More than any season in recent memory, the films shown at the Venice Film Festival and other fall-circuit festivals crack open heated, necessary political discourse worldwide.
In Nia DaCosta’s sensual adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, “care” is a form of both pleasure and power, and a stated limit is something to overcome.
The “old, obscure artist” drama Late Fame shows you’re never too old to be delusional about your youth, or too young to be delusional about your future.
Digger breaches like an apocalyptic iceberg, blowing its premise to bits with metacinematic bombs that unleash a ferocious horde of ideas at our late-capitalist brains.
John Patton Ford’s How to Make a Killing uses a dying man’s cheesecake complaint to expose the hidden violence of meritocracy: not greed, but the slow colonization of desire by a system that promises everything and recognizes nothing.
Far from the Disney path, these animated animal movies from Hungary and the Philippines revel in parody, satire, and real world-inspired violence.
Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest deepens as you wander further into its bucolic details, where things aren’t as serene and picturesque as they seem.
German actor Otto Gebühr’s story shows how consistent artistic work can soften propaganda and shape historical memory more powerfully than a political system.
Venice Film Festival 2026 embraced film’s political nature—though not without flinching—as we examine works by Paul Schrader, Shin’ya Tsukamoto, and an Oasis documentary.
The rest of America may have moved on from this 1997 disaster movie, but Dante’s Peak still percolates in the collective Northwestern consciousness, like slow-moving magma that never fully cools.
Two long-forgotten Czech silent films by pioneer Jan S. Kolár are not only artifacts of a fragile history but lessons in how historical legacy will try to kill you.
Christopher Nolan, today’s most ambitious director, lets us have our cake and eat it too by mixing avant-garde daring and maximalist spectacle.
