“How many people have eaten at our dinner table who have died?” asks Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi of her then-husband, Jimmy Chin, in Everest: The Other Side, questioning whether they should continue filming life-threatening stunts. “It might take a while,” Chin replies after staring at the ceiling for a few seconds in stunned silence. The co-directors collectively rattle off six names of perished friends before their kids run in, breaking the tension and dissipating the possibility of further discussion.

This moment of self-reflection is striking for laying bare the debate over the ethics of Vasarhelyi and Chin’s filmmaking practices. In their Oscar-winning Free Solo from 2018, which chronicled American rock climber Alex Honnold’s record-setting ascent of El Capitan without the assistance of ropes, the filmmakers practically laughed in the face of death as their crew commented on the film’s camera setups. When it comes to Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson, life and adventure partners who set out to become the first people to ski down the forbidding north face of Mount Everest, facing mortality becomes no laughing matter.

The line between the compassion of a friend and the compulsion of a filmmaker is fertile terrain for exploration when the stakes are life and death. It’s a shame, then, that Vasarhelyi’s internal reckoning largely goes unexplored beyond the single table discussion in Everest: The Other Side, as the documentary quickly quashes her misgivings. Instead, it follows Chin’s impulse to indulge, rather than confront, Morrison as he darts toward danger.

It’s alarmingly easy to put on blinders like the filmmakers do and strap in fully for the thrill ride of what Morrison attempts, even after it’s revealed that Nelson died while skiing with him down the Manasalu summit in Nepal in 2022. It’s impressive on its own that he can summit the world’s tallest peak, but he must still possess the skill and strength to successfully complete the most difficult and treacherous ski descent on Earth. That the film captures this accomplishment in such immersive, clear detail without impeding it only heightens our amazement.

Everest: The Other Side offers an arresting illustration of what Vasarhelyi and Chin do best, pairing the nail-biting tension of a sports drama with the epic sweep of a nature documentary. Because their cameras bear witness to every step, the film is also genuinely terrifying to watch unfold, with the worst possible outcome never a remote possibility.

But unlike Alex Honnold, whose psychology proves as compelling as his physicality, Morrison is less intriguing off the slopes in the film. The man is easily understood as an adrenaline junkie through and through. Challenging himself by trying to accomplish first-of-their-kind feats, even into his 50s, keeps his inner fire alive. Some men build monuments like the Taj Mahal to memorialize their loved ones. Morrison descends mountains with a daredevil’s abandon.

Chin and Vasarhelyi, with the assistance of a sizable contingent of Nepalese laborers, are facilitators—or enablers—of what many will see as a twisted memorial rite, letting Morrison dictate the tone of Everest: The Other Side by meeting him where he is in his journey with grief. Whatever reservations Chin and Vasarhelyi might have about who these athletic achievements really serve go unexpressed, at least on camera. The film might stop short of endorsing Morrison’s feats, but the way it captures and conveys them is assuredly a hero’s edit.

Such proximity to Morrison’s pain at each step of the grueling process yields many moving emotional moments, especially at one point when he and the film’s crew reach thinner air high on the titular mountain. Here, Morrison notes, the veil between the physical and spiritual world seems to dissipate. Nelson’s presence feels profoundly palpable in this setting, as does the possibility of Morrison reuniting with her sooner rather than later.

The post ‘Everest: The Other Side’ Review: A Gripping but Evasive Look at the Costs of Mountaineering appeared first on Slant Magazine.

Ángel Gómez Hernández’s Crawlers, like its deadly spiders, isn’t in the business of dilly-dallying, making us instantly aware of the giant abscess on George’s (Chris Rogers) upper back almost as soon as the arachnologist walks into his dingy Los Angeles apartment. Within seconds, George is vomiting and collapsing on the floor, and a swarm of baby spiders glides down the slow-moving river of pus oozing from the gnarly wound. If you’re not sufficiently grossed out yet, don’t worry: Hernández’s creature feature has you covered.

When the rundown building at the film’s center is placed under quarantine and no one is allowed out, live-in manager Serena (Matilda Lutz), already overworked by William Miller’s douchey landlord, is left to bear the bulk of the responsibility for getting rid of the deadly infestation. Serena’s predicament is a sly nod to the exploitative practices increasingly common during late capitalism, but, for better or worse, Jayson Rothwell’s screenplay isn’t terribly concerned with its human characters, many of whom never rise above cliché.

The filmmakers are far more inventive with the spiders, finding no shortage of places for them to lurk—inside chip bags, shoes, and baby cribs, above a stalled elevator, behind the eyeball of a recent victim—and wringing real suspense from most of the reveals. This is a taut little B film that makes effective use of confined spaces, boasts some impressively rendered CGI critters, and sustains tension through a steady run of close encounters rather than dragging things out.

It bears mentioning that the premise of Crawlers is distractingly similar to that of Sébastien Vaniček’s Infested from 2023. Coincidence or not, Hernández’s film milks its simple concept for everything it’s worth. The filmmakers may not color outside the lines of creature-feature formula, but they find suitably gruesome ways of dispatching many of their hapless victims and manage what few low-budget horror films do these days: simply doing what it says on the tin.

The post ‘Crawlers’ Review: Ángel Gómez Hernández’s Creature Feature Is a Fitfully Gross Squirm-Fest appeared first on Slant Magazine.

DOC NYC, the world’s largest documentary film festival, has announced the lineup for its influential, distinguished Short Lists section for the 2026 edition, along with the Winner’s Circle section slate, which celebrates certain award winners from this year. Short Lists […]

The post DOC NYC Unveils Its 2026 Short List and Winner’s Circle Selections appeared first on Hammer to Nail.

The End of The World as we Know it: Guadagnino Creates a Thrilling Portrait of the Losers who Will Kill us All

It’s all over the news, foisted upon your social media and even creeping into our mediums of creativity. If the sudden rise and development of AI feels overwhelmingly fast and uncontrolled, that’s because it is. And as Luca Guadagnino’s riotous if overegged 11th feature Artificial explains, it’s only going to get worse from here.

A biographical and remarkably relevant film which chronicles the meteoric rise of both artificial intelligence and Sam Altman’s (Andrew Garfield) progressively dangerous management of company OpenAI.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

As is often the case with CIFF, the team here at RogerEbert.com has seen and covered many of the films playing at the event. An increasingly impressive programming team does a stellar job of scouting events like Cannes for highlights, along with scheduling many of the same films that drew attention at Venice, Toronto, Telluride, and New York. We will be covering over a dozen films out of CIFF for the first time, along with running full reviews of “Club Kid,” “Rose,” “Clarissa,” “Behemoth!,” and more, but we thought the best way to preview this year’s event was to give you a portal to all of our coverage of CIFF 2026 films. Just looking at the list below reveals how completely the programmers of CIFF have brought home the best of the best of fest season 2026. Pick your faves. And go see a movie.

“14^th”

“All of a Sudden”

“Being Heumann”

“The Beloved”

“Ben’Imana”

“Bitter Christmas”

“Bunker”

“Burgundy”

“Clarissa”

“Club Kid”

“The Debut”

“The Diary of a Chambermaid”

“The Dreamed Adventure”

“Edward Said: Between Worlds”

“Elephants in the Fog”

“Elsinore”

“Everytime”

“Fatherland”

“Gentle Monster”

“I Play Rocky”

“I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning”

“I’ll Be Gone in June”

“Ink”

“Iron Boy”

“Josephine”

“La Gradiva”

“The Liberation”

“The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd”

“A Long Winter”

“Look Back”

“The Man I Love”

“Marie Madeleine”

“Minotaur”

“Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant”

“Musk”

“Nagi Notes”

“Once Upon a Time in Harlem”

“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York”

“Paper Tiger”

“Possible Love”

“Rose”

“The Spiral”

“Tangles”

“Tender Loving Care”

“Victorian Psycho”

“Wild Horse Nine”

If you like your arthouse pornography with a heaping ladle of leftist agitprop (or “agitporn,” as he’d call it), Bruce LaBruce is a name that should be on your lips. As our very own Scout Tafoya once put it, Bruce is “one of the most fearless filmmakers alive,” a man who’s spent the last thirty years making more than a dozen motion pictures both in and out of the adult filmmaking scene, pushing boundaries and wearing his politics (and his libido) on his sleeve along the way. And in Chicago, I was delighted to sample a goodly portion of them along with dozens of the city’s most discerning perverts at Lincoln Park’s Facets Chicago, formerly Facets Cinematheque, for a weekend-long retrospective called “The Revolution Is My Boyfriend: The Films of Bruce LaBruce.“

Curated by Optical Noise cofounder Raphael Jose Martinez, the retrospective was the result of five years of hard work, negotiation, and a lot of scheduling and rescheduling. For years at Facets, Martinez has delighted in building “discomfort, context, and conversation” with his Optical Noise screening series, which delights in the transgressive and out-of-the-way. This series feels like his Holy Grail of sorts, as Bruce himself came down from his native home of Canada to Chicago for three Q&As (and a host of other screenings and conversations around the city) over three days, with ten of his films screening at Facets.

I was lucky enough to attend the plurality of the festival, seeing many of Bruce’s movies for what would, for me, be the first time. I’d heard of Bruce’s many cinematic provocations—he started out in gay pornography on both sides of the camera, and helped build the queercore movement in Canada via the J.D.s zine he co-created with G.B. Jones; his politics are unabashedly leftist, anarchist, anti-colonial, and punk, and you’ll see that in ways both subtle and uproariously unsubtle in his films.

But apart from his incredible “Saint-Narcisse” in 2021 and his adorable gay zombie flick “Otto, or Up With Dead People,” so much of his work was new to me. And I’d be watching it with an audience comprised largely of fellow Chicago punks and queers; I saw sweater-clad theater gays sat next to feathered-haired polyamorous queerdos sporting combat boots and cut-off shirts. In the lobby sat tables hosted by a local leather and fetish group, and a collective of butch dyke pornographers selling their latest physical porn zine. The tattoo-to-person ratio would blow the mind of the average cinemagoer.

They chose their audience well: To watch a Bruce LaBruce movie, let alone multiple in the same day, is to expose yourself to so many other people’s exposures. No taboo is left untouched, from incest to group sex to fisting to force-femming. In Bruce’s first feature, “No Skin Off My Ass,” a hairdresser (LaBruce) falls in love with a skinhead (Klaus von Brücker, LaBruce’s partner at the time); we see everything from unsimulated sex to an improvised nipple piercing with a safety pin. 2024’s “The Visitor” explores all manner of kinks in up-close detail, from incest within an entire family to suspension play to race play. Even his most “palatable” and sexless movie, 2013’s “Gerontophilia,” uses the auspices of indie rom-com cinema to explore a young man’s granddaddy fetish with an old queen (Walter Borden) he meets at a nursing home.

And don’t get me started on “Hustler White,” LaBruce’s incredible (and funny; all of his films are funny!) exploration of LA’s gay hustler scene in the early 1990s, which offers Black gangbangs right alongside mummy fetishes and a scene where a one-legged gigolo makes… creative use of his stump. “Otto” features a zombie going balls-deep in a wound he created in his latest victim. Boundaries are pushed, even for we experienced degenerates; I won’t lie and say I didn’t look away from the screen at certain points, most notably a scene in 2018’s “The Misandrists” in which a male revolutionary is given compulsory gender-reassignment surgery, complete with graphic real vaginoplasty footage.

His prodding is not just penile, but political; nary will you see a Bruce LaBruce film that doesn’t position such sexual liberation as part of a broader liberatory politic that seeks to free everyone from the prisons of heteronormativity, capitalism, and patriarchy. As his career has progressed, those messages have pushed further to the forefront, right down to works like “The Raspberry Reich” and “The Visitor” flashing text like “Make (Revolutionary) Love Not (Imperialist) War” subliminally over scenes of people getting railed. Multiple films talk about the Baader-Meinhof Group, and his 2004 opus “The Raspberry Reich” takes direct inspiration from them in its group of horny revolutionaries. His editing style is frenetic, almost schizophrenic, with “Enter the Void”-like strobing effects that take on the rhythms of hypno porn before that was popular. It feels like indoctrination, in the best and most liberating way.

But suffused through each of Bruce’s movies, one after the other after the other, amid all the exposed cocks and unabashed cumshots and deliberate vulgarity, there’s an underlying sweetness and care for his characters that sets him apart from the average pornographer. There are no villains in Bruce LaBruce movies, only temporarily unturned allies in the fight against unjust systems. He has empathy for every character, even (or especially) as they make choices that render them selfish, or unlikable, or short-sighted. “Hustler White,” my favorite of his, is maybe the sweetest of his pictures, treating the work of hustlers like central figure Montgomery Ward (real-life sex worker Tony Ward) with all the romance of a Preston Sturges picture. The happiest endings—and I mean that in all the ways that entails—often include most of our onscreen characters having coupled, or throupled, or otherwise sat in a big old orgiastic pile of revolutionary love. These are not just bodies to be gazed at or lusted after, but people, whose sex and identities and flesh are intertwined with their selfhood and politics.

LaBruce may believe in all of these punk aesthetics and shouted political subtexts, but he also understands the comedy and absurdity beneath such bohemian certitude. “Raspberry Reich”‘s Gudrun (frequent LaBruce collaborator Susanne Sachsse, who also joined him on Saturday) is a hilariously controlling madwoman, humiliating her numerous male subservients in ways both radical and raucous, right down to insisting that they all have sex with each other, despite some of them being straight. This is the kind of film that will film someone jerking off for about fifteen minutes in front of a wall mural of Che Guevara (a move that, LaBruce told us in the Q&A, led to a million-dollar lawsuit from Alberto Korda, who shot that famous photo).

And all the while, it’s easy to see why cinephiles love his work: Not only is it stylistically daring, especially considering the budgets and resources he’s had to work with (both in Canada’s indie scene and in Germany, where he’s produced many of his most recent works), it’s also steeped in homages to classic cinema. “No Skin Off My Ass” is such an ode to Robert Altman’s “That Cold Day in the Park” that it simply lifts footage of the opening sequence for its own. His followup, the slept-on “Super 8 1/2,” is his self-reflexive response to that film’s cult success, and the expectations that came from being a gay pornographer suddenly thrust into the limelight in ways that blew up his relationships. “The Misandrists” feels like a play on “The Beguiled” (specifically Sofia Coppola’s version), and “The Visitor” is an overt take on Pasolini’s “Teorema,” where a stranger arrives at the home of a bourgeois family to destroy them through seduction. There are films where you’ll hear Fellini and Cahiers du cinema name-dropped within minutes of an unsimulated cumshot, often from Bruce himself.

In a world where queer rights are actively under attack from the current administration, and what queer culture is allowed to exist feeling neatly confined to homonormative models that fit cleanly into consumer capitalism, watching a Bruce LaBruce film feels like a splash of water to the face. Or, well, any number of other fluids, if you’re one of his stars. And walking out of that three-day experience, finding community with arthouse punks celebrating (and mingling with) one of that movement’s central figures, is one I’ll never forget.

One would hope that, after the push-and-pull of trying to do the right thing, Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) would have learned a thing or two.

The prickly protagonist of “The Lowdown” strutted down Tulsa’s streets during the Season One finale after earning citywide praise for his tribute to the late Dale Washberg. His essay helped guide Dale’s brother Donald (Kyle MacLachlan) toward a path lit by moral clarity; Lee even held it together through his ex-wife Samantha’s (Kaniehtiio Horn) wedding to Johnny the amiable dentist (Rafael Casal) and a searing conversation with his daughter Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong).

So it comes as a shock, albeit a welcome one, that creator Sterlin Harjo wastes no time in the Season Two opener cutting our hero down to size. Lee proposes marriage to the most recent woman in his bed, struggles to take pride in his achievements, and, at a journalism awards banquet, makes a mushroom-gummy-and-whisky-soaked hash of accepting a prize for the Washberg essay.

But this banquet sets the stage for the entire season: Francis witnesses her father’s mess and is disgusted, launching one of two deeply moving father-child arcs. Journalists in attendance take umbrage with Lee looking down on how their publications survive—not everyone can be a truth-storian in, to quote the paddlefish caviar smugglers from season one, “‘Saturday Night Fever’ pants.” 

At this banquet, Lee meets Ginger Rafferty (Betty Gilpin, to whom this season belongs), a lone figure in a cool blue gown. She looks like a femme fatale right out of “Chinatown,” but in fact she’s a public defender, worried she’s being followed, even more worried that one of her clients has gone missing inside a prison. Ginger’s quest for the truth draws Lee to her, and though she can see through his swashbuckling façade like a freshly washed window, she too begins to lean on him, while declining his romantic interest, as ports in a corrupt Oklahoma storm are few and far between.

It is nothing short of a pleasure to watch Gilpin and Hawke team up. Ginger justifiably calls Lee out for his judgment errors and idiocy, but the sincerity in his eyes helps her, and us, know he’s by her side for the right reasons. In season one, Lee played the funny man, charming his way into writing assignments, walking out of editors’ offices with spare revolvers. Now Hawke and Gilpin take turns, easily switching between straight man and foil. And the latter is the rare, true theatrical clown: at multiple moments throughout this season, Gilpin elicits laughter from the viewer despite tears running down her face.

Though Gilpin is certainly part of this season’s powerhouse, she’s not alone. Tommy Lee Jones, so restrained you can practically hear him breathe, adds considerable complexity as Lee Raybon Senior. Nary a happy word has left Lee Jr.’s mouth about his dad, from whom he’s been estranged for years, and the patriarch’s reappearance in his life upsets Francis, who has always been told that her grandfather was dead. This fiction, combined with Lee’s slovenly awards speech, strains her relationship with her father. She demands to get to know Lee Senior on her own terms, as does the latter; such opposition to lifelong resentment and a closely-held lie just about sends Lee Jr. over the edge.

Lee accuses his father of abandonment, tells him not to leave the bookstore or contact Francis, then storms out to resume his investigation. In his absence, Lee Senior befriends bookstore employee Deidra (Siena East), record store owner Abel Bell (Josh Fadem, who thankfully gets a bit more to do this season), and, of course, Francis.

This creates extraordinary emotional layers in the storytelling. Two fathers consider the impact their penchant for adventurous neglect has had on their respective offspring; Lee Junior slowly begins to assess how much of his rage was ever designed to protect Francis and how much is about his own pain. And though he promised to be better than his father, isn’t Lee—who once told Francis that he wanted to show up for her not by being present at parent-teacher conferences but by being someone worth admiring—just a chip off the old block?

Jones is perfectly cast. (Chalk up yet more victories for casting director Angelique Midthunder.) From Lee’s stories, the viewer would expect a caustic, abusive father, but instead we get a contemplative man who speaks only when he has something to say, who doesn’t repent the past but focuses on what he can make of the future. Every time Hawke blusters and rages, Jones seems to lower his affect further. This creates an undercurrent of humor and tension, and a power vacuum across which both characters eye each other with suspicion.

But Gilpin and Jones aren’t the only casting wins here. Armstrong continues to do a crackerjack job holding her own against actors many decades her senior; it’s a hoot watching her go toe-to-toe with Hawke, especially. Casal steals every scene he’s in, and Horn remains as arresting as ever, though I wish she had a bigger role. Martha Plimpton is terrifying as a tough-as-nails county sheriff—never has a blonde Karen wig made an actress look more sinister—who shares an uneasy alliance with a venal judge (John Hawkes, always welcome). Paul Schneider devastates the audience as a heartbroken prison guard; his role reflects this season’s many reflections on how ill-equipped men are to handle loneliness. 

Perhaps my favorite supporting role, however, comes courtesy of Austin Amelio, who recently starred with Hawke in the excellent film “The Weight.” I cannot reveal too much, but Amelio pairs his character’s wiry menace with a surprising fount of physical comedy.

As in season one, season two’s central mystery walks side by side with character development, riotous humor, references to a writer’s life, and even nods to “Reservation Dogs,” including some familiar faces. All of this makes for great TV on its own. But Harjo and his writers seem to realize that the megaphone in their hands is an opportunity. They take the time to explain why their characters are the way they are, because that often also explains the rotten state of the systems (prisons, academia, museums) people have built. 

“The Lowdown” suggests that seeking the truth and fighting evil isn’t simple, but when you build community—friends, colleagues, neighbors, sources; hell, even lovers—taking on the bad guys can feel less like going to war and more like building the world you want to live in. Great TV is one thing. This show is in a league all its own.

Whole season screened for review. Airs Wednesdays on FX and Hulu.

In September of 1940, Henri Marre (Swann Arlaud), a writer, engineer, and a man of great ambition, arrives in the Vichy France, controlled by the Nazi collaborator, Philippe Pétain. Even though Henri despises the current state of affairs, his aspirations, combined with pragmatism, win out, as he tries to publish his manuscript ‘Notre Salut’ (Our Salvation), where he pitches his ideas on the future of the country. His zeal ends up earning him a coveted governmental position at the Commission for the Fight against Unemployment. Henri quickly settles in, moves his estranged wife (Sandrine Blancke) and children into his new place, and sets out to do the best job possible within the collaborationist regime. It’s interesting that while the English title of Emmanuel Marre’s film…

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com…]

From the Book of Job to Jaws, people have always tested, found, and come to understand their essential humanity in the bosom of the sea, often at odds with the mighty creatures that lurk within. Whalefall, based on the book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Kraus, continues this tradition, spinning a pulpy premise into a harrowing tale of survival.

Brian Duffield’s film opens with a suicide. Mitt Gardner (Josh Brolin), dying from mesothelioma, takes his own life by flinging himself overboard off the coast of Monterey while fishing one afternoon with his best friend, Huey (John Ortiz). Sometime later, his estranged son, Jay (Austin Abrams), comes home to join his mother (Elisabeth Shue) and sisters (Jane Levy and Emily Rudd) in paying respects. Really, though, the young man has returned on a mad mission to retrieve his father’s unrecovered remains from the sea.

As Jay dives into the watery depths of the Pacific Ocean, he encounters a giant squid pursued by a hungry sperm whale and, in a freak occurrence, winds up swallowed whole alongside the dangerous cephalopod. Stuck in the belly of the 40-ton beast with just one hour of air left in his scuba tank, Jay must find a way out before he’s digested or suffocates.

Whalefall is the second film in a mere couple of months in which Abrams is tasked with holding the screen for the majority of the runtime on his own. With little to support him but his own charisma and special effects, the actor proves a disarming screen presence as his character is put through the wringer. Whether Jay is screaming in agony, befriending a jellyfish, or murmuring to himself through his breathing apparatus, Abrams is never anything less than riveting.

Jay is a different character from the snarky jabberjaw Abrams played in Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil: a young man locked in a state of shellshock, not just by Mitt’s death, but by having grown up as a scrawny disappointment, constantly buffeted against the tide of his father’s destructive will. Brolin ably plays a recalcitrant salty dog ill-adjusted to life on land, and the complexities of Mitt’s relationship with Jay, revealed in flashbacks, give Whalefall a muscular, bruised emotionality beautifully tied to the poetic absurdities of the central scenario.

This may be the most stiflingly claustrophobic film since Neil Marshall’s The Descent. The sperm whale’s interior is an organic torture chamber, with walls of pulverizing mucosa and burning lakes of digestive goo to contend with, while outside Jay’s fleshy prison, other cetaceans cut across the screen like sci-fi frigates zooming through the blackness of space.

Kraus’s story takes an impossible scenario and roots it in the technical realities of diving. Like all the best speculative fiction, Whalefall builds its what-ifs from a foundation of fact to better support its more poetic strains as it reaches its heart-swelling climax. As the world literally closes in on Jay and nitrogen narcosis takes effect, the film shifts into an increasingly surreal register, where memory bleeds into the present and human and animal consciousness intersect.

The title comes from the natural phenomenon in which a whale carcass, upon falling to the sea floor, creates an entire ecosystem that can feed thousands of organisms for decades. Appropriately, this tender fable about fathers and sons isn’t about salvaging the unsalvageable, but about how the wreckage of one life may be the raw material that allows another to flourish.

The post Austin Abrams Races the Clock in the Belly of the Beast in Brian Duffield’s Survival Thriller appeared first on Slant Magazine.