Putting aside the nostalgia that many kids of the 1980s have for the adventures of Prince Adam, there’s not a whole lot to be gained culturally from hauling out He-Man-flavored Member Berries for mass consumption in 2026. The tragedy of Masters of the Universe, directed by Travis Knight and written Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, and Dave Callaham, is that it locates the one fertile angle that would make a movie about a blond, buff, sword-wielding barbarian interesting in 2026, only to bury its heartening Barbie-style deconstruction under every terrible action-comedy instinct plaguing modern blockbuster filmmaking.

The film starts with a flashback to a young Adam (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt), prince of the verdant, far-away world of Eternia, playing with his friends, making them laugh, and being kind to everyone around him. His father, King Randor (James Purefoy), attempts to beat an (un)healthy respect for the sword into him, to no real avail, which becomes a problem when Skeletor (Jared Leto) and his minions show up to stage a coup and steal the royal family’s Sword of Power.

Adam is thrown into a portal with the sword, losing it during the trip, and is subsequently raised on Earth. He eventually grows up into a handsome HR rep (now played by Nicholas Galitzine), an indefatigable promoter of conflict resolution through words. When he finally manages to track down the Sword of Power, Adam is whisked back to Eternia by his childhood friend Teela (Camila Mendes), only to find Eternia’s mightiest heroes living under abject tyranny. The only thing standing between Skeletor and total domination is whether Adam can balance the gentle emotions that are core to who he is with the violence necessary to save the world.

That’s the overarching tale being told by the film, and it’s a great angle. But the devil is in the details. Not since the dark days of early-2000s comic-book and video-game adaptations has a film been so embarrassed to be itself, and tried to appeal to the audience more likely to laugh at it instead of with it. There isn’t a single character interaction so vital that the filmmakers don’t choose to insert an awkward, stuttery, sub-Marvel-quality quip. Every silly character name is clowned on, and not one Office-beaten cliché about workplaces goes untouched.

Masters of the Universe’s fight scenes, in particular, are bombastic, hard-hitting, even appropriately dramatic at times. But every time the film gains momentum, cheap attempts at comedy cripple those moments at the knees. Of course, despite being a film laser-targeted to the fortysomethings who were actually kids when He-Man held cultural sway—y’know, the ones who got really, really mad, and for the worst possible reasons, about ND Stevenson’s fantastic She-Ra revival—Masters of the Universe is, ostensibly, a kids’ movie, and kids will likely be okay with silly jokes killing the Frank Frazetta-lite aura of the film at its best.

That would be easier to accept if the film picked a lane and stuck to it. Is Adam a bumbling soy boy whose willingness to want to de-escalate tensions with his enemies is going to get himself or others killed? Or is he a dangerous barbarian who can ruin a whole room of Skeletor’s baddies without splitting a single blond end of his perfect hair? The scenes where Adam is the former are too dedicated to cringe-y slapstick to land as a serious option, and the film is all too eager to show him as the latter, connective narrative tissue be damned.

Similarly, Leto’s Skeletor is stuck in a strange limbo between the Shakespearean-tinged genocidal threat of Frank Langella’s 1987 live-action take on the character and Alan Oppenheimer’s mustache-twirling Saturday-morning caricature. And Brie’s Evil-Lyn vacillates between pure gothic camp and witchy, dommy-mommy, bloodthirsty ambition. The consistent inability to thread the needle between comedy and drama permeates every single element of this Masters of the Universe, usually winding up landing on comedy by default.

Early on, Adam describes Eternia as the heart of the galaxy and Castle Grayskull as the heart of the heart. Masters of the Universe has a beating heart—thoughtfully recontextualizing He-Man as a different presentation of masculinity—and it’s bolstered by a cartoon-perfect representation of the original cartoon’s menagerie of characters and their powers. But the poorly executed, jingling-key cheap elements piled up around that heart are enough to clog it until it explodes.

The post ‘Masters of the Universe’ Review: He-Man Gets a Pandering ‘Barbie’-Style Deconstruction appeared first on Slant Magazine.

One of the discoveries of this year’s Cannes Film Festival was the Un Certain Regard selected (should have been in competition for the Palme) Everytime, the latest feature from Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner would go onto win Un Certain Regard Prize. Best known for her provocative and unsettling The Trouble with Being Born, Wollner returns with a film that feels at once more intimate and emotionally accessible while remaining every bit as formally daring. Everytime is a work that throws its audience into catastrophe almost immediately, refusing the comforts of gradual exposition as it follows a family navigating the aftermath of unimaginable loss.… Read the rest

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Mainstream feature animation has become an airless thing. Every frame is locked down, every surface polished, every emotional beat pre-chewed for the audience. Sébastien Laudenbach works in the opposite direction. His characters seem to have just been drawn, his colors […]

The post A Conversation with Sébastien Laudenbach (VIVA CARMEN) appeared first on Hammer to Nail.

Marcia Lucas died of cancer last week at 80. She’s best known to the general public as the first wife of “Star Wars” creator George Lucas, who walked away with about $50 million in their 1983 divorce settlement. That’s too bad, because she was a great editor in her own right. She worked not only with her husband on the original “Star Wars” trilogy, but on his 1972 debut “THX-1138” and its follow-up, 1973’s “American Graffiti” (her first Oscar nomination for editing, along with her mentor Verna Fields, who won another Oscar for solo-editing “Jaws” one year later). 

She was the editor on Scorsese’s fourth feature, “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” and he was so pleased with the work that he promoted her to supervising the editing teams on “Taxi Driver” and “New York, New York.” She was assistant editor and a location scout on “The Rain People”—the first feature by Francis Ford Coppola, who’d been friends with the Lucases ever since he met George on the set of his 1969 film “Finian’s Rainbow.” She was also an assistant editor on 1969’s “Medium Cool,” the directorial debut of the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler. 

Winning an Oscar for cutting the original “Star Wars,” alongside Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch, is often marked as her career peak, but personally, I’d put “Taxi Driver” alongside it. It mixes multiple film genres together—vigilante thriller, character study, screwball comedy, film noir, and ‘70s style sleaze-pit exploitation, plus a bit of French New Wave playfulness, particularly in the driving sequences and in the “You talkin’ to me?” scene, which was made of behavioral bits invented on the spot by star Robert De Niro.

Some have made the case that throughout their relationship, which began in 1967 when they met at the University of Southern California film school, Marcia was the secret heart of Lucas’ productions as well as his domestic life, and that after they split up, his movies never recovered the magic they’d once had. There’s a lot of truth to that. Lucas is a legendary figure in movie history, perhaps more so in filmmaking technology, but he was never considered a “people person.” But his wife was. She was famed for her ability to add warmth and recognizable humanity to material that might otherwise seem too mechanical or theoretical, as well as for figuring out which pieces of the story were guaranteed to make the audience happy.  

Mark Hamill told  Film Freak Central, “I know for a fact that Marcia Lucas was responsible for convincing him to keep that little ‘kiss for luck’ before Carrie [Fisher] and I swing across the chasm in [“Star Wars”].” He said, “‘Oh, I don’t like it—people laugh in the previews,’ and she said, ‘George, they’re laughing because it’s so sweet and unexpected.” She also convinced him to keep the brief bit inside the Death Star when Chewbacca roars at a mouse droid and makes it skitter away in terror, a foolproof laugh-getter that the director had initially deleted because he worried it was too silly.

But Marcia wasn’t just good at the stereotypical “girl stuff.” She had an unerring sense of when to cut out of one storyline and into another, which came in handy on all three of the original “Star Wars” movies. The first cross-cuts between Leia and Luke’s individual stories before they meet at the Death Star, the second spends a full hour cross-cutting between the Millennium Falcon fleeing from Darth Vader and Luke traveling to Dagobah to train with Yoda, and the third has a much-imitated ending that jumps between three storylines: Luke confronting Vader and the Emperor in the second Death Star’s throne room; Luke and Leia trying to disable the Death Star’s shield down on Endor; and Lando Calrissian leading the rebel’s fleet’s attack from space. 

Marcia Lucas’ majestic architecture in that last act has a symphonic heft and goes a long way towards convincing viewers that they aren’t just seeing a puffed-up retread of the first movie’s ending. She was the perfect person to supervise that complex sequence, having partnered with her mentor Verna Fields on“American Graffiti,” a nostalgic teen epic that cuts between multiple storylines happening in the same town on the same night; New York Times film critic Roger Greenspun wrote, “American Graffiti exists not so much in its individual stories as in its orchestration of many stories, its sense of time and place.” 

She told George that the Death Star battle at the end of the movie lacked tension and said he needed a “ticking clock.” So she created one: the Death Star wasn’t traveling to Yavin to destroy the rebel base in the original script, but Marcia made it seem as if it was, by pulling alternate takes from the destruction of Alderaan earlier in the movie, adding a disembodied “official” voiceover narrating the Death Star’s progress, reusing the shot of Peter Cushing’s bad guy stating, “You may fire when ready,” and timing Luke’s one-in-a-million shot so that it entered the exhaust port just as the space station’s planet-pulverizing laser cannon was about blast Yavin to pieces. If you watch the sequence closely, you’ll see that at no point do any of the major characters talk about the Death Star advancing on Yavin. But you feel as if they did, because of the editor’s cleverness.

According to Brian Jay Jones’ book George Lucas: A Life, Marcia told George she wanted to split up in 1982. The third film in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, “Return of the Jedi,” was still in production and racing to meet its Memorial Day weekend 1983 release deadline. George asked if she could wait to announce their divorce until after “Jedi” came out, so bad news about their personal lives wouldn’t detract from the movie’s publicity campaign. She agreed. But even though the Lucases knew that their marriage was functionally over as early as the summer of 1982, they continued to work together on “Jedi.” A 1983 Time Magazine cover story about Lucas, dated three days before the film’s theatrical release, states that the filmmaker has “an apparently blissful marriage [to] a charming, attractive wife,” which ought to tell you how good the couple was at keeping secrets. 

By that point, the legal papers were already signed, and although the Time writer announces that George is about to start a two-and-a-half-year sabbatical “to spend time with his wife, play with his daughter, and go to movies,” the sabbatical never happened. George moved out of the family home weeks before the Time story hit newsstands and went back to the workaholic lifestyle that ruined his marriage. Over the next seven years, he developed and produced ”Howard the Duck,” “Willow,” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” and helped finance his hero Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran” and supervised postproduction on his penultimate film “Dreams,” among a sampler of 1980s projects spread across film, TV, and video games. 

Marcia had good reason to want a slower-paced life with more personal time: she’d gotten pregnant before the start of post-production on “Star Wars” and was expected to give birth while cutting “Taxi Driver,” but miscarried, then went on to help finish “Star Wars” and “Taxi Driver,” then went straight into “New York, New York.” In an interview with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls author Peter Biskind, Marcia said that her inability to have children with George was a source of tension and unhappiness in the marriage, almost as much as his inability to stop working even for a moment. She had more miscarriages and gave up trying to conceive. 

In 1981, they adopted a daughter, Amanda, but rather than clear his schedule to get to know her, George threw himself into preproduction on “Return of the Jedi”; spun Industrial Light and Magic, a division of his company Lucasfilm, into its own company; and oversaw the creation of the sound quality assurance company THX, among other obsessions. She didn’t want to go down that road, so that was the beginning of the end of their union.

After leaving the entertainment industry, Marcia seemed content to be an editor in life. She produced just two projects in the ‘90s, one of them a short film, and consulted on other people’s movies, but that was it. She continued to go to theaters and watch films at home, always with a ruthless eye. (After seeing the first “Star Wars” prequel, “The Phantom Menace,” she cried, not because she was moved, but because she thought it was awful. Audiences were certainly poorer without her. But they were no longer her concern. She mainly wanted peace and happiness for herself and Amanda, who went on to become a professional MMA fighter. The same year she and George divorced, Marcia married Tom Rodrigues, a stained glass artist and painter who had formerly been a production manager at Skywalker Ranch from 1980 to, well, 1983. In 1985, she gave birth to their daughter, Amy. That union lasted ten years. Marcia never married again. 

In the book In the Blink of an Eye, legendary editor Walter Murch asserts that after watching a film, “What audiences finally remember is not the editing, not the camerawork, not the performances, not even the story—it’s how they felt.” Marcia Lucas had an innate understanding of how to accomplish this and proved it in multiple all-time classics.

A celebratory Karlovy Vary International Film Festival revealed its competition lineups on Tuesday. The 60th edition, which will commemorate the 80-year anniversary of the festival’s founding, features a dozen world premieres competing for the Crystal Globe and another dozen films bowing in Proxima–including cinema hailing from Colombia and Myanmar.   

The Czech fest, located in a picturesque spa town just outside of Prague, also unveiled competition juries, including Pulitzer Prize winner and The New Yorker film critic Justin Chang and two-time Oscar nominee Eskil Vogt (“The Worst Person in the World” and “Sentimental Value“). KVIFF runs July 3-11. 

Some of the major highlights of the Crystal Globe competition this year starts with Bulgarian filmmaker Petar Valchanov’s “Black Money for White.” The director’s newest film—he previously co-helmed the Maria Bakalova-starrer “Triumph”—concerns an elderly couple whose dreams of traveling to St. Petersburg to witness the White Nights are upended by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “3 Weeks After” by Serbian director Miroslav Terzić also has ties to Bulgaria: It follows a group of students traveling to the country whose adolescent angst floods to the surface when their bus breaks down. 

Colombia also makes an appearance at the festival with Esteban Hoyos García and Juan Miguel Gelacio Ramírez’s “Five Years, Four Months,” an aching work about a mother making one last bid to find the remains of her long missing son. Joining Colombia is Chile, with Valeria Sarmiento’s “Behind the Rain.” Sarmiento, the esteemed editor behind “City of Pirates” and “Mysteries of Lisbon,” arrives with a film about a psychology graduate coming home to Valdivia only to discover a young girl’s body. The unearthing shakes open traumatic childhood memories. 

Aung Phyoe’s “Fruit Gathering,” which comes from Myanmar, expands the fest’s reach. It concerns two young women employed at a textile factory in Yangon where they face exploitation, social repression, and economic disparity. A romance based in quiet rhythms, it may well be one of more festivals premiering in the resplendent Czech town.

The Proxima competition, a vertical of the festival that grants space to emerging auteurs, is led by an equally geographically eclectic array of films. Indian director Yashasvi Juyal arrives with the most evocatively titled film: “The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb.” The picture follows two men working in broken down toll booths in search of an increasingly rare kind of happiness. 

Alex Bertha’s “After Nature” is a Mexico-set story about a man returning to the countryside to be a stonemason. The plot summary to Bertha’s film describes it as, “An evocatively told story of a silent man whose enigmatic nature stems from the dark side of humanity and from his contact with the sacred, the film moves along the boundary between the physical and the spiritual.” Conversely, Japanese Shuntaro Uchida’s “Incinerator,” an adaptation of Kaori Ekuni’s short story, bills itself as a ruminative coming of age story about learning about mortality and family relationships.

Accompanying these competition movies are special screenings, including Maryam Ataei and Hossein Keshavarz’s defiant Tehran-set Sundance political stunner “The Friend’s House is Here” and “The Story of Documentary Film – 1980s” from former Crystal Globe winner Mark Cousins. His epic chronicling of the history of documentary is split into sixteen one-hour parts: the section, which focused on the 1970s, premiered at this most recent Cannes. The second part, about the 1980s, bows at KVIFF. 

Along with these films, are also eleven other works ranging in topics from a portrait of three-time Oscar winning cinematographer Robert Richardson called “Robert Richardson: The White Devil” to an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner named “Gregorius, the Chosen One.” It’s also worth noting again that KVIFF will feature a wealth of retrospectives: “A Matter of Life and Death,” “Kes,” Río Escondido,” and more. 

Below are the competition titles and juries. 

Crystal Globe Competition

3 nedelje posle / 3 Weeks After 

Director: Miroslav Terzić

Serbia, Bulgaria, 2026, 94 min, World premiere 

Cherni pari za beli noshti / Black Money for White 

Director: Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov

Bulgaria, Greece, 2025, 94 min, World premiere 

Chica Checa 

Director: Šimon Holý

Czech Republic, France, Slovak Republic, 2026, 96 min, World premiere 

Cinco años, cuatro meses / Five Years, Four Months 

Director: Esteban Hoyos García, Juan Miguel Gelacio Ramírez

Colombia, USA, 2025, 83 min, World premiere 

Detrás de la lluvia / Behind the Rain 

Director: Valeria Sarmiento

Chile, 2026, 97 min, World premiere 

Gæsten / The Guest 

Director: Mads Mengel

Denmark, 2026, 99 min, World premiere 

A Happy Family 

Director: Jan-Eric Mack

Switzerland, 2026, 120 min, World premiere 

Hijamat 

Director: Nader Saeivar

Germany, 2026, 103 min, World premiere 

The Lion at My Back 

Director: Tonia Mishiali

Cyprus, Luxembourg, Greece, 2026, 106 min, World premiere 

Pipes

Director: Karim Kassem

Lebanon, 2025, 112 min, World premiere 

Prameň / Only Beautiful Things to Look At

Director: Ivan Ostrochovský

Slovak Republic, Czech Republic, Hungary, 2026, 90 min, World premiere 

Thit-thee Khu / Fruit Gathering 

Director: Aung Phyoe

Myanmar, France, Czech Republic, 2026, 97 min, World premiere 

Proxima Competition

33 krokov / 33 Steps 

Director: Anna Domček, Šimon Domček

Slovak Republic, Czech Republic, 2026, 71 min, World premiere 

Camionero / Truck Driver 

Director: Francisco Marise

Spain, Argentina, 2026, 84 min, World premiere 

Contra la Naturaleza / Against Nature 

Director: Axel Bertha

Mexico, 2026, 86 min, World premiere 

Enas olokliros anthropos schedon / A Whole Person Almost 

Director: Efthimis Kosemund-Sanidis

Greece, Bulgaria, Germany, Cyprus, Romania, 2025, 111 min, World premiere 

Homo Sive Natura 

Director: Giovanni C. Lorusso

Italy, 2026, 115 min, World premiere 

The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb 

Director: Yashasvi Juyal

India, 2026, 120 min, World premiere 

Mein Freund der Pornostar / My Friend the Porn Star 

Director: Rosa Friedrich

Austria, 2026, 94 min, World premiere 

Milovník, nie bojovník / Lover, Not a Fighter

Director: Martina Buchelová

Slovak Republic, 2026, 108 min, World premiere 

Paris Paris 

Director: Isabelle Tollenaere

Belgium, 2026, 78 min, World premiere 

Rain Catcher 

Director: Michele Fiascaris

Italy, United Kingdom, 2026, 109 min, World premiere 

Shokyakuro / Incinerator 

Director: Shuntaro Uchida

Japan, 2026, 97 min, World premiere 

Sitni lopovi / Petty Thieves 

Director: Mate Ugrin

Croatia, Germany, France, 2026, 106 min, World premiere 

Special Screenings

Bára Basiková / Bára – Diary of a Rockstar  

Director: Helena Třeštíková

Czech Republic, 2026, 97 min, World premiere 

Dvě deci tuše / A Pint of Ink 

Director: Ester Geislerová

Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, 2026, 83 min, World premiere 

Kdyby se holubi proměnili ve zlato / If Pigeons Turned to Gold 

Director: Pepa Lubojacki

Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, 2026, 110 min 

Khaneh doost injast / The Friend’s House is Here 

Director: Maryam Ataei, Hossein Keshavarz

Iran, USA, 2025, 96 min, International premiere 

Learning To Breathe Underwater 

Director: Rebekah Fortune

United Kingdom, Netherlands, Ireland, 2026, 95 min, World premiere 

Město otců / City of Fathers  

Director: Zdeněk Tyc

Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Poland, 2026, 100 min, World premiere 

Mistryně / Everything As It Should Be 

Director: Bohdan Karásek

Czech Republic, 2026, 101 min, World premiere 

Morten 

Director: Ivan Pavljutskov

Estonia, Lithuania, 2026, 101 min, World premiere 

Robert Richardson: The White Devil 

Director: Jana Hojdová

Czech Republic, USA, 2026, 105 min, World premiere 

The Story of Documentary Film – 1980s 

Director: Mark Cousins

United Kingdom, 2026, 120 min, World premiere 

To Die to Live 

Director: Yuliia Hontaruk

Ukraine, Latvia, Slovak Republic, 2026, 116 min, World premiere 

Vyvolený / Gregorius, the Chosen One 

Director: Tomasz Mielnik

Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, 2026, 90 min, World premiere 

Zpráva pro Minervu 2 / A Report for Minerva 2 

Director: Miroslav Krobot, Lubomír Smékal

Czech Republic, 2026, 69 min, World premiere 

Crystal Globe Jury

Justin Chang

Justin Chang is a film critic at The New Yorker and NPR’s “Fresh Air”. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for criticism for his writing at the Los Angeles Times, where he spent eight years as a critic. Previously, he was the chief film critic at Variety. Chang serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and is a member of the New York Film Festival selection committee. He teaches at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Amanda Nell Eu

Amanda Nell Eu is a filmmaker based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her debut feature film Tiger Stripes was the Grand Prize winner of Semaine de la Critique in the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. The film was also the official Malaysian submission for the Academy Awards in 2023. Amanda graduated from the London Film School with an MA in Filmmaking and is an alumna of Berlinale Talents, Tokyo Talents and Locarno Filmmakers Academy. She has also served as a jury member at various film festivals and mentored film workshops internationally.

Pavel Rejholec

Pavel Rejholec is a Czech sound designer, producer, composer, and educator. He graduated from the Department of Sound Design at FAMU, where he has been head of the department since 2011. Throughout his career, he has worked as a sound designer on more than fifty Czech and international feature films. Since 2003, he has served as the managing director of the Soundsquare studio. He has won eight Czech Lion Awards for Best Sound, for instance, for the films Zátopek or The Painted Bird. As a dubbing supervisor, he collaborated with Lucasfilm on Star Wars: Episode II and Star Wars: Episode III. He is a member of the Motion Picture Sound Editors and serves on the board of the Czech Film and Television Academy.

Nadia Turincev

Nadia Turincev was born in Moscow, grew up in Paris and studied cultural anthropology. She started off in the movie industry aged 16, making sandwiches for Marcello Mastroianni. In 2007, she co-founded Rouge International, producing 25+ films (Fix ME, Mimosas, Raw, Oscar-nominated The Insult and Faces Places). In 2019 she left Rouge and created Easy Riders Films (Mariupolis 2, Crossing, Only Rebels Win) with Omar El Kadi. She recently opened her solo company Sento Films to produce “unrealizable” films.

Eskil Vogt

Eskil Vogt is a two-time Oscar-nominated Norwegian filmmaker. His directing debut Blind (2014) premiered at the Sundance FF where it won the Screenwriting Award. His sophomore effort, The Innocents (2021), premiered at the Cannes FF before going on to win more than 20 international awards. Eskil also collaborates closely with Joachim Trier, co-writing all of Trier’s features since Reprise (2006), including Oslo, August 31st (2011), The Worst Person in the World (2021) and Sentimental Value (2025). Vogt is a directing graduate from La Fémis, the French national film school.

Proxima Jury

Estrella Araiza

Estrella Araiza is the General Director of the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG) and Cineteca UDG, where she has focused on strengthening the presence of Mexican and Latin American cinema across both institutions. Her professional career includes experience as Director of Industry and Market at FICG, as well as work as a sales agent, academic, and film distributor in Mexico. She began her career in international film distribution in 2005, and in 2012 founded her own company, Vendo Cine. Since 2018, she has overseen FICG’s special projects, including the acclaimed exhibition Guillermo del Toro: At Home with My Monsters in Guadalajara.

Dirk Decker

Dirk Decker is a producer and co-founder of Hamburg-based Tamtam Film. Through Tamtam, he works with emerging talents and supports distinctive auteur cinema across fiction and documentary. His productions have premiered at major international festivals. Recent titles include Rain Fell on the Nothing New (Karlovy Vary 2025), Short Summer (Venice 2025, Lion of the Future) and Trial of Hein (Berlinale 2026, Teddy Jury Award).

Jakub Felcman

Jakub Felcman is a Czech screenwriter, festival organizer, film critic, creative producer, director, and qualified plumber. He studied film at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and FAMU, published interviews and film analyses (for Cinepur), programmed film festivals, and co-founded two of them (Ostrava Kamera Oko, Marienbad). As a script editor he collaborated on films by Jan Němec, Petr Václav, Radu Jude, and Corneliu Porumboiu. Cinemas have screened several films that he co-wrote or produced (such as A Night Too Young, A Certain Kind of Silence, and The Wolf from Royal Vineyard Street).

Devika Girish

Devika Girish is editor at Film Comment magazine and a Talks programmer at the New York Film Festival. Her writing also appears in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Sight & Sound, The Criterion Collection, and others, and she has programmed series and festivals for the Criterion Channel, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Film at Lincoln Center, the Mumbai Film Festival, the Berlin Critics’ Week, and more. Devika has been invited to juries at CPH:DOX, the Locarno Film Festival, SEMINCI, and Visions du Réel.

Marija Kavtaradze

Marija Kavtaradze is a Lithuanian director and screenwriter. Graduating from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in 2014, she made her feature debut with Summer Survivors in 2018, which premiered at the Toronto IFF, followed by Slow (2023), which earned her a Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival and had its European premiere at KVIFF in 2023. Marija works as a screenwriter on shorts and feature films, including The Visitor (dir. Vytautas Katkus, KVIFF 2025), Runner (dir. Andrius Blaževičius, KVIFF 2021), the animated TV series BFF for kids, and others. 

It’s been five years since Daniel Craig ended his run as 007 in “No Time to Die,” sending one of the most historic and beloved franchises in movie history into limbo. In February 2025, James Bond went to work for Amazon MGM, who will produce the next film; it has yet to be announced who will step into Bond’s perfectly tailored suits, meaning the world is likely still over a year away from more 007 action. In the meantime, IO Interactive has jumped in to fill the gap in 007 culture with the phenomenal “007 First Light,” an action game that deftly blends elements of the “Hitman” franchise with world-building that feels similar to “Uncharted.” It has a few rough edges, but it’s so consistently entertaining that they’re easy to overlook, especially when one considers this as a foundation being poured for a franchise that could surpass the recent movies when it comes to pure entertainment value.

Fans of films like “Goldeneye” and “Casino Royale” will love how much “First Light” plays like an interactive Bond movie, right down to an opening action sequence that leads into a lavish credits sequence, complete with a new theme song by Lana Del Rey. “First Light” unfolds like an extended Bond film (or what the inevitable Bond streaming series might look like) with varied, gorgeous locations, and even an unexpectedly fun supporting cast that includes Lennie James (“The Walking Dead”), Gemma Chan (“The Eternals”), and believe it or not, Lenny Kravitz.

Patrick Gibson (“Dexter: Original Sin”) plays a 26-year-old James Bond, introduced as a Navy aircrewman on a mission in Iceland when his team is attacked and killed. The only survivor, he collaborates with MI6 to rescue scientists who have been taken captive by a terrorist group seeking a new weapon of mass destruction. Impressing his superiors with his fearlessness, Bond is asked to join the “00” program, coming in a few months after, you guessed it, six other candidates. The tutorial for the gameplay of “First Light” is brilliantly embedded in what plays out like a training montage from an actual James Bond film.

The opening action scene and even the tutorial are fun, but “First Light” truly reveals its excellence with the first mission, which sends Bond, a few of his colleagues named Monroe (Chris O’Reilly) and Cressida (Jessica Rhodes), and his handler John Greenway (James) to track down a rogue agent, 009, who has been spotted at a hotel in Slovakia.

As Bond cases the scene, eavesdropping on conversations and spotting opportunities to track 009, “First Light” echoes the authorship of “Hitman,” a series founded on the idea that missions could be completed in multiple ways, even using booby traps and disguises. It’s a bit more linear than the true open-world missions of recent “Hitman” games, but some of the mechanics are the same, right down to using a Q-watch to set traps or otherwise use the environment to your advantage. Alternating detective work with both melee and gunplay action sequence, ending with an incredible car chase that leads to a plane sequence, “First Light” sets its bar with this first mission and then mostly stays at that high level of entertainment for the next 15 hours or so.

The Slovakia mission goes very wrong, leading to the death of one of Bond’s allies, and sending Bond and Greenway to Mauritania to track the enemy. The plot of “First Light” won’t be spoiled, but it’s classic Bond stuff, including double crosses and action scenes that take place both far from home and right back in the heart of MI6. One of the key villains of “First Light” ends up being an AI pioneer who is using his access and technology to rule the world, giving the games a timeliness that even the Craig movies often dismissed. In a sense, it’s a story of old-fashioned spycraft defeating a tech sector that values profit and power over people. Sure, Bond gets a few Q-designed toys to play with, but his best weapons are still his fists and his silencer.

It’s also a fun reimagining of the Bond persona as a young, reckless spy instead of a mature, suave one. Risk-taking in the name of justice has been a part of some of the best pieces of Bond fiction, but it’s wonderfully embedded in this origin story in that this Bond acts more out of instinct than planning, and the strongest aspect of the writing of “First Light” is how well it performs as an origin story, taking James Bond from heroic aircrewman to recruit to training to superspy. As you develop your gameplay mechanics and abilities, it feels like you’re growing into the 007 character with your avatar.

As for that gameplay, it’s a confident mix of stealth, puzzle-solving, melee combat, and third-person shooting. Many missions can be completed with almost no combat, but there may be times when you want to punch or shoot your way to safety. Melee is smooth and often environmentally enhanced, such as in times when Bond can grab someone and throw them off a ledge or into a glass cabinet. At its core, it follows the “Arkham Asylum” model with punches, dodges, and parries. Gunplay has numerous variables, including being able to shoot weapons out of your enemy’s hands or even take them out at the knees. And if it’s Bond, there must be gadgets, so you’ll also have access to things like a Missile Pen and a Shockwave Camera, which are pretty self-explanatory.

“First Light” isn’t perfect. Some of the in-game graphics can be a bit janky, and even the cutscenes don’t look quite as polished as they should in 2026, at least on PS5. The settings are wonderfully varied from a luxury resort in Vietnam to an evil research lab atop a snowy mountain, but a close look reveals a bit of repetitive flatness in the character and environment design. These are elements that feel like they’ll be easily enhanced in future installments, as will the occasional bit of repetitive gameplay and the sense that there’s a bit too much exposition delivered via walk-and-talk sequences.

“007 First Light” is an action video game that’s designed to recall things that players have loved before from the Bond movies to “Uncharted” set pieces to “Hitman” gameplay, but it combines these things in a way that makes them feel fresh and new again. Everything that holds it back from Game of the Year status feels like something that will be ironed out in an inevitable sequel.

Of course, the game ends with a “James Bond Will Return” promise. Not soon enough.

The publisher provided a review copy of this title, played on PS5. It is now available.

An exploration of those internal impulses we don’t always understand ourselves and the impact that they can have on our lives, filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler‘s third feature film, “The Currents,” follows Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola), an Argentinian designer in the aftermath of a drastic decision. While in Switzerland accepting an award, she flees the ceremony and soon finds herself with the urge to jump into a frozen river. Surviving the fall, she heads back to her home in Buenos Aires with a debilitating fear of water, something she does not share with her husband (Esteban Bigliardi). 

Growing increasingly isolated, Lina slowly distances herself from everything she once held dear—her career, her husband, and even her 5-year-old daughter, Sofía (Emma Fayo Duerte). Will she ever find her way back?

Born in Argentina in 1977, Mumenthaler was raised in Switzerland, where her family immigrated during the country’s military dictatorship. Mumenthaler has directed numerous short films and three acclaimed feature films, all of which, in one way or another, explore the intimacy and interiority of women’s lives.

Her debut feature film, “Back to Stay,” about sisters grieving the loss of the grandmother who raised them, won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2011. Her follow-up feature, “The Idea of a Lake,” explores the fragmentation of memory through the story of a photographer who finds a photograph of her father, which inspires her to revisit his mysterious disappearance during the dictatorship. 

Her latest film, “The Currents,” premiered at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival and went on to screen at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and the Chicago International Film Festival. In her three-star review of the film, Sheila O’Malley writes that “‘The Currents’’s willingness to suggest, rather than show, to create echoes rather than draw verbal conclusions is the film’s main source of power.” 

For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Mumenthaler over Zoom and via a translator about the image that inspired her film, her exploration of dissociation and of navigating our many selves, her use of music by Gustav Holst, and her making of films that generate questions rather than offering answers.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This is such an emotional film, and I wondered what the initial kernel of inspiration was. Was there a question, an emotion, an image, or a feeling that you developed this story from?

At the beginning of this project, there was a picture, an image where I was going along the edge of the Rhône in Geneva, and all of a sudden, I imagined a woman throwing herself into the freezing water. It was an image that stuck with me for some time. It started out as an image that raised many questions about who this woman was, whether she was aware of what she had done, or whether her body had spoken for her. 

There’s something very intimate about working so much based on the character herself, putting me in her shoes or in her skin, and trying to be very perceptive and to really see where this condition she’s in takes her. Being actively adrift. I think that turns it into a very sensorial movie where you can really feel what the character sees or hears.

It very much feels like a film that’s trying to represent the feeling of disassociation. Did you research disassociation, or was this more of an intuitive exploration of that process and way of being?

There was a bit of both. There was a formal process in which I worked with a psychoanalyst throughout the filmmaking process, and I also leaned on readings more closely connected to neurology and psychology. But beyond that, I think there is something where, for anyone, the film’s character has a more existential conflict that becomes more evident after the event that puts a life in danger. All of us can ask ourselves, are there other possible lives for us? Can we just split off? Disappear? Or reinvent ourselves? 

Those questions are very much at the forefront right now. Lina is clearly someone who asks herself all those questions and even allows herself to physically go through that process. But she also has a very important anchor in her daughter. I think motherhood is what keeps her grounded, what keeps her present, and ultimately leads her to stay. 

For her work and her family, she is known as Lina, but with her friend, she is Cata. She is at once two different people. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that character’s attempt to blend those two lives, and whether you think it’s possible for someone to be multiple people at once. 

In the film, she is Cata, but Cata refers more to a past life, and Lina refers to her current life. Lina is someone who has moved between social classes. I think that in order to exist, she has to leave Cata behind and transform herself into Lina. So, for me, one of her biggest crises has to do with a sense of belonging, and how she doesn’t really feel like either Cata or Lina. So deep down, the question is, who is she really? 

I do think we can all be different people. I think each of us changes depending on where we are and what circles we move around in. Because in all of them, we are perceived differently as well. So, in that dynamic of relationships, we change. You are never the same person within your family because assigned and unassigned roles make us act or speak in certain ways; perhaps in another environment, we become different people with different roles. 

We don’t always occupy the same role in every space. We always present ourselves differently, or we always can, and we appear differently as well. And while all of this is going on, inside we’re still another person entirely, and I think the film talks a lot about precisely that tension between the objective outward appearance and the intimate subjective inner self.

You mentioned her daughter as an anchor for her, but obviously, her mother is another big factor in psychology and is maybe pulling her, like you said, back to her previous life. That tension she has with her mom might be holding her back a bit. Her mother and her daughter are such different anchors, both pulling her in such different directions at the end.

From the very beginning, there is this sense that, in some way, all roads lead back to her mother. When she sees the embroidery, and when she gets lost in that theatre where they’re doing the photoshoot, or later, of the lighthouse as well, when we find ourselves in front of that house without yet knowing what that house is as a viewer. Every path leads to the mother, in a way. Her mother is a bit like the seed of this story, or at least of what Lina is going through. In order for Lina to exist for herself, she had to flee from her mother’s house. When you have a mother who is so fragile and so consumed by her mental illness, there is an abandonment of the people who are near to her. 

Lina, in that sense, returns to her mother’s house to seek answers. I don’t think she finds them there, but the place she goes in search of answers ultimately affirms her in her own motherhood and allows her to stay beside her daughter without repeating what her mother did. She differentiates herself. On this note, many times in family relationships, even when we can be very critical of the relationship or family dynamics, those reference points remain, and we involuntarily end up falling into the same behaviors and attitudes as the people we may have critiqued.

I wanted to ask about the use of Gustav Holst’s “Venus, The Bringer of Peace.” It’s such a beautiful, calming piece of music, which contrasts with the very chaotic interiority Lina is going through at this moment. How did you land on that piece of music?

The moments when the “Venus” piece is used for the music, we knew the piece needed to have certain characteristics, and first it had to be something that moves you forward, a theme or a piece that feels like it’s going somewhere. Because some music is more repetitive or more rhythmic, while other pieces carry you toward a destination, so to speak.

It also had to contain a certain fairy-tale-like quality. Lina, in this active drifting state that she’s in throughout the film, has something very playful about her. In the sense of giving herself up to the experience, surrendering herself to the experience, to see what happens. To me, these elements represent Lina’s state very well. There’s tension because she doesn’t know, right? Just as her body suddenly spoke and threw her into the freezing water, she didn’t know what might happen next. 

There’s also nostalgia, because I think that Lina is a deeply nostalgic character throughout the film. It’s a representation of how she sees the world. So you feel that nostalgia when she’s looking at the embroidery or watching the woman make the corset. These are all activities that come from a totally different rhythm of life, very different from her work, that chaotic, frantic pace of her everyday life. I think that Lina carries that nostalgia within herself. 

Then there is the playful side. She’s not trying to find a concrete answer to the question “Well, what exactly is wrong with me?” She isn’t looking for a definitive diagnosis. She lets herself be carried away, and there’s something playful in that. A kind of “let’s see what happens.” But then there’s also a side of courage to it. 

So when we started looking for the music, I had all of those elements in the forefront of my mind. We would start listening to pieces, and we say, “Well, not this one because it doesn’t have that fairytale feeling,” or “Not this one” because it lacks something else. When we heard “Venus” by Gustav Holst, it was perfect. It reflected Lina’s emotional state exactly.

There are so many different interpretations that you can take from this film, depending on your own perspective on the character, on your own perspective on modern life. Do you have any hopes for what people might take away for their own lives after watching your film?

I don’t know if I’d say I want people to take something specific away, but I do think cinema should be a place for reflection or for carrying something with you afterward. Not necessarily forever, but at least for a little while, leaving you, as a viewer, asking yourself some questions. So that’s the spirit in which I make my films. 

My films ask for an active, involved viewer. Not in the sense that they’re demanding something from the audience, but in the sense of leaving space for the viewer to do something with what they’ve seen, instead of giving them every single answer. I don’t want the film to end and for it to simply be “Oh, okay. That’s what it meant. That was the message. That’s it.” 

Deep down, we are mysterious people, and there aren’t answers for everything. I like that we have mystery inside ourselves. Mystery has always been part of humanity, and I think it is important to make films that generate questions rather than answers or conclusions. 

Are there any filmmakers who are women or films that are made by women that have either inspired you, or that you think are really cool and you think other readers should seek out?

For many years, while working on this film, I made a conscious decision to read women authors. So, in some way, the film and I are defined by the stories women tell. Then, specifically for this project, it was about immersing myself in a world closely connected to how women perceive it through literature. 

But there is also an American director that I really like, Kelly Reichardt. I like her way of working, where there is always something almost Chekovian underneath, something quietly happening beneath the surface, but you don’t really know what exactly. She manages to create tension throughout her films like that, and I find that really interesting and fascinating. 

“Jinsei is a swan. You can go anywhere. You can do whatever you like,” muses the guilt-ridden Hiroshi (Shohei Uno) to his wayward, blue-haired stepson (Ace Cool) in writer-director Suzuki Ryuya’s animated feature Jinsei (which translates to “life” in Japanese). Hiroshi’s words of wisdom are as good a summation as any of this scrappy film, which blurs the borders of irony and sincerity beyond distinction. This brooding, disaffected character study is a singularly odd, messy, and haunting portrait of detachment.

Employing a squiggly, semi-manga digital art style redolent of Flash animation, Jinsei starts in the mid-1990s with an Up-like montage showing the protagonist’s family, birth, early childhood, and the traumatic loss of his biological parents in an accident—all framed in match cuts from the perspective of the family car. The film then proceeds through a chronological series of chapters named after different monikers—insults, nicknames, stage names, and more—that the main character goes by in different periods of his life. His true name is never spoken.

Rendered selectively mute by his trauma, our protagonist is brought up by the earnest but impotent Hiroshi and cruelly bullied by schoolmates, until a schoolyard fight leads to a tender, homoerotic friendship with fair-haired transfer student, Kin (Tanaka Taketo). Kin introduces his new friend to his obsession: the world of pop-idol boy bands. It’s one of the first and only experiences to make him speak out loud, when he lets out an awestruck “cool.”

As the 2010s arrive and his father’s wealthy estranged family and Hiroshi fight over custody of him, our hero and Kin chase dreams of idoldom, with the film exploring the two boys’ bond and the hidden costs of fame as they toil their way up the youth showbiz ladder. Everyone agrees, including the sinister record mogul (Tsuda Kanji) who recruits the boys into a band, that the protagonist has something special, an intangible aura of greatness, as he performs floppy dance moves with fewer animation frames than the average South Park character.

But Jinsei, like life, is often defined by violent swerves and unpredictable outcomes. As the timeline of events approaches the real-world present, Suzuki audaciously burns down the film’s dramatic scaffolding, reconfiguring the story into a series of increasingly disjointed, genre-defying, and surreal vignettes. And as traumas and triumphs seem to fall into his lap—and he variously assumes the roles of hermit, celebrity, husband, and demigod—our impassive lead continues to lash out in acts of jarring violence that derail his life, and in sync with the film resetting the board in a new time and place. The older the protagonist gets, the faster time passes and the more confusing, colorful, and angular the world seems to become, en route to a quietly apocalyptic, watercolor-tinged finale reminiscent of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.

While the alienating collapse of conventional plot structure and increasingly haphazard later episodes may be at least partly the result of an amateur filmmaker rushing toward a self-imposed deadline, it’s also reflective of Jinsei’s central theme. From the simple grayscale textures to the flat, symmetrical compositions (Suzuki favors rigid, single-subject profile shots), the film constructs a certain ironic distance from its earnest, evocatively scored theatrics. Its glassy-eyed protagonist likewise remains ambiguously torn between emotion and detachment, tumbling seemingly without even noticing into depths of degradation and heights of greatness in an absurd and senseless world, a man in fragments forever haunted by his stolen childhood.

The storytelling is similarly fragmentary. Key plot details, such as the backstory of the main character’s father, are implied through bits of dialogue and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it montage shots. Suzuki’s existential vision may tend toward the solipsistic, with its emphasis on the protagonist’s extreme suffering, specialness, and nihilistic apathy, but that unfiltered angst splattered on the screen combines with a subtle eye for psychological detail. Deeply felt and personal in its bittersweet ruminations on loneliness, pain, and destiny, Jinsei is an idiosyncratic and impressive debut by a fiercely independent artist eager to take on the world.

The post ‘Jinsei’ Review: Suzuki Ryuya’s Singularly Odd, Messy, and Haunting Portrait of Detachment appeared first on Slant Magazine.

As I type this review there are two horror films dominating the box office news, Curry Barker’s Obsession – which just tipped over $100 million on a budget of around $750 thousand- and Kane Parson’s Backrooms – a film that just hit $85 million a week behind the former film on a budget around $10 million. The media is salivating (and rightfully so) over these small budget wonders from young filmmakers who cut their teeth on YouTube and managed to get picked up by  A24 and Focus Features for their debut theatrical features. But this is only a small part of the story of low budget filmmaking in 2026. For every Obsession, there are dozens of micro budget films being released directly to VOD with…

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com…]

The Tribeca Festival is back and celebrates its 25th year! Taking place June 3 – 14, it will feature new titles from filmmakers such as Julian Schnabel, Katie Holmes, David Wain, Sophia Takal, Drake Doremus, and more. There’s also a […]

The post HTN’s 10 Most Anticipated Films of Tribeca 2026 appeared first on Hammer to Nail.