Wednesday, August 19, 2026 at 10:00AM By Ben Miller
It's always nice to be pleasantly surprised. Julia Hart's Don't Say Good Luck might have all the makings of a nothingburger direct-to-streaming film, but instead delivers a character-focused film filled with emotion and devoid of cliches. It's also one of the unexpectedly great films of the year...
Friday, August 14, 2026 at 9:40PM Elisa Giudici reporting from Locarno
David Lynch has consolidated his status as one of cinema's greatest auteurs and geniuses to such an extent that it is easy to forget just how much fighting against compromise every step of his career required, even after winning the Palme d’Or for Wild at Heart or revolutionizing TV history with Twin Peaks.
At the Locarno Film Festival, his Icelandic producer and lifelong friend Sigurjón "Joni" Sighvatsson was presented with the Raimondo Rezzonico Award for his decades-long career as an outsider working within Hollywood. The Festival recognized how, as an outsider, he found ways around the major studio system's rules, helping lots of the soon-to-be great directors of the Eighties and Nineties gain some experience as music video makers...
Wednesday, August 5, 2026 at 10:24AM By Ben Miller
While watching Matt Johnson's Tony, there were long stretches I forgot I was watching a biopic. Instead of focusing on the well-documented mythology of famed chef Anthony Bourdain, this film decides to tell a worthwhile story, which just happens to include a future famous person.
Biopics follow a well-worn pattern of showing a person in their pre-fame life, struggling to emerge through the crowd, which will lead them to a great successes and worldwide acclaim. Tony begins and ends with the main character completely anonymous to the world. Rather than hold your hand and lead you to the point where the character finds success, it plants the seeds to send them in that direction without ever getting close to the actual finish line...
Thursday, July 16, 2026 at 1:00PM By Ben Miller
13 feature films into his career, director Christopher Nolan has developed a string of touchstones for his films. You can expect an all-star cast, massive practical set pieces, underdeveloped women, stunning visuals, and clunky dialogue. With his new film The Odyssey, Nolan again delivers on everything you come to expect from a Nolan movie.
This time, Nolan (a well-documented child of cinema history), decides to take his chances with a sword and sandals epic in the vein of Ben-Hur or Quo Vadis. While the filmmaker might not have the reverence for the genre, he dives headfirst into the craft and scope necessary to make a film of this magnitude. When this film is big, bold, and a little silly, that’s where everything excels. It’s when things get more intimate that the film loses its way...
Thursday, July 16, 2026 at 9:00AM by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor
If you’re anything like me, you walk away from the Oscars each year under an absolute fugue state against all new films. If it was made in the last decade, then no thank you! When it comes to 2026 features, I’ll be spending the summer doing what I do best: catching up on new releases I missed in theaters as soon as they hit VOD. So let’s start with a relatively deep cut, recommended by my good friend and one-time TFE contributor Patrick Gratton and available for rental in the US as of this past weekend.
CAMP is the second narrative feature from Avalon Fast, a Canadian writer/director/producer/editor/actress with a prolific repertoire of short films and a well-received debut in the form of 2022’s Honeycomb. Fast’s acting credits include roles in Alice Mao Mackay’s The Serpent’s Skin, Louise Weard’s Castration Movie Pt. i, and Jane Schoenbrun’s upcoming Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, and her ambitions fit comfortably within this cadre of palpably queer, genre-bending directors. I’m automatically fascinated by any artist who describes their oeuvre as GIRL HORROR like Fast does, and CAMP’s uncanny, blossoming synthesis of aching grief and encroaching danger fits that description as easily as it defies it...
