San Sebastian 2026: The Awards
The big winner at San Sebastian 2026, ‘Tender Loving Care’, reads almost like a summing-up of Mike Leigh’s long and fruitful career.
2026
In My Father’s Room
In her first feature film, best-selling novelist Maha Harada captures the quiet grace of Japanese traditions from art to poetry, cherry blossoms to the tea ceremony, avoiding cliché with an evocative sensibility and a modern sense of humor.
The Housewife
Naomi Watts plays a prim suburban housewife with a very dark past in Canadian director Ben Shirinian’s good-looking but heavy-handed debut feature, a based-on-reality period thriller set in 1960s New York.
The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias
Proving their rambunctious, winning formula is a snug fit for dark times, Sophie Fiennes and philosopher comrade Slavoj Zizek plumb how our world got to where it is, through iconic movies.
Sarajevo 2026: The Verdict
Sandra Wollner’s Everytime won the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Feature Film at Sarajevo Film Festival’s star-studded and politically engaged 32nd edition.
Small Things
Less is enough in Zvonimir Juric’s portrait of a family tying up an inheritance on a stormy island, a quiet, modest portrait with a profound payoff.
You Don’t Belong Here
Florin Serban’s Locarno winner ‘You Don’t Belong Here’ deftly dismantles the reign of amoral masculinity over a Romanian town with the controlled, deliberate precision of a surgical cut.
Black Money for White Nights
A callous scam upends an ageing couple’s dream vacation in Kristina and Petar Valchanov’s acerbic, black-humoured social satire with a surprising heart.
Longtake Onetake Mistake
Self-avowed no-budget specialist and indie director Baek Seung-kee mixes absurd comedy, kitschily convincing AI-generated sequences and earnest commentary about the state of cinema in ‘Longtake Onetake Mistake’.
Something Hard, Something Strange: BIFAN hits 30
As the Bucheon International Fantasy Film Festival turns 30, its new Korean Cinema programmer Kim Hyung-seok explains why “the divide between art films and genre films is ultimately artificial”.
The Calf Doll
Revolving around an old teacher-turned-farmer’s doomed attempts to make his cow give milk, Ankur Hooda’s ‘The Calf Doll’ is a canny combination of aesthetics, atmosphere and subtle social analysis.