendous streak with All of a Sudden, starring Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival. This profound story of two soulmates left me speechless, teary-eyed, and made me fall in love with the power of cinema as if for the first time.

The Review

All of a Sudden is the movie that 2026 desperately needs. In a world plagued by senseless wars, grotesque crimes against humanity, fear of new pandemics, anxiety over machine takeovers, and the general degradation of a global rules-based order and Western moral values, it’s no wonder that the trend in cinema has skewed towards a glass-half-empty worldview. We are living in a timeline in which Homer’s The Odyssey has been adapted as one long PTSD therapy session and has become one of the most commercially successful films in history. Nihilism seems to be the overriding protocol, no doubt. And that’s why watching a movie like All of a Sudden feels like drinking the antidote right before the poison is able to take full effect.

The film is directed with impossibly effervescent care by the wonderful Japanese humanist-philosopher-director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, and has that cinéma vérité feel without the hand-held shakiness and improvised acting. Efira and Okamoto are a match made in heaven’s screen chemistry lab; both embodying their characters so completely that you end up walking out of the breezy three-hour encounter feeling like you’ve just met two real-life people that you, all of a sudden, care very deeply about.

Films like this are a rare breed; doing a capsule review during a festival, while having a Thai horror film you saw 2 hours ago stuck in your head, feels like a disservice. Marie-Lou and Mari’s all-nighter conversations are perpetual springs of thoughtful reflections; the nurses, caregivers, patients and families of patients at the nursing home are an entire universe onto themselves. All of it seems impossible to capture on film, and yet it is. One of the main themes in the story is the idea of making something impossible possible, which is exactly what the mere existence of a film like All of a Sudden feels like. Miraculous is the word that comes to mind.

There is, however, a small niggle. An academic dissection of capitalism that borders on self-righteousness in the second act that I struggle with. It sticks out like a fallen tree that disturbs the natural flow of a river, but it’s a temporary disturbance and the river continues to flow generously until the, emotionally charged and satisfying, end.

There’s so much more I’d love to write because this is the kind of film that will stay with me for years, probably forever, but that’s for another time. For now, I’ll end with one of my favorite lines from the film:

By helping others we avoid hurting ourselves.

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No matter how raw, genuine and human a movie’s themes are, something else is necessary for attention and curiosity to be sustained; a compelling visual language. At the risk of sounding too academic, if a film fails to find some kind of beauty in the ugliness of the world its depicting, momentum starts to drag and the audience starts to mentally check out, regardless of how strong the story’s core is. That’s exactly the affliction plaguing Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure.

Only a few masters have figured out the difficult trick of finding beauty in ugliness (Tsai Ming-liang, Andrei Tarkovsky, Emir Kusturica come to mind), and it’s a trick that would’ve served Grisebach well here, but that’s not to say that there’s absolutely no beauty in The Dreamed Adventure. Far from it.

The film is carried by the conversations the characters have, filled with poignant remembrances of a life once lived and weighed down by the heavy burdens left behind for the younger generation to carry. The dialogue is so simple and so real that it doesn’t feel scripted, and because of that it manages to scratch at something essential and distinctly human; the pangs of regret, fatigue and nostalgia of lived experience.

There’s beauty in the performances too, a full ensemble of interesting, weary faces that have lived through all sorts of pain. Radeva leads this troupe with great composure, her wonderful smile is the brightest light in a dimmed-out world, and Syuleyman Alilov Letifov has the kind of OG bandit ruggedness that gives credence to the western label some have attached to this movie.

Fascinating faces, confident performances, powerfully simple dialogue and some apt archeological symbolism aside, The Dreamed Adventure suffers the fate of being a drag. Grisebach fails to find the visual beauty in the film’s desolate environment and decrepit mise en scène. Ultimately, this oppressively drab aesthetic buries an otherwise good story a bit too deep.

Quirky and tender, the two most prominent tones that color Josef Kubota Wladyka’s Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! don’t always play well together in this odd duck of a film, but they ultimately mesh well enough for you to watch the final credits roll with the biggest grin on your face. The main source of joy is Kikuchi’s committed performance as the titular booty shaker, a woman that’s very easy to love because of her infectious love of dancing and gentle nature that just radiates kindness.

Apart from Kikuchi’s endearing and magnetic performance, Wladyka explores a lot of interesting avenues here, most poignantly the steady, difficult but inevitable act of moving on after a loved ones dies. Ha-Chan’s entire world falls apart and while it does take one too many bizarre turns I wasn’t always on board with, the script ultimately does an impressive job of balancing the tragicomic journey of self re-discovery she embarks on.

Something else I found particularly strong in Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! (apart from its glorious title) is the organic way the film represents different cultures, and cultural clashes. Japanese tradition, reverence and offbeat sense of humor meets Latin passion, unpredictability and exuberance and they make for strange, combustable bedfellows. Not only is it very entertaining to watch but there’s something beautifully universal about the message underneath. Life is messy, and we’re all in it together. The challenge is to find the joy in the mess.

It’s refreshing to watch a film in 2026 that actually celebrates life. This one also gets bonus points for reminding anyone not paying attention that the Cranberries are one of the best bands in history.

Oh, my life is changing everyday
In every possible way…

A singer and a piano. That’s the subject matter of Anderson’s latest motion picture, a concert film. And the result is like a mythical crystal found in some ancient cinematic cave that belongs to no space or time. Devoid of any politics or cultural lectures (an honor PTA’s most recent actual-movie, One Battle After Another, sadly does not share), Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall is a purified experience. Winter’s commanding cadence and hypnotic piano harmonies take most of the transcendence credits, and you couldn’t be blamed if you watched this one with eyes closed, but lovers of textured cinematography, and the inimitable grains of 35mm and 16mm film, need to keep their eyes wide open to feel the full sensory blast.

It’s impossible to pigeon hole a singer-songwriter like Cameron Winter, who was 23 years old when he preformed this solo act but has the aura of a timeless vampire with an ancient soul. The recording will be released in three days, October 9, and needless to say I highly recommend it. Lyrics filled with poetic contradictions — “the Devil will love you to death if you let him” — and deeply emotional by their very nature thanks to Winter’s elastic and erratic baritone; there’s definitely a big Bob Dylan meets Thom Yorke by way of Elvis Presley vibe in Winter. It’s all soul.

The camera work, some of which is handled by co-producer Bennie Safdie, and editing is exceptional and clearly directed by a master. Multiple perspectives and vantage points, multiple formats as the frames switch from grainy 35mm to grainier 16mm, are all experimented with for a completely felt experience. From one specific stage-POV angle, New York’s iconic Carnegie Hall venue has the look of a perfectly-lit spaceship in a dark galaxy, hovering at attention over the star on the piano. A frame I found quite serendipitous for this outer-body, outer-world experience.

— Virgil, Aeneid

A radically modernized revision of a timeless tale — ideologically twisted and transformed — lurks inside Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. It rushes out and assaults those who expected a faithful adaptation of a story that survived 2,700 years, mercilessly cutting down anyone who cherishes Homer’s epic poem. As exhilarating as it is, you’re left feeling that you’ve just witnessed an audacious act of artistic plunder.

Like the Trojans, those who walked out of the cinema with slumped shoulders and bemused expressions perhaps shouldn’t have been so surprised. In hindsight, the film’s marketing was filled with ominous portents, and its culturally ahistorical casting clearly foreshadowed the vision we were met with. As for myth and magic — the stuff that colors the original poem with ineffaceable wonder and creativity — Nolan showed his hand when he openly discussed the need to crack the “approach to mythological elements in a sort of real-world way.”1

Those who thought Nolan’s The Odyssey would be authentically grounded in the Late Bronze Age of Homer’s poem were fools.

Still, Nolan earned the benefit of the doubt even amid all these ill winds and storm clouds. After all, this is a filmmaker known for his tactile realism and habit of recruiting experts to ground even his most fantastical films in the “real-world way” of the worlds they depict. Most famously, he worked with theoretical physicist Kip Thorne to keep the science in Interstellar (2014) and speculative mechanics in Tenet (2020) believable, historian Joshua Levine to accurately reconstruct the evacuation in Dunkirk (2017), and physicist David Saltzberg to keep the nuclear science exact in Oppenheimer (2023).

That he chose not to consult a classicist, Homer scholar, Ancient Greek historian, or Bronze Age archaeologist for The Odyssey is perhaps the clearest sign that Nolan was not very interested in a faithful adaptation or recreation of 12th-century BC Greece. In fact, an expert has publicly flayed the film. Emily Wilson, whose translation has become the defining contemporary English version of The Odyssey — and one Nolan himself referenced — wrote a brutally honest review2 that reads like a 4,000-word Mortal Kombat fatality. It’s worth quoting the full paragraph that lit the internet on fire:

Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbors. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.

All of this points to The Odyssey being Nolan’s most controversial film to date — one that launched a thousand questions. But more on those later.

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The final act of The Odyssey, when the weary hero returns to Ithaca and reclaims his household, finds Nolan operating at the peak of his signature powers for propulsive storytelling. The mixing and editing of image, sound and dialogue are in glorious sync as the buildup to Odysseus’ final monologue gathers furious momentum. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, composer Ludwig Göransson and editor Jennifer Lame work in hydra-like harmony to conjure that special only-from-a-Nolan-movie feeling of exhilarating spectacle.

Within these sequences, Robert Pattinson outshines the film’s entire cast as the malevolent, cowardly suitor Antinous — the film’s primary villain — and makes an indelible contribution to the orchestral composition of the act. Most potently, tucked into this crescendo of events lies what is perhaps the emotional pinnacle of Nolan’s entire filmography to date. It’s the briefest of moments: Odysseus’ old hunting dog, Argos, becomes the first to recognize his master and manages one final, weak wag of his tail. It’s a moment the movie has been building toward since the beginning of the movie, through effective flashbacks of Argos the puppy and Argos the loyal hunting companion, and it lands like a heavyweight blow to the gut as Nolan’s finest act of fealty to Homer.

The film has a few other splendid moments, particularly Odysseus’ and his crew’s encounter with the sorceress-goddess Circe, played by an unnervingly menacing Samantha Morton, who devours every second of her short screen time with the appetite of a starved veteran. When Circe welcomes the men into her house, there is a near-imperceptible shift in time and space as the atmosphere morphs from warm hospitality to grotesque horror through some remarkable sleight-of-hand editing and blocking. The movie shifts gears into a whole other genre for the next few minutes, and it’s gloriously messy, disturbing and unlike anything Nolan has ever directed. Morton, the linchpin of the entire sequence, shape-shifts from humble host to wicked witch in ways that put her in a league next to only Pattinson and far above the rest of the cast.

The director’s loyalty to celluloid is a very welcome part of his brand, and his name has almost become synonymous with IMAX. So, water is wet, the sky is blue, and the most recent Nolan film is technically spectacular. Filmed entirely with IMAX 65mm cameras, The Odyssey uses the scale, scope and intimacy of the frame in all their splendor to really make you feel the texture of the world on screen. You wince at the swords as if they’re about to land on your neck, smell the stink of the men suffocating inside the Trojan Horse, and taste the salt of the freezing ocean water as waves crash into Odysseus’ ship.

And yet, as a devout Nolanite for the last two decades — my own Ultimate Guide to Christopher Nolan’s Movies a testament to that devotion — it is not without considerable pain that I admit The Odyssey, as great a ride as it is on the surface and on a sensory level, did not leave me with the familiar buzz I get after total transportation. For the first time, in fact, it felt like the reactor core powering an explosive Christopher Nolan spectacle was fueled not by storytelling but by something else.

Distraction, distortion and dissonance ripple through the experience from beginning to end.

I. Distraction — Familiar Strangers

“Perhaps you've heard of Helen? Face that launched a thousand ships.”

[Shows her scarred face]

“Maybe now just five hundred.”

— Menelaus, The Odyssey (2026)

Christopher Nolan knew exactly what he was doing when he cast Lupita Nyong’o in the dual roles of Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, Elliot Page as Sinon, the Greek soldier dubbed “the bravest of them all”, rapper Travis Scott as a nameless bard in Ithaca who recites the opening lines of the film, and Himesh Patel as Odysseus’ second-in-command Eurylochus. By choosing to make a subversive meta point about the makeup of Western civilization today, he deliberately pulls the audience out of the story they are watching.3

Every time one of these actors appears on screen — regardless of their undeniable talent or commitment to their roles — one can’t help but feel distracted, thrown out of Homer’s world and into whatever liminal space lies between it and 21st-century expectations of representation that seem to interest Nolan more. It is distraction by design. Sinon doesn’t appear in Homer’s epic poem at all, yet by the end of Nolan’s adaptation he emerges as one of the film’s moral epicenters. Helen of Troy stands out not simply because she is a Greek character played by a Kenyan actress, but because Nolan draws even more attention to that visual dissonance by having Menelaus scar her face, effectively “uglifying” the most beautiful woman in Western literature. Her Helen is also remorseful and subdued, a choice that feels deliberately at odds with the mythic, arrogant, proudly defiant figure Homer gives us.

There are even stranger dislocations than that. A particularly surreal scene features Eurylochus confronting a villager whose language he doesn’t understand. A translator explains the villager’s words to him, only for Patel’s Eurylochus to respond in frustration that the man should not fear them because they, too, are Greeks. The language the villager was speaking all along? Greek.

The scene, like Helen’s scar, Sinon’s exaltation and the choice to open the movie with a rapper from Texas, is symptomatic of the film’s larger problem of distraction. Rather than being fully transported into the “real-world way” of the story on screen, the audience is repeatedly made aware of the real world off screen by the modern machinations of Nolan’s adaptation. It’s like watching a theater play with the curtains pulled back to expose the backstage, all the ropes, levers and pulleys laid bare. The spell of storytelling is repeatedly broken. We’re not watching Homer’s world; we’re watching Nolan watching Homer’s world.

The other cast members also play their parts in distracting the audience, but not for the same reasons. The film is littered with megastars playing dress-up. The likes of John Leguizamo (as the blind and loyal old man Eumaeus) and Mia Goth (Penelope’s not-so-loyal maiden Melantho) do the best they can with the meager material they’re given, but the marquee A-listers carrying the greatest responsibility for the story ultimately fail to convince because they do not disappear into their roles.

Matt Damon has made a wonderful career out of playing outsiders, tricksters and fast-talking high-IQ manipulators (The Informant!, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Rounders, etc.). Nolan’s script would’ve served him better by tapping into those aspects of Homer’s Odysseus more, because that’s when Damon shines and is most entertaining to watch. Instead, for most of the movie, the audience is asked to buy him as a returning warrior-king, leader of men, and great military commander. Damon simply doesn’t have the charisma and aura to pull that off. He is far more convincing in the final act, when he’s disguised as a beggar and glimpses of Jason Bourne appear, than he ever is as Odysseus leading his men or as Calypso’s traumatized prisoner.

The other big stars — Theron, Holland, Zendaya (who plays the goddess Athena with her signature scowl that becomes a distraction of its own) and Jon Bernthal (as Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus) — can’t shake their stardom. Ironically enough, a few weeks after the The Odyssey’s release, Holland, Zendaya and Bernthal appeared much more at home when they reprised their Marvel roles in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Oppenheimer worked brilliantly in part because Cillian Murphy had never carried a movie of that size as the lead. John David Washington was a casting masterstroke as the Protagonist in Tenet because of his relative anonymity. For Dunkirk, Nolan deliberately chose Fionn Whitehead as the central British private Tommy “so that the audience could feel the reality of the situation without any movie star distractions.”4 Other than Morton, Pattinson and a small handful of other familiar faces in minor roles, the rest of the cast is a parade of movie-star distractions.

Anne Hathaway walks away as the one who commits most fully, though she should have been reined in on more than one occasion and reminded that she’s not on stage but in front of a camera — an IMAX one at that. Worse than that, though, is how her Penelope is reduced to little more than a grieving woman yearning for her husband’s return. This strips one of the poem’s strongest female characters of much of her intelligence, agency and cunning.

That speaks to a larger issue, one that lies beneath the distractions of casting and performances: a screenplay that wants to have Homer’s cake and eat it too, even as the head baker is busy baking an entirely different one.

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II. Distortion — Ancient Modernity

"Ten years on this fucking beach. Let's go home!"

— Odysseus, The Odyssey (2026)

Much of the discomfort and unease that permeates The Odyssey can be traced to its screenplay — adapted by Nolan himself. This turns out to be more curse than gift, not only because screenwriting is Nolan’s Achilles heel but because, in his dogged pursuit to satisfy modern audience sensibilities, his script dies from a thousand modern cuts. Whether it’s Telemachus referring to his father as “Dad”, Odysseus dropping F-bombs on the beach, or that horribly on-the-nose line that has now become a meme — “our age of Bronze is collapsing” — the dialogue too often feels written for the audience to hear rather than the characters to speak. The jarring thing is that these anachronistic lines are part of the same script that contains moments of startling Homeric lyricism, like Odysseus’ poetic description of the Sirens’ song or the very formal conversation he has with Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) in the underworld.

At times, the film isn’t sure whether it wants to be a modernized adaptation or a faithful recreation. Baz Luhrmann’s Rome + Juliet (1996) works because it’s very clearly set in a modern world even though the characters all speak Shakespearean English. The Odyssey is the inverse of that: a modern voice transplanted into Homer’s world of giants, monsters and gods. Except it’s not always a modern voice, and the relationship between gods and men is reduced to little more than a psychological device. Athena brings none of the power or commanding presence she has in the poem; the goddess of strategic warfare and wisdom is diminished to a figment of Odysseus’ traumatized imagination, the personification of his coping mechanism. Yet another strike against Nolan’s ability to write interesting women.

The moral heart of Nolan’s reinterpretation, however, is in the right place. Songs of heroic fame and glory passed down through generations should serve as cautionary tales about men losing their moral compass and the civilizational collapse that inevitably follows. To serve this idea to modern palates, Nolan simplifies the complex Ancient Greek code of hospitality known as xenia — presented as Zeus’ Law in the movie — into the Golden Rule of treating others the way you wish to be treated.

Military commanders like Odysseus are revered as heroes when in reality, Nolan suggests, they were more likely broken men, hollowed out by the trauma of war, eaten away from within by guilt and regret. All of this is revealed quite matter-of-factly through Odysseus’ final monologue, that admittedly contains some of the best lines in the film.

The message is clear, it sticks the landing, and it resonates on a profound level today. We are currently living through times when foolish, power-hungry leaders wage wars without any thought for the moral cost, while the international laws and institutions meant to hold Western civilization together are broken, dismantled or ignored. In that sense, Nolan’s The Odyssey is very topical.

The trouble is that this somber, serious, reflective tone becomes the film’s overarching preoccupation. Nolan zeroes in on the darkest, most melancholic thread running through Homer's epic and weaves an entire tapestry out of it, discarding the multitude of beautiful and complex threads that have made the original so wondrous. In doing so, he compresses The Odyssey into a single emotional register, flattening one of the richest works of Western literature into a meditation on trauma and guilt.

The distortion is especially pronounced when you compare the vitality of the original Odyssey, which bursts with life, color, humor, cosmic chaos, and messy humanity, to Nolan’s sterile treatment. His stated “approach to mythological elements in a sort of real-world way” is a prime example. Odysseus’ episodes with the Cyclops, the Sirens and the six-headed sea monster Scylla are all rendered with the same rushed, colorless brushstroke, as though the script is simply going through the motions.

The Cyclops becomes a sad, unintelligible giant; the Sirens occupy the screen for barely half a minute, with Odysseus’ reasons for binding himself to the mast drowned out by impatient editing; and Scylla is reduced to a faceless CGI rock monster on loan from the set of a bad Flintstones adaptation. The vivid imagination that breathed life into these mythical creatures in the original poem is smothered on screen in a “real-world way” that says nothing good about our real-world ways.

Taken individually, these distortions might amount to little more than the compulsory compromises of adaptation. Taken together, they create something harder to reconcile: the jarring effect of trying to fit a modern square peg into an ancient round hole. There’s a persistent dissonance between the world Nolan recreates and the worldview he places inside it.

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III. Dissonance — Catastrophic Success

“We used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars; now, we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

— Cooper, Interstellar (2014)

The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan’s first adaptation of a major literary classic, and one can’t help but walk away from it hoping it’s his last. Distraction — by way of star-filled and subversive (mis-)casting — and distortion — born from the collision between the world Nolan is writing and the world he’s adapting — work in tandem to suck the wondrous spirit out of the original poem. And once you drain The Odyssey of its wonder, you’re left with a felt absence that hollows out the experience from the inside. No matter how magnificent and rich it appears on the surface, a lingering dissonance drums beneath.

In my Ultimate Guide, I write:

Christopher Nolan is special because he’s the guy who built the strongest bridge between thought-provoking cinema and box-office entertainment.

The “box-office entertainment” end of the bridge has only been strengthened by The Odyssey. At the time of writing, the movie has grossed just over a gargantuan $1.6 billion worldwide, becoming Nolan’s highest-grossing film, the highest-grossing R-rated film in history, and one of the 20 highest-grossing films of all time. Only The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) can compete once you adjust for average movie-ticket prices.

Fans of Nolan’s The Odyssey point to its commercial success as vindication, conveniently forgetting an axiom as old as the blockbuster itself: ticket sales are proof of appeal, not artistic merit. In this case, the appeal isn’t just the biggest director in the world returning after the Academy Award and box-office triumph of Oppenheimer with an even more star-studded cast; it’s the biggest director in the world adapting one of the oldest, most beloved and influential works of literature ever written. Nolan brought people to Homer, but Homer also brought people to Nolan.

Since we’re not dealing with original ideas, historical events or real-life biographies, the film’s artistry has to be weighed on the scales of adaptation. For anyone who has never read or heard of The Odyssey before watching Nolan’s film (Lupita Nyong’o, take a bow),5 ignorance truly is bliss. But for people who love and admire Homer’s original epic poem, Nolan’s adaptation takes on the dimensions of an artistic catastrophe. It’s eerily appropriate that The Odyssey is Nolan’s thirteenth film; like any true-to-form unlucky number thirteen, it disrupts the flow of one of contemporary cinema's most remarkable filmographies. And even though The Odyssey thematically follows the end-of-world fixation so central to its two predecessors, it feels like an abrupt left turn from the path Tenet and Oppenheimer had naturally laid out. It’s an outlier defined by cinematic dissonance, ringing out from an entire parade of paradoxes.

The film is commercially successful yet artistically vapid; an R-rated spectacle that sanitizes its source material of all the sexual coercion, dismemberment, cannibalism, mutilation, mass slaughter and executions6; a mythological epic that distrusts its own mythology; an ancient world populated by conspicuously modern minds; a three-hour epic that somehow feels rushed; a story about one of literature’s great tricksters, starring an actor who excels at playing them, with hardly any trickery on display; a film overflowing with grandiosity yet starved of the original poem’s wonder; a faithful reinterpretation that is, in too many essential ways, a profoundly unfaithful adaptation.

Perhaps the biggest paradox of all is that Nolan, by his own admission, felt liberated after the success of Oppenheimer and finally had the opportunity to tackle The Odyssey in the way he always wanted to.7 But instead of subverting narrative mechanisms by toying with time and space inside the world of the story — something he has done so wonderfully in his very best movies — he directs his subversive instincts outside it. He flips one of the foundational texts of the Western literary canon like a pancake: writes self-aware dialogue, diminishes the role of the gods, psychologizes its mythology, modernizes its morality, and bends its characters toward contemporary sensibilities.

Given the freedom to reinvent The Odyssey, Nolan instead chooses to reinvent Homer, writing and directing an adaptation in spite of him rather than in his spirit.

IV. Coda — A Thousand Questions

“Art is born of constraint, thrives on struggle, and dies in freedom.”

— André Gide, “The Evolution of the Theater” (1904)

In a February 2024 interview8, after the success of Oppenheimer, the subject of art and money came up. The interviewer referenced the André Gide line directly, asking Nolan whether he had ever struggled to reconcile himself with an excess of freedom as his budgets grew and the scale of his films expanded. Nolan dismissed the premise, and the first part of his answer is worth quoting in full:

Oh, no. The wonderful thing about large-scale filmmaking, in my experience, is it’s exactly the same as a tiny-scale independent movie; you never have enough time, you never have enough money for whatever it is you’re trying to do. It’s the nature of budgeting: you chase your own tail, so if they give you more money, you try and do more. Everything Emma and I have ever done, our philosophy’s always been to take the money and put it on the screen. So, we don’t waste money pampering movie stars, or whatever.

The irony practically unspools itself. Nolan had $250 million worth of freedom to finally direct The Odyssey his way, and the end result is a “less is more” approach populated by quite a few pampered movie stars. It would seem that adapting The Odyssey on his own terms meant, above all, having enough money to film the entire thing with IMAX cameras. Was Nolan’s idea of tackling this epic story on his own terms ultimately just about expanding the scope of its production, not the scope of the story itself? With so many possibilities, avenues and themes of the poem left unexplored in the film, the answer is disappointingly clear.

I wouldn’t go quite as far as Gide and pronounce the artistry of Nolan’s cinema dead, but The Odyssey has certainly given it a good thrashing. Maybe, after repeat viewings of the film and readings of the poem, something deeper and more profound about Nolan’s revisionist approach will crystallize — something beyond the sheer spectacle of it, something that resembles the cerebral work of the man behind Tenet, Interstellar and Inception. Alas, after letting it brew in my mind for two months, the stripped-down, postmodern, self-aware version of The Odyssey still feels too reductive.

That’s not to say it hasn’t sparked a healthy amount of discourse. One fascinating lens through which to view the film emerges in one of the best interviews Nolan has done on the press tour.9 The conversation begins with the topic of civilizational perspective — Homer wrote The Odyssey some 400 years after the events it depicts; Nolan adapts it 3,000 years later — and to the stark difference between the tone of the poem (celebratory) and the film (funereal). Nolan admits this gap fascinates him and more or less says he adapted Homer with modern audience expectations front of mind.

Both Homer and Nolan inherited Odysseus from another era and remade him in the image of their own. In that sense, Nolan is something of a modern-day rhapsode, continuing an ancient tradition of reshaping a story that was sung by generations of different voices before taking the written form in which we know it today. But where that tradition expanded The Odyssey, Nolan’s modern improvisation contracts it. Homer modernized through accumulation; Nolan modernizes through reduction.

What also becomes evident from Nolan’s answers in this interview is that he appears less interested in adapting The Odyssey as it is written than in adapting what The Odyssey has come to represent. He moves through the major landmarks of Homer’s narrative, but the real lead feels less like Odysseus than The Odyssey itself, cast in the role of foundational text of Western literature and survivor of three millennia, perpetually questioning its own place within the Western canon and what that inheritance means today. It’s as if The Odyssey itself has broken the fourth wall to address us while all the other characters continue playing their parts, oblivious to what is happening around them.

It is the cultural object, not Homer’s story, that Nolan sets about reinterpreting — diversifying the ethnicity of the characters, psychologizing its mythology, modernizing its morality and filtering its ancient worldview through our own cultural sensibilities. This mechanism is evident. “To be able to identify the mechanism does not invalidate the mechanism,” Nolan explains in the same interview. “People have this idea that because I can understand why the story affects me the way it is therefore it didn’t work. That’s not how storytelling works.”

But what happens when the mechanism becomes so laborious and self-evident that it fails to affect us? Nolan is right that seeing why a story affects us needn’t stop it from working, but surely that depends on the story retaining its power to transport us in spite of the visible mechanism. The world on screen has to remain compelling enough for us to surrender to the illusion, be transported, and stop caring that we see the pulleys, levers and ropes behind it. But how can we surrender when the world on screen is not a portal into a mythical Bronze Age but a mirror, continually reflecting our own world’s sensibilities back at us? Rather than let us get lost in the fiction and contemplate its meanings afterwards, we are expected to surrender and contemplate simultaneously.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” ring Shakespeare’s eternal words. “The stage’s all the world, and all the players are merely men and women,” Nolan appears to reply.

My attempt at examining the imbalance, uncertainty and clashing impulses inherent in Nolan’s reimagining of The Odyssey launches a thousand questions. Is Nolan implying that, because Western civilization is teetering toward collapse, we don’t deserve the effervescence and grandiosity of Homer’s verse in the form of a faithful, Lord of the Rings-style, three-part, twelve-hour cinematic adaptation? Is he treating The Odyssey as a cultural artifact rather than an epic poem because the distance between our world and Homer’s has become too great, or because he thinks Homer no longer speaks to our world as directly as he once did? Why does he believe modern audiences need to have mythology rationalized in order to connect with a story from an ancient time? How far can an adaptation fundamentally alter the chemistry of its source before it ceases to feel like an adaptation and becomes a reinvention?

Does Nolan actually enjoy The Odyssey?

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In the tempestuous sea of contradiction, ambivalence and underwhelming undercurrents that shape my feelings about this film, I cling to whatever life rafts I can find to save the Nolan fan in me from drowning. For all my struggles with his narrative choices, the final act of the film and the Circe sequence are, as spectacles of image and sound, magnificent. I will try to watch the film one more time in cinemas for those moments alone.

The film is also indisputably an extraordinary commercial success. In the month and a half or so I spent writing this essay, the film jumped from #19 to #14 on the all-time worldwide box-office list. And it’s not done yet. Anything that gets people back into cinemas to experience the magic of movies deserves its flowers — even a film that sucks much of the magic out of the material it adapts.

The greatest gift of all, however, is also its most wonderful paradox: what it may have done for Homer. Thanks in no small part to Christopher Nolan’s own mythic status as a filmmaker, The Odyssey reignited interest in the poem: book sales skyrocketed10, and despite the adaptation’s many flaws and subversive choices, the film will undoubtedly become a gateway through which multitudes discover the beauty and wonder of the original.

Perhaps we would still do well to beware of great filmmakers bearing gifts. Perhaps our imperfect world deserves an imperfect adaptation of a poem that may itself be too exuberant for our dreary times. And if the reactor core powering this Christopher Nolan spectacle was not, as I argued at the beginning, storytelling itself, perhaps I finally understand what it was: one filmmaker’s idea of what The Odyssey needs to represent for a modern audience in 2026. Fixating on that, rather than the true spirit of the poem, hollowed out the experience for those already familiar with the source material, but it may yet send others searching for the missing depth inside.

If Nolan’s Odyssey never quite finds its way home to Homer, perhaps its greatest achievement will be leading countless members of its audience there.

The 79th edition of the most prestigious film festival in the world is well underway, with nearly a third of the films in Competition already screened and on the grid. The ferocious pace of the Cannes Film Festival can only be matched by the nostalgic weight of the monstrous FOMO I’m feeling. It’s been almost a decade since I was last at Cannes myself, and while I don’t miss the grotesque queues, the unforgiving heat, the sleep deprivation or the ingrained elitism, I definitely miss watching new films from revered arthouse masters and discovering arthouse gems from new-to-me filmmakers.

This article is my way of coping. Personal life stuff has kept me away from the site and movies in general these past few months, so this could also be a good way to defibrillate the dormant cinephile in me. If I was at the Croisette this year, 10 movies vying for the prize more golden than the Oscar, and that still haven’t screened, would excite me the most. But first, a few confessions.

Confession #1: To make things easier, I’ve narrowed the scope to only the Palme d’Or nominees. I have no doubt that, just like almost every year, Cannes will deliver some knockouts from the other columns - ‘Un Certain Regarde’ is notoriously fertile ground for wonderful discoveries - but I wanted to get this piece out ASAP, so I’m only looking at the competition.

Confession #2: Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales was part of the original list because Farhadi is a bonafide master who rarely misses and A Separation (2011) is a masterpiece, but his latest opened to abysmal reviews before I had a chance to write this article so my anticipation fell off a cliff. The alternate came in at #10.

Confession #3: There are two films that were part of the original list from the start, but that have already screened, and that I couldn’t remove from the list for the same reason I removed Parallel Tales. Namely, the positive response to them have made me anticipate them even more and removing them would’ve felt disingenuous.

And so with that, my 10 most anticipated Cannes 2026 Palme d’Or nominees are…

10. Another Day (dir. Jeanne Herry)

I deliberately wanted to pick a few wild cards because that’s a huge part of the beauty of festivals - pleasant surprises from unexpected films. This is giving me A Woman Under the Influence (1974) meets Smashed (2012) vibes, and Adèle Exarchopoulos (Blue is the Warmest Colour) is a magnetic on-screen presence and with the right material can help you get get lost, and found again, in an ocean of emotion. Jeanne Herry would’ve been a discovery for me, but my Spidey sense is tingling around this being one of those hidden gems packing a powerhouse performance.

9. The Beloved (dir. Rodrigo Sorogoyen)

Another shot in the dark in terms of directors, but I simply wouldn’t be able to resist a film that basically sounds like Spanish Sentimental Value (a.k.a. the best film of 2025). To top it off it’s Javier Bardem in Spanish (a.k.a. the best Bardem) and it has all the makings of being a fascinating exploration of fragile family ties intertwined with the messy magic of making movies.

Extra brownie points for the film’s PR team, which has given download access to the film’s full press kit in English. Muy bien.

8. The Unknown (dir. Arthur Harari)

This could really backfire on me because if not executed well it could end up as a poor man’s Black Mirror episode or some kind of failed ode to David Cronenberg. But Harari co-wrote Anatomy of a Fall for which he deservedly won an Oscar, so he knows how to execute to perfection. At least in the writer’s room. The cast led by the excellent Léa Seydoux also featured whacky Romanian director Radu Jude so that just makes me even more intrigued.

7. Fatherland (dir. Paweł Pawlikowski)

I didn’t love Pawlikowski’s Cold War (2018), and I adore crisp black and white cinematography as much as anyone, but this one has a few more things going for it despite my WW2 fatigue. For one, Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall, Zone of Interest) is on a roll and she really knows how to pick them. And as a student of literature and history, with a copy of The Magic Mountain staring at me from my bookshelf dying to be read one day, I wouldn’t be able to resist.

Also, this is one of the films that have already screened to thunderously positive reviews, so of course I want to see it even more now.

6. Coward (dir. Lukas Dhont)

Lukas Dhont’s Close (2022) is a magnificent film so his next one was always going to be on my radar. Coupled with the fact that this takes a look at WW1 - a far less beaten path than its more popular sequel - and that it tackles one of the most interesting psychological themes in my wheelhouse, coping with trauma through art, I was always going to be looking forward to this one. The only thing I’m not looking forward to is the amount of times critics will play with the phrase ‘theatre of war’.

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5. Fjord (dir. Cristian Mungiu)

How anyone can look at Sebastian Stan in that still and not immediately want to watch the film, I don’t know. Of course it’s not just Stan, who is really putting all of his MCU buddies to shame with the projects and director’s he’s picking, but the mesmerising Renate Reinsve and the Romanian master Cristian Mungiu who together make up a truly impressive and exciting creative trio. The story and location are also ingredients for a potential masterstroke.

4. Paper Tiger (dir. James Gray)

James Gray is easily one of the best American filmmakers working today. While Armageddon Time (2022) wasn’t anywhere near his best effort, everything that came before it - from Ad Astra (2019) to The Immigrant (2013) and beyond - is exquisite filmmaking, supercharged with emotional nuance and gravitas that’s quite unlike anything else. A new Gray film with a crime element and a cast featuring Adam Driver, Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson is, therefore, a no-brainer for this list.

3. All of a Sudden (dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)

Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021) is one of the best films of the century, and this is the second film that has already screened at Cannes to rave reviews. What else is there to say, really?

2. Minotaur (dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev)

For those who may not know, Andrey Zvyagintsev - whom I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing twice in Cannes, once for Leviathan (2014) and again for Loveless (2017) - almost died during Covid. Plans for an English-language film were scrapped (or put on hold? Not sure) so he is now, thankfully, back with another scathing allegorical tale of corruption and violence in his own backyard. Set in the same year Russia decided to do something about NATO and American meddling with Ukraine, I’m sure the film’s politics will be obvious but I simply do not care. Zvyagintsev is too much of master, easily one of the best in the business, and I cannot wait to hear news about this one.

1. Hope (dir. Na Hong-jin)

Finally, Na Hong-jin is back after The Wailing (2016) - one of the best horror films of the century - with Hope, which has all the markings of another insanely entertaining and chaotic ride. One of my proudest achievements as a critic was leading the buzz for The Wailing and getting a pull quote on the poster and trailer, so that sweet-n-salty wave of nostalgia is definitely playing a role here and bumping Hong-jin to number one.

Pull quotes or no, I would still be clamouring like a man possessed to get into the Palais on the day of this screening. To make things even more intriguing, Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander are part of the cast, playing characters called Ma’veyyo and J’aur. I need this. Now.

For a full look at the Competition lineup - including films from big names like Pedro Almodovar and László Nemes that didn’t meet my high anticipatory standards - visit the Cannes Film Festival’s official website.

It already feels like it’s been five years since last year with everything that’s been going on in the world, but the year 2025 in film is still very much front of mind. And what a year it was. Sure, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (both Vol.1 and Vol.2 as one film) trolled today’s sorry state of cinema as the best film released in theatres. But even as movies continue their steady decline in the 21st century, 2025 has done a lot of heavy lifting to try and flatten that downward curve.

One clear indication of how great of a year it’s been is the list of films that didn’t make the cut for my Top 20. Titles like Bugonia, Die My Love, Is This Thing On? No Other Choice, Blue Moon, A Useful Ghost and The Mastermind are all great, some even excellent, and, in some other year, they could’ve all made it in. Even big studio movies made for the most general audiences excelled. Superman was surprisingly great - a film I saw twice in theatres because it was so fun, embraces its comic book character and nature whole heartedly, and is more politically courageous than any film nominated for an Oscar. James Cameron’s third Avatar film was also an absolute treat to experience in IMAX 3D, and would’ve made the cut if it weren’t for the formulaic story.

What also strengthens my belief in the goodness of the year in film is that, on a personal note, I was able to properly attend and cover the London Film Festival. This made a huge difference in the quantity and quality of candidates for my list. Of the 30 films I saw at the festival, 12 made the cut.

So, in a year filled with films about grief, parenting, politics and cinema - a year where spirituality took on multiple dimensions, depression wore many masks, and the crossroads between adolescence and adulthood collided with growing up despite all efforts to the contrary - what were the best of the lot? Read on to find out.

20. 28 Years Later

Visceral, mercurial and filthy in ways that’ll make you want to take a decontamination shower, Danny Boyle’s return to his signature world plagued by zombies-on-meth is a primal scream that has echoed in my nightmares all year long.

It stretches the usual boundaries of conventional horror with the most out-of-the-box batshit contagious score of the year by Young Fathers, a gripping mother-son emotional core anchored by coming-of-age energy, Oscar-worthy editing, arresting cinematography, and an electric Ralph Fiennes who delivers one of the best supporting performances of the year. Bring on The Bone Temple!

19. Rose of Nevada

Mark Jenkin’s maritime-traveling 16MM experiment, about two boatmen who board the mysterious Rose of Nevada only to go back to the past, feels like it was pulled out of a vat of sludge and scraped off with seaweed. Whatever power it conveys, it’s the kind that can only be transferred through the medium of film. Its analogue texture makes it the grimiest film of the year, so if you’re after pretty aesthetics, you won’t find it here but the result is really something quite mesmeric.

The discomfort from unconventional means leads to comfort from metaphysical ends. Our relationship with the past and its relationship with us has rarely been confronted in such an audacious way.

18. Roofman

Derek Cianfrance doesn’t flex his directorial muscles to the limits he’s reached before with films like Place Beyond the Pines (2012) and Blue Valentine (2010), but there are still levels to Roofman that make it more profound than meets the eye.

The cast is remarkable - especially Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, who should be attending all of these awards shows as nominees right now - and the bizarre true story of Jeffrey Manchester builds up to an incredibly moving climax. Very entertaining and funny, and packed with stuff that makes the human condition such a wondrous, beautiful, oddity.

17. The Ice Tower

Get through the challenging first act of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s beguiling film and you’ll discover dark and mysterious corners of cinema that few directors have the talent to tap into. The story follows orphan-on-the-run Jeanne (Clara Pacini) who takes shelter in a film set of The Snow Queen and gets a little too close to its main star.

There is an indisputably Lynchian shiver that runs throughout this brooding coming-of-age movie that twists its cues from The Brothers Grimm but is really about obsession, voyeurism, infatuation and power. The raw power that the worst kinds of monsters in human clothing desire and believe they’re owed. Never meet your heroes has rarely felt so chilling an adage. Features Marion Cotillard’s most freighting - and fantastic - performance in years.

16. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

The pangs of single motherhood with all its horrors and joys (mostly horrors here) are tactfully, thrillingly depicted by director Mary Bronstein who has so much confidence in Rose Byrne that she gives her all the heavy lifting. And boy does Byrne lift. You’ve rarely seen acting range flexed like this, from darkly funny to painfully tragic and everything in between. She spars with Timothée Chalamet for best performance of 2025.

The beauty is that the script, editing, supporting cast and direction all sync up perfectly with Byrne to create a truly masterful experience of what it feels like, down to the core, of being a working parent in a stress-addled world.

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15. Miroirs No. 3

The liminal space in Christian Petzold’s mellow drama is like a hoarder’s attic — filled with a lifetime of pain and emotion. There’s a lot that’s left unsaid here, but thanks to the sophisticated direction and the measured performances, Miroirs No. 3 creates a sense of uncertainty and suspense that had me glued from start to finish. And with depression and post-personal tragedy resilience as the core themes here, it’s a real magic trick to pull that off.

In a year filled with films dealing with trauma and grief, Petzold’s is the most understated. As the title suggests, the power music has to unlock the emotional mystery boxes of our minds is also handled beautifully here. Listen out for Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons’ ‘The Night’ as one of the most effective uses of music in 2025.

14. Two Prosecutors

I’ve developed an allergy for the anti-Russian sentiment that has the entire UK under a spell, and when you’ve seen one Sergei Loznitsa film (be it documentary or fiction) you’ve seen them all in terms of his personal feelings about Russia under Putin.

Luckily, Two Prosecutors is an example of a brilliantly told story about ideals suffocated by the cold hands of totalitarianism that doesn’t make any overt attempts at drawing direct parallels to the modern world. It also gets my pick as the best cast film of the year, where every face is like a painted portrait of a different shade of life under tyranny.

13. Resurrection

The film that demands a second viewing more than any other on this list, Resurrection is not recommended for tired eyes. A near 3-hour science fiction epic that’s filled with history, Buddhist theology and a very literal love of cinema, where a woman enters the visions of a creature who still has the capacity to dream in a future where humanity has lost this ability. Through his multiple resurrections, she aims to uncover fragmented truths of the past. Wild, right?

In large enough parts, Resurrection left me in breathless awe of Bi Gan’s imagination, creativity and poetic talents as a filmmaker. His love of cinema, during the age of streamers and fledgling box office numbers, burns brightly and contagiously, as the sum of all the parts is one big magnificent ode to the wonder and magic of the moving image and sound. The final long take (a Gan signature), and the final image, is beyond astonishing. Embodiment trumps cognition, with a touch of the sublime, in Resurrection.

12. Eddington

As with the phantasmagorical, psychoanalytical nightmare Beau is Afraid (2023), Ari Aster proves that he’s ahead of the game with his latest. Compared to the more critically adored One Battle After Another - and the comparisons are bountiful - Eddington captures the contemporary political climate in a much more nuanced, sophisticated and multivalent way.

It also juggles a multitude of tones and genres while still feeling like a cohesive whole with a focused point about the absurdity of humanity we all collectively experienced during the pandemic. Needless to say the ensemble nails it, none more so than Joaquin Phoenix as the fumbling neurotic town sheriff, who reminds us why he’s one of our greats.

11. Sinners

I’m not a fan of the subject of race, but there’s no avoiding it when you’re talking about a movie set in the Mississippi Delta of the 1930s, directed by a black director. The brilliance of Sinners is that it’s such a fresh, entertaining and musical take on the topic. A period gangster film about the blues that pulls a From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and becomes a vampire horror set in a single location? Yes please.

Ryan Coogler trips up on a few cliches, but all is forgiven with one of the year’s most spine-tingling transcendental sequences that truly transport. I’ve been rocking Ludwig Göransson’s score all year on Spotify, and the fact that it’s one of the year’s biggest box office success stories, R-rated and all, guarantees its legendary status. In most recent news, Sinners has made Oscar history with 16 nominations (more than any other movie ever) which has predictably set the internet on fire. But that’s a topic for another article.

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10. Silent Friend

It’s a film about a tree, which is a tough sell for audiences in 2025. But those with open minds could be lucky and feel as transformed as I did after Ildikó Enyedi’s meditative botanical odyssey. Silent Friend feels like a balm for the soul, a scarce resource these days, and the three different time periods and stories, seep in, slowly but surely, gripping you in ways that will make you feel genuine emotions about the natural world, and the central tree in particular.

It’s not so much the conventional elements that elevate Silent Friend to the realms of cinematic greatness — performance, cinematography etc. — but the direction and vision, and the sense of exploration and discovery. Magnificent in a multitude of surprising ways.

9. Black Bag

This is the best thing Steven Soderbergh has directed since The Knick (2015), so it’s been a minute. With not a single frame or line of dialogue wasted, Black Bag moves through its gripping story of espionage and double-cross with panther-like stealth and precision.

Led by a remarkable ensemble, with Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett perfectly paired as the killer couple at the centre of it all, we watch as betrayal and loyalty tango in suspense that ratchets up towards a brilliant conclusion. There’s not much under the surface here but what’s on it is so captivating and touches upon so many tantalizing themes, that the taut 1hr 30m breezes by in a flash. Films like this are much needed these days - intelligent, apolitical, grown-up entertainment.

8. The Testament of Ann Lee

If you’d have told me last year that I’d have a musical about the Shaker movement starring Amanda Seyfried and written by the same team behind the bloated Brutalist, in my Top 10, I would’ve thought you insane. Fast forward to my jaw dropping, my heart stopping and my mind reeling more than once while being completely under the spell of one of the year’s weirdest, most spiritual, films.

Seyfried fully commits to this role and shifts her career into a whole new level as a result, but she’s just one piece of the enchanting puzzle. The story of how the Shaker movement was born in the impoverished neighborhoods of 1800s Manchester and transported to America, on the wings of motherhood and faith, is ludicrously captivating. And that music, those harmonies, the dancing? Authentically mystical.

7. One Battle After Another

In many ways, this is the movie of 2025, with one of the highest Metascores around and on its way to win big at the Oscars, One Battle reaffirms Paul Thomas Anderson as probably the greatest American filmmaker working today. It’s one of the most engrossing and entertaining films of the year, preformed to perfection. As an action genre film, it’s damn near flawless.

Where it falters, and why it’s more PTA-lite compared to his previous masterpieces, is the canvas used for the story. It’s a bit like fine wine served in a plastic cup: a film with a beautiful message about family and legacy, told against a backdrop of safe, clichéd, intellectually inert politics (White supremacy! Kids in cages! Black power!) which feels unfortunately performative for someone who has built a reputation on a streak of principled masterpieces that go against the grain. One Battle is very much in line with the grain.

6. Weapons

As I said in my article on the genre, we are in a golden age of horror and Weapons is the film that crystallized that for me in the clearest way. The cocktail of shock, terror, suspense and pitch black humor that Zach Cregger conjures up here delivered one of the biggest dopamine hits to my system in 2025.

Amy Madigan’s instantly-iconic Aunt Gladys who haunts everyone’s dreams is malevolence personified, a terrifying villain unlike any other. That she doesn’t overshadow the entire film is a testament to the rest of the outstanding cast, Cregger’s masterful story-building told through a multiple POV structure, and one of the best screenplays of the year.

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5. It Was Just An Accident

Jafar Panahi has been sentenced to one year in prison by the Iranian court, for alleged “propaganda against the state”, while he’s been touring Europe and the US with his latest film. He’s already been in Iranian jail and banned from making films but he just keeps going, and his latest - a riff on the concept from Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden (1994) - might be his crowning achievement.

The premise of a group of ex-political activists kidnapping a man they’re pretty sure was their torturer is magnificently layered, deceptively entertaining and psychologically rich. Viewing and thinking about the film through the lens of Panahi’s real life struggles with the Iranian regime gives it that extra meta kick, right between the blurry line that divides life and art. It Was Just An Accident also has the kind of ending that the absolute cinema meme was made for.

4. Marty Supreme

Just like One Battle After Another isn’t a political movie, Marty Supreme isn’t a sports movie. It’s hard to pin down what Josh Safdie’s crazy movie is exactly, outside of obviously being a character study of a young, cocky, selfish, ping pong wizard with a big dream. One that’s portrayed by soon-to-be-Oscar-winner Timothée Chalamet in ways you cannot prepare for.

This shapeshifting quality of the film is part of its allure; its set in the 1950s but anachronistic in cadence and music, it’s a gangster film, a dog film, a reckoning with parenthood, an odyssey of a hustler all set in post-WW2 1950s Jewish neighborhood of New York while avoiding all the cliched traps lesser filmmakers would fall into. The two and a half hour running time whizzes past in what is one of the most purely entertaining films of the year.

3. The Secret Agent

There hasn’t been a shortage of big political movies or movies where politics plays a big role this year. Four have already featured on my list here. But it’s this fifth one that gets my vote as the best of the lot; Kleber Mendonça Filho’s scintillating neo-noir is imperceptibly rich and features the year’s most delectable cornucopia of characters.

Wagner Moura delivers the second greatest male performance of the year as an academic researcher, sheltered by anarcho-communists and on the run from sleazy assassins, dodging dirty cops and trying to hold it all together for his son and in-laws in the sun soaked asphalt jungle of 1970s Brazil under a brutal military dictatorship. An entire subplot is dedicated to the wonder and magic of movies and the theatre experience, and the final act builds up to quiet move filled with so much symbolism and meaning, it’s nothing short of breathtaking.

2. Train Dreams

We are in a different realm altogether with Clint Bentley’s monumentally moving spiritual search for some kind of order in the chaos of life. Terence Malick is my favorite director, and Train Dreams leans heavily on Malickian techniques with the magic hour nature cinematography, and a camera that feels present rather than imposing, capturing the trajectory of an ordinary man’s quietly extraordinary life as a silent observer. Some see that as the film’s weakness, I see it as strength (although yes, I am biased). Besides, it has much more of its adapted source material, Denis Johnson’s novella, and much less of Malick’s religious overtones, so the whole affair strikes me more as inspiration than imitation.

Train Dreams is the most stoic film of the year, examining a life that’s worth living even when faced with the most unspeakable and arbitrary tragedy. The passage of time, the advancing world around us, the mysteries of life and the connection to all things man, animal and the natural world are all the big ideas swirling in this gentle hug of a film. My cup runneth over.

1. Sentimental Value

The margins in my top 5 of 2025 are razor thin, so it was no easy task picking number one. That makes it pretty tough to describe what Joachim Trier’s film does to earn that spot. All I know is it took all of 2 minutes into the film for me to know, deep in my bones, that Sentimental Value hits the bullseye of the bullseye of my wheelhouse. Anchored by the year’s best screenplay, and four seismic performances by Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning, everything Trier explores in this movie hits hard, with perfect pitch and tempo.

We have a multi-generational story of how a house became a home, an aging father’s attempt to reconnect with his traumatized and depressed daughter, two sisters as each other’s rocks, a film-within-a-film (what the French wonderfully call mise-en-abyme) as therapy, the filmmaking process in the age of Netflix, and the psychology behind performing a part. Herein lies a complete universe packaged into something so impossibly intimate and personal, with none of the outside world’s petty distractions (politics, religion, culture wars, etc.) allowed to enter and disrupt from what really matters. Family and home and one’s sense of place in them is at the core here, and there are few more meaningful subjects to explore in this life.

If Die Hard is not a Christmas movie because the story and plot would unfold in the same way regardless of the holiday, then Marty Supreme is not a ping pong movie. It’s a character study disguised as a sports movie. Deeper still, under the sports mask lies a psychological odyssey into the depths of the human soul, in search for the stuff that gives people drive and self-belief. It’s Taxi Driver meets Uncut Gems in how it depicts a dirty, corrupt, sleazy New York — embodied most spectacularly by the great Abel Ferrara’s dangerous criminal who only loves his dog — as we follow a protagonist who relentlessly pursues his goal, regardless of how much he lies and cheats, and who he hurts, along the way.

Marty is a difficult person to love. There are glimpses of a heart during his Japan-bound odyssey, as one hustle after another gets more intense and critical, but it’s mostly hard shell. This is a man driven by an unholy belief in himself, with animalistic tenacity that works like a primal survival instinct. And like most narcissists, he’s incredibly charismatic and funny, but he tends to see people as either obstacles or stepping stones along his path to glory. Marty Mauser’s arc is less nihilistic than some of his other screen counterparts, but the big question is: how late is it by the time life’s emotional freight train steamrolls him? Is it too late to care? Are people like Marty Mauser redeemable? And what does it say about those of us who find his dogged persistence so contagious and captivating, even when some of his actions are repellent in so many ways? Like, what did his poor mother ever do to him to deserve such treatment?!

Marty Supreme is the Danny DeVito “So anyway, I started blasting” meme of movies. It’s some of the most liberated and freewheeling direction, dialogue, editing and acting of 2025, with Chalamet (who is also credited as a producer) spring-boarding even further into superstardom. He is an acting wunderkind, and Marty is his career-best work following a string of career-defining roles. He chews every scene with the feral compulsion of a starved artist whose very life depends on this role, and it’s spellbinding to watch. If there was any doubt he’s a generational talent, Marty Supreme puts it to rest. He is so larger-than-life that it’s easy to forget the rest of the ensemble, but they are all excellent - from A’zion to even Tyler the Creator who plays fellow table tennis hustler Wally.

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Something else I really respect about Safdie’s approach in Marty Supreme is the resistance of leaning on the overdone movie trope of the post-WW2 Jewish struggle as a crutch. The film had many opportunities to do so, as Marty’s Star of David necklace works a subtle reminder of this part of his identity throughout the film, but his attitude to the Second World War is non-existent aside from one Auschwitz joke, and Safdie doesn’t let any of the many supporting Jewish characters play the obvious card either. On the contrary, the film features one concentration camp flashback, when ping pong rival-turned-mate Béla Kletzki (Géza Röhrig of Son of Saul fame, adding a pinch of extra meta for the moment) recounts his story to Rockwell, but it opts for grotesque and uncomfortably funny over pitiful and austere which instantly makes it an all-time original WW2 flashback. It’s refreshing to see this somewhat blasé, subversive and courageous attitude towards such a sacred Hollywood topic in 2025.

All of this makes Marty Supreme one of the most refreshing experiences at the moves this year. It’s a story loosely inspired by real life table tennis pro Marty Reisman and his autobiography, but it feels original as hell — similar to how One Battle After Another is a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon yet still feels wholly unique. Chalamet’s unbridled ferocity is the propane to Josh Safdie’s fiery and dynamic direction, and the result is cinematic combustion. Paced to perfection, filled with unpredictable twists and turns, and performed with real audacity, Marty Supreme lives up to the hype as one of the most entertaining films of the year, and ends up unveiling a deceptively touching reflection on parenthood.

American cinema is not what it used to be. The 2020s have not been kind, and one could even argue that it’s all been one slow, steady downward tumble since the early 2010s. Shouldering the burden of keeping the pulse of American cinema beating in creative, deep, and original ways is much too much for one Paul Thomas Anderson to handle. And as good as One Battle After Another is, it’s still pretty mid compared to his earlier masterpieces.

So Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams arrives to the station, like a breath of fresh pinewood air. A much needed oxidant for polluted cinephile lungs, heavy with the wheeze of toxic fumes from the politicised junk of the Hollywood factory. It’s been over a month since I’ve seen it and not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought of it in some shape or form.

Netflix has reached a new high with Train Dreams. This is Capital-C Cinema not lowercase-c content, the most prestigious art film from the streaming giant to date. The appetite is satiated with a myriad of flavourful riches. Adolpho Veloso’s gorgeous magic hour cinematography of the deep American landscape; the reverent reflections from Arn Peoples (William H. Macy) as he puts our place in this world into soulful perspective; the moments of deep love between Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) and his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and daughter Kate, the centre of his tiny, inconspicuous universe; the wolf-dogs that keep Robert sane in times of dire need; the conversation Robert has with Claire Thompson (Kerry Condon) about how even the smallest of creatures serve some imperceptible yet no less meaningful purpose on Earth.

Train Dreams feels like some kind of tiny miracle of a film. The ensemble is terrific, led by a never-better Edgerton, with lived-in performances that support the story without needing to dominate it. Even more impressive than the actors is the passage of time that Clint Bentley manages to evoke. It’s only his second feature film as a director, and yet the transitions from scene to scene, weaved through the warm embrace of storytelling in the form of Will Patton’s comforting cadence in voice over, makes one think it’s directed by the steady hand of a veteran who’s experienced all of life’s tragedies and wonders. For that is the essence of the film: the multitudes of life’s ebbs and flows.

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Set along the Idaho panhandle, in the northwestern US region, with Los Angeles over 1,000 kilometres to the south, New York and Washington DC over 3,000 kilometres to the east, Train Dreams feels like it’s in a different American universe from a different American dimension. A million miles away from the cesspools of concrete, callous politics and tribal ideologies that split humans into bits.

Nature is very much a lead character here, which makes the comparisons to Terrence Malick accurate, and most welcome. Train Dreams is more temporal and Malick’s stuff is more spiritual, though Bentley doesn’t completely shy away from God and the metaphysical, since these centripetal forces all move towards the great mystery of life, which is - as the magnificent ending indicates - the core of the film.

The geographical setting is just as important to the film’s potency as its historical one. The 1910s and 1920s bridged the two centuries through the powerful invention of the locomotive train, the great symbolic herald of the fast-approaching technological age of interconnected networks. Robert Grainer works as a logger and throughout his life, though barely travelling, he bears witness to the advancing science of machines, trying to make sense of it all as a simple man whose only vocation required brawn over brains.

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The atmosphere of this particular point in the film’s space and time creates a wondrous resonance. This environment, this era, and this character form a trifecta that arrive as a much needed tonic for those of us who appreciate living in an age of highly advanced technology, but can’t seem to shake off the feeling of a great detachment within. Train Dreams is the cinematic equivalent of escaping to the country. The answer for that restless feeling city dwellers get when they want to just “get away from it all”.

The film has such a calming and meditative affect on the spirit, in fact, that a 22-minute Immersive Audio Journey was created as a “Sleep Story” for the popular meditation app Calm. A brilliant marketing move because it directly speaks to the film as a balm for the restless mind. Complimenting this is its philosophical contours, which are decidedly stoic in nature. So much so that you can close your eyes and point a finger at any random passage in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and the dots to Train Dreams connect themselves...

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone — those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the “what” is in constant flux, the “why” has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us — a chasm whose depths we cannot see.

Book 5, Paragraph 23

Or,

Anyone with a feeling for nature — a deeper sensitivity — will find it all gives pleasure. Even what seems inadvertent. He’ll find the jaws of live animals as beautiful as painted ones or sculptures. He’ll look calmly at the distinct beauty of old age in men, women, and at the loveliness of children. And other things like that will call out to him constantly — things unnoticed by others. Things seen only by those at home with Nature and its works.

Book 3, Paragraph 2

Impossible not to think of characters like Arn Peoples or Robert Grainier’s quiet moments in the forest or on the train, when reading passages like that.

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You can’t get lower to the earth than the extraordinarily ordinary Robert Grainier - the kind of man authors don’t write books about, certainly not the kind of book directors adapt into Netflix movies. That is of course exactly what makes him, and the film, so special. I purposefully avoided getting into the specifics of plot or what kind of tragedies and wonders befall Grainier here. I’d also urge readers to steer clear from the teasers and trailers, which give away much of what deserves to be experienced with fresh eyes. This is the kind of picture whose surprises and ambiguities deserve preservation, so that the film happens to you as life happens to Grainier - flowing past like a river.

None of this would be possible without Denis Johnson’s original novella. I bought it soon after I saw Train Dreams at LFF, and I finished reading it - on the train, as it happens - in the same amount of time it takes to watch the movie. It’s a beguiling piece of literature, more violent and shocking than the film in a few ways, but carrying the exact same unpretentious profundity as the film.

In closing, I’ll leave you with one of my favourite passages. A taste of the primal beauty and wonder that, for those inclined, can stir something in the soul.

Grainier felt sure this dog was got of a wolf, but it never even whimpered in reply when the packs in the distance, some as far away as the Selkirks on the British Columbia side, sang at dusk. The creature needed to be taught its nature, Grainier felt. One evening he got down beside it and howled. The little pup only sat on its rump with an inch of pink tongue jutting stupidly from its closed mouth. “You’re not growing in the direction of your own nature, which is to howl when the others do,” he told the mongrel. He stood up straight himself and howled long and sorrowfully over the gorge, and over the low quiet river he could hardly see across this close to nightfall... Nothing from the pup. But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart, and after an evening’s program with his choir of British Columbian wolves he felt warm and buoyant.

“Train Dreams” (2012, Granta Books) — Denis Johnson

Train Dreams is streaming on Netflix from November 21, 2025.

Earlier this year, while walking out of a theatre and into the midnight darkness of New York City, it dawned on me that horror fans have been eating well. So well, in fact, that it must mean we’re somewhere at or near the peak of a new golden age of the genre.

Nothing will likely touch the definitive, auteur-driven golden era of horror that was the 70s and early 80s. I mean, we’re talking The Exorcist (1973), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Jaws (1975), Halloween (1975), Alien (1979), The Shining (1980), The Thing (1982). As high as that bar is, it feels like we’re in new, unchartered, psychologically terrifying territory of the so-called elevated or arthouse horror.

Perhaps this new era doesn’t externalise the fears as well as those iconic 70s and 80s films, but it does tap into something bending inward in all of us in a far more visceral way. The best of them are cracked mirrors in some shape or form, reflecting our deepest, darkest anxieties, insecurities and traumas. Our own moral and mental demons, wrestling in perpetual struggle, come to life through the power of story.

Asking when an age starts is like asking how long a piece of string is, but hindsight is 20/20 and mine tells me this one begins in 2014. To celebrate this modern golden age of horror, in honour of Halloween, I’ve selected one film from each year since that beginning, up to and including 2025, that best reflect our collective psyche in this modern, anxiety-riddled, age.

Of course, 12 films are only 12 films and cannot, by themselves, define an entire era. That’s why there are honourable mentions of films that are worthy of being in the conversation, and add some shine to the gold.

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1. The Babadook (2014) - dir. Jennifer Kent

Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook gets first dibs. I still recall the waves it made when it premiered, 11 years ago. A masterpiece horror film that deserved a Best Picture nomination and a Best Actress win for Essie Davies, who delivers one of the genre’s greatest ever performances as Amelia, a widow crushed by the weight of being a single mom and dealing with a difficult kid (Noah Wiseman, also excellent).

Themes of depression, unprocessed loss and motherhood are beautifully baked into an otherwise frightening film, with blood-curdling moments of the creature that lurks in the shadows. The Babadook is a modern classic that stands the test of time as the genesis of this new golden age of artistic horror.

Honourable Horrors from 2014: It Follows, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

2. The Witch (2015) - dir. Robert Eggers

Robert Eggers announced himself to the world with The Witch, a horror film that uses the myth of religious hysteria to explore the fears people have of God, of nature and even womanhood itself. Set on the edge of a puritan wilderness, the film follows a family exiled from their colony and undone by their own faith. Their crops rot, their baby vanishes, and paranoia starts to slowly creep in. Anya Taylor-Joy, in her breakout role, is extraordinary as Thomasin, the teenage girl blamed for it all and declared a witch.

Eggers became an instant director-to-watch with the way he obsessively recreated 17th-century New England. His use of elemental cinema, the silence, the candlelight, the repressed atmosphere, all build up towards an unsettling sense of liberation.

Honourable Horrors from 2015: Crimson Peak, The Gift, The Visit

3. The Wailing (2016) - dir. Na Hong-jin

Religion, folklore, disease and paranoia are the centrifugal forces in Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing, a masterpiece that’s like a juggernaut of cinematic delights. What starts off as a small-town murder mystery, with a police officer investigating a string of bizarre deaths in a remote Korean village, ends as a full-blown spiritual war zone, filled with superstition, shamanism, and biblical dread. The horror sinks its teeth in slowly and, before you know it, you’re already way passed the first circle of hell. Jun Kunimura’s nameless Japanese man has haunted me ever since I saw this film when it premiered at Cannes.

It’s the ambiguity that makes The Wailing so unnerving; there has rarely been a film that uses morbid curiosity to its advantage as well as this one.

Honourable Horrors from 2016: Raw, Don’t Breathe, Train to Busan, Terrifier

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4. mother! (2017) - dir. Darren Aronofsky

Some films were destined to be misunderstood upon their initial release, only to thrive on re-examination as they mould their way into cult status. Darren Aronofsky’s mother! - an allegorical nightmare about the corruption of Mother Nature by a narcissistic Artist/God, with a brilliant cast led by a towering Jennifer Lawrence - is a claustrophobic fever dream that will leave you gasping for air by the end.

It’s experimental, it’s visionary, and it’s certifiably fucking insane. It also holds up really well as a mirror to our anxieties and polluting ways, better than the critical darling Get Out, which cleverly uses racism to tap into the Zeitgeist but isn’t as cinematically bold and impressive.

Honourable Horrors from 2017: Get Out, It Comes At Night, It, The Killing of a Sacred Deer

5. Hereditary (2018) - dir. Ari Aster

Ari Aster is, like Eggers, an essential new voice for the golden age of horror. His debut Hereditary is, scream for scream, the scariest film on this list and maybe even the scariest of the century. It’s disguised as a family drama, but very quickly descends into shock, horror and pagan madness, with the domestic space - family home, the dinner table, bonds between mother and child and wife and husband - all twisted into a demonic knot. A tragic scene that happens fairly early in the film, let’s call it a road accident, is one of the most heart-stopping shocking moments I’ve ever seen on film.

Toni Collette gives a career-defining performance as Annie Graham (another running theme in this golden age: insanely strong lead female performances) a woman who resists, and ultimately succumbs, to madness. Aster directs his feature film like a veteran who’s been at it for years; redefining fright and tapping into the psychology of trauma and guilt unlike anything before it or after.

Honourable Horrors from 2018: A Quiet Place, Mandy, Upgrade, The Nightingale, The House That Jack Built

6. Doctor Sleep (2019) - dir. Mike Flanagan

2019 was one of the best years for the genre in the past decade, with Aster, Eggers and Jordan Peele all releasing excellent golden-age-worthy horror films, but it’s Mike Flanagan’s overlooked Doctor Sleep that gets the honours here. More precisely, the 3-hour Director’s Cut version of this direct sequel to The Shining, which flies by as a labor of love that doubles as faithful to the spirit of its horror-master Stephen King’s source material, and spine-tingling homage to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece. It hits all the right notes, from True Blood-style camp to genuine, psychologically deep chills. I’m convinced that the bathroom lady is still one of the most frighting images every put on screen.

Ewan McGregor is perfect as the adult, traumatised Danny Torrence, as is Rebecca Ferguson as the film’s charismatic villanelle, but it’s the Overlook Hotel that ends up being the MVP. Again.

Honourable Horrors from 2019: Midsommar, Us, The Lighthouse, Saint Maud

7. The Night House (2020) dir. David Bruckner

Grief is the canvass used to paint the horror that unfolds, from the point of view of Beth (a transcendent Rebecca Hall) who is looking for answers about her dead husband. David Bruckner’s The Night House is a ghost story unlike any other, with an ingenious approach to how interior space can be used to create the sense of another presence. What makes the whole affair especially unsettling is Beth’s unravelling realisation that she didn’t really know the one person she thought she knew the most. Piecing her husband’s secret life after his death, wading through nightmares and some seriously bone-chilling moments that live in the in-between world of reality and dark imagination, she confronts the void of the afterlife head on.

Incidentally, for a film that premiered at Sundance in 2020, and was delayed for a whole year due to COVID, The Night House also perfectly captures the psychological milieu of early pandemic uncertainty and isolation.

Honourable Horrors from 2020: Possessor, The Dark and the Wicked, His House, The Wolf of Snow Hollow

8. The Innocents (2021) dir. Eskil Vogt

Children are a big theme in this new golden age of horror, and the biggest in Eskil Vogt’s The Innocents, a film about the horrors that lurk when adults aren’t around. Vogt brings his dramatic writing sensibilities from his collaborations with Joachim Trier (Sentimental Value) to full effect here, and puts the kids centre stage in a chilling tale about that prepubescent gap where impulse and reason get blurred, and where empathy and morality still hasn’t quite developed in little boys as it has in little girls. All wrapped around a brilliant twist on the otherwise grossly overused concept of superpowers.

Ben (Sam Ashraf) is one of the scariest villains on this list and he’s only 9, while little Ida’s (Rakel Lenora Petersen Fløttum) character arc is a visceral rollercoaster for any parent. Titane shockingly won the Palme D’Or in 2021, marking a new milestone for the genre, but that film is a pretentious mess that will only go down as one of the worst Cannes winners of all time. The Innocents, on the other hand, is timeless.

Honourable Horrors from 2021: Lamb, The Medium, The Black Phone, Malignant

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9. Speak No Evil (2022) dir. Christian Tafdrup

The horrors of complacency, of “going with the flow”, of ignoring blood-red flags, of parental powerlessness. That is the meat of Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil, a film that gradually crawls under your skin, burrows deep into your bone marrow, and in its final 15 minutes, squeezes the essence out of your sharking core. A horror film so good, Hollywood instantly remade it, releasing its own version a few years later. Stick with the original on this one.

What starts off as an innocent invitation to a country house turns into an unspeakable nightmare. It’s impossible not to feel for Bjorn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch), as the nice Danish couple try to navigate their way through the unpleasantness of their strange Dutch hosts Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders). Tafdrup turns the banalities of the everyday into ingredients of one of the most unsettling horrors I have ever seen.

Honourable Horrors from 2022: Barbarian, Smile, Talk To Me, Enys Men, X, Pearl, Crimes of the Future, Terrifier 2

10. Late Night with the Devil (2023) dir. Cameron and Colin Cairnes

Cameron and Colin Cairnes’ Late Night with the Devil is where The Exorcist meets Network (1976), an unlikely pairing that’s as inventive in execution as it is on paper. A deliciously clever blend of found footage and talk show reality TV, the film playfully toys with nostalgia as it recalls that defining age of horror, the 1970s. Desperate TV host Jack Delroy (a superb David Dastmalchian) takes desperate measures for his late-night broadcast, and welcomes the literal devil onto the stage, in the form of an innocent, but possessed, young girl. The warm hues and lights of broadcast TV create the most demented setting for the evil that emerges, which is scary as fuck all the way through to the absolutely brutal ending.

The film works as both a satire about the media industry’s obsession with sensationalism (how topical!) and a meta examination of our own inability to unglue ourselves from the screen, the soul sucker that possesses us all.

Honourable Horrors from 2023: Infinity Pool, Scream VI, Evil Dead Rise, Beau is Afraid,

11. Longlegs (2024)

Osgood Perkins' Longlegs is the stuff nightmares are made of, giving Hereditary a run for its money in the scare department. It features on my Best-of-2024 list at No. 11 and, together with the previous entry and the next one, solidified my opinion that we are witnessing an absolute tear in terms of elevated horror films.

As a spiritual cousin to The Wailing, this also begins as a detective story that quickly spirals into a biblical abyss of evil, where the mystery keeps tearing down all logical barriers and keeps you guessing until the final frames. Nicolas Cage got his make up done in Hell for this role, he is unrecognisable and so unfathomably chilling as the killer being chased by Maika Monroe’s FBI agent.

Perkins joins the ranks of Eggers, Aster and Kent as a fresh new voice for the horror genre that demands our attention. Longlegs redefines existential dread, as all mental faculties of an analytical mind are torn to shreds.

Honourable Horrors from 2024: The Substance, Nosferatu, Oddity, Smile 2, Terrifier 3

12. Weapons (2025)

Zach Cregger’s Weapons, the follow up to his brilliant Barbarian which was very close to making the cut for 2022, cements the idea that we are experiencing the peak of a new golden age of elevated horror. As I walked out of the theatre, still shaking from a mixture of ecstasy and fright after what I had just witnessed, I wondered if I had ever seen anything like this. A story told from multiple perspectives, balancing dark humour, jump-scare horror and psychological nightmare in such a sophisticated, compelling way. It features incredible performances from the entire ensemble but especially Amy Madigan, whose career has been deservedly reignited thanks to her Oscar-worthy portrayal of Aunt Gladys.

Not to mention the story itself - a whole classroom of kids mysteriously disappearing in the middle of the night, leaving the powerless adults to figure it all out by themselves. The film taps into a real 21st century fear of our society today - what happens when our kids get weaponised by some foreign evil entity we can’t even begin to understand.

The cherry on the cake is that Weapons is one of the biggest financial success stories of 2025. A film that has grossed $268 million on a $38 million budget at a time when so many other big movies led by A-list stars are struggling in theatres. The other big financial success story of the year? Ryan Coogler’s excellent Sinners, another horror film.

Here’s hoping this golden age of horror keeps on shining.

Honourable Horrors from 2025: Bring Her Back, Sinners, Good Boy, The Black Phone 2