Screen Anarchy

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art, the 55th edition of New Directors/New Films takes place from April 8 through April 19, 2026, with filmmakers scheduled to attend in person. With a focus on innovative cinema that sets the stage for the future of film, the festival champions filmmakers with distinctive visions and bold new ideas that push the art form into new terrain. This year’s selection will introduce 24 features and 10 shorts, including festival winners and favorites from Cannes, Sundance, Locarno, Venice, Berlinale, Rotterdam, Toronto, San Sebastián, and more. Screenings take place at FLC’s Walter Reade Theater and MoMA’s Titus theaters. Below are some of the films I had a privilege to preview:…

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Plus: ‘Mermaid,’ ‘Hamlet,’ ‘The Yeti,’ ‘Infiltrate.’

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When we reunite with the former Sith apprentice to Darth Sidious they are now the Zabrak crime lord, one-time leader of the large criminal alliance, the collapsed Shadow Collective.   We are one year after Order 66, between their betrayal by Sidious during The Clone Wars, and their ultimate demise at the hands of Kenobi in Rebels. With remnants of the collective, Maul has established operations on the planet Janix, which is still outside of Empire control.    The only law enforcement they would have to contend with includes Captain Brander Lawson and his partner, the robot Two-Boots. Lawson lives on planet with his son, Rylee, and tries to be present in their life but the job is always demanding his attention, more so once…

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Co-created by Juri Rechinsky and Mario Hainzl, the film constructs a first-person docu-experiment in which body-camera footage across multiple continents reframes notions of everyday life through contrasting conditions of normalcy.

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Abu Bakr Shawky’s film unfolds as a multi-generational family saga that situates an intimate love story within the shifting social and political landscape of Egypt from the 1960s to the 1990s.

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Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann uses the spatial and historical layers of the Hilton Addis Ababa to examine how the legacy of Haile Selassie is constructed, negotiated and contested through personal memory, archival material and competing narratives.

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Turning a maybe not quite beloved but certainly important cult object like 1978’s faux-snuff/faux-documentary Faces of Death into a multiplex-friendly narrative film with aspirations of taking on major social media companies is no small endeavor, creatively or culturally. That’s part of why it’s taken director/co-writer Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer/producer Isa Mazzei’s new Faces of Death almost two full years to make its way to public screens after being completed in early 2024. So when I had the chance to sit down with the creatives, there was a lot I was curious about. With Faces of Death in particular, and within the context of their other films, another of which similarly brought a more obscure source to larger audiences, and all of which seek to say…

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Jon Hamm, Amanda Peet, and Olivia Munn return in the ensemble dramatic series, with James Marsden joining as a mysterious new, ultra-wealthy neighbor.

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Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer’s third feature casts Sandra Hüller as a woman who adopts a male identity within a Protestant farming community during the Thirty Years’ War in order to secure property, labour autonomy and social legitimacy otherwise inaccessible to her.

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One of a pair of character posters for Kane Parson’s upcoming, creepy-pasta meets liminal terror horror film, Backrooms, that places Academy Award-nominated actors into some unorthodox and tight framing.   The original poster for the big-screen blow up of the YouTube series of mystery-box meets by way of found footage viral videos with a dedicated cult following, perhaps leaned too far and too clean into negative space, to the point of being novel, but rather boring. This one, which has more texture, more grain, and a distressed Renate Reinsve, with unkempt hair, fingernails of unequal length, pushed into the sickly yellow wallpaper that is the hallmark of the series, is a far better use of said negative space, and you feel the negative here more fulsome, more…

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