Ioncinema

Spanish filmmaker Àlex Lora (winner of Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize for his 2024 short) has completed production on his sophomore feature film. The folks at Cineuropa report that L’escletxa (aka The Fissure) (which was shot in Barcelona this past fall) is now in post production. The cast includes Anna Alarcón, Mourad Ouani, newcomers Younes Tisghiti, Walid Zaghdoud and Maia Vila, with Alex Brendemühl shoring up in a smaller capacity. Locarno, Venice, Toronto and San Sebastián are all legit film fests that could nab the world premiere. Lora already has his third feature in the works in Blue-Smurf Ice Cream which could move into production as early as this year.… Read the rest

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Buenos Aires born filmmaker Benjamín Naishtat has steadily become one of the premiere voices in Argentinian cinema with the entire body of his work premiering at the major film festivals. His 2014 debut Historia del miedo premiered at the 64th Berlinale, 2015’s El movimiento premiered at the Locarno, and 2018’s Rojo premiered at TIFF and San Sebastián – the same lieu where he premiered 2023’s Puan with María Alché. His cinema is political and critical of Argentina’s past, and carries a certain ambiguity favoring mood and tone over straight forward narratives. This next project (his five feature film) looks set to flirt with genre conventions only to discard them, shaping something sultry, noir-tinged and sharply biting in themes of desire and revenge.… Read the rest

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It might be the best film of 2025 being launched in … 2026. Silent Friend, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was an instant favorite among critics and was lassoed by the 1-2 Special folks and now we have a firm release date (May 8th) and trailer debut.

In our ★★★★ review, Nicholas Bell says “with a vibrating audio palette and crisply edited finesse, Silent Friend becomes a sensuous immersive experience, flitting between observational instances of periods and characters, pollinating the audience with characteristics of its players with just enough information to keep desiring more. A structure similar to Bertrand Bonello’s 2023 masterpiece The Beast (also starring Seydoux) utilizes a same sense of how humankind’s essence travels beyond the mortality of the flesh.… Read the rest

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Before becoming Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla was very much both an intellectual and, for a significant part of his life, an ordinary citizen. His philosophical writings was appreciated by others. His personal life from priesthood onwards is probed in Bertrand Bonello‘s Santo Subito! which began lensing last week and we now learn the identity of a web of players in what is a proposed Vatican thriller. Variety reports that Charlotte Rampling, Andrzej Chyra, Cezary Żak, Marisa Borini, Adam Bessa and Anton Lesser are all playing real figures in what we confidently predict will land in a Palme d’Or or Golden Lion competition slot next year.… Read the rest

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Staples of Naples: Rosi Sifts Through Timeworn Sediments

The past informs the present of modern day Naples in Below the Clouds, the latest documentary from Gianfranco Rosi. Much like his famous filmmaking father Francesco Rosi sought to mine Italy’s past through narrative cinema, his son continues his homage to their country in documentary form. In the vein of his earlier Golden Lion winning Sacro GRA (2013), which depicted a smattering of lives connected to the circular roadway on the outskirts of Rome, and his Golden Bear winning Fire at Sea (2016), which dealt directly with the refugee crisis affecting modern day Lampedusa, his latest is a mixture of how colliding histories shift interpretations.… Read the rest

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Entering his third decade of filmmaking with this decade seeing three Venice Film Festival preemed films in 2020’s New Order, 2021’s Sundown, 2023’s Memory with last year’s Dreams going the Berlinale route, Michel Franco moves far off his normal Mexico/United States backdrop for his tenth feature film. Violence, detachment, isolation and disconnection are touchstone themes in his work, and here Franco crawls back into Israel’s history and the story of Meir Har Zion. Here is everything we know so far … for Michel Franco’s Circles.

Shot at the very start of January last year, as with all his work we’re kept in the dark and often only find out abiout projects a bit after the fact.… Read the rest

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Major world cinema news lands on a Friday afternoon: Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, arguably riding the high of her finest feature yet with La Chimera (review), is set to reunite with Josh O’Connor and assemble a formidable trio in Dakota Johnson, Saoirse Ronan and Jessie Buckley for a screen adaptation of Three Incestuous Sisters. It would appear her long-rumoured silent film detour is no longer next in the queue. With production slated to begin in April, it’s hardly premature to start imagining this as a prime contender for a Cannes 2027 Competition berth. We can expect a sensual mood piece.… Read the rest

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Known for blurring the boundaries between fiction and documentary, Palestinian filmmaker Scandar Copti crafts work that moves fluidly between lived reality and constructed narrative. At last year’s Marrakech Film Festival his Happy Holidays (premiered in the Orizzonti section of the Venice International Film Festival just months prior) was feted. His latest project in development (winner of the Atlas development prize) a hybrid documentary tracing Palestinian children growing up under Israeli occupation, where play and safety are continually disrupted by systems of control. A film that will collect and chart testimonies and footage gathered before the current assault on Gaza, I had the chance to have a quick chat about A Childhood.… Read the rest

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It was a rare Thursday night ceremony for the 51st César Awards ceremony and Carine Tardieu‘s L’Attachement aka The Ties That Binds Us (which was selected for last year’s Venice International Film Festival in the Orizzonti section) claimed the top prize of the evening beating out four films that were featured in the competition for the Palme d’Or in Case 137, Nouvelle Vague, The Little Sister and It Was Just An Accident. The picture also had a win for actress Vimala Pons as Best Supporting Actress. Best Director went to Richard Linklater (who did not attend the ceremony) for Nouvelle Vague which also nabbed Best Editing award.… Read the rest

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The Parent Trap: Sang-soo Takes Sideways Swipe at Social Etiquette

A constant purveyor of how subtle social cues are obliterated by the lowered inhibitions of alcohol, Hong Sang-soo unveils his meatiest narrative in years with What Does That Nature Say To You. The set-up is familiarly threadbare, with numerous lackadaisical interactions between some sort of creative type confronted by new people whose orbits slowly circle one another as they engage in an eat/drink/be merry scenario. But it builds to a surprisingly weighty climax in a third act which is more confrontational about duplicitous human behaviors than most of his past works.… Read the rest

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