'A movie with this subject, homosexuality, is rated Category III. As such, this movie would not be allowed in mainland China. With all these criteria, it’s very hard for me to secure investors. So last year I made the decision that I would finance this film myself. I had faith because, despite it being controversial, I don’t think a movie like this will have a small audience. So that’s why I decided to bet on myself.' @BrndnStrssng in conversation with the iconic Herman Yau on his new independent feature We're Nothing At All: inreviewonline.com/2026/10/1…

'Aware that this film project might be a last chance to get things right, the air is fused by potential: to speak one’s truth, to commemorate and foreground the forgotten, and to overwrite “wrong” notions of history, if necessary. And for all the inadequacies of history, whose writings, ultimately, escape the grasp of the individual, the allure of making a film such as Harlem might lie precisely in the potential of exerting this control over the uncontrollable, of getting things “right” — if only for 100 minutes.' inreviewonline.com/2026/01/2…

'Unfortunately, as Whalefall progresses and Jay is affected further by lack of air and injury, his delirium pushes the film into more well-trod territory. He imagines that his father’s soul somehow inhabits his giant undersea captor, and repeatedly hears Mitt’s voice advising, hectoring, and eventually forgiving him. All of the locked-room, trapped-in-a-whale stuff works so well that it’s a shame that the film has to turn to some extremely hackneyed bad dad issues melodrama, and the more it anchors itself to Jay’s grief, the duller things get.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/1…

'With his debut House of the Wind, director Bernard Auguste Kouemo Yanghu (who won both an Orizzonti Special Jury Prize and the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for Best Debut at this year’s Venice Film Festival) was inspired by personal experience. Returning home to Cameroon and seeing his mother living alone, he originally started this project as a documentary, before gradually developing the film’s fictional elements. Indeed, there’s a palpable sense of intimacy that Yanghu brings to House of the Wind, a texture made even more apparent by some of the more potent choices he makes, like casting his own mother, Josette Kwanya (who passed away in 2024), as the central matriarch.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/1…

'The world we have built for ourselves is an ersatz one. We gaze at our screens, watching videos and listening to songs that are only digital replications of information received by sensors and converted into data. We flick through images of memories, replacing them rather than representing them. Leonardo Pirondi’s Tropical Fractals imagines a future in which this world we’ve built has, quite plausibly, become uninhabitable, and asks: if all we have left are copies, of what use are our original selves?' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/1…

'Mixtape, as that subtitle might imply, uses the series’ extant fetish for analog video and extends that affinity to audio, working in a music theme that ties together each of its segments... a new horror short from Demon Knight and Bones director Ernest R. Dickerson is the best reason to see V/H/S: Mixtape, but even his segment is only marginally worth celebrating...' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/0…

'Set during the early days of France’s yellow vest protests in 2018, the film follows IGPN (that’s French for Internal Affairs) officer Stephanie Bertrand (Drucker), whose desk is inundated with complaints regarding police violence against protestors. Her work is fairly routine and the heavy workload — not to mention institutional indifference — leaves little time to properly investigate each case. But the case of a brutally injured young man shot in the head with a riot round becomes an object of obsession.' inreviewonline.com/2026/03/1…

'There isn’t actually a lot of chess featured in the film, beyond its implicit driving force for the film’s existence. Buettner repeatedly talks about how his freestyle chess league is bringing Formula 1 to chess and will make it an international sensation. Of course, it seems unlikely that wish will be granted, but Mandelup has brought a similar formula to the film, which is successful. The framing of shots is just dramatic enough to hold attention despite capturing a topic that isn’t typically attention-grabbing to non-chessheads or kinetically provocative. In so doing, Grandmasters manages to communicate the tension — so illusory to lay observers —that is inherent to the sport and those who play it.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/1…