Son of acclaimed Temur Babluani, Georgian-French filmmaker Géla Babluani blasted out of the gates when his feature debut 13 Tzameti traveled to the Venice Film Festival winning Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future for Best First Feature in 2005 and the then making a rare splash at Sundance in 2006 winning the World Cinema Jury Prize (Dramatic) at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. His films look at fate, chance, isolation and violence as a social system, Babluani is one of the rare filmmakers to remake their own film for English speaking auds (13 was launched in 2010). His other films 2006’s L’héritage (co-directed with his father) and 2017’s Money weren’t as widely acclaimed but this next project might put the filmmaker back on the map.… 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.… 
