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.

La Gradiva

LA GRADIVA   ***

Marine Atlan

2026

IDEA:  On a class trip to Pompeii just before graduation, conflicts big and small arise among a diverse group of French high-school students and their teacher.

BLURB:  Anyone who’s been on a school trip abroad or studied far from home knows that a substantial portion of the learning happens well outside the official lesson plan. Usually, the coursework ends up dovetailing with the random stuff going on in your life, and if you’re not too distracted by the latter, the two have the tendency to mutually enrich each other. The students in La Gradiva aren’t yet conscious of the connections. While they learn about plate tectonics and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, tensions among them are building to a head. In scenes of remarkably fluid, documentary-like realism — the most brilliant taking place in front of a Dionysian fresco — the class is increasingly unable to hold together as simmering resentments become scathing attacks, and Madame Mercier (a superb Antonia Buresi) finally cracks. Throughout all this, Toni is conducting a private, parallel excavation into his own family history, surfacing uncomfortable truths about class relations that reverberate in his close friendship with the affluent James. Atlan’s script has a novelistic complexity in the way it shifts between the perspectives of several characters who keep on revealing multitudes. The tragedy is their inability to recognize those shades in each other, clinging as they are, sometimes literally, to static images and their false narratives. La Gradiva’s emotional wallop comes not only from its climactic event, but the impossibility of fully accounting for it. Like our view of Vesuvius’s victims, frozen at the last moment of their lives, we can only try to interpret the traces left by the past. The trip ends, the class goes home, but the learning never stops.

Chronovisor

CHRONOVISOR   **1/2

Jack Auen and Kevin Walker

2026

IDEA:  A professor at Columbia University becomes obsessed with learning about the chronovisor, a machine allegedly invented by Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti that allows the user to observe any moment from the past.

BLURB:  A mystery-thriller whose most recurrent visual is a slow pan over a book page, Chronovisor turns the activity of scholarly research into a subject of cinematic excitement. The narrative, as it were, is driven by nothing so much as the protagonist’s thirst for specialty knowledge. Chronovisor unfolds largely in grand, tenebrous libraries by glowing banker’s lamps, dramatizing what is basically intangible — intellectual pursuit — by focusing on its material effects. In harmony with its retro 16 mm aesthetic, the film incorporates books, journals, magazines, CRT screens, audio recordings, and other analog information technologies into a fascinating intermedia gestalt. It’s especially keenly attuned to the affects of concentrated study, using glacial long takes, a hypnotic orchestral score, and sequences composed entirely of print to reproduce the attention-sharpening, temporal-suspending flow of being drawn into a world of ideas. Anne Laure Sellier’s agog eyes, shown in closeup examining an artifact, mirror our own curiosity, while her vexed process of tracking down leads captures the more routine, enervating side of academic access. Auen and Walker know these feelings well, for the research performed onscreen is the double of the research they did to make the film. The problem is their findings become less credible the more they lead down a conspiracy rabbit hole, and their metatextual bona fides all but telegraph the ouroboros of a denouement. Chronovisor buzzes with entrancingly eerie mood, but, ironically, it could use a little more academic rigor.