The Christophers

Against the notion of cinematic auteurism, it has sometimes been thought enough to respond that, after all, cinema is a collaborative medium to which certain conceptions of authorship simply don’t apply. The artist-work relations involved in a Keats poem or a Cézanne painting, so this line of thinking goes, are just different in kind from that of a film by Hawks or Ford. Such responses tend to be as simplistic as the models of authorship they assume. Nevertheless, there are substantial differences in the medium-specific conditions of ascribing and acknowledging authorship and intention across the various arts. In more concrete terms: there are good reasons why Godard’s Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars” (2023) and Scénarios (2024), for example, posthumously completed by producer and collaborator Fabrice Aragno, are not considered forgeries.

A chamber comedy set in the contemporary art world, Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers deftly examines the tangle of issues — art, authorship, authenticity — in this vicinity. When first introduced, Lori (Michaela Coel) is splitting her time sketching an urban landscape and working at a food truck. We soon learn that she is, or was, a painter. And when the greedy heirs of renowned painter Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) approach her with a proposition to secretly complete a famous series of works known as the Christophers, we learn that she was perhaps quite a good one. Or, at least, that she is knowledgeable enough about Sklar’s work to be the right person for the job. We also learn that she may have some score to settle with the aging artist. When she interviews for, and then takes, a job as Sklar’s assistant, the question becomes just how she might do this — and for what reasons.

Made from a script by Ed Solomon, The Christophers mainly turns on the push-pull dynamic between Lori and Sklar. As Sklar, an aging painter who has lapsed into irrelevance, having produced nothing of note in decades, and who now spends his time livestreaming invective on some web series, McKellan creates a brashly entertaining character — a person outwardly oblivious but just a touch too self-aware to not know that he is self-deluding. As Lori, meanwhile, Coel expertly creates a sense of mystery about her motives, especially the non-monetary reasons that she might have for taking on such a project to begin with. Together, the pair’s performances provide a superbly entertaining ballast for the heady philosophical questions that arise over the course of the film. If Lori completing the Christophers without Sklar’s consent would unambiguously be a forgery, would her completing them under his supervision, as in an earlier studio model or as in Warhol’s Factory practice, also count as such? What sort of timespan is operative when it comes to artistic intention? Do the intentions of the younger Sklar, who was infatuated with the paintings’ subject, take precedence over those of the much-older, present-day Sklar? And is it possible to, as it were, inhabit someone’s prior intention to complete a work, even or especially if that someone is oneself?

That such questions arise is, to a degree, simply due to the script, and would seem to have little to do with Soderbergh’s direction. But then again, it is worth noting that for this film about the complexities of art and art-making, Soderbergh has delivered his most formally self-effacing film in almost a decade. The film is not anonymous, exactly, but it doesn’t signal its intentions in the manner of, say, the point-of-view conceit of Presence (2024) or the iPhone experimentation in Unsane (2018) and High Flying Bird (2019). Mostly, Soderbergh just creates a dynamic space for his actors to perform. Of course, to even say this is to ascribe some sort of artistic intention, even if the specifics of Soderbergh’s contributions seem opaque. But then again, as Lori shows us by the end of the film, there is in this context a certain thrill in self-effacement, where as in the best of heists, success lies in finding new ways to disappear. — LAWRENCE GARCIA

Franz

Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s last film, 2023’s Green Border, was a fact-based drama about migrants who were lured to Belarus by false promises of asylum, specifically to inflame tensions in a NATO-member nation. As Holland’s film shows, Poland did not want them, and so these innocent people were terrorized by officers on both borders, driven into a small, unlivable area in between. Green Border caused a major stir in Poland, where it was denounced on the parliament floor as untrue and insufficiently patriotic. The film was a massive media talking point in that country, even leading to some death threats for its director. Given this political heat, no one could possibly blame Holland for choosing a less fraught subject for her follow-up.

But that is no excuse for Franz, as colossal a bellyflop as we’ve seen from a luminary director in several years. This is ostensibly a biopic of Franz Kafka (Iden Weiss), and the film does indeed touch on more or less all the turning points in his life: his conflict with his stern merchant father (Peter Kurth), his relationship with his doting sister Ottla (Katharina Stark), his professional rivalry with fellow writer and publisher Max Brod (Sebastian Schwartz), his strained marriage to a poor German, woman, Felice Bauer (Carol Schuler), his abortive attempt to join the army during World War I, his decline from tuberculosis, and his eventual death. It’s all there, periodically interrupted by flashback scenes to little Franz failing to live up to his father’s masculine ideals. Franz is certainly thorough.

But it’s also overstuffed with absolute nonsense. Holland seemed to think that the cure for the common biopic was to include every cinematic trick she could think of, lifted from every unconventional biographical film she’d ever seen. We have historical personages speaking directly to the camera with metacommentary, just like in Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch. We have sudden anachronisms, like in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. There’s some overt Freudianism smuggled in from Raoul Ruiz’s Klimt, and a tendency to scramble time to demonstrate the pull of memory, like Michael Mann’s Ali. But interestingly enough, Holland’s opus never once resembles Kafka, Steven Soderbergh’s dreary second film. Maximalism is the order of the day here, and it retroactively makes one admire Soderbergh’s restraint, if nothing else.

In what is probably the single most misjudged choice in a film teeming with them, Holland frequently cuts to present-day Prague to show contemporary punters at the Franz Kafka Museum, sort of. Although there is indeed a Kafka Museum in Prague, the one Holland shows us is a bit more like Alex Ross Perry’s ersatz Pavement Museum. Unless, of course, you really can get Kafka Burgers there. (“Eat like Franz Kafka did!” a docent says.) There are also fairly explicit nods to 21st-century identity and sensibility, and because the tone of Franz is so scattershot, it’s genuinely impossible to tell whether Holland means them sincerely, or if they are ironically planted to make fun of the presentist tendencies of historical biography. Is the museum worker callow for comparing Kafka’s correspondence to emails and tweets? Are we meant to cringe at specific moments that suggest that Kafka was asexual, on the spectrum, and suffered from OCD? Or are these signposts actually meant to round out this opaque character for the contemporary viewer?

If Franz had adopted one, maybe two, of these disruptive techniques, it might have served a discernible critical purpose. But instead, Holland throws everything at the wall, and the dominant impression is that the director is shamefaced at the very idea of a biopic. But this doesn’t prevent her from giving us canned traumas meant to explain the torment in young Kafka’s soul, the first of which is a staging of the honest-to-God primal scene, as the boy is locked outside while his parents have sex, little Franz gazing through a peephole. On the other hand, Ottla’s quasi-incestuous fixation on her brother receives little if any response from Kafka. Genius that he is, he is far more bothered by his wife’s nattering about wallpaper.

In a film so stylistically diverse, it stands to reason that Franz would get something right, even if only by chance. Far and away the best scene in the film features Kafka presenting his story “In the Penal Colony” in public for the first time. Holland alternates between the scandalized audience at the reading and a cinematic staging of the climax of the story, when the narrator discovers the device that etches the name of the accused’s crime on their body with a pallet of foot-long needles. This moment, oddly enough, calls to mind Wes Anderson’s very successful short film anthology based on the writings of Roald Dahl. Holland might’ve taken the same road, combining a film about Kafka with a film of Kafka, reminding us why the author remains a literary titan. Alas, this is the only scene that attempts to visualize the writer’s imagination. Unless, that is, you count the two different moments when a character forcefully smashes a cockroach. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Sound of Falling

“Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers all fantasies of having lived otherwise — in another time or place, or in a manner less harshly consummated by regret or resentment. Infected by this realization, Mascha Schilinski’s phenomenal Sound of Falling suffuses its textures of bare, unadulterated vignettes with the porousness that comes with things half-remembered, events reconstituted, all to permeate the vague and vast gestalt of collective memory…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — MORRIS YANG

A Pale View of Hills

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1982 novel A Pale View of Hills, with its unreliable first-person narrator and dual timelines of Nagasaki in the 1950s and England in the 1980s, presents clear challenges for film adaptation. It is to filmmaker Kei Ishikawa’s credit, then, that as director, writer, and editor of the novel’s new screen treatment, he guides the slippery narrative with emotional clarity and creates a sense of aesthetic unity throughout its temporal shifts. Yet for all its attributes, certain weaknesses reveal how some of the challenges in adapting Ishiguro’s novel may have proved too difficult to solve: many of the novel’s ambiguities are made explicit, a logically necessary choice that nonetheless smooths out too many of the novel’s fascinating subtleties, and Ishikawa struggles to give equal weight to the scenes set in England, which contain much less narrative action than those in Nagasaki. If an imperfect adaptation, A Pale View of Hills is at least thoughtfully made, and evokes lingering historical traumas with an appropriate moral sincerity.

In 1982, a young writer living in London, Niki (Camilla Aiko), visits her mother, Etsuko (Yoh Yoshida), in the countryside home she grew up in, which Etsuko is preparing to sell. Their relationship is loving but distant, particularly in the wake of Niki’s sister and Etsuko’s daughter Keiko’s recent death by suicide. Niki asks Etsuko to tell her about her life in Nagasaki before emigrating to England, wanting to learn more about her mother’s past before she moves out of the memory-filled home, and also hoping to publish an article based on Etsuko’s recollections. Etsuko, over the course of the visit, tells her about her friendship with a mysterious neighbor named Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido) in 1953. The film depicts how Etsuko (played as a younger woman by Suzu Hirose) and Sachiko’s friendship develops as Sachiko struggles to parent her troubled young daughter, Mariko, and prepares to move to the United States with an American soldier. The film also delves into Etsuko’s domestic life as she questions her relationship with her husband Jiro (Kouhei Matsushita), while pregnant and entertaining Jiro’s visiting father, Ogata (Tomokazu Miura). As Niki learns more about her mother and Etsuko reflects deeper on her past, inconsistencies and ambiguities emerge in Etsuko’s recollections, suggesting that the story she tells herself about her life in post-war Nagasaki and her subsequent move to England may not be entirely accurate.

The plot mostly follows Ishiguro’s novel, with two key changes. The England portions are from Niki’s point of view, rather than Etsuko’s, and the immediate catastrophe and ongoing trauma of the atomic bomb are discussed much more frankly in the Nagasaki portions than in the novel. The latter choice was suggested by Ishiguro, also an executive producer on the film: As Ishikawa noted regarding his and Ishiguro’s discussions about addressing the bomb more openly, “It has been 80 years since the war and, as memories begin to fade, it’s important to say the things that need to be said, to portray them clearly.” The post-traumatic stress, loss of family members, and social stigma experienced by injured survivors after the United States bombed Nagasaki are indeed portrayed clearly, and while this effectively foregrounds the major issue that subtly undergirds the entire narrative, the psychological shading of the characters suffers. The unwillingness, or inability, of the characters to fully face the horror of what they or their parents have endured propels the story forward in both content and in form, and so a morally and historically justifiable choice becomes a narrative hindrance. Other, equally significant narrative issues are also present. The perspective change from Etsuko to Niki falters because Niki is simply not as rich of a character as Etsuko, and in the film’s final act, Ishikawa’s efforts to orchestrate an essential rug-pull — achieved by Ishiguro on the page from a subtle shift in perspective impossible to film — comes across as heavy-handed, blunting the reveal’s emotional power, if not its thematic resonance.

The perhaps inevitable narrative stumbles are mitigated by Ishikawa’s graceful handling of aesthetic and tone. In collaboration with director of photography Piotr Niemyjski, Ishikawa creates canny visual distinctions between the two timelines. 1953 Nagasaki, depicted as being in a rush of rebuilding and modernization, is colorful and classical, with bright lighting and bold blues and yellows dominating the mise en scène. 1982 England is more muted, with primarily natural and diffused lighting, and a color palette similar to the 1953 timeline — except in uniformly darker shades. The aesthetic differences are subtle enough that it is not jarring when Ishikawa shifts to a different time period, but are legibly separate, and evoke how both settings are meant to be viewed: 1953 through the dreamy filter of memory, 1982 from a more grounded and naturalistic point of view. Ishikawa navigates the film’s frequent tonal shifts with a similar intelligence and subtlety, bolstered by emotionally supple performances from a strong cast led by Hirose and Nikaido. 

Ultimately, though its weaknesses inadvertently highlight the difficulties inherent in adapting literature, A Pale View of Hills resonates as a poignant evocation of how the devastation of violence and war follow those affected across time, place, and generations. Ishikawa concludes the film with a perhaps overly optimistic coda, but he possesses an ability — crucial for this particular film — to balance devastation with grace. A Pale View of Hills ultimately does not outmatch its formidable source material, but Ishikawa has crafted an admirable counterpart. — ROBERT STINNER

The Fox King

As Bubi (Amerul Affendi), the dispassionate and dismally successful hustler of small scams, re-marries, he abandons his two sons, Ali (Idan Aedan) and Amir (Hadi Putra), to the care of Lonny (Chew Kin Wah), the owner of a shady fishing business. Ali and Amir, fraternally twinned and more or less secluded from all unnecessary social interaction, earn their keep setting fish to dry and attend school in a sleepy coastal Malaysian town. While Ali speaks normally, Amir barely communicates — when he does, it’s almost exclusively using the names of animals, each possibly signifying a particular idea, wish, or command. But in contrast with his classmates, Amir reads voraciously, possessing (according to his brother) some gifted element that allows him to win each time at the little games they play. It is unsurprising, then, that their new English teacher, the young Lara (Dian Sastrowardoyo), takes a liking to him more than Ali — or anyone else, for that matter.

This liking, as well as the fondness the boys nurse for each other, inflects much of Woo Ming Jin’s latest film, The Fox King, with a preternatural touch of subjectivity. A co-production between Malaysia and Indonesia, the film delights in its rough-hewn textures, blending realism and sensual memory in a coming-of-age framework that’s advantaged by an equatorial, perpetual summer. Save for this fact, however, much of The Fox King remains a muddled, half-baked mess. It ebbs and flows inconsistently between narrative points that receive little redress and ones that do; though Lonny, along with the boys’ friends and occasional bullies, maintains a straightforward presence throughout, Lara’s is more mercurial. As much as this may speak to the hazy, hormonal vagaries of teenage recollection, Woo doesn’t quite earn the comparison when he pursues about a dozen separate subplots, many of which advance a certain thematic aspect while further shrouding the young woman in unreadable mystery. Though young, she has worldly, cosmopolitan dreams; while kind to Amir, she flirts with disaster in her coolly unprofessional conduct in the classroom.

A more fascinating work might foreground Lara, rather than the twins, as a linchpin for the film’s psychological undercurrents, but The Fox King, to its credit, mines most of its emotional beats from Ali and Amir’s relationship. Jealousy, helplessness, and brotherly concern rear their heads, somewhat inchoately, from this premise as the hot-tempered Ali bears the bulk of onscreen burden in reconciling with troubles aplenty: his boss runs a tightly unethical ship, his brother frequently runs off with Lara, and his father selfishly flits in and out of their lives. The film’s focus on one brother over the other diverges from the fetishizing tendencies of a work like Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Silent Twins, but both films lamentably squander the enigma of their central protagonists on routine and desultory sequences. The oneiric atmosphere besieging Ali’s impressions of Lara, likewise, hovers above flimsy ground, its material tensions scattershot and cloyingly melodramatic. Like the durian species — illegally harvested by Bubi’s sons for him — after which it is named, The Fox King bears a strong scent, but little bite. — MORRIS YANG

Copper

“In director Nicolás Pereda’s Copper, Lázaro (Pereda regular Lázaro Rodríguez) discovers a corpse by the side of the road. It’s unusual enough for him to mention this to his mother Tere (Teresita Sánchez) and his aunt Rosa (Rosa Estela Juárez — these eponymous characters also a Pereda hallmark), but not important enough to report to anyone else. Lázaro is much more concerned with obtaining an oxygen tank as his breathing has been infrequently more laborious, likely due to his time spent in the mines. It’s a mining town, El Carmen, and everyone seems to work for the mine in one way or another, including the doctor who tells Lázaro that his problems come from and will subside with his small smoking habit…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — ZACH LEWIS

Mama

When one sees enough festival films, certain patterns begin to emerge. This isn’t in reference to the thematic ones that are often articulated in critics’ festival reports, along the lines of “this was a big year for close-up examinations of the toll taken by global capital.” (Is it ever not a big year for that?) No, more specifically, this is referring to formal patterns that tend to traverse genres and national boundaries, ones that speak less to the Zeitgeist and more to the particular structures of international funding, production workshops, and the various institutional mechanisms that assist first-time directors in getting their debuts out to the circuit. Mama, by Israel’s Or Sinai, is a perfectly respectable, low-key drama about Mila (Evgenia Dodina), a middle-aged Pole who works as a domestic employee in the home of some well-to-do Israelis. The film makes some cogent observations about familial expectations, the pull of tradition, and indeed, the toll taken by global capital. But something gets lost along the way.

Mila’s family is back in Poland. She has been away from her husband, Anton (Arkadiusz Jakubik), and college-age daughter, Kasia (Katarzyna Łubik), for several years. When Mila has an accident and injures her wrist, her employers decide that she should spend her time off going back home, where she can presumably recuperate in peace. But upon her return, she discovers that life has gone on without her, in ways that her family has not necessarily felt the need to share. The cynical reading of this is that Anton and Kasia want Mila to keep sending money back home; the generous reading is that they don’t want to stress her out about problems she’s in no position to solve. To Sinai’s credit, she shows that the truth of the situation is a mixture of the two. It’s also to Mama’s credit that it treats Mila and Anton as reasonable adults, despite the small-town setting. Mila has taken a lover (Martin Ogbu) in Israel, and Anton has taken up with a local woman, Natasha (Dominika Bednarczyk), who has gradually insinuated her way into the family. While these decisions are a point of contention, there is no double standard. “You’re with someone, I know you are,” Anton tells Mila, “and so was I.”

But the primary conflict has to do with Kasia’s plans. Mila has been working to make sure her daughter stays in college in Krakow, to get a degree in computer programming so that she “won’t end up like me.” Kasia has other plans, including marrying her boyfriend and quitting school. These changes are the result of an unplanned pregnancy, which Mila very much wants Kasia to terminate. (While abortion is illegal in Poland, there are clinics on the Czechian border that cater specifically to Polish women.) But it’s here that Sinai loses the plot. There is a deeply troubling turn of events when Kasia gets an ultrasound and discovers the fetus has fatal abnormalities. Kasia is crushed, and Mila is in the awkward position of getting what she wants, but not in the way she wanted it. She seems almost sorry, and resolute in helping Kasia through this tragedy.

But then there’s a twist. It’s the kind of twist that undergraduates put in their short stories, the kind that screenwriters throw in when someone has given them notes about “third act problems.” Mama completely undoes the messy, ambivalent emotions that Mila, Kasia, and Anton are grappling with, and the impact nearly tanks the film entirely. This is a shame, because Mama is well-acted, with skillful but unfussy cinematography and an admirably plainspoken tone. Sinai manages to convey the cultural and atmospheric distance between Israel and Poland without sanitizing the former or provincializing the latter. The film constructs a world filled with real, imperfect people, sometimes blinded by their own good intentions. And with one ill-conceived revelation, Mama blows it all to hell. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

The Man in My Basement

One of the more amusing filmmaking exercises of the last few years was 2023’s Inside, which depicted the steady unraveling of a man who becomes inadvertently trapped inside a luxury penthouse apartment he was attempting to burglarize. Set entirely in a single location, the film is most memorable for gifting a notable showcase to Willem Dafoe, who portrayed the ensnared man and is virtually the only character to appear on screen. While Inside didn’t make any headway in reinventing the wheel, it made for a compelling enough sit thanks entirely to Dafoe, whose trademark gravelly voice and striking screen presence did wonders to carry the project across the finish line. Now, in 2025, there’s The Man in My Basement, which similarly promises another tale of Dafoe confined to a single location for much of the film’s duration, though this time he’s not alone. Based on a 2004 novel by Walter Mosley, The Man in My Basement is the feature debut of Nadia Latif, striving to make her mark with a thematically dense work. The film offers many provocative ideas, and there’s a typically strong Dafoe performance at the center of it all, but the reality of watching it is far less enthralling, as the film’s near two-hour runtime winds up becoming an enormous liability, gradually dissipating any tension or intrigue like air leaking out of a balloon.

The basement in question is attached to a house owned by Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins), a man currently struggling to make ends meet. Having recently lost his mother, Charles is the eighth and last of his generation growing up in his family home in Sag Harbor Hills, a predominantly Black community in New York. As bills and property taxes pile up, and with no luck in finding any job opportunities, Charles is having a difficult time keeping his head above water, while his combative behavior slowly alienates the remaining family and friends he has left. His only viable option seems to be selling his house to the bank, which would absolve his debts but force him to lose the only thing of value he has left in his life. With the entire world against him, it seems not only serendipitous but also downright miraculous that Anniston Bennet (Willem Dafoe) enters his life, toting an unusual proposition: if Charles allows him to rent out the basement of his home, he will receive a payment of $65,000, with nearly half of that paid up front. Initially rebuffing the stranger’s offer, Charles is eventually left with no choice but to accept, welcoming Anniston into his home. However, after the first night passes by, Charles awakens to a harrowing discovery: Anniston has locked himself in an elaborate cage system within the dwelling, and will now solely depend on Charles for food, water, and electricity to survive his stay, further rocking the world of a man backed into a corner, plagued with his own demons. 

Though the title and premise foreground Dafoe’s presence in the film, Anniston does not enter Charles’ home until the 30-minute mark. Latif, who co-adapted the screenplay with Mosley, spends an inordinate amount of time establishing Charles’ strife, painting a portrait of a man who is down but not quite out. Gas is low, groceries are sparse, nobody’s hiring, and the bank is threatening foreclosure, with the burden of existence drawing real-world parallels from those attempting to navigate a poisoned economy. Charles is also in possession of many ancestral artifacts from West Africa, meeting with art dealer Narciss (Anna Diop) to see about selling off his valuable collection of masks, toying with the idea of parting with priceless heirlooms for any sort of financial reprieve, however momentary it may be. The Man in My Basement tackles race, history, legacy, culture, and guilt, but as the film (slowly) marches on, one can’t help but feel that the overbearing whole is less than the sum of its grab bag of ideas, as Latif seems content only to hat tip to their presence, which fails to pay off these themes with any sort of convincing closure.

Thankfully, there is the Dafoe of it all, with the actor still completely magnetic to watch, even when confined to a 10-by-10 cell block for the bulk of the film. He’s matched well by Hawkins, and The Man in My Basement is at its absolute best when the film hunkers down with these two men, squaring off with intense scenes of interrogation as Anniston’s true motives are doled out piecemeal. Mosley is an acclaimed crime novelist (his most famous work is arguably his Easy Rawlins series, which kicked off with The Devil in a Blue Dress), but this film feels more theatrical by design — those going in blind would be likely to assume this derived from a stage play rather than a mystery novel. Part of the problem also lies in Latif’s confused direction: The Man in My Basement feints at being a ghost story, a haunted house picture, and a knotty psychological thriller, but it ultimately crystallizes into none of the above or any strange amalgam of all three, taking the cheap way out with a limp ending that does not bring the story to a satisfying close. Dafoe is as reliable a presence as ever, but The Man in My Basement squanders its intriguing premise, bottoming out long before the picture ends. — JAKE TROPILA

Two Prosecutors

“Ever since his debut fiction film My Joy (2010) premiered in the main competition of Cannes, Sergei Loznitsa has been a repeat visitor to the Croisette. Two Prosecutors, his first fiction feature since 2018’s Donbass, marks the tenth time the Belarussian-born director has been included in the festival’s lineup. Unfortunately, what could have been a victory lap and a grand return to the main competition — where Loznitsa was last slotted with A Gentle Creature (2017) — turns out to be a disappointing new entry in the director’s otherwise impressive oeuvre…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — HUGO EMMERZAEL