Originally published on Ink19 on December 2nd, 2025

“Apocalyptic” is far too harsh and hyperbolic an adjective to describe the tone of the predominance of selections in this year’s Best of Film list. Perhaps “elegiac” is the right word instead?

Constant geopolitical chaos, increasing threats to language, perception, and artistic expression via AI, and ongoing decline of the human capacity for communication point us toward the closing chapters of the book of modernity. Sure, we’re past the 20th century already, but we’re moving toward a radical departure from the bedrocks of our culture and society inherited from that era, and we’re moving past whatever has briefly stuck around in the 21st century thus far. We’re barreling toward an end of some kind, and many of our favorite films acknowledge this transition in our world in one way or another.

Five explore the shifts in the meaning, usage, and purpose of language. Two look at the process of image creation, manipulation, and dissipation of historical artistic figures. Three ruminate on the unsustainably isolating and delusion-inducing effects of current day technology. One says goodbye in a spectacular fashion to the spy genre and its feelings of international intrigue based on the wars of the 20th century. Another captures the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for a group of independent journalists oppressed by Vladimir Putin. And one directly confronts our senses about the arrival of the end of the world.

As with every year, we’d like to give our appreciation to the outstanding folks behind Acropolis Cinema, AFI Fest, Independent Film Festival Boston, the Brattle Theater, Films at Lincoln Center, the Coolidge Corner Theater, Film Fest Knox, and the Cleveland Cinematheque for their programming and their steadfast efforts to preserve the awe of experiencing cinema on a big screen with an audience who can all simultaneously delight in the joys, sorrows, laughs, tensions, and revelations that only film can supply. Please support these festivals, microcinemas, and independent theaters in their work because, hey, if the world is really ending, then let’s watch good films together.

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Dracula / Romania / dir Radu Jude

Capitalism has reared its ugly head in Romania, and Radu Jude is the master of showing the havoc that it and its tentacles of technology and foreign investment continue to inflict on Romanian society. With 2023’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World and this year’s Kontinental ‘25, Jude established then expanded his gonzo but revelatory collage style with its outrageous sexuality and vulgarity mixed with realism, philosophy, and the history of cinema to uncover tragic suffering as economic pressures warp his homeland. And with Dracula, he completes his magnum opus of capitalist and technological destruction by using the famed myth of Dracula/Vlad the Impaler, one of Romania’s most well known exports (even if the country during its years under Ceaușescu did not know it), to impart the ways that AI and the ruthless pursuit of economic gain commoditize, desecrate, and bastardize humanity, art, and culture. The film begins with a series of AI-generated Vlad the Impalers who challenge the viewer to perform fellatio on him. Soon after, we meet a director (Adonis Tanța) sitting at a desk in a sparse bedroom, and he outlines the structure for Dracula’s close to three hour running time. The director needs to make a commercial, approachable Dracula film, and he seeks the assistance of the large language model, Dr. Judex 0.0 (naturally voiced by Jude himself). As Dracula progresses, the director orally submits new prompts to the model, and it returns a story tailored to the request. The primary story, which continues in segments interspliced between the fourteen others, sees two leads of a tacky Dracula dinner theater (Gabriel Spahiu and Oana Maria Zaharia) trying to escape their working lives where the low-rent performance of Bram Stoker’s version of the myth leaves them on stage for the derision and mockery of tourists nightly. Story number two contains a series of late night infomercials using images from Murnau’s Nosferatu; number five is a mournful tale of love and heartbreak inspired by a story from author Nicolae Velea; number eleven features Vlad as the cruel owner of an abandoned factory that houses an operation where international buyers pay Romanian workers to play the lower levels of a video game for them; number nine is a distorted but period accurate interpretation of Vampirul, the first Romanian Dracula novel. And in the closing stories, Vlad the Impaler is discussed as a national icon via an influencer video and an elementary school performance. Throughout Dracula, the myth of the character is distilled down to its most basic, recognizable parts (i.e. blood drinking, impaling) and then projected onto a form that incites the most shock and reaction, an optimization that urges more clicks, views, shares, and purchases. Jude’s Dracula has something for everyone — yes, it has a multitude of genres and storytelling methods, but more importantly, it has something to say about how capitalism affects us individually and how we are each complicitous in its exponential growth. Our full review written for the theatrical release of Dracula can be found at Ink 19.

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Sorella di Clausura / Romania, Serbia, Italy, Spain / dir Ivana Mladenović

We were first introduced to actor/director Ivana Mladenović’s filmmaking at AFI Fest 2019, which screened her third feature, Ivana the Terrible, a hybrid-fiction comedy centered around Mladenović’s 2017 return to her hometown of Kladovo in Serbia, where she errantly attempted to cope with the joint burnout stemming from making her successful debut feature and from starring in Radu Jude’s Scarred Hearts while also serving as the central ambassador for the Serbian-Romanian Friendship Festival. We were enthralled by Ivana the Terrible’s frenetic, reflexive character study, an urgent and provocative piece that stressed the complex relationship between Mladenović’s homeland and its neighbor across the Danube. Co-starring in the film with Ivana was celebrated singer-songwriter Anca Pop, who sadly passed away a year after its premiere when she lost control of her car. A longtime friend of Mladenović’s, Pop once upon a time recommended that the director consider an unpublished autobiographical manuscript by Liliana Pelici for one of her films, and now, in Anca Pop’s honor, Mladenović has adapted the text into her strongest film to date, Sorella di Clausura. Set in 2008, the year of Romania’s entry into the EU, the film follows Stela (Katia Pascariu), a middle-aged, quasi-employed clothing factory worker and failed philologist who lives in a crammed Timișoara apartment with a pack of older relatives who relish every opportunity to slam Stela’s feeble earnings as well as her only true love, an elderly Balkan pop star named Boban (portrayed by Ivana’s own father, Miodrag Mladenović), whom she has been obsessed with since her childhood. Guided by only her fascination with Boban, Stela steals her uncle’s pension to buy a ticket to see her idol, causing her family to be short on rent, leaving them no option but to move out to the countryside. Undaunted, Stela refuses to leave the apartment and instead, doubles down on her Boban obsession, which turns sour when she sees that Boban himself has developed an infatuation with a local pop star, the free-spirited Vera Pop (Cendana Trifan). Stela responds to this imaginary transgression against her by vigorously attacking Vera on Facebook, but that effort positively backfires when Vera sees the value in Stela’s creative online barrage and offers to be her patroness. Vera provides Stela the means and the places to write a book while also dragging her into a myriad of absurd get-rich schemes that mirror the cash-grab economy of Romania during that period. Lensed by Radu Jude’s regular DP Marius Panduru who gives the film a fitting fatalistic aura of brokenness, Sorella di Clausura will invariably draw comparisons to the Romanian director’s work, but like Mladenović’s previous feature, her newest owes more to the Yugoslav Black Wave than any contemporary filmography. The film’s 2008 setting serves as an apt platform for resounding comments on the place for women in a post-Communist country with an emerging ramshackle economy and on our internet-fueled obsession with celebrity as a method for avoiding self-reflection, but its intentionally shambolic mood, exceptionally funny characters, and audacious setups allow the messages to seep in completely without any degree of heavy-handedness or self-importance impeding their delivery.

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Pin De Fartie / Argentina / dir Alejo Moguillansky

A film of variations, Pin de Fartie projects, stretches, and morphs the acts of viewing and storytelling inherent in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (Fin de Partie) to form a vital dialog about filmmaking itself. In the sections closest to Beckett’s play, a girl (portrayed by director Alejo Moguillansky’s daughter and regular collaborator Cleo Moguillansky) serves as a weary caretaker to a demanding blind man (Santiago Gobernori). We also watch two silent and unnamed filmmakers creating sounds and models for the film we’re actively viewing, two actors rehearsing Endgame and falling in and out of their characters and their emerging romance, a mother and son reading Endgame and aligning their reality with the fiction, and a couple living in a large garbage bin somewhere in Buenos Aires. Interspliced between these various storylines, a woman (Luciana Acuña, Moguillansky’s wife and creative partner) provides connective narration alongside a musician (Maxi Prietto) who sings the sentiments and themes of each scenario. And, to top it all off, we view glimpses of the director’s hand underlining key passages in a printed copy of Endgame. Pin de Fartie brings together literature, music, and cinema, allowing the three to share the stage of the frame and communicate with each other. From their intertwining, Moguillansky reveals the magic of film as the conduit that can incorporate each artform’s strengths to bring us to new truths. A work ever moving toward farewells, Pin de Fartie has a mournful tone for what has been and what will be lost in each of its stories and in our overall zeitgeist, but rejoices in the endurance and infinite possibilities of the moving image and encourages us to place our hope there. A work that reaffirms El Pampero Cine’s standing as one of the most significant filmmaking collectives in the world, Pin de Fartie is a culmination of Moguillansky’s innovative, spirited, and collaborative methods of cinema and perfectly represents the ethos of the collective he co-founded. We had the privilege of speaking with director Alejo Moguillansky at AFI Fest 2025, and that conversation is available at Ink 19.

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Tóc, giấy và nước… (Hair, Paper, Water…) / Belgium, France, Vietnam / dirs Nicolas Graux and Trương Minh Quý

These days, the humanness of language is at the forefront of our minds. Multiple films on our list this year center on wordsmiths, but only Nicolas Graux and Trương Minh Quý’s Hair, Paper, Water…, the winner of the Pardo d’Oro in the Cineasti del Presente section at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, directly addresses how language historically sat at the foundation of our shared humanity and our umwelt and how its standing is changing. Part elegy, part homage, part memoir, the film sets forth Cao Thị Hậu, one of the primary subjects of Trương’s outstanding 2019 documentary, The Tree House, as our guide through the essence of language, and her grandson leads us through its preservation and transformation. Mrs. Cao speaks about her life and recounts memories and tales primarily in the critically endangered Rục language, and the directors pair her reflections and stories with sumptuous images, all captured with only two Bolex cameras, of her daily life and surroundings in a lush, nearly primordial valley not too far from the caves where she was born. Mrs. Cao forages medicinal plants, harvests cassava, sweeps out flood waters from her home, travels by canoe to her birthplace, and cares for grandson, whom she teaches the Rục language word-by-word. As she speaks the fundamental words around human cognition such as remember, fear, and think, as well as the essential terms for our habitats such as light, rain, fire, earth, and sky, and her grandson repeats each one in Rục, we see the Vietnamese equivalent in red text paired with striking glimpses of the natural setting. We also observe the grandson learning how to read and write Vietnamese through his homework; we watch and listen to him and his classmates learn how to read and speak English at school; and, we hear him tell the story about his father’s abandonment and his hopes for his own future in Vietnamese. The film is not only a rich anthropological study on generational change for the Rục ethnic minority, but also a poetic, delicate essay on how we universally learn how to perceive and describe the elements and phenomena in our world through family, education, and experience. Though the film never explicitly calls out the threat to language by contemporary technology, its visual and linguistic portrait of Mrs. Cao and her grandson capture a fleeting personal and cultural history, making Hair, Paper, Water… a touching archive of a key point in time and a contemplative farewell. And personally, for us, Hair, Paper, Water… takes on special significance because it recalls our memories of our first languages (Italian for Generoso and Vietnamese and Cantonese for Lily), our sorrow when struggle to remember the vocabulary, and our rejoicing when we can speak the words that first helped us understand our existence.

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Grand Tour / Portugal, Italy, France, Germany / dir Miguel Gomes

Having long admired Miguel Gomes’s work (his 2016 feature Arabian Nights topped our Best of Film list for the 2010s), we were beyond frustrated when his most recent film, Grand Tour, slipped through our fingers time and time again at multiple festivals in 2024. This fact is, of course, painfully ironic for us, as the central conceit of Grand Tour is the cat-and-mouse game through the Asian continent commenced by the nebbishy, but discombobulated Englishman Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), who makes the sudden and unexplained decision at a railway station in Rangoon to opt out of reuniting with his fiancé, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), whom he has not laid eyes on for the past seven years. Initially drawing inspiration from W. Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour, a travelogue of Maugham’s 1923 trip through Burma and Siam, ending in Haiphong, Vietnam, Gomes, with his co-writers, Maureen Fazendeiro, Telmo Churro, and Mariana Ricardo, set the narrative of Grand Tour in 1918 but intersperse it with footage captured from Asia in the 2020s. The film takes on Edward’s perspective of his scattershot, play it by ear marital escape through multiple Asian countries during the first half before switching to Molly’s purposeful viewpoint in the latter half as she commits to “dragging Edward by the throat” if she finds him. Separate from one another and driven by different agendas, the individual journeys of Edward and Molly forgo any romantic tension, allowing the viewer to tag along. And in bringing together the disregard for period accuracy as Gomes did with the music and other cultural identifiers in his 2012 feature, Tabu, and the playfulness in the experimental comedic anarchy of the director’s 2021 comedy, The Tsugua Diaries, Grand Tour develops into a pure experiential voyage that starts with specific travel destinations and opens up to the wonders of cinema, that magical realm where the laws of time and space don’t apply and where fiction can signify the real and vice versa. Created during pandemic restrictions, Gomes employed two cinematographers to film the Asian locales, Guo Liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s regular DP, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and then staged the rest of the film with set pieces shot by the third DP, Rui Poças, in studios in Portugal, and this balance of the real and clearly artificial forms an enigmatic, timeless atmosphere fertile for a wide dearth of emotional reactions and interpretations along with a reawakened receptivity to the world around us and the worlds of the screen. A magnificent culmination of Gomes’s career so far, Grand Tour, for some, might seem like an unrequited love story between two people looking for entirely different outcomes, but for us, it is an ode to the power of observation and imagination and the places you can go when they intermingle.

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Geu jayeoni nege mworago hani (What Does That Nature Say To You) / South Korea / dir Hong Sangsoo

When we think of Hong Sangsoo’s films, we first recall his consistent tools for filmmaking: his regular players, particularly Kim Minhee and Kwon Haehyo, alcohol (often in soju or makgeolli form), cigarettes, and an artist protagonist. In reflecting on some of our favorite films of Hong, we recognize another common device — a painfully uncomfortable, embarrassing, and awkward confrontation. In 2024’s A Traveler’s Needs, the cringing point arrives when the mother of poet In-guk histrionically questions the young man’s reasons for allowing a French stranger (Isabelle Huppert) to live with him. In 2015’s Right Now, Wrong Then, it appears when the painter (Kim Minhee) awakens the director (Jung Jaeyoung) from his drunken sleep and proceeds to berate him after she learns about his reputation of disingenuousness. And in Hong’s latest, What Does That Nature Say To You, a genteel drinking challenge generates one of the most tortuous outbursts we’ve ever seen in a Hong Sangsoo film. What Does That Nature Say To You captures a single day for thirty-something poet Donghwa (Ha Seongguk). It all begins innocently enough: Donghwa drives his girlfriend Junhee (Kang Soyi) to her family home in Yeoju. He plans to drop her off and return immediately back to Seoul, but when he pulls up the driveway, Junhee’s father (Kwon Haehyo) is outside and insists that Donghwa stay for dinner. This naturally forces Donghwa to meet all of Junhee’s family for the first time, and they seize the opportunity to learn more about the boyfriend they’ve heard about for the past few years. Junhee’s sister (Park Miso) fixates on Donghwa’s esteemed attorney father and repeatedly prods to try to understand how much of his wealth has landed on Donghwa. Junhee’s father gives him a tour of the lush grounds of the family home originally built for Junhee’s grandmother, and in the process, quietly tests for Donghwa’s intentions with his daughter as well as his capacity to feel. Then, once she arrives home from work, Junhee’s mother (Cho Yunhee) makes a feast for everyone and proceeds to inquire about Donghwa’s poetry. Throughout the meal, Donghwa is gracious, complementary, respectful, and incredibly thoughtful in his comments around the mother’s poetry and the father’s landscaping talents. The parents meanwhile appear as good hosts, but in between smiles and then eventually drinks poured non-stop by Junhee’s father, they reveal their skepticism about Donghwa’s attempts to be independent, his philosophy for simple living, and his talent as a poet. After an intoxicated recitation of one of his poems and a modest criticism from Junhee’s sister, Donghwa melts down, precipitating a sequence of brutal revelations. With What Does That Nature Say To You, Hong utilizes the typical family drama trope of meeting a child’s romantic partner for the first time to provoke challenging questions about how familial structures and economic viability erode artistic inspiration and pure intentions. Donghwa may not be a good poet, but his spirit is exemplary, and watching it get challenged throughout What Does That Nature Say To You makes this one of Hong’s more tragic films to date.

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Sirât / France, Spain / dir Oliver Laxe

In the Sahara Desert, modernity has made few gains. Amongst the ancient sand, hills, and canyons, time as we know it is insignificant, and the environment is indifferent if not adversarial to our needs and desires as humans, making it a sobering grand stage for Oliver Laxe’s Sirât, a work that seeks to understand human and societal transitions and impermanence. Set in the Moroccan stretch of the Sahara during some unspecified point in the collapse of civilization, Sirât takes us on a grueling spiritual and physical journey as Luis (Sergi López) searches for his daughter Mar alongside his young son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), and a pack of ravers (Stefania Gadda, Joshua Liam Herderson, Richard Bellamy ‘Bigui’, Tonin Janvier, and Jade Oukid, all non-professional actors and members of a rave collective). Disciplined in its structure and composition (narratively, visually, and sonically) while still reverent to the loose and uncontrollable nature of reality, Sirât forces us to repeatedly question how its title — named after As-Sirāt, the bridge over hell that must be crossed in order to attempt to reach paradise on the Day of Judgment in Islam, which Laxe explains plainly in text at the beginning of the film — manifests itself in the shared and divergent trajectories of each of its characters, who, out of the reach of most contemporary trappings, potentially enter interplanes separating Earth, purgatory, Hell, and Heaven. Though the desert landscape remains constant, Laxe, his cinematographer, Mauro Herce, and composer Kangding Ray astonishingly tie together image and sound to transmit ecstatic and terrifying glimpses into these spaces on and beyond Earth. We are at the denouement of life as we know it, and Sirât presses us to look at the path in front of us and to follow it as fearlessly as possible to where it ends.

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My Undesirable Friends: Part One—Last Air in Moscow / United States / dir Julia Loktev

What began in 2021 as a documentary about opposition journalists working at the last independent television station in Russia, TV Rain, which had been labeled as a “foreign agent” by Putin’s government, director Julia Loktev boldly expands into a harrowing and deeply personal film with multiple viewpoints on the repressive political maneuverings in the months leading up to the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Divided into five segments and clocking in at almost six hours, Loktev begins her feature by introducing us to Anya (Anna Nemzer), the senior host of two political programs at TV Rain and a mother raising an adolescent daughter in her family’s longtime apartment. These early scenes set what will turn out to be the comprehensive tone for Loktev’s film as she provides us unlimited access into Anya’s life, which includes everything from tension-filled workplace encounters to making dinner for her daughter and friends to the many direct-to-camera conversations with Loktev about the degrading state of Russia and the sometimes futile nature of her work that occur while the pair gets repeatedly stuck in Moscow traffic jams. Through Anya, we begin to meet the many journalists who will make up the rest of Loktev’s ensemble portrait: her co-worker Ksyusha (Ksenia Mironova), a young reporter at TV Rain whose fiancé has been jailed for treason, Olya (Olga Churakova) and Sonya (Sonya Groysman), who were amongst the first to be labeled as “foreign agents,” a fate which also befell Ira (Irina Dolinina) and Alesya (Alesya Marokhovskaya), who work at the investigative media outlet Important Stories, and celebrated veteran correspondent Lena (Elena Kostyuchenko), a dedicated writer for Novaya Gazeta who had been reporting on Russia’s actions against Ukraine since 2014. As she did with Anya, Loktev spends ample time with each of the aforementioned journalists as they valiantly attempt to inform the public about their firsthand observations on the authoritarian crackdowns that initially targeted only a small number of colleagues that will soon eliminate their entire professional community as Russia begins its full-scale war. Some 27 years ago, Loktev’s powerful debut documentary feature, Moment of Impact, meticulously explored the damaging effects of a car accident on her own parents’ lives, and in many ways, that same level of seldom-seen intimacy exists throughout My Undesirable Friends: Part One. After over three years of Russia’s horrific assault on the people of Ukraine, we might forget the circumstances that led to that action, but through Loktev’s film and her unprecedented look at the day-to-day lives of the people committed to telling the true story, we receive an alarmingly clear understanding of how each transgression against the press can lead to a total suppression of rights under a brutal dictatorship.

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Henry Fonda for President / Austria, Germany / dir Alexander Horwath

Director Alexander Horwath’s expansive experimental 185-minute essay, which is among the most impressive debut features we’ve seen in some time, explores the decades-long public façade of the everyman demonstrated in the films of the legendary star of Mister Roberts and how that image was created and reflected back onto the nation and even Fonda himself. Beginning with a scene from the Norman Lear sitcom Maude where the titular character devises a plan to run Fonda for the White House to heal the nation post-Watergate, Horwath’s film incorporates a staggering amount of clips from Fonda’s movie and television work that solidified his position as the ultimate do-gooder citizen, helping Americans to buy into the myth of homespun decency that became essential to the country’s self-perceived identity. Throughout the film, these scenes are astutely juxtaposed against a raw and never-before-released audiotaped interview with Fonda that occurred during his final year of life by Playboy magazine’s Lawrence Grobel that dispels the actor’s flawless persona with his own words. Horwath also presents further proof of the souring of the American ethos of right over might when he incorporates present-day recorded footage of the settings of Fonda’s films, such as the still-active migrant camps that Fonda’s Tom Joad experienced in The Grapes of Wrath and the town of Tombstone, Arizona, the setting for Fonda’s turn as famed lawman Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine, now reduced to a cheesy Western-reenactment attraction for tourists. As Horwath’s film progresses chronologically through Fonda’s life, we see an alignment of the actor’s selection of roles that furthered the public’s perception of him as the wise and friendly elder statesman that rings false now against the truths of his known rocky relationship with his children and the allegations made by his previous wives that labeled him as distant and cold. In the film’s final moments, Henry Fonda for President stresses the very real dangers of the constructed persona and how that feeds into our constant need to reinforce our own belief systems, even when we inherently know that the person whom we are rallying behind was most likely created to promote values that have been proven, time and time again, to be nothing more than a fantasy. Our full review of the film from earlier this year can be found at Ink 19.

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Reflet dans un diamant mort (Reflection In a Dead Diamond) / Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, France / dirs Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani

It’s been eight years since Cattet and Forzani gave us their dazzling poliziotteschi-esque feature, Let the Corpses Tan, a scintillating adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s debut novel that transformed a relentless festival of gunfire under the Corsican sun into a wildly provocative performance art spectacle that was so enrapturing for us that it subsequently landed high on our Best of the 2010s film list. Drawing again from pulp literature and cult cinema’s past for their latest feature, Reflection In a Dead Diamond gathers its particular inspirations from the multinational productions of Euro-espionage thrillers from the 60s and 70s and the fumetti that inspired them for an adrenaline-fueled narrative that somehow outmatches the breakneck pace of their previous effort. For the film’s lead, Cattet and Forzani fittingly select the eternally elegant veteran of countless Euro-crime films, Fabio Testi, to portray John Diman, an elderly distinguished gentleman who spends his days relaxing oceanside by a palatial hotel on the Côte d’Azur that he calls home. It’s an idyllic final abode for John, but one that is suddenly disturbed by the appearance of his next-door neighbor, a stunning woman whose presence prompts a whirring recollection of his past exploits as a spy, or perhaps of his life as an actor who once portrayed a spy. Within these memories, which Cattet and Forzani present in a bedazzling and almost overwhelming manner, we meet John’s younger self (Yannick Renier), who dashingly fulfills his duties as a man of intrigue, complete with exceptionally tailored clothes, nifty techy tools, and a cadre of storybook foes, including the ninja-like leather-ensconced Serpentik (Thi Mai Nguyen), flashed quickly and without much explanation to eschew the outdated idea of a singular enemy. Although all of this may simply seem like a fetishistic cinematic homage, this feverish blending of various genre inspirations creates its own filmic language that fosters a compelling state of doubt for the viewer between the real and the unreal that entertainingly relinquishes any inclination you may have to attach yourself to a character or traditional genre outcome that would weigh down the experience of plunging into John’s memories. For its entire 87-minute running time, Reflection In a Dead Diamond bombards us with visuals and sounds that toy with how we recall the past while miraculously forging a storytelling technique that confronts our perspective on cinema.

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SUPPLEMENTAL FILMS

L’Accident de piano (The Piano Accident) / France / dir Quentin Dupieux

Perhaps the finest chameleon-esque actress working today, Adèle Exarchopoulos has fearlessly taken on an eclectic array of characters over her nearly twenty-year career. Though she’s mostly known for her dramatic projects, prior to The Piano Accident, Adèle had twice lent her considerable talents for small roles in Dupieux’s absurdist comedies, most notably in 2020’s Mandibles, where she drew peculiar inspiration from Greta Thunberg and uproariously punctuated scene after scene with her high-decibel line readings as an aggressively audibly impaired houseguest. For Dupieux’s newest feature, Adèle finally takes the lead as Magalie Moreau, an adult braces-wearing, poorly coiffed, and consistently marred social media sensation who has amassed considerable wealth from the time she was a tween by creating Tik Tok-length videos of her injuring herself through, at first, simple and then extravagant methods ranging from a drive-by baseball bat assault to getting run over by a wheel of a monster truck. Born without a shred of any real talent, but possessing an affliction that prevents her from feeling any pain, Magalie began her dubious career of self-abuse after seeing her unsupportive father roar in laughter while watching an episode of Jackass. As foul as all of this is, it’s seemingly business as usual for the callous Magalie and her obedient, but beleaguered manservant Patrick (Jérôme Commandeur) as they descend on an opulent secluded chalet for a bit of rest. However, once they arrive, there is trouble afoot in the form of Simone (Sandrine Kiberlain), a blackmailing journalist who knows a dark secret about one of Magalie and Patrick’s recent stunts gone wrong that could land them both in the clink. In response, the pair offer the journalist a tidy sum for her silence, but Simone demands the one thing that Magalie despises, a revealing interview for her publication that might open Magalie up and uncover the psyche that led her to this point in her life. One of the darkest and most affecting comedies Dupieux has made in his career, The Piano Accident finds the director continuing a theme that has been omnipresent in his work going back to Deerskin and through Smoking Causes Coughing and up to The Second Act: in our hyper connected world, the line between the truth and fiction for images captured from reality has blurred more than ever, leaving us unable to see who humans actually are and eroding our senses of self. As with most of Dupieux’s work, there is a lot packed into the short running time of The Piano Accident, but by smartly focusing almost exclusively on Adèle’s borderline sociopathic yet complex depiction of Magalie, it’s successful in gaining empathy for an unlikable figure, who, like so many in today’s world, is desperately manipulating technology to fit their own definition of a tangible existence.

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Kontinental ‘25 / Romania / dir Radu Jude

In the final scene of Rossellini’s neo-realist film, Europa ‘51, the namesake and quasi-inspiration for Radu Jude’s latest feature, a grief-stricken bourgeois wife of an American businessman, Irene Girard (Ingrid Bergman), now committed to a mental hospital, waves at the grateful destitute people she’s tried to help throughout her journey, and they proclaim her as a modern saint. Overwhelmed and rendered near catatonic by the unexpected suicide of her young son in the film’s first quarter, Irene’s journey in Europa ‘51 begins as a serendipitous clandestine mission outside of any faith or political agenda to help everyone she encounters as a method to compensate for a life of tone-deafness toward all outside of her elite circle. For Irene, a walk through any post-war Roman neighborhood beyond her own provides an instant opportunity for a philanthropic effort, but can she really make any difference given the scale of misery around her at that time? The same question can be asked of Kontinental ‘25’s Orsolya (in an outstanding performance from Eszter Tompa), an ethnic Hungarian court bailiff in the city of Cluj, Romania, who, like Irene, is gobsmacked from the guilt of a suicide she feels responsible for — that of a homeless man who crudely hangs himself when she gives him a moment to collect his belongings while she is carrying out her court-appointed duty of evicting him from a squat. Like Rossellini’s Irene, Orsolya at first takes refuge in her bed, but as the story of the suicide becomes more public through partisan news reports, she must also confront the onslaught of online comments from people who not only show their hatred for her actions, but also seem to relish the opportunity to slam her Hungarian background, stressing that particular divide in the country. Now inconsolable, Orsolya decides to let her family vacation without her in Greece as she roams the streets of her city, telling everyone she can find, from her mother to a priest to a former student turned bike delivery person, about her sadness. She is rudderless, and as we would expect from a Jude film, her journey is a dark and absurdly comedic one that has Orsolya taking an almost opposite path of that of Irene’s that is more endemic of our time of constant meaningless input. Lost in her misery, she helps no one in her travels, opting instead to clumsily descend toward a debaucherous rock bottom to gain some sense of clarity. In many ways, but most importantly with its use of a flawed but empathic protagonist, Kontinental ‘25 is the logical next feature for Jude, whose immensely profound and utterly enjoyable gut punch from 2023, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, also utilized a film from the past in its structure as a contrasting force to aggressively jab at the pitfalls of the Romanian version of late-stage capitalism that sees profits over the best interests of its citizens, who, like Orsolya, are uncertain of the necessary philosophy to adopt to overcome.

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Measures for a Funeral / Canada / dir Sofia Bohdanowicz

We first met the character of Audrey Benac (played by the brilliant Deragh Campbell) in 2019 when we viewed Sofia Bohdanowicz’s idiosyncratic and impressively reflective portrayal of archive excavation, MS Slavic 7. Since then, we’ve gone back into Bohdanowicz’s filmography to see earlier stages of Audrey in 2016’s Never Eat Alone and 2018’s Veslemøy’s Song and followed her progression in 2020’s Point and Line to Plane and 2021’s A Woman Escapes. Throughout the Audrey Benac films, the main character operates as a roman à clef lead, standing in for the director Bohdanowicz herself and navigating the history and present of the director’s own family’s artistic legacies to progress a discourse around the threads between self and kin. Suitably, Measures for a Funeral brings that discussion to its peak and close. The 2025 representation of Audrey is struggling on multiple fronts. Her dying mother throws a suffocating amount of guilt on her as she reveals her regret in sacrificing her career as a professional violinist to become a mother and requests that her daughter destroy her father’s violin, one of the only relics of his that remains. Her PhD thesis languishes as she falls deeper into the archives of her subject, the famed Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow, who was also the mentor and teacher of her own grandfather. And she’s lost in her romantic life after deciding to end her long-term relationship with her partner without any clear reason. To try to recharge at least her academic pursuit, Audrey travels to England to visit one of her closest friends and to seek inspiration in Meldreth, a town that Parlow lived in for many years. On the trip, she, for the first time, speaks with full candor and vulnerability about why and how she feels so lost, and in this moment of openness, her friend provides new kindling to help Audrey’s self-illumination by suggesting that she restage the lost violin concerto by Johan Halvorsen, Opus 28, which was written for Parlow. Energized by this task, Audrey goes to Norway to bask in the space where Parlow performed the concerto for the first and only time and to seek the collaborators to make the restaging possible. Of course, Audrey’s personal reality bleeds in, since her father’s violin remains strapped to her back throughout her journey, and she must finally delineate her identity from the webs of her family and set the course for her own life. Measures for a Funeral feels like Bohdanowicz’s last film for Audrey Benac, but it releases her to a world of newfound possibilities, and we’re excited for both the director and her signature character. Our full review from August is available at Ink 19.

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I Dannati (The Damned) / Italy, United States, Belgium, France, Canada / dir Roberto Minervini

For the last two decades, director Roberto Minervini has created an impressive list of hybrid documentaries that examine the American identity with an incisiveness that few have been able to accomplish. A native-born Italian, Minervini has long lived in the Southern United States and has employed his objective position as an immigrant to examine a multitude of social and historical factors that led to the stagnant evolution of our indigent communities with his films such as 2015’s The Other Side and 2018’s What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? Given his interest in our historical development, it only makes sense that for his first fiction feature, Minervini decided to go back to 1862 and the early days of the Civil War. The Damned follows a group of woefully unprepared Union soldiers sent to the Northwest part of the United States for reasons that the director purposefully obfuscates. Encamped in a wintry outpost, the men spend their days drinking, shooting at wild game, and chatting in an anachronistic vernacular that mashes up words from the present and the past to discuss various topics, including how their moral structure and faith played into their position on the abolition of slavery. The days are long for the men, and without any stated strategy to guide them, they wait for anything to happen. When an attack eventually commences without provocation, an erratic and terrifying blur of bodies and bullets surround our soldiers, leaving them to fire haphazardly at foes that they cannot see. They watch as their comrades’ bodies quickly fall to the ground, and after a few extremely harrowing minutes, the battle is over. It’s a grim scene, and all that the men can do is bury their dead and move on with their undefined mission, but as the days pass, their conversations turn to their depleting supplies and more random attacks, while their overall resolve weakens. By using an experimental technique that divorces the narrative from any historical details and cultural identifiers, Minervini, with The Damned, gives us an impactful way of looking at disenfranchised Americans who find themselves in a harrowing predicament that we are in no position to judge. The soldiers in The Damned are like any group of indigent people trapped by their situations in present-day America seen in the director’s previous films, people who are fighting for their lives due to unknown circumstances that put them in volatile places, leaving them without any real options to find peace and with no choice but to search for an undefinable enemy. Our full review of the film from earlier this year can be read at Ink 19.

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Fiume o morte! (Rijeka or death!) / Croatia, Italy, Slovenia / dir Igor Bezinović

This year marks the 106th anniversary of the unparalleled absurdity that was the siege and occupation of the Adriatic port of Fiume led by the eminent Italian poet, playwright, aristocrat, and army general Gabriele D’Annunzio. Angered that the city, which once had a substantial population of ethnic Italians, would be annexed by the then newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, D’Annunzio led a force of 186 “legionaries” from Ronchi in Italy to Fiume with the initial goal of reclaiming the former Roman province of Dalmatia for the new state of Italy. Once established in Fiume, these troops received reinforcements totalling over 2,500 men who were composed of Italian veterans of the Battles of the Isonzo and nationalists who subsequently forced the withdrawal of the Allied occupying forces there, leading to the establishment of the self-proclaimed state of the Reggenza Italiana del Carnaro, an event so audacious that it inspired the political leanings of a young Benito Mussolini. Now, as historically significant as all of this sounds on paper, a casual questioning of the current residents of Rijeka, Croatia (the former Fiume) garners only spotty recollections of this event, if any at all. Thus, in a salute to what Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” hometown director Igor Bezinović leads the people of Rijeka into recreating D’Annunzio’s invasion for his oddly entertaining, but thought-provoking hybrid documentary, Fiume o morte! Fittingly, as a method to reconstruct the event for this current era of media oversaturation to forever bind this part of the town’s history in the minds of locals, Bezinović recruited anyone willing to don the military regalia of the invading forces to play a part and opted as well to find an endless throng of bald-headed men to play the Duce himself. With our players in place, and with the ethos similar to that of D’Annunzio, who hired professional photographers and cinematographers back in 1919 to film his actions to appear more like an artistic rendezvous rather than a hard-fought military campaign, the proceeding filming by Bezinović and cinematographer Gregor Bozic matches note for note the grand splendor of the images that were once sent back to the Italian homeland, where D’Annunzio, already revered as a celebrated artist and war hero, would be lauded as a conquering ruler. These contemporary scenes filmed by Bezinović are matched with archival footage and photographs throughout Fiume o morte!, which at first feel whimsical as the locals jest while being costumed, but as the combined images segue to December of 1920, when the city’s bridges were destroyed and soldiers laid dead after the town was stormed by the Royal Italian Army, these merged scenes dramatically change the tone of the film to accentuate the fatuity of that dark moment in Rijeka’s past. That shift in tone hammers home the ultimate message inherent in Fiume o morte!: although few in Rijeka remember D’Annunzio’s occupation, elaborately staged and documented audacious acts perpetrated by a cult of personality have an eternally seductive power that survives in many figures of today.

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Friendship / United States / dir Andrew DeYoung

Much has been created in the last twenty-plus years in cinema to illustrate the negative impact that internet technology, and especially its ugly stepchild of social media, has had on contemporary society, but what of the plight of the denizens of lonely cubicles and shared desks around the world who toil incessantly to maximize brand clicks, push forward company agendas, and make apps more addictive despite the questionable nature of these duties? The latter lot in life is sadly that of Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson), a moderately successful marketing lead and unknowing poster child for autism who is shunned by his equally socially awkward workmates as well as his family, who all dismiss Craig’s feeble attempts at being a well-rounded man. It’s a sad sight to see, but from afar, Craig might seem a step or two up on the evolutionary vocation chain from his cinematic counterpart from six decades earlier, C.C. Baxter, Jack Lemmon’s shell of a man masquerading as an insurance clerk in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, but the dire loneliness and unbeknownst lack of humanity are just as profoundly felt on this side of the screen. Craig is clearly frustrated by the lack of connection, but trudges on, and so, when he is tasked by his wife to bring a misdelivered package from their home to that of a nearby neighbor who just moved into their subdivision, he does so willingly. During this neighborly interaction, he meets Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd), a local weatherman and alpha male, who soon invites Craig over for a drink and shows off the prehistoric weapon within the package that had been errantly dropped on his doorstep. They chat for a bit, and Austin takes a liking to Craig and proceeds to drag his new friend on adventures around town and into the woods akin to Water Rat and Mole from Wind in the Willows. Finally, Craig has excitement for something in his life outside of the home, but when a guys’ night at Austin’s house turns sour due to a misstep and then an overreaction from Craig, he is shunned by Austin. Alone again and visibly jarred by the rejection, Craig turns toward his family with new ideas for connection learned from his brief time with Austin, but he’s now even more psychologically ill-equipped to share his experiences with them, causing him to spiral out further. Not sure why pull quotes on Friendship labeled it as “laugh out loud funny.” This is a dark comedy of the 99% cacao variety of dark, and although a few scenes grant us an embarrassingly awkward laugh or two thanks to Tim Robinson’s uncanny talent of being affable while exuding sadness, Friendship operates as social tragedy. As Craig’s blunders pile up, director Andrew DeYoung molds a chilling portrait of the dysfunctional post-Covid male, who, to survive, has filled his life with rules and numbers that extinguish any natural instincts to evolve socially and render him unable to navigate our contemporary malaise.

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Un Poeta (A Poet) / Colombia, Germany, Sweden / dir Simón Mesa Soto

What a coincidence that the poet’s struggle lies at the heart of two of our favorite films from this year’s AFI Fest. And yet, it’s not a surprise in a time when expressive language, written for the mysterious and often indescribable moments and feelings of human existence, is declining, replaced by words generated from a massive corpora of all things online or, more frightfully, by a reductive language that seeks optimal superficial reaction with the fewest words and concepts. In Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet, Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Rios) has been battling for an extended period against the forces that led to our current state of language and unfortunately has continued to fail. Once a young and award-winning poet and notable professor, Oscar now spends his days and nights as a drunkard who lives at home with his elderly mother. He consistently avoids working on his next book and takes any opportunity he can to espouse the virtues of poetry and lionize his hero, the tragic poet José Asunción Silva. A constant disappointment and embarrassment to his family and colleagues, Oscar learns about his daughter’s upcoming college plans and consequent financial needs and wants to contribute, even though he’s unequipped to do much. So with the help of his sister, he begrudgingly takes a job as a high school teacher. During one of Oscar’s inebriated lectures attempting to explain poetry to his uninterested pupils, the students point out Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade) as the sole young poet in the class, and he’s moved by the natural talent and earnestness in her writings and drawings. Oscar attempts to mentor Yurlady and convinces his poet colleagues to accept her into their poetry school. And for the first time in many years, the community of poets who have long seen Oscar as a wayward stepchild are delighted by one of his actions. But quickly their motivations misalign with Oscar’s: instead of encouraging Yurlady to build on her voice, they immediately laser in on the political value of Yurlady, who comes from a very poor family, and put in place the machinations to create a star sociopolitical poet perfect for the appetite of European donors and sponsors. Though a satire of the commoditization and debasement of art as well as the suffering for art, A Poet maintains an impressive humanity carried by the man portraying Oscar, Ubeimar Rios, a non-professional actor who is actually a high school philosophy teacher in real life. Rios soaks the delusional high poet Oscar with electric feeling and lures us into Oscar’s self-aggrandizement, self-loathing, and self-pity without alienating the viewer. Undoubtedly, Oscar is frustrating, but Rios’s performance along with Simón Mesa Soto’s direction and script instill a peculiar kind of nobility and innocence in a character who, despite all of the disappointing elements of life, art, and society, continues to seek the beauty of unadulterated poetry rooted in the sanctity of words, unfeigned emotion, and sober self-examination.

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BEST REPERTORY/RESTORATION SCREENING

Slade in Flame / United Kingdom / dir Richard Loncraine

First and foremost, we adore all manifestations of the glam into hard rock band Slade, but with the utmost respect to film critic Mark Kermode, who once described Loncraine’s bold and darkly comic feature Slade in Flame as “The Citizen Kane of British Pop Films,” we strongly feel that his appraisal is more fitting to John Boorman’s Catch Us If You Can, an utterly enjoyable and well-crafted pessimistic romp starring The Dave Clark Five from a decade earlier. That stated, we were as ecstatic as Kermode to see a new restoration of the glorious revelation that is Slade in Flame, which was completed and released just in time for the film’s fiftieth anniversary! Produced by Gavrik Losey, who is responsible for two of our all-time favorite music films, Joe Massot’s Two-Tone label concert extravaganza, Dance Craze, and Franco Rosso’s exquisite socially conscious reggae feature, Babylon, Slade in Flame tells the origin story and subsequent demise of the fictional titular band Flame (Slade), the composite of two Midlands bands who selectively combine forces in prison following a clash during and after a shambolic gig. Once assembled, this newly formed band plays a raucous set at a nightclub, which simultaneously garners jeers and a dismissal from their low-level crime boss manager, Harding (Johnny Shannon), and positive interest from talent scout Tony Devlin (Kenneth Colley), who offers the band a visit to a London-based agency run by his upscale boss, Robert Seymour (Tom Conti). A businessman first and hardly a lover of music of any kind, Seymour is nevertheless genuinely interested in commoditizing Flame no differently than he would a brand of packaged fish sticks. Sans management, our group takes the offer of a new puppetmaster, and they’re off to lavishly staged photo shoots and carefully orchestrated bullet-soaked publicity stunts designed to push their new single, which soon flies off the shelves, leading the band to massive concert halls and eventually bitter infighting as the marketing and spectacle overtake the joys of creating and playing. Though they certainly include an endless buffet of comedic moments and exceptional live performances, Loncraine and screenwriter Andrew Birkin underlay their film in the world of the kitchen sink as they underscore the economic despair of the era, and like Catch Us If You Can, Slade in Flame achieves a seamless construction that combines the bliss of being in a young rock band and the painful disappointment that comes with the added artificial, soul-crushing commercialization needed to sell the masses what the machine wants them to buy. Oh, and here, we 100% agree with Mark Kermode: Slade in Flame is the band’s best album.

Featured photo from Radu Jude’s Dracula is courtesy of 1-2 Special.

Lily and Generoso

Lily and Generoso Fierro