Locarno 2026

As of this writing, the 2026 edition of the Locarno Film Festival is just a little over 24 hours from concluding. This year's gathering marked a very special place in my heart for being the first edition I had the privilege of finally attending in person, fulfilling a nearly decade long reverie. Upon first embarking in film production in 2017, the festival played a critical role in shaping which direction I felt I needed to traverse in to give needed clarity to where I wanted to aim as an aspiring artist, on top of programming what I perceived as the most refreshing & cutting edge work at the time (which still holds true). I couldn't tell you for the life of me what played Sundance or Telluride that year, but I sure still remember what did at Locarno (Ralitza Petrova's Godless won the Golden Leopard that iteration). The festival's programming during those impressionable years to follow would become both a safe haven of annual anticipation for what was most exciting to me in contemporary cinema, but also increasingly a goal post for where I'd hope to land at some point sooner than later. Though festivals like Locarno should probably never be an end point for a film, emotionally for me, it is also far more than just a means for sales & other further distribution. It's a sacred place of gathering where the most enthusiastic parties convene to communally consider the evolution of the art form and film history at large. Cynics may poke holes into that kind of sanctity, but it remains one of my last wholesome ideals. During my 4 days spent at this year's fest, I had the pleasure of seeing a decent handful of new works across a few different sections and my notes for which are as follows:

THE DAYS OFF (Lucila MARIANI) - An ostensible upgrade to the cinema of interliminality that another filmmaker like Jane Schoenbrun may be better known for inhabiting. Mariani's slight offset from her lead's immediate subjectivity (played with much astuteness by newcomer Antonia Robolini) opens the film's implicit plays towards a looming spectral force as a phenomenon to be dubious of rather than imminently conjured, further unsettling the possibilities of the immediate physical reality. Opposed to embracing an imminent digital horror, Mariani opts instead to ride out the eerieness that may be introduced to a physical space with something as nonchalant as an endless feed of autoplayed videos, where-in the algorithm can summon the most uncanny & supernatural of transmissions entirely from automated code.

ÜBERGANG (Peter BADEL & Chris WRIGHT) - Possibly more or less interesting a completed work depending on which turn filmmaker Thomas Heise's life & fate ultimately took. As a film originating as the last essayistic work of the late German documentarian and ending up as an emotional tribute to the man by his closest collaborators, Übergang's final form as half theoristic exercise & half testimonial is at once like nothing I've ever seen, for better or worse. What's legible as Heise's original doing is when the film is at its most activated, with passages of interrogation between the printed image and historical context more refined than ever. With that, the fireworks sequence in the film's opening is probably the most stimulating thing I saw from the entire fest.

KETTÍCE (Giovanni TORTORICI) - A film whose aggressively garish & tacky formal mode nearly checked me out within its first 10 minutes before gradually luring me back in and winning me over by the latter half. Tortorici's sensibilities appear highly receptive to a hyper modern aesthetic of digital zooms and constant movement (like that of a TikTok or Instagram reel as to not lull the viewer) that one may find themselves quickly allergic to, but it is in his complication of that trendiness with an underlying tragic provocation that snags my curiosity. There's a direct reference to Uli Edel's Christiane F. (1981) that is cited at the moment the consequences of its characters begin to come home to roost that seems key in understanding Tortorici's aim here.

VIOLENCE DU CORPS DE L'AUTRE (Denis CÔTÉ) - As potent (and pleasurable) an exercise in post-modernist self reflexivity that only an artist of Côté’s whims could impulsively conjure. The cinema equivalent to a kind of free form jazz. Thoughtfully unadorned, unvarnished & unsettled. Côté’s major skill is translating his very academic observations and straining them out entirely through his own production methods. What's left is the concentrated remains of unsolicited expression.

BRAVE NEW LOVE (Maria BÄCK) - Tis a shame that the film with the most evocative sequence of shots in its opening of everything I saw at the fest would turn out to be this laborious and exhausting. Contrary to what I perceive some may feel about the film's well treaded thematic territory, I still find much significance artistically in the exploration of one's sexual desires, but when the result is so rigidly conceived and sterile in imagination, I'm only left wondering how much is left til I am able to respectfully exit the cinema. Bless Maria Bäck who seemed overwhelmed with joy to be able to premiere her film at the festival.

YOU DON'T BELONG HERE (Florin SERBAN) - Registered to me as an especially major work, let alone the best of the festival bar none, within its first 30 minutes. Serban keeps the austere traditions of the Romanian New Wave alive and well whilst deploying a long term temporal arc that crescendoes with the full catharsis I'm sure he intended in the film's cantankerous & heartbreaking epilogue. Notable as well are a few scattered moments of dramatic liminality where-in characters completely exit the frame for prolonged durations and we the audience are coerced into uninterrupted dead space. I completely loved this.

I RARELY WAKE UP DREAMING (Isabelle STEVER) - The premise may turn some off, which can be unfairly perceived as a concatenation of political & social "relevance," but this is anything but opportunistic. Aesthetics of German modernity (of the Berlin Schuler kind) implanted onto the ethereality of its queer & Ukrainian subjects and placing intersectional realities at the fore of its images. Stever reads as being far less interested with arriving at any grand constellation of truth than she is with riding along shifting waves of tonality. There is a party scene earlier on among Ukrainian youths during a critical chronological inflection point that is aptly comparable to the one that introduces the friend group in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Millenium Mambo (2001).

Six Sizes Fit None

Earlier this week, I'd caught wind of the latest gimmick deployed for The Odyssey's (NOLAN, 2026) seemingly never ending marketing push in the form of six interchangeable formatting ratios to experience the newest trailer in (and ostensibly for the film's release as well). Billed with the bluntly fetishistic header "EXPLORE PREMIUM FORMATS" on the site's dedicated page, users are given choice to simulate each distinct format's dimensions & shape, slightly altering the visibility of details in the periphery of each shot.

Though I personally am not in the oppositional camp to this escalating trend of reemphasis on the nuances of theatrical exhibition (seen in the releases of One Battle After Another, Sinners & The Brutalist most recently), one cannot be at least slightly alarmed at the equivalent fallibility it presents to image composition and thusly, the intent of the art itself, in such a harmlessly pro-cinephilic gesture.

Whether switching between regular IMAX to 35mm or 70mm to "Dolby Vision," one damning thing is immediately made clear: the subjectivity of each image identifies as practically identical regardless of which scope its ultimately rendered in. The marginal differences in whether one sees more of Robert Pattinson's hairline in a close-up or even the perceived sense of scale of the Cyclops in 70mm IMAX would likely make no discernible or tangible change in how one would consume and digest the film at the end of the day. Even more egregiously, and what bothers me most here, is how this proliferation of "choices" might've informed the initial image making during production or the effects it may have on future ones. 

If saving theatrical cinema means the further constriction of specificities a director must make when composing images to service ones with the most adaptable features, then what functional difference does it make from the existent gripes this tribe of thought yields for the Netflix productions that treat dialogue as pure information delivery for the multi-tasking viewer or the onset of the One Perfect Shot-ification of cinema to better serve an audience streaming on their phones? Some food for thought.

In my mind, I'm reminded of the all too persistent proverb, of the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

For your own reference, I've linked this feature here.

Throwing a Stone into the Pond

A still from Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher (1999)

When I initially started this blog almost six years go (!), my core intent was to use it as a running extension of the pedagogical insights that were then very active to me as a full time undergraduate in film. A chapter in my life with less immediate duties and dreamed ambitions still faraway from any practical reality. It was, and still is the case, that film critique and filmmaking respond to each other as an intertwined dialog for me personally. And this blog, however nascent, has largely stayed the course on that maiden voyage I set upon as an active forum for the exploration and documentation of the dynamic.

What I couldn't foresee upon completion of my degree was the exigent motivation I'd suddenly form to rapidly hit the ground running on the filmmaking portion (which understandably remains my truest passion), leaving the criticism part gradually malnourished over the years, reducing the promise of this blog to nothing more than a holiday enterprise for freely musing about year end favorites and the occasional filmmaker dialog for chronicling the medium's great minds & luminaries. Though I view those as still being innate features of my project, the eventizing of my exercise in thought have increasingly left a bitter taste in my mouth as what at first were the efforts I could find the time to do given my accelerating busyness became regular programming for the next few years to come. With the slippage of my devotion to this kind of writing, came with a creeping sense of intellectual laziness & calcification I was beginning to feel set in.

It's time I put an end to that. Although my filmmaking life is only due for further intensity from here on out, I am fully committed and reenergized after a few years of dormancy to set this blog back to its original pace. To write about the cinema both old and contemporary, to muse about whatever permutations emerge in my head about whatever topics spring to mind and to express what I simply must that even the cinema cannot merely render alone.

The water sits still no more. I've thrown a stone into the pond.

The Favorites of 2025

Numerous tragedies abound between the personal and the political. Grief, heartbreak, episodic fits of voluntary solitude. If 2025 were my year of moribund shock, the key antidote from having slipped into full numbness remained reliably found in the stimulant wealth of cinema. Attempting to forge a thread of thematic coherence as I usually do among my viewings is of low motivation to me this year, as recollecting anything from much of the previous 12 months only leads me to a diluted mess of scattered debris & vague shapes where cogency is normally located. Think of my mind matter as a Rothko painting for this chapter. Still colorful, still alive, but harbored with the abstruse etchings of the human rough. My only interest now to list & share the films I was luckiest to encounter. Instead of therapy, I went to the movies.

For 2025, I've decided to alter my format for listing newly released favorites & first time discoveries as one all-inclusive chunk neatly split into two parts. You know, like Rothko.

The Discoveries

MARNIE (Alfred HITCHCOCK, 1964)

IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (José Luis GUERÍN, 2007)

THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (Jean EUSTACHE, 1973)

KEEP IT QUIET (Benoit JACQUOT, 1999)

TWENTIETH CENTURY (Howard HAWKS, 1934)

LA FAMILLE WOLBERG (Axelle ROPERT, 2009)

RENDEZ-VOUS (Andre TECHINE, 1985)

LES ROSES DE LA VIE (Paul VECCHIALI, 1962)

LONGING (Valeska GRISEBACH, 2006)

IN THIS VERY MOMENT (Christoph HOCHHÄUSLER, 2003)

New Releases & Premieres

MOON (Kurdwin AYUB)

Austrian austerity in contact with the barbs of foreign oppression.

THE ICE TOWER (Lucile HADŽIHALILOVIĆ)

Drawn towards a cold bosom in search of inner warmth.

WHERE TO LAND (Hal HARTLEY)

A meta textual looking glass for a storied artist grasping with his twilight.

SENTIMENTAL VALUE (Joachim TRIER)

An intersectional apotheosis for Trier, where his Scandinavian art film bumps up against the tides of an increasingly commodified global arthouse.

NOUVELLE VAGUE (Richard LINKLATER)

An elegy to an artistic & intellectual hive and their network of process.

SUSPENDED TIME (Olivier ASSAYAS)

Personal polemics made less agonizing through bucolic leisure & the beauty of Nine d'Urso.

AFTERNOONS OF SOLITUDE (Albert SERRA)

Two mortal vessels engaged in their own survival, bathed in the ornament of their own mortality.

THE TEMPLE WOODS GANG (Rabah AMEUR-ZAÏMECHE)

Dreams of the working class aspirant towards life and materialized through death.

GRAND TOUR (Miguel GOMES)

Revisiting the ethnocentrism of early Western cinema ala Ford, Murnau & von Sternberg and pushing it up against images of the post-colonialist present to offer a dialectic for how the former ultimately fared in history.

VISITING HOURS (Patricia MAZUY)

Playful contrasting of Huppert & Herzi's screen personas as tethered analogs to their characters' class strata and the behavioral roles assumed.

A Dialogue with Christoph Hochhäusler

Iconoclastic German director Christoph Hochhäusler (MILCHWALD, TILL THE END OF THE NIGHT) chats with me about his observations on filmmaking, AI, documentary realism and much more in this freeform conversation as part of filmstreet's ongoing director dialogue series. Initially recorded on Aug 30, 2025.

Additionally, I recommend following Christoph's blog PARALLEL FILM for his personal insights on cinema, culture and everything related. A real tonic for the mind in these times.

Top 10 Films of 2024

AKA a gallery of late-style fantasia. This year, long established auteurs triumphed, simply producing more fruitful work than their younger counterparts. As we inevitably head to the finish line for many of these directors' careers, it feels more like a blessing than anything to see our increasingly turbulent world observed through the lens of those who've gazed upon it longer than most of us have been alive. 

10) AGATHE, SOLANGE ET MOI

(Dir. Louise NARBONI)

Resurrecting old ghosts and connecting the passages of previous lives lived to contextualize the present moment and give hint to future lives ahead. Narboni's home videos interspersed with her postured chronicle of Agathe in the present day cleverly chart an artistic maturation for both over time, paying loving tribute to the experience of life as symbiotic to abstract pursuit. Just beautiful.

9) GHOSTLIGHT

(Dir. Alex THOMPSON, Kelly O'SULLIVAN)

Exactly the form of contemporary American drama I've been mostly starved of since Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea. A loaded morsel of regional specificity in constant modulation of its spectrum of tones, inscribing mannered realism with splashes of abstraction that help shape the realer parts of the fiction. Thompson & O' Sullivan's distribution of revelatory info surrounding the tragedy of the Muellers notably seems to always coincide with moments of raised emotional urgency, which never fails to effectively make one fully feel their weight due to their revealing always being accompanied by raw expressions of outburst or catharsis. 

8) JUROR NO. 2

(Dir. Clint EASTWOOD)

The epochal bursting of a lifetime of socially conservative and structurally libertarian views once coagulated now made fluid with prominent streaks of empathetic liberalism. Clint's anti-government sentiment is now obfuscated; seemingly reconciling with the existential consideration that 'good' government may be achieved with the willing participation of 'good' individuals. 

7) HARD TRUTHS

(Dir. Mike LEIGH)

Leigh sketches the cacophony of relational crises around Jean-Baptiste's Pansy as too obfuscated for us to ever properly assess or grasp, making her severe state of anguish all the more upsetting in their varied implications. The abrupt shift towards silence after the explosive & talky first half, slyly hinting at the shared pain being so isolated and so metastasized that hardly any speech could effectively render it out further anymore worked like a vacuum to my soul. Potential for amends reduced to a moot state because what plagues Pansy and her family has simply become too entrenched.

6) THE TASTE OF THINGS

(Dir. TRÂŃ Anh Hùng)

Simply astonishing. Tran organizes the drama rather succinctly amidst his clear preoccupation for the film's sensorial pleasures - and rightly so. The food is rendered as delectable as can be, and at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, DP Jonathan Ricquebourg's work here has to easily rank amongst the most striking of digital imagery I've seen done yet with the nocturnal scene by the lake doing things with digital no other film of the same format has even remotely approached. Surface textures are well defined and colored with a wide distribution of rich tones. The slight overexposure in background elements looks quite possibly the best I've ever seen it.

5) CLOSE YOUR EYES

(Dir. Victor ERICE)

The eyes. They've seen a lot.

4) COUP DE CHANCE

(Dir. Woody ALLEN)

Some truly masterful economy on display here - both in Allen's direction from scene to scene & the precision with which each of his actors lock in to their roles in the fiction. A glossier spin on Chabrol-ian mischief with some inward critique of the unchecked spoils of the upper class, which I reckon Allen may know a thing or two about.

If nothing else, I can just watch Lou de Laâge roam around Storaro's lit sceneries forever.

3) THE ROOM NEXT DOOR

(Dir. Pedro ALMODOVAR)

Astonishing praxis of classical poetics imbued into a pool of formal ellipsis. A hall of mirrors for both the physical likeness & persona of Tilda Swinton, tracing a line from her origins in the avant-garde to her dedicated work stints to her present self, refracting moments of a life lived to be memorialized and released back into the ether for eternity. In art, there is no death as long as the witnesses (us) to what came before continue to see more days.

2) TROIS AMIES

(Dir. Emmanuel MOURET)

Tracing amorous rectification and allowing its characters to feel, grieve & discover through their own paths and at their own individual paces. Mouret presents an Allen-esque quotidian exploit and surprises midway with an emotionally honest pivot towards transcendence that reveals the film's true heart, observing its ensemble with an omnipresent empathy freed of any clever pretense. A film pulsating with love and unburdened by the melancholic spontaneity of its romantic longing.

1) LAST SUMMER

(Dir. Catherine BREILLAT)

Breillat presents a concatenation of spontaneous bursts unvarnished from edification, cloying to the sheer euphoria of momentary sexual release as "worth it" in the face of mounting consequences and systematic punishment as the organic aftermath of the taboo relationship. Pushing beyond the straits of forbidden love, is the high that comes from taking control of it. Drucker's Anne, always seemingly christened with the protective veil of her high status and blonde hair, is sketched with a cryptic aura in constant question of the extents of her calculations. In pursuit of her classically androgynous French step son Theo (played by Samuel Kircher, who evokes an uncanny throwback to Björn Andrésen and is later brilliant in his poisoned state of trauma), the genius of Breillat's game lies in the duplicitous quandaries of Anne's actions. Do her destructive acts come more from pure carnal instinct or perverse rarefied desire? And to what extent does the processing of her own power influence her doing?

10 Favorite New-to-Me Films of 2024

Another year, another list of cherished film discoveries. The usual pace and quantity I typically take in movies at was rather unusual this year, starting off hot towards the beginning, climaxing around my attendance at the TCM Classic Film Festival (a blog which I've yet to publish my musings about), then taking a noticeable cliff dive into fatigue around production of my upcoming film The Miracle and since then never really recovering to my normal pace up until the very end of December. For those like myself who like to regularly follow Steven Soderbergh's annual list of film & TV viewings, its perplexing to consider how he manages his regular cinephilia in the midst of often multiple productions a year. It boggles the mind. Movies can be quite taxing if one views them with full absorption, even more so when trying to do it while making one as well. There's plenty more I had originally planned to get to this year that's just gonna have to wait til next. However, this is by no means any form of complaint by me considering what I did manage to see in the past year, which truly ranks up among as one of the best year for film discoveries in my cinephilic journey so far. Of the 108 non-2024 films I watched in the past year (according to Letterboxd statistics), these are my treasures.

10) SUMMERTIME
(David Lean, 1955)

A leisurely paced travelogue spent in the company of a myriad of unalloyed pleasures, including Katharine Hepburn's many faces and moods. As if David Lean directed a narrative insert into one of James A. Fitzpatrick's wonderful Traveltalks shorts. Beautiful people filmed in beautiful locations wearing beautiful clothes. The easiest, but among the most pleasurable, cinema.

9) CLAIRE'S KNEE
(Eric Rohmer, 1970)

When the dilemma of Jean-Claude Brialy's Jerome finally clicked for me, I couldn't help but be so painfully amused at the rollicking sundry of his own rose tinted debauchery, completely severed from the reality before him yet given some approximate judgement from Rohmer's slight removal. So much so, that this registers more or less as comedy to me. Dryly conjured portrait of privileged, chauvinistic insipidity on full display. In an alternate dimension, this is the movie young men would be hanging up posters of in their dorm rooms over Fight Club & Taxi Driver.

8) THINGS TO COME
(Mia Hansen-Løve, 2016)

Haven't seen anything like this before - a forward accumulation of loose dramatic strata which suggests a greater arc but simply never unmoors from its establishing features. At times while watching I noticed trace fragments of Hansen-Løve's priors: Pialat, Rohmer, Naruse - but alas, her canvas here remains too ambiguously sprawling versus the minimality of her fiction. Huppert quite literally acts as the glue that holds everything here together and the dynamism of her plights, whose range of implications and consequences never spells outright tragedy, still manages to imbue a difficult tension between free spirited independence and entrapment that shrouds her navigation with a strong tinge of quiet melancholy.

7)  A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE
(John Cassavetes, 1974)

A harrowing chronicle of life that I'm sure will only grow more potent & acute in future viewings. Adults trying, trying and struggling to try. Because what else.

RIP Gena Rowlands. <3

6) THE LUSTY MEN
(Nicholas Ray, 1952)

Traditional masculinity as a cult of death. That's the American way.

5) THE GOOD FAIRY
(William Wyler, 1935)

A full injection of jubilation and comic mischief with Margaret Sullavan deploying the fullest of her acting range, and screen charm. Enters shiningly into my personal canon of "pick me ups."

4) BACKSTAGE
(Emmanuelle Bercot, 2005)

Longing so hard, so passionately, so agonizingly for the idealized form - that the sensible world rips open into a blistered euphoria of lustful ecstasy and spiritual transcendence.

3) SCARFACE
(Howard Hawks, 1932)

Paul Muni's Tony Comante as the human incarnate of death itself chasing calamity over any material gain as the ultimate pleasure. Scored by the endless rattling of machine gun fire to orchestrate the lawless American apocalypse of the Gilded Age.

2) LATE AUGUST, EARLY SEPTEMBER
(Olivier Assayas, 1998)

Pretty much everything I'm predisposed to in a contemporary French drama distributed nimbly across multiple chapters. I've always found Assayas' more quaint works (Summer Hours, Non-Fiction) as equally if not more pleasing than his greatest hits (Irma Vep, Personal Shopper), and this perfectly harmonizes the application of his modernistic, transgressive camera work & textures (rendered beautifully as always by Denis Lenoir) with the deep affection he clearly displays for his characters in these minimal portraits. Each passage breezes with a poetic clarity between its subjects unadorned by fictive stratagems that'd otherwise play out as contrived in less deft hands. Assayas simply dissolves the shapes of fiction and leaves us with nothing else but life in front of the camera.

1) ESTHER KAHN
(Arnaud Desplechin, 2000)

A symphonic reverie of one lyrical passage overflowing to the next, with its protagonist galvanizing towards a burst of personal & seraphic rapture. Phoenix's Khan projects an unusual behavioral autonomy, as she navigates through the world and the film's dimensions with a dynamic latitude untethered from any set destiny. A swelling performance of rareified desire and artistic ascendance unobstructed by the impediments of narrative fiction and the fiction of real life social mores. Gestures enacted towards ghostly preservation of one's self to be memorialized forever in an abstract heaven.