- The Eye of a Camera: Frederick Wiseman (1930-2026) (February 17, 2026)
The great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman lived 96 years, long enough to watch the world remake itself many times over. Most of his movies were studies of communities, subcultures, and pursuits, and were titled after the institutions, locations or jobs they depicted: “Hospital,” “Basic Training,” “Juvenile Court,” “Primate” (about animal testing”, “Canal Zone,” “La Comédie-Française ou l’Amour joué,” “Central Park,” “Boxing Gym,” “Jackson Heights” and “City Hall.” Wiseman’s filmography as a director kicked off with 1967’s “Titicut Follies,” about a state-run mental institution in Bridgeport, Massachusetts, and continued through 2023’s “Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros,” about the day-to-day operations of three family-owned restaurants in France. His work would be considered essential even if it did nothing more than capture specific places and people at specific points in history. But it’s much more than that. Taken as a whole, Wiseman’s features exemplify nonfiction filmmaking at peak originality and exactness.
Wiseman directed nearly 50 movies. All were made in accordance with rules and conditions devised by Wiseman, and were as uniquely specific as any in cinema history. First, Wiseman would get permission to film somewhere that didn’t normally tolerate film crews, at such length (anywhere from four weeks to three months) that the people who passed through his viewfinder forgot they were on camera and gave him material that seemed as close to authentic and natural as anybody could get. Wiseman would live in those spaces, often amassing hundreds of hours’ worth of material showing people and communities caught in the act of existing. Then he and his assistants would sift through the material, pick the most fascinating or informative bits, and assemble them into narrative mosaics of then-contemporary life.
The results were mesmerizing in their placid focus, despite or maybe because of how they ignored received wisdom about how to make a proper documentary. Wiseman had no interest in moving things along to prevent the audience from getting bored. Where most documentaries keep their running time between 90 and 105 minutes so they’ll fit in a two-hour time slot on TV, Wiseman’s routinely ran three to six hours with intermissions. There were no narrators or formal interviews. He didn’t use onscreen graphics or narration. He didn’t begin a film with a brisk summary of the work you were about to watch, or end it with a summation, or even a parting thought. His editing was precise and deliberate in its choices, but it was executed with such subtlety that you couldn’t be sure if Wiseman was consciously drawing connections between outwardly disparate people, facts, or events, or if you’d done that on your own.
Wiseman was a Boston lawyer who switched to filmmaking after producing 1963’s “The Cool World,” a low-budget drama about a Harlem youth gang directed by Shirley Clarke, a rare Black female filmmaker. In 1966, Wiseman shot his debut “Titicut Follies,” after taking his law students there on a field trip. The movie’s images of inmates being neglected, taunted, improperly medicated, force-fed, and stripped naked were so horrifying that the state sought a court injunction to prevent it from premiering at the 1967 New York Film Festival on grounds that it violated inmates’ privacy. This was the opening salvo in an ongoing legal battle that seemed to end with a federal appeals court deciding that “Titicut Follies” could only be shown to people in jobs related to medicine and its institutions. (The US Supreme Court could have heard the case one more time, but declined.)
Then, two decades later, the families of seven inmates who had died at Bridgewater between 1967 and 1987 sued the state of Massachusetts. One of the plaintiff’s lawyers argued that if “Titicut Follies” had been given a proper release, the public would have been appalled enough to demand reforms that would have saved those inmates’ lives. In 1991, a Superior Court judge concluded that the movie was no longer a privacy violation because most of the inmates in the movie had died by then, and that the First Amendment right to free expression was more important anyway. The ruling allowed “Titicut Follies” to be shown publicly for the first time, 25 years after its completion. (It was unveiled on PBS, which would go on to become Wiseman’s most important patrons.)
Wiseman came up during the formative years of Direct Cinema, a movement originated by documentary filmmaker Robert Drew. Drew’s movies about John F. Kennedy’s presidency, “Primary” and “Crisis,” were works of exceptional frankness, made with the enthusiastic cooperation of the president, who agreed with Drew’s mission to record history as it happened, in an intimate, quietly observational style. Drew’s approach was only possible because of a recently invented advance in the nonfiction filmmaking toolkit: a battery-powered, handheld, shoulder-mounted 16mm film camera, outfitted with a shotgun microphone that could capture dialogue on the other side of a room or across a noisy street. The sound was recorded directly to the same spools of film unreeling within the camera, rather than being recorded separately by a boom operator and a sound engineer and merged in postproduction.
All of a sudden, work that once required separate picture and sound crews, lighting kits, and 35mm cameras too heavy to carry for hours on end could be done by one or two people. It could also enable what would later be called “fly on the wall” filmmaking, renamed “cinema verite” by French New Wave filmmakers who adopted it for fiction and added many innovative, energetic, low-budget films to the canon, including ”The 400 Blows” and “Breathless.” Documentaries made this way tended to adhere to a minimalistic, truth-oriented code. Events could be observed by the filmmakers, but not initiated or manipulated on location or through montage editing. Sound could not be dubbed after the fact, nor could events be shown out-of-sequence to make the movie more superficially dramatic or simplify a complicated chain of events.
An impressive group of US filmmakers emerged from this movement, including Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, the sibling duo of Albert and David Maysles, and their editor Charlotte Zwerin, who later segued into directing. But none practiced their trade with the monklike zeal of Wiseman. In a 2000 Star-Ledger interview to promote his two part, four hour, PBS-funded epic “Belfast, Maine,” about life in the eponymous fishing village, Wiseman told me he didn’t appreciate being lumped in with other filmmakers in the Direct Cinema movement because to one degree or another, all but Wiseman routinely broke the same rules they’d set for themselves, allowing themselves a bit of post-production dialogue replacement or a pop music-scored montage as a treat.
Which isn’t to say Wiseman saw himself as a heroic avatar of non-intervention. He often told interviewers that the location shoots for his movies were conducted under a non-interventionist policy, but that in the editing process, he’d avail himself of editing’s liberating powers, and create a work that was more of a subjective personal take than something in the vein of a reference book. Accepting an 2016 honorary Oscar for his unique contributions to cinema, Wiseman was self-deprecating about his process, which could seem to the uninitiated like no process. “I usually know nothing about the subject before I start, and I know there are those that feel I know nothing about it when it’s finished,” he told the audience.
In interviews with publications that cared about aesthetics, Wiseman admitted he was working mainly from instinct, on location as well as in the editing room, and did not consider any of his films to be definitive statements on their chosen topics, but glimpses of moments in time that accumulated power and suggested meanings when laid end-to-end on an editing timeline.
Wiseman’s movies recapture the original impulse that drove early cinema: to show things that viewers might not experience otherwise, be it a bare-knuckle boxing match, a train pulling into a French railway station, or the construction of the Panama Canal. And yet, in their meditative, hands-off way, these proto-documentaries were aesthetically radical, because they rejected every supposed norm of motion picture storytelling, including ones that had been explored by his colleagues in the Direct Cinema movement.
The way he talked about them sometimes made it sound like as much a record of a roving mind as Kenneth Anger’s experimental films, Jean Luc-Godard’s essay movies, and David Lynch’s phantasmagoric explorations of his dreams and nightmares. In a 1994 interview with CINEASTE, Wiseman said, “This great glop of material which represents the externally recorded memory of my experience of making the film is of necessity incomplete. The memories not preserved on film float somewhat in my mind as fragments available for recall, unavailable for inclusion but of great importance in the mining and shifting process known as editing. This editorial process is sometimes deductive, sometimes associational, sometimes non-logical and sometimes a failure. The crucial element for me is to try and think through my own relationship to the material, by whatever combination of means is compatible. This involves a need to conduct a four-way conversation between myself, the sequence being worked on, my memory, and general values and experience.”
Wiseman’s films are as recognizably Wiseman’s as all the films of Hollywood directors routinely name-checked as masters of auteurist filmmaking. Once you’ve seen a couple of his movies, you can identify the rest from watching a couple of minutes of a scene on somebody else’s phone. His stated approach to capturing reality evoked the opening lines of Christopher Isherwood’s I Am a Camera: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.” But the reality was something else. The passivity ended once the editing began.
“I try to avoid imposing a preconceived view on the material,” he told The Paris Review in a 2018 interview. “Editing is a process that combines the rational and the nonrational. I have learned to pay as much attention to peripheral thoughts at the edge of my mind as to any formally logical approaches to the material. My associations are often as valuable as my attempts at deductive logic. It’s the old cliché—you find a solution to a problem because you dream it, or you’re walking down the street and it occurs to you, or you think of it in the shower. I’ve resolved editing problems many times that way, by trying to be alert to the way my mind—or what’s left of it—thinks about the material.”
- Remembering the Forgotten Movies of the 2026 Oscar Season (February 17, 2026)
Every year, the Oscars get it wrong. By “it,” I mean the nominations and, later, the winners—and by “wrong,” I mean that their choices fail to completely line up with your own personal favorites. Naturally, then, it’s inevitable that a degree of discontent is baked into the proceedings, leaving film fans complaining about the omissions and snubs. Although let’s be fair: Any Academy Awards that chooses to honor major films like “One Battle After Another,” “Sinners,” “Sirât,” and “Marty Supreme” is actually getting it right a lot of the time.
Nonetheless, once the Oscar nominations are announced, so many worthy films immediately get brushed aside because they didn’t earn a single nod. That narrowing of the race, which throws a huge spotlight on the nominated movies, means so many others are largely forgotten about. In the eyes of the media, it’s almost as if they never existed.
For the third straight year, I’m very happy to pay tribute to 10 great films from the past year whose titles you won’t hear mentioned during the Oscars on March 15. As always, narrowing it down to 10 was its own version of culling the field, and I’m sorry to leave off so many fine movies that might have been among your own highlights of 2025. But whether I snubbed them or the Academy did, those films have lost none of their luster. If anything, a personal beloved choice sometimes seems even more luminous because our love for the film isn’t widely shared—it becomes a treasure we get to keep close to our heart. In alphabetical order, here’s my salute to some such jewels.
“BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions”
Last year’s Sundance featured myriad exceptional nonfiction films. All five Oscar nominees for Best Documentary debuted at the Park City festival, alongside such other memorable documentaries as “Predators” and “Zodiac Killer Project.” Add to that list visual artist and music video director Kahlil Joseph’s stunning feature-length debut. Based on his own video installation, “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” opens with a consideration of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience, a 1999 collection (since expanded) that sought to encompass the totality of Black history.
But that tome is merely the starting point for Joseph’s ambitious, dizzying work, which plays like a record album, each new vignette serving as a separate “track.” The film honors Black journalists, thinkers, and leaders who have fought to center the Black experience, but “BLKNWS” is not limited to the past. (Indeed, one of the movie’s key lines of dialogue is “Do you even remember the future?”) With its forward-looking mixture of sources and art forms—making room for dance, poetry, sculpture, social media, music, and more—Joseph blends autobiography with commentary, fiction with nonfiction. It’s a knockout.
“Caught by the Tides”
Is Zhao Tao the most acclaimed actress most American moviegoers have never heard of? Just recently turned 49, she has been the star of her husband, Jia Zhangke,’s films for roughly half of her life, starting with his 2000 breakthrough “Platform.” The Chinese writer-director has devoted his career to chronicling his homeland’s uneasy embrace of globalization, which has marginalized poorer communities and changed the nation’s very understanding of itself. Zhao’s expressive, melancholy face has often personified that societal tension, especially so in “Caught by the Tides,” one of Jia’s most radical films.
Here, he pulls from footage he’s shot for previous movies—including “Still Life” and “Ash Is Purest White”—to tell a decades-spanning tale of two lovers (Zhao Tao, Li Zhubin) that’s set against the country’s changing character. Drawing comparisons to films like “Boyhood,” “Caught by the Tides” captures its protagonists as they seemingly age in real time, leading to a newly shot final sequence that plays like a bittersweet summation of Jia and Zhao’s lifework. She’s never been so luminous.
“Familiar Touch”
Writer-director Sarah Friedland rightly describes her unsentimental feature debut, which won three prizes at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, as a political film. Other movies about the elderly treat their subjects as overly adorable, but “Familiar Touch” allows for not such cutesiness to intrude. The movie stars venerable stage actress Kathleen Chalfant as Ruth, who is sent to an assisted living center by her concerned, loving son (H. Jon Benjamin) once her dementia becomes more pronounced.
Friedland, who has experience as a care companion, shot Ruth’s awkward navigation of her new life at an actual Pasadena center, recruiting the residents to be part of the filmmaking process. What emerges is a touching meditation on aging that doesn’t shy away from the limits of medical care during our twilight years. Chalfant was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, a deserving recognition for a performance that nimbly conveys Ruth’s fear and resignation as her mind starts slipping away. But kudos also go to Friedland for making an honest film about the American healthcare system and the ways we tend to marginalize and infantilize the aged in popular culture.
“A Little Prayer”
So few American films get small-town life right, which is why it’s always worth celebrating one that does. Not surprisingly, one of the best examples in recent years, “A Little Prayer,” comes from the writer of 2005’s “Junebug.” Filmmaker Angus MacLachlan once again sets the action in North Carolina, introducing us to a loving but troubled suburban family led by kindly patriarch Bill (David Strathairn).
Running a factory with his son David (Will Pullen), Bill starts to suspect that David is having an affair with a coworker, which especially displeases Bill because he has such fondness for David’s wife Tammy (Jane Levy). As Bill struggles with whether to say anything to Tammy or his wife, Venida (Celia Weston), he must also contend with the abrupt return home of his restless, irresponsible daughter, Patti (Anna Camp).
“A Little Prayer” captures all the gentle rhythms of domestic life far away from the big cities, and Strathairn does stellar work as a good man unsure of the right thing to do for either his daughter or his daughter-in-law. Few American films inspire comparisons to the quietly observant, subtly emotional approach of Yasujirō Ozu—this one does.
“The Mastermind”
Josh O’Connor’s career is just getting started, so one shouldn’t be shocked that he has yet to receive an Oscar nomination. But what about Kelly Reichardt? This singular filmmaker’s ninth feature is among her finest, starring O’Connor as J.B., a going-nowhere family man in 1970 who plots a heist at a local art museum. “The Mastermind” upends the conventions of the crime-thriller to deliver a seriocomic character study of a directionless, privileged middle-class American unaware of the tumultuous political climate swirling around him.
In the process, Reichardt also writes an astounding homage to the sort of revolutionary films that littered the landscape during Hollywood’s 1970s golden age, except with her own unique perspective on individuals’ wary relationship with society. She found the perfect rising talent for the job: O’Connor starred in four movies in 2025, but this was his high-water mark.
“My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow”
Winning Best Documentary from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics, Julia Loktev’s engrossing portrait of the embattled journalists working for TV Rain, Russia’s last independent news agency, was one of 2025’s most critically-acclaimed films. The Academy’s failure to nominate “My Undesirable Friends” will go down as one of that branch’s most questionable omissions, alongside “Hoop Dreams” and “The Thin Blue Line.” The documentary takes viewers inside the newsroom and into the apartments of these young, mostly female reporters, who are trying to expose the corruption running rampant within Vladimir Putin’s regime.
But the film’s power stems from its incredible timing: Loktev arrived in Moscow mere months before the country’s invasion of Ukraine, which had chilling effects inside Russia as the government cracked down even more forcefully on free speech and protest. Instantly establishing itself as one of the great movies about journalism, “My Undesirable Friends” is also a portrait of courage and friendship during impossible times. That its depiction of an authoritarian government feels increasingly relevant to American viewers is just another of the film’s gripping selling points.
“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”
Like “It Was Just an Accident,” British-Zambian filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s second feature opens with an upsetting incident behind the wheel in the middle of the night. Shula (Susan Chardy) drives home from a costume party to discover her uncle’s dead body in the road. That sets in motion preparations for a family gathering to mourn the man’s passing, except some of the women assembled have good reason to be glad he’s gone.
Nyoni, who won best director in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, casts a harsh light on Zambia’s patriarchal culture, using the deceased’s not-so-secret history of sexual abuse as a catalyst for a liberating, burn-it-all-down commentary. “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” opened nearly a year ago, when Academy members and critics weren’t necessarily thinking about award-worthy films. Their loss: Anyone who saw “Guinea Fowl” was bewitched by its gorgeous images, angry undercurrent, and unforgettable final moments.
“Resurrection”
It had been seven long years since Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan released “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a seductive love story that featured an hour-long oner presented in 3D. He returned with another audacious enterprise in “Resurrection,” which traces China’s 20th century, as well as cinema’s, through an entrancing, episodic story of a strange creature (Jackson Yee) who escapes into movies so that he can still dream. (In the world of “Resurrection,” society has stopped dreaming so it can gain immortality.)
Bi works his way through silent cinema, noir, and genre flicks, and once again delivers an ambitious long take set at the close of the millennium. Hollywood is always preaching about the importance of the theatrical experience, but few studio movies were as sumptuous in their big-screen beauty as Bi’s intoxicating ode to the power of cinema. The jaw-dropping images never let up, and the score, provided by M83, is equally transporting. “Resurrection” reminds the viewer why the movie theater remains the optimal way to appreciate a filmmaker’s grand vision.
Eva Victor appears in Sorry, Baby by Eva Victor, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Mia Cioffy Henry.
“Sorry, Baby”
At a moment when #MeToo’s impact seems, sadly, to be waning in Hollywood, writer-director-star Eva Victor’s feature debut was a moving tribute to a survivor of sexual assault. But what was most remarkable about “Sorry, Baby” was how nuanced and even hysterically funny such a tribute could be. Victor plays Agnes, an aspiring-writer-turned-professor whose early artistic promise was demolished by an abusive teacher who sent her life on a different course.
Featuring spectacular supporting performances from Naomi Ackie and Lucas Hedges, this comedy-drama explores the lingering pain and confusion that survivors experience, while eschewing the well-meaning but melodramatic clichés usually associated with such subject matter. As a result, “Sorry, Baby” celebrates a life rather than focuses on just the tragedy, presenting Agnes as a hobbled but by no means broken person on the path to rediscovering herself.
“Sound of Falling”
Oscar shortlisted for Best International Film and Best Cinematography, German director Mascha Schilinski’s second feature won the Jury Prize at Cannes and entrances more with each subsequent viewing. “Sound of Falling” spans approximately 100 years, following four young women who live in the same house at different times in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Working with her cinematographer husband Fabian Gamper, Schilinski astutely observes the similar challenges these girls face, whether they live during the run-up to World War I or in modern Germany. Indeed, the movie weaves together disparate time frames so that the characters’ circumstances seem to speak to one another across generations. Haunted by the occasional use of Anna von Hausswolff’s ethereal “Stranger,” “Sound of Falling” turns the past into a ghost story while making history feel very much alive and unresolved. Many have yet to see this wonderful film, but just because the Academy overlooked it isn’t an excuse for the rest of us to do the same.
- Something Lasting and Unforgettable: Robert Duvall (1931-2026) (February 16, 2026)
“Duvall never plays the same character twice, and he makes other actors look good. He brings a quality to his listening, his reactions, that charges a scene even when he’s not talking.” – Roger Ebert on Robert Duvall
Another titan is gone. They seem to be falling with more frequency these days. Following in the footsteps of Gene Hackman, Diane Keaton, Robert Redford, and the many more we lost in 2025, today the news broke that one of the strongest pillars of one of the most important eras of film history is gone. Robert Duvall passed away yesterday “surrounded by love and comfort” at his Virginia ranch, according to his wife Luciana.
It’s hard to overstate the legacy of Robert Duvall. Just the breadth of his output alone makes him an essential name in any retelling of film history as he worked for seven consecutive decades starting in the 1960s. Over that span, he won an Oscar, four Golden Globe Awards, two Emmys, a SAG Award, a BAFTA Award, and more. He was nearly as essential to the stage as he was to film and TV, appearing in vital productions of Wait Until Dark and David Mamet’s powerful American Buffalo.
From the minute he appeared on screen in Boo Radley in the beloved adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, there was a presence to Robert Duvall that was undeniable. He won his Oscar for “Tender Mercies,” but he just as easily could have taken home Academy Awards for a dozen other films: “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now,” “The Great Santini,” “The Apostle,” “The Conversation,” “Network,” “The Natural,” “Sling Blade,” “Crazy Heart,” “The Natural,” “A Civil Action,” and “Rambling Rose.” Watching those 12 films alone would give one a solid marathon of American filmmaking from the ’70 to the ‘90s. Duvall was a support beam for the American film movement.
Born to a Rear Admiral and a woman reportedly related to General Robert E. Lee, Robert Selden Duvall always seemed to carry a bit of military authority in his on-screen presence. Everything changed for young Duvall when he enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre under the legendary Sanford Meisner, where Duvall’s classmates included James Caan, Dustin Hoffman, and Gene Hackman.
Like a lot of actors of his era, Robert Duvall began his career on the stage, reportedly taking a role in a Long Island summer theater production in 1952. He worked consistently on the stage in the New York area in the ‘50s, and his most notable role off-Broadway in this period was in the original production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge with Dustin Hoffman. He made his Broadway debut in Wait Until Dark in 1966 and played Teach in the first Broadway production of American Buffalo. It’s an incredible part that would be played in later productions by Al Pacino and William H. Macy.
Robert Duvall transitioned to television in the ‘60s, appearing in numerous hits of the day like “The Untouchables,” “The Outer Limits,” “The Fugitive,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” and a great episode of “The Twilight Zone” called “Miniature,” in which he plays a museum goer who discovers that a dollhouse has living residents. When he falls in love with the female of the dollhouse, things get even weirder. It doesn’t quite stick the landing, but it’s easy to see the way that Duvall holds a camera even this early in his career in 1963.
The story goes that none other than Horton Foote saw a young Duvall in a production of his The Midnight Caller in 1957, and he’s the one who recommended him for Boo Radley in 1962’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” (and would later write the part that would win Duvall his Oscar). The recluse in the town of Maycomb, Alabama, Radley is a character who reflects acceptance of outsiders in Lee’s book and the adaptation, a figure who represents the folly of judgment. Radley ultimately saves the lives of Jem and Scout Finch, and Duvall makes an impact in the film despite limited screen time.
There were small roles in big films in the ‘60s, including parts in “Bullitt” and “True Grit,” but Duvall’s prime came relatively late, in his forties, in the 1970s. There were few major American filmmakers of the era whose work wasn’t grounded by Duvall, including Robert Altman (“M*A*S*H”), George Lucas (“THX 1138”), John Sturges (“The Eagle Has Landed”), Sidney Lumet (“Network”), and, of course, Francis Ford Coppola, who cast Duvall as Tom Hagen in a little movie called “The Godfather,” which earned Duvall his first Oscar nomination. He would, of course, appear in the sequel, along with Coppola’s other ‘70s masterpieces “The Conversation” and “Apocalypse Now,” which won him BAFTA and Golden Globe awards.
Going into the ‘80s as one of the most acclaimed character actors in the world, Duvall would eventually get his Oscar for Bruce Beresford’s “Tender Mercies,” the story of an alcoholic country singer. Roger Ebert wrote in his Great Movies essay on the film, “It contains one of his most understated performances. It’s mostly done with his eyes. The actor who shouted, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” here plays a character who wants to be rid of shouting. The film itself never shouts. Its title evokes its mood, although this is not a story about happiness. “I don’t trust happiness. I never did, I never will,” Mac Sledge tells Rosa Lee, in a scene framed entirely in a medium-long shot that possibly won him the Oscar.”
The roles would literally never stop from here. In 1989, he appeared in what many still consider the best TV mini-series of all time, “Lonesome Dove,” which he told the Los Angeles Times was his favorite role. He won a Golden Globe for the part.
Robert Duvall maintained remarkable control over his career for the last four decades of his life, a model of how to use fame to be selective in his roles. He refused to return to “The Godfather Part III” because he wasn’t getting paid as much as Pacino. He wrote and directed himself to an Oscar nomination for his breathtaking work in “The Apostle.” Other highlights include “Days of Thunder,” “Rambling Rose,” “Falling Down,” “The Paper,” “Sling Blade,” “Deep Impact,” “A Civil Action,” “Gone in 60 Seconds,” “We Own the Night,” “Get Low,” “Jack Reacher,” “The Judge,” and “Widows.”
Robert Duvall wasn’t a typical Hollywood presence. When you think of him, it’s not on red carpets or late-night talk shows. It’s on screen. It’s the characters who you can see thinking, feeling, and reacting, often men who believe themselves impenetrable from the world, being proven otherwise.
As Roger said, “It’s mostly done with his eyes.”
- Short Films in Focus: The 2026 Oscar-Nominated Shorts (February 16, 2026)
The Oscar-nominated Shorts programs continue to attract audiences who are either looking to complete their Oscar viewing list or just curious cinephiles seeking works from new voices from around the world. This year’s crop is a mostly solid bunch and difficult to predict. There are three English-language crowd-pleasers in the Live Action category (those always win), two kid-friendly shorts in the Animated category (same), and four films in the Documentary category that examine the personal toll of the tragedies that surround us and that are produced by major media outlets (New Yorker, HB,O and Netflix). I’m usually good at narrowing down the winner and am often right, but this year the Academy voters made it difficult, which makes the challenge more interesting and more fun. So, I can’t really help you win the night at your Oscar party contest. All I can do is tell you which ones are my personal favorites.
LIVE ACTION
“Butcher’s Stain” – An Israeli grocery store employee (Omar Sameer) gets accused of taking posters of hostages down in the employee breakroom. One person claims to have seen him do it, but the details are vague. Did he do it? Should he be fired for it if he did? I happened to watch this the same evening as the documentary short nominee “Children No More: Were and Are Gone,” and the films echo one another as they explore the complexities of protest and perception. The film works best when focusing on the workplace mystery, but the coda feels underdeveloped and would benefit from a longer form. Directed by Meyer Levinson-Blount. (26 min.)
“A Friend Of Dorothy” – An elderly woman, Dorothy (Miriam Margolyes), leaves an inheritance to a young man, J.J. (Alistair Nwachukwu), whom she met after he lost a football in her front yard. The movie flashes back to how they met and how they eventually formed a deep friendship, during which she encouraged him to make acting more than a hobby. This one will warm the hearts of many voters who will appreciate its simplicity, as well as a couple of recognizable names (Stephen Fry plays the executor of the will). It’s the most sentimental film of the bunch, which helps put it in good standing to win the award. (22 min.)
“Jane Austen’s Period Drama” – The tone is set right away with this one, as stock characters from Jane Austen novels are given names like Estrogenia Talbot (co-director Julia Aks) and Mr. Dickley (Ta’imua). There is also a precocious little sister named Vagianna (Nicole Alyse Nelson). Mr. Dickley is about to propose marriage to our heroine when, suddenly, she starts bleeding (get the title now?). Mr. Dickley is clueless as to why. Should she lie to him about what causes this? The film feels inspired by “Barbie,” cheerfully putting the plight of womanhood front and center as the men around them walk around befuddled by their behavior, all while the film tries anything for a laugh. Stick around for the entirety of the credits and listen to the lyrics of the closing song, as well as the credit for a certain Academy Award-winning screenwriter who has dabbled in this genre before. I don’t mind saying that this one is my favorite of the bunch, and I’m glad I watched it last. Directed by Julia Aks and Steve Pinder.
“The Singers” – One night, in a little bar with a lot of history, a group of working-class men who probably hang out there regularly start an impromptu singing contest for the coveted prize of a one-hundred-dollar bill. Egos take hold of most of the men in the place, as many of them argue about who can sing the best. A short that boasts an uncommonly rich soundtrack, which includes a brief snippet of “Das Rheingold,” as well as a few standards sung with varying degrees of greatness. Who will win? That, of course, is not important. Some may find it hard to warm up to the film at first, as we hear and see many conversations taking place, many in inarticulate, hushed tones, but once the story kicks into gear, audiences will find themselves attached to the piece as a whole, if not to any singular character. It has the Netflix muscle behind it, making it a likely winner. Directed by Sam Davis. (15 min.)
“Two People Exchanging Saliva” – A hugely ambitious short with chapter breaks, world-building, and beautiful black-and-white cinematography. This French offering has been appropriately described as a bent version of Todd Haynes’ “Carol,” by way of Yorgos Lanthimos. In this world, we eventually gather that exchanging saliva with someone carries with it a penalty of death, so when a first-time sales clerk in a shopping mall named Malaise (Luàna Bajrami) feels an attraction to one of the store regulars named Angine (Zar Amir Ebrahimi), the societal stakes become more and more dangerous with each flirtation. Directors Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh keep us a bit baffled throughout much of the first chapter, choosing to reveal their characters rather than provide exposition about the world they’ve created, one loosely based on the absurdities of our current state of affairs. It won’t be hard to see the allegory, but the overall journey is worth the 36-minute running time, with exceptional performances throughout.
ANIMATED
“Butterfly” – Inspired by French Olympic butterfly swimmer Alfred Nakache, who gained international prominence in 1931 and was booted out of the Berlin Olympics and eventually sent to a concentration camp. Florence Miailhe’s gorgeously textured film sums up his life in a dreamlike fifteen minutes, giving us an overview that amounts to just as much substance as a feature film would have done, but with the added bonus of some beautifully rendered images to be seen this year in any of these programs. The moving brushstroke style of animation always commands my attention in shorts like these, but the narratives can be frustratingly vague. That’s not the case here. Miailhe, who has a personal connection to this story, keeps everything clear and mesmerizing. (15 min.)
“Forevergreen” – This one might remind viewers of last year’s Best Animated Feature winner “Flow” with its wordless storytelling of animals in nature trying to survive the elements, but really this is a film about a friendship between a lost bear cub and a tree that nurtures it throughout its young life until the bear decides he has no use for the tree anymore. The jerky animation style works well when combined with the unique look that does not favor photorealism. The characters still feel alive, and the animators imbue them, as well as the story itself, with genuine emotion. It overreaches in spots, mainly due to the score, but the end result is irresistibly warm and pleasing. The most kid-friendly of the bunch, which means it has a good shot at winning. Directed by Nathan Engelhardt and Jeremy Spears. (13 min.)
“The Girl Who Cried Pearls” – Charles Dickens meets Roald Dahl in this fable about a girl who, yes, cries pearls, a greedy pawnbroker who sees their monetary value, and a homeless boy who brings him the pearls in exchange for money. The film is told in flashback and narrated by Colm Feore, who plays a young girl’s grandfather telling her the tale. Like “Butterfly,” the texture of the animation is incredibly striking. The characters look like marionettes without strings, and the dilapidated surroundings have a tangible and lived-in quality. Although the characters’ mouths don’t move, the expressions on their faces tell the story beautifully. My favorite film of this block. Directed by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski. (16 min.)
“Retirement Plan” – Domhnall Gleeson narrates this gem that plays out the list we have all made of all the great things we’ll all accomplish when we retire. It all seems so doable until it’s not. This film reminded me of Bernardo Britto’s short films, with its concise storytelling, quick editing, and attention to detail. More than that, though, writers John Kelly and Tara Lawall capture a similar melancholia, steeped in the inescapable familiarity of everyday life and its limitations. Never mind whether or not any retirement plan is even affordable; those last twenty or so years of anyone’s existence are exciting and frightening at the same time, and this film conveys that conflicting feeling beautifully. Directed by John Kelly. (7 min)
“The Three Sisters” – This one has a “Tripletts Of Belleville” vibe (minus the soundtrack) as three sisters, who live in a house on a remote island, rent out one of their rooms. A big, burly sailor becomes their tenant and so much more. Your mileage may vary with the animation style–simple 2-D animation with very little detail in the faces or expressions–and how that will help or hinder our engagement with it. It doesn’t do much for me. There’s no dialogue, save for the sailor’s “Ha!” every time something, or someone, gets him excited. It’s full of sight gags and whimsy, but there’s not much of a lift to it. It certainly has its charm in spots, though, and I dug the closing credits. Directed by Konstantin Bronzit (14 min.)
DOCUMENTARY
“All the Empty Rooms” – CBS News’ Steve Hartman has been reporting on school shootings since 1997. For the past seven years, he’s been working on a piece about kids’ bedrooms. He has three left to visit and document, along with his photographer, Lou Bopp. Hartman has always been a feel-good reporter, one of those people who files a story of an inspirational do-gooder at the end of a newscast to help people feel positive about the world again. This project feels more appropriate and urgent to him, and the film follows him as he visits the empty and untouched bedrooms of four lives tragically cut short. There’s a delicate balance here between making the movie too much about Hartman and not about the deceased kids, and director Joshua Seftel keeps the balance in check. It’s a moving film about memories and how they fade away through time. The physical objects left behind keep us connected to them, be it a basketball, a pile of laundry, or a photo collage. (35 min).
“Armed With Only A Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud” – So many echoes of “All The Empty Rooms” in this, mainly about the idea of photographers and journalists using everything they have to document the most tragic corners of human existence. Brent Renaud’s death at the hands of Russian combatants in Ukraine made national headlines. Renaud was fearless in his pursuit of truth while documenting the very real lives of survivors in Iraq in 2003, Haiti in 2010, the violent streets of Chicago in 2017, and Ukraine in 2022, just to name a few. The film flashes back to the films he made about these people and the devastation that surrounded them, while also following his brother, Craig, who has to transport Brent’s dead body back to America.
Craig also directed this film and made a wise choice in not editing Brent’s footage in any chronological order, thereby putting every one of Brent’s destinations on equal footing and emphasizing that Brent went everywhere, no matter how dangerous, because that’s who he was. Some might find the narrative a bit messy as it jumps around, but since Craig was alongside Brent much of the time, perhaps a nonlinear approach mirrors how he sees and experiences his memory of his brother. A loving tribute, nonetheless. Directed by Brent Renaud and Craig Renaud. (39 min.)
“Children No More: Were And Are Gone” – In Tel Aviv, a group of organizers holds silent vigils in the city streets and parks every Saturday for all the children who have died in Gaza. They don’t speak or chant. They simply hold pictures (if any are available) that say the child’s name, age, and “was and is no more.” Passersby hurl slurs and counterprotests in their direction, demanding to know why they do not hold pictures of the hostages. This is not that kind of protest, of course. Theirs is a plea to all of humanity. The film conveys their message while also exploring the dangers of expressing it and whether it gets across. In the end, the film does not have all the answers, but how could it? Instead, it effectively puts the viewer in the uncomfortable position of attending a vigil like this and enduring the provocations from the heated onlookers. What would you do in that situation? Directed by Hilla Medalia. (30 min.)
“The Devil Is Busy” – This one takes place at a Feminist Women’s Health Center in Atlanta, GA, where we first meet the head of security, Tracii, as she sets up for a busy day at the clinic. It’s a highly stressful job, of course, because there could always be an anti-abortion protester hiding somewhere who has a deadly plan. She knows the protesters by name and knows some of their histories. We also get to know the operators and doctors who work there and the stress they face every day. Mostly, we remember Tracii, who goes to work every day knowing there’s a chance she won’t make it home. “The Devil Is Busy” is an effective overview of a day in the life of a women’s health clinic three years after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Prayer works in some situations, but for many women, it isn’t enough. Directed by Christalyn Hampton and Geeta Gandbhir. (32 min.)
“Perfectly A Strangeness” – Palermo, Roberto, and Palaye are three seemingly random donkeys wandering through the desert who find an abandoned observatory that can see deep into the universe. Alison McAlpine’s visually expansive, meditative, and wordless film will remind viewers that documentaries can take multiple shapes and sizes. It’s the kind of film I love to program at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, the kind that immerses the viewer into something otherworldly, best experienced in a darkened theater. Some might question its validity as a documentary, but I prefer to accept it for what it is. While I would not go so far as to say it’s the first of its kind (I’ve seen many shorts like it), in the case of this year’s Oscar nominees, it’s the one film that goes against the grain in every single way. (15 min.)
- “Train Dreams” Wins Big at the 2026 Independent Spirit Awards (February 16, 2026)
On Sunday afternoon, exactly a month before the 2026 Academy Awards, the Independent Spirit Awards were handed out and Netflix’s “Train Dreams” was the big winner for the night, taking home prizes for Best Feature, Best Director (Clint Bentley), and Best Cinematography (Adolpho Veloso). Netflix also dominated the TV side of the event with the awards juggernaut that is “Adolescence” taking home most of the major prizes. Other big winners at the show hosted by Ego Nwodim included Rose Byrne for “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” Eva Victor & Naomi Ackie for “Sorry, Baby,” Alex Russell for “Lurker,” and “The Secret Agent,” winner for Best International Film.
All the winners can be found below:
Best Feature: “Train Dreams”
Best Director: Clint Bentley, “Train Dreams”
Best Screenplay: Eva Victor, “Sorry, Baby”
Best First Feature: “Lurker”
Best First Screenplay: “Lurker”
John Cassavetes Award: “Esta Isla (The Island)”
Best Breakthrough Performance: Kayo Martin, “The Plague”
Best Supporting Performance: Naomi Ackie, “Sorry, Baby”
Best Lead Performance: Rose Byrne, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
Robert Altman Award: “The Long Walk”
Best Cinematography: Adolpho Veloso, “Train Dreams”
Best Editing: Sofia Subercaseaux, “The Testament of Ann Lee”
Best International Film: “The Secret Agent”
Best Documentary: “The Perfect Neighbor”
Someone to Watch Award: Tatti Ribeiro, “Valentina”
Truer Than Fiction Award: Rajee Samarasinghe, “Your Touch Makes Others Invisible”
Producers Award: Tony Yang
Best New Scripted Series: “Adolescence”
Best New Non-Scripted Series of Documentary Series: “Pee-Wee as Himself”
Best Breakthrough Performance in a New Scripted Series: Owen Cooper, “Adolescence”
Best Supporting Performance in a New Scripted Series: Erin Doherty, “Adolescence”
Best Lead Performance in a New Scripted Series: Stephen Graham, “Adolescence”
Best Ensemble Cast in a New Scripted Series: “Chief of War”
