If a James Bond or Mission: Impossible film excised all its action scenes––save a stray explosion or gunshot––while employing a script with a pop John le Carré sensibility, it might resemble something like Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag. A hyper-slick, suave spy thriller, it’s mainly relegated to dinner tables and office rooms as stages for rapid-fire, gleefully barbed verbal sparring scripted by David Koepp, returning to the genre after Ethan Hunt’s first outing. Primarily focusing on a trio of couples working in British intelligence, Koepp’s script poses the question: it is possible to have a healthy relationship when there’s no such thing as separating work from life, particularly when your job description is one of a professional liar?

Although the budget allows a dash of globe-trotting requisite for its genre, most of the week-long story takes place in London. We’re introduced to George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender), a top agent with OCD-level attention to cleanliness and detail not far removed from the actor’s recent Fincher outing. He’s tasked with finding the rat in his top-secret intelligence agency, the suspects now narrowed down to five colleagues: Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), a weathered agent past his prime; Freddie’s younger girlfriend Clarissa (Marisa Abela); the agency’s resident therapist, Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris); and her significant other, the newly promoted Colonel James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page). The fifth is his wife, Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), a woman he adores so much he’d kill for her.

Setting up this tangled web of suspicion and paranoia, Soderbergh and Koepp have a field day with a riveting, extended introductory dinner scene where each couple gathers at George and Kathryn’s home, full of barbed, cutting accusations in which nothing professional or personal is off the table. It’s quickly apparent Black Bag is more concerned with the mechanics of relationships than the standard, world-saving lore of the spy genre. There’s a playful, heightened quality to the dialogue––claims of infidelity, jealousy, and betrayal are doled out––yet such assertions are delivered and received with an air of nonchalance. It’s all in the name of a game where one wrong word can have deathly consequences. Capturing this with a gauzy sheen, light sources appearing from the most unexpected of places––an effect strangely cozy as it is disorienting––Peter Andrews is once again in fine form.

As in most spy thrillers worth their salt, Soderbergh is less concerned about detailing the MacGuffin (in this case, Severus, a malware that has the ability to destabilize a nuclear facility with mass casualties) and more preoccupied with George’s commitment to Kathryn while secretly attempting to track her every move. In a workplace where a committed relationship can be a professional weakness and easy target for the enemy to exploit, Black Bag evolves into a story about the lengths one will go to protect the one they love. Rather than anything so schmaltzy as that may sound, there’s an exacting, sharp precision to the caustic turns where clues of potential betrayal are uncovered, in which a misplaced movie stub means one’s entire life could shatter.

The film draws its title from the phrase an agent uses when they can’t reveal anything about a mission or their motives. Transferring this cop-out to the foundation of marriage––which, at its healthiest, means no secret should ever be concealed––makes for a compelling juxtaposition: one is on the edge of their seat, perpetually wondering if Kathryn is staying loyal to both her job and George or if she truly has ulterior, treasonous motives. While the immaculately costumed cast (including a winking Bond cameo) is clearly taking great pleasure in playing the game, there is the sense they are pawns in Soderbergh’s brisk chess match, here to entertain without a great deal of depth. Nevertheless, Black Bag moves with such a briskness it hardly matters in the moment.

A friend recently remarked how Soderbergh’s career since a very short-lived, self-imposed “retirement” has mainly been the experiment of an A-level director punching below their weight, selecting projects––many of them formal-flexing genre exercies––that are entertaining in the moment but lack a certain ambition or staying power. The insular, ouroboros arc of Black Bag won’t prove any detractors wrong per se, but seeing how Soderbergh and Koepp can expertly stack the deck to always be one step before the viewer is an exhilarating thrill to behold. Not since his Ocean’s days has the director had as much amusement at pulling the rug out from underneath his audience. If Amazon’s all-but-certain exploitation of James Bond and Tom Cruise’s potential goodbye to Mission: Impossible has one feeling bleak about the spy thriller, Black Bag is proof it’s very much alive and kicking.

Black Bag opens in theaters on Friday, March 14.

“The world is a vampire” –– Billy Corgan, 1995

Before jumping directly into the action, Paul W.S. Anderson’s In the Lost Lands opens with a framing device we’ll return to only at film’s end. The George R. R. Martin adaptation otherwise gives no context whatsoever, and when the plot elements finally reveal themselves it’s near-fablelike, with a powerful Queen despondent that she hasn’t been able to experience the true mysteries of the world. She requests that the witch Grey Alys (played, of course, by Milla Jovovich) grant her powers to transform into a werewolf. Until then the movie is a set of seemingly unstructured action sequences with no narrative information to grasp and nothing to connect to. Things seem to happen purely mechanically––at one point, portions of a fight scene take place telepathically between two characters. But far from being confusing, the effect is entirely thrilling. 

This is important, too, because after years of many others delivering generic, overly digestible streaming slop, Paul W.S. Anderson––a director once relentlessly mocked for nearly two decades––now seems to be among the three or four people on the planet who know how to direct an action scene. There is a still plot, even plotting––as Grey Alys goes off on her mission with Dave Bautista’s Boyce, we’re littered with bits and pieces of palace intrigue on the other end, not unlike the director’s own Three Musketeers. But as in that film, it’s just the enclosure around action and adventure: not exactly window dressing or means to an end, but a rigid, constraining world in which these adventurers seek freedom and reprieve.

The external characters are just as trapped, our Queen (Amara Okereke) not having been born royal by blood but being raised from birth to serve as wife to an infirm, elderly King. But this is still just that––an enclosure, the world as a trap. And while silly dialogue abounds in Constantin Werner’s script, there are also wonderful performances by Jovovich and especially Bautista to sell story and, just as crucially, visual style itself. Anderson never really uses his imagery for world-building in the way of, say, Denis Villeneuve or Ridley Scott.

Instead it’s always a bit expressionistic, landscapes becoming suggestive not of the external world but the internal feeling of our leads and emotional tenor of the movie itself. Light, color, and shadow tell this story and what we will be feeling. Lost Lands even hops between genres just to land the right timbre: it’s variously a Western, horror, and sci-fi epic––whichever genre fits the tonality that Anderson seeks to convey.

Sets are dazzling (particularly the Queen’s throne room) and it’s philosophically compelling––not Lost Lands‘ positioning of organized religion as a tool of social control, which now borders on cliché, but in positioning the real mysteries of the universe to be found in the occult. The joy is all in its inspired, sensuous imagery, fantastical and dreamlike. The action scene as poetry, endless poetry in and for a hopeless world.

In the Lost Lands opens on Friday, March 7.

Amongst the debut features populating Berlinale’s new section called Perspectives, none presented so admirably fresh take on fiction and political histories as Two Times João Liberada. The Portuguese hidden gem is directed by Paula Tomás Marques, who has made a few captivating shorts and also worked as a cinematographer on others’ films (including Matiás Piñeiro’s You Burn Me) as well as being an editor and script supervisor. Given her all-round involvement with independent production, it’s little surprise her full-length debut is a film about the making of a film. In the Lisbon-set João Liberada, an actress named João (June João, collaborator of Marques on shorts and performance) is cast to play a namesake of hers in a micro-budget period film. 

Even if we spend all our screen time with João the actress, it’s João Liberada who is the film’s actual protagonist. With the twin name being a supposed coincidence, the (male) director of the film sought out a trans woman for the main part, since Liberada was gender non-conforming, according to the archival documents. Marques (who also appears as a member of the production crew) is interested in how thin the veil can be between actor and character; to explore this relation, she and June João wrote together a script of ghostly presences. Moreso, their script includes another script (for the film-within-the-film) that is far less intriguing.

As João struggles with the director’s treatment of Liberada’s story, she coats her discontent in suggestions on set during shooting. But as one colleague of hers points out, “If you want to change the script during shooting, it’s always already too late.” There are equal-parts melancholy and detachment guiding the main character, evident in the frank voiceover that peppers João Liberada from beginning to end: the making of this feature is not exactly easy, but when an inexplicable event befalls the director, João sees an opportunity to reframe the narrative.

The film picks at the politics of a set (“at least the director hired a mainly LGBTQI+ cast and crew,” João admits) and trans representation through an almost-real fabulation. João Liberada is a fictional character, but drawn together from 17th- and 18th-century trial recordings of the Inquisition pursuing gender dissidents. Instead of sticking to a more straightforward idea of a film “rectifying” or “illuminating” the “invisible histories,” Marques and her team prefer to make a meta-point about it. Not only does the film make apparent modes of representation, tropes, and the tiptoeing around them and often at the cost of truthfulness to actual queer and trans existences, but in a way that is inviting: both cheeky and gorgeous to look at. 

Shot in dazzling 16mm and bathed in summer light, Two Times João Liberada doesn’t shy from being a textured film: there are interventions made on the level of editing (with experimental filmmaker Jorge Jacome in charge), that separate “reality” from “the film,” and in other instances, overlaid writing appears onscreen atop the scene as it unfolds. Light flares and occasional marks on the 16mm footage are there too, as tactile as João’s own discontent.

Two Times João Liberada contains a wish-fulfillment element that is never self-serving. Maybe the whole film can be seen as João’s attempt to meet her queer ancestor and, in a way, it is that; yet that only complicates things. Representation is not only sometimes unreliable; it’s also vital. With histories written in a way that forcefully disregards the marginalized, questioning, curiosity, and new forms of contact provide an alternative to archaeology. Marques applies such anti-archaeological approach to her debut feature with a delightful result: Two Times João Liberada is a small treasure that shines brightly.

Two Times João Liberada premiered at the 2025 Berlinale.

The last time Hong Sangsoo failed to feature in a Berlinale program, Childish Gambino’s “This is America” was in the charts and Green Book was on its way to beating Roma at the Oscars. (2019 notwithstanding, you have to go back to the Obama years to find a selection without the South Korean’s name.) In just those six years, the festival has witnessed three different creative directors, weathered a global pandemic, and buckled under the weight of its own political fealty. Which is to say: some things change, but the Hong remains the same. He is still tiring to his detractors. He is still a reassuring ever-presence to his devotees. If, like I, you happen to be one of the latter, you’ll probably find much to enjoy in What Does that Nature Say to You, the director’s latest comic melodrama and the closest he has yet come to remaking Meet the Parents.

As low-key and delightful as last year’s A Travelers Needs, but without Isabelle Huppert to steal the show, Nature sees Hong leaning back into the collective pleasures of his less-starry ensemble pieces. Ha Donghwa (Ha Seong-guk) and Kim Junhee (Kang Soyi) have already been dating for months when they arrive at Junhee’s family home and meet her father, Kim Oryeong (Hong regular Kwon Hae-hyo), in the driveway. “He drove me here,” she tells him, allowing an awkward silence to fall before breaking the news, which Oryeong takes surprisingly well. This might be attributed to two factors: his potential son-in-law’s family connections (his father is a notable attorney) or his 96 KIA Pride, a retro car that Kim takes for a spin down memory lane. Later they’ll share a cigarette on the grounds of the estate and some meaningful conversation as Junhee talks to her sister about life. The younger generation then take a walk to visit some pagodas before reconvening with Junhee’s parents for a dinner of roast chicken. Everything appears to be going smoothly until Oryeong produces a bottle of bourbon, at which point the conversation goes awry.

After a gloomy spell a couple years ago, it’s nice to see the director returning to a lighter groove. Nature can’t boast the absurdist jolt of Traveler’s Needs, but it’s rewarding in quieter ways. The conversations between Donghwa and Oryeong of course have territorial tensions baked in, but Hong approaches their relationship with curiosity and good faith. Having learned that Oryeong’s family helped him work the landscape around the house––enough to create a beautiful view of a nearby lake––Donghwa genuinely gushes over what he calls the “filial bond.” The car dialogue is played for laughs but similarly endearing in its insecurities. Everything is as patiently observed as fans of Hong have come to expect, not least the performances. The Geakholli eventually flows. The awkward humor mostly lands. The images are at best a little blurry. If you know the drill, you know the drill.

I can’t say if the opening music, a lovely synthy piece composed by Hong––also credited as writer, editor, producer, sound designer, and cinematographer––is an homage to Angelo Badalamenti, but I wouldn’t be surprised; either way, it perfectly sets the film’s melancholy tone. A day will come when he decides to do something else in February. I’m grateful it’s not this one.

What Does That Nature Say to You premiered at the 2025 Berlinale.

Consider the logline: a 34-year-old, pre-diabetic, 250-pound, extremely anxious loner finds respite as a cleaning simp for dominatrices eager to belittle him as he tidies up their homes. Now think of the word simp: in Internet patois, a term denoting people prone to show excessive attention to someone who won’t reciprocate. If the premise sounds ripe for a voyeuristic spectacle, what’s most riveting about Denis Côté’s Paul is the documentary’s pointed refusal to infantilize its subject and his fantasies. For a portrait of a man whose primary sources of pleasure and validation are so tangled up with humiliation––verbal and physical––Paul treats its eponymous protagonist with nothing but dignity, and the results are oddly moving.

Then again, this isn’t the first time Côté has trained his camera on hot-button topics without giving in to sensationalism. With That Kind of Summer, the Quebecois filmmaker ventured into a community of nymphomaniacs trying to curb their urges, yet never played their struggles and insatiable desires for shock value. A few years prior, in A Skin So Soft, he turned to the world of bodybuilders, dogging a gaggle of weightlifters as they readied for a career-defining contest. Different as the two films were, they exemplified Côté’s refreshingly non-judgmental approach: sex or muscles addicts were never pegged as freaks or aberrations but ordinary people living quietly extraordinary lives. One never laughed at, but with them. 

So it is with Paul. In the hands of a lesser director, this diaristic study of a simp and his interactions with a few Montreal-based mistresses would have likely come across as tawdry misery porn. In Côté’s, it emerges an uplifting, intermittently humorous ethnography of sorts. Photographed by Vincent Biron and François Messier-Rheault with a Blackmagic camera in largely static shots, the film toggles between glimpses of Paul’s daily routine and the clips he began recording ever since he decided to “change his life,” videos he’s been sharing on his Instagram page (CleaningSimpPaul, what else?) and which Côté disseminates throughout. 

The two sources of footage make for some productive frictions. At one level, there’s a stark juxtaposition between the Blackmagic’s grainy, film-adjacent look and the crisp sheen of Paul’s online content. Yet there’s also a much deeper tension between the life Côté captures and Paul’s hardly NSFW social-media content. At no point is the material ever (porno)graphic. Paul, after all, does not seek gratification via sex, and his private encounters around the city are far more ludicrous than they are erotic. His kink, such as it is, isn’t just to serve “polite and condescending” women, but to “get to know a side of them others do not get to see,” as he confides to strangers and potential new clients online. And the dominatrices he serves are all unfailingly happy to reward him––a free haircut, a yoga lesson, or a friendly chat. It’s crucial that none of these aftercare moments feels staged; Paul and his bosses are bound by a sense of palpable affection and mutual understanding. 

But for all the time it devotes to these outwardly humiliating cleaning sessions, Paul is just as interested in interrogating the kind of relationship that ties its titular guy to the camera. In one crucial passage, the thirty-something suggests he views his compulsive filmmaking as a way to master his life. (“Here I can control everything I post,” he says of his IG account. “I edit everything.”) Which is interesting to contrast with his readiness to let women enjoy free reign over his mind and body. Yet Paul itself never becomes an act of domination. In that, its protagonist’s grand design––to uncover facets of these women’s lives they would otherwise seldom make public––speaks to Côté’s own curiosity. There is a sense throughout Paul of a near-reverential attitude towards these rituals and their intricate choreographies. Côté’s filmmaking is so unobtrusive that the inclusion of a non-diegetic, Chilly Gonzales-styled piano ditty by Chantale Morin feels almost jarring, as do the few times the camera momentarily abandons Paul to focus on a few details around him: a fish tank, the frosted glass tiles of his living room window, some magnet words on his fridge arranged into a plea: “Can you break me?”

That magpie-like attention is nothing novel in Côté’s cinema, nor is the director’s ability to mine surrealism in his subjects’ everyday routines: one of the most indelible sequences in A Skin So Soft, in my book, found a few bodybuilders gazing at sheep while meditatively munching on carrots. What is new––and what, on second thought, makes Paul such a singular addition––is the humanist and life-affirming tone it exudes. Anecdotally, I saw the film as it unveiled in the Berlinale’s Panorama Documentary sidebar. It was the first Côté premiere I attended where majority of the questions at the post-screening debate were not raised at the filmmaker but his star, who was thanked for his “authenticity”––for speaking for so many others wrestling with depression and social anxiety. That too is a testament to the film’s equanimity. Whether Paul will sponge and address some of your own insecurities, it’s a strikingly affecting surprise. 

Paul premiered at the 2025 Berlinale.

There was Dewey Finn, Ned Schneebly, Willoughby, Mason Evans Sr.––now there’s Lorenz (or Larry) Hart. Richard Linklater likes a certain type of guy, and maybe these features come across too infrequently in his female characters: charismatic, voluble, verbose, enthusiastic as a puppy, and if prone to morose stretches, never in a way that destabilizes an essential upbeat humanism. 

Blue Moon, which world-premiered at the Berlinale, is another beautifully personal work from Linklater, full of authorial idiosyncrasies and tics, but distinguishing the film from his corpus is it being the kind you can only make at a mature career stage. It’s not so much that Linklater has nothing to prove––screenplays like Robert Kaplow’s and its rarified, remote milieu of mid-WWII New York theaterland can typically send financiers balking. With a “legacy” career, little favors and gives come your way; for Linklater, maybe his next will be a legitimate awards contender, and new relationships with acting talent can be brought to bear. And different or lower expectations for the end product allow him to really express who he is as an artist at this point in his life. 

Yet on the timely subject of awards-campaigning, as Ethan Hawke gets older and even more respectable, some areas of the industry could well call him due. Blue Moon thankfully evades being an “Oscar movie,” but portraying Lorenz Hart is an Oscar role. It just hits so many of the beats (or syllable stresses, given his provenance as a librettist): reams of dialogue to chew on, vast emotional range deftly calibrated, a slight physical transformation. Perhaps we feel overly conscious of this to the extent that it becomes dissonantly noticeable, with Hawke’s pleading mannerisms to his scene partners (and awards body members beyond the screen), yet it’s that fundamental Linklaterian garrulousness and charm that defeats this impulse.

We’re in the familiar yet still potent domain of bruised artistic egos, backstage drama, and subtle yet vital shifts in popular culture. Hart, who’s trying to have a more functional relationship with alcohol, is in a defeated hangdog mode at Sardi’s Bar in Midtown, awaiting his old partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and his entourage as they celebrate the theatrical premiere of Oklahoma! There are three key portions of the screenplay, which gladly don’t equate to a rigid, three-act structure: an introduction where we learn of Hart’s inconsistent genius and many personal limitations; an emotive reunion with Rodgers (who will still collaborate with him, though not as a primary partner) and sincere congratulatory handshake to his lyricist replacement Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney); and an intimate duologue with young protegé Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), whose incandescent appeal for him challenges the homosexual identity he comfortably inhabits. 

Not dissimilar to Peter Hujar’s Day, another recent festival premiere, Kaplow’s screenplay takes published correspondence between Hart and Weiland as one of his primary sources. Their scenes are curious and undeniably effective, yet we can still have questions. If Linklater wasn’t such a consummate director of dialogue––has any American filmmaker made conventional visual storytelling seem so easily discardable?––perhaps the 20-year-old Weiland telling Hart about her attempts to finally lose her virginity would feel awkward and a bit letchy. It nevertheless provides the most overt allusion to sex in a film where it darkly shadows everything, locked in repression with ’60s liberation still far away. 

There are no moments where the dramaturgy stops and we hear larger passages from the title number, “Everything Happens to Me,” “Isn’t it Romantic?” et al––a-cappella sung, and spare piano-backed snippets are their mode of inclusion. Yet it’s such a naturally musical and flowing film, which you could really feel the crowd at my screening respond to. Hart is very endearing, and even if we aren’t American Songbook composers in 1943, his very human characteristics speak to all of what ails us: our pride, vanity, and fear of obsolescence, none of which are innate to aging. We fade out of the lives of ephemeral loved ones, until we’re, as the song mournfully tells, “standing alone.”

Blue Moon premiered at the 2025 Berlinale and will be released by Sony Pictures Classics.

When reading Claude Lanzmann’s 2009 memoir The Patagonian Hare, director Guillaume Ribot was struck by insights into making the monumental Shoah. The book recounts the making of Shoah in four of its chapters, presenting Lanzmann’s own detective work finding perpetrators and witnesses and interviewing them. Maybe it was the investigative element of this method that initially drew Ribot to consider telling a sort of behind-the-scenes story, but what makes a perfect companion piece out of All I Had Was Nothingness is the way it surrenders to asking the most difficult questions in the deafening silence: the “why” of the Holocaust is hauntingly present.

Ribot, whose background is in photography and Holocaust memory, narrates the film using Lanzmann’s own words layered over archival footage unused in the final nine-hour cut of Shoah. A total of 220 hours of rushes were kept in the United States Holocaust Museum (online even), of which Ribot gleaned fragments to assemble what is, if not a road movie, then a movie on the road: a meandering, self-reflexive documentation of Lanzmann’s own doubts and aspirations for the 12 years it took to make the definitive film about the Holocaust. 

All I Had Was Nothingness finds its own storytelling rhythm without necessarily making a structural point about it: some scenes are cut short until we return to them later, for example. While Ribot is almost completely absent (voice notwithstanding), Lanzmann is there in every shot. There are short, B-roll scenes of the director smoking in silence, sequences that capture landscapes of his journey (be it Poland or New York) with sunrises, sunsets, and parks to give the viewer some breathing room before the next interview takes place. The documentarian-detective mode herein includes Lanzmann’s struggles to finance his film and accounts of endeavors to raise more money for it. 

Shoah is often discussed as a landmark of cinema. While it certainly is that, Ribot’s film also brings attention to Lanzmann’s sustained effort to document Holocaust oral histories. All I Had Was Nothingness paints him as a researcher driven by ethical and moral conundrums, as well as an empathetic man whose ability to converse honestly made the film what it is today. In one scene, Lanzmann and his small crew get caught in the act, presenting as historians and recording video without permission; another time, the camera zooms in during a heavy emotional revelation to show Lanzmann placing a hand on that of his interviewee. 

“Shoah is the abolition of the distance between past and present,” Lanzmann’s words echo at the end of the film. The same is true about trauma; it’s not a “thing” but rather an embodied chronotope. A body remembers, and in trauma it regresses to an earlier time and place where it first occurred. These observations are not clearly stated in All I Had Was Nothingness and only for the better: Lanzmann’s perceptive understanding of how important talking was to victims and witnesses informed his directorial decisions to stage scenes or occasionally reenact events. All this footage oozes with pain and everything about its making keeps All I Had Was Nothingness at a safe distance from any negative criticism. The film is a homage to Lanzmann’s work with the purest intentions, but hopefully it will see longer life than being programmed at the Berlinale as a token of German self-flagellation. Within the context of present-day German politics and stringent rules around what the government deems permissible to say or not with regards to Israel and Gaza, the kind of bravery Lanzmann exhibits should not be restricted to a Holocaust of the past.

All I Had Was Nothingness premiered at the 2025 Berlinale.

“The id grows tedious,” art critic Jackson Arn wrote recently, “when left to speak too freely.” The Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude keeps his in check by grounding flourishes in pure mundanity. Near the end of Kontinental ’25, an ex-professor, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), and her former student, Fred (Adonis Tanța), sit by an anti-communist resistance monument in Cluj and watch a horrific video of a drone attack on a Russian soldier. Having found the dead body of a man she evicted earlier that day, Orsolya, who now works as a bailiff, is looking to blow off some steam. They move uphill and Fred––whose delivery bag is plastered with Romanian flags, so as not to be confused with immigrant gig workers––serenades her. Next, they have sex in the bushes. The film up to this point has been awash with ideas and vaguely apocalyptic images: Roman ruins, a robot dog, a dinosaur park, zoomed-in footage of the Hindenburg disaster, a scene from Robert Aldrich’s atomic-era nightmare Kiss Me Deadly. This should all be a lot, but somehow Jude keeps it together.

Landing in-between his widely celebrated Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World and upcoming Dracula project, Kontinental was always going to have the whiff of a b-side about it, but this is a rich and substantial work. Taking Romania’s housing crisis as a central theme, it bombards the viewer with triggers, sight gags, and juxtapositions. You don’t have to go too far back to recall a time when this kind of onslaught of information felt jarring, but anyone who has swiped through TikTok or Instagram Reels in the last 12 months will recognize the rhythms with rueful familiarity. No filmmaker has yet been able to capture this feeling quite so fluently as Jude, which is why he’s one of the most important working today.

Kontinental begins with the soon-to-be-evicted Ion (played by Romanian New Wave veteran Gabriel Spahiu) scavenging for bottles at a dinosaur park. Asleep in his room that night, he’s visited by police who threaten to kick him out. Rather than face a life on the street, he decides to take his own by strangulation. When Orsolya discovers his body the next day, she suffers a moral breakdown and starts traveling through the city like many a Jude protagonist before her, searching for comfort, reassurance, and validation––first through her partner, but later her mother, her best friend, and her priest. (In press note, the director has described it as an homage to Rossellini’s Europa ’51, a sentiment echoed by its poster.) Jude uses this reliable framework to go deep on a number of topics: nationalism and faith, the poisoned chalice of post-Soviet capitalism (all classic material), and the current housing crisis. It’s not exactly premium cut (the images can be a little janky and there are a few notable lags) but there is still more to chew on in any ten minutes of Kontinental ’25 than most films (even the supposedly thought-provoking ones) manage in their entire runtime.

A friend who caught an earlier preview described Kontinental ’25 to me as Jude entering his “Hong phase,” referring to the South Korean filmmaker’s recent distillation of his cinema opting for quantity, control, and spontaneity over what you might call “production value.” Jude is one of the few directors who can rival Hong’s work rate, and Kontinental does have something of the South Korean’s sauce to it: a film seemingly shot on the fly, constructed around three or four wide-ranging conversations, and one in which the characters are comically inebriated. Another reading would be to say that he has reached a similar status. It was a shock when Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn won the Golden Bear during the pandemic, but even mainstream critics were putting Do Not Expect on their year-end lists. Now Jude is being name-dropped by Martin Scorsese. He is a singular artist with bags of ideas and nothing left to prove.

Kontinental ’25 premiered at the 2025 Berlinale.

Positive or not, all critical appraisals of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s films inevitably land on the same talking point: their inordinate cinephilia. Rightly so: the Belgian duo’s filmography––an oeuvre now spanning four features and a handful of shorts––teems with nods to a seemingly endless cascade of Italian giallos from the likes of Mario Bava, Sergio Martino, and Dario Argento. You can call that an act of “cinematic rehabilitation,” as Justin Chang once wrote in his review of Let the Corpses Tan––though perhaps that’s only apt to ring true if you think that particular blend of hyper-stylized pulp needs rehabilitating in the first place. Hence the rather simplistic argument: fans of the classics Cattet and Forzani invoke will undoubtedly relish their works while everyone else likely writes them off as hollow tributes––or, to borrow from Stephen Holden’s far less generous take on their 2009 Amer, “recycled psychosexual kitsch.”

If the either-or debate feels especially asphyxiating, it’s because it presupposes that only giallo connoisseurs will be able to luxuriate in the pleasures Cattet and Forzani conjure. But those charms are not scholarly. Rather than mere regurgitations of vintage titles, their films ooze a seductive power that’s entirely their own––not to mention an insouciant disregard for plot conventions that can make watching them akin to getting stuck in a whirlpool where the basic laws of physics and narrative don’t apply.

Enter Reflection in a Dead Diamond. Set in an unidentified stretch of southern France, the same Mediterranean backdrop that housed Amer and Corpses, Diamond centers on a seventy-something retired spy, Monsieur Diman (Fabio Testi), whose sojourn at a luxurious seaside hotel is suddenly interrupted by fears his old enemies might be after him again. That’s a very succinct way of distilling what is, in fact, an impossibly intricate diegesis, a Russian Doll of stories within stories within films. Diman’s younger, James Bond-esque self (Yannick Renier), whose gruesome missions keep intersecting the old man’s retreat in rivulets of flashbacks, is not a real spy, but a character of some B-movie espionage saga, one “John D.” Which is to say that the increasingly violent memories Diman is exhuming in-between martinis may have less to do with actual, real-life experience than delusions around his own fictional alter-ego. 

Then again, Diamond has such little interest in logic that teasing out the difference between real life and hallucinations would miss the point. Anyone familiar with Cattet and Forzani’s oeuvre will know the kind of thrills their films unfailingly elicit. For newcomers, the encounter might amount––I say this as the highest of compliments––to an assault to the senses. Like its predecessors, Diamond unfurls as a sort of feverish mirage. It’s a film where the camera seldom stays still, shots rarely last more than five seconds, and the frame keeps splintering with the same orgasmic joy that characters experience whenever stabbing or slashing through human flesh (which happens a lot). Manuel Dacosse, who’s shot all the couple’s previous features, works with a palette that’s drenched in lurid crimsons and blues, toggling between extreme close-ups of eyes and mouths redolent of Spaghetti Westerns and Argento-styled shots of blades and stilettos tearing through skin. This is a film where the camera need only tilt skyward and back to earth for the story to shift from present to past, one fiction to the next. There are images culled from nightmares––a giant millipede crawling over a corpse––and others that are almost disarming in their inventiveness, such as an evening dress worn by one of John D’s female associates made entirely of sequins the size of a two-euro coin that can dart in all directions like scintillating daggers, killing everyone in their wake.

That’s another thing that’s often overlooked in critical debates around Cattet and Forzani: their films’ playfulness. Diamond is––despite or maybe because of all the blood and narrative somersaulting––a profoundly funny watch. Which is why I’m so hesitant to use the word homage. At one level that’s technically what this is, but the kind of tributes Diamond offer are not reverential. You can feel the directors having fun as they provoke and dissect ur-texts spanning giallos to seminal Italian comic books like Diabolik. And their glee is contagious. The sight of Maria de Medeiros, who struts into Diamond as Diman’s old flame, recalls a filmmaker she once worked with, Quentin Tarantino, another director who’s hardly shied from homage himself. But while in Tarantino’s cinema the nods to other revered auteurs can often register with a self-congratulatory ah-ah! (not unlike an instantly memefied moment from Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), Cattet and Forzani have a way of turning their cinephilia into something welcoming. Diamond isn’t a film that will shame you for not catching everything in its Warren Commission-sized list of references, though it might encourage one to brush up knowledge of the cinema it speaks to, which is all for the better.

Does it amount to much beyond pastiche? This is the final point all reviews of Cattet and Forzani’s projects eventually arrive at, and again the question feels misplaced. Diamond is much more than the sum of its sizzling parts; for all these hat tips, the film emerges as its own shapeshifting oddity. At a time when festivals are increasingly flooded with far-flung productions that all feel crafted from the same mold, here’s a film that manages to be both familiar and completely different, a work of visceral pleasures uninterested in genuflecting to rules or expectations. 

Reflection in a Dead Diamond premiered at the 2025 Berlinale and will be released by Shudder.

If there is a filmmaker whose work can be described as “elemental cinema,” that’s Lucile Hadžihalilović. It’s easy to chronicle her 2015 film Evolution as fluvial for its many water (and underwater) scenes, but also how its rhythmic flow steers the mysteries of a post-humanist plot. One might say that Innocence is earthy with a soil that’s dry––there, the woods are where secrets are concealed––and the San Sebastian Special Jury Prize winner Earwig is as ethereal as it is enigmatic. The way Hadžihalilović borrows from elements serves to alchemize the images we see onscreen, lacing them with a thin veil of unknowability. Yet their meaning is never fully out of reach; these are coming-of-age stories at their core. Hadžihalilović’s newest film, The Ice Tower, was billed as her most accessible work yet, borrowing from a source more familiar than she has before: Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale “The Snow Queen.”

It’s made explicit, too, by voiceover accompanying a spectacular opening shot of a vast ice-capped landscape, a tiny village in the mountains, and the small figure of a girl plowing through. Jeanne (Clara Pacini) is a teenager with a bob cut and frugal look, the oldest in a foster home and thus the bedtime storyteller. In what’s nearly a ritual, she recounts the Snow Queen’s enchanting beauty and her demands to surrender her heart to an icy embrace––a doomed, romantic kind of togetherness. But even such obvious foreshadowing cannot square the script (written by Hadžihalilović and Geoff Cox again) into something predictable. 

Jeanne is the first Hadžihalilović protagonist to escape her confines in the very beginning: one morning she simply leaves for the city (the chronotopes are murky, but we’re somewhere in 1970s France), pulled by a pure desire to experience life. There is little conflict underscoring her decision, which must mean she is still to come of age. Jeanne is impressionable––she’s taken by a group of teenagers floating over a small ice rink, especially a pirouetting brunette whose handbag she will later come to possess. Bianca is what Jeanne starts calling herself, and no wonder: the name means “white” in Italian, evoking Snow White (Biancaneve). The most intriguing part about Jeanne / Bianca’s life beyond the foster home is that the basement she decides to bunk up in turns out to be a film set––not just any, but one of a gloriously stylish film adaptation of “The Snow Queen” where the title character is played by a well-respected diva film star, Cristina van den Berg (notice the mountain in her last name!), herself portrayed by Marion Cotillard.

The two worlds––the one in Jeanne’s imagination and the film-within-the-film––are always dangerously close. Some will call this surrealism, an epithet that’s been used time and again to describe Hadžihalilović’s approach to world-building, but it’s much more intricate. She doesn’t do hierarchies, even if the grown-ups in her films insist on them so much. There is no “superior” reality; even the quasi-magical or inexplicable events enrich what’s already happening in the “real” world of the protagonist. That’s true for The Ice Tower as well, even though it has to be said that cinema itself (technological first in Hadžihalilović’s work so far) is portrayed with the allure of a fairytale. 

Whether in costume as the Snow Queen or in her robe as actress Cristina van den Berg, Cotillard is always breathtaking. No coincidence: identification between Jeanne and the viewer intensifies with every scene, Cristina’s allure only increasing as the film progresses. The Ice Tower is magnificent to look at, so textured and lavish at the same time; the smooth work of cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg (The Taste of Things) ensures longer takes are as glacial as winter terrain. 

Hadžihalilović has formed an homage to cinema as an enchantment-casting machine. Alongside Jeanne, who steps in as a supposed extra to then be promoted to stand-in and secondary character by Cristina herself, we peek behind the scenes, seeing the shoot and everything between takes (including the drama and inarticulate tensions). Yet the mise-en-scène is always a stand-out: there is no “ugly” place in The Ice Tower, a film where nature, the dailies, and the film shoot are equally mesmerizing, no space that is less-than-magical when everything is equally exciting for Jeanne herself.

While Andersen’s tale features a cursed mirror distorting everything reflected in it, The Ice Tower uses mirrors, ice, and glass to build kaleidoscopic versions of the Queen’s kingdom and Jeanne’s perception of the world. There’s something elemental, too, in how Hadžihalilović uses those reflective surfaces without dwelling too much on the artifice they evoke. A few times, the camera itself turns into a reflective device the way a look through textured glass brought an eerie new perspective in Earwig; it’s in this gesture that Hadžihalilović invites us to allow ourselves enchantment, well knowing that the world is still a place we ought to leave behind. 

The Ice Tower premiered at the 2025 Berlinale and will be released by Yellow Veil Pictures.

French director Léonor Serraille’s third feature Ari is the portrait of an über-sensitive young man who ponders his place in the world while looking up people from his past to hold conversations that were never had. If this sounds like the premise for a parody of talky French dramas, for a while it really does suggest one––until the perceived tropes and stereotypes fall away to reveal a raw, humanist core that’s anything but clichéd.    

Ari (Andranic Manet) is a 27-year-old trainee teacher. We see early on that he’s awkward around children, at one point collapsing in class. After an ensuing argument with his father, he gets kicked out of the home where he still lives. With his career in question and no place to stay, Ari finds himself in a pre-midlife crisis, forced to rekindle friendships and explain himself to people he’s cut off along the way. Through these encounters––some cordial, some strained or downright confrontational––we pick up clues that unlock the beautiful mystery of a most ordinary life. 

Again: this is a very French film. People chat, debate, argue a lot. They communicate every tiny emotion that ripples through their head using the minutely descriptive vocabulary that seems only available in French. The lengthy dialogues may trigger allergic reactions in some viewers, yet it must be said that Serraille’s screenplay is quite a remarkable piece of writing. Without resorting to exposition, she builds the central character via his conversations with others. We learn about the early death of his mother, his views on succeeding in life so as to provide for his family, and the failed relationship with a girlfriend who got pregnant. None of it is used to expressly explain anything about how Ari turns out, but these details add up to a compelling, deeply intimate profile of the man we see onscreen. 

Perhaps even more strikingly, the film never tries convincing one why they should bother with such a quote-unquote loser. It simply presents the hopes and regrets, doubts and confusion of someone trying to do good by himself and those around him. In seeing the choices he has to make and how he must live with the consequences, you realize how each person’s journey is precious and profound. Towards film’s end there’s a surprise revelation involving the child that Ari never had. It’s a testament to the script’s power that by then one feels so invested that the tenderness of this moment is almost too much to bear.     

Another scene exemplifying Serraille’s skills and instincts depicts the chance encounter between Ari and a gardener at his friend’s seaside villa. The two straight men meet under somewhat unusual circumstances and vibes go from suspicious to curious and flirtatious faster than you’d expect. Ultimately nothing more than a kiss comes of the exchange and both participants can happily go back to their heterosexual lifestyles, but the wonderfully written scene not only showcases Serraille’s observant eye and naturalistic touch––it reminds one how silly it is for us to have rules about how we may experience pleasure when so much of our lives is spent dealing with hardships and sorrows.   

As brilliant as Serraille’s writing is, Ari wouldn’t have worked if it weren’t for the heart and soul Manet brings to his part. This is not an all-around sympathetic character. He’s quite inadequate, not particularly courageous, doesn’t always know the right thing to do or say. He’d sit in front of a painting for two hours trying to figure out what the painter is saying. Or maybe he’s just looking for something to distract him from what he has to face outside the museum? With an open face that exposes his character’s interiority so completely and immediately, Manet embodies Ari down to his very last flaw. The honesty of his performance cuts through the barrage of words and gives the film its emotional center. Even without dramatic outbursts, the scenes where we find out why he made his ex-girlfriend abort their child and when he realizes what she’s telling him when they meet again are so moving they hit you right in the gut.  

Running a mere 88 minutes, Ari is a deceptively modest portrait of a seemingly unspectacular protagonist. In truth, however, there’s nothing slight about a film that’s so genuinely interested in the struggles of the everyman, that captures facets of the human experience with such eloquence. Don’t let its Frenchness fool you––this is a real one. 

Ari premiered at the 2025 Berlinale.

Some images have become metonymic by nature, reflecting the political problems of today with little to no context needed. Such a shot opens Michel Franco’s newest offering, Dreams, and it is one of a huge truck abandoned next to a railway: illegal border-crossing. It rattles and shakes with the screams of people locked inside, clamoring for help; one already anticipates the dire condition the fugitives all are in once the police break open the back door. One of those “illegals” manages to escape amidst the chaos: a youngish, strong-looking man (Isaác Hernández) whose determination is made clear by every step he takes on that desolate road. We don’t know who he is, but he surely knows where he’s going, and there’s a fierceness to him that overpowers the pain he’s obviously in. 

After hitchhiking to San Francisco, he breaks into the lavish house of Jennifer McCarthy (Jessica Chastain), who finds him sleeping in her bed the next morning, naked. Her silence betrays her, alluding to the fact that he is no random stranger and within a minute of waking up, Fernando is already on top of her with the long-lost lover’s fervor. “I want to take care of you,” Jennifer whispers, pulling up the curtain to a love story that spans countries and social classes. Before the audience can piece together the relationship timeline, Dreams gives more of the couple’s backstory through scenes of intense intimacy. Franco’s usual collaborators, cinematographer Yves Cape and editor Óscar Figueroa, use their trademark tense visual language previously reserved for violent outbursts to sculpt sexual sequences out of static long takes and forceful cuts. But the result is never harsh. Quite the contrary: when every instance of touch is fueled by such sizzling chemistry like that between Chastain and Hernández (and their two very assertive characters) those scenes swell with an insatiable yearning.

Yet life is love’s enemy. Jennifer is the daughter of multi-rich benefactor Michael McCarthy (Marshall Bell) and the family money holds all power while Fernando, no matter how talented a ballet dancer he is, will always be a paperless Mexican immigrant in the eyes of this clan. What we have is a case of impossible love (already one of the most potent dramaturgical devices) that’s full of pride and shackled by class prejudice. As a writer, Franco has hesitated to push his characters into morally ambiguous territories, but this may be his most masterful statement yet on complex power dynamics. 

Dreams‘ economic storytelling––linear, with ellipses and a spectacular flashback / daydream sequence that shakes up the obvious realism––works less in service of the plot, more to highlight the submissive and dominant steaks in both Jennifer and Fernando: sexually, emotionally, and financially, they sway in a treacherous dance. Isaac Hernández (a Principal Dancer at the American Ballet Theatre) is a real revelation in his first feature-film role, combining levity and instinct with sentimental weight. The way he channels Fernando’s stubbornness into allure and charisma is perfectly matched by how gradually Chastain peels back her composure layer by layer. Her Jennifer is a genuine lover who’s burdened by the safety she so desperately clings to and in constant conflict with her desires. It’s easy to want everything when you can literally have everything you’d want, but the American actress goes to great lengths (physically and emotionally) to animate every single paradox in a character who’d otherwise be easily dismissed as spoiled. The two powerhouse performances at the heart of Dreams manage to stand so tall that it seems a love story like theirs can overpower even the trademark brutality one has learned to expect in every Michel Franco film. 

Up until Franco premiered Memory in the main competition at Venice in 2023, people thought they knew what to expect of him. Since his 2009 debut Daniel and Ana, the Mexican director has been testing the limits of human relationships onscreen. In particular he’d zoom in on familial dynamics, how they tense and crack under pressure; in his film worlds, nobody comes out of it unscathed. Memory, though, was a first in more than one sense: the first collaboration with Chastain, but also the first glimpse of hope at the end of a Franco film. With it, and now its follow-up, it seems the filmmaker has left more space for love, potentially redemption. If Memory was deeply romantic, Dreams sets the romance on fire and its flames burn brighter than ever.

Dreams premiered at the 2025 Berlinale in Competition.