by Elisa Giudici Leonardo Sbaraglia stars in 'BITTER CHRISTMAS' Pedro Almodóvar has spent the last few years stripping away the protective layers between himself and his cinema. Ever since Pain and Glory, his films have stopped merely borrowing from autobiography and started openly feeding on it. The characters no longer resemble fragments of the director; they practically announce themselves as extensions of him. Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad) pushes that process to an almost uncomfortable…

Vitals Al Pacino as Will Dormer, shrewd but increasingly sleepy LAPD detective Northern Alaska, June 2002 Film: Insomnia Release Date: May 22, 2002 Director: Christopher Nolan Costume Designer: Tish Monaghan WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Background By this time in mid-May, towns like Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow) in the northern tip of Alaska are experiencing the midnight sun, typically lasting 83 days from May 10th or 11th through the beginning of August. The mid-June setting of Insomnia—to date, the…

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As part of the Fritzes Best Interfaces award for 2026, I am reviewing the interfaces in Star Trek: Section 31. This post is about the mission briefer. When HQ needs a team to get moving, they send a mission briefer. (n.b. Ths is my term. They don’t mention it by name in the movie.) This little faceted matte-black pod is the size of an orange with one flat side. Rest it on a surface, and when an authorized person long-touches the top, it spins open like a lotus flower. A lens rises up and emits…

Jack Ryan: Ghost War (2026) • View trailer2.5 stars (out of five); rated R, for violence and profoanityAvailable via: Amazon PrimeBy Derrick Bang This seems to be the week for popular streaming shows to spawn feature-length films. I hope the Mandalorian and Grogu are treated with more respect. When a tightly planned operation goes horribly wrong, CIA Deputy Director Greer(Wendell Pierce, center) must be restrained by MI6 operative Emma Marlow(Sienna Miller) and veteran CIA agent Jack Ryan (John…

This is David, your semi-professional internet-shrinker so that it neatly fits into your inbox. You're reading the Weekly Filet, the newsletter for curious minds who love when something makes them go «Huh, I never thought of it this way!». As every Friday, I'm here to help you make sense of what’s happening, and imagine what could be. Ready?1. A Question of Margin«We’re shrinking the board on which we play the sublime game of being human.» Bill McKibben provides a useful lens through which to…

by Cláudio Alves Adèle Exarchopoulos won a César for Jeanne Herry's ALL YOUR FACES. Will her new collaboration with the director, presently at Cannes, produce similar results? The 2026 Cannes Film Festival is drawing to a close, so I should probably hurry up with this corresponding Cannes at Home program. In the past few days, a number of titles have come and gone on the Croisette, most of them eliciting wildly divisive reactions. Nobody seems to agree on the merits of Na Hong-jin’s Hope, and…

It is a bit sad to me to watch the ending of the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Tonight will be his final show. Of all the current late show hosts, he’s the one I have found to be the classiest and wittiest. Watching David Letterman and Colbert together from last week’s show made me laugh a lot! Excited for what he is doing next – writing a Lord of the Rings movie directed by Peter Jackson.Of all the clips I’ve seen of Colbert, this one is my favorite.

by Elisa Giudici Cate Blanchett. Photo © Elisa Giudici Cate Blanchett came to Cannes ostensibly to spotlight the Displacement Film Fund, the initiative she co-founded with the UNHCR to support displaced filmmakers and stories about forced migration. But the conversation quickly expanded into something broader: a sharp, funny, deeply thoughtful reflection on acting, authorship, AI, artistic risk, and the changing state of cinema itself...

A classic investigation board (of conjoined twins) appears in Two [Dos] (dir. Mar Targarona, 2021). ▲ Two [Dos] (dir. Mar Targarona, 2021) ▲ Two [Dos] (dir. Mar Targarona, 2021) ▲ Two [Dos] (dir. Mar Targarona, 2021)

I join Guy Walker and Rob Heath for a look at twistedly comic mid-nineties British horror film that fell completely off the radar - and possibly with good reason - The Young Poisoner's Handbook.

I figure it’s time for me to review the big Wuthering Heights movie — no,

Historical predictions from the Scottish Nostradamus.

"How do you reconcile something so tragic, yet something that has brought fame?" A documentary that proposes that Nick Ut, photographer of “The Terror of War” (aka Napalm Girl), may not have actually taken the photo. Instead it seems like it was taken by a ‘stringer’ (a local freelancer, in journo speak)—Nguyễn Thành Nghệ. There’s a half decent case to be made here—indeed we can see some discrepancies in the timeline, and as to who was where and when. There’s also an analysis that suggests the…

ein lichtstreifen am horizont, ein aufatmen nach monaten jobsuche albtraum

Day 12 in Tokyo. Asanoyama and Kotozakura are kyujo. Kotoeiho and Churanoumi will receive default wins. I also wanted to bring up the kyujo of Yumenofuji now that more information has been made available. On Day 10, Yumenofuji fought Tsurubayashi and suffered a hard fall as both men crashed from the dohyo. He was not … Continue reading Natsu 2026: Day Twelve

NIGHT WORLD (1932), an entertaining 58-minute pre-Code from Universal Pictures, has just been released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber Studio Classics.The movie, directed by Hobart Henley, starts with a fantastic opening montage of nighttime in New York City.The screenplay, written by Richard Schayer from a story by P.J. Wolfson and Allen Rivkin, then zeroes in on one specific place, a nightclub run by Happy MacDonald (Boris Karloff) and his unfaithful wife Jill (Dorothy Revier).A great deal happens…

by Elisa Giudici FJORD from Cristian Mungiu Cristian Mungiu has built an entire career around moral instability, yet Fjord feels particularly thorny. The Romanian filmmaker’s latest Cannes Competition entry begins as a family drama rooted in a real-life custody case before gradually revealing itself as something much larger and far more uncomfortable: a film about the impossibility of reconciling competing moral systems inside supposedly enlightened societies. The Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker…

“This is going to be a copyright nightmare. If you’re watching this in theaters, thank your lucky stars.” Annoying handicam fake-doc transforms into a very good Back to the Future ripoff. Narratively goes through great lengths only to loop around itself and accomplish nothing. I laughed for five straight minutes during the CN Tower lightning rod sequence. Calum Marsh: It didn’t surprise me to realize that this movie was largely built around unused webseries footage, because they have so much…

StarringKarl Urban, Jack Quaid, Antony Starr, Erin Moriarty, Laz AlonsoOverviewNever meet your heroes.A group of vigilantes known informally as “The Boys” set out to take down corrupt superheroes with no more than blue-collar grit and a willingness to fight dirty.Review: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ (85% Community)It’s unfair to judge the quality of a series solely on the finale, but it’s also hard to ignore a bad finale and consider the entity of the show. The finale here was bad, it wrapped everything up in tidy…

The first recording today is What’s New Scooby-Doo? – It’s Mean, it’s Green, it’s the Mystery Machine. The Mystery Machine seems to be possessed, as it starts driving on its own, first to chase Shaggy and Scooby, then when they’re driving along a rather dangerous road. They check with the mechanic who recently fixed it. He tells them everything was fine when he worked on it, but he also offers them money to buy it from them. They follow an oil trail to a house, and there they find Susan…

Watched at the bar on mute, this appeared to be quite bad. The director was a real 90s Guy, starting out with Erik Estrada and David Carradine then breaking through with Tom Berenger and Billy Zane. The editor did Miller’s Crossing and the DP did Jaws, but the writers did Turner & Hooch and Legal Eagles, and the lure of dodgy CG and a crazed Jon Voight as the villain dragged this down. The entire cast would make quick recoveries (Out of Sight, Three Kings, Heat Vision & Jack, Mr. Jealousy,…

by Cláudio Alves Long before he was selected for the Cannes Main Competition, Rodrigo Sorogoyen became an Oscar nominee with his MOTHER short film. The race for the Palme is heating up… is what you’d assume we’d be saying by the time half the Main Competition had screened. However, this year isn’t like most years at Cannes. Or maybe, it’s an edition where issues that have prevailed for years are finally becoming too noticeable to politely ignore. Thierry Frémaux’s favorite auteurs aren’t…

Bulletproof Monk (2003)

If you want to see Food Network's Tournament of Champions: All Star Christmas season 2 filmed in person, it's filming even though the holiday season is half a year away.

If asked to name a great film about filmmaking, I would imagine that most people will likely mention at least one of the following: Day For Night, Sunset Blvd, 8½, Singin’ In The Rain, The Bad And The Beautiful, The Player, Once Upon A Time In America, Postcards From The Edge, A Star Is Born, Ed Wood etc. I think that few, if any at all, would mention Shooting Stars(1928). This little-known British silent, with its playful title which has two completely different meanings, is not only one of…

As I mentioned last time, The Curse of Capistrano was adapted to film in The Mark of Zorro (1920), the first of Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s swashbuckling historical adventure films. (Most of these early productions are in public domain and easy to find on YouTube or other streaming services.) The Fairbanks movie follows the plot of the novel fairly closely, aside from revealing Zorro’s identity to the audience much earlier, after his first fight sequence. It also changes Don Diego’s surname from…

MEKANECK — HEROIC HUMAN PERISCOPE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE (MATTEL) Did you guys hear that the Masters of the Universe movie bombed at the box office? Isn’t that crazy, what with it not being out in theaters for another two weeks and all? Feels like actually letting the movie come out in theaters *might* be an essential part of how it does in said theaters, but what do I know; I’m just a guy who writes about toys. While the last Masters movie was pretty sparse on the colorful denizens of Eternia…

The Epic of Gilgamesh isn’t a natural choice for the subject of a short animated film, but that’s what we have here, the first directorial effort by Czech film-maker and TV director Pavel Aujezdský. I’ve never read the Sumerian saga so I’m in no position to judge the success of Aujezdský’s adaptation, but given the strange and confusing nature of the opening scenes I’d guess it helps to be acquainted with the story. The scenes that follow are more straightforward, depicting a journey by the…

Mariner’s conspiracy board from Star Trek: Lower Decks s01e05 [NST #436] appears in full in The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks (IDW, 2026). ▲ The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks (IDW, 2026), pages 100-101