Media, Art, and Culture ISSN 1918-4026 Intermedias Review is an independent publication based on reviews of art, media, and their interconnections. We…
Set in a Maison Maternelle, Jeunes Mères follows four interwoven stories of pregnant adolescents and very young mothers—Vanessa, Perla, Ariane, and Julie—balancing attachment, abandonment, and precarious responsibility. Eschewing cathartic payoffs, the Dardennes’ handheld realism traces everyday acts of solidarity and strain within cramped institutional spaces, where love, volatility, and structural pressures (absent fathers, addiction, poverty) collide. The result is an unsentimental, ethically attentive portrait of adolescent motherhood as ongoing labor rather than melodrama.
Algiers is a lean, earnest entry in the docu-procedural mode: formally assured in its urban cinematography and temporal pressure, intermittently hampered by thinly drawn character motives and genre clichés. When it trusts its spaces and its competing epistemologies—Sami’s force, Dounia’s analysis—it approaches something urgent. When it leans on familiar confrontations without clarifying their stakes, it wobbles. Even so, the film leaves a residue of hard questions about collaboration, gendered authority, and the civic cost of speed, which linger long after the countdown stops.
Freyne’s Eternity imagines the afterlife as a one-week junction where Joan must choose between Larry—the ordinary life built over sixty-five years (the “beach”)—and Luke—the preserved intensity of first love (the “mountain”). Guided by mordantly comic coordinators and a cinema-museum that screens her past, the film hovers between drama and comedy, sometimes diffusing its moral clarity amid a catalog of whimsical “worlds.” Yet, by reframing Casablanca’s duty-versus-desire calculus as self-authorship rather than geopolitics, it locates a quiet grace: eternity becomes not reward but the age, mood, and truth one is willing to inhabit, asking whether we choose the life we imagined or the life we faithfully lived.
Predator: Badlands recenters the franchise on Yautja subjectivity, opening with an opaque, hyper-Darwinian filicide that gestures toward myth and ethology but leaves the political and emotional stakes underdeveloped. Exiled to Genna—a lab-like killing ground—Dek’s arc gains momentum through his bond with Thia, a half-bodied synthetic whose wit, care, and tactical acumen reframe survival as collaboration; their alliance is complicated by her concealed mandate and a corporate clone-sister, Tessa, crystallizing the series’ critique of biopolitical engineering. Trachtenberg delivers vivid landscapes and kinetic set-pieces, yet the clan tragedy feels rushed and thematically thin. Most compelling is the film’s inversion of moral coordinates—the most “human” is a damaged robot, the most ethical hunter an alien—even as the franchise’s core mystique erodes: the Predator becomes a tender, emotionally legible hero, and the techno-sublime arsenal is traded for natural materials and animal allies, yielding a thoughtful but demystified, almost artisanal survivalism.
Léa Pool’s We’ll Find Happiness (On Sera Heureux) follows Reza and Saad, queer lovers and asylum seekers whose love story is literally put on trial by Canada’s refugee system, forcing them to expose, edit, or weaponize their intimacy to survive. The film is at its strongest when it shows the brutal absurdity of having to “prove” one’s sexuality to bureaucrats and traces the precarious journey through camps, borders, and administrative suspicion. But it leans heavily into melodrama and symbolic burden…
Before anything else, a clear warning: No Chains, No Masters contains repeated, graphic, and prolonged scenes of violence against Black bodies—whippings, branding, muzzling, animal-like treatment, executions—shown in close detail and with very little respite. For Afro-descendant viewers, especially those already carrying inherited or lived trauma around slavery and anti-Black violence, this is not a neutral “history lesson”: it can be overwhelming, triggering, and, at times, feels closer to an unbroken spectacle of suffering than to a space for mourning, resistance, or complex remembrance.
by Hudson Moura Dominik Moll’s Case 137 (Dossier 137) is not “about” the Gilets Jaunes so much as it is…
In The Thieving Magpie, Robert Guédiguian returns to his Marseille family—Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, the working-class apartments and port-side streets—but knots them into one of his sharpest moral dilemmas. Maria, an overworked home-care aide with a good heart and an empty wallet, quietly steals small sums from the elderly people she tends in order to support her grandson, just as her daughter falls in love with the son of one of her clients.
Costa-Gavras’ The Last Breath is a sober, talk-driven drama that turns away from medical heroics to ask what happens when curing is no longer possible and only caring remains. Through the encounters between a renowned philosopher (Denis Podalydès) and a palliative-care doctor (Kad Merad), the film probes how to tell the truth, when to stop treatment, and how to accompany patients who know they are nearing the end.
The Future Awaits (La vie devant moi) focuses on one Jewish family hidden in a Paris chambre de bonne after the Vél d’Hiv roundup, guided by the real testimony of Tauba Birenbaum. Niels Tavernier’s film is strongest when it sticks to that narrow premise: the claustrophobia of silence, the grinding fear of being discovered, the moral courage of Rose and Désiré, the ordinary couple who choose to hide them.
A tender, unsentimental portrait in which Calvin Liu turns his camera toward his father, a 58-year-old Chinese immigrant motel owner in Gaspésie, and lets work, habit, and landscape speak in place of speeches.
A soft, luminous midlife love story, Montréal ma belle follows Feng Xia (a superb Joan Chen), a 54-year-old Chinese immigrant in Montréal whose encounter with a younger Québécoise woman awakens long-suppressed desire and self-determination; Xiaodan He films her with rare dignity and sensuality, offering a tender love letter to both woman and city, even if the cross-cultural tensions remain more beautified than fully explored.
Barny’s Fanon is strongest when it turns the Algerian psychiatric hospital into a clear microcosm of colonial violence.
A queer rural trance-piece of fog, leather, and collapsing houses, Only Good Things showcases Daniel Nolasco’s sensual visual language but lets mood eclipse meaning.
Colin Hanks signs a warm, craft-conscious portrait that follows John Candy from his Toronto’s vanished childhood cinema and SCTV days to Hollywood stardom and home life, pairing sharp testimonies with clips that show—rather than tell—his generosity, timing, and enduring charm.
by Hudson Moura Cédric Klapisch’s Colours of Time is an elegant, intergenerational tale that treats memory as both archive and encounter. The…
by Hudson Moura Varante Soudjian’s Challenger is a breezy, good-natured crowd-pleaser that marries working-class aspiration with the slapstick volatility of viral fame.…
by Hudson Moura Philippe Mechelen’s The Rookie Guide (Le Routard) turns the famed travel brand into a buoyant meta-comedy: Yan Tatin (a…
by Hudson Moura Peter Dourountzis’s Vultures (Rapaces) descends into a France where organized, paramilitary rape-gangs terrorize cities and where the…
by Hudson Moura Adapted from Laurent Petitmangin’s Ce qu’il faut de nuit, Delphine et Muriel Coulin’s The Quiet Son reframes a familiar social…
by Hudson Moura Throughout Peak Everything (Amour Apocalypse) Anne Émond saturates the narrative with what we could call an immanent critique of wellness:…