The Debut

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

THE DEBUT   ***1/2

Jesse Eisenberg

2026

IDEA:  When she lands a small part in a New Jersey community-theater production of the musical "Nosy Neighbors," housewife Mona Friedman becomes obsessed with getting her character right at all costs, much to the chagrin of ornery director Jerry Blankenbuehler.

BLURB:  In Mona Friedman, Jesse Eisenberg has gifted Julianne Moore — and us — with perhaps the ne plus ultra of her roles, an amalgamation of several of her past characters archly dialed up to a fever pitch. She starts off as that most archetypal Moore character: the neglected housewife putting on a brittle performance of domesticity. Wearing a series of pastel sweaters in a brightly-lit home, the camera pressing in on her, Mona grins and speaks with the labored cheer of a woman who’s internalized her pain for so long she doesn’t even know how to be convincingly happy. She has the childlike neediness of May December’s Gracie and the spiritual vacancy of Safe’s Carol, a complacently empty vessel on autopilot waiting to be filled and set in the right direction. That the profoundly broken Mona should find her calling in community theater is both Eisenberg’s sardonic joke and sincere paean to this makeshift haven of outcasts (or in-casts, as she cracks with overeager glee). Watching Mona gain grit, purpose, and agency via the role of Miss Danielle — a role as tertiary to the musical-within-the film as Mona is to her own life — is akin to seeing a baby take its first steps, or, well, an actor get the role of a lifetime and knock it clear out of the auditorium. Moore keeps us on a razor’s edge between tragedy and comedy throughout, from a volcanic rehearsal where her line readings transform into increasingly deranged, improvised expressions of her long-repressed suffering to her mostly disastrous attempts, as Miss Danielle in real life, to fix plumbing and electrical issues in a fleabag motel. In Mona’s total possession by the character of Miss Danielle, The Debut viscerally conveys the physical, emotional, and psychological lure of acting, as well as the anxious thrill of realizing a power you never knew you had. Mona is an absurd character in an absurd movie (one that could arguably use a little more development of its own tertiary, and even secondary, characters), but it’s due to Eisenberg’s and Moore’s absolute commitment to taking her seriously that we do, too. When the lights go up, a star has been born, again.

Eight Bridges

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

EIGHT BRIDGES   **1/2

James Benning

2026

IDEA:  Eight stationary, ten-minute shots of different bridges in the United States.

BLURB:  A structural film in more ways than one, Eight Bridges presents static shots of fixed structures and lets the world, and our minds, drift around them. What happens during these shots? The light subtly changes as clouds and fog shift in the sky; vehicular and pedestrian traffic flows across the bridges; water ripples and boats sail by. For an attentive viewer, much more might occur outside the frame. We might begin tracking compositional and graphic patterns across the shots, like the angles and distances at which Benning films the bridges, the positions at which he places the horizon, or what foreground or background elements — clouds, foliage, birds — are in motion. We might even try to retain the look of the first frames of each shot so we can mentally compare them to the final frames to clock what’s changed. Our minds could turn to more historical-materialist matters, like where these bridges are located and when they were built, what purposes they’ve served, and how their relative upkeep or dereliction might reflect a post-industrial landscape. Maybe we’ll wonder more broadly and philosophically about bridges as liminal spaces, and afterward, do some research on the ones Benning chose. Or perhaps we’ll spend quite a bit of time thinking about what we’re having for lunch later. Eight Bridges really doesn’t care. It’s as indifferent to you as steel and concrete. 

Everything Else is Noise

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

EVERYTHING ELSE IS NOISE   ***

Nicolás Pereda

2026

IDEA:  When a two-person documentary crew arrives at an apartment to film an interview with a cellist, the situation devolves into a comedy of errors.

BLURB:  So much is effaced in a piece of art: the time and money spent, the physical and mental exhaustion, the dog that was incessantly barking in the neighboring apartment while the power kept going out. The latter are just some of the contingencies folded into the creative fabric of Everything Else is Noise, a dryly irreverent doodle of a film that celebrates the noise that goes along with art-making, and living. Pereda presents two artistic disciplines and philosophies not so much clashing as rubbing in droll counterpoint. In a clear gendered dichotomy, there are the women cellist-composers, who seem not to take their craft too seriously, and the male documentarians, a well-intentioned but bumbling pair who like to intellectualize their subject matter. The guys are essentially flummoxed by the stoic, impenetrable host Teresa (a truly mischievous Teresita Sánchez), the unforthcoming interviewee Rosa (Rosa Estela Juárez Vargas), and Teresa’s smirky adult daughter Luisa (Luisa Pardo). Their questions about inspiration and music theory are continually met with answers that undermine their lofty, romanticized expectations, most hilariously in Teresa’s stone-faced confabulations about synesthesia. All the while, the filming process is thwarted by outside noises and technical issues the women have clearly assimilated as part of life’s own eccentric music. Pereda directs with the blasé whimsy of Teresa and Luisa, using his wide frame to block the characters in deliberate asynchrony and juxtaposing on- and offscreen space so we’re made acutely aware of what we’re not seeing. Both approaches are present in what might be called the centerpiece scene, in which Luisa performs a bizarre cello arrangement for her guests after instructing them to close their eyes. We never see her ourselves, but her noise is remarkable.

The Dreamed Adventure

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

THE DREAMED ADVENTURE   **

Valeska Grisebach

2026

IDEA:  An archeologist and her old acquaintance fall back into the criminal network they were involved in during Bulgaria's immediate post-Soviet years.

BLURB:  The Dreamed Adventure is a crime movie, a Western, and an ethnographic documentary, but only sort of. It’s kind of an adventure, but then, the title tells us that part is dreamed. Throughout the film’s saggy 164-minute runtime, Grisebach demonstrates a refusal of spectacle or dramatic excitement that is almost admirable. Set amid the infrastructural and social decay of a small town on the Bulgarian-Turkish border in the present day, the story lumbers between interchangeably decrepit buildings and dirt roads, linked by rambling dinner-table conversations held in the dark outside. Grisebach’s docufiction style is most evident in these scenes, where an array of mostly older folk, seemingly speaking from experience, reminisce about life in Bulgaria in the years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union. Pointedly, how that past is remembered is divided along gender lines: at an all-female gathering, the women lament how terribly they were treated by men impervious to any law but their own, while the all-male gathering is filled with casual misogyny and nostalgia for the unchecked corruption of the past, which we learn is far from past. Our guide through this ecosystem is Yana Radeva’s Veska, who, in the film’s most effective gambit, replaces a man (Syuleyman Letifov’s Said) as the protagonist about a third of the way in. Like the rest of the nonprofessional cast, Radeva and Letifov have exceptionally intriguing faces but dubious ability to hold the screen during The Dreamed Adventure’s wanly shot, talky longueurs. There’s a very good, taut movie in here somewhere, one that’s still neorealist and feminist and detailed about the local-level socioeconomics of post-Communist Eastern Europe, but it’s been lost in a listless, shapeless sprawl.

Possible Love

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

POSSIBLE LOVE   ***

Lee Chang-dong

2026

IDEA:  In the wake of mass layoffs and a violent union crackdown at a factory, a wealthy filmmaker decides to make a documentary about the fired workers, her focus being on the traumatized Ho-seok and his wife Mi-ok.

BLURB:  A spiritual companion to Parasite, No Other Choice, and Lee’s own Burning, the epic-length Possible Love is a sobering examination of the intransigent class barriers of late-capitalist South Korea. Lee is operating from sociological scales both wide and intimate, and on tonal registers by turns righteously furious and emotionally ambiguous. The anger comes through, at least initially, on the macro level, in the way Lee chronicles the fallout of SP Heavy Industry’s mass layoffs. The villains are made plain as day — private equity, capitalist greed, anti-labor law enforcement — and the victims are portrayed as socially and psychologically ruined, metaphorically “dead” in Korean employment parlance if not literally so. A scene of fired workers giving testimonies during group therapy has the puncturing realism of documentary. This is apt, because Possible Love is also about documentary filmmaking, with the camera serving as the bridge between the working class and the social elite. The former are watched, represented, objectified; the latter get to do the watching and representing. This hierarchy is staged in microcosm between the film’s two couples, the possibility of exploitation always hovering ominously in the air. Lee never dispels the fear, but he also refuses to make the rich couple monsters; Ye-ji’s documentary might even be conducive to securing unionization and exorcising Ho-seok’s trauma. It’s a shame the moral complexity and incisive social portraiture of Possible Love aren’t expressed through equally compelling visual means, as Lee’s bland, perfunctory shots have the stale look of a soap opera. The richness of the text is usually enough to compensate, as are the performances. As the working-class couple, Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu are pressurized canisters of frustration and resentment. Pointedly, the latter’s belated emotional outpouring is catalyzed by the act of being filmed, but whether he can ever actually be “seen” by the right people is left a disquieting uncertainty. 

Bitter Christmas

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

BITTER CHRISTMAS   ***

Pedro Almodóvar

2026

IDEA:  Raúl, a filmmaker in physical and creative decline, writes a new screenplay about a filmmaker quite like him, drawing inspiration from his life and his acquaintances. 

BLURB:  An auteur’s late-career work is viewed fundamentally differently than their other work. Saddled with expectations built up by audiences over time, it carries the burden of an entire oeuvre and established persona, and is equally liable to being received as an august capstone or a “minor” work by an artist past their prime. Few films have so plainly articulated this condition as Bitter Christmas, which is self-reflexively and self-deprecatingly designed by Almodóvar as a minor work that also functions as a career summation. An autofiction about Almodóvar’s penchant for autofiction, it surpasses Pain and Glory for sheer creative solipsism with its nesting narrative structure that gives us not one, but two stand-ins for the Spanish auteur. Both stories, the one about Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) and the one about Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), concern the interpersonal effects of making fiction using real people from one’s life. Most of Bitter Christmas takes place inside Raúl’s screenplay of the same name (“a suitable title,” quips Elsa), where Almodóvar indulges in his aesthetic and melodramatic loves: chicly dressed and color-coordinated homes (and people), a flowery Alberto Iglesias score, women on the verge of nervous breakdowns and women supporting each other through them. The story itself is of uneven interest, despite containing such stellar scenes as a male striptease (courtesy Patrick Criado) that Almodóvar keeps on going well past the point of narrative sense, and a sojourn on Lanzarote where the black-sand beaches make his vibrant reds and yellows pop like never before. It’s in the final, intensely-acted finale that the filmmaker retroactively makes the meandering and recycled qualities of “Bitter Christmas” the whole point. Raúl is aging, depressed, physically infirm, diminished in prestige, and likely out of new ideas. Almodóvar doesn’t sanitize or placate this alter-ego; his most daring move in a film with not too many of them is confess his own sickness as an artist, and, rather than apologize for it, claim it as a compulsion he simply cannot stop. It’s the kind of naked honesty that makes a minor work a major act of self-exposure.