You Can See Everything(10/16/2026)

Remember back when the Silicon Valley seemed like a cool place?  Or at least a place that wasn’t actively doing harm to the world on a massive scale?  That was fun, sure wish it were still the case now.  In the October of 2026 we’re sitting at a point where this documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is sandwiched in-between a scripted film about Mark Zuckerberg allowing the Facebook algorithm to actively radicalize people and a lengthy documentary about Elon Musk actively destroying institutions and not too long before we get a film about Sam Altman ushering us into whatever horrible AI future we’re now facing.  Out of all of those this movie, You Can See Everything, has gotten the most plaudits and attention by far and that’s for a lot of reasons but I can’t help but wonder if a big part of it is that while its subject ultimately did less harm than the others (very low bar) she is the only one who actually faced any kind of consequences for her malfeasance.  In fact she’s faced so many consequences that she’s currently in prison.  There are a lot of reasons for this, namely that despite the vibes she was giving off she was actually working in the field of medical devices rather than “big tech” and also that she never really had much of a consumer base rooting for her and was caught before she was “too big to fail” but nonetheless it would seem we don’t have Elizabeth Holmes to kick around anymore… or do we?

The new documentary You Can See Anything suggests that Holmes may actually be laying the groundwork for a comeback eventually, or at least trying to lay said groundwork.  The movie begins in 2023, about a month before Holmes is required to finally begin her prison sentence, and in that month they’ve decided to allow a camera crew run by Nathan Fielder, who’d known for his semi-comedic/semi-documentary TV series “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal.”  They say they’re doing this in the name of “radical transparency” in order to show the world that Holmes is not someone to be feared though Fielder goes into the project with skepticism as he’s reviewed her case and thinks there is in fact a lot of evidence of her guilt.  Holmes and her partner Billy Evans both maintain her innocence in the case throughout this though not a whole lot of screen time is dedicated to her making some detailed case for this or for debunking said case.  Fielder seems more interested in just determining what kind of people Holmes and Evans are and what they’re up to in all of this.  Holmes herself seems all kinds of strange throughout the movie and Evans proves to be something of a character himself.

This is in some ways a film of two halves: the first half of the movie focuses pretty specifically on that month long span before Holmes goes to jail and takes something of a direct cinema approach aside form Fielder being on camera and a subject of his own movie.  There’s no voiceover and the film doesn’t feel obligated to cut away to archival footage or give tons of background on Holmes’ past.  These sections of the movie are characterized mainly by extreme close-ups on the faces of the people involved giving the audience a close look at Holmes’s big and often unblinking eyes, allowing the audience to really try to judge if she’s lying or telling the truth.  Fielder himself is not exactly a fly on the wall in all of this and is very willing to occasionally challenge her when she says things that seem particularly outlandish, sometimes resulting in “Curb Your Enthusiasm”-esque staredowns.  Without giving too much away the second half of the film opens things up a bit and starts introducing new techniques to dig deeper into the story and in some ways deconstruct the experience Fielder had in the first half, an experience that in many ways left him more unsure about Holmes and her situation than he was before.

At the center of all of this is the enigma and contradictions of Elizabeth Holmes and by the end I’m not sure that Fielder really thinks he’s gotten entirely to the bottom of.  On one hand Holmes seems to very earnestly maintain her innocence throughout and over the course of numerous days of observation and questioning she rarely seems to “break” from that story.  The problem is that this can’t possibly be true: the evidence presented against Holmes at trial and in the media is almost overwhelming and it’s not like what she’s accused of is some mistake made in the heat of the moment, it’s a sophisticated web of lies that she constructed over the course of years and against a large number of people.  The nature of her crimes also makes it a lot more believable that she could be running an extended con on Fielder; she is, after all, famous for lying to the point where she spent years putting on a fake deep voice.  The other possibility is that Holmes may not be consciously lying so much as she’s delusional, a true believer in the non-functioning invention she tried to sell to investors, an interpretation that’s belied by all the lying and covering up she needed to do in order to run her con.  Yet another possibility, the one that’s probably explored in the most depth, is the idea that she’s actually a dumb patsy being used by manipulative men to put a nice face onto their schemes, a theory that flies in the face of the “girlboss” image she tried to cultivate when running Theranos.

These contradictions make Holmes a strange person I wouldn’t want to be around and certainly wouldn’t trust to wash my car let alone test my blood, but it makes her a pretty endlessly fascinating documentary subject and that’s a big part of why this has become the most buzzed about documentary in years if not decades.  In fact she may well be too fascinating because you do have to wonder if in some ways Holmes and Evans may well still have the last laugh from all of this despite the film painting a fairly unflattering portrait in certain ways.  Why did these two reach out to A24 and by extension Nathan Fielder in the first place?  Probably because they knew these people were likely to make a particularly interesting film that people were actually going to want to see.  And why did they want people to see it?  To generate sympathy of course, likely by making Holmes seem either innocent or a victim of other people’s sins, and they also likely knew that people were more likely to believe this if it wasn’t coming from something that felt like a lame puff piece.  The final film does not necessarily argue this point for them but it’s also ambiguous enough not to entirely debunk it either and if enough people do take away that message from the movie that’s probably to Holmes’ and Evans’ benefit.  Note also how Evans demeanor changes with his agenda in the second half with him going from seemingly like a loving father in the first half to seeming like a smart tech bro (despite minimal evidence of accomplishment) in the second half and you also have to wonder if his right wing turn at one point may have been directed at audiences who could be in communication with the one person who has the power to pardon Holmes even if it comes at the expense of making himself a heel.  So it is indeed possible that in the grand scheme of things Fielder is the one being played by his own movie but… as viewers that in some ways just makes things even more fascinating.  People are going to be talking about this for a very long time and Holmes may well prove to be one of the great elusive documentary subjects alongside the Beales from Gray Gardens or Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man and even if that’s the only thing it accomplishes for Holmes it’s still probably a better legacy than being the cold hearted fraudster who ripped a bunch of people off.  And the question for the viewer is, does she deserve that?
****1/2 out of Five

Naza(10/9/2026)

There’s a brief moment midway through the new Gaza themed documentary Naza in which the camera observes and advertisement announcing a retrospective of the works of Claude Lanzmann, whose magnum opus is the nearly ten hour long 1986 documentary Shoah, which is a landmark in the documentation of the Holocaust.  That film is notable in that it avoids showing archival imagery of the genocide it discusses and instead consists almost entirely of newly filmed interviews with victims, witnesses, bystanders, and perpetrators of the Holocaust that often accounts for some of the more minute logistical details how the Holocaust was carried out like a detailed account of how much logistical work the Nazis put into transporting that many people on their rail lines.  I’m pretty sure that showing that advertisement is not a coincidence, firstly because directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor clearly see some similarities between what Lanzmann was chronicling and what they are documenting but also because their film is similarly rooted in interviews rather than violent footage of the actions in question.

            Naza, which runs a lean 77 minutes long, does not claim to be an all-encompassing survey of what’s happened between Israel and Gaza since 2023 and is instead fairly laser focused on intelligence officers stationed in Tel Aviv who are engaged in giving targets to the people dropping the bombs, often though chilling techniques like using AI to target people for death based on patterns which suggest that they may or may not be Hamas militants, locating them with their cell phone signals, and assessing whether they’re even going to be home when said home is then bombed along with their entire families.  The film’s title is an abbreviated form of the Hebrew words “Nezek Agavi,” which roughly translates to “collateral damage” and is a number assessed to describe how many civilians are likely to be killed when bombing someone that the AI has decided is a militant.  For example, if a teenage “militant” is living at a home with 19 other family members then that strikes is assessed as “NAZA 19” and the decision to bomb them is made accordingly.  One person interviewed describes a bombing that was carried out which had a “NAZA” in the hundreds.  Later the film goes into such actions as destroying entire buildings, not out of a desire to target any specific militants but to remove people from entire sections of Gaza and kill those who fail to evacuate fast enough, and finally the sniping of starving people who didn’t perfectly follow their assigned path when seeking out whatever small amount of food aid was allowed to reach them.

All of this is conveyed through interviews with these various IDF officers, all of whom have chosen to remain anonymous.  As you can probably imagine this poses a bit of a cinematic challenge as a film that consists entirely of discussions between one guy and various people with digitally obscured faces would not be the most visually exciting of movies.  Their solution to this is that they conduct all of these interviews in the dead of night with most of the people being talked to on the rooftops of various buildings in Tel Aviv.  In addition to allowing the digital identity obscuring techniques to blend in with the dark of night this certainly invokes a kind of cloak and dagger intrigue to this whistleblowing.  It also provides another statement by letting the camera frequently pan across the various windows of these Israeli buildings as the interviewers discuss bombing entire floors of buildings in Gaza and this seems to be subliminally asking the audience “what if these measures were being used against us instead of them?”  If the film does have any real issue it’s that there are limits to how much it can really structure these testimonials into a clear beginning, middle, and end.  Most of the real news being broken by it is the AI discussion that’s present at the beginning and the movie struggles to find a real climax that ties its various threads entirely together at the end, but given that this is very much an ongoing crisis that was probably inevitable.

            Naza was made by two of the four filmmakers behind the West Bank-set documentary No Other Land, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary two years ago and even though the documentary has not even opened in Israel it’s already become a lightning rod of controversy there.  Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to revoke the citizenship of the film’s two directors despite both having been born and raised in Israel, a pretty shocking turn of events in a country that prides itself on being the “only democracy in the middle east.”  Much like No Other Land this has not been able to be purchased by a conventional distributor because of its controversial nature, but has struck deals to arrive in American theaters much faster than that movie did which matters because this is in many ways an important and vital piece of journalism.  Because I’ve been following the news around this situation pretty closely I’m not going to say that there’s a whole lot here I didn’t already know about to some extent, the results of these people’s actions have been very public despite their exact methods being secret.  That having been said there’s a ton of value in getting direct testimonial confirmation of what’s long been suspected directly from the people involved and the most chilling aspect of it all is that this documentary likely only shows the tip of the iceberg.
****1/2 out of four

Cinemap: Completing Africa

I’m honestly kind of surprised I’ve made it this far.  When I started this project of trying to watch a movie from every country in the world the African map seemed like such a vast swatch of countries that were blank spaces in need of filling.  And yet piece by piece I’ve actually managed to get almost the entire continent filled in, including some of the most remote and film starved places there.  I’m now down to just six countries left to fill in, many of them actually fairly large countries, many of them bunched around the Gulf of Guinea, but also a couple of other notable countries more inland in the continent.  Some of these countries are actually fairly populous and have something of a film industry but others are going to take a little bit more digging, but I don’t think any of these countries are going to force me to dig up school projects made by high school students or Al Jazeera news reports so it should be smoother sailing than the last couple of runs I went on and a couple of these are actually made by some fairly high profile people.

Malawi: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2019)

Malawi is a fairly oddly shaped country in southern Africa that’s largely centered around Lake Malawi, from which the country gets its name, and the country sort of drapes around this lake on its west side taking a piece of what would otherwise be Zambia and then sort of stabs into Mozambique giving that country a sort of “Y” shape.  In some ways it feels like a country that could have blended in with its neighbors but it has its own identity despite several social problems.  By GDP per capita Malawi is presently measured as the fifth poorest country in the world behind Burundi, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Somalia despite not being particularly war torn, at least in its recent history.  It’s not a particularly developed country and there are fairly large populations there living in rural poverty, which will come up in our review today, but it does have a larger cinematic legacy than some African countries and there are something like thirty movies tied to the country on Letterboxd, most of them made pretty recently but still being fairly small productions.  The film I selected, however, is not so small.  In fact it’s a pretty big co-production with the U.S. and U.K. directed by and starring a major actor and which is presently available to watch on the world’s most popular streaming service: Netflix.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is an adaptation of a book of the same name written by a guy named William Kamkwamba, a guy who was born in a pretty destitute area of Malawi but managed to help his family by doing some science research on his own time and building a wind turbine with his family in order to electrify his village.  This accomplishment got him a lot of attention and helped him get an education and his “inspirational” story made him something of a celebrity within the TED Talk circuit and this memoir became something of a best seller amongst the type of people who read these sorts of things and that’s likely how they managed to get some serious investment into making this movie in Malawi.  Also helping the movie get made was the fact that a genuine movie star, Chiwetel Ejiofor, was brought in both to play Kamkwamba’s father and to make his directorial debut as well.  The film, which is partly in the Chewa language and partly in English depending on whether the character is with his family or in school, looks at this character’s childhood and I was surprised that it actually takes a pretty long time to get to the whole October Sky routine that made Kamkwamba famous and instead focuses more on just kind of hanging with this family and depicting what its life is like in this Malawi village and it doesn’t bother with following him into his adulthood motivational speaker career.  There’s some value with that but do note that this is definitely a movie made by and for people from outside Malawi and there are limits to how authentic it’s going to feel despite the best intentions of all involved.
*** out of Five

Central African Republic: The Silence of the Forest (2003)

The Central African Republic is a country located, unsurprisingly, in the center of Africa.  Perhaps it’s a touch north of the dead center of the continent, which to my eyes would be somewhere in the Republic of the Congo but it’s close enough.  It was a country that fell under French colonial rule and during those years it went by the name Ubangi-Shari but was actually given a more generic name by its first leader post-independence, possibly because he thought there was a chance of expanding into a larger territory in central Africa that never quite emerged.  That first leader proved to be quite the dictator, albeit a short-lived one and there have been a succession of coups and civil wars in the years since then leaving the country rather poor and unstable.  In fact the year 2003, the year the movie I selected was released, was the year of yet another military coup that would set off a series of civil wars that would plague the country for over another decade.  Needless to say this isn’t much of an environment for filmmaking: the film I selected is said to be the first scripted feature produced in the country and since then there have only been a handful of other options produced, most of them co-productions of some variety, but at least this one film feels pretty well done.

The Silence of the Forrest is a co-production between The Central African Republic, France, Cameroon, and Gabon and was co-directed by a Central African named Didier Ouenangare and a Cameroonian named Bassek Ba Kobhio and like a lot of the African movies I’ve seen it involves a man returning to his home country after getting an education abroad.  In this case the man in question returns in the first scene but we then flash forward ten years to find him completely fed up with trying to help reform the country’s corrupt government and he finds himself drawn to go into the jungle to live in a village that’s home to a group of Mbenga people, a minority group more widely (though incorrectly) known as the pygmies who are short in stature and are often treated poorly by other groups of Central Africans.  The guy integrates somewhat successfully with the village and is accepted to some extent but he never quite understands him and despite being a non-Mbenga black man he does have certain “white savior” attitudes reminiscent indicative of a kind of patronizing colonialism.  In a Hollywood “Dances with Wolves” type movie he’d eventually integrate a bit more and save village from some outside threat but this doesn’t go down that road and I can respect that.  The film is made fairly professionally and has a pretty nice central performance by the French-Cameroonian actor Eriq Ebouaney but I wouldn’t say the visual style is any kind of knockout necessarily.  It’s not a mind-blowing movie but as movies produced on low budgets in the third world go this was pretty impressive.
*** out of Five

Ghana: The Burial of Kojo (2018)

The last four African countries I need to watch movies from are all in West Africa and lined up around the Gulf of Guinea.  This region has something of a dark history as it was the center of the African portion of the triangle slave trade from the fifteenth century into the nineteenth century and was once known as the “slave coast.”  Because of that some of these countries hold a special relevance to people in the African diaspora abroad with many of these countries being the ones that African Americans seek out when tracing their roots and because many of these countries are former British and French colonies there has been a lot of immigration to both of those countries from this region.  The nation of Ghana would be one of the British colonies in the area and is the westernmost of the four countries I’ll be looking at.  It’s a short rectangular countries located east of Cote d’Ivoir but west of Togo and south of Burkina Faso.  Formerly known as the Gold Coast, Ghana gained its independence from the British in the 1950s, which was a bit earlier than a number of other African nations and they seem to have been a bit more stable than some of their neighbors and have noticeably had a bit more of a film industry than a lot of African nations with Letterboxd showing as many as 263 movies with at least 150 of those being scripted features, which is a ton for Africa and I had a lot of different choices and ultimately went with an early film from one of Africa’s most successful filmmakers.

The Burial of Kojo was directed by a guy named Blitz Bazawule, who actually began his career as a musician having been a reasonably successful Afrobeat artist during the 2000s and 2010s before transitioning into filmmaking.  He eventually scored a bit of a coup in 2020 having been selected as one of the nine credited directors on Beyonce’s “visual album” Black is King, which was essentially a series of music videos meant to compliment her “The Lion King: The Gift” album which was a tie-in to Disney’s “live action” remake of their 1995 classic.  That movie ended up having very little to do with The Lion King but did involve a great deal of African imagery and as such filmmakers from the continent were sought out for it.  Bazawule then leveraged that connection to become the director of the recent musical remake of The Color Purple so he’s clearly going to be a big of a Hollywood player going forward but the movie that likely got him selected by Beyonce’s team in the first place was this 2018 film.  And I must say that it doesn’t surprise me that this movie proved to be an effective calling card because watching it my first thought is “this dude would be great at directing music videos.”  Despite not necessarily being made on a high budget this movie looks really sharp and generally has a real “vibe.”  In terms of substance the film is a bit more, abstract.  The film involves a miner that’s been trapped in a collapse and his daughter going on some sort of spiritual odyssey that gets a bit abstract.  Going to be honest, I did not have the easiest time following this story and it didn’t do much for me, but the talent on screen was obvious and I would like to see what some of Bazawule work looks like as he continues to operate in Hollywood and seeing him bring his skills back to Ghana would also be cool.
*** out of Five

Togo: Ashakara (1991)

Togo is a very small and skinny country that’s squeezed between Ghana and fellow slim nation Benin along the Guinea Coast.  The country used to be wider back when it was actually a German colony but after World War I it got split in two and divided between the UK and France with the British portion being absorbed into Ghana and the French portion becoming Togo.  Despite the French being latecomers to colonizing this country their influence seems to have stuck around and the place is pretty heavily francophone country even though they gained independence only fifty years later.  Togo has not always been a particularly heavy hitter in the imaginations of outsiders with many people probably not having the easiest time differentiating it from its neighbor Benin on a map and both countries kind of get sandwiched between the more heavily discussed Ghana on their west and Nigeria on their east and that’s kind of reflected in their film output which is a lot lower than either of those countries.  The country only has about 20 feature films attributed to it on Letterboxed about half of which are documentaries but there some scripted features to choose form including the one I picked.

Ashakara is not a movie that I’ve been able to find a lot of information about.  It was made in the early 90s in Togo and while it’s a very low budget production it does seem to have been made more or less professionally by people with decent-ish equipment, though I will say its visual quality is a little hard to judge from the VHS-like scan I had access to.  The film is a francophone African take on a sort of spy thriller as it deals with an ongoing viral infection that some people find a natural remedy to which is more effective than western medicine and agents are sent by a multinational pharma company to try to suppress it.  The politics of this are something I’d probably have been a bit more sympathetic to several years ago but the “do your own research” crowd has kind of radicalized me against movies that try to disparage western medicine and craft outlandish conspiracy theories about “big pharma” and if the disease here is meant to be a stand in for AIDS this kind of attitude could point to something really unsavory but perhaps reading too much into that is kind of dumb as this is ultimately kind of a MacGuffin that isn’t supposed to be taken that seriously.  That would be fine if not for the fact that the movie is a thriller that isn’t particularly thrilling and the limitations of the film’s low budget third world filmmaking are a little more glaring in the context of a genre film than it is in the kind of social realist things that normally get made under these circumstances.  I would not say I enjoyed this movie much at all, even in the academic way I normally enjoy these things and would probably not recommend it to anyone not trying to cross countries off a list cinematically.
* out of Five

Benin: Divine Carcasse (1998)

Benin is, at least in my mind, something of a sibling nation to Togo if only because of its general shape and proximity to that country and both being Francophone though I’m sure the differences are a lot more stark to the people who live in both countries.  In its pre-colonial history the area was home to the Kingdom of Dahomey, which was a major force in the region, albeit one with a very controversial history as it was a major supplier of slaves to the triangle slave trade.  That kingdom is having a bit of a cultural moment currently as it was the setting for the recent historical drama The Woman King was set and it also lent its name to Mati Diop’s experimental documentary Dahomey about the repatriation of artifacts from French museums back to Benin.  Letterboxd did not, however attributed either of these movies to the nation of Benin despite their settings (or partial settings) so it’s still a blank space on my map.  The country did have more movies on offer than Togo but still isn’t much of a cinema powerhouse.  There were a bit over forty feature films attributed to Benin with about twenty five of those being scripted though finding one that was streaming was a little trickier.  Nonetheless I think I found a decent representative.

Divine Carcasse, a title I’ve seen translated as “Divine Body” is a film from the late 90s directed by a Belgian filmmaker named Dominique Loreau who seems like something of a globetrotter with a penchant for exerimentalism.  This film is described as being mixture of fiction and ethnography, though I don’t think anything here is really unscripted at all.  This is one of those films like L’Argent where we follow an object rather than a character as it goes between various owners.  In this case the object is a car, a 1955 Peugeot to be exact, which is shipped into Benin to be delivered to a European philosopher who’s living there but it then finds itself sold on until it’s used by someone else as a taxi and then later eventually finds itself being stripped for parts and used for traditional rituals.  I think this is meant to be something of a metaphor for decolonization with the car initially being the possession of a white guy and then eventually being taken over by locals and finally being used for highly traditional purposes.  Or at least that’s one take.  The movie clearly has some fairly high minded philosophical ideas going on under its surface but I’m not quite sure it has the filmmaking chops to go along with it.  The movie is competently made to be sure and doesn’t feel particularly hampered by budget concerns but I also wouldn’t necessarily say it has a ton of “juice” behind it, which is probably something that was needed to kick this up a notch given that it doesn’t have too much of a narrative backbone on account of its experimental format.  Still, it’s a cool way to look at this society and made for a neat viewing experience.
*** out of Five

Nigeria: Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) (2020)

Nigeria is a country I saved for last in my journey to see a movie from every country in Africa for a reason.  Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and is in fact the sixth most populous country in the entire world and could go up in that ranking with birthrates being what they are.  The country, a former British colony, is also the second most populated country in the anglosphere (third if you count India), but really it’s an extremely multilingual society with a fairly rich history in the arts.  This is also very much not a country that requires you to search very hard to find movies from, in fact the place has a very large film industry that’s been dubbed “Nollywood.”  In fact Letterboxd attributes over a thousand movies to the country, which is still a fraction of the number of movies that come out of real powerhouses like the U.S. or Japan but compared to some of the remote places I’ve been dealing with it’s quite a lot.  Given this I was left with a bit of a “paradox of choice” situation and ultimately just picked one of the most watched options instead of digging for a super historically significant title but I don’t regret this too much because it turned out to be from some promising up and coming filmmakers.

Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) is a film from the sibling filmmaking duo of Arie and Chuko Esiri who seem to be notable up and comers and have a new film now called Clarissa that seems to be getting some notable buzz.  That movie sounds like an experimental adaptation of a Virginia Woolfe novel but this earlier film is a bit more down to earth.  The film looks at two different people in Lagos who are interested in leaving Nigeria but ultimately life gets in the way of both of their plans.  It does not take long for the movie to reveal its main influence: Wong Kar-Wai.  The film pretty openly apes Wong’s visual style and has a similar kind of hazy vibe.  We’re probably going to be seeing a lot of Wong Kar-Wai accolades going forward, especially internationally as I think denizens of crowded world cities particularly jive with that guy and his portraits of Hong Kong.  We saw similar work last year with Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, though I would say that movie was a bit more successful at pulling this mimicry off.  I did mostly dig the style here but I’m not sure I ever quite connected with either of the characters it follows and I’m also not sure that playing their stories side by side like it does was as illuminating about either as the Esiris wanted them to be.  Still, this is a promising start for a pair of still very young filmmakers and given that these guys are Columbia film grads with connections to real funding they’re definitely people to keep an eye on when it comes to the future of African filmmaking.
***1/2 out of Five

In Conclusion

When I set out to watch all these movies I must say I never really thought I’d make it this far but having now seen a movie from every country in Africa I’m kind of shocked at the efficiency with which I pulled this off.  So what are my takeaway’s from African cinema?  Well, on some level that seems like a stupid question, these are movies from several diverse countries with separate traditions and at the end of the day I’ve still only scratched the surface and am probably not qualified to be making such proclamations… but that also feels a bit like a copout.  The truth is there are definitely patterns to be found across many though certainly not all of these movies.  For one thing this was a lesson in just how extremely unavoidable the legacy of colonialism is in this region.  Several of the films were set amidst wars of independence and civil wars sparked by colonial interference and mistakes, but even outside of more direct connections like that it’s notable how many of these movies were about people interacting with colonial or formerly colonial institutions.  I’d also say that while most of these movies are attributed to the countries in question there are lot of films here that were directed by people from outside the country or from people within the country who live abroad or were educated abroad so movies made from an entirely local perspective are kind of rare and truth be told the ones that were authentically local were not always the ones that were most comprehensible to me.  Being honest the movies in this journey that spoke to me the most were probably the ones that were less rather than more “authentic” but at the same time African cinema is so damn rare on the world stage that even “inauthentic” African cinema getting a wider audience would be a big improvement over the status quo.

Now that I’ve seen a movie from every country in Africa, every country in Oceania, and every country in both North and South America there are only two populated continents left to cross off: Europe and Asia.  As of right now I think I have about ten countries in each of those continent (give or take) that need to be explored, but that will need to wait because as usual I’m putting this series on pause during award season.  2027 should be the year I conclusively finish this off however, and that will be quite a moment.

Digger(10/3/2026)

Warning: Review contains spoilers

Alejandro G. Iñárritu is a guy who’s had a pretty weird career over the years.  For years he was known as the maker of really intense dramas about painful situations, one who was frequently criticized as a “miserablist” for how dark his movies got, then with the movie Birdman in 2014 he kind of radically re-invented himself into a comedic director who makes movies with a sort of Fellini carnivalesque sensibility.  Of course there’s a bit of a The Revenant sized hole in this narrative, in retrospect it feels like that should have come out before Birdman rather than after, but at this point that just seems like an outlier and perhaps a quirk of what got funding when.  Of course the “Iñárritu the outlandish satirist” experiment has not exactly gone entirely smoothly after its Oscar winning debut.  His second movie made with this sensibility, Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, probably suffered from Iñárritu’s attempts at outlandishness and might have benefited from a more straightforward approach.  And now Iñárritu has returned with what may well be the always divisive filmmaker’s most divisive effort yet, a broad satire about climate change called Digger which has become an unlikely vehicle for the legendary superstar Tom Cruise and I sure hope it doesn’t ruin the director’s career and dissuade the start from ever making a non-franchise movie again because this thing is going to piss people off.

Digger concerns a Texas oil man named Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise, in old age makeup) who’s living a life of extravagant wealth but has a lot of eccentricities like a fixation on his aging cat and an abrasive work demeanor in which he kind of shouts down anyone telling him something he doesn’t want to hear.  The guy employs folksy charm when necessary but basically acts like Logan Roy more often than not.  This attitude comes back to bite him hard one morning when he gets a video call from one of the scientists at one of his Greenland drill sites.  The scientist tells him that issues that they previously tried to alert him to (to no avail) are coming to a head and the glacier they’re drilling on has become inflamed in methane and turned rather unstable.  Rockwell initially dismisses this and just demands that they keep on drilling but then there’s an explosion on the platform which splits off a giant a huge chunk of ice the size of a major city which appears to be rapidly floating in the direction of Europe and a scientist (Riz Ahmed) tell him that this could cause a massive tsunami that could hit large swaths of that continent and kill millions.  Rockwell calls in the president (John Goodman), an aged and seemingly not very competent man, who spends more time trying to figure out how to “spin” this than solve it but the fact of the matter is that it was probably too late to solve it anyway, and the rest of the story follows the fallout of all this.

In case you couldn’t tell from the description, Digger is a wildly over the top satire about climate change and will be the first to tell you that it’s got about the subtlety of a sledgehammer.  In this sense the film is fairly comparable to another recent film that tried to be the Dr. Strangelove of climate change, Don’t Look Up, but even that movie was sort of an allegory rather than a direct comment on the effects of climate change like this is.  The film’s depiction of Rockwell basically the symbol of everything that’s wrong with the ruling class and specifically the American ruling class is all there on the screen.  He’s a crass and self-absorbed man with an almost cult-like fixation on drilling at all costs and is in a constant state of delusional denial about the eventual consequences of his actions and has an unending ability to justify what are plainly amoral policies at least to himself even if not everyone else.  He’s a piece of shit, but a piece of shit with a whole lot of over the top swagger that is supposed to be fun to watch, which is where the Tom Cruise of it all is supposed to come into play.  However, I was a lot less impressed by this than I think I was supposed to be.  The idea here is that Cruise is supposed to bring the sort of confidence and energy of his characters from Magnolia and Tropic Thunder to the screen, and he sort of does do that but… this material just isn’t as funny as Iñárritu and his co-writers think it is, in no small part because we’ve seen a lot of this before.  Obviously there’s something darkly comic, at least in theory, about the odious shamelessness of these characters but the joke at the center seems kind of obvious and the over the top nature of everything is such a funhouse mirror that I’m not sure the film will make people recognize themselves or their leaders in it as much as they need to (which is saying something given how cartoonish our actual leaders are at the moment).

I will also say that even beyond the style complaints I’m not sure the substance of this satire is really sending quite the right message either.  The comparison to Don’t Look Up is probably apt here too given that both are essentially focused on the lengths society will go to deny the dangers in front of them but where that movie did present a window of time when disaster could have been averted (which the characters then piss away) this one pretty much starts after the damage is already done and we’re given a front row seat at that fateful moment we’ll probably never live to see in real life when the climate deniers finally have to face down the disaster we’re causing, but their bumbling in the movie feels less dark if only because the mistakes they’re making kind of only add insult to an injury they already inflicted years ago.  The film also doesn’t exactly do a lot to instill some hope about avoiding things.  Again, Don’t Look Up did present a scenario where the comet could have been destroyed by a sort of satellite system (an allegory for decarbonization) that gets sabotaged by the billionaires who want to take a riskier and more lucrative approach that may get them some rare minerals.  That’s clumsy but it is sort of a call to action for the audience.  This doesn’t really have that and the one place where it really does address the audience is in a fairly dark speech that Rockwell gives where he essentially says that “the people” don’t want him to stop drilling out of their own greed, and while there is some truth to this it kind of ignores the acceptable solutions that are there (he dismisses clean energy in a very “citation needed” kind of way) in favor of a sort of harmful binary where people need to choose between full degrowth and “drill baby drill” and that’s probably not the right message for something like this to be sending.

So there’s a lot about this movie I find very annoying and obvious and which I also don’t think it’s saying anything particularly insightful or unique about wealth, power, or climate change and about midway through the movie I was constructing a logline about the movie which would be something like “wow, they really made a climate change satire that was even more misguided than Don’t Look Up.”  However, there is something of a twist here that does recontextualize things a little. About twenty minutes into the film things abruptly stop and the film’s stylized sets are revealed to be exactly that, sets, and everyone breaks character revealing that what we’ve been watching is a rehearsal for some sort of elaborate stage production and we start to follow the man playing Rockwell around for a bit before he returns to the set and the main narrative begins again.  The relevance of this isn’t clear initially but eventually we get the full picture: this play within the film is being staged well into the future after the disastrous things being depicted have already happened and while society hasn’t completely collapsed as a result life on Earth is now hellish, and the play being put on is a sort of satirical and over-the-top reenactment of the events that caused everyone’s misery.

This does explain a lot.  Throughout these scenes the actor playing Rockwell in the framing story actually expresses several of the concerns I have about the movie we’re watching, saying that this depiction of the “real” guy is kind of ridiculous and that it was unlikely that he’d personally be in the room when all this stuff is happening.  Some people have even defended this movie as a sort of comment on overly broad satires like Don’t Look Up rather than an example of one because of this but I don’t think that’s really the case.  When confronted with the actor’s criticisms the play’s director played by Sophie Wilde and producer played by Jesse Plemons both defend the play/film, saying it’s the kind of funny satire that the people of a fallen world need and that he should just go along with it even if it’s ridiculous and the film itself kind of backs them up at the end with the audience reaction in the theater and response of the cast after it’s all done.  What’s more I’ve got to say that I don’t really agree with the producer and director’s assessment that the play/movie in question is the kind of fun satire that “the people” need in its execution.  They say that the actor playing Rockwell is “nailing” the character and is really fun on screen but I’m not so sure.  We’ve seen Tom Cruise do variations on this schtick in the past and the main difference here is just that he’s doing it in heavy makeup and with a Texas accent and I’m not sure he really embodies this guy beyond being super wacky on screen.  What’s more, the movie just isn’t really funny.  I get the satirical point it’s trying to make and there are moments when you get caught up a bit in the energy, but there aren’t really many “jokes” in it and I can’t say I was laughing much at all while watching it.

Even if I did accent that the movie’s point was that the stage director and producer are wrong and that the play at the center of the film is bad and that the point of Digger was somehow to make fun of movies like Don’t Look Up that still wouldn’t strike me as a valid excuse because, well, something like 99 minutes of the movie’s 129 minute runtime are taken up by a dramatization of that fictional play and if the fictional play is supposed to be bad why is Iñárritu making us sit through so much of it?  Whether intentional or not I really don’t think the main narrative here works but it’s not without some redeeming qualities.   The stylized sets are cool and while it’s about as blunt as it gets I do think its skewering of American business ethos has some value even if Rockwell strikes me as a slightly dated avatar for it (the tech bro is probably the more relevant symbol of this mentality than the Texas oilman).  It’s really just the Asteroid City elements of the movie that come closer to redeeming it and while I do think they make the overall film more interesting it’s kind of too little too late.  I maybe wish they hadn’t tried to make the truth of what’s going on here a “twist” at all because I think I might have been more forgiving of the movie if I’d just known what it was up to from the jump and maybe this will make it work better on a re-watch but I don’t think I’ll be doing that any time soon.  For all my issues with the movie I really don’t want to be too hard on it.  It’s certainly trying for something and there are elements of good craft to be found in it but I just did not find the experience of watching most of it to be pleasant at all and that’s going to be hard to overcome.
**1/2 out of Five

Home Video Round-Up 9/30/2026

Best of the Best (9/24/2026)
	Did you know that competitive “Bollywood Dance” teams are a thing in American universities?  I didn’t but apparently there are and this new movie is set in the world of them.  The film looks at two friends of desi heritage who were both knew Bollywood dances recreationally and only upon entering their first year at UCLA do they find they can channel this into an extracurricular activity, though the differences between the two and the stress of being involved in this could tear apart their friendship.  So clearly this is kind of giving Bollywood dance the Bring it On/Pitch Perfect treatment, and being a snob I’ve never seen either of those movies and can’t really compare this to them directly but even without that background it’s not hard to tell that this is a pretty formulaic movie and you can kind of tell beat for beat where it’s going.  Despite that I’d say this is still pretty damn charming.  Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia are both solid as the leads and the dance scenes are appropriately impressive, but not impressive to the point where they’re not completely implausible as productions put on by amateur college students.  Now, I don’t want to oversell this too much, if it succeeds it’s by the kind of low standards of Netflix produced teen movies, but it was one that was made with a certain amount of heart and I hope it pays off well for the cast and crew. *** out of Five
Teenage Wasteland (9/26/2026)
There have been a really disappointing number of instances in the recent past where student journalists have been a lot bolder and more straightforward than their professional counterparts and the new documentary Teenage Wasteland suggests that this is nothing new.  The film is about a group of teenagers at a New Jersey high school in the 1990s that were enrolled in an A/V class what includes a CCTV school news program and these students ended up stumbling upon a legit news story involving pollution in their town’s local water supply caused by building a landfill on top of an aquifer and the rest of the documentary is about their fight to both get taken seriously and to get the local officials to actually do something about it.  The documentary is a combination of the extensive footage that the A/V class shot back in the day as well as modern interviews with the student journalist, who are now middle aged adults.  I don’t want to give too much away but ultimately this situation was caused by exactly the organization that you tend to associate with “waste management” in the fine state of New Jersey.  I might have liked a little more focus here on the aftermath of all this as the movie does kind of lose track of the “case” after it kind of leaves the school kids’ hands but I can also get why they didn’t want to get too bogged down in things that didn’t involve the principal characters. ***1/2 out of Five
The Last House (9/27/2026)
	This Netflix production has a fairly impressive pedigree; Greta Lee and Wagner Moura are both red hot actors and while director Louis Leterrier isn’t a great talent he is at least something of a “name” and not some anonymous hack.  The film also has kind of an intriguing premise, being about a family that one night mysteriously finds that an invisible force has surrounded their house preventing them from leaving, a force that also seems to have trapped their neighbors and given that phones, internet, and TV signals also aren’t working they have no idea how widespread this phenomenon is.  Despite all this the film hasn’t been well received at all and is currently sitting at a dismal 22% on RottenTomatoes and while it is indeed a flawed movie in certain ways I do think it’s got more going for it than that score would suggest.  On one hand the film’s high concept is not really explained in as much depth as it probably should have been, having certain holes in the family’s survival strategies that I might have liked more of.  Additionally, this premise is plainly meant to be some sort of allegory for the experience we all went through during COVID but if its making any kind of meaningful statement about that I don’t know what it is.  The film also goes to a more action oriented place in its third act that I actually kind of liked but which will probably be a bit divisive to people looking for something a bit more existential out of this.  Despite all this, I don’t know, I still kind of liked hanging out with this family for two hours and thought some of the survival problems the script got into were kind of clever and its focus on the persistent desire to survive in a messed up situation mostly vibed with me.  Netflix puts out a lot of trash and I don’t think this is really an example of that, it comes by its flaws much more honestly and there is some creativity and ingenuity to be found in aspects of it. **1/2 out of Five
The AI Doc: or how I Became an Apocaloptimist (9/29/2026)
To say the least I’ve been pretty cynical about this documentary ever since it was announced.  The film presents itself as a sort of “unbiased” exploration of the effects A.I. will have on the world, which isn’t an inherently bad thing but I’ve had a sinking suspicion that it was actually kind of a covert ad for the AI industry.  To be clear I have no proof whatsoever that anyone involved in the production was actually “on the take” or being given marching orders but it is noticeable how much more budget this has than your average doc and how much twee stylization that buys to make it accessible to the normies and also how much wider its distribution is than most docs, and of course the fact that they were able to get interviews with actual AI CEOs like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei and those aren’t people who are likely to appear in something that’s going to trash them.  The very title with the use of the term “apocaloptimist” sure suggested that this was going to be some fence sitting bullshit and I think the actual movie mostly lives down to that title.  Now, I’m not saying the movie is poorly constructed.  Directors Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell know how to put together an accessible documentary and manage to make a fairly well paced and reasonably visually engaging piece of work but in many ways it’s already dated (the issue of data centers is notably absent, likely because the debates about them ramped up more during the summer) and most of the arguments presented in it are just the same back and forths that have been going on in the newspapers as of late. Of course the “apocal” part of the argument is presented here, which is probably the best argument that this isn’t just an advertisement for AI, but maybe not as good of an argument as you’d think.  The big cons of AI that get presented are often the “flattering” scary arguments that these companies oddly want to spread more than you’d think because they’re a signal to investors that this technology is “amazing” even if scary.  And then of course there’s the ending, where they do this “cute” trick where they basically try to wrap the film up with a pat and non-committal summation that says nothing at all, only to then have someone call them out for that before presenting the “real” ending which is… only slightly better.  Basically the conclusion they come to first invokes the favorite slogan of AI boosters everywhere “AI is here to stay” but then makes a very non-specific argument for telling your congressperson to invoke some sort of regulations on it.  That ending is still weak sauce and despite sounding tough still basically plays into the messaging these companies want and it feels like they only did the “fake” ending first in order to make this seem less lame by comparison.  I call shenanigans.  The people making this might not see themselves as propagandists for these companies but they are useful idiots for them and there’s a reason that the powers that be decided to boost theses voices instead of the voices of people who will really tell truth to power about these tech CEOs. *1/2 out of Five
Romería (9/30/2026)
	The last time I gave Spanish director Carla Simón a shot was with her 2017 film Summer 1993 and while I kind of got what it was going for I can’t say I was really feeling it.  The movie had something of a vibe and it had an interesting way of slowly revealing what it was really about but at the end of the day it was one of those movies where “nothing really happens” and on that day my patience was not really going along with it.  I ended up skipping her next movie Alcarràs, albeit more as a function of it getting spotty distribution than anything.  Her new movie Romería did not suffer the same fate however and I’m glad I caught up with it because I think I might have finally caught up with Simón’s style.  Though this film is fictional, I think it’s safe to say that this is a movie is pretty rooted in the director’s own experience as she is reportedly the daughter of two people who died of AIDS shortly before she was born.  The young woman at the center of this film, which is set around the early 2000s, has that same background and is meeting the family of her birth father for the first time in order to get some paperwork done for a scholarship she’s applying for.  This trip is in some ways an uneventful family gathering except when she tries to bring up her parents and their fate, at which point people suddenly clam up and act weird.  You might suspect there are some huge twist they’re covering up, but there isn’t really, it’s mostly just lasting stigma against AIDS that they’re trying to ignore which is also a theme of the aforementioned Summer 1993 (a movie that I was not previously aware was as directly tied to the director’s own childhood situation).  Of course we’re dealing with a movie from this year set in the early 2000s where a female director reckons with her parents and childhood in a somewhat meta way… kind of feels like it should be a double feature with Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron, and of course both films are doing similar things as Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun which is… interesting.  I certainly don’t think any of these filmmakers are copying each other but it is noteworthy that the post-pandemic world seems to have a lot of directors in the mood to relitigate their youths though what initially appear to be slice of life portraits. **** out of Five

September Round-Up 2026

American Doctor(9/4/2026)

Documentaries about Gaza and the broader Israel-Palestine conflict are coming along at a fast pace but often don’t have distribution channels to reach people because the usual distributors for documentaries often find them a little to “controversial” to handle for whatever reasons and as such a lot of them have had to go through niche distributors like Watermelon Films, who are behind the release of this buzzy documentary about three American doctors who volunteered to save lives in Gaza through a “Doctors Without Borders” type arrangement.  Among the subjects are an American Jewish doctor from North Carolina who found this experience eye opening, a Palestinian-American doctor who has more challenges getting into the country than the other two, and a Paskistani-American doctor from a family that practiced Zoroastrianism who views himself as approaching the conflict from a religiously neutral point of view but all three become harsh critics of Israel over the course of their experiences.  The film is somewhat divided between footage shot during their time in Gaza, mostly during the ceasefires and their various activist activities back home.  The hospital sections are tense and sometimes graphic and have an extra charge because many of them are occurring at Nasser Hospital, which would become the location of the infamous “Double tap” strike that killed numerous aid workers and journalists in one of the more clear-cut and heavily documented war crimes committed by the IDF.  That occurred after all three of the doctors had left but it is nonetheless uncanny to see them standing on the same balconies that would be at the center of that controversy.  The activism portions of the film are also interesting in their way but are more mundane and I probably would have liked a bit more of the hospital portions and I wonder if they just ran into some hard limits on how much of that footage they had.  Also, while I’m not going to say I wanted more “nuance” here as I’m not really sure there is as much nuance to this situation as certain media figures would want there to be, the sheer confidence of convictions of all involved maybe robs the film of a certain level of conflict that may have made it more interesting and the film’s final “call to action” in particular almost bordered on making the film feel like a sort of advertisement for the movement more than a document of an experience in a way that somewhat cheapened the experience.  That having been said, this is a very useful peak into this situation that offers a very necessary perspective that the mainstream media often doesn’t.
***1/2 out of Five

Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger(9/9/2026)

In the mid-90s the world saw an unlikely a pair of unlikely and highly lucrative reunion tours by Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles, the later of which was considered so impossible that the tour and its accompanying album were dubbed “Hell Freezes Over.”  The boomers rejoiced.  Well, now some thirty years later Gen X had its own equivalent of this when the band Oasis somehow overcame their extensive and highly public animosity to do a massive worldwide stadium tour which would be that year’s highest grossing live venture behind only Beyonce.  It was of course a venture that lots of people were skeptical about given how explosive this band could be and there were a multitude of jokes about the possibility of the Gallagher brothers breaking up the band again before the first show even happened and/or getting into a fight on stage, but this breakdown never happened and the tour ultimately went off without a hitch.  In fact it went so smoothly that this film, which chronicles the reunion tour, was in danger of not really having too much of a dramatic arc to depict.  The film, which begins at the rehersals for the concerts and continues on the road with it, is not going to necessarily give you “the dirt” about the band’s past animosity.  We do get an acknowledgement about how messy they used to be but we’re never told what specifically broke the band up nor do we get any specific explanation about what finally broke the ice and reunited the two beyond giving the general impression that the two grew up and matured over the course of the 15 years they refused to so much as speak to one another and also that they very much wanted to fix the band’s narrative and this doc seems to kind of be an extension of that later goal. 

I’m not going to necessarily say that these guys owe their fans some kind of explanation for everything that kept them apart but if you’re going to spend multiple decades regularly publically calling each other “wankers” it’s not unreasonable for people to want to know what could have changed that dynamic and at the very least it would have made the documentary in question a bit juicier.  Without any kind of blow by blow of the band’s fights and without a lot of drama complicating the tour the doc is forced to fill time with a lot of material where they talk to fans around the world about how important the band is to them along with a lot of commentary about just how much fun the crowds are having watching the show and how much it means to the Gallaghers and that all feels a bit… self-aggrandizing.  Frankly I wish they’d filled that time with a bit more music.  It should be noted that this isn’t really a concert film; you’ll get fairly long snippets of live performances of many of their most famous songs but we rarely see songs performed in their entirety without interruption and it certainly isn’t a complete setlist and that would be more forgivable if the commentary we got was a bit more substantive.  So in a lot of ways I have some pretty big issues with what this documentary is doing, and yet, you kind of can’t help but get intoxicated by it all just the same.  Those crowds sure do seem to be digging what they’re seeing an you do feel a certain catharsis in seeing them finally getting their band back.  Also, while the Gallaghers are more mature and functional here than they have been in the past they do remain witty and amusing in their working class Mancunian patter.  So I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a good time with this movie but… I do see through it and I can’t say I respect it, this could have been a lot more than it was if it were made with less of a PR eye.
*** out of Five

The Weight(9/16/2026)

Full disclosure: I was in a bit of a grumpy mood the day I saw this and it might have affected my experience a touch, which I feel like calling out because there’s a lot here that I feel like I’d dig in theory but never quite felt.  The film is set during the great depression and follows a set of prisoners who are hired by their corrupt warden to help a nearby gold mine smuggle their gold out before it’s confiscated by the government, ostensibly in exchange for a pardon.  They’re supposed to carry these gold bars through the wilderness and are told that the deal’s off if even a single bar goes missing and as you’d probably guess things don’t go entirely as expected on the trek.  So you’ve basically got The Wages of Fear (but on foot) crossed with Deliverance (but with less rape) and that’s a compelling idea but I’m not sure the execution ever quite lived up to that.  This is in part because I wasn’t really sold on Padraic McKinley (who’s previously only worked in television) as a visual stylist.  I’m not great at describing the minutia of blocking but some of his shots felt a bit too close to the action and some of the editing felt a bit clumsy.  I would also say that a lot of the film’s side characters didn’t stand out too much to me and also that the film’s final resolution to all of this felt a bit cheap, that it doesn’t really ramp up to something terribly satisfying.  Still there are some good things along the way; it’s always good to see Ethan Hawk getting a juicy project like this and there’s also a lot of nice scenery here and a couple of the set pieces were decent.  It would be nice if there were more movies like this so the “mid” ones felt less like endangered species in need of protection but this ultimately just didn’t do enough to really stand out for me.
**1/2 out of Five

Filipiñana(9/19/2026)

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from Rafael Manuel’s Filipiñana; it’s a debut film so I couldn’t necessarily lean on Manuel’s previous work to give me hints about what I was in for and while it’s gotten some very strong reviews out of Sundance and Berlin the film’s reputation doesn’t quite precede itself.  The film’s trailer kind of made it look like a sort of “The White Lotus” style class satire set at a country club in the Philippines and while it is that on the surface the film’s style is a lot different and a lot more highbrow in its way.  The movie looks at this environment from a couple of perspectives, namely that of a lowly “tee girl” (a young woman employed to set up the tees that golfers hit off of at the driving range) and that of a young woman who’s related to the owner of the club and is mulling over getting a job at the family business.  The film is clearly a class commentary but I wouldn’t really call it a satire exactly, or at least it’s not a movie that’s necessarily expecting its audience to laugh at much of this.  Instead I’d be more inclined to call this an entry in the “slow-cinema” movement, which is often a bit of an acquired taste and can make for some challenging viewing.  I wouldn’t say this one is the most difficult example of this kind of movie by any means but it is something you’re going to want to pay close attention to and it’s not going to fully spoon feed its themes to you.  It is, however, a film whose visual style is a lot easier to recognize and appreciate because it’s so well put together that you really find it hard to believe this is Manuel’s first feature.  The film was shot in the Academy ratio and the blocking here is clearly extremely intentional and uses the extra height of its frames to its full extent with a lot of artfully deployed negative space at the top of the images.  As the title would suggest the movie is probably trying to say something about the Philippines and it certainly isn’t shying away from cultural specificity when necessary but the larger themes here are pretty universal with a focus on the systems that exacerbate class inequality and exploit workers being front and center.  It is, at times perhaps an easier movie to respect than love and I’m not quite sure I got everything out of it on a first viewing but I will say I very much liked what I saw and Rafael Manuel is definitely one to watch going forward.
**** out of Five

Forgotten Island(9/20/2026)

One of the more unsung trends in animation has been the artistic comeback that Dreamworks Animation has been going through during the 2020s… actually is it even right to call it a comeback?  The studio was kind of a joke during the 2000s when they were decidedly thought of as the lesser competition to Pixar and outside of the How to Train Your Dragon franchise they were seen as an even more mercenary outfit in the 2010s but a switched seems to have flipped for them in 2022 when they released the shockingly well received Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and they’ve put out other movies like The Wild Robot too which seem to be trying to take themselves seriously as competition for Disney and Pixar.  Even their less well received movies like The Bad Guys or Dog Man seemed to catch people off guard by at least trying to stand out a little and they’ve also had some odd experiments like Orion and the Dark or Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken which were flawed but were at least taking a swing at doing something interesting.  They are not, however, being particularly consistently rewarded for their risks: audiences looking for quality animation still don’t really trust their brand and the audience looking for dumb kid movies seems to have migrated to Illumination, so it’s all a little frustrating.  Dreamworks’ latest film, Forgotten Island, seems to be a victim of this because it’s a (relatively) ambitious animated film that’s made with a lot of heart but audiences aren’t really rewarding their effort and as much as I want to defend it I don’t think it’s perfect either.

The film is actually set in the Philippines and is also rooted in Philippine mythology and, uh, if I’m being honest I was not aware that the Philippines had a mythology.  The film follows two girls who met in middle school and became best friends but are now of college age and are likely to be torn apart when one of them looks to go to university abroad while the other has kind of a chaotic personality and is in kind of an aimless place in life.  The night before they’re supposed to split apart they get transported to a magical island that they used to hear about from elders as children and is filled with the various magical creatures.  This island is imaginative and colorful and fun to look at and is based on family friendly versions of various Filipino legends, which is a pantheon of creatures and entities that feel fairly original to audiences.  That the film is looking at a unique mythology (to mainstream western audiences anyway) is a bit of a double edge sword however, as the film does kind of risk overloading audiences with various “stuff” on this island including a perhaps overlarge assemblage of comedic side characters who start following our main characters around.  They probably could have stood to streamline the film a bit instead of constantly throwing new things at the audience, but this ultimately isn’t that much of a problem.  The film was directed by co-directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, the former of whom was the director of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and the success of that movie seems to have gotten him a bit of a blank check with this follow-up.  The film uses some of the cell shaded elements and anime like third wall breaks that re becoming common in post-Spier-verse animated movies but it doesn’t feel like a total copycat of anything and while the base story isn’t really re-inventing the wheel it does work for the purposes of this.  As mainstream animated movies go I’d say this does belong right up there with Hoppers this year but I’m not sure it quite has that crossover panache that will really make it a must-see for non-family audiences.
***1/2 out of Five

The Stories(9/23/2026)

The Egyptian film The Stories scored some impressive popularity scores on Letterboxd early in the year and is now that country’s submission for the Best International Film category at the Oscars and that certainly made if feel worth checking out.  The film was made by a guy named Abu Bakr Shawky, who had an Egyptian father but an Austrian mother and the film tells the story of how these two met as pen pals and how she eventually found herself joining this eccentric Egyptian family.  This is all set during the 60s, 70s, and 80s which was certainly a fraught time for Egypt including two wars with Israel and various regime changes and this is discussed in the film but with a light touch and from the perspective of people who consider themselves rather apolitical.  In fact the whole movie kind of feels like the sort of “friendly foreign film” that Miramax might have brought over in the 80s or 90s, for better or worse.  The film is probably at its best when depicting this guy’s extended family in Cairo and their various rituals, all of that seems pretty vivid.  I was less impressed by Shawky’s take on the romance between his father and mother, which maybe lacked a certain spark.  His take on his parents, particularly his mother, is kind of bland.  I think he may have actually been depicting her a bit too close to what she was actually like in real life and maybe could have stood to make her more of an interesting movie character.  The two characters also rarely show much sexual chemistry on screen and their relationship seems rather chaste in a way that falls flat on screen.  I can understand why Shawky would interpret his parents like this, I wouldn’t want to have to write or direct love scenes between people based on my parents either, but it’s a problem for the movie.  I would say that there’s still enough good here to be fairly worth a watch but I think it could have been a lot more.
*** out of Five

Primetime(9/25/2026)

It remains pretty crazy to me that “Dateline: To Catch a Predator” was a thing and it’s kind of crazy that the rest of the world isn’t as baffled by its existence.  It’s not so much that I’m surprised that sting operations like that were carried out, nor am I particularly sympathetic to the people caught by them, but there does seem to be something particularly obscene about the idea of turning them into a sort of televised spectacle.  If feels like the kind of over the top crazy thing that would be pitched by one of the satirically amoral executives in the movie Network as a mid-season replacement but it actually existed not that long ago.  It’s the kind of thing that might have been defensible as a single episode of Dateline but then they kept on making it to chase the ratings and turned it into a rather tasteless spectacle.  I thought it was weird then and I think it’s weird now and I think Lance Oppenhiem, director of the new movie about the making of that show, also finds it weird but maybe expresses it in a much different way than I would. To me if the ethics of that show are evil they’re a very banal kind of evil; Chris Hansen seems like a pretty normal newscaster on the show and it plays out with the aesthetics of a mid-2000s news magazine program.  That’s definitely not a conception matched by this movie, which seems to really depict Hansen as this kind of unhinged and “on edge” guy pretty much right from the jump, which is partly a function of the fact that the film starts at a point where the show is already ongoing and he seems to already be kind of midway through his arc.  The movie also opts for a strangely stylized visual palate which does not really resemble either the look of those broadcasts or a “normal” movie much at all and scenes like the ending which we know from the archives were kind of drab in real life are kind of pumped up and to me the last thing this story needed was extra sensationalizing.  So I must say in a lot of ways I’m kind of baffled by some of the choices made here, it’s very much not how I’d tell this story and it’s not how I view this material and I do somewhat wonder if I’m being a little unfair to the film because of that, but there are things here I just generally find kind of messy both thematically and in terms of filmmaking and it just didn’t work for me.
**1/2 out of Five

The History of Concrete(9/28/2026)

Late 2026 is proving to be something of a big year for documentaries from alt comedy types with Nathan Fielder’s big movie coming out soon and in the run up to that we’re also getting this feature length film which is also being produced by Fielder but which is more prominently form a guy named John Wilson, made indie famous by his HBO docu-series “How To With John Wilson.”  Wilson has kind of a unique video essay style in that he seems to spend hours a day filmmaking street scenes in New York City and then incorporates them into these explorations of various topics, but explorations that are very willing to go off in various digressions as he encounters various people, but digressions that somehow do come back to the original topic when necessary all accompanied by Wilson’s voice-over which is (I think?) feigning a level of ignorance about the topic at hand.  It’s a style that could prove a bit maddening to people who don’t quite get on board with it and for that reason I can’t guarantee that this new feature length film from him will work for everyone but I thought the expanded palate that this movie has to work with really brought what he does to life.  The film is ostensible an exploration of concrete as a substance both in human development and its role in modern society, and while these educational elements are to be found here one should not expect the movie to play out like some sort of PBS doc on the topic.  There are historical tidbits here but more often it looks at concrete today in places like a bricklayer competition or a profile of a business that scrapes chewed gum off the street.  The truth that a lot of these explorations lead to is a reminder that modern concrete is actually a very imperfect substance that crumbles after a couple decades and that a whole lot of infrastructure right now is in a state of decay.  In a fairly sneaky and unpretentious way Wilson spins this sense of impermanence into a larger theme about human society and about human lifespans more widely by the end of the film.  Not every digression works as well as others and while there’s a wry sense of humor throughout I’m not necessarily inclined to recommend the film as a pure comedy, but if you get on the movie’s wavelength you realize it’s a deceptively smart deconstruction of a lot of big themes in American life and by the end you do feel like you’ve been on a bit of a journey despite the tone frequently being deflated.
**** out of Five