MRQE

DUTTON RANCH Review: Trouble Is Coming. They Can Handle It.

mrqe — Thu, 14 May 2026 08:00:03 +0000

Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser reprise their roles in the dynamic sequel series.

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com…]

Cannes Review: Kantemir Balagov’s Butterfly Jam Can’t Find a Rhythm

mrqe — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:05:44 +0000

Without putting too fine a point on it, the 2026 Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes has kicked off with a bit of a dog. The latest from exiled Russian filmmaker Kantemir Balagov, Butterfly Jam takes place in and around the Circassian community in New Jersey—a diasporic milieu that will call to mind movies like Anora, Little Odessa, and Levan Koguashvili’s underappreciated Brighton Fourth, only with little of the texture or granular details that made those pictures feel so lived-in.

For anyone who followed the festival scene in the second half of the 2010s, this might come as a bit of a surprise. Writing for Filmmaker Magazine in 2020, the critic Carlos Aguilar—not one for hyperbole—probably spoke for most critics at the time when he described Balagov as “a prodigy of international cinema” on the cusp of “an auspicious career.” For that interview, Aguilar had met the then-28-year-old director in sunny L.A. where Balagov was campaigning for an Oscar nomination for his second feature, Beanpole—a remarkable film that had been one of Cannes’ great success stories the previous year.

Time does fly. Butterfly Jam, his first project since, focuses on the relationship between a young father who works as a chef in his sister’s cafe serving delen (a tortilla-like delicacy) to the local community, and his son who’s training to become a wrestler. One day, a local businessman drops by and is won over by the dish, and a more lucrative job appears to be in the cards. This stroke of good fortune comes in the same week that his sister announces she’s pregnant and his son wins a match and is interviewed on local TV. For a brief moment, their unconventional but tender family unit appears to be on the up, but as the rules of gravity and storytelling dictate, such leaps of upward mobility are seldom to be trusted.

The father’s name is Azik and he’s played by Barry Keoghan, a skilled performer who inhabited another conspicuously young dad to a teenage kid in Andrea Arnold’s Bird two years ago. (A 2024 Cannes premiere that, like its fellow Anora, casts a long shadow here—winged wonder and flights of magical realism included.) The Irish star is joined by newcomer Talha Akdogan as Pyteh, who probably does the steadiest work out of anyone here besides Riley Keough—an actress who I’ve yet to see give a bad performance, in spite of some adventurous but uneven choices in recent years. Butterfly Jam is usually at its best whenever Keough is in the room, and the rare moments in which her and Keoghan’s performances click perhaps offer a glimmer of what might have been.

That central trio is joined by Harry Melling, a former Harry Potter star who has admirably managed to shed the skin of those movies—earning a reputation as one of the more interesting and versatile British actors of his generation in the process. We got a hint of this with his limbless marionette act in the Coens’ Ballad of Buster Scrubs and saw him rise to the occasion with his breakout performance in Pillion last year, but whether through Butterfly’s script or Balagov’s direction, his Marat—an impulsive, volatile Ziggy to Keoghan’s Nick Sobotka—stands conspicuously underdeveloped. As Keough’s heavily pregnant Zalya works to keep the cafe going, the movie’s male characters each take turns experiencing their own crises of masculinity. Mileage may vary, but when it comes time for these uneven storylines to reach their climactic moment, the lack of time spent with Marat’s insecurities leaves the movie’s key scene feeling rushed at best, at worst gratuitous.

Revisiting those early Balagov years in the week leading up to Cannes, it was easy to feel seduced by that fervor of that moment all over again. Here was an improbably talented and good-looking filmmaker who’d risen up seemingly out of nowhere, graduated from Aleksandr Sokurov’s filmmaking school, and won back-to-back prizes in Cannes with his first two films before the age of 30. That early flush led to a surprise offer from HBO to direct the first episode of The Last of Us, which Balagov eventually left due to creative differences (Craig Mazin said the resulting pilot contained 40% of his footage) just as Russia’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, forcing him into exile. Creative flows have been disrupted by far less consequential things; here’s hoping it’s only temporary.

Butterfly Jam premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.

The post Cannes Review: Kantemir Balagov’s Butterfly Jam Can’t Find a Rhythm first appeared on The Film Stage.

2026 Cannes Critics’ Panel: Day 1 – Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s ‘A Woman’s Life’

mrqe — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:30:38 +0000

With her sophomore feature, Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet made her first trip up the red carpet steps today as one of the several competition first-timers. Sshe unveiled her short Pauline asservie at Critics’ Week in 2018, then presented her debut feature Les Amours d’Anaïs as a special screening at the 60th Critics’ Week (read our glowing ★★★½ review). La Vie d’une femme aka A Woman’s Life features players Léa Drucker, Mélanie Thierry, Charles Berling and Laurent Capelluto and follows Gabrielle, 55, a highly dedicated head surgeon at a public hospital whose life is defined by relentless professional commitment, leaving little space for her personal world — including a devoted husband and an aging mother who depends on her care.… Read the rest

THE DEAD PLACE: TERRIFIER’s David Howard Thorton Stars, Arrives on BloodStreamTV on June 1st!

mrqe — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:15:00 +0000

Troubled High School Senior Isaac suffers from visions of malevolent spirits whose hauntings intensify amidst an onslaught of bullying and familial tragedy, pushing him to discover a capacity for violence he never knew he possessed.

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com…]

2026 Cannes Critics’ Panel: Day 1 – Koji Fukada’s ‘Nagi Notes’

mrqe — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:45:11 +0000

Koji Fukada emerged as one of the major voices of contemporary Japanese cinema through intimate dramas examining social alienation, fractured families and emotional repression but he has not always been a sure bet for Cannes with items finding themselves on the Lido instead. His breakthrough came with Harmonium (2016), which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize and pandemic year 2020 saw The Real Thing. land in Cannes 2020 Official Selection label. He was last in Cannes for a Cannes Premiere labeled premiere for Love on Trial. So not only is this his first time in comp, but this year is a special year with three Japanese auteurs in the race joining compatriots Hirokazu Kore-eda and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi.… Read the rest

FATHERLAND

mrqe — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:34:54 +0000

(Check out Savina Petkova’s Fatherland movie review. The film just had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.) Eight years after he was named Best Director at Cannes for Cold […]

The post FATHERLAND appeared first on Hammer to Nail.

A Woman’s Life (La Vie d’une femme) | 2026 Cannes Film Festival Review

mrqe — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:00:02 +0000

Things to Come: Bourgeois-Tacquet Explores an Affair to Remember

Crimes of the heart are afoot once more in Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s A Woman’s Life (La Vie d’une femme), a film which feels a lot less generic than its title suggests (and is no relation to the 2016 Guy de Maupassant adaptation from Stephane Brize, which wielded it ironically). Led by the effortless Léa Drucker, the intensely paced life of a high profile surgeon is suddenly rejuvenated by a surprise affair with a writer shadowing her work at a state-run French hospital, fortuitously when it seems everything else around her seems to be eroding.… Read the rest

‘LifeHack’ Review: Ronan Corrigan’s Thrilling Depiction of a Cyber Heist

mrqe — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:14:15 +0000

The latest from producer and screenlife mastermind Timur Bekmambetov, Ronan Corrigan’s LifeHack drapes the Bekmambetov-approved medium of in-screen PC and smartphone captures over the skeleton of a heist film. In doing so, this 2018 period piece, written by Corrigan and Hope Elliott Kemp, also becomes an unlikely study of Gen Z nostalgia, capturing the precise technological and cultural landscape of the internet as experienced by ambitious screen-addicted young people before the 2020s would forever change its tone.

Through a densely constructed series of Discord calls, WhatsApp chats, Steam sessions, and Instagram posts, a crack team of gifted teen outcasts are united by their penchant for technological mischief and semi-principled cybercrime. In a montage showing his evolving internet usage and increasingly creative and complex trolling schemes across a digital timeline of his adolescence, the pimpled, nerd-swaggy Kyle (Georgie Farmer) works his way up from posting obscene messages on Club Penguin to swatting sex site scammers in West Bengal. Along the way, he befriends crafty fellow wiz kids Sid (Roman Hayeck-Green) and Petey (James Scholz), as well as Alex (Yasmin Finney), a beautiful, intelligent, Final Fantasy– and anime-loving camgirl whom Kyle is more than a little eager to impress.

All four teens have strained parental relationships and little to no offline social life. These factors, combined with tech startup culture’s obsession with youthful genius and high-risk, rulebook-shredding ventures, embolden Kyle to push the envelope on bigger and bolder troll jobs, to his friends’ initial hesitation. Noting the career trajectories of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, Kyle opines that he has only until age 19 to prove himself to the world.

Researching a man his absentee father idolizes, British-American tech oligarch Don Heard (Charlie Creed-Miles)—an aggressive, juvenile crypto hawker pictured wielding a flamethrower in publicity photos and lighting up a spliff on Joe Brogan—Kyle senses the opportunity of a lifetime. He enlists his crew to scam the billionaire’s spoiled, oversharing daughter, Lindsey (Jessica Reynolds), and raid his untraceable bitcoin wallet for massive sums of digital currency.

LifeHack cleverly utilizes tight plotting and editing, interface-driven storytelling, and a propulsive electronic score by English indie band Two Blinks, I Love You to hype up an uncommonly realistic depiction of cybercrime. The heroes meticulously comb the web, analyze building and IT infrastructures, assume false identities, and contact unsuspecting individuals on the periphery of Heard’s private empire to identify and exploit security weaknesses, maneuvering their way online and on-site to the ultimate prize: high-value information.

The film’s format and subject matter engender a distinctly claustrophobic and paranoid awareness of the power that screens and digital networks have over modern life, reinforced by LifeHack’s setting in a not-so-distant time just before the world of big tech, isolation, and online exposure would take on new levels of social, economic and political salience. In one of many Easter eggs and cheeky world-building details tucked into the background of the film’s busy monitors, Heard’s hacked email inbox contains new unread messages from one “J Epstein.”

The film, though, flinches from some of the darker and headier implications of its script. It prefers to breezily work up to tidy character and plot resolutions rather than truly explore its heroes’ alienation and digital dependency, the relationship between online exposure and mental illness, and the toxic culture of big tech and its adjacency to state power and international crime. Still, LifeHack is consistently intriguing for the conflicting emotions with which it looks back on its chosen moment in tech and time, characterized by cutthroat scamming and cynicism, as well as empowerment and camaraderie for the young and quick-witted.

Score:

Cast: Georgie Farmer, Yasmin Finney, Roman Hayeck-Green, James Scholz, Jessica Reynolds, Charlie Creed-Miles Director: Ronan Corrigan Screenwriter: Ronan Corrigan, Hope Elliott Kemp Distributor: Iconic Events Running Time: 96 min Rating: NR Year: 2025

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The post ‘LifeHack’ Review: Ronan Corrigan’s Thrilling Depiction of a Cyber Heist appeared first on Slant Magazine.

Nagi Notes | 2026 Cannes Film Festival Review

mrqe — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:00:57 +0000

Only the Lonely: Fukada Explores Constructions of Identity

Japanese auteur Kôji Fukada often favors narratives wherein tenuous but comfortable rhythms are suddenly upended by a confrontation with unresolved issues instigated by relationships with new acquaintances or old reunions. Often, these result in drastic, dramatic emotional shifts, such as in Harmonium (2016) or A Girl Missing (2019), or lead to a divine sense of catharsis in 2022’s Love Life (read review). For his latest feature, Nagi Notes, Fukada is perhaps at his most elegantly demure as he juxtaposes two developing relationships rapidly progressing during one week in the titular rural area located in Okayama Prefecture.… Read the rest

Prime Video’s “Off Campus” is Big on Romance, Music, and Spice

mrqe — Wed, 13 May 2026 18:46:03 +0000

As a self-professed Romance girlie, I’ve frequently written about the difference between a romantic film/show and a romance novel. That difference isn’t semantics. It comes down to the storytelling, the characterizations, and the thing that Romance readers love most: the tropes. “Bridgerton” was the first to recognize this fact. We haven’t seen that dedication to Romance novel-styled storytelling repeated. Until now.

Enter Prime Video’s “Off Campus”, based on the novels by Elle Kennedy. Here, we join the fictional Boston-set university, Briar U, for an intimate look at the love lives and friendships of its hockey team.

Networks and studios are excited about the viewership prospects of hockey/sports romance after the success of “Heated Rivalry.” Why not? Part of launching a hit series is knowing when to catch a wave. However, while both shows are swoony hockey love stories, the two differ in style. The former is a romantic drama, darker in tone and driven by hidden passions. “Off Campus” is playful, at times exuberant, with the trope-y rom-com readers and audiences also crave. The genre is contemporary and new adult—the college-aged or new to the workforce—and although you’ll get some of the same hijinks as in YA, it skews older and does it well.

Logan (Antonio Cipriano), Garrett (Belmont Cameli), Dean (Stephen Thomas Kalyn), and Tucker (Jalen Thomas Brooks) in OFF CAMPUS
Photo: Liane Hentscher/ Prime
© AMAZON CONTENT SERVICES LLC

The first couple in the lineup ignites when quiet songwriter Hannah (Ella Bright) and all-star hockey player Garrett (Belmont Cameli) meet in the locker room showers at Briar University. She sees everything he has to offer—at least on the outside—but it isn’t until they make a mutually beneficial deal that they truly see each other. He pretends to be her boyfriend to make another guy jealous, while she tutors him in philosophy. Classic. It’s a set-up we’ve seen before.

What sets this first season of “Off Campus” apart is how tangible Bright and Cameli make Hannah and Garrett feel. Every shade of emotion is explored; they are vulnerable, quippy, hopeful, and honest in a way that makes you forget their characters are on screen.

The rest of the cast delivers, too. “Off Campus” is boosted by lively, engaging dialogue between characters who are growing toward better versions of themselves. It’s easy to imagine future seasons with John Logan (Antonio Cipriano), Allie (Mika Abdalla), or Dean (Stephen Kalyn), but this is the season of ‘Gannah,’ and the pair is charming in the extreme. If this were a chemistry class, they’d ace it with extra credit. They’re playful, considerate, and have beloved nicknames—he calls her Wellsy because her last name is Wells. So cute.

Beyond their winning portrayals, the heroine and hero are dealing with childhood traumas. As a result, their character arcs are partially defined by their efforts to define themselves without the context of their parents or the people who hurt them badly in the past.

Another factor that makes “Off Campus” work is that Louisa Levy, the series creator, and co-showrunner Gina Fattore understand that romance on TV is common, but true Romance novel formats are hard to find. The story beats and progression of falling in love are different between the two. The series envisions the episodes like chapters, closing out on cliffhangers or with hooks that pull you into the next episode.

The classic tropes: jock boy paired with nerdy girl, jock needs a tutor, one bed, opposites attract, and the Queen Mother of tropes: fake dating, all sparkle throughout the season. And it’s spicy too. Spice refers to how explicit the sex is, and this show is saucy. There’s lots of sex, but it never objectifies. There’s also nudity, and some of it is full frontal. Just thought I should let you know if you’re a pearl clutcher.

Music as a healing force is part of the connection between Hannah and Garrett, especially classic rock. Early on, I thought of the Fox series “Glee” and was rewarded with a reference. “Off Campus” doesn’t just have a soundtrack; many of the plot beats hinge on music—from classical to rock to pop—and all the sub-genres in between. To accentuate the storytelling, Prime Video bought out the record store with big needle drops and musical guest appearances, including one that fans will be howling for.

“Off Campus” is a swoon-worthy, hot, and heated rom-com-drama that gives its story space to fully bloom just like its characters. It’s a highly enjoyable romance from front to back that’ll leave you wishing, hoping, and anticipating which couple you’ll spend the sophomore season with. Until then, this series will get plenty of replays.