- We Were Warned: On “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” at 35 (August 24, 2026)
A teenage boy talks to his machine, giving it commands.
His first task begins innocently enough: “stand on one foot,” the boy says. The machine obeys.
His second task reveals a sinister edge: to target nearby onlookers. The boy orders his machine to grab one of them by the head, pulling him into the air while he screams. His friend tries to intervene, and the machine, leather-clad and 6 feet tall, draws a handgun, and just as it’s about to blast a hole in the man’s head, the boy screams “NO! Put the gun down now!” and stops him just in the nick of time.
This short scene from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” captures in elegant shorthand the possibility and danger of using thinking machines. Released in the final months of the Cold War and nuclear annihilation remained a terrifying possibility, “Terminator 2” harnessed those fears and redirected them towards something more intimate: the rise of the computer, and unlike the atom bomb—which could only be misused by Governments—these machines would soon be in millions of homes around the world. The terrifying result? Using them would turn each person into a makeshift cyborg, with silicon computing becoming an amazing, but frightening, transhuman extension of how we think and behave.
At release, “Terminator 2” was a tech-noir cautionary tale on the rise of computers (in military application and at home). 35 years later, it plays as a cyberpunk mirror of how far we’ve already let technology disrupt and dominate our lives. From the devices we hold in our han to “smart” algorithms and predictive language models, we don’t have to carry laser rifles or battle armies of skeletal machines to feel as though we’re in a cyber-dystopia. Machines replace us in the work force, our dopamine is dependent on the addictive scrolling of our devices, and it’s never been easier to blur ethical lines in how you behave online. Whether through the moral prompts of how to use the T-800 or the propulsive set-pieces, “Terminator 2” demonstrates the more we use machines the more we risk becoming like them, and that the danger from A.I. isn’t necessarily a singularity superbeing starting World War III, but from the way we let technology change who we are in the first place.
So when that boy, John Connor (Edward Furlong), escalates a physical gag into physical violence, he’s proven just how quickly machines blindside us into morally pernicious choices we may never have otherwise. Vigilance is required. It’s that key scene that sets John on the path to be the future leader of the human resistance, where in the far future (in the film, 2029) he fights against Skynet, a synthetic super-intelligence that enslaved humanity. To save his younger self, he sent a reformatted version of the villain in “The Terminator,” the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger), which involves obeying any and all commands John Conner (of any age) will give. It’s for good reason: Skynet has sent the T-1000 (Robert Patrick) after John, a nexus point to save this once and future leader. The young John may have been told how this android operates—it will follow precise instructions without question—and yet his careless teenage words still nearly get a man killed.
Sometimes seen as a softer, less hardcore sequel to the straight-horror original, “Terminator 2” is still plenty horrifying; beyond the tests of will that Cameron imposes on the human characters, the film’s scares reveal the ways a digital intelligence can penetrate, and then distort, what we know reality to be. In what was a landmark leap in CGI technology, the body of the T-1000 is a kind of shape-shifting, liquid metal, and thus can take on any physical form, have any voice, or become any non-complex object: deepfakes that can kill you. It can trick a husband that his wife—already deceased off-screen—is still in the room. It can take on the blue dress of law enforcement, a not-so-subtle hint at Cameron’s dismal view of authority.In one of the film’s most uncanny moments, the T-1000 breaks into a mental health facility by taking on the appearance of a security guard and terrifies the guard with, well, himself. Gazing at this digital homunculus leaves him terrified, only for the villain to morph his hand into a shimmering metal spike and kill him. It’s a warning by Cameron that soon, computer technology will be able to inhabit, if not also replace, human beings. Thus, the T-1000 is, itself, a meta-cinematic device. On its most basic level, the plot follows a killer computer repeatedly trying to kill a teenager, but on another, the clearly digital liquid-metal visual effects add an uncanny wrongness to the film’s moments, where something clearly synthetic, diegetically and to the movie audience, is attempting to replicate being human.
Part of Cameron’s genius with spectacle comes from his magician’s way to blend multiple techniques across micro-seconds of footage, like stop motion, reverse photography, CGI, practical explosions, and miniatures, to create a convincing tableau for his impossibly epic images. It’s just the same in “Terminator 2” and the T-1000, a mix of Robert Patrick’s lithe stunt work, makeup and prosthetics in the form of metallic geometry attached to Patrick’s body, and computer-generated imagery. It’s a combination that successfully makes him a frightening, wholly credible foe. It also, however, shows possibilities of the limits of machines: when the T-1000 liquifies and moves through a gate in the hospital, he forgets he’s carrying a gun, and is snagged on the bars. The weapon can’t move through like he can, and the T-1000 didn’t realize.
On one level, this is Cameron’s way of selling a cool visual effect. But on another, it’s revealing that something so seemingly advanced can still have its blind-spots. Even the way the T-1000 always re-absorbs its liquid metal is a disarming reminder that machines are closed-systems; they cannot iterate on themselves, and if they can adapt, they’re still slow learners. Each masterful set-piece becomes a chess match where the underdog heroes try to exploit a machine’s weaknesses (something that, if anything, is more cathartic today than at release). Sometimes that’s brute force—pumping round after round into its fluid metallic body—and, in others, it’s by forcing it into the extreme elements of ice and fire.In fact, in some ways Cameron’s obsessive desire for photorealistic visual effects has led us to where we are today. From the enchanted tentacle of animated sea water in “The Abyss” to the effervescent beauty of the Na’vi in “Avatar,” the creation of a digital character as perceptually real as any human has been his life’s pursuit. Pause any close-up from “The Way of Water” and marvel at its artistry: the cracks of Ikran-feet around the hero’s aging eyes, the perfect pores that dot Neytiri’s’ face, the fidelity of skin as it wrinkles from an outburst of a teenager’s volatile emotion. The greatest triumph of his “Avatar” Trilogy is how while watching, you are seduced by its mimetic spectacle; you soon forget that none of it is really happening.
“Avatar” is the crowning achievement of how persuasively computers could create a fully believable, lush, dynamic and hyper-immersive digital world. Or, at least it was, until that same push for verisimilitude has (in a sense) encouraged A.I. programs like Grok, Sora and Midjourney to achieve the same, but with more unsettling results. Just as the T-1000 was a shape-shifting metaphor for digital tech in the ’90s since we can perceive a certain offness as it tries to inhabit different shapes and people, these programs have largely produced images that are lifelike but with details that betray its veneer of fidelity. For a long time, the most upsetting were by studying the hands: while the location, props, and even faces might look alright (if somehow, undefinably weird) images of people made by these applications might have too many fingers or too few. In some cases, the hands would appear as if they melted together under intense heat (ironically, one of weaknesses of the T-1000). Today, A.I. images come eerily close to replicating whatever they want, and just as John initially used his terminator as a bad actor to razz some nearby onlookers, the potential consequences for easy, thoughtless misuse are massive.
Far more insidious than any terminator attacker is how machines create gateways for our behavior to change for the worst, and it becomes extremely easy to embrace the digital devils of our worst selves. It’s why John’s interactions with the T-800 are so revealingly dangerous. It exposes the (now cliche) difficulty of how carefully we must choose our words when communicating with literal minded machines; a technical design comes with technically specific instructions. A.I. can only know what we program it to know, and even the most advanced language models in the world expose huge gaps in problem solving. This dilemma has given rise to a whole subset of sci-fi storytelling—from “I, Robot” (2004) and beyond, there’s the infamous sci-fi scenario of telling an A.I. super-intelligence to “protect humans” only for it to then enslave the human race since we are the greatest threat to ourselves. This is at the heart of landmark sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov’s law of robotics, where the first states “a robot may not harm a human, or through inaction allow a human to come to harm.” His stories would create complicated scenarios where artificial intelligence could do just that.Likewise, John quickly realizes he still hasn’t solved the dilemma of how to work with the T-800. In one of Cameron’s most intense sequences, designed with low-angled shots that make the characters look a thousand feet tall, they have to spring his mom, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the main character of “The Terminator,” out of a mental institution. Though John has already given the command never to kill, the T-800 pulls his handgun and casually double-taps a security guard in both of his legs; John screams “what are you doing,” and the T-800 replies with Schwarzenegger’s effortless comic timing: “he’ll live.” John’s input removed one sort of action from the table, without accounting for others. The rest of the movie shows the T-800 balancing his non-kill rule with Cameronian blockbuster badassery, none more so than pumping rounds of gas into an army of police who have the building surrounding. They’ll live, but only just.
Worse, it reveals the critical issue isn’t whether John can control the T-800, but whether John can control himself. When John had the T-800 razz the two men nearby, they only approached after “his” android seized John and the boy screamed for help; they weren’t just random bystanders, they were good samaritans. Drunk off the power fantasy that this all-powerful action figure clad in biker leather will do whatever he wants, his line of empathy temporarily clicks off, and he abuses these men for no reason other than a cruel pleasure.
No one reveals that entangled psychology more than Sarah, who begins the film with enough hatred towards robotics that she gets thrown in a mental ward for trying to blow up machine factories. She gave up her motherhood for the cause. By the time the reprogrammed T-800 shows up to liberate her, she still holds a repulsive, virulent anger towards all machines. Expectedly, she panics when it first appears. But after they’ve escaped and she has time to stage her next steps, Sarah makes the decision, in Cameron’s words, to become a terminator herself and assassinate the man about to create the chip that will eventually launch Skynet, Mike Dyson.
What gets overlooked aren’t the ethics of her is-it-ethical-to-kill-baby-hitler sniper mission, but what comes immediately before it: in narration, she gives an uncharacteristically sentimental speech on why the T-800 is an ideal father for John. This machine isn’t only a valid or valuable ally, but a fit father figure, one that’s better than her past boyfriends and better, she imagines, than most fathers period. What she says is simultaneously true and untrue, a harsh if fair judgement of humanity. By this point, the T-800 hasn’t just learned to crack jokes or evolve with his “thinking chip” (in the “Special Edition” they remove a chip Skynet built to inhibit learning as a means of explaining his personality shift), he’s protected John better than Sarah ever has.
But Cameron, typically sharper a writer than he’s given credit for, has a dual meaning beneath what could sound like a mom’s cornball parental philosophizing: this speech is Sarah’s rationalization that the murder she’s about to commit is okay, that John will have someone to take care of him, that this new robotic dad, this machine, this computer moments ago she thought she could never bring herself to stop hating, will take care of him.
In other words, Sarah has made herself into a terminator by projecting shades of humanity onto a terminator, a more psychological version of the dilemma of John back in that parking lot. It’s not the orders she’s giving the machine that matters, it’s that the machine has allowed her to change, that it has allowed her to act on her worst impulses. In those moments, neither she nor John understand how the very existence of these super-machines can reprogram their behavior in ways beyond their self-conscious understanding. Once these machines exist, it is we who need to police what the machines let us convince ourselves to do, rather than a need to police the machines.
In one of Cameron’s greatest bars, the iconic “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves” speaks to today as much as it did when he wrote it. It’s a line that speaks against a predetermined universe, that no amount of certainty towards a worse tomorrow justifies a lack of action today. It’s a crucial bit of dialogue that recalls one of the ending lines from “Tenet”: “What’s happened happened. It’s an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world, but it’s not an excuse to do nothing.” So it is the same in “Terminator 2,” where there’s a time-loop that should make their situation fruitless. The chip Dyson is about to make is based on technology he only had access to because of the events of “The Terminator,” but that doesn’t mean we should not act to change it.
In 1991, computers were about to enter our homes before we realized all that meant. As if to complete the metaphor, Cameron set both “Terminator” climaxes in the iconic backdrops of an automatized machine factory, making his breathless action a forewarning that if we aren’t careful, we’ll soon be just as mechanized ourselves. Today, Cameron warns the next cycle of escalation won’t be in stock loads of nuclear weapons, but artificial intelligence, where wars will be fought between data centers instead of battlefields. At home, jobs will be lost. The CEOs of companies building these products insist these changes are inevitable, that there’s no use fighting the tide. The most powerful legacy of “Terminator 2” is to fight the fatalism of tomorrow, and to remember its refrain, “no fate.” Our digital age may have dehumanized and changed us, but we are still in control—and the future is always in our hands.
“Terminator 2: Judgment Day” will be re-released in a new 4K edition this Friday, August 28.
- Liminal Spaces, Transitional States: Alexander Ullom on “It Ends” (August 21, 2026)
Fred Rogers’s song “What do you do with the Mad that you Feel” comes to mind when watching director Alexander Ullom’s existential road-trip nightmare, “It Ends.” In his song, Rogers articulates a need for vessels to place our rage, angst, and grief, and sings how easy it is to feel powerless in the face of all that afflicts us. That same thorny longing, terrifying questioning, and ultimately deep-seated hope that depression won’t rule the day courses through Ullom’s film, which takes the straitjackets of horror and hangout movies and blends them into a unique meditation on growing up and finding your way.
Ullom’s film follows four recent college grads, James (Phinehas Yoon), Tyler (Mitchell Cole), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Day (Akira Jackson), who embark on a late-night drive before they go their separate ways. They realize that they’ve turned onto a never-ending road, and any time they try to pause to catch their breath, they have only ninety seconds of respite before hordes of screaming people swarm and attack them. As the odometer climbs and days begin to blend, each member of the crew has to wrestle with what this purgatory means for the futures they once thought they had.
Though the foursome are plagued by eternal monotony, the road to “It Ends” finding a movie home was far from straightforward. After a premiere at SXSW, a subsequent tour on the festival circuit that included the 2025 Chicago Critics Film Festival, a stint on the Letterboxd Video Store, and creative persistence from Ullom himself (“insanity,” he corrects me in our interview) involving influencers at a “Jurassic World: Rebirth” event, “It Ends” finally roars into theaters now.
RogerEbert.com spoke with Ullom once in person during the film’s Chicago premiere and once over Zoom after Ullom wrapped principal photography on his follow-up, “4×4: The Event”; this piece combines those interviews into one fluid conversation. Ullom spoke about the importance of silly questions when navigating our present hellscape, humanity’s tendency to create liturgies to process suffering, and how his decisions to balance the film’s horror and hangout elements manifest in the characters’ arcs.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I found the sequence where James is pleading out to some unknown force for the car to start to be relatable for those who come from religious backgrounds, in particular, the ways people of faith or dechurched people can be so quick to revert to crying out to God in a moment of crisis. Did drawing from your own faith background prove prudent when articulating some of these characters’ spiritual angsts?
Alexander Ullom: The film is definitely religious trauma coded, but I have nothing against religion. Anything that would give people a sense of comfort as they’re dying is probably a good thing, and we have an increasingly short supply of those balms. That scene where Fisher is lamenting that his mother might think he’s going to hell because he told her he was not religious has personal resonance.
In the two-and-a-half-hour version of this movie, there was a whole swath of scenes where the group was trying to remember stories from the Bible. They were talking about Lot’s wife and how she turned to a pillar of salt because she turned around to look at the destruction of Sodom when God told her not to, and trying to understand why she’d do that. Like, dude, if God–like literally, God– fucking showed up and was like, “Do not turn around or else …” I would be like, “Yeah, absolutely. Assignment understood.”
Director Alex Ullom. (Photo: Chris Violette)
One thing that your film really dives into is the fear of eternity. I feel like as human beings we’re not built to fully reckon with the concept of “forever.” What’s your relationship to eternity?
I think for people my age, our relationship with infiniteness and liminality–call it “Backrooms,” if you will–all stems less from a religious place and more from the fact that we don’t really have a destination to “arrive at” anymore. There’s a movement away from any sort of interconnected moral system in our generation that there might have been in the past. The tent poles of structure that used to hold up society, whether it was having a family or buying a house, or literally religion–which used to be one of the moral center points of what held all the kids together–all of those structures have kind of dissolved, and in their place is kind of nothing, like a transitional state.
If liminal spaces are transitionary states, it just feels like we’re in a long one right now. Our relationship with nature is off right now, and because, in general, I think people are becoming less religious or spiritual, we’re losing a connection to something bigger than ourselves.
I was struck by a relatable, futile tendency to graft ritual onto otherworldly situations to shrink them down to size and make them relatable. It’s why I resonated so much with the on-screen rituals we see the characters undergo once they accept their fate. What was the origin of coming up with these rituals?
The guide rails were that each practice or “time” was crafted to process a specific emotion. The screaming is the physical sensation of getting the fear out; the memes are brain gooping, to give your mind space to unwind. I’m probably not smart enough to articulate this, but with the dancing, one of the things I was trying to communicate was how, within the confines of capitalism, every emotion and physical need is exploited, individual time that needs to exist inside of a larger structure. So dancing was a way to break free from some of that.
Are there practices you find yourself implementing now that act as your form of release? What do you do with your anger, despondency, and despair?
It has changed over time. When I was young, meditating was ridiculous to me, but now I figured out how to climb our fire escape to get to the roof of my apartment. So now I’ll go up there and just sit in the sun for a while. Reading has reentered my life, which is crazy. I’m trying to commit to doing things that actually are good for your well-being. Eating all the food groups …
Where do Clif Bars–which get a nice payoff at the end of the film–fall into that diet?
I don’t think I can eat those anymore. I told Phineas I’d eat bar for bar what he ate during production, and I ended up eating a lot of them. This stuff to actually improve your life is just what everyone already knows; you just have to commit to doing it, which sucks. With meditation, my attitude was, “ I don’t want to waste 15 minutes sitting in silence when I could be, I don’t know, doing anything else.” But then after 15 minutes, I’m like, “All right, I feel a little better. I can enjoy TikTok a little better now.” (Laughs)
NEON
How do you think growing up terminally online has shaped your (or Gen Z’s) approach to processing trauma?
Personally, I was fifteen when I saw the Russian Brick Video. I saw a cartel execution online when I was twelve years old. Every single time you watch anything on a phone–even in movies– there’s a simulation of emotion, and so if I was going to feel the real thing, I had already been desensitized to the actual sensation of that feeling. I think we’re all walking around with a functioning numbness, spawned in part due to a collective dissociation.
I’m curious if someone in medieval times who saw their family’s heads chopped off in real time would process it better than how we’re processing similar images now because their emotions are rooted in witnessing something real. Every time we see awful footage online and go on with our lives, we are–as Fisher says–experiencing weaker shades of emotions.
I remember my first heartbreak, and it was world-ending, and then I got used to it. It feels like we only have a certain reservoir for a specific emotion, and over time, it gets ground down and down. You run out of it, and the more you’re online watching stuff, the more I think you use up that reservoir.
Even with watching a horror movie, about an hour in, I just get desensitized to the actual sound of the theater. There’s only a certain number of times a speaker gets really loud before I’m completely used to it.
It’s terrifying how easily we get used to things. In addition to the aforementioned Russian Brick Video and Bible story retelling scene, I also know there were lots of conversations and scenes that you ultimately didn’t include in this edited cut, like another one including the song “Viva La Vida.” Tell me more about the process of choosing the cultural references in this film, knowing that by the time of release, the film may feel dated by what its characters talk about?
I just wanted to root the dialogue in the stuff that’s stuck around with my actual friends in real life. It’s weird because by the time this movie comes out, people are going to think that we’re copying the “100 men versus gorillas” meme based on the question that the characters bicker about at the start of the film. This interview proves we are ahead of the game right now. I think what will keep it universal and fresh is that the references aren’t necessarily rooted in a specific trend. Like modern art, people use memes to process what they’re going through, and that’s what will be familiar, less so the content of the meme itself.
You’ve shared before that when you were in a dark place, the silly debate you had with a friend about whether a gorilla or bear would win in a fight galvanized something in you that helped make life worth living. Tell me more about the role of silly questions in friendships.
There’s no such thing as objective truth anymore. So now these questions are a truth in a way. The actual limit of the human experience is questions with no answers. The confines of existence are questions without an answer, but also know that since there’s no truth, everyone’s subjective opinion is the most important thing now. So the person arguing for the gorilla …. That debate is essentially a spiritual battle, because that’s all that’s left (Laughs). I feel like scholars and scientists have kind of already figured out everything there needs to be, and now it’s for us to debate the silly questions of life. Maybe that’s the unifying moral structure our generation can push together in the absence of religion. In many ways, arguing over a stupid hypothetical is actually the most important thing in the entire world.
A lot of the characters’ grief stems from a legitimate nihilism that anyone would feel living in the world we’re in now. I found their grief to be an almost righteous form of discontent.
If there’s all this horror, if all this shit is going on around us all the time, then the only real thing we can do to make our fellow conscious experience a little bit better is hang out and connect with someone through conversation. Talking with people, hearing different perspectives- to me, these feel like the ways to combat that desensitized meaninglessness. They don’t necessarily need to be these “bear versus gorilla” questions either. If everything’s horrifying, terrifying, and meaningless, then the only reaction is to hear everyone talking about it.
NEON
You talked about how one read of “It Ends” that you like is that there’s a war over the film’s tone with the characters themselves, right down to the changes in aspect ratio. The film widens during the hangout moments, whereas in its “horror” phase the frame is tighter. Talk to me a little bit about that wrestling you were undergoing as a director with this film, and then transplanting that struggle onto the characters?
I think that if they didn’t make that turn, the group would have gone and had a “Dazed and Confused” kind of night. The film would have been a dope little hangout movie, and they probably would have kept butting heads because James is a bit of an asshole. But the film turns onto the road, and now it’s in horror movie mode.
Horror and genre are built on overcoming conflict as quickly as possible. A belief runs through those projects, rooted in the hero’s journey: I’m going to conquer this object, this conflict, and then I will return having changed. That is not how adulthood works at all, or real life. There’s just this scrap in the mud where you pull meaning from wherever, and that’s the thing that James couldn’t fully understand.
So while James is on one end, bringing in that framework and horror, you have Fisher and Day on the other, who, after the time jump, are just trying to hang out. There’s a healing in vibing, and that helps save us from the period of transition we’re in. James is literally saying: “I want the new thing? What is the new thing?” That’s very typical of a genre audience member. For James, he can’t accept that relationships and the people you love are what give life meaning. He doesn’t want to hang out. That was me when I was younger; I couldn’t be present. I couldn’t live in a world where I couldn’t get an answer for that, partly because of my religious upbringing too.
Fisher and Day have to literally turn off the story vehicle. James can’t accept that, so he takes the same vehicle, the one driving the plot, and takes off on his own. They’re battling, and the movie can’t conclude till the plot concludes and, by extension, he takes the movie from them.
Going just off the logline of your next film, “4×4: The Event,” it feels like if “It Ends” is going to be about that transition to adulthood, your follow-up is about how to survive the reality of adulthood.
Yeah, if “It Ends is like “Hey, don’t kill yourself. Love the people around you,” “4×4: The Event” is very much “Okay, now that you didn’t kill yourself, we need to unite.” It’s an intense escalation. If “It Ends” was about the transition from 18 to the ages 23-25, then the next project is about me going from 25 to 30 and watching the people I love’s lives be deeply and negatively affected by the state of the world.
Visually, the film was inspired by my time living in that windowless walk-in closet while I was making “It Ends.” You don’t get this from the logline, but yeah, all the contestants are living in small, dark, windowless concrete rooms with tunnels between them. There’s a drop chute where their orders come in. It’s a setup that truly inverts the natural world. There’s not a single thing in that room that’s organic. They’re pretty much told, “Hey, here’s your computer … here’s your tool to conquer the world. Good fucking luck.” That’s modern life in a nutshell.
“It Ends” is in select theaters via NEON.
- Locarno Film Festival 2026 Wrap-up (August 19, 2026)
Every year I’m reminded that Locarno is a festival whose cinema is earned. This is my third straight year covering the festival that’s nestled amid picturesque Swiss mountains, which requires a trans-Atlantic flight into Milan, an extended train ride over the Italian border, and a thick skin for the unforgiving heat that radiates from the luminous sun that bears down onto the pebbled pavement that grounds the Piazza Grande, which, when filled with 8,000 people, who are watching the newest work from a cinematic master, makes for a sight to behold. This time around, the festival, which ran August 5-15, was brimming with more experimental works, gorgeous restorations, and a new retrospective program that sought to put HUAC and the Blacklist in its filmic context.
Per usual, I arrived in the second half of the festival. It’s a decision that’s sometimes presents an obstacle, at least on a personal level, because you’re arriving when most of your colleagues are venturing off to the next fest, usually Sarajevo Film Festival, rather than remaining (though, on an inside baseball note, you do end up forming very close bonds with those who do stay, if only because you have more time to hang out specifically with them).
Nevertheless, an advantage to arriving “late” is that many others have done some of the legwork for you. They’ve seen several of the premieres and have already parsed what’s forgettable, notable, or good—making your job a two-fold venture: catching up with the good that you’ve missed while consuming what’s yet to premiere. I can’t adequately tell you how much time that saves, especially at a festival where some of the shiniest options are actually classic films playing at the mercifully air-conditioned GranRex cinema.
And while I’m still watching films, another positive of Locarno for press is that the movies on the digital platform stay active through the end of August; I have already seen enough to look back fondly on this edition of Locarno as a real opportunity for discovery and proselytization.
As you can already tell, I split my time between new films and restorations or retrospective titles. For the former, I watched 16 films, and, for the latter, I saw 12. My new movie viewing, funnily enough, began with a movie I’ve already seen: James Gray’s “Paper Tiger,” which screened at Piazza Grande with Gray on hand to accept the festival’s Lifetime Achievement award. While I admired the film out of Cannes, watching it a second time at Locarno, where I could focus on how the film’s rich visual and aural techniques bring to life the story of a working class father (Miles Teller) and a flashy uncle (Adam Driver) who strive for the mirage of the American dream with such abandonment that it imperils their family (a fantastic Scarlett Johansson, Gavin Goudey and Roman Engel), was an incredible luxury to open the festival with.
Further highlights followed in the coming days. In the main competition were several stirring works: Isabelle Stever’s queer wartime drama “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming,” Hong Sang-soo’s latest melancholic treatise on art “Nowhere to Lay My Eyes” (which won Best Performance for Kim Min-hee and Best Director), Ann Oren’s horny and sensorial surgical fever dream “Objet A,” Lê Bảo’s ambitious dreamscape “Hearing,” and Florin Șerban’s Golden Leopard winning paternal drama “You Don’t Belong Here.”
Equally great wealth could also be discovered in the sidebars. Umair Bilal’s culturally specific Pakistani experimental film “As Light As Air” in the Semaine de la Critique was a small gem, as was Mamadou Dia’s Pan-African dance documentary “Atcha Atcha,” which bowed in the Fuori Concorso section.
The most adventurous section, however, might’ve been Concorso Cineasti del Presente—which is often reserved for promising filmmakers on their first or second feature. Beatrice Gibson’s ruminative feminist conversation “At Night,” Ana Vaz’s experimental essayist narrative “Fire Flower” (“Hanabi”), and Uta Beria’s rebellious free speech rallying cry “Tear Gas” were all towering works that were on display.
Accompanying the festival premieres were several major stars and creatives, also honored by Locarno and the fest’s Artistic Director, Giona A. Nazzaro. Before I arrived, Olivia Wilde, who came to send off her latest directorial effort, “The Invite,” for its European Premiere (the film sold out the 8,000-seat Piazza Grande), Isabella Rossellini, Sigurjón Sighvatsson, and Virginie Efira were honored. During my stay, Gray, Zoe Saldaña, Rick Baker, Asia Argento, and Darren Aronofsky were also feted (during the festival, I was fortunate enough to dine with Baker and his wife Silvia, a noted film and television hairstylist in her own right, a personal highlight of mine).
And as always, the major thrill of Locarno arose from squirreling away time to catch the fest’s incredible retrospective series. “Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist,” which was produced in conjunction with Cinémathèque suisse and with the support of UCLA Film & Television Archive, see curator Ehsan Khoshbakht once again utilizing his deep knowledge of classic cinema to tell a story about a specific and imperative period in moviemaking (in prior years he’s curated a celebration of Columbia Pictures’ 100th anniversary called “The Lady With the Torch” and a look back on British postwar cinema).
While I won’t take too much time to give my thoughts on the retrospective, as I don’t want to subtract from Marya E. Gates’ far more historically informed coverage for the site, I will say this, “Red & Black” makes a remarkable effort to fully contextualize a period of anti-art facism that destroyed many people’s lives and creatively set back Hollywood for so long that it still hasn’t totally dug its way out of the grave ramifications caused by the period. I was honored, in fact, to introduce Emile de Antonio’s revealing documentary “Point of Order,” a film composed wholly of footage from the Army-McCarthy hearings (you can get a version of what I spoke about via the festival’s Instagram page). Other speakers included Eddie Muller, Imogen Sara Smith, Phuong Le, Tanya Goldman, Christopher Small, Eva Markovits, Thierry Méranger, Joseph Losey’s 88-year-old son, Gaverick, and more.
Some of my personal favorites from the series were Luis Buñuel’s racial critique “The Young One,” Allan Dwan’s “High Noon” riff “Silver Lode,” Herbert J. Biberman’s pro-union melodrama “Salt of the Earth,” and Lewis Milestone’s wildly pro-Soviet war flick “The North Star.” If you’d like a further taste of the full series, I’d recommend checking out Marya’s piece, picking up the accompanying same-titled book edited by Khoshbakht (for now it’s sold out!!), or listening to the podcast series.
And as I file this edition of Locarno into my memory, I am once again filled with immense joy. Never let anyone tell you that it’s been a terrible year for movies. There are always innumerable movies to find at festivals big and small, hidden gems that deserve words and eyes, notable new voices awaiting uplift. I curse how few hours in the day I have to find many of them, fearing to immeasurable ends that I am right now, as I type away, missing a truly great film.
I hope that some of these works will make it to your theater, screens, and eyes (a few that I highlighted are slated to appear at NYFF, TIFF, and many regional festivals, hopefully, near you). As I have written in the past, the future of film resides in discovery; it’s made fertile when one takes a leap in watching a film from a country they haven’t visited, from a people they don’t know, in a tongue that is different but no less melodic. In these five days, Locarno has once again revitalized my pursuit of those discoveries. I hope to be at the festival next year to experience it once again.
- Locarno 2026: You Don’t Belong Here, Who Is Still Alive, Sixteen Moments of My Life, Letter From My Village (August 19, 2026)
My final dispatch from Locarno is probably the most varied of the quartet that I’ve filed. Fittingly, it’s composed of four films, each from a different section of the festival. Collectively, they’re also the most likely to travel outside of the festival to a screen near you. Most of all, they’re either about defiant people telling their own stories against their oppressors or are works that decry hate and bigotry. They characterize what Locarno Artistic Director Giona A Nazzaro said would be the aim of this festival: “To regain cinema as a freedom that can’t be predicted through algorithms or consumer habits.” These films resist any strict definition.
Florin Șerban’s “You Don’t Belong Here,” the winner of the Golden Leopard, is a classically styled Romanian drama whose methodical rhythm often belies its radical message. It begins unassumingly, maybe even plaintively, with an opening shot of an aged nuclear power plant’s smokestack nestled in a rural field. From there it cuts to an ornate water fountain then to a skate park and then to a sleepy residential neighborhood. This is a small town not unlike many others. But its daytime calm will soon be broken by nighttime hate: We see an army of armored cyclists roll onto a quiet street, slashing car tires, breaking windows, and vandalizing these parked vehicles by placing posters that say “you don’t belong here.” One man, a Romani, tries to defend the neighborhood, only to be savagely beaten to death.
That captivating opening is but a small part of a puzzle whose many pieces will be sequentially added throughout the 254 minutes of Șerban’s interrogative work. By dawn we’re introduced to a new character, Marius Călimanescu (Adrian Văncică), a surgeon who after his morning jog finds his car damaged by that evening’s hooligans. He thinks little of property damage. This single father, whose son Ioan (Teodor Butănescu) is hiding a gnarly leg contusion from an unknown source, is more enamored with keeping his hospital afloat than to worry about what he perceives as outside noise. Unbeknownst to him, the troubles of his town and his son will soon come barreling toward him.
Șerban’s “You Don’t Belong Here” is an intricate picture of misplaced masculinity, toxic discrimination and parental anguish. Its well-earned profundity, reliant on assured compositions and a detailed sound design, pulls one deep into its whirlpool-sized narrative that only seems to gain speed and viciousness as the film progresses. It’s telling, in fact, how much happens underneath Marius’ nose: Ioan visits a clinic for his leg, meets up a mysterious biker guy at the local dam and gives away the yellow bike that Marius bought for him. Instead, Marius is consumed with his reputation. When angry Romani men trash his hospital because the police have decided to autopsy the deceased man who was beaten to death the night before—an order the film suggests is a vindictive bigoted act by Marius’ former high school classmate and current inspector—Marius simply demands the problem be placed outside of his hospital. Worse yet, the only other subject pulling at his attention is his high school reunion where laments he won’t be seen as truly great.
The film smartly closes in on Marius. Cramped compositions between himself and his son show how uncomfortable he is fulfilling his fatherly role, especially as he expresses disappointment that Ioan seemingly has zero ambition. The perpetual presence of police sirens in the soundscape, which increases in volume and in frequency as the film lurches forward further teases reality creeping toward Marius. Văncică’s evolutionary performance, which sees this once confident man reduced to shambles, is another excellent car on a melancholic train barreling toward the heart (his quiet, observational performance does make Șerban’s decision to employ a late on-the-nose voiceover monologue quite disappointing). All these sturdy components combine to patiently render “You Don’t Belong Here” into a soul-shattering picture of grief and regret.
For these dispatches, I’ve tried to primarily focus on films having their world premiere at Locarno. A 2025 Venice Film Festival selection, Nicolas Wadimoff’s “Who Is Still Alive” breaks that trend a bit—especially because it only had a single screening at the Swiss fest. Last week, however, it was announced that Switzerland would be selecting the pro-Palestine documentary as their submission to the 99th Academy Awards, so combined with the imperative subject matter it made even more sense to include some words about Wadimoff’s film.
“Who Is Still Alive” concerns ten subjects: Each hail from Gaza, each escaped to Egypt before the Rafa border was closed on May 7, 2024. They all have a story to tell about survival and loss, with each detail more harrowing than the last. While Wadimoff, who previously directed “Aisheen (Still Alive in Gaza)” in 2010, wanted to film his subjects in Switzerland, the country doesn’t accept Palestinians lacking a visa. He instead opted to shoot on a South African soundstage where Adel Altaweel, a visual artist and one of the subjects, has decided to draw a large map of Gaza in white marker on a black floor. On that map he draws individual boxes that represent where each subject’s home was in Gaza.
Before launching into their respective story, each person shares their intimate memory of what their house and neighborhood looked like, holding back tears as they recall their former, now erased, abodes. Wadimoff mixes these recollections with some unique staging, allowing the camera to track and pan around each subject as they stand upright, bathed in theatrical lighting.
Following these lyrical sequences, the film becomes familiar in form, compiling one-on-one interviews with the figures. All of them have different backgrounds. The defiant Haneen Harara, for instance, is a journalist. A heartbroken Jawdat Khoudary is a businessman. The former mourns the 13 people from her family who died on March 5 in an Israeli airstrike; the latter laments the history and culture permanently lost in the devastating missile strike of Al Mat’haf museum, which he owned. Fascinatingly, in a midway break in the film, Jawdat and Haneen argue over whether they should return to rebuild Gaza. Haneen castigates Jawdat for not being strong enough to take part, demonstrating the magnitude of the hurt Palestinians have endured in war and in exile.
For his part, Wadimoff is attentive to the film’s aching tone. He doesn’t want to make a documentary wholly predicated on trauma. He reaches for ruminative moments like the aforementioned lyrical theatrical sequences and toward the end of the film finds time to get the subjects out of the darkened soundstage to the outside, which is filled with sounds of the wind blowing and children playing. He also leans on the talents of Feras, who, when his family was issued an evacuation order, only took his Qanun with him from his home. That stringed instrument provides a kind of comfort for the end of the film to the subjects and to the viewer for a final bold note that fortifies “Who Is Still Alive” as a story of survival and determination.
On its face, “Sixteen Moments of My Life,” the latest from Spanish auteur Albert Serra, isn’t terribly notable. Unlike “Pacification” or “Afternoons of Solitude,” idiosyncratic works that embed viewers in insular worlds, his latest film initially appears to be far more conventional. A concert documentary that observes German singer/actress Ingrid Caven’s one-off performance at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, the film, nevertheless, is just as operatic yet intuitively focused as his prior films.
Caven, who’s best known to cinephiles as a consistent collaborator with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, sings a sixteen song set filled with pieces composed in conjunction with Marc Verdaguer and Joe Robinson. She rarely speaks to the audience, only offering a courteous “merci” every half hour or so; neither Serra nor her ever notify the viewer of each track’s name either. Those details aren’t imperative to them. What counts is allowing space for the overall story to be told without distraction. The result is spellbinding yet stimulating, tangible but fleeting. That’s partly because of the reserve Serra employs in shooting Cavern. He’ll rely on a slow push-in on the opening song for dramatic effect or hold on Verdaguer and Robinson’s accompanying band as they provide kinetic abstract textures to the avant-garde these arrangements for rousing moments of musical alchemy.
And while Cavern remains an island unto herself, situated in the middle of the stage with instrumentalists on either flank, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t work the crowd. Her side door exit off stage, which allows her to steal a few sips of water, leaves the crowd pining for more; her contorted dance with the microphone actualizes the evocative imagery of her songs’ lyrics; her blue satin gown mixed with her mysterious dark sunglasses give a transcendent impression. While performing, Cavern switches between French and German and sings of distant memories and lost loves, bending her voice tightly around these imaginative musical scenes.
Once again, “Sixteen Moments of My Life” isn’t a major work by Serra. But its existence is still major to someone: Cavern. And while this will be more of an oddity for hardcore fans of the director than a necessary example of his filmmaking, it’s a major statement for his subject.
In another change-up, this dispatch isn’t filled entirely of new films. While at Locarno, I saw a restoration of Senegalese auteur Safi Faye’s “Letter from My Village” (“Kaddu Beykat”). The restoration feels notable for a few reasons. For one, Faye’s work is difficult to see because her films aren’t available on streaming (though you can locate them through other means). Also, the 2K revitalization of her classic film, which was carried out by Locarno Heritage in collaboration with Cinegrel from a 16mm master, was touted throughout the festival before most screenings with a brief sizzle reel of the before and after of the restoration. Most importantly, “Letter from My Village” is an integral piece of African cinematic history and a quintessential example of Faye’s interest in the travails of rural Senegalese life.
While the film takes care to record the day-by-day customs and discussions shared in a small African village, it would be a grave mistake to relate it to any ethnographic leanings. Rather Faye crafts a loose narrative about a drought that’s afflicting this small community so badly that it’s revealing the many systematic inequalities engineered against them. We view this oncoming calamity through the eyes of Ngor (Assane Faye), a young man whose aim of marrying Coumba (Maguette Gueye) is momentarily dashed because the drought, which has severely impacted the local groundnut crops, has rendered his family too disadvantaged to afford the necessary cultural accoutrements for the ceremony. To make ends meet, he ventures to Dakar in search of work only to be exploited by those who’ve seen enough people with a similiar plight to know he’s vulnerable and naive.
Accompanying this primary plot, is, of course, the epistolary component—which comes in the form of letters written from a villager to a friend. These letters are read by Faye herself and give voice to the many customs, expectations and roles, particularly between men and women, within this community. These observational words are matched with Faye’s equally expressive lens, which absorbs the many sights of village and urban life—the delineation between the calm pace of the former and bustling force of the latter, especially regarding unnavigable traffic—gives a full picture of the many faces of Senegal. Her winking humor, often displayed in Ngor’s metropolitan troubles, also keeps this work from being a dour affair. By the end, through the monumental achievement that is “Letter from My Village,” one gets a tantalizing sense of Faye as an empathetic filmmaker and a biting storyteller. And hopefully, with a new 2K DCP now readily available, one hopes Faye’s inquisitive picture travels the world once more.
- I Was Compelled to Revisit: Rory Kennedy on “Freefall: A Reckoning For Boeing” (August 19, 2026)
Rory Kennedy has followed up her searing documentary “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” with an update, “Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing.” The first film focused on the two 737 crashes within five months of each other, killing 346 people. The Boeing executives insisted it was not their fault but, as often happens in litigation and regulatory enforcement, they promised they were fixing whatever was wrong. She says she was “chronologically incentivized” to film and update.
In “Freefall,” Kennedy shows us the evidence that came up when whistleblowers went on the record with their concerns that the quality control that once defined the company’s reputation had been jettisoned in favor of bonus-incentivized cost-cutting.
In an interview with RogerEbert.com, she talks about what brought her back to the story, her view on re-enactment in documentaries, and how she brought cameras into an especially sensitive moment.
What happened after the first movie that brought you back to the story?
“Downfall” really focused on the 737 MAX crashes. And the two airplanes crashed within five months of each other, same kind of airplane, new aircraft. Initially, Boeing argued that it was pilot error. Ultimately, after pressure, congressional investigations, and reporters staying on them, they admitted it was the fault of the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System for flight stabilization) and the plane itself, and they took responsibility. However, they weren’t criminally held accountable. And they had been responsible for killing 346 people, and they assured the public and government and all of us that they learned their lessons and changed their ways. But pretty soon after that plane went up into the air, which is where “Downfall” ends.
And suspicious things were going on. We were reading about incident after incident in the press: engines falling off airplanes, smoke filling cabins, wheels not working. Then the Air Alaska incident happened, when a window blew out midair. Around that same time, the whistleblower, John Barnett, whom I had interviewed for “Downfall” and had a friendship with, died under suspicious circumstances while he was testifying about Boeing. Several whistleblowers were coming out in the press, but others were reaching out to me, saying, “You really need to see what’s going on inside of Boeing.”
So, at that point I went back to Netflix and Imagine, who we worked with on the first film. We huddled together, and I said that I was compelled to revisit and go back in there, and they agreed.
And so, this film is much more inside the factories, what’s happening inside of Boeing from the perspective of the whistleblowers.
You just used the words “took responsibility.” Does that mean admitting it was their fault? Or does that mean some reparations? Or does that mean taking the steps necessary to prevent it from happening again?
Legally, they admitted responsibility, but there was still pushback on criminal responsibility and on holding the CEOs and the people in charge accountable with the impact of actually going to prison. So that’s never happened. Part of the story of this film is the pressure on the families to try to compel these CEOs to actually take responsibility in a way that one would if they killed one person, let alone 346 people. That’s never happened.
I remember in 1985, after a Japan Airlines plane crashed into a mountain, the President, Yasumoto Takagi, spent months traveling across Japan to visit the homes of the victims’ families in person, offering his condolences and a formal apology. We did not see anything like that from Boeing.
Many of the families have yet to get a call directly from Boeing apologizing.
I’m sure their lawyers advise them not to do that. But yeah, as a human being, it’s horrifying to think about.
That’s what this film shows compellingly: Boeing’s continued lack of humanity in handling the MAX crashes, and its continued decision-making that prioritizes profits over safety. It’s been pointed out that they’re not making dishwashers; they’re making airplanes. So, it’s a company where we’re all invested in compliance with regulatory mandates for safety.
In both films, you show us a changeover from a quality-, reliability-, and safety-focused company to a profit-focused company. When did that change occur, and how do you see that change occurring?
We documented some choices that start with “Downfall” and continue through “Freefall.” “Downfall” goes a little deeper, back to the McDonnell Douglas merger, which was a seminal event. And the move of the headquarters from Seattle, which is where the factory was, where all these planes were being built, to Chicago, too.
“Freefall” does a deeper dive into the Jack Welch model of corporate America, prioritizing corporations and shareholder profits above all else. And the kinds of decisions that GE was making then got pulled over to Boeing.
Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing. Cr. Maxwell Archives
GE does make dishwashers.
And they do make dishwashers. But that company also went down. “Freefall” is not just a profile of concerns about an airplane and how it’s built and the safety protocols, but it’s also the health of this company. It has been losing more and more money because of the decisions it’s making. It’s not just about safety, although to me that’s the highest priority. It’s also about running a company as effectively as possible.
The point you’re making is that they are cutting costs in the short term but losing money in the long term. That is the fault of the way the board structures incentive compensation. As we see in your film, the CEO made more than $100 million, which is unrelated to what we would consider performance.
As one of our experts says at the end, this company is self-destructive. It’s in free fall, and yet the CEOs who have been running it are some of the wealthiest people in our country’s history.
There’s a very, very sensitive moment in this film when the Barnett family members get some really painful news, and you are in the room filming their reaction. How do you as a documentarian make them feel comfortable enough to have you there?
In the aftermath of John’s death, I was very immediately in touch with his mother and have stayed in touch with her. I also have a good relationship with his lawyers. Because I had made “Downfall,” I had a good amount of credibility for family members and whistleblowers to trust that I was going in there in a way that would represent their stories fairly. I think all of that contributed to their trust in me and their willingness to let me document very intimate moments.
How do you calibrate the kind of re-enactments you include?
I try to minimize reenactment. When you’re making a documentary, you’re always thinking “What is the visual storytelling?” I really prioritize archive research. And I have a really fantastic team who helps me do that. But there are parts of storytelling where there’s just no footage. I’m trying to make a film and a story that is, most importantly, true and at the same time try to make it, for lack of a better word, entertaining, like engaging, keeping audiences invested.
Visual storytelling, whether I’m using graphics or recreations, is an important part of helping audiences understand what’s happening. But I always try to distinguish it stylistically so audiences know what’s recreation and what is archive. I try not to mesh them and confuse people.
One of the most compelling parts of the film for me was the Senate hearing. Senator Blumenthal uses the word “preventable,” and Senator Hassan uses the word “systemic.” Both are powerful and very clear that Boeing is responsible. And yet nobody’s really done anything to make any changes. Who is in a position to address this? And how do you hope they will see this film?
Part of the story is that this is one of the all-time great companies in American history, a company that I’ve long admired. I’m rooting for Boeing, right? I want Boeing to be successful and to do what it has done historically: make some of the greatest, safest aircraft known to man.
Many people can do something. You can get a CEO in there who is an engineer and says, “We’re going to focus on excellence, and we’re going to focus on safety.” There’s a saying that a fish smells from the head, right? But from the head, you can create something good that trickles down, and you feel throughout this institution. Having a CEO and board who really prioritize that would make a world of difference. But then there’s also the Department of Justice. The previous Department of Justice had held Boeing accountable, and Boeing had agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges. Then a new administration comes in and says, “Actually, we don’t need you to plead guilty.”
Those choices affect whether a company is incentivized to do the right thing. And if you’re holding the CEOs who have killed 346 people accountable and they have to go to prison, that sends a very powerful message that any other CEO who comes into that company is going to be like, “I’m going to focus on safety because I don’t want to go to prison.” We can financially support the FAA, the regulatory agency that is responsible for enforcing safety at Boeing. Instead, a lot of FAA funding has been gutted, and its authority to oversee what’s happening at Boeing has been pulled back. There’s also a revolving-door situation where people work at the FAA, and then get hired by Boeing, and vice versa. And so, you know, they’re not fully incentivized to do the right thing.
These are choices that people in elected office are making. And so, with an election coming around the corner, it behooves people to research who they’re voting for and whether they have a record of supporting the agencies that regulate corporations.
