- TIFF 2026: Tender Loving Care, Bucking Fastard, A Long Winter (September 13, 2026)
Three of our best working filmmakers have new films on the fest circuit, and they all made the journey north to Canada this year to premiere them in Toronto. The very good news is that they all work, to varying degrees, and one is even among the best films you’ll see in 2026.
The standout is Mike Leigh’s devastating and beautiful “Tender Loving Care,” a dramedy that looks like it might be the legendary British filmmaker’s last. The man behind “Naked,” “Secrets and Lies,” “Topsy-Turvy,” “Happy-Go-Lucky,” and many more has been one of the most consistent directors we have for decades, and he has delivered a truly beautiful swan song, a movie that works as both a character study and a commentary on his entire career.
Most of all, it’s a film that reflects his deep humanism. Leigh understands people—how they move, think, and speak—as well as anyone, and he has poured that desire to find truth in his fellow man into this story about arguably one of the most important things you can do: Be present for someone else. It’s not about active empathy as much as it’s about just being there: Laughing, crying, feeling, and even just sitting in silence. Sometimes that’s all we can do, and all other people need. Mike Leigh’s films often feel like they find the extraordinary in ordinary lives. This is one of his best.
Kate O’Flynn (doing such a different register from her work on “Widow’s Bay“) stars as Amy, a social worker who works to protect young people, sometimes from themselves, and sometimes from their parents. She’s partnered with her best friend Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), a social worker who deals with the needy at the other end of life, assisting with the elderly as much as she possibly can. They’re both often pushed away by the people they encounter, whether it’s a mother fighting for custody of her kid or a woman who appears to be a hoarder and screams about her neighbor through a mostly-closed door. These scenes clearly followed Leigh’s unique process, one that isn’t improvisational as much as workshopped: The actors work with Leigh to find the right lines and beats within the construct of the plot. These clients may feel like narrative tangents, but they are essential to the fabric of the piece and the understanding that Amy and Rosie know how to actively listen more than most people.
They also love to drink wine and joke around with each other. Amy has actually come home to crash with Rosie after her garbage boyfriend went back to his wife. They laugh about each other’s love lives—Rosie is dating a firefighter that’s never seen—in a manner that makes their friendship 100% believable. Rarely has female friendship been captured with more veracity. It truly feels like these women have known each other for years.
Like a lot of best friends, Rosie has also known Amy’s parents, played by Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson, both spectacular. At first, it almost feels like this is a film about their love. They joke, laugh, worry about Amy, and even dance together. Have they found the love and care that Amy and Rosie have as friends more than in their romantic lives?
This is not that movie, even if it’s a part of the fabric of Leigh’s quilt. Without spoiling, the final act of “Tender Loving Care” dips into something heartbreaking, but it never loses its buoyancy. It’s a reminder of the value of human decency, of love, and of care. It’s kind of all we have.
A much different experience awaits you in Werner Herzog’s first narrative film in years, the truly bonkers, even for Werner, “Bucking Fastard,” a film that opens with the words “For David Lynch” and then unfolds as a movie the deceased auteur would have almost certainly loved. Herzog’s interests are all up there on the screen in this surreal, trippy, funny, strange flick that’s truly hard to put into words. The first hour of “BF” is among Herzog’s best filmmaking, his fluid camera gliding across the story of a two sisters too strange for this world. Just as it feels like the themes are coalescing it takes a sharp turn and becomes something even stranger in the caves of Northern Ireland. Werner sure loves his caves. This section of the film gets almost as lost as the sisters, but the final shot really works, a sort of refusal to give viewers a concrete ending, letting them wander the tunnels of this world, rolling the movie’s questions around in their heads instead of providing easy answers.
Herzog takes inspiration for his fairy tale from the true story of Freda and Greta Chaplin, twin sisters who wore the same clothes and spoke at the same time. They also terrorized a man with whom they were obsessed, even testifying at a trial about their persistence, reportedly in unison. Herzog’s sisters aren’t twins, but they are played by real-life siblings Kate Mara and Rooney Mara, as Joanie and Jeannie Holbrooke. And his film opens at his version of the trial, where neighbor Gareth Mulroney (Orlando Bloom) seeks a restraining order. The trial sets the stage for the weirdness to come as the Mara sisters speak often simultaneously—same cadence, emphasis, and words—giving the film a dreamlike rhythm right from the beginning.
After lighting Gareth’s post box on fire so he can no longer receive love letters, a kindly neighbor sweeps up the girls and puts them up in an apartment, where he protects and watches over them. A man named Timothy (Domhnall Gleeson) tries to train them to separate enough to be able to vacuum and open a can of sardines, while their internet celebrity status continues to grow. The apartment section of “Bucking Fastard” is fantastic stuff, feeling almost like a parallel to the film’s prologue, one in which the sisters speak of a dream about birds, creatures that often move and chirp in unison. In a sense, the Holbrookes have been put in a birdcage, admired by the men outside and protected by their keepers.
Believe it or not, “Bucking Fastard” gets much, much weirder. Eventually, the girls find themselves chiseling away in a tunnel in a cave, trying to find a path to a place where they belong. Herzog has made several films about people who don’t fit in normal society, and this one seems to suggest that it is up to those people to carve their own path. It’s captured in one of my favorite lines of the year: “Everyone should dig a tunnel through a mountain.” It’s rich coming from the man who made “Fitzcarraldo,” but it’s also, somehow, remarkably inspiring.
Finally, there’s the latest drama from the masterful director of “45 Years” and “All of Us Strangers.” Andrew Haigh never really makes the same movie twice, and yet all of his films, like Leigh, reflect a deep humanism, a desire to understand the complexity of people in a way that makes them feel genuine on-screen. His adaptation of a 2006 short story by Colm Toibin is so methodical that it can verge on feeling too slow, a pace that almost feels designed to capture the snowbound conditions in which it unfolds. You know how when you’re covered in snow gear and trudging up a hill that you don’t move at quite the same pace? There are parts of “A Long Winter” that verge on glacial, but strong performances and a truly moving final beat pull it all together.
Fred Hechinger does the best work of his career as Mike, who has returned home to his Colorado cabin in the ‘50s, just before his brother Tommy (Kit Connor) is leaving. He will be alone with a taciturn father (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and troubled mother (Caitriona Balfe). Despite efforts to put on a brave face, it seems like mom is the kind of soul who has been fighting depression for years, stuck in a desolate place she never wanted to be in. When the family goes into town for supplies, she sneaks a drink or two, and hides wine around the house. When dad takes the booze away, mom literally walks out the front door, disappearing just before a snowstorm. Everyone searches for her, hoping she made it to shelter, possibly even her brother’s (Martin Freeman) house before the storm really made everything deadly, but it becomes increasingly likely that she simply disappeared into the snow.
“A Long Winter” becomes not so much a survival story or a mystery but a study in sustained melancholy. Mike walks the hills, hoping to stumble onto something that he knows is buried in the snow, and that he doesn’t really want to find. His father becomes increasingly petulant, refusing to do the basic things around the house that mom did before, and Haigh slowly makes it clear how suffocating this life must have been for his wife. It’s really a study of what happens when you take away someone’s only escape, even if it’s the deadly one of alcohol addiction.
Haigh really takes his time with a movie that moves at the pace of a winter search. Men trudge through the snow, and silence fills a cabin without a motherly presence. He directs Hechinger and Moss-Bacharach to do a great deal in the quiet beats. Mike is also hiding his sexual urges, first aimed at a local cop and then a young man who dad hires to do the cooking and cleaning around the house. He is figuring out who he is in this motherless scenario, turning “A Long Winter” into a study of manhood. Is the son who won’t give up on a doomed search less of a man than the father who seems to have moved on? And is the father who mocks and demeans both his only true ally in his son and the new young man in his house really any kind of role model? Can you blame anyone for choosing the wilderness over oppressive depression?
“A Long Winter” is also a gorgeously shot movie, as the snowy landscapes are alternately striking and foreboding. There are times when one feels the pace of Haigh’s approach more than most of his films as we plod through the snow with these increasingly depressed characters, but it makes for a film that’s more haunting and deliberate than it might have otherwise been. And it allows for the film’s stunning final shot to feel like more of a release, an escape from an unwanted life.
- TIFF 2026: In the Heart of the South, Idda, Magazine (September 12, 2026)
In this year’s Discovery and Platform sections at the Toronto International Film Festival, I saw three films about women navigating their twenties, their artistic ambitious, and their interpersonal relationships with their closest friends: Alexandra Pechman’s “Magazine,” Nyla Innuksuk’s “In The Heart of the South,” and Irene Dionisio’s “Idda.” Two of these films are far more successful at processing the growing pains of your twenties through the lens of cinema than the third.
Following up her debut 2022 alien invasion debut “Slash/Back,” writer-director Nyla Innuksuk’s doesn’t totally pivot away from genre filmmaking, although she does have plenty to say about why certain stories are only allowed to be told through the lens of genre. “In The Heart of The South,” a title that is in reference to Toronto being south of the arctic from which its main Inuk protagonist Yura Ivalu (Anna Lambe) hails. Yura is the current it girl of the Toronto art world after her immersive virtual reality piece about residential schools shoots her to stardom.
A few film offers follow. In one meeting Yura has the opportunity to adapt an Inuit novel that will help teach white audiences; the other company is less up front with their well-meaning racism, claiming they want to platform Yura’s personal story — just it has to have genre hook. But really, it’s her story they assure her. As she frantically attempts to write an outline based on a traumatic story from her childhood, her estranged friend Sesi (Zorga Qaunaq) re-enters her life, and soon the truth about their shared past comes back to haunt her.
Yura has no qualms about commodifying her culture for the great good, when she’s the only Native artist in the room. However, as soon as Sesi enters the picture, not only does Yura begin to question her own “Inuit-ness,” she begins to spiral about her talent as an artist as well. Like Yura’s VR piece, Innuksuk uses immersive sound design to bring the audience into her psychosis. As Yura’s self-doubt grows, it also manifests as rashes on her skin, showing for the whole world her insecurities.
Qaunaq is deeply ominous as Sesi, while also being wonderfully mordant. As the tides turn on Yura and Sesi’s strange behavior begins to make more sense, both actresses manage to ground the more melodramatic elements of the plot in sincere emotionality. Innuksuk’s razor sharp satire bites not only into the white guilt ridden art and film world that’s more than ready to exploit Indigenous pain for profit, but also those Indigenous artists who are willing to sell their pain – and the pain of their communities – to the highest bidder in the name of speaking “the truth.”
In Irene Dionisio’s dizzying drama “Idda,” two women reconnect in their hometown of Catania in Sicily during the festival of Festival of Saint Agatha with plans to climb to the top of Mount Etna. Idda, we learn, is the feminine name given by the locals to the active volcano. Adele (Tecla Insolia) is a photographer, whose mother passed away a few years ago. Sofia (Romana Maggiora Vergano) is a dance teacher and free spirit. As these two women crash back into each other’s lives, Dionisio continually flashes to the volcano, its grey ash and red molten lava, destroying in its beautiful path. Cinematographer Gergely Pohárnok brings a rich and tactile texture to this world, while the film’s sound design wholly transports the viewer into the realm of the mountain.
As the women make their way up the mountain, a strange resentment bubbles between them. Dionisio allows this fissure to rumble without quite exploding for most of the film, much like the mountain itself. It’s alive, but under the surface. And while the final reveal at the end of the film doesn’t quite work, the film’s immersive world almost makes up for the distance we’re kept from these characters. Dionisio also does a wonderful job of bringing the local festival back to its pagan roots, contrasting the procession of the candalora of Saint Agatha to an altar up on the mountain for the nymph Aetna, who is said to have carried her child to term on the volcano’s peak.
Time, like the volcano’s ash, will come for everyone and everything, even if you’re able to capture a moment of it with a photograph. As the film progresses, Adele must learn to live with the ghosts of her past, and feel the warmth of the memories that remain, because even the painful ones remind us of what once was, and what still remains.
Sometimes at a festival like TIFF you discover a bold new voice with a distinct point of view or singular cinematic vision. Other times you watch a first time director and wonder if they’re even a storyteller, let alone a filmmaker. Unfortunately Alexandra Pechman’s debut film “Magazine” falls in the latter category. Set in 2011, the film follows Arizona transplant and wannabe poet Nora (Lily McInerny, whose wide eyes aren’t enough to add texture or internality to the hollowness of her character) during her stint as an unpaid summer intern at Platen, a fictional prestigious quarterly lit journal a la The Paris Review or Granta.
Early on she makes it clear she does not come from money, unlike it’s implied most of the young people who are able to live and work in NYC unpaid are. However, the economic disparity of Nora’s situation with her peers and the way this system weeds out working class youth is not really touched on again beyond a broadly stereotyped “writer actress model” rich girl who can’t utter a word without dropping the name of a famous person. Nora quickly finds herself in a situationship with Thomas (Joshuah Melnick), the associate editor who hired her, the power dynamics of which are only briefly addressed towards the end of the film. Delaney Rowe, who terminally online folks might know from her satirical rom com videos, has a cameo as the managing editor of the mag that proves just because you can make people laugh for 60 seconds online does not mean who can actually act
There are also brief moments within this literary milieu that aim for satire by falling embarrassingly short of the mark. For a character who claims to want to be a writer, we barely get a hint at what Noa has to say or worse why she even wants to be a poet. If the film had even vaguely hinted that it was about how at twenty-two you still need to find your voice, that would have been cliche, but at least it would have been some kind of arc. Instead we get a whole lot of nothing. All the characters are either painted in the broadest strokes, or left completely undeveloped; never once did I care about the emotional stakes of any of these characters.
Along with the poor writing, Pechman’s filmmaking itself leaves much to be desired. The dramatic tension is inert, leaning heavily on montage and soundtrack to move things forward. The sound edits are incompetent, with most songs ending abruptly, without any editorial thrust as to why. Ultimately, it’s a New York movie that makes New York seem incredibly insular and boring. It’s a film that is perhaps so specific it never manages to strike on any universal feeling nor find any kind of wisdom or truth. As for its period setting, if you’re nostalgic for your BlackBerry or Peter Pan collars, maybe that would elicit an emotion beyond boredom. Alas, I mostly just felt relief. . .when the film finally ended.
- TIFF 2026: River, Stuffed, The Housewife (September 12, 2026)
Sometimes themes emerge at festivals. Sometimes dispatches like this are merely about what played on the same day, location, or, in this case, both. While Sian Heder’s “Being Heumann” took the coveted spot of Opening Night at the Princess of Wales Theatre, three remarkably different films unfolded across the evening, just down the street at the Royal Alexandra. A horror film, morbid musical, and period drama filled the theatre for three movies in a row, and yours truly was there to report back. Sadly, only one truly made the impact it intended.
What if Leatherface could swim? This was the thought that possibly inspired Joshua Giuliano’s grisly debut, “River,” an IFC effort that should find a blood-loving audience outside of the fest circuit. Two modern-day scream queens in Jane Levy (“Evil Dead”) and Jessica Rothe (“Happy Death Day”) give their fearless, physical all, but the real star here is the sound design and remarkable POV choices that announce newcomer Giuliano as a major genre talent to watch. A lot of the buzz on the ground at TIFF this year has been the question of what could be this fest’s “Obsession”—the Curry Barker film premiered here almost exactly a year ago. “River” is too brutal to make that kinda bank, but it’s the kind of movie that horror fans will truly jump for, something they’ll tell their friends they need to see to believe.
“River” opens with one of its most remarkable scenes. As the camera slowly pans over an empty car with an open trunk, we hear the action that took place before the images on the screen. A couple talks, flirts, listens to music, and then notices someone watching them from the woods. Giuliano and his excellent cinematographer pan across the car from different angles as the sounds of violence fill the soundtrack, sometimes ending on something disturbing like a bloody dent in the car or a human leg. It’s a neat trick, but it’s also an overture to a film that will play with sound and POV in ways that horror often never considers.
The real action of “River” starts with the introduction of tough Lucy (Levy), gentle brother Drew (Max Mattern), and their virtually estranged sister Carla (Rothe). She’s come home after the death of their father, but don’t worry, this isn’t overtly “grief horror,” even if the different relationships these three had with dad feel like they influence their choices as they try to survive the worst night of their lives.
The trio heads out early with dad’s ashes to spread them on his favorite spot on the local river, just past a rickety bridge. After the ceremony, they discover their gas line has ruptured and they’re stuck. Carla swims to shore, but they spot a bloody, shirtless, masked figure before she gets there. From that point on, “River” is relentless, a slasher movie that somehow turns the open space of a river into someplace claustrophobic. You have no gas in your boat, and the shore contains its version of Michael Myers. What the F do you do? It’s the starting point for an insanely brutal journey, one that puts Levy through the wringer nearly as much as “Evil Dead,” and reminds viewers how remarkably physical she can be as a performer.
Levy and Rothe are fantastic, but it’s Giuliano’s use of space and sound that truly elevate “River” above your standard slasher flick. One game he loves to rewardingly play is to have his characters see something before we do—we watch their terrified expression, taking a beat in our own minds to imagine what they could possibly be seeing, before the camera reveals it. It’s remarkably effective, and it’s joined by some of the best genre sound design in years. This movie crunches and breaks in a manner that’s reminiscent of the IFC hit “In a Violent Nature.” With only a few tweaks it could actually have been a sequel to that movie in how it also presents an unkillable force of unimaginable violence through sound design and brutality.
“River” won’t be for everyone—it’s insanely violent—but those who like a slasher pic that isn’t afraid to slash will find so much to admire in a film that doesn’t just play like homage to the ‘70s and ‘80s era when slashers ruled but updates the aesthetics and structure of those films for a new era. The synopsis at TIFF references John Carpenter, which often feels like the kind of standard that does a midnight movie no favors because so few can live up to it. The best compliment I can pay this one is that I think John will dig it.
Theo Rhys’ “Stuffed” should be like shooting roadkill in a barrel for this fan of not just musical theater but morbid humor. Clearly inspired by dark musicals like Sweeney Todd and even Little Shop of Horrors, “Stuffed” is a unique love story with a slowing pulse, a movie about how we all long to be remembered, to do something extraordinary with our ordinary lives. Sadly, despite its captivating concept and influences, along with two committed leads, it’s a misfire, a movie that feels incredibly long at nearly two hours, and one that wastes its performances on characters on a story that never gets under your skin.
Harry Melling continues to impress as Bernie, an ordinary guy who works at the local sandwich factory and cares for a dementia-addled mother. He has absolutely nothing going for him, and he’ll have even less when mom dies. The aesthetic of Bernie’s life reminded me of several Tim Burton characters: oddballs who do their little best to rebel against a world of conformity. What can Bernie possibly do to find his purpose?
When he answers an ad in the paper via a website, he crosses paths with Araminta (Jodie Comer), an equally quirky soul with a morbid hobby. Araminta is a taxidermist, someone who brings home roadkill, skins it, and adds it to her house of silent, unmoving animal friends. She’s waiting on the ultimate prize: A human being. She convinces Bernie that the most extraordinary thing he could do is to live forever in her stuffed menagerie. As they both plan his death, doing things like fake his suicide, they get closer, leading to the question of if, through planning the goodbye for something with nothing, they’ve given him something to live for: Love.
All of this is set to original songs, most of them of the Les Mis sung-dialogue type. Rhys stays close on his talented performers, which allows them to emote through song, but leads to a shockingly flat film visually. There are two numbers with significant choreography—one in the factory with Bernie and another alongside his burning car—and they are easily the standout sequences in the film. I kept wanting the camera to pull back on these performers, to give them a chance to act with their bodies as much as their faces and voices. It leads to a movie that’s remarkably repetitive visually, while also spinning its wheels narratively for way too long. “Stuffed” needed another twist, character, or arc to justify its length. As is, it just feels too hollow.
Finally, there’s the disappointing “The Housewife,” a film that sadly fails a test of a fictional take on a true story in that a documentary about this subject would almost certainly be significantly more interesting. The biggest problem is that director Ben Shirinian never finds a visual language for this period drama, shooting it like a TV movie instead of a theatrical feature. Naomi Watts does her absolute best, but she gets lost in a character that screenwriter Alyssa Hill never quite figured out. On the one hand, Hermine Braunsteiner would be difficult for anyone to unpack, but Shirinian is too content to keep her as a mystery for the first half of the film and an unspeakable villain for the second. The result is a movie that has no real identity, not in character, visual, or theme.
Watts plays Hermine Ryan, a New York woman in Queens in the ‘60s. She’s the pillar of her community, admired by her neighbors and loved by her husband Russell (Luke Evans). When the New York Times gets a tip from Elie Wiesenthal that the Ryan house is hiding a Nazi right in a New York City borough, writer Joseph Lelyveld (Tye Sheridan) goes to the house to talk to Russell, falling for Hermine’s warmth and excellent oatmeal raisin cookies. Of course, it’s barely a spoiler to reveal that it’s not Russell that the Times, and eventually the U.S. Government (personified here by an immigration officer played by Michael Imperioli), should worry about: It’s “The Mare,” a female guard at Majdanek given that name because of how much she liked to kick prisoners. She was the first Nazi extradited from the United States, accused of collaborating in the murders of over 1,000 people.
Watts is most interesting in scenes in which she allows The Mare to sneak through the façade that she has created as a perfect immigrant wife. At first, she totally denies the charges, but Watts allows us to peek at the evil barely concealed underneath. Despite how the screenplay forces her to play aspects of Hermine that feel tailored to the movie more than real, Watts makes choices that shine through.
There’s not much to praise about the rest. It’s one of those historical dramas that means well, one that thinks the power of the true story will do the heavy lifting, but questions like what this narrative means in 2026 or how to make it visually engaging were never asked. The idea that a child-murdering Nazi could become a beloved Queens housewife is a fascinating one. But a movie needs to be more than just an idea.
- Venice 2026: The Basics of Philosophy, Diane in the Loop, Look Back (September 11, 2026)
“The Basics of Philosophy” might be the worst film of Paul Schrader’s career. Jack Huston stars as John Jorrinson, a philosophy professor at a small Midwestern college who is erudite, multitalented (he plays piano well enough to teach it), and troubled in ways he can’t or won’t recognize. He’s dating a psychology prof named Rebecca (Sofia Boutella) but has a secret life picking up men at Sidekicks Saloon (where John gets his kicks on the side). The place has a rainbow motif outside, and a rainbow lighting scheme inside, but both are overpowered by hellish red lighting. Because John is sinning, you see.
John also has a disturbing secret in his past, hinted at when a younger man who looks oddly familiar shows up at the funeral of John’s beloved dad, Melvyn (Bill Pullman), a businessman and pillar of the local community, and locks eyes with John. Through flashbacks and present-tense scenes, we learn this man is a former student, Miguel Vasque (Daniel Zovatto), the son of a Mexican-American man who once worked on Melvyn Jorrinson’s estate. The lad was John’s piano student until John groomed and then molested him.
The movie doesn’t treat this as a spoiler, tipping its hand early, then watching fate close around John’s neck. Schrader’s upfront way of handling the pedo material is only slightly more sophisticated than its depiction of Jack’s identity as a gay man, which is strangely retrograde in its details and suffused in a fog of shame that doesn’t seem entirely a function of the story. At one point, Jack asks his former student if being molested by a man turned him gay and is relieved when Miguel says no.
The psychosexual aspects of the story are soon eclipsed by a thriller scenario. This is unsurprising, given that John’s private life is such a moral as well as professional disaster that it’s a wonder he wasn’t blackmailed earlier. Zovatto’s character gets pulled into a criminal plot against John, teetering between vengeful feelings and humanistic objections in ways that seem tied to whatever the plot requires at any given moment. The pressure causes John to fake a sudden desire to marry his girlfriend, in whom he had little interest before.
“American Gigolo” star Richard Gere has a scene as the university president, who knew John’s father, is determined to bring John into the local establishment, and warns him, “You may be gay, but you’re gonna maintain the illusion of propriety.” It’s an effective cameo that doubles as a callback to Schrader’s early years. The hero of “American Gigolo,” Julian Kay, is a social striver who prefers to sleep with rich women and refuses to accept same-sex trysts or any other assignment he considers kinky because they remind him of the period before he became respectable (in his own mind, anyway).
“The Basics of Philosophy” is the latest installment in what Schrader has labeled his “Man in a Room” series, with some written and directed by Schrader and others written only (such as “Taxi Driver”). All follow loners who struggle to make meaningful connections with others and record their struggles in journals. From “Taxi Driver” and “Light Sleeper” through a more recent triptych consisting of “First Reformed,” “The Card Counter,” and “Master Gardener.”
He literally wrote the book on such films: his canonical 1972 film theory book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, identified most of the characteristics of a Paul Schrader film before he’d actually made one. The last filmmaker in the book’s title, Robert Bresson, directed some of Schrader’s all-time favorites, including “Diary of a Country Priest” and “Pickpocket,” both of which are invoked here. Never let it be said that the former film critic doesn’t honor his artistic inspirations.
Unfortunately, although this one feels as personal as everything else Schrader does, it’s far from a classic on the order of “Mishima” or “First Reformed,” or even a fitfully strong movie in the vein of “The Comfort of Strangers” or “The Light of Day.” The writing tends toward stilted and declamatory. Some of its big conceptual swings just don’t connect.
The biggest misfire is the fantasy sequence in which John encounters one of his inspirations, Baruch Spinoza (Karl Glausman of “The Neon Demon”), in a park and discusses whether individuals are truly capable of change. Spinoza wears a “period” outfit that looks like it was FedExed from the Spirit Halloween Store in Amsterdam. Mel Brooks would have known what to do here.
Technically, “The Basics of Philosophy” is barely professional. Both the present-day color scenes and the black-and-white flashbacks have a harsh, sometimes blown-out, very video look. Huston struggles valiantly to find a person inside a role that’s mainly a pack mule for Schrader’s baggage. Huston’s solution, while not wholly successful, is nevertheless ingenious: he plays most of his scenes smiling, seeming as if he’s about to smile, or holding back a smile, a time-honored tactic of deceivers trying to seem honest and sincere.
Pullman nails his role as a charming patriarch who treats money as a velvet hammer. “Light Sleeper” costar Dana Delaney as the hero’s sister Gloria, Shiloh Fernandez as a gun shop owner that John picks up at Sidekicks, and especially Boutella as Rebecca, do their best to make lemonade from lemons. But this movie is a sour misfire.
With its jump cuts, plain close-ups, matter-of-fact use of real-life locations, and handheld shots taken from just behind people’s shoulders as they move through space, “Diane in the Loop” superficially suggests a missing film by one of the greatest directors of modern neorealist dramas: the Dardenne brothers. As it turns out, the Belgian siblings only produced this movie. But writer-directors Anne Sirot and Raphaël Balboni not only honor the masters but also infuse the tale with dry humor and a playful air of mystery that is uncharacteristic of them, which makes the movie bearable when it goes dark.
If you walked into “Diane” without knowing any plot details, you might mistake it for a quirky family comedy with a wistful, slightly sad undertone. The heroine, 28-year-old Diane (Ninon Borsei), initially presents as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl type, wandering the countryside, encountering fellow eccentrics, and letting us know her. She’s a loner by choice, is frustrated by many things (including her inability to finish her graduate thesis), and admits she has difficulty sustaining relationships. By osmosis, seemingly, she has absorbed some of the damage inflicted on her mother (Sandrine Black), who was raped as a young woman but kept it a secret from Diane until a conversation that occurs early in the film. Diane demands to know the perpetrator’s name. Her mother won’t disclose it. She would rather leave the past in the past and keep moving forward with her life.
Many movies explore revenge and/or justice, and how the two concepts risk becoming interchangeable. A lot of these movies revolve around sexual assault, its aftermath, and the general indifference of society when it comes to legally dealing with the crime. This one is free of the usual clichés. The film discusses the crime but doesn’t show it.
The big question here (thankfully never summarized by the characters in dialogue) is whether a victim has the sole right to determine how others should view a crime committed against them, and can exercise veto power over those who disagree. Intergenerational trauma caused by rape is embedded into the story in a way that makes it feel like part of the fabric of life rather than a prompt for online discourse. The horrible ordinariness of the outrage makes it more disturbing, as does the way it must constantly take a backseat to the tedious demands of daily life.
The story turns into a kind of buddy movie with romantic potential when a cyclist (Lucas Meister) enters Diane’s orbit. After a prickly first encounter, they meet each other again, and it’s apparent that they click as classic movie couples should. But this is not one of those movies that establishes the heroine’s negative attitude towards men as a setup to present her with an exception who will win her heart (which would have been pretty gross, anyway, given the main storyline). What the movie does with this relationship is so right in every way that it’s best if you experience it yourself.
“Diane in the Loop” lives up to its title, which alludes to the self-defeating cycles of behavior that keep people from evolving. It also does justice to many perspectives on how to handle an unpunished crime. It’s hard to think of another film on this subject that’s as life-affirming.
“Look Back” is the third telling of a story of the friendship and creative partnership between two young girls who are obsessed with manga, break into the business through pure talent and determination, and forge a partnership that seems ordained by the universe until tragedy strikes. The first telling was the source material for the adaptations: the one-shot 2021 web manga of the same name. The second was a 2024 animated feature co-written and directed by Kiyotaka Oshiyama. The third pass is a live-action movie, radiantly shot by cinematographer Senzo Ueno on 35mm film, and written, edited, and directed by one of Japan’s greatest living auteurs, Hirokazu Kore-eda (“Like Father, Like Son,” “Still Walking”).
It’s a testament to the story’s innate power that it can not only support more than one adaptation in a short timespan, but also inspire storytellers to explore the potential of different media (respectively, animation and live-action cinema) with the same focus and inventiveness the fictional duo brought to their beloved manga. The Kore-eda version is a highlight of the moviegoing year, so affecting that it proved impossible to find anyone who saw it at Venice who got through the whole thing without ugly-crying at least once.
The artistic duo consists of a popular go-getter named Fujino (played by Furi Nanase as a girl and Natsuki Deguchi as a young adult) and her friend Kyomoto (Rokka Okada and Aju Makita). They meet when Fujino’s teacher asks her to hand-deliver a diploma to Kyomoto, who was constantly absent and didn’t show up at all toward the end of the spring semester. It turns out that Kiyomoto suffers from agoraphobia so severe that she can barely stand to leave her room, let alone walk to school and spend the day there.
After initial tension, they become friends based on their mutual love of manga, always meeting at Kyomoto’s house and spending many long hours in her room working out original material. With Fujino serving as project taskmaster and drawing the characters while Kyomoto executes breathtakingly detailed backgrounds, the two complete a 42-page story that wins a student art contest, catapulting them into the professional world and earning acclaim for the work’s quality and the artists’ youth.
“Look Back” is mainly an experiential film, investing most of its energy in showing you what it feels like to be in a place and do a thing. We get to know every square centimeter of Kyomoto’s room, become familiar with the girls’ different body language and taste in clothes, shoes and makeup, and spend lots of time watching their art as they plan and create it. Agoraphobic viewers will appreciate the treatment of the condition, as serious but not uncommon, and fully deserving of sympathy.
The scratch-scratching of pen nibs on paper and the squeak of fat-tipped markers are central elements in the soundtrack, along with the roar of storms, the din of city noise, and the seawave hiss of wind moving through grasslands and treetops. Just as you find yourself wondering whether this director is paying tribute to another Japanese legend, Hayao Miyazaki, the movie answers by briefly showing the girls admiring art books from the director’s movies.
The boldest aspect of “Look Back” is the way it deploys live-action filmmaking technology in a way that reminds us of the sweetest and most viscerally involving techniques perfected by Miyazaki, especially the master’s willingness to sideline or suspend the plot and let us bask in a moment, such as the girls running home through the countryside after school or the physical process of penciling and inking pages of artwork and applying screens to get the gradations of shadow just right.
The movie takes a sharp turn into heartbreak midway through, with a twist that’s as shocking as it is believable, but “Look Back” doesn’t cheapen the event’s power by wallowing in it, instead using it as a means to explore how artists use the worst events in their lives as fuel for artistic expression and personal growth.
When was the last time you saw a movie that ended with an affirmation of art’s ability to alchemize suffering into a statement that touches all who encounter it? This is a movie you’ll remember fondly. It might even make you want to buy pens and paper and make comics.
- “Marvel’s Wolverine” is a Bloody Good Time, Bub (September 10, 2026)
Superheroes really are back in 2026. As if they ever left. The record-breaking success of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” segues nicely into next week’s long-awaited release of Insomniac’s “Marvel’s Wolverine,” a game with structural echoes of the company’s beloved “Spider-Man” games, with significantly less kid-friendly violence and more linear, intense storytelling. After a prologue/tutorial that feels a bit rocky in storytelling and gameplay, “Wolverine” settles in spectacularly, strapping players into a rollercoaster narrative and telling them not to panic. With remarkably fluid combat, gorgeous graphics, strong voice work, and compelling storytelling, this is one of the best games of 2026, which has already been a remarkably great year for gaming before roughly a dozen more intriguing titles come out before Thanksgiving. The Sony disc drama aside, it’s a good time to be a gamer.
“Marvel’s Wolverine” also owes a wonderful amount to the movies most readers have probably seen about the man with Adamantium bones. At first, it feels like it’s intentionally echoing the excellent “Logan,” the best film about this beloved character, in its sketch of a slightly older Wolverine forced into a protective role for more vulnerable mutants when the evil Bolivar Trask starts kidnapping them. The plan to eradicate mutantkind sends Logan back to his allies at Team X, including founder Nathaniel Essex and familiar faces like Sabretooth, Mystique, and Jean Grey, sketched very differently here than the Sadie Sink version from “BND.” More on that later.
After Team X rescues a group of mutants from Trask’s captivity, including Callisto, “Marvel’s Wolverine” pivots again to incorporate other comic book and film source material. It’s the kind of story that never directly mimics something you’ve seen before, but one can definitely feel the influence of Bryan Singer’s films on Logan’s search for identity and even Jean Grey’s ultimate arc (don’t worry, comic fans—I didn’t just spoil that it goes full Dark Phoenix à la the horrendous “The Last Stand”). As the story moves to Japan, it also brings in some of that country’s influence on this character, as seen cinematically in James Mangold’s underrated “The Wolverine.” You’ll even get to slice and dice your way through hundreds of members of The Hand, also seen in the best action sequence in “Brand New Day.”
And I do mean slice and dice. Parents should be warned that this game is far more violent than they may expect from the developers of “Miles Morales.” The developers don’t dull Logan’s blades in the slightest, allowing you to use them to stab, mutilate, and decapitate on a regular basis. The combat gameplay is familiar in its mix of strike, parry, dodge, and special powers, but it’s as fluid as any game like this that’s ever been released. As techniques, unlike new skills that recharge over time and one improves at the base mechanics, Wolverine becomes almost a Tasmanian Devil of a killing machine, taking enemies out at a rate befitting one of comicdom’s most beloved heroes. It gets to the point where one sees a dozen enemies and doesn’t question how to get through them but wonders why there aren’t more. By the time I got into my New Game Plus playthrough, I had fully mastered the combat of “Wolverine” as much as any game in years, and the adrenaline rush of a perfectly executed move simply never abates. I’ll honestly miss it.
Of course, a game can’t just be about decapitating fools who underestimated a man with claws. As for the rest of the experience, the set pieces are so spectacular that you can forgive the lackluster exploration. As for the latter, Logan often has to find something in a room to push the story forward, which basically just amounts to looking for the white dot that cues you to hit triangle. It’s not exactly thrilling. On the other hand, there are a couple of motorcycle set pieces that are so spectacular that you’ll wish there were more of them, and the big action sequences are as impressive as any MCU movie. The truth is that “Marvel’s Wolverine” gets the big and basic things right; so the minor connective tissue like running around the Team X facility to find the triangle that will push the story forward isn’t really a drag as much as a little break from the intensity before it becomes numbing.
Something else that elevates “Marvel’s Wolverine” over many games of this generation is its attention to environment. As you can imagine, when Logan turns into a blade whirlwind, nothing is safe, and the designers brilliantly allow you to leave a mark, whether it’s just a blade scratch on metal or something more intense. For example, you get into a fight in an arcade in Japan, and no claw machine is safe. Most combat sequences end in the kind of environmental destruction rarely seen in games where you can still take cover behind a wooden box, and it’s the kind of detail that really elevates the overall experience. It should also be noted that this game makes use of the PS5 controller in expansive ways, whether it’s a radio signal or just the hum and buzz of action. And the load times are insanely fast. You can go from startup to combat in actual seconds.
Finally, while “Marvel’s Wolverine” is incredibly fun, it’s also narratively richer than many superhero games. Without spoiling, Logan and Jean Grey become allies not just in stopping the big bad of this game but in figuring out the details of Logan’s lost past. Like in the Singer movies and some of the comic arcs, Logan is a killing machine who doesn’t really know how he got that way, and the script here lands in a place that’s both satisfying and poignant. It’s as rich as the great Uncanny X-Men arcs that this comic book fan grew up loving, and a reminder of how both superhero fiction and gaming can be so much more satisfying when it’s developed with true love, care, and mutilations.
Sony provided a review copy of this game. It is available on September 15, exclusively on PlayStation.
