Media, Art, and Culture ISSN 1918-4026 Intermedias Review is an independent publication based on reviews of art, media, and their interconnections. We…
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..
Jody Wilson’s film is therefore both entertaining and meaningful, a vibrant coming-of-age tale about learning how to live with a body and an identity that society insists on treating as other.
Mike, Nick Nick and Alice (written and directed by BenDavid Grabinski) is built around a potentially useful gimmick—time, doubles, and underworld confusion—but the film rarely converts that premise into sustained pleasure or coherent tension. Structured around “the party” and its aftermath, it leans heavily on the energy of endless bickering, yet the repeated fighting quickly becomes predictable rather than dynamic: noise replaces rhythm, and irritation substitutes for escalation.
In aggregate, the shorts reveal the festival’s strongest achievement: they treat “Canadian cinema” not as a single identity, but as a set of forms—documentary, fable, performance, social realism—through which Canadian filmmakers test how much complexity can be carried in a brief duration. At its best, this short-film programme does exactly what the anniversary rhetoric promises: it asks audiences to look up, lean in, and recognize that the boldest ideas in a festival are often the ones that arrive in the smallest packages.
Project Hail Mary is both entertaining and quietly philosophical, particularly in its reflection on otherness, human expectations, and the limits—and possibilities—of technology. It does not drift into the mystical or transcendental; its questions remain anchored in ethics, cooperation, and survival. What lingers most is the film’s insistence that a mission of planetary scale can still be carried by the fragile, persuasive drama of one person learning—slowly and painfully—what responsibility might demand.
The film is less interested in being genuinely scary than in sustaining a particular genre cocktail: gore plus dark humour plus chase mechanics. Its pleasures are visceral and comedic rather than suspenseful.
The film’s most distinctive—if not fully original—device is Nikki’s voice-over, in which she articulates thoughts, tactics, and a kind of soldierly methodology. It adds a marginal layer of character interiority and technique, functioning like a procedural annotation to the action.
What gives The Unknown of the Grande Arche its resonance is its insistence that this is not merely a period tale. The film’s conclusion is implicit throughout: some conflicts do not change. In any era, the artist’s dream collides with the same enduring forces—politics, industry, finance—and the larger the public project, the more brutally those forces assert themselves.
Seen as a whole, the retrospective clarifies Depardon’s singular achievement: he turns observation into a form of thinking—cinema as attentive presence, as social description, as an ethics of time.
Scream 7 is unlikely to disappoint franchise fans, because it delivers the familiar ingredients with enough energy and self-awareness to keep the machinery running: media satire, nostalgia, meta-theory, and the enduring thrill of a mask that can belong to anyone.