6 pieces
Kleber Mendonça Filho's Recife thriller left the Academy Awards with nothing from four nominations. Its subject was never the chase. It was who gets to keep the record of a city.
The 2025 Sundance Film Festival acquisitions market cleared more titles than any edition since 2022, but at substantially lower average price points. The buyers are active. The cheques are smaller.
There was a specific mid-budget horror economy that functioned across the 2010s. It does not function anymore. An essay on what was lost.
Mohammad Rasoulof shot the film in secret, fled Iran during post-production, and arrived at Cannes with a three-hour domestic thriller about a judiciary father and his protesting daughters. The retrospective argument is that the long cut is the cut.
A year after Longlegs' extraordinary marketing run turned into an extraordinary opening weekend, the film looks smaller than the hype suggested and stranger than the backlash allowed.
Steven Soderbergh shot a haunted house film entirely from the ghost's point of view. The formal constraint should not work. It does, and the reasons are technical.