It’s been a thrill watching Little Rock, Arkansas native Jeff Nichols evolve into one of the defining voices in American independent cinema. He announced himself with the slow-burning powder keg that was Shotgun Stories (Sundance passed on the film, the Berlinale didn’t) before cementing his arrival with the apocalyptic brilliance of Take Shelter. Over nearly two decades, Nichols has built an impeccable filmography rooted in family, faith, and the fragile ties that bind us, effortlessly weaving together Southern Gothic, science fiction, romance, crime, and historical drama. Whether it’s Mud (2012), 2016’s Midnight Special and Loving (read review), or The Bikeriders (2023), his films return time and again to three defining obsessions: the mythic landscapes of the American South, fathers and sons navigating fractured relationships, and ordinary people confronting extraordinary forces—be they supernatural mysteries or history-changing battles for justice.… Read the rest
After disappearing into television for the past decade, Nicolas Winding Refn once again rears into the cinema with Her Private Hell, which unfortunately is an insufferable, nonsensical exercise suggesting his narrative coffers remain empty. While it would appear Refn desires to channel a Lynchian nightmare subconscious realm, the extravagant neon-lit demimonde from DP Magnus Nordenhof Jønck aligns more with a Tron-inspired music video mentality, exploring ambiguous themes about eroding kinship roles between fathers and their daughters who are routinely devoured by an exploitative entertainment industry informed by a misogynistic culture.… 
Somehow, despite being set in the ‘not too distant future,’ Hirokzau Kore-eda’s twee take on robotic children in Sheep in the Box manages to seem like an anachronistic blast from the past. Its title, lifted from the classic 1943 children’s novella The Little Prince, is a thematic reference to how imagination allows us to explore what really matters is on the inside. With a plot usually utilized in nightmarish genre films with robots or cloning (think B-movie drivel, such as 2004’s Godsend), a Japanese couple mourning the loss of their kidnapped son from two years prior are headhunted for a promotional offer to receive his likeness duplicated as a completely passable humanoid robot.… 
Lebanese filmmaker Cyril Aris utilizes the three distinct yet related measurements of time elapsed, time apart, and time away to craft an ode to the invisible, happy-chance forces that govern human connection. With a focus on the cosmos’s funny way of intervening in matters of the heart, his film, A Sad and Beautiful World, lackadaisically shifts across tones, eras, and economic struggles. At its core, the fiction offering captures an inner-child wonder that still nourishes some adults, raising the question of whether an individual will choose to break the cycle of circumstance or perpetuate it for the next generation.… 
Karim Aïnouz doesn’t so much eat the rich as he does regurgitate them in his latest feature, Rosebush Pruning, a hyper stylized rehash of Marco Bellocchio’s breakout classic, Fists in the Pocket (1965). Tonally, this feels much more like a dead end tangent to the Greek Weird Wave thanks to screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, who seems to have approached Bellocchio’s masterwork as a sordid sequel to The Lobster (2015). Aïnouz, whose previous feature Motel Destino (2024) attempted to resuscitate The Postman Always Rings Twice through a vaguely queer lens, lustily follows a similar pattern of lost souls indefinitely confined within the very abode which defines and sustains their existence.… 
