- I’m Trying to Create Visceral Things: Boots Riley on “I Love Boosters” (May 18, 2026)
Boots Riley is one of the few American filmmakers who are most visibly invested in conversations about class, capitalism, and aesthetics in their works. He pushes each subject to the point of breaking in absurdist works whose visual ambition and thematic audacity can often feel as knowingly chaotic as our contemporary world. With “Sorry to Bother You,” for instance, he rendered a call center into a pro-union narrative whose dystopian and sci-fi realities show how industries position workers as slave labor. His hit television series “I’m a Virgo,” produced by Amazon Studios, for which Riley was open about retooling their money into a political statement, imagined Jharrel Jerome as a giant turned activist superhero.
“I Love Boosters,” which premiered at SXSW in March, is as bold as his prior projects, taking aim at the fashion industry’s exploitation through the eyes of aspiring designer and booster Corvette (a spellbinding Keke Palmer). Corvette works with a team of Boosters—Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige)—who often target the popular brand Metro.
But when Metro’s coldhearted designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore) steals Corvette’s concepts, the boosters’ rivalry with Christie becomes personal. Inspired by a song of the same name by Riley, which he made with his band The Coup for their album Pick a Bigger Weapon, “I Love Boosters” is a global story intertwined with the local that also comes to include the Chinese sweatshop workers Jianhu (Poppy Liu) and surprising turns by LaKeith Stanfield and Don Cheadle.
RogerEbert.com spoke to Riley prior to the Chicago screening of his film in a space between two screening rooms that, in an apt twist, was marked “lactation room” but was really a conference room. As the sounds of explosions and car crashes bled in from other theaters, Riley spoke about capturing “magic parts,” deploying unique textures, and the role of art and the artist in a capitalist world.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
It’s been eight years since “Sorry to Bother You.” Though you had the great TV series “I’m a Virgo” at that time, I’m wondering if in those eight years you were frustrated by the fact that a second movie hadn’t happened sooner.
As you said, I was doing something else in between while writing my next two films. For some reason, I had this idea that I was going to do three films in a row without stopping and then edit them all. But that would’ve been crazy. Because of doing “I’m a Virgo”—the amount of work, the amount of crazy shots, and the length of it—that was like making three movies. I could use the same crew. So it wasn’t as frustrating, but you would think that it would’ve happened faster after the success of “Sorry to Bother You.” Still, it takes time to put schedules together and assemble the right cast while pushing for the budget you need.
Three straight would be very Soderbergh of you.
Except that he can do it because it’s him and a camera. Jarrell [Jerome] worked with him on “Full Circle,” and he said it was six hours a day. So, if you’re doing six hours a day, then you can have family time and all that kind of stuff.
For “I’m a Virgo,” you did quite a bit of storyboarding. Did you end up doing the same for “I Love Boosters”?
On “I’m a Virgo,” we shot it cross-boarded, like you’d do a movie. Although we got notes for each episode, post-production was handled on an episode-by-episode basis. We didn’t start post until we were done shooting. We did all of that because we needed to do that for the budget. And I was shooting all of the episodes. For “I Love Boosters,” we only storyboarded for the parts I had to prove.
At first, it was only the chase scene. I did that before I sold the film because I knew that people were going to look at that and be like: You know, the chase scene alone is gonna cost $3 million or whatever. I did stick figure versions of the storyboard, which also scared people. Because they’re like: This is the director?
I did that so we can say, “We can do it in this number of setups.” I had it down to about 20 setups in the early version. But originally, I was only planning to do the mall part as a miniature, and the rest was going to be done through this very economical way of shooting on the street. Well, even that was costing a bit, so it was a matter of cutting back on the approach of doing it on the street.
But then we were just losing a lot of the magic parts. Chris Warren, the guy doing the miniatures, said that since we had the buildings, we could just set them at an angle and it would look like a hill. When we moved it all to miniature, not only were we able to do everything that was planned for, but I could also make certain movements that then allowed us to take advantage of the things we wouldn’t have been able to do on the street, like make the police tank jump over the hill.
I Love Boosters (NEON)
You mentioned the “magic parts.” Do you find those tactile moments, when you can use miniatures or stop motion, as moments for magic?
For me, it’s like layering texture. The idea is for it to feel visceral and almost three-dimensional. It’s like when we’re babies, we must have put our mouths on everything because I can look at this table and know what it tastes like. We can also do that with feel and texture. There are certain textures we don’t see often in film, and when we do, they can be a little off-putting because we’re not used to them. It’s like when you film someone with a checkered shirt. There’s a certain feeling like that.
The stop motion, the way that looks and feels, was obviously a different layer than the miniatures and the colors that we were using. With miniatures, these folks are used to doing miniatures, so that you don’t know that they’re miniatures, but I wanted things to be off. For those in the know, they know they’re miniatures. But some folks look at it and know it’s not “real,” yet they don’t know what it is. I want to repel you enough that you know this is made by someone, while still keeping the challenge of keeping you locked in and still caring about it.
I think about music in the 1970s, for instance, there was this push to be clean. I mean, even since the 1960s, like the Beatles were trying to do that, and it continued with Stevie Wonder. Clean, clean, clean. And then, finally, they got to digital, which is, like, the cleanest. Usually, the people who pushed for clean were happy they were doing clean stuff, but everybody else was like, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s missing something.” Maybe we liked that distortion that used to happen? So, I’m trying to create visceral things.
I think CGI made things more technical, not amazing. I often say that you can have a sky with CGI, you could have a CGI skyscraper, stand up, walk over, and take a shit on it, and it wouldn’t be amazing. But that should be amazing. There are a lot of things we don’t know about how light works. No matter what they do, they can’t figure it out. It’s not interesting. So, I want everything to be interesting. I want to have visceral rhythms, whether it’s in the cutting or whether it’s in something happening that you don’t expect, and I’m looking to have something a little bit off, something that makes you have to pay attention.
The most obvious moment of something being off is, of course, Demi Moore’s 45-degree slanted office. How did you achieve that?
I can’t claim too much credit for that, because there is a building in San Francisco that is leaning by maybe 0.5 degrees or something, and it keeps leaning, and people paid millions of dollars for each condo in the Millennium Towers. Ours is the Decadian Towers. So, I just turned it up.
That, to me, symbolized the arbitrary value that’s put on stuff. In the Bay Area, it really is connected to the housing stuff that’s going on there, how much homeless we have versus what the rent is, because there’s a value put on there that has nothing to do with anything real, except what real estate agents want to make. We’ve got 80,000 empty units in the Bay Area and the highest rent there could be. Whereas YIMBY folks would be like: If you have empty units, the price is going to go down. No. This has just been decided. People would rather keep those units empty and keep the price up. But anyway, my point is that it’s all real. There’s nothing fake in my movies.
Boots Riley on the set of “I Love Boosters.” (NEON)
In your projects, you sometimes emphasize different kinds of labor. With “I’m a Virgo,” you have the labor of the body. “Sorry to Bother You” is the friction between labor and art. Here, with Keke Palmer’s character, it’s her intellectual labor.
There’s also the labor of the people working in factories and retail. I think also, “Sorry to Bother You,” obviously, there are both the folks who are producing things and folks who are selling them. So yes, this is another aspect of it. Although I think it’s a small aspect of the movie. It’s a starting point. It’s a motivation. It’s not everything the movie’s about.
I think this is about art in general. In the real world, the analogous thing, I’m not even talking about one designer getting their stuff stolen. I’m talking about how the fashion industry, depending on the place, uses the styles of people of color and working-class folks in general to create ways of wearing and combining things that can then be marketed. So in this film, it’s just a simpler way to talk about it. And to me, it’s more about what that relationship is to the communities that have nothing and the folks who are making millions off of fashion, taking it from communities that then wish they could get that stuff because it’s been remarketed to them. So, I’m talking about something that I don’t even think people would call IP; they might call it appropriation. That’s how all things happen fashion-wise.
As a matter of fact, KRS-One had an album called Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop. He talked about—now, I’m not going to claim it was research because since then I’ve seen that he says all kinds of stuff—how music was always inspired by the poorer classes of any area or era, because that’s where the passion was. But then that music got turned into something that was, in some cases. just more acceptable.
In that sense, I’m often saying that artists have to have something they’re more passionate about than the art itself, which goes against the critique that some people have about art that is supposedly hyper capitalist. Why do you like this art where these dope dealers are talking about making money? Well, they might not only be rapping about surviving, they often are not, but there’s a passion there that has to do with the idea of using this art to get to this other thing. It’s the same passion you feel when Barry White is trying to sleep with somebody, and he makes a whole song to do it. But when you hear people who just love making songs, but who don’t have a passion to do it, it can get tedious to hear.
So, when people are making their styles and wearing their styles, there’s sometimes a bit of aspiration, which, because of the culture we’re in, has to do with some climbing of some sort. But when you break it down, what it means is wanting to express yourself, wanting to be part of a community, wanting to feel some agency in the world, wanting to have control over the world around you. It’s all connected.
- This Year’s Ebert Fellows Reflect on the 2026 True/False Film Festival (May 18, 2026)
This year’s Ebert Fellows attended the True/False Film Festival, one of the most essential non-fiction cinema events of the year. Here are their reports:
PAIGE TERNADO
“To really make a film like this, you have to ignore every commercial model that we’re sold.” Filmmaker Patrick Bresnan, whose documentary “First They Came for My College” tells a lot more than one story, says this as I hurry after him, recording our walk-and-talk down the streets of Columbus, Missouri.
“In these situations,” he says, “when you focus on one professor or one student or one situation, you alienate the suffering of all the other people who are going through it. You unfortunately fail in what you’re trying to do.”
At the True/False Film Festival, which took place in March, “First They Came for My College” generated a buzz in the air and a distinct current of resistance in those who were gripped by the world premiere. Director Bresnan’s film is about New College of Florida, a public liberal arts school in conservative Sarasota, and how the rise of a reactionary government tore the school apart, even before the second coming of Trump.
The troubles for New College began in 2023, when Florida’s Governor, Ron DeSantis, targeted the progressive educational enclave for a permanent makeover. The school’s president was canned; the board of trustees, whisked to the side, making room for new trustees agreeable to the mission of reorienting New College in a different and, to the conservative forces behind the mission, less troubling direction. Gone were the campus gardens, the Gender Studies courses, and the Title IX office. The community spoke out, as did the professors and the students about to graduate, many of whom became the documentary’s narrative threads.
Slowly but surely, the punitive restrictions that came for New College, as chronicled by Bresnan, have spread to educational institutions all over Trump’s America. At my alma mater, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, I have seen funding slashed for so many programs, from science to the arts. Yet not all hope is lost, and in “First They Came For My College,” the voices of rage and resistance give the documentary a vital sense of purpose.
True/False stands in stark contrast to Ebertfest, this year (a month after True/False) marking its apparent “Last Dance,” as the official 2026 edition called it.
There was an air of solemnity, as it was the final year of this 27-year-old downtown Champaign Virginia Theatre tradition, begun by the late film critic Roger Ebert, a Champaign native and U of I graduate. Since Roger’s death, the festival tradition continued under the direction of Chaz Ebert and Nate Kohn.My own ties to the festival were not simply due to the Ebert Fellowship. Here’s how I heard the story: In the late 1800s, Joseph and Katharina Ebert were traveling via train, and found a little baby swaddled in a basket, abandoned. The couple had been wanting a baby of their own, and took her in.
The baby was my great-great-grandmother, Mayme. Joseph and Katharina had several more children, including a son named Walter. Walter ended up having one child of his own, my cousin Roger Ebert.
Many ask if I knew Roger and what he was like. Unfortunately, he passed away before I got the chance to truly know him. Though our family ties are convoluted and not by physical blood, I inherited some of Roger’s passion for film and storytelling. I find myself drawn to the same stories he was—stories where we can empathize with those with lives different than ours.
The films shown in this final Ebertfest were perfectly representative of what filmmaking and moviegoing can be, and should be. This year’s titles, such as “Mi Familia,” “Bob Trevino Likes It,” and “Charliebird,” dared anyone to leave the theater with a dry eye. Older films screened last month at Ebertfest, including Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” and Buster Keaton’s “The General,” are classics in their own right, separated by nearly a century. The festival has always had one eye on where filmmaking has come from, and the other on what is yet to come. True/False, in its documentary focus and love of the here and now, filled my chest with hope.
I can only imagine Roger is excited for all of it, as we face our future with film.
AMIR REHAB
“Movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” This is one of Roger Ebert’s most famous and repeated quotes, and it was heard—and emphasized—through the “Last Dance” farewell edition of Ebertfest, held in April at the Virginia Theatre in Champaign, IL., where Ebert grew up and attended the University of Illinois. The university lost a large portion of its funding this year and was no longer in a position to support the annual Ebertfest event.
The meaning behind the empathy quote is simple and powerful. When we watch a movie, it trains us to place ourselves in the characters’ shoes—to empathize, connect, and feel. Movies are not purely entertainment; they are experiences that allow us to better understand other people and their realities. My last two years at the U of I hold a special place in my heart, thanks to the campus and Champaign-Urbana itself. For that reason, this final Ebertfest felt especially meaningful, with each screening in mid-April carrying an extra emotional weight.
One movie that particularly spoke to me was “Mi Familia,” from writer-director Gregory Nava, a frequent Ebertfest guest over the years. The 1995 film draws from Nava’s own family history while incorporating the stories and experiences of many Latino Americans. It follows the Sánchez family across generations and represents an evolution of Mexican-American identity. The first generation centers on survival and sacrifice. The second generation reflects conflict, belonging, and the challenge of adapting to American culture while preserving cultural roots. The third generation focuses on self-definition—the ability to decide who you are on your own terms rather than being shaped only by tradition or society.
Watching the film, I found myself reflecting on my own family history. Coming from an Algerian Arab background, Nava’s story spoke to my father’s experiences and the lives of my grandparents, who lived through the period when France colonized Algeria. Although the histories are different, I recognized similar themes of struggle, identity, and resilience extending from one generation to the next.
One of the great things about the compact, easygoing nature of Ebertfest was getting to speak with Gregory Nava and his wife, producer Barbara Martinez, after the screening, at the nearby Big Grove Tavern. (Festival guests and film presenters mixed it up between screenings there all weekend.) I had to build up the courage to approach them; it’s not every day you get to speak directly with the filmmaker behind a festival screening of something that meant something to you. After a quick introduction, we sat—me, Nava, and Nava’s producer and filmmaker wife, Barbara Martinez—and we talked: about my background, about my feelings about his movie, about Nava’s visit to a Cairo film festival, where he met directors from all over North Africa. He told me many of them connected deeply with “Mi Familia,” and our conversation proved the value of Ebert’s phrase about the movies and empathy.
Before this year, and before my time as a U of I College of Media Ebert Fellow, the film festival experience–any film festival experience–was unknown territory. My back-to-back introductions to the Columbia, MO. True/False Film Festival in March and the April Ebertfest changed that. As different as the two were, they both helped me appreciate film in a deeper way. Larger in number of venues and screenings, though narrower than Ebertfest in its focus on nonfiction work only, True/False created an urgent, socially engaged, and community-driven atmosphere, with audiences participating in conversations all over downtown Columbia about people, society, and truth.The “Last Dance” Ebertfest felt more reflective and, given the circumstances, more emotional, with a sense of history and bittersweet closure. Ebertfest showed me how powerful film and festival-going can be when it is connected to memory, legacy, and personal reflection. What I enjoyed most of all, at both experiences, was the feeling of the movie not ending when the credits rolled. At both True/False and Ebertfest, the post-screening discussions, the audience reactions, and the shared emotions made everything more alive. Watching a film alone, at home, or in a regular multiplex can still be meaningful. But watching it in a festival setting makes it feel like a conversation with a brand new community.
JIN WANG
A film festival is more than just watching movies; it creates an environment where movies become part of a larger conversation among audiences, filmmakers, and the community around them. People discuss movies in nearby cafes, and the overall impression you get when overhearing this or that discussion is this: You should not and cannot possibly miss anything being shown here.
This impression turned out to be one of the strongest aspects of my first-ever festival experiences recently, as part of the U of I College of Media Roger Ebert Fellowship. At the True/False Film Festival in March, the movie and conversation energy spread throughout downtown Columbia, MO., in coffeehouses, restaurants, on hilly sidewalks near the University of Missouri campus, in line for the next screening.
True/False and, a month later, the final edition of the Roger Ebert Film Festival, aka Ebertfest, in downtown Champaign, IL, gave me my first and second film festival opportunities. Both were welcoming and personally meaningful, providing ways of establishing connections with people, with culture, and with community through the medium of film. Hearing filmmakers talk about the films we saw, immediately after seeing them on screen, showed the audience how cinema can bridge language and cultural differences and create an empathetic shared space.
While both Ebertfest and True/False are dedicated to films and filmmakers, the differences between the two were many. The larger True/False, focused on documentary work, covered many areas of downtown Columbia. The feeling there was open, with choices of venues and films to be made each day. Some films were shown in a bar, or in the back of a bakery and restaurant; the atmosphere was really lively, chaotic, and joyful. Walking through downtown Columbia felt like walking through a living art space.
Ebertfest was very different: smaller, easier, with a single, enormous and beautiful venue, the historic Virginia Theatre, serving as the screening location. The format felt organized, orderly, and free from decisions about what to see and where. One space, one collective emotional rhythm.
I came to these two festivals as an international student relatively new to both Central Illinois (and Missouri) and the film festival experience. At True/False, the standout for me was “Pinball,” directed by Naveen Chaubal. It is a film about Yosef, an Iraqi refugee whose family fled to Egypt and then to Louisville, KY., after the US invasion of Iraq.
One particular scene in the documentary finds Yosef returning to Egypt with his sister. They find themselves near the apartment where they used to live. In a small restaurant, he eats his favorite dish from childhood, and his face suddenly changes; the memory of earlier years and experiences flows back into him. This particular scene creates intimacy rather than any kind of overt drama. The camera is positioned close enough to show Yosef’s face without being emotionally intrusive. Another memorable sequence finds Yosef running and doing different exercises, breathing heavily. Through those moments, the director establishes a connection between the body and the protagonist’s need to find his home, as if physical movement is the only thing that can liberate him from uncertainty.
For some of us in the True/False audience for “Pinball,” born and raised in more than one country or culture, Yosef’s search felt especially relevant. Returning to childhood memories and places, connecting via such things as food, memory, and family, provides an opportunity to feel the difficulty of what it means to be part of two places at once. An individual may have connections with many different cultures yet remain unsure about where their true home is. In “Pinball,” the story of Yosef becomes part of something greater: humanity’s struggle for self-understanding.
The Q&A discussions with the filmmakers after the movies made everything more meaningful. The comments by the filmmakers illuminated many of the scenes; equally important were the reactions of audience members. At both True/False and Ebertfest, these extra experiences achieved something special: a chance to learn how a piece of art brings people together. Staying for the post-screening discussions became one of the most enjoyable elements of the festivals.
If it meant a delayed lunch, it was well worthwhile. The discussions have stayed in my mind, just as the movies have.
- Cannes 2026: The Meltdown, La Frappe, I’ll Be Gone in June (May 18, 2026)
Maybe it’s a product of being a father of three myself, but I often find that my assignments at film festivals tend to be stories of teenagers. It could also be that the coming-of-age drama is a standard of the indie movement, no matter its country of origin. Three films from this year’s Cannes are distinct in tone and setting, but all feature troubled young people trying to solve both day-to-day problems and the bigger questions they’re about to face in adulthood.
The best of the three is Manuela Martelli’s “The Meltdown,” a drama that borders on being a thriller but eschews procedural mystery elements in favor of consistent mood. It’s a well-made film that feels a bit narratively thin, but that almost feels intentional. After all, it’s a film about confused emotions and how easy it is for something or someone to get lost in the night. So it should kind of slip through your fingers. Martelli is clearly a talented filmmaker, and her work here marks her as someone to watch going forward.
“The Meltdown” unfolds in an Andean ski resort in Chile in 1992. Nine-year-old Ines (Maya O’Rourke) is staying there with her grandparents, watching the bigger kids ski gracefully up and down the mountain. She’s particularly taken with the 15-year-old Hanna (Maia Rae), who seems to be the one she kind of looks up to like a big sister. Hanna’s beauty has drawn the attention of the older men around her, giving the early scenes of “The Meltdown” a sense of predatory dread.
When Hanna literally disappears one night, fingers point at a boy she had been talking to or possibly even her tough instructor. Her mother Lina (an excellent Saskia Rosendahl) comes to the region to join in the search and Martelli maintains a delicate tone that’s closer to confusion than procedural. Part of this is maintained by how much we see through Ines’ eyes, a girl who just wants her friend back more than anything else.
It’s worth noting that Chile in 1992 was just coming off the Pinochet regime, which was known for disappearances, and that the film directly references an event in April of that year when an iceberg was transported from Antarctica to the Universal Exposition of Seville, apparently seen as a sign of a new Chile. Part of Martelli’s drama seems to be asking exactly what has changed when 15-year-old girls can simply vanish.
It’s a bit too long and could have used a bit more depth in its supporting characters, but, again, those elements feel entwined in the attempt to tell this story through the innocent eyes of a child, a time when people often learn how dangerous the world can be.
The protagonists of Julien Gasper-Oliveri’s “La Frappe (The Blow)” had to learn that truth about danger far too young, and at home. The dilemma at the center of Gasper-Oliveri’s film is an impossible one for 19-year-old Enzo Comini (Diego Murgia), whose father Anthony (Bastien Bouillon) is being released from prison as the film opens. While the script is purposefully vague for much of its runtime as to the details of Enzo’s childhood with Anthony, we know it was bad; so bad that Enzo’s sister Carla (Romane Fringeli) refuses to have anything to do with him and is furious that his brother has chosen the opposite approach. Enzo gets stuck in the middle, pulled between a loving sister and an abusive parent.
On paper, that might sound like an easy choice for adults who have been to therapy, but teenagers, especially those stunted in their development by trauma, will often do anything to keep a parent in their life, even forgiving the unforgivable.
Gaspar-Oliveri has a deep well of effective sympathy for Enzo, often moving his camera in close on his emotional face or even tracking his body in the film’s opening shot. He returns repeatedly to images of Enzo and/or Carla sleeping, as if this were one of the only times they could find peace. As a writer, he withholds a bit too long regarding the depth of Anthony’s abuse, but that’s almost in keeping with the film’s POV in that Enzo himself doesn’t want to think or talk about what happened as he tries so heartbreakingly hard to move forward. That we know this is impossible gives the film an oppressive tension as we wait for Enzo’s new reality to be destroyed by his old one.
Approaching its final act, “La Frappe” hits a few too many of the same beats repeatedly, making emotional and narrative points more times than it needs to. It feels like a drama that spins its wheels a few times before finding its way again, but it usually does so through a nuanced choice by Murgia or Fringeli. These are talented young performers who disappear into the characters, giving the production an echo of another Cannes favorite: the Dardennes brothers. Like those verité masters, we often forget the artifice of filmmaking here, simply watching two young people fight something they can’t defeat: their own past.
Artifice is what fractures and sinks Katharina Rivilis’ frustrating “I’ll Be Gone in June.” A strong central performance from newcomer Naomi Cosma gets lost in a clunky screenplay that often feels written by someone who has never even been to the United States. With a producer credit by the great Wim Wenders, one can expect a little cultural dissonance, but there’s a difference between his masterful studies of the U.S. and this fantasy version of 2001 New Mexico, something someone in Germany might imagine instead of something that actually happened or a place that actually existed despite being based on the filmmaker’s experiences there. Rivilis leans on so many clichés about the U.S., from religion to patriotism to guns, and that’s before she drops 9/11 into her screenplay.
Cosma plays Franny, a German teenager who comes to live with a family in Las Cruces, New Mexico. From the beginning, her host family comes across as pretty awful (and unbelievable, due to clunky line readings). Mom doesn’t give her a ride home from school because she’s a few minutes late, and won’t let her eat a second apple because they can’t afford it. The vision of an awful American host family doesn’t ring true, but the screenplay sinks even further when Rivilis chooses to inject 9/11 into the narrative, showing clips on TVs that look much older than 2001 and forcing awkward conversations about war and patriotism into the mouths of teenagers, most of whom become screenwriter mouthpieces instead of real people.
Against this backdrop, Franny begins a tentative relationship with a moody loner musician named Elliott (David Flores), who also walked right out of Clichéd American Teen 101. Elliott is so boring that one can’t figure out what Franny, who, thanks to Cosma’s heavy lifting, is pretty charming, smart, and funny, would see in him. Is Rivilis commenting on the shallow vapidity of the American experience in 2001? If so, that element isn’t refined enough.
The worst sin of “I’ll Be Gone in June” is its dialogue, which all sounds like the product of a German writer rather than the way young people actually acted in the Southwest at the turn of the millennium. With the exception of a handful of beats, almost everyone and everything in “I’ll Be Gone in June” feels like a screenwriter’s product instead of something real. It has no weight in the real world.
- Cannes 2026 Video #4: Festival Dispatch with Zachary Lee (May 17, 2026)
The 2026 Cannes Film Festival starts Tuesday, May 12th, running through May 24th. The Ebert team returns this year with coverage of all of the major films in review and video form. In this video dispatch, Scott Dummler interviews correspondent Zachary Lee about some of his highlights from the fest, from “Karma” to a restoration screening of Ken Russell’s “The Devils.” Watch the video and enjoy an edited transcript below.
Scott:
Thanks for joining us here again for Cannes 2026. My name is Scott Dummler, sitting in for the irreplaceable Chaz Ebert. Today, we have Zachary Lee from RogerEbert.com with us. Hi, Zachary. Thanks for coming in today.
Zachary:
Of course, it’s a joy. Thanks so much for having me.
Scott:
How long have you been coming to Cannes yourself?
Zachary:
Yeah, this is my second year coming to Cannes. So still very new, you know.
Scott:
Oh, you’re a veteran now. Second year. You know, all the tricks.
Zachary:
I’ve gotten over the jet lag a little more easily, I will say. I feel like last year, I was just like, I felt bad. I was like, can I even say I saw some of these movies? Because I was asleep for so long, I’m awake. That’s a good start.
Scott:
That’s a good start. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, we’re going to talk about a few movies today. The first one is a title in competition by acclaimed director Asghar Farhadi. Tell us a little bit about “Parallel Tales.”
Zachary:
I was trying to think about the best way to summarize it. I feel like it’s about voyeurs watching voyeurs who then watch the other set of voyeurs, and then they all make stories about each other. It’s like my unofficial way of summarizing it.
Scott:
Not a bad way to do it.
Zachary:
Yeah. And, you know, there’s a lot of we’re like “Rear Window” viewing that’s kind of going on. There’s lots of audio equipment. So I was like, this is kind of giving Blow Out too.
Scott:
It’s a “Rear Window” plus “Blow Out” kind of feeling. Absolutely.
Z:
Yeah. But I think what I found, I mean, and I, you know, those are apt comparisons that I think the way to use this audio technology is really interesting. But it’s really about, I think, the power and stewardship of storytelling in a lot of ways that I feel like you kind of see that a lot in the way that this movie set the rules and things like.
S:
For sure. Did you feel like it all held together? Because it’s a very, I would almost say convoluted type of story, because there are so many twists and turns and stories that kind of weave back on each other and loop back and forth, and do you feel like it all held together for you as a viewer?
Z:
It’s a good question because there are parts of it that I was wondering about the design of the show. Right. Like, is it meant to be a little confusing or inaccessible because you have these stories that are folding in on themselves in that way? So it’s one of those areas where I think it might have been less convoluted if it were a little tighter and maybe didn’t feel like it needed to kind of repeat the same ideas or motifs, you know, to really drive its point home.
S:
I agree with you 100%. I think it really could have held together a little bit better, just as a tighter narrative. Yeah, a little bit more for sure.
S:
So there’s another film I want to talk to you about that you’ve seen, which is the out-of-competition film “Karma.” I have not seen that. So, can you tell us a little bit about “Karma”?
Z:
It’s a movie I want to describe. It kind of morphs and shifts before your very eyes. It begins with, you know, this character Jean, played by Marion Cotillard. Amazing.
S:
I wouldn’t be Cannes without Marion Cotillard.
z:
So funny, because I was watching her and I was like, I may not have been caught up to date. Like where she, like, it’s so. Oh, okay, I just maybe haven’t caught up on the films she’s done in the past couple of years. So it was one, it was just great to see her back on screen again.
And it starts off with, you know, her character’s godson going missing, and she is the suspect. And then, without giving too much away, it kind of morphs into this religious thriller. The whole escape story is quite interesting. And there’s a lot going on there. It was thrilling, and I feel like seeing Marion on screen is always a joy.
S:
So Canet is known for thrillers. He did one about 20 years ago, “Tell No One,” which was a big international hit. How did you feel it worked as a thriller?
Z:
What I feel about “Karma” is that, in the beginning, it’s most formally interesting. I think, you know, I’m dealing with a lot of interesting ideas. He’s talking about how religious trauma manifests in our bodies, not just in our souls. I think he’s talking about what horrible things people will do in the name of God, right?
But it’s not like we don’t know that. And so it feels a little more didactic and a little more like it’s pontificating, whereas at the beginning, there’s this really interesting element to what’s going on. We don’t really know. So I think to myself, that’s just the interesting part of it, it kind of shifts into something that is a little more, maybe conventional, still exciting.
I think I always enjoy seeing cults get their comeuppance, you know, so you certainly get some of that here. But maybe it’s not quite as daring as I might have liked in the first one.
S:
So one more film I want to talk to you about is Ken Russell’s “The Devils,” which is in Cannes Classics from 1971. It had been banned in many countries for a long time and didn’t have much of a physical release. And so it was sort of tough to see. So there’s been a lot of excitement about people getting to see a 4K director’s cut.
What did you think of the film? Was this the first time seeing it?
Z:
Oh yeah, definitely. It’s funny, I come from a faith and religious background, but that’s probably why Karma also, now that I’m thinking about it, that and “The Devils” have been a really interesting pairing from the past couple of days, but yeah, I mean, this is a movie I had heard about people. I have some really close mutual friends who had seen it and loved it, and so this is also, I mean, I just want to make sure people know that, like, this was probably the hardest ticket to grab because it was in the Buñuel theater, which I think only seats about 300 people. And so I know, like, there are a lot of really amazing premieres we’ll get to see. But I felt very favored and grateful. I’m like, maybe it was a divine gift that I was able to get this ticket, you know? But yeah, I mean, it very much lived up to the hype for me.
So, this is kind of the unvarnished, full vision that Ken really wanted for this movie. And so there was a real, I think, emotional weight to being able to see it, you know, at a festival like Cannes.
S:
Very interesting. So, Roger’s review from 1971, he hated the movie. He gave it zero stars. It’s actually a hilarious review because it’s incredibly sarcastic. It’s probably the most sarcastic review I remember reading from him. But yeah, I think he felt like all the religious imagery and some of the things that took place in the film were just an excuse to have blood and sex.
And so what did you think about it? Did you think that there was more to the film than just that? And, maybe if he had revisited the film later, he might have reconsidered?
Z:
Even when he’s being sarcastic and he’s critiquing, he’s always so eloquent, like he has that line about, “You have to look into the devil’s mouth to see his teeth” or something like that. And I’m like, I wish when I’m being sarcastic and critiquing like this, I could be this, this funny. Anyway, I just wanted to say I love reading that.
I thought it was really funny, and I certainly share that critique. In a lot of ways, I think like seeing everything that happens to that movie, like, made it makes sense. Like, I think I was thinking like, in order to have any sort of faith in what you can’t physically, tangibly grab or hold, like, it kind of requires a certain madness.
And in order to stick to what you believe, you have to really, you know, test whether storms of controversy and critique, you have to really stay rooted and be certain of what you hope for. And I think we really see powerful depictions of that in this film. And so, I don’t know, for me, it rattled me in the best way.
And as much as I love Roger’s critique, I want to say both things can be true.
S:
Absolutely, absolutely. Well, thank you again for being here with us, Zachary, and have a great rest of your Cannes.
Z:
Of course. Thank you.
Scott:
And in today’s Cannes flashback, we’re going to look back to 2014 with one of my personal memories from Cannes.
It wasn’t your usual Cannes screening, and the dragon was the least shocking thing. In 2014, DreamWorks unveiled its animated sequel, “How to Train Your Dragon 2,” on the red carpet. As I filmed the cast starting their walk, everything seemed normal enough. But soon after, a self-proclaimed red carpet prankster crawled onto the carpet and into America Ferrera’s dress. It was so odd.
No one was really sure what was happening… Before security swiftly pulled him away.
Ferrara laughed it off like a pro, but everyone else was left shaking their heads.
That’s all for now. But don’t forget to check back each day at http://RogerEbert.com/festivals for more reviews, news, and reactions from the Cannes Film Festival. We’ll see you then.
- Cannes 2026: John Lennon: The Last Interview, La Libertad Doble (May 17, 2026)
The afternoon of the day he was killed in 1980, John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, sat for a radio interview at their apartment in the Dakota in New York. The ostensible subject was their new album, Double Fantasy, but the conversation was expansive. It included reflections on how they met, their artistic temperaments, and their feelings about their lives together and parenthood.
The audio recording forms the spine of “John Lennon: The Last Interview,” a documentary by Steven Soderbergh selected for Cannes’s Special Screenings section. Soderbergh told Deadline that he had to abridge the interview for running-time purposes but nevertheless preserved its chronology and flow.
Although the reporters speaking to Lennon and Ono were told that questions about the Beatles were off-limits, Lennon doesn’t seem to have been shy about the subject. He describes Paul McCartney as the only Beatle he picked as his partner (George came through Paul and Ringo came through George); how his experiments with “freaky music” worked their way into songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows” (apparently a night of playing with tapes and making sounds marked a pivotal step in his and Ono’s courtship); and how he had lived the boyhood dream of being Elvis, a stage he sounds eager to move past. He explains the difference between composing on assignment—not his preferred mode—and genuine inspiration.
Most of the discussion is accompanied by conventional archival footage. Soderbergh also shot a group interview with the three still-starstruck reporters—Laurie Kaye, Ron Hummel, and Dave Sholin—who were there asking the questions. These talking-head interludes are perfunctory, but the trio’s recollections set the scene well. Among other details, we learn that care was taken to use a special audio setup involving chromium dioxide tape to be minimally disruptive, since the three of them were intruding on Lennon and Ono’s home.
The twist is that Soderbergh, in collaboration with the film’s presenter and “technology partner” Meta, has used A.I.-generated imagery to accompany passages in which Lennon and Ono turned philosophical, meaning that there weren’t obvious photographs or clips that could be wedded to their words.
Soderbergh has taken to calling the resulting imagery “thematic surrealism,” which seems like an intellectualized way of saying that the art created with A.I. almost invariably looks bogus and wrong. Whether Lennon and Ono’s deeply personal musings really needed to be accompanied by such patently inhuman imagery as a baby walking through a misty hallway or a caveman winking by a fire is, perhaps, the subject for a very short debate. But “John Lennon: The Last Interview” is far from the first documentary to face the problem of matching pictures to dialogue. It may be the first to solve that problem by resorting to technologically trendy clip art.
By contrast, the minimalist Argentine director Lisandro Alonso’s “La Libertad Doble” (in Directors’ Fortnight) has a bracing commitment to the real. (Indeed, it opens with a shot of an actual man at a campfire, eating meat with a knife.) In outline, the film is both a follow-up to and a rethinking of Alonso’s first feature, “La Libertad” (2001). But Alonso noted in the Q&A that relatively few people had seen that film (myself included—my first Alonso was “Los Muertos” from 2004), and that he felt “La Libertad Doble” could be watched as a standalone work.
Like “La Libertad,” “La Libertad Doble” focuses on Misael Saavedra, a woodcutter in Argentina’s La Pampa province who plays a version of himself. If the actress Tao Okamoto in “All of a Sudden” stole the festival a couple of days ago simply by delivering a lecture at a whiteboard, Misael (character, actor, or perhaps both) achieves a similar feat: There’s something disarmingly peaceful about watching a lone man in a Mets hat saw branches at great length. Alonso’s careful attention to duration, framing, and especially sound transforms the mundane into the sublime.
The way Alonso attunes viewers to Misael’s routine also serves a dramatic purpose. We learn that Misael has a sister, Micaela (Catalina Saavedra, who, despite her last name, is not related to Misael in real life), who has spent most of her life in asylums and may have a habit of wandering off. The rural center where she is living now is closing because of a lack of funds and is discharging all its patients, regardless of their treatment regimens. That leaves Micaela with no alternative but to join Misael in his largely solitary lifestyle in nature. (One of the film’s small laughs occurs when Misael is told that Micaela likes to water plants. “Are there plants where you are going?” he is asked.)
From this appalling situation, Alonso shows two siblings finding their element together: Misael gently corrects Micaela on the types of birds. She learns the pleasures of interacting with moss and sunlight. Without much fuss, Misael accommodates Micaela in what little space he has. (She takes his bed in his hut; he opts for a sleeping bag outdoors.) Wind, light, and—toward the end—a bit of mystery help make “La Libertad Doble” one of the festival’s loveliest films.
