Rose

Part of my coverage of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival

ROSE   ***

Markus Schleinzer

2026

IDEA:  A woman in 17th-century rural Germany disguises as a man in order to live in freedom. 

BLURB:  Rose opens on scorched earth and skeletons and proceeds through a series of landscapes so funereal you wonder how anyone’s living in them. From scene to scene, Gerald Kerkletz’s silvery cinematography makes the images appear alternately like intricate metal engravings or tableaux of graphite and charcoal, and his use of extreme wide shots and frames-within-frames render a world of desolation and constriction, respectively. It’s hospitable to those who adhere to the dogmatic rules of 17th-century German Protestantism, but that’s certainly not Sandra Hüller’s Rose, who rejects her assigned subservient role as a woman by switching to the only gender with any agency or power. Her transformation, like the more metaphysical one of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, reveals the arbitrary cultural construction of gender. The qualities that go unquestioned when Rose is male — her capabilities as a landowner, community leader, or romantic partner — are suddenly void when she’s recognized as a woman. In a scene clearly designed, quite didactically, to address the transphobes of today, Rose stands at the door of her home lambasting the townsfolk’s obsession with her anatomy and demanding they all reveal their own sexes. Hüller’s gesticulating fury seems to exceed her body’s ability to contain it, and she explodes in humorous paroxysms that mock the crowd’s religious hysteria. When put on trial for her deceit, the actress becomes more subdued but no less exasperated by her scrutiny, fielding questions like “Why would one act this way?” with a perplexed expression and a bitter incredulity in her voice. Hüller turns saintly by the concluding images, her battle-scarred face resting into repose as a straw crown makes her a spitting image of Falconetti’s Joan of Arc. Rose’s journey would have been plenty legible without the storybook narration to guide us here; Schleinzer’s and Hüller’s craft take care of things. But in its directness, Rose is sufficiently damning toward a worldview that cares a whole lot more about damnation than love.

Fatherland

Part of my coverage of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival

FATHERLAND   ***

Paweł Pawlikowski

2026

IDEA:  After over a decade in exile, Thomas Mann returns to Germany in 1949 to receive the Goethe Prize, controversially in both sides of the country.

BLURB:  Fatherland is a palm-sized miniature carved from a mighty block of marble, compact and pin-sharp. In his loose historical trilogy, of which this is the putative final chapter, Pawlikowski has honed a style of methodical subtraction, distilling the chaotic, fractured landscape of postwar Europe into austere close-up vignettes. Fatherland provides just a sliver of the life of famed author Thomas Mann, using his real-life return to Germany in 1949 to reflect a nation, a continent, and a world divided, seemingly irreconcilably. Depending on the location — West Germany, the Soviet occupation zone, the US — Mann is received as a progressive intellectual or an exemplar of the German nationalist character, a Communist traitor or a Marxist hero. In the wake of a war that confounds identity and redraws state and ideological lines, what happens to the culture, and the artists, of the past? Where do they belong, and to whom? These questions echo through the liminal spaces of a country torn between old and new, in hotel rooms and churches and on rubble-lined streets rendered in Łukasz Żal’s stark, geometrically precise black-and-white cinematography. They flash across the faces of Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller, terrifically controlled actors who make even slight disruptions to their miens feel shattering. And they’re present in Pawlikowski’s soundtrack contrasts, from Bach to Becher, making music an object of cultural distinction as well as a source of transcendent feeling beyond borders. Fatherland is so short that it doesn’t ruminate on these ideas so much as briefly cast raking light on them. It might seem too slight if that bone-dry brevity weren’t also what gives such palpable fragility to the historical moment it depicts.

All of a Sudden

Part of my coverage of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival

ALL OF A SUDDEN   **1/2

Ryusuke Hamaguchi

2026

IDEA:  Marie-Lou, the director of a nursing home in France, forms a serendipitous friendship with Mari, a Japanese theater director dying of cancer.

BLURB:  The pleasures of a Ryusuke Hamaguchi film are the pleasures of salutary human interaction: of spontaneity, generosity, curiosity, and inspiration passing between people who, more often than not, have been thrown together by chance. Set in the world of elder care, All of a Sudden has an explicit, particularly haptic focus on such interactions. The caregivers at Garden of Freedom are learning a method that keeps them in close physical contact with their residents: gazes are held from centimeters away, hands gently cup shoulders, and upraised feet are massaged in the early-summer sun. Rooted in individualized attention, embodied empathy, and sensory alertness that benefit both sides of the care relationship, it’s the ideal Marie-Lou is fighting for against a for-profit system that sees elder bodies only as numbers. Much of All of a Sudden plays out as a literal dialogue about capitalism’s inhospitality to effective healthcare, with bureaucratic conversations and whiteboard diagrams alike serving as Marxist-lite primers. Hamaguchi’s images are mostly static and straight-on, his main characters forthright and unwaveringly virtuous, giving large stretches of the film the tenor of a PSA. This is not the thorny, elusive Hamaguchi of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy or Evil Does Not Exist but the treacly Hamaguchi of Drive My Car, the cornball humanist who signifies interconnectedness by naming his protagonists Marie and Mari — and having a bird poop on both at the same perfect interval. All of a Sudden, like Drive My Car, hinges on a stage play that blends into the action of the film, in this case one designed to destigmatize illness and old age. Hamaguchi’s faith in art and basic human kindness to accomplish empathic goals remains moving, even if this film’s iffy conceptualization doesn’t always support the passion of his conviction.

Clarissa

Part of my coverage of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival

CLARISSA   **1/2

Arie and Chuko Esiri

2026

IDEA:  A modern-day retelling of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway set in Lagos, Nigeria.

BLURB:  The dual narrative threads of Clarissa first hit us like sense memories, feeling coming before meaning. For the titular moneyed Dalloway, it’s a languid drift down a river, rippling water, and pink azaleas; for the shell-shocked soldier Septimus, it’s an apparition of his slain comrade, sitting lifeless in weathered boots as toenail shavings fill the air like dust in a mausoleum. One lush and tropical, the other ashen and arid; it’s a tale of two environments, two social stations, two versions of a nation running parallel to each other, only moved from Woolf’s England to one of that country’s largest former colonies. It’s an interesting and welcome postcolonial spin, but Clarissa mostly sticks to the story beats of the original, making for a satisfying if not hugely imaginative adaptation. Sophie Okonedo is a fine Clarissa, delicately negotiating the fussy sternness of a high-society lady with the warmth and wistfulness of a compromised romantic. As the teenage Clarissa, India Amarteifio beautifully embodies the romance in fuller flush. The long two-shot between Amarteifio’s Clarissa and Toheeb Jimoh’s Peter, in which she tearfully dashes their future together, is among the film’s best, conveying the pang of unrequited love in falling cadences and body language. The Esiri brothers are less agile with other exchanges, especially ones that spell out the precarious politics of contemporary Nigeria. Clarissa doesn’t need to be so prosaic when it has such vivid documentary images of blue-collar labor and urban construction, juxtapositions of cramped rooms and military fatigues with swanky modernist homes and patterned dresses. We can glean from all those artfully arranged mirrors that Clarissa and Septimus, despite their unequal opportunities, have both been visited by the human despair that makes Woolf’s text so evergreen, in any country.

The Diary of a Chambermaid

Part of my coverage of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival

THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID   **1/2

Radu Jude

2026

IDEA:  A Romanian woman works as a live-in nanny for a family in Bordeaux, France while rehearsing for a theatrical production of Octave Mirbeau's The Diary of a Chambermaid.

BLURB:  The Diary of a Chambermaid is the third, or maybe fourth, consecutive film by Radu Jude to caustically reimagine an older European text. In his contemporary updates of these works, whether as canonical as Europe ’51 or Dracula or as obscure as Angela Goes On, Jude diagnoses a 21st-century state of the world afflicted by all their same animating sociopolitical issues, only now in different forms. An immigrant domestic servant still has to put up with the exhausting crap of her employers, but now she has the added daily labor of making video calls to a dyspeptic young daughter she can see but never be beside. Champagne socialists still proclaim their virtue around the dinner table, but now they can pull up snuff war footage posted to their Facebook group to prove their social conscience. Mobile screens and their images take up a significant portion of The Diary of a Chambermaid’s aesthetic, as they do our everyday visual economies, and Jude shows how they do less to foster connection than compound our distance from people and things we aren’t meaningfully engaging with. Perhaps this is why face-to-face storytelling — from a stage production of Chambermaid to Gianina’s Romanian folktales — assumes such an integral role in the film, making history and narrative materially present in spaces from which they’ve been emptied, or paved over by the façade of neoliberal progress. (Which isn’t to say those retold histories or narratives are without their own oversights!) The thing is, Jude has basically said all this already, with greater verve, wit, and formal ingenuity, in previous films, especially when he used a more essayistic, confrontational style to rupture the language of the status quo. As cynical as he is, it may be a sign of his underlying humanism that he’s reduced some of that bile, content to toss off a wink rather than a grenade.

Digger

DIGGER   ***

Alejandro G. Iñárritu

2026

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

IDEA:  In a dystopian future ravaged by ecological catastrophe, a crew puts on a stage production of a cult-classic play depicting the Texas oil tycoon responsible for the crisis.

BLURB:  A nagging creative problem over the last decade, especially in the US, has been how to satirize a reality more insane and unbelievable than any satire. Iñárritu and his collaborators have answered with a clever Brechtian solution: you make a movie where reality is staged as literal theater. Although heavily hinted at through ersatz digital backdrops and a curtain rising under a proscenium, Digger doesn’t give away its game until about 30 minutes in, at which point it becomes exponentially more complex and interesting than the shrill screed against the power elite it initially seemed to be. This isn’t a novel metatextual device (it was present without the misdirect in Birdman), but Iñárritu is after something more insightful than just another tricksy blurring of reality and representation. He wants to understand the value and capacity of art — culturally, economically, psychologically — in reflecting the horrors of the real world. For most of the film, this is done from the side of the creators, particularly Tom Cruise’s Curtis Markson as notorious, apocalypse-hastening oil tycoon Digger Rockwell. Markson’s conflict with his director over how to portray Digger and his time underscores the film’s skepticism about the credibility of historical representation. Just how faithful is Fossil Fools, the play-within-the-film, to the events it depicts? Is it supposed to be funnier to the film’s diegetic future audience than it seems to us, or is it so appealing simply because it provides the catharsis of watching (reliving?) the comeuppance of awful and likely long-dead people? Iñárritu channels these uncertainties through prickly tensions between textures and tones. They percolate in Dennis Gassner’s production design, an uncanny mélange of implausible multimedia stagecraft; Emmanuel Lubezki’s claustrophobic low-angle close-ups, perversely at odds with any theater-seat vantage; Cosmo Sheldrake’s bizarre musique-concrète score; and the OTT performances, however unevenly the cast is utilized. In its final switcheroo, Digger shifts its perspective to the audience, making us question the meaning of our own media consumption. Can art effect real change? Society has been wondering that forever, and Iñárritu is obviously wary. What he does know is it gets us thinking about this question at all, and that we’ll continue pondering it through all the Diggers and Fossil Fools yet to come.