My review of Andrew Haigh’s *A Long Winter*, a beautifully crafted but dramatically conventional family drama set in Colorado and filmed in the Canadian Rockies. Starring Fred Hechinger, Caitríona Balfe, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Kit Connor, the film follows a young man searching for his missing mother as her absence exposes the emotional fractures within his family. André Turpin’s extraordinary cinematography transforms the snowy mountains into an expressive landscape of loneliness, memory, and longing. Yet despite its accomplished production, sensitive performances, and visual elegance, the film’s familiar narrative and overly insistent soundtrack prevent it from achieving the emotional intensity its setting promises.
Written and directed by Lee Chang-dong, Possible Love contains many of the elements of a potentially fascinating film: class, marriage, labour conflict, trauma, envy, grief, and the uneasy relationship between private pain and public representation. Its central setup is strong. Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) and Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) are trying to move on from the trauma of a disastrous labour dispute when they are approached by Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), an ambitious and rich documentary filmmaker whose project gradually draws them into the orbit of her and her wealthy husband, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung).
The film’s most interesting idea is the role of rehearsal itself. The actors repeat scenes, gestures, lines, and emotional beats, constantly trying to refine them and get closer to something more truthful. Outside the theatre, however, life offers no such possibility. It cannot be repeated, corrected, or perfected. That contrast becomes particularly powerful through the film’s main character, Jimmy George, played by Rami Malek, who is living with AIDS and for whom the play may represent one of his final experiences on stage. Rehearsal therefore acquires a different emotional weight: it is no longer simply about perfecting a performance, but about time, mortality, and the desire to hold on to something that is already slipping away.
My review of Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s *La Bola Negra*, a visually audacious Spanish film exploring nearly a century of queer history through poetry, theatre, cinema, and cultural memory. Its elaborate mise-en-scène and ambitious structure create a powerful tribute to generations whose lives and desires were shaped by repression and silence. Yet the film’s fragmented storytelling sometimes undermines its emotional impact, while its representation of homosexuality remains largely confined to suffering and tragedy. Despite its impressive artistic achievements and enthusiastic reception at TIFF 2026, *La Bola Negra* is a film I admire more for how it tells its story than for the story it ultimately chooses to tell.
by Hudson Moura TIFF’s Short Cuts 2026 Programme 01 brings together six films that are very different in tone and form, but…
Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, Bitter Christmas unfolds across two temporal planes, 2004 and 2026, and develops one of the filmmaker’s most self-reflexive ideas: the way writers and directors transform the lives of people around them into fiction. The film follows two filmmakers whose creative processes become entangled with grief, love, ambition, and the ethical dangers of artistic appropriation.
My review of Gabriel Martins’ *On Behalf of My Son* (*Vicentina Pede Desculpas*), an extraordinarily moving Brazilian drama about grief, responsibility, and the limits of forgiveness. Featuring a remarkable performance by Rejane Faria, the film follows a mother who travels across the city to apologize to families devastated by her son’s actions. Through intimate encounters, restrained performances, and a striking contrast between urban noise and personal suffering, Martins creates a powerful meditation on guilt, human connection, and the impossibility of repairing certain tragedies. Premiering at TIFF 2026, the film transforms the simple act of asking forgiveness into an emotionally profound cinematic experience.
The film’s strongest decision is to remain almost completely attached to Stan’s point of view. Rather than approaching the hospital through doctors or medical staff, as so many medical dramas do, L’autre stays with the patient’s unstable perception, shaped by a confusing mixture of fear, pain, medication, vulnerability, and anxiety. Stan is immobilized, heavily medicated, struggling to adapt to his prosthesis, and gradually becoming less certain about what is happening around him. Morphine, nightmares, hallucinations, and physical suffering begin to distort his perception, making the hospital itself increasingly difficult to read.
My review of Simon Stone’s *Elsinore*, one of the most moving films at TIFF 2026, featuring an extraordinary performance by Andrew Scott as Scottish actor Ian Charleson. Facing the final stages of AIDS, Charleson chooses to perform Hamlet rather than allow illness to define his remaining life. Combining humour, theatrical camaraderie, queer history, and emotional restraint, the film explores artistic creation as an affirmation of existence. With an outstanding ensemble, including Olivia Colman, *Elsinore* offers a profoundly human portrayal of mortality that celebrates life without diminishing the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic.
My review of Cristian Mungiu’s *Fjord*, a politically provocative and remarkably restrained drama starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve. Set in Norway, the film follows a Romanian-Norwegian family confronting child-protection authorities as religious beliefs, cultural traditions, and competing moral convictions collide. Through its deliberately observational style and procedural narrative, Mungiu examines the limits of tolerance in societies that consider themselves progressive, questioning how institutional authority can transform disagreement into exclusion. Intellectually challenging and emotionally restrained, *Fjord* refuses easy moral judgments, inviting audiences to confront the uncomfortable complexity of cultural differences, parental authority, and the necessity of dialogue.
My review of *Call My Agent! The Movie*, a delightful continuation of the internationally successful French series *Dix pour cent*. Five years after the original finale, the former ASK agents reunite in a new professional landscape, with Andréa (Camille Cottin) now confronting the chaos of filmmaking. Featuring familiar characters, outrageous celebrity appearances, and the series’ unmistakable humour, the movie successfully recaptures the charm of its wonderfully flawed protagonists. Rather than merely exploiting nostalgia or repeating old formulas, it gives these beloved characters new opportunities to collide, evolve, and remind us why their personal and professional disorder was always the heart of the series.
Drunken Noodles is therefore an intriguing but uneven film. At its best, Castro captures queer desire as something ephemeral, sensual, poetic, and imagined, moving between what is lived and what may only be fantasized. Unfortunately, the later segments never fully match the freshness, intimacy, and complexity of the film’s beginning.
With its precise compositions, controlled rhythm, and refusal of melodramatic excess, Minotaur is a remarkably cohesive film. Zvyagintsev uses a seemingly familiar story of marital suspicion to explore something far more intimate: how loneliness, affection, jealousy, and love persist even when the world around us appears to be coming apart. The war may shape the atmosphere, but the real battlefield remains emotional.
The film is extraordinarily moving because it rarely gives the viewer emotional distance. The camera remains close to the characters, and the performances are remarkably strong: Emmanuel Macchia as Pierre and Valentin Campagne as Francis, who jointly received the Best Actor award at Cannes 2026, anchor the film with an intense and affecting chemistry. Around them, the story moves through a continuous series of emotional shifts—fear, tenderness, humour, desire, grief, and brief moments of freedom. The ensemble surrounding Pierre and Francis is especially effective, giving the world of the camp an intensity that often feels like a film within the film.
My review of Karim Aïnouz’s *Rosebush Pruning*, a visually elegant and provocatively absurd family drama written by Efthimis Filippou and inspired by Marco Bellocchio’s *Fists in the Pocket*. Set within an extraordinarily wealthy and dysfunctional family living in Spain, the film explores narcissism, sexual obsession, cruelty, inherited privilege, and the disturbing rituals that hold its members together. With striking cinematography and a deliberately grotesque sense of humour, Aïnouz creates a world in which eccentricity becomes ordinary. Yet the accumulation of bizarre behaviours sometimes overwhelms the dramatic substance, making the film more fascinating for its absurdity than for the characters inhabiting it.
My review of Adrian Chiarella’s *Leviticus* (2026), a powerful Australian queer horror film that transforms religious repression, homophobia, and forbidden desire into a terrifying supernatural experience. Following two teenage boys pursued by an entity that assumes the appearance of those they desire most, the film explores how shame and social condemnation can turn intimacy into fear. More than a conventional horror story, *Leviticus* offers a disturbing and psychologically compelling examination of the consequences of internalized hatred and the belief that desire itself must be exorcised.
Louis Leterrier’s The Last House begins with a simple but unsettling premise: one rainy day, houses suddenly become sealed, trapping everyone inside. No one can leave, and no one from outside can enter. The rain itself appears to be more than a natural phenomenon, because anything the inhabitants attempt to break—walls, windows, floors—is mysteriously restored to its original state. As the days pass, Wagner Moura’s family is forced to create new routines, ration supplies, and make increasingly difficult decisions while trying to understand what has happened to the world beyond their walls.
One Night Only may be one of the goofiest and most consistently funny romantic comedies in recent memory. Gluck embraces absurdity rather than trying to make the premise feel realistic, and the film benefits enormously from that choice. It is light, fast, playful, and genuinely entertaining, while Turner and Barbaro provide enough chemistry to keep the romance alive beneath the farce. Sometimes a title tells you everything you need to know—and One Night Only delivers exactly the wild, romantic, and very funny night it promises.
Across four very different streaming series, action, crime, sexuality, violence, and institutional power collide with uneven results, from the efficient adrenaline of Elite Force (GIGN) to the squandered potential of Jogada de Risco, the disturbing moral darkness of Furious, and the unfocused erotic paranoia of The Shards.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day pushes the franchise further away from the traditional superhero spectacle and toward something lighter, younger, and more openly shaped by teenage identity, romance, and self-acceptance. The familiar idea that “with great power comes great responsibility” remains present, but here it is filtered through a story about difference, control, and the pressure to define who you are in relation to institutions that claim to protect society while also seeking to regulate those who do not fit within its norms.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026), written for the screen from Homer’s epic, arrives with all the expectations that inevitably accompany one of the filmmaker’s large-scale productions. Yet despite the magnitude of the source material and the evident ambition of the adaptation, the film surprisingly lacks much of the force normally associated with Nolan’s cinema. His most recognizable signatures—the propulsive montage, the manipulation of temporal and spatial perception, and the overwhelming use of sound as a dramatic force—feel considerably less distinctive here. The result is a film that is undeniably large in scale but strangely less powerful in cinematic presence.




















