Leviticus

LEVITICUS   **1/2

Adrian Chiarella

2026

IDEA:  After being subjected to a religious ritual to cleanse them of their homosexuality, two teenage boys find themselves hunted by an entity that takes the form of the other. 

BLURB:  A recent trend in LGBTQ indie filmmaking has used the horror genre to explore religious bigotry, physicalizing sexual oppression as a deadly supernatural force preying on gay youth in conservative communities (see Almamula and Ganymede, both 2023). While the monsters in those films were more generalized manifestations of homophobia the protagonists had to contend with largely alone, Leviticus adds an intriguing wrinkle to the formula: romance, as both a target for and bulwark against a provincial town’s homophobic Christian dogmas. Chiarella’s central metaphor is blunt but potent, conveying how society weaponizes fear to suppress queer identities, and how in turn queer people internalize that fear so they’re forced to see the things they desire as dangerous. As human nature evinces, though, repressing desire only makes it stronger, and it’s the palpable intensity of desire as communicated between Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen that makes Leviticus work better as romance than horror. There are some genuinely unnerving moments — a bloody invasion of home (and mouth) is a standout — but Chiarella’s script is too underbaked, and the cinematography too slick, for these elements to really take hold. Character development is minimal, as is the elaboration of the town itself, which has plenty of forbidding rural-industrial atmosphere but little in the way of social logic. Everything is in the service of allegory; thankfully, Leviticus is so short the allegory doesn’t have time to be beaten into the ground, nor, regrettably, does it have time to be fully fleshed out.

Disclosure Day

DISCLOSURE DAY   ***

Steven Spielberg

2026

IDEA:  With the world on the brink of geopolitical catastrophe, a cybersecurity expert and a TV weatherwoman are involved in a plot to publicly reveal the existence of extraterrestrial life.

BLURB:  Disclosure Day starts as a paranoid conspiracy thriller and ends as an irony-free, self-reflexive paean to the power of movies to foster awe, empathy, and unity. Perhaps only a filmmaker as titanically venerable as Spielberg could get away with implicitly positing himself, and his work, as channels for the communication of a higher power (art), the same way Emily Blunt’s Margaret Fairchild becomes an empathic vessel through which the extraterrestrials appeal to humankind’s better nature. Spielberg’s cinema has always been one rooted in primal pleasures and fears, connecting us to our most easily dazzled (and vulnerable) selves, and in Disclosure Day he makes a studio-set replica of Fairchild’s old family home serve as a madeleine-trigger to awaken her buried childhood memories. What could be a more perfect metaphor for Spielberg’s films, fastidiously constructed simulacra that bring us back to our own primal scenes? Spielberg and Koepp expand the metaphor as the film progresses, linking aliens and the stories told by moving images as figures of a collective faith that could, ideally, change human consciousness for the better. Disclosure Day’s earnest belief in this possibility — achieved via legacy media, no less — feels admittedly at odds with our increasingly atomized, factious society. Such guileless optimism is not exactly helped by being grafted to some very dubious plotting and character writing. But goofy and implausible are par for the invariably fun Spielberg genre course, as is schmaltzy humanism. Despite its messiness, Disclosure Day is still the expertly shot, edited, and acted work of a master, full of Kamiński’s dynamic, pirouetting camerawork and invigorated, especially, by Blunt’s alternately vivacious and tense, funny, polyglot performance as a possessed woman who persists even when she has no idea what she’s doing, or why. She’s all of us, beckoned alike by the terrifying unknowns of life and the transformative potential of stories to soothe them. If it’s hard to fully believe in the film’s message of hope, Spielberg seems to be entreating us: try.

Renoir

RENOIR   ***

Chie Hayakawa

2025

IDEA:  A young girl in 1987 Japan deals in her own ways with a terminally ill father and distant mother.

BLURB:  Played by wonderful young actress Yui Suzuki with a mix of stoic inscrutability and a sense of rash, unquenchable mischief, Fuki is not your typical movie kid. When she’s not sating her morbid curiosity by watching documentaries about the bombing of Japan or listening to gruesome news reports, she’s practicing her psychic abilities, dialing a telephone dating hotline, and neighing like a horse. We understand these as character idiosyncrasies, but more significantly as the effects of a culture in which emotions, not readily demonstrated, are rerouted through unique avenues of expression. Fuki is a product of Japanese attitudes of humility and self-restraint, and she processes her grief not by crying or talking but discreetly testing the bounds of her mortality, and morality. It’s a testament to Hayakawa and Suzuki that this girl can seem at once sweet and sociopathic; that she resists sentimentality and even full comprehension is a mark of the film’s authenticity in depicting a child’s complex engagement with the world. Renoir surrounds her with other characters who are similarly adrift in their private grieving, loneliness, or disaffection and turn to unusual or aberrant means in order to cope. Hayakawa’s style is graceful and empathic, with a fluidity that finds its correlation in billowing curtains and the motif of water. She ably communicates the melancholy of transience — but also the succor of connection — her characters struggle to verbalize.

Club Zero

CLUB ZERO   *

Jessica Hausner

2023

IDEA:  A nutrition teacher at a boarding school trains her pupils to obey a regimen of "conscious eating," which entails starvation as a means of achieving greater wellbeing.

BLURB:  It is a challenge to think of many other narrative feature films as immaculately designed yet with so very little to say as Club Zero, one in which pompously affected form is so risibly out of step with any perceivable function. No amount of icy-cool static long shots, slow zooms, persistent drumming on the soundtrack, or flamboyantly over-stylized sets and costumes can mask a painfully obvious and superficial allegory of religious-ideological indoctrination that culminates with a recreation of the Last Supper. Hausner is evidently going after jet-black absurdist social satire à la Yorgos Lanthimos, down to the deliberately stilted line readings, but she forgets to make her story compelling or any of her characters or situations convincing within the flimsy framework she’s established. Her world isn’t absurdist but merely nonsensical, so devoid of sociological or psychological nuance that it all but loses resonance with the reality it’s ostensibly critiquing. Where is this school located? Why do the students in Miss Novak’s class not interact with a single other student in the whole school, or have other classes? Why does literally everyone look like they’re dressed for the Met Gala? Hausner seems to care not a whit. She’s smugly fixated on her color-coordinated Architectural Digest mise en scène, lazy ironies (get it, “Silent Night” because people died on Christmas!), and pseudo-épater-la-bourgeoisie cheap shots that even an actor as talented as Mia Wasikowska is unable to give weight to. The most authentic part of Club Zero may be when Mathieu Demy, making physical what the audience has been doing mentally the whole time, rolls his eyes.

Silent Friend

SILENT FRIEND   ***

Ildikó Enyedi

2025

IDEA:  Three timelines spanning over a century are united by the same gingko tree on the campus of a German university.

BLURB:  Silent Friend is a highly idiosyncratic work that, unlike the plants it spends so much time observing, escapes classification. Deeply reverent of nature but not quite environmentalist, full of science but prone to New Age-y metaphysical gaping, and interested in non-anthropocentric perspectives while mostly hewing to banal human concerns, it sparks curiosity more than the full-blown wonder it seems to be courting. Still, as Enyedi shows us, curiosity is a vital thing; across her three parallel timelines, she presents it as the bedrock of creativity, knowledge, discovery, and advancement. Curiosity drives Dr. Tony Wong to attempt to understand infant neurology, and then the biology of a gingko tree; Grete to break the glass ceiling and become a trailblazing botanist and photographer; and Hannes to build a device in order to better connect (literally) with a purple geranium. In all these cases, Silent Friend extols the power of the scientific spirit to challenge received wisdom and create new data, and in turn enhance how we understand and coexist with the world around us. Inevitably, Enyedi turns toward medium self-reflexivity, using the storyline of an old photographer to center the camera among a wide-ranging group of instruments humans use to expand their perception, joining pens, microphones, computers, brain scanners, hallucinogens, and so much more. Teasing the boundaries of what we can perceive through such instruments, Enyedi and DP Gergely Pálos imagine the lived experiences of flora by lavishing indulgent attention on bark, branches, leaves, and flower petals while people are rendered out of focus in the background, and at times zooming in to the plants’ cellular level as the soundtrack crackles and hisses like nature ASMR. This admittedly gets pretty repetitive over 150 minutes, and the scenes that aren’t as purely sensory are often bogged down by extended, prosaic human drama. Silent Friend works best as an insinuating, contemplative, kinetic Zen koan, exploiting image and sound to adjust our consciousnesses to a frequency accessible only through technological medi(t)ation. 

Blue Heron

BLUE HERON   ***1/2

Sophy Romvari

2025

IDEA:  A Hungarian immigrant family in British Columbia struggles with how to manage the eldest son's erratic behavior.

*LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD*

BLURB:  Through what means do we recall our childhoods? How much is pure memory, stories we’re told, keepsakes, or photographs and movies? With heartrending, metatextual specificity, Blue Heron shows that our pasts can’t be recovered but only partially reconstructed through multiple layers of mediation. Technology plays the primary role here, and throughout the first half of Blue Heron cameras appear regularly as mechanisms the family uses to record itself. Already framed as memories, these passages carry an understated but acutely felt nostalgia for bygone childhood pleasures: playing hopscotch with friends, family outings at the beach, watching Looney Tunes, doodling on MS Paint. Romvari subtly signals to us that there’s missing information, though, not just in relation to Jeremy’s enigmatic condition but within and between her images themselves, which are consistently being reframed through camera movement and obfuscated by windows, mirrors, and blurry foregrounds. The ultimate reframing — the masterstroke of Blue Heron — comes midway through, when the preceding fiction is recast as reality and Romvari steps in, via the proxy of a superb Amy Zimmer, as the creator-protagonist. With the kind of temporal sleight of hand only cinema can achieve, the film slips through time and perspective, evolving from a relatively standard memory piece into an investigation of technology’s capacity to preserve, reveal, and potentially even resolve past experiences. For Romvari, it’s the last point that is painfully ambiguous; even with her imagination and artistry, she still can’t fill the lacuna of her troubled late brother. In this inability, Blue Heron mournfully acknowledges the limits of knowing and representing, yet takes this not as a deterrent but a catalyst to keep remembering, and creating.