Featured
Cannes: Devils May Care
All of a Sudden
Cannes, while a real privilege to attend, is also a gauntlet—a marathon of viewing and socializing—and I’ve reached the point where my eyes have begun to droop and my head has started to throb. But there’s still work to be done! I’m here on behalf of the Asia Society, a global network of centers dedicated to deepening understanding between Asia and the rest of the world. We have a beautiful 258-seat theater at our museum building on the Upper East Side of New York, and my remit is to seek out new releases and repertory films that might eventually grace its screen. My most anticipated movie of the festival was Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden. I’m pleased to say it… Read more
Cannes: Premium Diesel
The Fast and The Furious
It’s one of my closely held festival precepts that the odds of seeing a great film are much improved by making a beeline for the restorations and revivals. These are films that have endured beyond just one turn of the festival hamster wheel, their merits as art or artifact more or less established. Although a festival is first and foremost a showcase of things new and notable, sometimes the thought of enduring another two-plus hours of likely tepid drama is too much to countenance, and only a surefire prospect will do.That is why, despite the incredulity of my more seasoned yet still less cynical colleagues, I felt compelled last Wednesday to upend my circadian rhythms for the Cannes midnight showing… Read more
Ready or Not, the Emmys Are Coming
Hacks
To quote Schitt’s Creek’s Moira Rose: My favorite season? Awards. And for some of us, it’s a year-round venture. Weeks before the Academy Awards took place on March 15, I began tracking the dozens of shows that would soon be campaigning for Emmys. The Emmys take place each year in September, but like its cinematic counterpart, the preparation begins many months earlier. After all, Oscar futures are currently being debated as Cannes rolls into its second week. Similarly, the Emmy luncheons, billboards, screenings, and Q&As have been in the works for a long time already. But we’re now in the thick of it. May is essentially Oscar-season December for television, with (mostly) the streamers rushing out their shows ahead of the Emmys’… Read more
Personal Effects: Boots Riley and His Collaborators on Crafting I Love Boosters
Boots Riley BTS on I Love Boosters
Boots Riley has directed two movies and one TV show over the past decade, but he’s been telling stories through music for more than 30 years. “I usually think about my songs the same way I think about movies,” said Riley, whose Oakland-based hip hop group The Coup started 35 years ago. “Music was a way for me to cheaply make movies.” Now, music fuels his movies in other ways, though he’s still on the lookout for inventive ways to stretch his budget. Riley officially transitioned into filmmaking around 2015, when his time at the Sundance Labs laid the groundwork for his zany workplace satire Sorry to Bother You, which started as an album in 2012. His surreal second feature, I… Read more
Cannes Interview: Dominga Sotomayor on Her “Spontaneous and Liberating” La Perra
La Perra
Dominga Sotomayor’s cinema is one of confined spaces. Her features tend to unfurl in tight, growingly claustrophobic settings. In her 2012 debut Thursday till Sunday, the action took place by and large inside a car en route to the beaches of northern Chile; her festival prizewinning breakout Too Late to Die Young (2018) never strayed beyond the confines of a bohemian commune at the dawn of the country’s post-Pinochet era; and her Netflix-produced Swim to Me (2025) zoomed in on an affluent villa in present-day Santiago. So it is for Sotomayor’s Cannes-premiering La Perra, a character study set on a windswept island off Chile’s southern coast. Like its predecessors, Sotomayor’s latest is principally concerned with the relationship between those spaces… Read more
Visions du Réel 2026: Utopian Futures
For Life
Crisp powder blue shirting, the shock of red wool, and a puff of a curly bob—Visions du Réel Artistic Director Emilie Bujès was everywhere at this year’s festival, whether on stage at Place du Réel, smiling as she greeted friends old and new, or grasping a karaoke mic with her staff. Just two weeks before the opening of the annual creative nonfiction festival in Nyon, Switzerland, Bujès announced that she was leaving her role to join the Geneva International Film Festival in August. Her final edition in charge leaves an indelible fingerprint on the landscape—this year, VdR felt more international than ever, burrowing deeper into the global languages of nonfiction. From films about sperm smuggling in Palestine, to Kelly Reichardt’s wild open… Read more
