Film
Stillz’s “Barrio Triste” transforms the dangers of life in Medellín into a haunting journey through cosmic horror, media distrust, and adolescent fear.
Across two October weekends at the Brattle, the expanded 27-film series offers Boston audiences early looks at new work by Lee Chang-dong, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Martin McDonagh, Pedro Almodóvar, and more.
At TIFF, Barbara Kopple follows exploited delivery workers, William Greaves revives the Harlem Renaissance, and Iranian filmmakers find private lives shadowed by surveillance, war, and repression, yet also beautified in some cases.
Tom Cruise delivers a virtuoso turn, but Iñárritu buries a potentially potent climate-change comedy beneath exposition, self-congratulation, and stunts.
Three Toronto premieres — John Trengove’s “The Smell of Apples,” Avi Nesher’s “Our Loves,” and Pedro Almodóvar’s “Bitter Christmas” — locate private lives within political violence, historical memory, and the seductive artifices of storytelling.
Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa transforms a revenge thriller into a chilling examination of guilt, conspiracy, and the violence that permeates modern life.
Lili Reinhart charms as a cancer-curing Stanford Ph.D. candidate, but Amazon’s uneven adaptation works best when it follows Olive’s friendship with Anh—not her contrived fake-dating romance.
“Edie Arnold Is a Loser” is a divinely idiotic punk-rock Catholic-school comedy: sweet, predictable, outrageous, mildly blasphemous—and infectious.
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s rigorously constructed follow-up to “No Other Land” uses testimony from Israeli military whistleblowers to expose the systems of surveillance, dehumanization, and moral evasion that shaped Israel’s war on Gaza.
The festival’s strongest films find courage, comedy, and unexpected forms of kinship amid political repression, mortality, war, and the complications of family.
Arts Commentary: The Distance Between Us and the Museum