Media, Art, and Culture ISSN 1918-4026 Intermedias Review is an independent publication based on reviews of art, media, and their interconnections. We…
This year’s edition features 293 titles and filmmakers from nearly 30 countries, with more than 60 films across the Gala and Special Presentations programmes. Among the major attractions are new works by Pedro Almodóvar, Danny Boyle, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Cristian Mungiu, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Lukas Dhont, Mike Leigh, and Gael García Bernal, alongside high-profile premieres such as Siân Heder’s opening-night film Being Heumann, Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky, and the closing-night Canadian production Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend.
Karim Aïnouz’s Rosebush Pruning, written by Efthimis Filippou and based on Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket, begins in deceptively elegant fashion. On a beach, Edward Taylor (Callum Turner) gives etiquette and fashion advice to George, a doctor attending a medical conference, while the blue sea stretches behind them and Edward’s narration immediately establishes his peculiar worldview. He is fascinated by aphorisms such as “People are roses, families are rosebushes. Rosebushes need pruning,” and for him rosebushes are not merely a metaphor but almost erotically charged, an early indication that this family inhabits a world governed by eccentricity, obsession, and unsettling desires.
Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus (Australia, 2026) announces its horror dimension immediately. From its opening sequence, the film establishes an atmosphere of estrangement, suffering, violence, and death, suggesting that something profoundly disturbing inhabits this small and intensely religious Australian town. That presence gradually takes hold of young people, pushing them toward erratic, frightening, and increasingly dangerous behaviour. Yet the film quickly makes clear that the real horror may not reside only in a supernatural force, but in the hatred, repression, and fear already embedded within the community itself. The film consequently blurs the distinction between supernatural possession and socially imposed repression, suggesting that the most damaging form of possession may be the internalization of a community’s hatred. Chiarella transforms sexual repression into horror imagery with considerable force, making the film not simply a story about teenagers escaping an evil presence, but about the terrifying consequences of turning desire into sin and difference into something that 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.
Spielberg mixes action and science-fiction fantasy with a surprisingly strong spiritual dimension. The film’s most interesting idea is that the true “disclosure” may not simply be the confirmation of another civilization, but the possibility of humanity becoming more conscious of itself. The unknown becomes something that must be approached rather than immediately feared.
More than a showcase, the festival offers audiences a chance to encounter the distinct ways Indigenous filmmakers are appropriating cinema on their own terms, adapting the medium to particular storytelling traditions that often challenge dominant conventions of editing, pace, rhythm, characterization, and narrative progression. What emerges through these films is not a single model of Indigenous cinema, but a rich field of aesthetic forms and political perspectives, where territory, family, history, and survival are constantly being rethought on screen.
Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious is a deliberately old-style kung fu action film that embraces the pleasures of the genre with little hesitation. It recalls the kinds of films that made martial arts cinema such a sensation in the 1970s: lean on plot, rich in physical confrontation, punctuated by comic touches, and driven above all by the choreography of combat. In that sense, the film feels like a throwback to the tradition that Quentin Tarantino has so openly admired and reworked in Kill Bill. From its opening sequence, The Furious makes its priorities clear: kung-fu action is not an accessory here but the very essence of the film, the force that defines its rhythm, tone, and identity. The action sequences are immensely entertaining, driven by fast-paced editing that slightly accelerates the characters’ movements, heightening the action while giving it a comic, almost cartoonish quality.
Although Inside Out presents a broad range of voices and identities, it should not automatically be described as a “queer film festival” in the stronger countercultural sense of the term. Rather, its programming seems closer to what film theorists call a negotiation between traditionalist and queer strategies, and, in this case, it often leans toward a more accessible 2SLGBTQ+ festival model that privileges polished, audience-friendly, and emotionally legible stories over formally radical or politically disruptive queer cinema.
Cannes 2026 appears as a festival that not only celebrated world cinema, but also reaffirmed its role as a major space for artistic reflection, film community debate, and urgent political discussion. It was a festival where auteur cinema, geopolitical crisis, feminist questions, queer visibility, technological anxiety, and cinematic memory all converged. If Cannes sometimes seems caught between tradition and reinvention, this edition showed that this tension is precisely what keeps it central: it remains one of the few places where cinema is still discussed not only as entertainment or industry, but as a global cultural force capable of thinking through the present.
One of the film’s strengths is that it fully justifies its title. Grogu has a much more influential role here than in much of the series, and the relationship between him and Din Djarin becomes one of the film’s central pleasures. The dynamic is subtly rebalanced: it is no longer only the older protector caring for the child, but also, in some sense, the young caring for the old. This gives the film warmth and emotional continuity, and it confirms that the bond between the two characters remains the beating heart of the franchise.
Hot Docs 2026 emerges as a festival where documentary cinema proves its continuing power to confront the present, revisit the past, and reclaim voices too often marginalized or distorted. Through films that move between global crises and intimate histories, the festival affirms documentary not only as a form of record, but as a vital practice of inquiry, resistance, and cultural memory.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is watchable largely because of its cast, and especially because Emily Blunt keeps its wit alive whenever she appears. But as a sequel, it feels too safe, too predictable, and too dependent on memory. It brings back the icons, but not quite the bite.
Fantasy Life is an imperfect but charming film, shaped by an appealing central performance and a strong ensemble. Its portrait of depression, anxiety, emotional immaturity, and fragile connection is often compelling, even if its script and seasonal structure do not always fully support its ambitions. Matthew Shear’s work is consistently engaging, and the film finds much of its value in the tension between light comedy and personal struggle. It may not be fully polished, but it has enough tenderness, intelligence, and good performances to make its awkwardness part of its appeal.
What makes the film compelling is precisely this tonal balance. It never abandons the pleasures of romantic comedy and relational drama, but it gradually infuses them with discomfort, uncertainty, and emotional volatility. The result is a film that is both entertaining and perceptive, one that captures how intimacy can move rapidly from warmth to estrangement, from play to revelation, from trust to doubt.
Akashi is an imperfect but sincere and thoughtfully directed film. Its exploration of mourning, family memory, and first love contains genuine emotional weight, while its visual treatment of time through colour and monochrome gives the story a distinctive texture. The direction shows sensitivity, and the Japanese cast brings depth, restraint, and authenticity to the film’s most affecting moments. Although the screenplay leans too heavily on dialogue and Mayumi Yoshida’s casting as Kana creates some distance within the film’s emotional world, Akashi still emerges as a work of recognizable delicacy and earnestness.
A Breed Apart contains the outline of a meaningful story about grief, land, and the fragile bond between father and son, but it never fully transforms those ideas into a gripping or emotionally grounded film. Its premise suggests a drama of hardship and attachment, yet the weak script, limited action, uneven performances, and unconvincing visual details prevent it from achieving the depth or intensity it seems to seek. What remains is a film with interesting thematic possibilities, but one that feels underdeveloped in execution.
It Comes In Waves is a sincere and often powerful film about the afterlife of genocide, displacement, and familial trauma. Its atmosphere is intensely oppressive, its thematic focus urgent, and its formal choices are effective in conveying anguish and entrapment. At times, however, this intensity becomes excessive, making parts of the film feel almost tiring over the course of more than an hour. If some performances and relationships lack the depth needed to fully realize the emotional complexity of the material, the film nevertheless remains a serious and affecting attempt to give form to the ongoing reverberations of historical violence..