The Daily | Criteria

September 21, 2026·David Hudson

TIFF 2026: The People Have Chosen

Guitarricadelafuente in Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s La bola negra (2026) Anyone mentioning the People’s Choice Award voted on by attendees at the Toronto International Film Festival is going to add, as Stephanie Goodman does in the New York Times, that the coveted prize “can be a bellwether of the Best Picture Oscar, as in 2018 and 2020, when Green Book and Nomadland went on to win at the Academy Awards.” This year’s winner, announced on Sunday as TIFF 2026 wrapped, is La bola negra (The Black Ball), directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi.Los Javis, as the two-man team is…

September 18, 2026·David Hudson

To Be Free

Did You See This? Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972) Patricio Guzmán’s The Battle of Chile (1975–1979) “endures to this day as a furious witness to a terrible history,” wrote Samuel Brodsky when he interviewed Guzmán for Film Comment a few years ago. The three-part chronicle of events leading up to, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the military coup that put an end to leftist Salvador Allende’s democratic government in Chile is “widely regarded as one of the towering achievements in the history of documentary film,” wrote Sukhdev Sandhu for the Guardian in 2012, and it “nearly didn’t…

September 16, 2026·David Hudson

Alex Gibney’s Musk

Alex Gibney’s Musk (2026) In a recent cover story for the Hollywood Reporter, Steven Zeitchik calls documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney “the closest the current film world has to a Bob Woodward.” Gibney won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), an investigation into the CIA’s use of torture, and he’s won Emmys for Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012), which traces the history of clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief (2015).In 2022, Gibney and his team began working on a film about Elon Musk for HBO. Within two…

September 15, 2026·David Hudson

Jeremy Thomas: An Astonishing Career

Mark Cousins’s The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (2021) “One of the greatest film producers, Jeremy Thomas, died last night,” posted writer and filmmaker Mark Cousins on Saturday. “I made it back from America to be with him at the end. We drank red wine and cried. Truly loved him.”Cousins is probably best known for his epic 2011 documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey, but he’s also made “more, shall we say, idiosyncratic works,” as Matt Zoller Seitz puts it at RogerEbert.com. The Eyes of Orson Welles (2018), for example, is framed as what Glenn Kenny has called an “unabashedly, unapologetically…

September 14, 2026·David Hudson

Underrepresented, Women Triumph in Venice

Mathilde Arcel and Flora Yde Sander in May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown (2026) “I actually didn’t see Woman Unknown,” quipped jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal at a press conference following Saturday night’s presentation of the awards at the eighty-third Venice International Film Festival. “I just was like, ‘It’s made by a woman and so, Golden Lion!’”Launching the always-teeming fall festival season, Venice opened nearly two weeks ago with another press conference in which Gyllenhaal was asked to address the paucity of women filmmakers in the main competition lineup. Only one of the twenty-one…

September 11, 2026·David Hudson

Turning Points

Did You See This? Jafar Panahi’s No Bears (2022) The trailer has racked up nearly six million views and become an instant meme. Codirected by Nathan Fielder (The Rehearsal) and Lance Oppenheim, whose Primetime has premiered in Venice to mixed-to-positive reviews, You Can See Everything was the big surprise screening at Telluride last weekend and is now the latest addition to the lineup of this year’s New York Film Festival.In 2022, Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors in her health-tech company Theranos, and one month before she began serving an eleven-month sentence in the…

September 9, 2026·David Hudson

Robert Greene’s Too Much Sugar

Robert Greene’s Too Much Sugar (2026) “Simply put,” wrote Robert Greene for Sight and Sound in 2020, “all movies are hybrids.” By that point, Greene had made a string of features—Fake It So Real (2011), Actress (2014), Kate Plays Christine (2016), and Bisbee ’17 (2018)—that delved further and further into the conviction that he expressed in a 2014 essay for the same magazine, namely, “that I prefer to see the relationship between fiction and nonfiction more as an unstable continuum.” And as “the kind of marketing term” that “might be useful in some vague branding sense,” hybrid is “ultimately…

September 8, 2026·David Hudson

Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love

Jeon Do-yeon and Cho Yeo-jeong in Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love (2026) Throughout the Labor Day weekend, premieres of some of the season’s most promising films were popping off in Venice and Telluride. The first episodes of the fall marathon are out from the Film Comment Podcast and The Last Thing I Saw, and critics are posting ratings to the grid at Moirée. While some are scoping out Oscar prospects for a few standout performances—for example, Julianne Moore’s in Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, Robert Pattinson’s in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, and Andrew Scott’s in Simon Stone’s…

September 4, 2026·David Hudson

Holding Our Own

Did You See This? Mike Leigh’s Bleak Moments (1971) And we’re off. Venice has opened with Danny Boyle’s Ink, and Telluride, opening today and running through Sunday, has announced a lineup of more than sixty features. The Colorado festival with what IndieWire’s Anne Thompson calls a “Rocky Mountain summer-camp vibe” will host the world premieres of Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, with Julianne Moore; Andrew Haigh’s Colm Tóibín adaptation, A Long Winter; Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care, with Kate O’Flynn; Simon Stone’s Elsinore, with Andrew Scott; and David Zellner and Nathan Zellner’s Alpha…

September 3, 2026·David Hudson

Danny Boyle’s Ink

Jack O’Connell in Danny Boyle’s Ink (2026) “I’m not sure it’s a Venice film,” Danny Boyle tells Luke Georgiades at A Rabbit’s Foot. “I’m certain it’s not a Venice opening film,” Boyle adds with a laugh, but of course, Ink—an adaptation of James Graham’s 2017 play about publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) and editor Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), who in the early 1970s transformed the British paper The Sun into a scandalous tabloid and the country’s highest-selling daily—has, in fact, opened the eighty-third Venice International Film Festival. And it will go on to screen at festivals…

September 2, 2026·David Hudson

Other Goings On

František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1967) The fall festival season kicks off with this evening’s world premiere of Danny Boyle’s Ink in Venice, which will be followed in rapid succession by Telluride (Friday through Monday), Toronto (September 10 through 20), and New York (September 25 through October 12). Before we’re swept away by this river of red carpets, let’s have a look at some of the other noteworthy events happening from now through the Labor Day Weekend.In New York, Musclefest opens tomorrow at the Roxy Cinema and runs through Sunday. For AnOther Magazine, Elizabeth Purchell, the…

August 31, 2026·David Hudson

Venice Classics 2026

TGeorge Sanders and Ingrid Bergman in Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954) It’s becoming a tradition for the Venice International Film Festival to give its Venice Classics program a head start with a pre–opening night screening. On Tuesday, the festival will pay tribute to hometown director Tinto Brass—probably best known for his work in soft-core erotica and for overseeing the outlandish production of Caligula (1979)—with the world premiere of a new restoration of Deadly Sweet (1967). When a comely young woman (Ewa Aulin) is suspected of murdering a mobster in a London nightclub, an…

August 28, 2026·David Hudson

Disappearing Moments

Did You See This? Whit Stillman’s Barcelona (1994) On Tuesday, we lost Dolly Parton, and then, hours later, Tim Curry. As the mad scientist and self-described “sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania” in writer Richard O’Brien and director Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Curry “didn’t simply play Frank-N-Furter,” writes Seth Abramovitch in the Hollywood Reporter. “He established the character’s entire vocabulary of seduction, danger, comedy, and camp, delivering every lyric and raised eyebrow with absolute conviction. The performance was outrageous without ever…

August 27, 2026·David Hudson

We Will Always Love Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton in Herbert Ross’s Steel Magnolias (1989) “Instant sainthood,” declared Jack White when the news of Dolly Parton’s passing at the age of eighty broke on Tuesday. The White Stripes’ 2004 cover of “Jolene”—the second of many of Parton’s solo number-one singles on the country charts and first released in 1974—is one of the fiercest of the nearly three hundred of them, including covers by Olivia Newton-John, Beyoncé, and Parton’s goddaughter, Miley Cyrus.For decades, legend held that Parton had written “Jolene” on the same day that she wrote “I Will Always Love You,” which Whitney…

August 26, 2026·David Hudson

Bibliomania: A Preface to Chronovisor

Jack Auen and Kevin Walker Chronovisor (2026) When Chronovisor premiered this past winter at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Zach Lewis, writing for In Review Online, called it “one of the most formally inventive and genuinely thrilling new movies in years.” The film—the first feature from directing duo Jack Auen and Kevin Walker—is set to open in New York on September 4, and in the run-up to its theatrical release, Film at Lincoln Center will present Bibliomania: A Preface to Chronovisor, a fifteen-film series starting Friday and featuring a free public book fair on Saturday.The…

August 25, 2026·David Hudson

Isabelle Stever’s I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming

Tania Myronyshena and Markus Bright in Isabelle Stever’s I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming (2026) When the awards were presented in Locarno earlier this month, both Variety’s Guy Lodge and RogerEbert.com’s Robert Daniels noted that they were surprised that Fabrice Du Welz’s jury had overlooked a clear critical favorite, I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming. Written by Anna Melikova and directed by Isabelle Stever—the married couple who previously collaborated on the daring incest story Grand Jeté (2022)—I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming heads next to the New York Film Festival.Olya (Tania Myronyshena) and Oleh (Markus…

August 24, 2026·David Hudson

August Books

Natalie Portman in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) Let’s open this month’s overview of new and noteworthy titles with a glance over at Film Comment, where we find a Summer Books Roundup. Maybe—we can hope!—this feature will be a part of each seasonal issue of the magazine’s new incarnation as a digital quarterly.Whitney Strub’s Films That Explode Like Grenades: Robert Kramer and the Search for a Radical Cinema “presents Kramer as an ambivalent figure,” writes Benjamin Crais, “a major filmmaker in the history of committed cinema, a frequent embodiment of his milieu’s worst tendencies, and…

August 21, 2026·David Hudson

Somewhere In-Between

Did You See This? Laura Elena Harring in David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001) Many have spent much of this week reflecting on the tragic end of the difficult life of Hayden Panettiere, whose acting career began with a toy commercial she appeared in when she was just eleven months old. Her “momager,” as Panettiere called her in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, kept her busy with a steady string of soap-opera roles throughout her childhood, and she eventually came into her own playing a figure skater in the 2005 Disney movie Ice Princess and a high-schooler crazy about horror movies in the…

In the catalogMulholland Dr.2001Early Spring1956

August 20, 2026·David Hudson

Graham Greene at the Harvard Film Archive

Joseph Cotten in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) The Harvard Film Archive returns from its summer break with a selective yet robust retrospective, The Cold Heart Is More Precious Than Diamonds: The Cinema of Graham Greene. Running through September 19, the series opens on Friday with The Fallen Idol (1948), the first of three collaborations between director Carol Reed and the prolific novelist, book and film critic, and screenwriter.As Howard A. Rodman has noted, Greene once described Reed as “the only director I know with that particular warmth of human sympathy, the extraordinary feeling…

In the catalogThe Third Man1949This Gun for Hire1942

August 19, 2026·David Hudson

Art-House Sci-Fi

Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) Starring Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution—a secret agent whose mission is to take out the inventor of a near-omniscient and seemingly sentient fascist computer—Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) is a scrappily inventive amalgam of film noir and science fiction that, as Eric Hynes put it in Reverse Shot in 2008, “refined a lexicon for subsequent big-budgeted, high-concept offspring (Soylent Green, Blade Runner, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey). It’s only fitting then that in its offhanded, thrift-store approach…

In the catalogAlphaville1965Solaris1972Stalker1979