- San Diego Comic-Con 2026: Composers, Costume Designers, and Brad Bird in Hall H (July 27, 2026)
While clips and headlines exploded from Comic-Con 2026 this weekend about the upcoming “Avengers: Doomsday,” the casting of David Jonsson in Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther III,” and the fact that Ryan Gosling is playing “Ghost Rider” for Shawn Levy, we found the stories at this year’s event that deserve more attention.
As San Diego Comic-Con attendees walked through the Sails Pavilion on the second floor of the convention center, about 20 cosplayers dressed as Indiana Jones, a Henry Jones senior, a Marion, a handful of Short Rounds, and someone dressed as the boulder in the first scene of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” surrounded a guy in a suit who turned out to be the real-life John Rhys-Davis, who played Indy’s friend Salleh in four films. San Diego Comic-Con is where fans get to be the characters they love and interact with the creators and the real-life stars who played them.
And they have the fun of learning that it goes both ways. At the panel of costume designers for the Percy Jackson show, lead designer Catherine Adair told the audience that when it came to a wedding dress that was described in detail by author Rick Riordan in book two of the series, they checked out the online fan art to see how the audience envisioned it. I asked composer Michael Dean Parsons how it felt to know the “Bridgerton” theme he composed with Kris Bowers was so popular at weddings, he admitted he checks out YouTube to see the way people are incorporating it into their most significant moments. And on the panel for collectors of the cherished physical media collectibles SteelBooks, Devon Downs of Alliance Entertainment presented the forthcoming “Project Hail Mary” 4K UHD edition, telling the audience that the company likes to find new artists for the cover and interior designs through Instagram. And the entire SteelBooks panel loves to check online for “shelfies,” displays of fan collections.
I especially enjoy the panels with people we don’t usually get to hear from, but who make creative contributions that contribute immeasurably to cinematic storytelling. The twelfth annual panel of composers who write for superhero movies is one of my favorites and I had a chance to talk with each of them afterward. The panel was moderated by Oscar-winner Michael Giacchino (“Up,” “The Incredibles,” “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”), with Kris Bowers and Michael Dean Parsons (“Spider-Noir” and “Bridgerton”), Mick Giacchino (“VisionQuest”), and Claudia Sarne (“Supergirl”). Parsons talked about the “bottle episode” 6 of “Spider-Noir,” where his assignment was to make it “really weird,” so they “played every instrument that you could play wrong.” For “Spider-Noir,” the music had to combine classic noir, sci-fi, and superhero, conveying a strong theme and a character arc. His co-composer, Kris Bowers said they felt like they were in the writers’ room. They had a funny discussion about name track titles, some referring to what is actually happening in the scene, some more random, some a reference to how much trouble they had getting it finished. But all agreed that nothing is more fun than “painting with sound.”
Michael Giacchino shared the “VisionQuest” theme; the rest of the world will not hear it until the show premieres on October 14 and told us Ultron (James Spader) will be getting a new theme. I asked him about using voices in his composition for the first time. “In some of the more emotional moments, I had the choir double what the strings were doing, but with humming. The texture can almost sound like one of those old Disney films. It just gave a really nice kind of warmth to the strings and filled out the sound a little bit. But there are also times where vocals are leading with melodies, and there is one character who has a theme that’s more based around vocals at times and then it transitions into the orchestra.” Bowers, last year’s Middleburg Film Festival Composer Award-winner, said, “When you work on a project, it creates this filter. Then you see the whole world through that filter, and you hear something and say, ‘Oh, that’ll be perfect for this thing.’” Sarne said, “Music imprints just as much as visual does. And it’s such a shorthand. It does what words can’t. You’re immediately brought into the world of the characters, and that to me is the magic of what we do.”
A panel of Black costume designers specializing in action and superhero movies provided a lot of insights into the challenges of making supersuits that are like “mini-Ferraris,” inserting stretch panels, hidden zippers, cooling or warming layers, and pick points (to attach to harnesses and pullies). Gersha Phillips (“Captain America”), Trayce Gigi Field (“Spider-Noir”), Charlese Antoinette (“Children of Blood and Bone”), Antoinette Messam (“The Bluff”), Dominique Dawson (“HIM”), Tiffany Hasbourne (“Shadow Force”), and Jennifer Bryan (“The Acolyte”) have to dress stunt performers who are often bigger and more muscular and with different races or skin tones from the actors they are portraying to make them look indistinguishable while keeping them safe with padding and inflammable fabrics.
The question that provoked the most laughter from the panelists was, “How do they go to the bathroom?” That is an important issue not just for the comfort of the actors but for the production as a whole, so they don’t hold up shooting for an hour “while three people help the actor pee.”
Messam talked about setting up a full costume production operation in a parking lot with dyers, agers (pro tip: put the clothes in the dryer with cut up car mats to make them look worn), welding, with one set of costumes that needed to be drenched with water and another that they had to keep dry. Field said that when she signed on to do “Spider-Noir,” she was told it was just going to be black and white. Two weeks into it, they told her it was going to be in color, too. They had to keep special lenses in the costume department because over 1000 items had to be “camera-tested” to see if they would work in both formats. “Anything with a lot of contrast or reflective translated well.” All of the panelists were department heads, sometimes supervising 100 people with different specialties. Antoinette had a cobbler, a jeweler, sewers, a group working with the background performers, fitters for men, fitters for women, and beaders. “It was like running my own fashion brand.”
Writer/director Brad Bird held the cavernous Hall H rapt with a discussion of his films, with stories about “The Iron Giant” (“The story of a gun with a soul who didn’t want to be a gun”),“The Incredibles” (completely changing the villain to one created for a brief opening scene), writing and re-writing Ego’s speech at the end of “Ratatouille” (“You’re supposed to get faster and louder near the end but we made it slower and quieter”). And he told us about his first live action film be “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” being terrified as the “one of one” fearless Tom Cruise was hanging off a skyscraper. “He’s the producer; you can’t tell him no.” He showed us the first seven minutes of his new film for Netflix, “Ray Gunn,” a “Buck Rogers meets ‘The Maltese Falcon’”) detective story he had been developing for 30 years. It features the voices of Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, and Tom Waits. His other dream project is a series about the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.
Of course there were many questions throughout Comic-Con about AI. One of the booths on the exhibition floor had a sign assuring us that there was no use of AI in creating their products. When the subject came up on the composers panel, Michael Giacchino said, “I don’t think anyone wants to see a laptop doing a concert.”
- A Home Away from Home: Goodbye to the Lake Street Screening Room (July 27, 2026)
Last week, it was reported that Chicago-based Honore Properties had purchased the 17-story building at 70 E. Lake St. in the Loop. The 99-year-old office building will be converted into approximately 170 luxury apartments.
Just another real estate story, just another sign of an evolving downtown. There’s nothing villainous about this; in fact, it will likely inject new life into the structure for generations to come. Still, for me and for my fellow critics from the Chicago area (especially the veterans), there was a deeply personal element, because for decades, that gorgeous and weathered Gothic Revival/Art Deco building has been home to one of the most iconic screening rooms in the world.
The place where Siskel & Ebert saw so many films. A newsroom away from the newsroom, a destination where critics from the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune and suburban papers, as well as TV and radio personalities and producers and publicists, gathered for advance showings of movies that would be coming soon to a theater near you.
The Lake Street Screening Room.
This is where Roger Ebert would always sit in the last row on the left, closest to the entrance, and Gene Siskel would take the farthest right seat in that last row. Back in the day, there was a small table in the middle of that back row with a landline telephone. Before and after screenings, Gene or Roger would sometimes work the phones, confabbing with an editor or the producers for their local TV gigs or their nationally syndicated show. When you saw them on your television on Saturday or Sunday, or on Carson or Letterman or Leno, engaging in passionate conversation about a particular film, there was a good chance they had seen that movie at the Lake Street Screening Room. (Sidebar: I can neither confirm nor deny that on occasion between screenings in the 1990s, Gene would take me over to the Off-Track Betting facility around the corner on State Street.)
Downtown Chicago commuters hustling to and from work, tourists on their way to the Magnificent Mile and Grant Park, street musicians and traffic cops, shoppers and diners, hotel guests—virtually none of them had any inkling that while they were going about their business, a small group of us were hunkered down in the cool and soothing darkness of the 48-seat screening room on the 16th floor as early as 10 a.m., lost in the latest film from Spike Lee or Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino, or tapping our feet while enduring some tepid remake or unnecessary sequel. (Although you never really knew what anyone else was thinking. The first unwritten rule of Screen Club was you generally kept your opinions to yourself, until it was time to share those opinions with your respective outlets.)
There was no marquee on the outside of the building, no concession stand in the lobby. On countless mornings and afternoons dating back to the early 1990s, I’d walk down a stretch of Lake Street that was not particularly glamorous, maybe stopping in at the 7/11 (still open) or the branch of the Billy Goat Tavern (sadly, closed) for a coffee before walking past Imperial Shoe Services and entering the lobby. I’d take an elevator car with a capacity of four people (hey, the building is about to turn 100), ride up to the 16th floor, and make a hard left past the framed movie posters to enter the screening room. The curtains are straight out of a 1980s “Tonight Show” set and the seats are well-worn, but the sound and picture were always state of the art.
That pristine viewing experience came courtesy of Steve Kraus, who has been with the Lake Street Screening Room for some four decades and has run it as his own business since 2000. “It used to mean getting there an hour before showtime to inspect heads and tails of every reel of film prior to projection,” said Kraus. “Now it means going to ingest movies onto the server. Usually days before. Many cinemas get movies via satellite. We get them on hard drives.” (Kraus’ expertise is such that Roger would often rely on him to answer technical questions for the “Movie Answer Man” columns.)
When Siskel & Ebert celebrated their 20th anniversary, I interviewed them in the Lake Street Screening Room. When the city honored the 50th anniversary of their TV partnership last year, ABC-7’s Hosea Sanders interviewed me in the Lake Street Screening Room. In the 2000s, Roger and I would huddle with our producers in the stairwell on the 16th floor between screenings, mapping out the next show taping. Kevin Smith attended a screening there when he was filling in for Roger on an episode of “Ebert & Roeper.” When an actor friend of mine was in town shooting a long-running hit TV series, I took them to a showing of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” at Lake Street. In addition to the regular critics’ screenings, Kraus would often screen a locally made film for cast and crew. Shortly after COVID, he held a test screening for a biopic starring an A-lister.
Still, it was never about Hollywood or celebrities or glamour. Day in and day out, the screening room was a workplace in a building filled with workplaces. In fact, it shares 16th floor space with an office that has housed administration for the Joffrey Ballet and legal aid organizations, among other tenants. Get this: whenever a movie was playing, the sound was piped into the bathrooms, so your friendly neighborhood critic wouldn’t miss any dialogue while taking a break. Imagine being a guest or a new employee at the adjacent office, going to the bathroom—and hearing Tom Hanks saying, “Life is like a box of chocolates” or a blood-curdling cry from a “Scream” movie emanating from an overhead speaker.
Not that Lake Street was the only place for advance screening. We sometimes saw “big ticket” films at commercial theaters, along with other critics and fans who had been granted an opportunity to see a movie in advance. These days, nearly all of the screenings I attend are in the afternoon or evening at one of the AMC theaters in the city. I still see a lot of friendly faces, including critics who write for this very site, as well as the new breed known as influencers. Every once in a while, there’s a screening at Lake Street—and when there is, I almost always take my usual spot in the third row. Sometimes the attendees sitting in Roger’s or Gene’s old seat are aware that royalty once occupied those spots; I would imagine that with other, younger members of the press, they might not be aware of all the history. That’s OK. Time marches on.
I asked Steve Kraus if he planned to establish another space after 70 E. Lake closes. His answer was matter-of-fact: “No. Business is too low. It pays the bills but not much beyond. It’s been a good run. No complaints.” Although Kraus does note that the timeline on the end is unclear (“could be a matter of months or years”) and there’s even “a remote chance they wish to keep the space as an amenity.” Although that seems unlikely to include film critics.
Over the last 30 years, Chaz Ebert has been a treasured regular at Lake Street screenings. “The Lake Street screening room, presided over by Steve, served as a magic cocoon over the years to see movies with Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel and Richard Roeper,” she said. “What a thrill when we saw something we suspected would be special. Steve always made sure the sound and picture was just right. As I think back on those times, I realize that the glow of the friendship among the film critics was sometimes as special as the glow from the screen. There was an unspoken agreement not to talk or do anything to distract from the experience we were having from the film. What beautiful memories.”
The building at 401 N. Wabash Ave. that once housed the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger’s home newspaper (and mine as well), was demolished to make way for a gleaming luxury condo skyscraper. The tower at 435 N. Michigan Ave. that once housed Gene’s home newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, has been converted into a high-end condo building. A similar future awaits the home of the Lake Street Screening Room. In the not too distant future, residents will move into their new homes with the prestigious address of 70 E. Lake Street. I’m sure there will be times when someone living on the 16th floor will unwind at night by playing an old movie. They’ll probably have no idea how fitting that will be.
- What Could Have Been: Kaylee Hottle (2007-2026) (July 24, 2026)
From Jean Harlow and James Dean through Simone Battle and Anton Yelchin, entertainment history is filled with instances of performers dying just as audiences had begun to appreciate how much they had achieved at a young age, and what incredible potential they had when they were taken.
Just added to that awful roll call: Kaylee Hottle, who was 18 when she died this week in an automobile accident in Jaynesville, Maryland.
Hottle costarred in “Godzilla vs. Kong” and its followup “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” as Jia, a little girl who lived alone on Skull Island, home of Kong and other giant creatures, and was the last known descendant of a nearly extinct indigenous tribe, the Iwi.
Jia had a powerful bond with the great ape and communicated with him through American Sign Language. The relationship was conveyed mainly by gestures and facial experessions and carried by Hottle’s acting and the visual effects crew. It’s easy to underestimate the degree of difficulty involved in humanizing a character whose most important relationship is with a nonhuman character that would remain an abstraction until months after principal photography had concluded. It requires imagination, focus, and an ability to take very precise directions while transforming the result into something that feels organic.
“When it comes to imagining Godzilla and Kong, that’s tough,” said Rebecca Hall, who played anthropological linguist Dr. Ilene Andrews in both films, a character who not only studies and protects Kong but becomes an adoptive mother to Jia. “That’s tough, because more often than not it’s a tennis ball on a stick.”
Hottle was herself deaf, born to an all-deaf family in Atlanta, Georgia. Her mother Ketsi is Korean-American, and her father Joshua is a white man descended from four generations of deaf people. She was educated at the Texas School for the Deaf in Austin and got into acting through TV commercials.
The assistant casting director on 2017’s “Kong: Skull Island” saw Hottle in her first commercial, for Convo, a video relay service with settings that let deaf or hearing impaired callers connect to sign language interpreters around the world, and suggested her to the casting director of “Godzilla vs. Kong,” Sarah Halley Finn, as a candidate to play Jia.
Hottle’s emotionally affecting performances in the two hit monster films—similar in feeling and plot function to the bond between the title character of “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial” and his human friend Eliot—set her on course to be the most sought-after hearing impaired actress since Marlee Matlin, who in 1987 became the first deaf performer to win an Oscar, as Best Actress in “Children of a Lesser God.” (Maitlin mourned Hottle’s passing on Instagram, stating, “May her beauty and talent be a memory for eternity.”)
Hottle’s exceptional work in “Godzilla vs. Kong” is the main factor that caused the follow-up to focus a central subplot on Jia: she learns that a part of her tribe survived, is thriving in a previously unexplored section of Hollow Earth, and wants her to leave Dr. Andrews and the surface world and “come home” to her cultural origin point. Jia’s story in the film mirrors that of Kong, who also believed himself the only survivor of a once thriving society but finds giant apes is living in the same section of Hollow Earth as the Iwi tribe. Unfortunately, it’s ruled by a despot known as Skar King who must be deposed before he can achieve his goal of rising to the surface and conquering the planet. Jia’s re-acceptance into her tribe plays a central role in Skar King’s defeat, because the Iwi are the heralds and subjects of the monster goddess Mothra.
The most moving scenes in the two films are anchored to Hottle’s performance. One is the moment in “Godzilla vs. Kong” when Jia comforts Kong, who is sedated and chained on the deck of a ship during a rainstorm, her tiny hand reaching out to him. The image evokes the “E.T.” poster, with its Sistine Chapel-like image of God and man touching fingertips, except the nonhuman side of the exchange is a finger the size of a cargo container.
“They literally had a foam hand with a pointy finger that they were just putting up towards her,” Hall told People Magazine, in an interview timed to the release of the second movie. “That was hard not to laugh at.”
The other great moment is the climactic sequence in the second film where Jia must decide whether to remain with her adoptive mother and become part of the Iwi tribe. That moment, like so many others, is carried entirely by minimal ASL exchanges and expressive closeups of Hottle and Hall.
Hall, her “Godzilla vs. Kong” costar Alexander Skarsgaard, and other participants in both productions learned ASL so they could talk to Hottle. Fala Chen, who played the chief of the Iwi tribe in “Godzilla x Kong,” also knew ASL before joining the film series; although not deaf herself, she learned ASL to play a mute girl in the 2008 drama “Moonlight Resonance.”
Hall paid tribute to her onscreen daughter in a post on her Instagram page that included multiple photos of her and Hottle in production. “Devastated to hear this news,” her caption read. “My heart goes out to your family. You will be missed, Kaylee.”
Hottle’s only other major credit was a guest appearance on an episode of the rebooted version of CBS’ “Magnum, P.I.” She was set to appear in “What Doesn’t Kill Us,” a fantasy adventure about disabled people becoming superheroes, but at the time of her death, the movie was still in pre-production, so her role will have to be re-cast.
Hottle used her Hollywood connections to advocate on behalf of deaf and hearing impaired people, and not just in the entertainment business. Teri Devine, associate director of inclusion at UK charity Royal National Institute for Deaf People, said Hottle used her platform to “raise awareness and inspire others to drive positive change for people who are deaf or have hearing loss” and “prove there are no limits to what people who are deaf or have hearing loss can achieve.”
Hottle was a passenger in the car that crashed and took her life. The local coroner’s office said she was killed by “multiple blunt-force injuries” caused by the impact, and ruled her death an accident. There were two other occupants: a driver and a second passenger. The driver taken to a nearby hospital and released with non-life-threatening injuries. The second passenger declined medical treatment. The sheriff’s office said excessive speed was thought to be a factor in the crash.
In a Facebook video post, Hottle’s father Joshua told the driver, “I have forgiven you. Don’t let this incident ruin the rest of your life.”
Her mother Ketsi said, “I still feel Kaylee is with us.”
- With “The Odyssey,” Christopher Nolan Has Crafted The Best Horror Film of The Year (July 24, 2026)
Since his career began, Christopher Nolan has crafted a cinematic environment where horror elements are present. But because his films are often gargantuan and unlike anything else in the cinematic canon, these influences have often not been fully realized until the release of “Oppenheimer” (2023). As Nolan himself has become more jaded about the state of the world, he has begun to use his status as a genre auteur to finally allow these horror influences to permeate the foundations of his most recent work. Nolan’s newest film, an adaptation of Homer’s “The Odyssey,” invokes horror motifs tenfold, forcing the audience to confront how this fantastical epic may not be so different from the slowly crumbling world from which its audience is watching the film.
The adaptation begins straightforwardly, alternating between the point of view of Telemachus (Tom Holland), son of Odysseus (Matt Damon), and the missing leader himself. But once things focus on the journey home of Odysseus and his crew, all hell breaks loose.
In the first major horror setpiece, Odysseus and his men find what they believe to be solitude on an island. But once they follow sheep into a cave and try to capture some of them for food, they encounter the flock’s shepherd, the Cyclops Polyphemus. Polyphemus devours some of the soldiers and traps them. They answer this with their own violence, even poking his lone eye with a burning piece of wood. Shrouded in darkness, with only the light of fire gleaming through the cave, Polyphemus shrieks and cries in pain, sounds so garish that it seems as if the theater speakers are about to shatter. The soundscape is unrelenting, ricocheting off the walls of the Cyclops’ cave.
After their escape, the men seek refuge on Telepylos, where they face the Laestrygonian giants. Their pursuit of Odysseus and his men is backed by Ludwig Göransson’s score, which bleats out synths unlike those commonly heard in a film set in the time of the ancient Greeks. Nolan and Göransson use the film’s soundscape to shape these first two terrifying encounters to suggest to the audience that Polyphemus and the Laestrygonians aren’t simply villains, but defenders attempting to stop Odysseus and his men from invading and desecrating their way of life as they did to the people of Troy.
The cruelty that is exposed slowly throughout “The Odyssey” becomes more prevalent in its second act, when the men arrive at Aeaea, looking for provisions and shelter. Separated from his men because they believe him to be cursed, Odysseus goes hunting, while his men slink up a hill to a lone shack that resides at the top. This is the home of Circe (Samantha Morton), who feeds them stew that turns them into pigs. This transformation isn’t done offscreen. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema’s camera zooms into closeups, focusing on the faces of Odysseus’ men as hairs sprout from their sweaty faces, their ears slowly become pointed, and their gasps for air slowly turn into garish snarls. Circe’s hands mold the faces of these men before our eyes, her fingers peeling back their eyelids and her fists plunging down their throats.
These stomach-turning images are unlike anything Nolan has ever put to screen, and are joined by Morton’s snarls once Odysseus enters her hut looking for his men. When asked why she turned them into pigs, Circe replies, “I didn’t turn your men into anything! Look at them. This is what they are.” Nolan uses Circe and her ire for the crew as a means for the audience to understand that the pillaging and assumed sexual violence Odysseus’ men have wreaked on innocents during their years-long war cannot be denied. The body horror applied as she turns them into animals is used to further signify just how horrific the acts they committed in Troy were, even though the sequences of what really happened there remain slightly bloodless.
Nolan’s penchant for not showcasing the intimate acts of violence as they are is not a ploy to shield the audience from the brutal reality of war, but rather to slowly expose viewers to the violence these characters are capable of. “The Odyssey” is comparable to “Oppenheimer” in this way, where the titular character envisions his fellow Americans with their skin frayed and peeling, but looks away from images of Hiroshima’s actual victims when they’re showcased to him.
Similarly, we watch as Odysseus’ men are eaten, stabbed, and drowned, yet during the sacking of Troy, we are only shown flashes of the havoc these men wreaked on their fellow man. This is not Nolan shying away from the bloodless nature of the crimes his protagonists committed, but instead a reflection of how they are unable to see their victims as actual casualties until the horrors they’ve committed begin to shape the unraveling of the world around them.
The audio and visual motifs used by Nolan, van Hoytema, and Göransson force their audience, which is undeniably made up of cinephiles and average moviegoers alike, to confront how this adaptation of “The Odyssey” stands not as a hero’s journey, but a swan song for a world on the brink of collapse. This intensifies each time we see the city of Troy, first as Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) is retelling it, and later, as Odysseus witnesses it. In Menelaus’ version, the invasion of the city was a righteous thing, yet once again, Göransson’s score and van Hoytema’s lens undercut this fact. The music penetrates the sequence with rhythmic clanging, intensifying drums, and dissonant hums that increase in speed as the scene unfolds.
With only the light of sparse lanterns lighting their way, Odysseus and his men scurry around the city like rats before finally welcoming Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), who hovers at the city’s entrance like a representation of death itself. Later, when Odysseus relays what actually happened that fateful night to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway), Göransson’s score is largely absent as our protagonist paints a picture of men desecrating places of worship, slaughtering civilians, and brutalizing women.
Nolan’s films have long since resonated with the political climate in which they’re released, but rather than simply make it clear that these films are tied to his audience’s reality, “The Odyssey” pleads with its viewers to understand just what is at cost. In Nolan’s version of this tale, he weaves a sequence told by a triumphant man into a horrific act that has ushered in the unraveling not only of Zeus’ law, but the morality of civilization as Odysseus, his men, and Troy’s inhabitants knew it.
Rather than epic encounters that feel like sections of a sweeping epic, these setpieces instead feel like they belong in a horror film. Throughout the film’s nearly three-hour runtime, Nolan delivers elongated sequences of Odysseus and his men as they are confronted by various creatures, beings, and gods. Nolan, Van Hoytema, and Göransson combine their talents to create a film imbued with influences that the horror genre has long used to shock viewers and fill them with dread. These genre conventions aren’t employed as simple scare tactics but are instead tied to the idea that the customs and laws these men broke, and the violence they enacted in Troy, mirror instances of violence in humanity’s past, present, and future.
Whether moments in the film are bathed in darkness or accompanied by ominous bells and distorted gasps, Nolan makes it clear that this version of Odysseus’ story is a timely warning against the current age his audience exists in; one where civilians are more than happy to turn a blind eye to injustice, welcoming in a new age of violence and darkness. Although this version of “The Odyssey” begins as an epic fantasy, it slowly transforms into a film that binds itself to the realities and horrors of human nature, which can be traced through the director’s filmography from Ancient Greece to the creation of the atom bomb.
Like the Athena (Zendaya) who appears to Odysseus throughout his years of travel, Christopher Nolan has become a specter that haunts his audience, appearing every few years not to deliver a spectacle, but to remind us that the worlds he has created on screen are hauntingly similar to the one in which we live.
- Fantasia 2026: You Are the Film, Someone’s Daughter, Los Vampires (July 23, 2026)
As Fantasia chugs mightily along its first full week, its selections grow ever more niche and specific. That’s nothing new; Fantasia is nothing if not a pure genre festival, less concerned with attracting A-list talent than offering film dorks like myself a taste of the offbeat, the microbudget, the locally endorsed. That’s certainly true with today’s dispatch, featuring three films as constrained by their budgets as their locations and concepts, using small spaces and casts to nonetheless explore big ideas about art, predation, and creativity.
Makoto Ueda’s works are hardly new to the fest; “Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes” and “River,” both written by Ueda, were featured at previous fests and revealed his penchant for small-scale, charming works that play with time. His latest, “You Are the Film,” features two modest changes: This time, he’s also behind the director’s chair, and the twists shift beyond looped time to the gossamer-thin veil between fantasy and reality that is the cinema screen.
We’re introduced to Madoka (Ito Marika), a struggling playwright grappling with the usual struggles: creative blocks, the logistics of storefront theater, actor friends who are thinking of leaving for greener pastures. After a recommendation from the manager (Ishida Gota) leads her to a cute nearby theater for a film called “Sangenjaya Escape,” she plops down to see the beginnings of another charming tale of creative frustration. In it, a frustrated musician named Kazuma (Kai Inowaki) bickers with the lead guitarist of his band about everything from his inability to practice to some missing cash. That is, until he is encouraged to go to a very similar-looking movie theater.
It’s less than ten minutes into this 68-minute feature that Ueda brings his protagonists together—not in romantic union, but as witnesses to the “movie” of each other’s lives. You see, they’re each watching each other on the screen and are somehow able to converse through it. Neither knows why this is happening, and despite some hokey explanations later on about “cinematic multiverses,” Ueda’s film doesn’t really concern itself with the logistics of such metanarratives (especially the theater pamphlets that allow each of them to warn the other of even the most minuscule plot beats). All that matters is that each of them can help each other solve their problems and find solidarity in the curious situation they’ve found themselves in.
Of course, “You Are the Film” does a lot more with its premise than that, as their respective crises escalate from the quotidian aggravations of the working-class artist into stakes ranging from gangland violence to alien invasions. Yet through all of those wacky, goofy turns, Ueda keeps the tone light, his cast effervescently throwing themselves into each new twist with tremendous aplomb. And, like so many of Ueda’s works, we see the delight that comes from engaging in artistic play: even within the four walls of a tiny boutique theater, universes can be created, and lives changed.
The local press was out in force for the premiere of Wiebke von Carolsfeld’s intimate thriller “Someone’s Daughter,” and it’s easy to see why. The film co-stars “Heated Rivalry” breakout François Arnaud (though he only offered a video intro after not being able to make the festival premiere), and (crucially) was shot in Quebec’s Eastern Townships region, a mere hour’s drive from Montreal. Its Appalachian hills and thick foliage offer a suitably claustrophobic setting for the film’s high-concept conceit, even as von Carolsfeld’s script doesn’t explore it with as much depth (or pulp) as one would like.
“Someone’s Daughter” wastes little time setting its characters and its stage: fiftysomething defense attorney Sam (Pascale Bussières) wakes up in a car, kidnapped by the father (Peter Outerbridge, making the most of a few minutes’ appearance) of a young girl who lost her trial against the man who allegedly raped her (Arnaud), years prior. Sam is told that the girl has since died of drug use spurred by trauma and grief, and the father has chosen a particularly noxious mode of revenge: Stranding Sam and her ex-client, Paul, out in the Canadian wilderness. A boat ride and three haunting gunshots later, Sam and Paul are stuck in the wilds on their own, with no food and a long, dangerous hike back to safety.
And so begins a patient, if occasionally lumbering, morality play, as the two people wrestle both with their immediate survival needs and the innate tension of the role they played, both directly and indirectly, in the destruction of a young woman’s life. Sam, a widower whose hikes with her late husband imbued her with some essential survival skills, must play mother and survival guide to the urbane, whiny Paul; he’s impulsive and childish in ways that hardly endear him to Sam, much less the audience. Still, both actors play off each other electrically, Bussières’s measured resolve giving Arnaud plenty of runway to run pages from the manipulator’s playbook. Should he ingratiate? Should he cower in need? Should he bide his time, waiting for the right moment to take advantage of their situation?
These tensions are occasionally explored in a few bubbling outbursts of conflict, especially in its final act. But “Someone’s Daughter” remains frustratingly sedate for most of its runtime, preferring not to explore the characters’ thorny pasts in favor of a more straightforward survival narrative. One would hope that this lack of trust in each other, this lack of certitude about one of the most important truths in their lives, would play more actively in the drama. Instead, it fizzles in the background for long stretches before exploding in a thorny but abrupt ending that makes room for Michael Greyeyes to make a far-too-short cameo. A beautiful showcase for two fine actors and the claustrophobia of the Canadian wilderness, but more dramatically inert than one might hope.
The battle of wills between two people more alike than they’d like to believe continues in Craig Mitchell’s beguiling “Los Vampires,” which thinly restages the presumed behind-the-scenes production of George Melford’s 1931 Spanish-language adaptation of “Dracula,”—shot at the same time as Tod Browning’s classic, on the same sets, at night when the English-language film would stop production. Here, we follow Luis de Ossorio (“Lost”‘s Henry Ian Cusick), the Spanish actor cast to play “Count Vlad”; he’s been tasked to watch the day’s dailies of his English-language counterpart, Hans Orlov (Thomas Krestchmann), as Orlov (and the producers) insist he emulate each mannerism to a tee. Luis, however, bristles; he is an ack-tor, after all, and wants to make the role his own. (He’s even brought some custom-made fangs for the trouble.)
But Luis’ growing rivalry with Orlov, and their growing mutual fascination with the Spanish-speaking ingenue, Vianca (newcomer Daniela Couso), who’s been cast alongside him, begin to turn the production into a psychological nightmare for the struggling actor. And that’s before a series of mysterious murders around the soundstages begin to threaten the production itself.
It’s hard not to think of E. Elias Merhige’s haunting “Shadow of the Vampire” when watching this, finding similar supernatural sins in Spanish “Dracula” as that film did with “Nosferatu.” And granted, Mitchell makes the most of what was an exceedingly modest budget (the film was self-funded); the sets feel sparse in ways that match the charms of Old Hollywood, with graveyards backed by ominous backdrops featuring gigantic moons. The famous Dracula steps are emulated too (though not too much, to avoid litigation), and Simon Coull’s cinematography coats the whole thing in a soft-focus dream haze.
The central performances are uniformly excellent, too; Cusick’s antic disposition as Luis bounces wonderfully off Krestchmann’s Romanian diva. The real standout, surprisingly, is Couso, who finds a delicate balance between slinky ingenue and more complex aims as the film progresses. Mitchell’s script juggles a murderer’s row of thematic aims: acting as vampirism, the immortality of cinema, Old Hollywood’s fear of the immigrant, the impending censorship of the Hays Code, the predation of older men upon younger women. Some get plenty of room to shine; others get lost in a few moments of miscalibrated comedy and a wonky sound design (the English-language dialogue suffers most for this; the Spanish, helpfully, is subtitled).
But there’s a hallucinatory mist that surrounds “Los Vampires” that still intrigues among all its formlessness, especially as it stalks its way toward a surprising, somber grace note that evokes everything from “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” to “Boogie Nights.” Some actors lose themselves in the part; others succumb to it.
