Are the new Best International Film rules a good idea?

As the summer stands between us and the awards season to come, Cláudio Alves and Juan Carlos Ojano discuss some of this year’s new Oscar rules, focusing on their beloved Best International Film race.

Visar Morina's SHAME AND MONEY became the first film eligible for the Best International Feature Oscar this season, when it won the World Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival.

CLÁUDIO: Much was said about the Oscar rule changes when they were first announced at the beginning of May, with various opinions going around. While the possibility of actors double-dipping in the same category for the first time since the 1930s is enticing, the transformations to the Best International Film race are perhaps more important and worthy of discussion. And who better to discuss it with than Juan Carlos Ojano, the only person I know who has seen every single nominee in the category's history and discussed them through The One-Inch Barrier podcast? But first, let's assess the rules themselves…

Click to read more ...

2026 Cannes Winners + Oscar Submission Speculation

by Nathaniel R

FJORD wins the coveted Palme d'Or. Will Oscars nominations follow for Cristian Mungiu, Renate Reinsve, and Sebastian Stan? ?

Will the 2026 Cannes Festival have lasting impact on this cinematic year? With the oft-reported absence of major Hollywood outings at the 79th festival, the best we might hope for (for those of us on the other side of the ocean) is a similar or muted echo to last year when the four non-English features that dominated the Cannes conversation (It Was Just An Accident, Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, Sirāt) proved to have incredible staying power, wowing audiences from their May 2025 premieres all the way through the culmination of awards season on Oscar night in March of 2026. Not all of the award-winning films from a year ago held strong the whole film year, of course; Sound of Falling, The President's Cake, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, award-winning in May, struggled to make a big impact several months later with quieter distribution and media reactions.  Now that the 2026 edition of the festival has wrapped Fjord, Fatherland, The Black Ball, Minotaur, A Man of His Time, All of a Sudden, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, as well as all of the non-winning films will now face the broader audience endurance test as they make their way through international markets. Will we see any of the 2026 Cannes titles in the mix come Oscar season, still building large devout fanbases? Not every film that wins big at Cannes "plays" elsewhere and some which come up empty-handed on the Croisette become awards players in other contexts (like Oscar or equivalent awards in their home countries).

The winners from the 79th Annual Cannes Film Festival and some commentary after the jump... 

Click to read more ...

Cannes: "La Bola Negra (The Black Ball)"

by Elisa Giudici

The cast of LA BOLA NEGRA

By now, the Los Javis hardly need introduction at Cannes. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, who just tied Pawel Pawlikowski to win Best Director at the Cannes closing ceremony, have spent the last decade becoming not just successful filmmakers and showrunners, but cultural architects for a new generation of Spanish storytelling: proudly queer, emotionally maximalist, deeply rooted in national history while fully conversant in pop melodrama and contemporary television language. If Veneno made them unavoidable and La Mesías confirmed their creative ambition, La Bola Negra (The Black Ball) arrives as the film where they attempt to canonize themselves.

The scale alone announces the shift. Produced under the banner of El Deseo (the Almodóvar brothers’ company, also in Competition this year with Pedro’s latest) La Bola Negra carries the unmistakable aura of succession mythology around it. Not a rejection of the Almodóvar lineage so much as a generational mutation of it...

Click to read more ...

Cannes 'Jury of One' and Predictions

by Elisa Giudici

LA BOLA NEGRA

There’s a strange atmosphere lingering over Cannes this year: not scandal, not outrage, not even division exactly. More like collective hesitation. A sense that everyone liked several films, respected many more, but truly loved very few. The consensus around the Croisette is unusually blunt: Competition was quite weak, only occasionally excellent, and rarely exhilarating. In a year where Hollywood increasingly seems willing to bypass festivals altogether for its prestige launches (Sinners, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another all cultivated awards ambitions without Cannes or Venice), the festival perhaps needed a genuine cinematic event more than usual. Instead, 2026 mostly offered strong craftsmanship without many discoveries. The real surprises often came outside Competition.

That doesn’t mean the lineup failed. The major auteurs mostly delivered exactly what one expects from them: polished, controlled, intelligent work. Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur are all films of remarkable rigor and seriousness...

Click to read more ...

Cannes: Pedro Almodovar's "Bitter Christmas" plays a dangerous artistic game

by Elisa Giudici

Leonardo Sbaraglia stars in 'BITTER CHRISTMAS'

Pedro Almodóvar has spent the last few years stripping away the protective layers between himself and his cinema. Ever since Pain and Glory, his films have stopped merely borrowing from autobiography and started openly feeding on it. The characters no longer resemble fragments of the director; they practically announce themselves as extensions of him. Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad) pushes that process to an almost uncomfortable extreme. It is simultaneously a film about artistic exhaustion, physical decline, creative addiction, and the terror of becoming irrelevant while still alive enough to notice it happening.

For much of its runtime, though, the film appears to be failing. Scenes drift without urgency. Narrative threads open and dissipate. Characters talk endlessly without ever fully arriving anywhere emotionally. Even desire, once the volatile lifeblood of Almodóvar’s cinema, feels strangely absent, reduced to memory, routine, residue. Watching Amarga Navidad, it becomes difficult not to wonder whether this is simply what late-period decline looks like: a legendary filmmaker trapped inside diminished versions of his former obsessions. That uneasy sensation turns out to be the film’s central provocation...

Click to read more ...