Screen Anarchy

Rotterdam 2026 Review: FISH, FISTS AND AMBERGRIS Hits All Of Its Targets

Rotterdam 2026 Review: FISH, FISTS AND AMBERGRIS Hits All Of Its Targets

The International Film Festival Rotterdam doesn’t just do the no-budget debuts of beginning directors, it also allows glimpses of what is hot in other countries. This is the festival where we got introduced to the Korean classics of the past three decades, J-horror, Miike Takashi and Thai martial arts… Well, this year, the festival hosted a film which was a debut AND an Asian blockbuster: Dương Minh Chiến’s Fish, Fists, and Ambergris. A massive success in its home country of Vietnam, this was the kind of bone-crushing acrobatic jawdropper many festival-goers were waiting for. In Fish, Fists, and Ambergris, a small fishing village in Vietnam has a small temple containing a very valuable statue of a whale, made from ambergris, which is rumored to protect…

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Rotterdam 2026 Review: MURDER IN THE BUILDING, Funny Hitchcockian Shenanigans

Rotterdam 2026 Review: MURDER IN THE BUILDING, Funny Hitchcockian Shenanigans

Time flies when you’re having fun, and that saying applies to the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Last Saturday there was the screening of the closing film already, the world première of Rémi Bezançon’s Le Crime du 3e Étage, to be released internationally as Murder in the Building. It’s a comedy crime thriller starring Gilles Lellouche and Laetitia Casta, and time did fly during the screening as well as people were having a lot of fun with it. In the film, we follow François and Colette. François writes adventure novels and Colette is a renowned expert on Hitchcock, giving lectures at the university about suspense in films. Their time together lacks spice though; François stays indoors in his pyjamas all the time, writing, while Colette daydreams…

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Sundance 2026 Review: I WANT YOUR SEX, Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman Headline Gregg Araki’s Welcome Return to Filmmaking

Sundance 2026 Review: I WANT YOUR SEX, Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman Headline Gregg Araki’s Welcome Return to Filmmaking

Between 1987 (Three Bewildered People in the Night) and 2010 (Kaboom), queer filmmaker Gregg Araki wrote and directed 10 films, solidifying his status as a New Queer Cinema visionary with few, if any, peers (only arthouse favorites Derek Jarman and Todd Haynes belong in the conversation).   Simply put, Araki was one of the exhilaratingly transgressive filmmakers working at the margins of indie filmmaking as the 20th century ended and the 21st century began.   As months turned into years and years turned into decades, changing cinema-going habits and generational shifts (Gen X, millennials, Gen Z, etc.) led to a noticeable slowdown in Araki’s output as a filmmaker. Araki shifted to directing episodic television, only returning to feature-length filmmaking in 2014 with White Bird in a…

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Sundance 2026 Review: THE INVITE, Who’s Afraid of Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen?

Sundance 2026 Review: THE INVITE, Who’s Afraid of Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen?

When we first meet Joe (Seth Rogen), a failed musician turned conservatory music instructor, in director Olivia Wilde’s (Don’t Worry Darling, Booksmart) superbly engaging third film, The Invite, he’s mired in a miasma of self-doubt, disappointment, and frustration.   Indifferently releasing his students from practice, he embarks on the train and bike-rides home from the East Bay to San Francisco, the city where he lives, if not exactly thrives, as one-half of a floundering, forty-something couple with his longtime wife, Angela (Wilde).    Together, they live in an impossibly spacious, cavernous apartment, the kind of San Francisco apartment acquirable only through wealth, usually of the tech kind, or inheritance. Joe falls in the latter category, having inherited his apartment from his late parents. A point…

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