- Locarno Film Festival 2026 Wrap-up (August 19, 2026)
Every year I’m reminded that Locarno is a festival whose cinema is earned. This is my third straight year covering the festival that’s nestled amid picturesque Swiss mountains, which requires a trans-Atlantic flight into Milan, an extended train ride over the Italian border, and a thick skin for the unforgiving heat that radiates from the luminous sun that bears down onto the pebbled pavement that grounds the Piazza Grande, which, when filled with 8,000 people, who are watching the newest work from a cinematic master, makes for a sight to behold. This time around, the festival, which ran August 5-15, was brimming with more experimental works, gorgeous restorations, and a new retrospective programme that sought to put HUAC and the Blacklist in its filmic context.
Per usual, I arrived in the second half of the festival. It’s a decision that’s sometimes presents an obstacle, at least on a personal level, because you’re arriving when most of your colleagues are venturing off to the next fest, usually Sarajevo Film Festival, rather than remaining (though, on an inside baseball note, you do end up forming very close bonds with those who do stay, if only because you have more time to hang out specifically with them). Nevertheless, an advantage to arriving “late” is that many others have done some of the leg work for you. They’ve seen several of the premieres and have already parsed what’s forgettable, notable, or good—making your job a two-fold venture: catching up with the good that you’ve missed while consuming what’s yet to premiere. I can’t adequately tell you how much time that saves, especially at a festival where some of the shiniest options are actually classic films playing at the mercifully air conditioned GranRex cinema.
And while I’m still watching films, another positive of Locarno for press is that the movies on the digital platform stay active through the end of August, I have already seen enough to look back fondly on this edition of Locarno as a real opportunity for discovery and proselytization.
As you can already tell, I split my time between new films and restorations or retrospective titles. For the former, I watched 16 films, and, for the latter, I saw 12. My new movie viewing, funnily enough, began with a movie I’ve already seen: James Gray’s “Paper Tiger,” which screened at Piazza Grande with Gray on hand to accept the festival’s Lifetime Achievement award. While I admired the film out Cannes, watching it a second time at Locarno, where I could focus on how the film’s rich visual and aural techniques bring to life the story of a working class father (Miles Teller) and a flashy uncle (Adam Driver) who strive for the mirage of the American dream with such abandonment that it imperils their family (a fantastic Scarlett Johansson, Gavin Goudey and Roman Engel), was an incredible luxury to open the festival with.
Further highlights followed in the coming days. In the main competition were several stirring works: Isabelle Stever’s queer wartime drama “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming,” Hong Sang-soo’s latest melancholic treatise on art “Nowhere to Lay My Eyes” (which won Best Performance for Kim Min-hee and Best Director), Ann Oren’s horny and sensorial surgical fever dream “Objet A,” Lê Bảo’s ambitious dreamscape “Hearing,” and Florin Șerban’s Golden Leopard winning paternal drama “You Don’t Belong Here.”
Equally great wealth could also be discovered in the side bars. Umair Bilal’s culturally specific Pakistani experimental film “As Light As Air” in the Semaine de la Critique was a small gem, as was Mamadou Dia’s Pan-African dance documentary “Atcha Atcha,” which bowed in the Fuori Concorso section.
The most adventurous section, however, might’ve been Concorso Cineasti del Presente—which is often reserved for promising filmmakers on their first or second feature. Beatrice Gibson’s ruminative feminist conversation “At Night,” Ana Vaz’s experimental essayist narrative “Fire Flower” (“Hanabi”), and Uta Beria’s rebellious free speech rallying cry “Tear Gas” were all towering works that were on display.
Accompanying the festival premieres were several major stars and creatives who were also honored by Locarno and the fest’s Artistic Director Giona A. Nazzaro. Prior to my arrival, Olivia Wilde, who arrived to send off her latest directorial effort “The Invite” for its European Premiere (the film sold out the 8,000-seat Piazza Grande), Isabella Rosselini, Sigurjón Sighvatsson, and Virginie Efira were honored. During my stay, Gray, Zoe Saldaña, Rick Baker, Asia Argento, and Darren Aronofsky were also feted (during the festival, I was fortunate enough to dine with Baker and his wife Silvia, a noted film and television hairstylist in her own right, a personal highlight of mine).
And as always, the major thrill of Locarno arose from squirreling away time to catch the fest’s incredible retrospective series. “Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist,” which was produced in conjunction with Cinémathèque suisse and with the support of UCLA Film & Television Archive, see curator Ehsan Khoshbakht once again utilizing his deep knowledge of classic cinema to tell a story about a specific and imperative period in moviemaking (in prior years he’s curated a celebration of Columbia Pictures’ 100th anniversary called “The Lady With the Torch” and a look back on British postwar cinema).
While I won’t take too much time to give my thoughts on the retrospective, as I don’t want to subtract from Marya E. Gates’ far more historically informed coverage for the site, I will say this, “Red & Black” makes a remarkable effort to fully contextualize a period of anti-art facism that destroyed many people’s lives and creatively set back Hollywood for so long that it still hasn’t totally dug its way out of the grave ramifications caused by the period. I was honored, in fact, to introduce Emile de Antonio’s revealing documentary “Point of Order,” a film composed wholly of footage from the Army-McCarthy hearings (you can get a version of what I spoke about via the festival’s Instagram page). Other speakers included Eddie Muller, Imogen Sara Smith, Phuong Le, Tanya Goldman, Christopher Small, Eva Markovits, Thierry Méranger, the 88-year-old son of Joseph Losey, Gaverick, and more.
Some of my personal favorites from the series were Luis Buñuel’s racial critique “The Young One,” Allan Dwan’s “High Noon” riff “Silver Lode,” Herbert J. Biberman’s pro-union melodrama “Salt of the Earth,” and Lewis Milestone’s wildly pro-Soviet war flick “The North Star.” If you’d like a further taste of the full series, I’d recommend checking out Marya’s piece, picking up the accompanying same-titled book edited by Khoshbakht (for now it’s sold out!!), or listening to the podcast series.
And as I file this edition of Locarno into my memory, I am once again filled with immense joy. Never let anyone tell you that it’s been a terrible year for movies. There are always innumerable movies to find at festivals big and small, hidden gems that deserve words and eyes, notable new voices awaiting uplift. I curse how few hours in the day I have to find many of them, fearing to immeasurable ends that I am right now, as I type away, missing a truly great film.
I hope that some of these works will make it to your theater, screens and eyes (a few that I highlighted are slated to appear at NYFF, TIFF, and many regional festivals, hopefully, near you). As I have written in the past, the future of film resides in discovery; it’s made fertile when one takes a leap in watching a film from a country they haven’t visited, from a people they don’t know, in a tongue that is different but no less melodic. In these five days, Locarno has once again revitalized my pursuit of those discoveries. I hope to be at the festival next year to experience it once again.
- Locarno 2026: You Don’t Belong Here, Who Is Still Alive, Sixteen Moments of My Life, Letter From My Village (August 19, 2026)
My final dispatch from Locarno is probably the most varied of the quartet that I’ve filed. Fittingly, it’s composed of four films, each from a different section of the festival. Collectively, they’re also the most likely to travel outside of the festival to a screen near you. Most of all, they’re either about defiant people telling their own stories against their oppressors or are works that decry hate and bigotry. They characterize what Locarno Artistic Director Giona A Nazzaro said would be the aim of this festival: “To regain cinema as a freedom that can’t be predicted through algorithms or consumer habits.” These films resist any strict definition.
Florin Șerban’s “You Don’t Belong Here,” the winner of the Golden Leopard, is a classically styled Romanian drama whose methodical rhythm often belies its radical message. It begins unassumingly, maybe even plaintively, with an opening shot of an aged nuclear power plant’s smokestack nestled in a rural field. From there it cuts to an ornate water fountain then to a skate park and then to a sleepy residential neighborhood. This is a small town not unlike many others. But its daytime calm will soon be broken by nighttime hate: We see an army of armored cyclists roll onto a quiet street, slashing car tires, breaking windows, and vandalizing these parked vehicles by placing posters that say “you don’t belong here.” One man, a Romani, tries to defend the neighborhood, only to be savagely beaten to death.
That captivating opening is but a small part of a puzzle whose many pieces will be sequentially added throughout the 254 minutes of Șerban’s interrogative work. By dawn we’re introduced to a new character, Marius Călimanescu (Adrian Văncică), a surgeon who after his morning jog finds his car damaged by that evening’s hooligans. He thinks little of property damage. This single father, whose son Ioan (Teodor Butănescu) is hiding a gnarly leg contusion from an unknown source, is more enamored with keeping his hospital afloat than to worry about what he perceives as outside noise. Unbeknownst to him, the troubles of his town and his son will soon come barreling toward him.
Șerban’s “You Don’t Belong Here” is an intricate picture of misplaced masculinity, toxic discrimination and parental anguish. Its well-earned profundity, reliant on assured compositions and a detailed sound design, pulls one deep into its whirlpool-sized narrative that only seems to gain speed and viciousness as the film progresses. It’s telling, in fact, how much happens underneath Marius’ nose: Ioan visits a clinic for his leg, meets up a mysterious biker guy at the local dam and gives away the yellow bike that Marius bought for him. Instead, Marius is consumed with his reputation. When angry Romani men trash his hospital because the police have decided to autopsy the deceased man who was beaten to death the night before—an order the film suggests is a vindictive bigoted act by Marius’ former high school classmate and current inspector—Marius simply demands the problem be placed outside of his hospital. Worse yet, the only other subject pulling at his attention is his high school reunion where laments he won’t be seen as truly great.
The film smartly closes in on Marius. Cramped compositions between himself and his son show how uncomfortable he is fulfilling his fatherly role, especially as he expresses disappointment that Ioan seemingly has zero ambition. The perpetual presence of police sirens in the soundscape, which increases in volume and in frequency as the film lurches forward further teases reality creeping toward Marius. Văncică’s evolutionary performance, which sees this once confident man reduced to shambles, is another excellent car on a melancholic train barreling toward the heart (his quiet, observational performance does make Șerban’s decision to employ a late on-the-nose voiceover monologue quite disappointing). All these sturdy components combine to patiently render “You Don’t Belong Here” into a soul-shattering picture of grief and regret.
For these dispatches, I’ve tried to primarily focus on films having their world premiere at Locarno. A 2025 Venice Film Festival selection, Nicolas Wadimoff’s “Who Is Still Alive” breaks that trend a bit—especially because it only had a single screening at the Swiss fest. Last week, however, it was announced that Switzerland would be selecting the pro-Palestine documentary as their submission to the 99th Academy Awards, so combined with the imperative subject matter it made even more sense to include some words about Wadimoff’s film.
“Who Is Still Alive” concerns ten subjects: Each hail from Gaza, each escaped to Egypt before the Rafa border was closed on May 7, 2024. They all have a story to tell about survival and loss, with each detail more harrowing than the last. While Wadimoff, who previously directed “Aisheen (Still Alive in Gaza)” in 2010, wanted to film his subjects in Switzerland, the country doesn’t accept Palestinians lacking a visa. He instead opted to shoot on a South African soundstage where Adel Altaweel, a visual artist and one of the subjects, has decided to draw a large map of Gaza in white marker on a black floor. On that map he draws individual boxes that represent where each subject’s home was in Gaza.
Before launching into their respective story, each person shares their intimate memory of what their house and neighborhood looked like, holding back tears as they recall their former, now erased, abodes. Wadimoff mixes these recollections with some unique staging, allowing the camera to track and pan around each subject as they stand upright, bathed in theatrical lighting.
Following these lyrical sequences, the film becomes familiar in form, compiling one-on-one interviews with the figures. All of them have different backgrounds. The defiant Haneen Harara, for instance, is a journalist. A heartbroken Jawdat Khoudary is a businessman. The former mourns the 13 people from her family who died on March 5 in an Israeli airstrike; the latter laments the history and culture permanently lost in the devastating missile strike of Al Mat’haf museum, which he owned. Fascinatingly, in a midway break in the film, Jawdat and Haneen argue over whether they should return to rebuild Gaza. Haneen castigates Jawdat for not being strong enough to take part, demonstrating the magnitude of the hurt Palestinians have endured in war and in exile.
For his part, Wadimoff is attentive to the film’s aching tone. He doesn’t want to make a documentary wholly predicated on trauma. He reaches for ruminative moments like the aforementioned lyrical theatrical sequences and toward the end of the film finds time to get the subjects out of the darkened soundstage to the outside, which is filled with sounds of the wind blowing and children playing. He also leans on the talents of Feras, who, when his family was issued an evacuation order, only took his Qanun with him from his home. That stringed instrument provides a kind of comfort for the end of the film to the subjects and to the viewer for a final bold note that fortifies “Who Is Still Alive” as a story of survival and determination.
On its face, “Sixteen Moments of My Life,” the latest from Spanish auteur Albert Serra, isn’t terribly notable. Unlike “Pacification” or “Afternoons of Solitude,” idiosyncratic works that embed viewers in insular worlds, his latest film initially appears to be far more conventional. A concert documentary that observes German singer/actress Ingrid Caven’s one-off performance at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, the film, nevertheless, is just as operatic yet intuitively focused as his prior films.
Caven, who’s best known to cinephiles as a consistent collaborator with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, sings a sixteen song set filled with pieces composed in conjunction with Marc Verdaguer and Joe Robinson. She rarely speaks to the audience, only offering a courteous “merci” every half hour or so; neither Serra nor her ever notify the viewer of each track’s name either. Those details aren’t imperative to them. What counts is allowing space for the overall story to be told without distraction. The result is spellbinding yet stimulating, tangible but fleeting. That’s partly because of the reserve Serra employs in shooting Cavern. He’ll rely on a slow push-in on the opening song for dramatic effect or hold on Verdaguer and Robinson’s accompanying band as they provide kinetic abstract textures to the avant-garde these arrangements for rousing moments of musical alchemy.
And while Cavern remains an island unto herself, situated in the middle of the stage with instrumentalists on either flank, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t work the crowd. Her side door exit off stage, which allows her to steal a few sips of water, leaves the crowd pining for more; her contorted dance with the microphone actualizes the evocative imagery of her songs’ lyrics; her blue satin gown mixed with her mysterious dark sunglasses give a transcendent impression. While performing, Cavern switches between French and German and sings of distant memories and lost loves, bending her voice tightly around these imaginative musical scenes.
Once again, “Sixteen Moments of My Life” isn’t a major work by Serra. But its existence is still major to someone: Cavern. And while this will be more of an oddity for hardcore fans of the director than a necessary example of his filmmaking, it’s a major statement for his subject.
In another change-up, this dispatch isn’t filled entirely of new films. While at Locarno, I saw a restoration of Senegalese auteur Safi Faye’s “Letter from My Village” (“Kaddu Beykat”). The restoration feels notable for a few reasons. For one, Faye’s work is difficult to see because her films aren’t available on streaming (though you can locate them through other means). Also, the 2K revitalization of her classic film, which was carried out by Locarno Heritage in collaboration with Cinegrel from a 16mm master, was touted throughout the festival before most screenings with a brief sizzle reel of the before and after of the restoration. Most importantly, “Letter from My Village” is an integral piece of African cinematic history and a quintessential example of Faye’s interest in the travails of rural Senegalese life.
While the film takes care to record the day-by-day customs and discussions shared in a small African village, it would be a grave mistake to relate it to any ethnographic leanings. Rather Faye crafts a loose narrative about a drought that’s afflicting this small community so badly that it’s revealing the many systematic inequalities engineered against them. We view this oncoming calamity through the eyes of Ngor (Assane Faye), a young man whose aim of marrying Coumba (Maguette Gueye) is momentarily dashed because the drought, which has severely impacted the local groundnut crops, has rendered his family too disadvantaged to afford the necessary cultural accoutrements for the ceremony. To make ends meet, he ventures to Dakar in search of work only to be exploited by those who’ve seen enough people with a similiar plight to know he’s vulnerable and naive.
Accompanying this primary plot, is, of course, the epistolary component—which comes in the form of letters written from a villager to a friend. These letters are read by Faye herself and give voice to the many customs, expectations and roles, particularly between men and women, within this community. These observational words are matched with Faye’s equally expressive lens, which absorbs the many sights of village and urban life—the delineation between the calm pace of the former and bustling force of the latter, especially regarding unnavigable traffic—gives a full picture of the many faces of Senegal. Her winking humor, often displayed in Ngor’s metropolitan troubles, also keeps this work from being a dour affair. By the end, through the monumental achievement that is “Letter from My Village,” one gets a tantalizing sense of Faye as an empathetic filmmaker and a biting storyteller. And hopefully, with a new 2K DCP now readily available, one hopes Faye’s inquisitive picture travels the world once more.
- I Was Compelled to Revisit: Rory Kennedy on “Freefall: A Reckoning For Boeing” (August 19, 2026)
Rory Kennedy has followed up her searing documentary “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” with an update, “Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing.” The first film focused on the two 737 crashes within five months of each other, killing 346 people. The Boeing executives insisted it was not their fault but, as often happens in litigation and regulatory enforcement, they promised they were fixing whatever was wrong. She says she was “chronologically incentivized” to film and update.
In “Freefall,” Kennedy shows us the evidence that came up when whistleblowers went on the record with their concerns that the quality control that once defined the company’s reputation had been jettisoned in favor of bonus-incentivized cost-cutting.
In an interview with RogerEbert.com, she talks about what brought her back to the story, her view on re-enactment in documentaries, and how she brought cameras into an especially sensitive moment.
What happened after the first movie that brought you back to the story?
“Downfall” really focused on the 737 MAX crashes. And the two airplanes crashed within five months of each other, same kind of airplane, new aircraft. Initially, Boeing argued that it was pilot error. Ultimately, after pressure, congressional investigations, and reporters staying on them, they admitted it was the fault of the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System for flight stabilization) and the plane itself, and they took responsibility. However, they weren’t criminally held accountable. And they had been responsible for killing 346 people, and they assured the public and government and all of us that they learned their lessons and changed their ways. But pretty soon after that plane went up into the air, which is where “Downfall” ends.
And suspicious things were going on. We were reading about incident after incident in the press: engines falling off airplanes, smoke filling cabins, wheels not working. Then the Air Alaska incident happened, when a window blew out midair. Around that same time, the whistleblower, John Barnett, whom I had interviewed for “Downfall” and had a friendship with, died under suspicious circumstances while he was testifying about Boeing. Several whistleblowers were coming out in the press, but others were reaching out to me, saying, “You really need to see what’s going on inside of Boeing.”
So, at that point I went back to Netflix and Imagine, who we worked with on the first film. We huddled together, and I said that I was compelled to revisit and go back in there, and they agreed.
And so, this film is much more inside the factories, what’s happening inside of Boeing from the perspective of the whistleblowers.
You just used the words “took responsibility.” Does that mean admitting it was their fault? Or does that mean some reparations? Or does that mean taking the steps necessary to prevent it from happening again?
Legally, they admitted responsibility, but there was still pushback on criminal responsibility and on holding the CEOs and the people in charge accountable with the impact of actually going to prison. So that’s never happened. Part of the story of this film is the pressure on the families to try to compel these CEOs to actually take responsibility in a way that one would if they killed one person, let alone 346 people. That’s never happened.
I remember in 1985, after a Japan Airlines plane crashed into a mountain, the President, Yasumoto Takagi, spent months traveling across Japan to visit the homes of the victims’ families in person, offering his condolences and a formal apology. We did not see anything like that from Boeing.
Many of the families have yet to get a call directly from Boeing apologizing.
I’m sure their lawyers advise them not to do that. But yeah, as a human being, it’s horrifying to think about.
That’s what this film shows compellingly: Boeing’s continued lack of humanity in handling the MAX crashes, and its continued decision-making that prioritizes profits over safety. It’s been pointed out that they’re not making dishwashers; they’re making airplanes. So, it’s a company where we’re all invested in compliance with regulatory mandates for safety.
In both films, you show us a changeover from a quality-, reliability-, and safety-focused company to a profit-focused company. When did that change occur, and how do you see that change occurring?
We documented some choices that start with “Downfall” and continue through “Freefall.” “Downfall” goes a little deeper, back to the McDonnell Douglas merger, which was a seminal event. And the move of the headquarters from Seattle, which is where the factory was, where all these planes were being built, to Chicago, too.
“Freefall” does a deeper dive into the Jack Welch model of corporate America, prioritizing corporations and shareholder profits above all else. And the kinds of decisions that GE was making then got pulled over to Boeing.
Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing. Cr. Maxwell Archives
GE does make dishwashers.
And they do make dishwashers. But that company also went down. “Freefall” is not just a profile of concerns about an airplane and how it’s built and the safety protocols, but it’s also the health of this company. It has been losing more and more money because of the decisions it’s making. It’s not just about safety, although to me that’s the highest priority. It’s also about running a company as effectively as possible.
The point you’re making is that they are cutting costs in the short term but losing money in the long term. That is the fault of the way the board structures incentive compensation. As we see in your film, the CEO made more than $100 million, which is unrelated to what we would consider performance.
As one of our experts says at the end, this company is self-destructive. It’s in free fall, and yet the CEOs who have been running it are some of the wealthiest people in our country’s history.
There’s a very, very sensitive moment in this film when the Barnett family members get some really painful news, and you are in the room filming their reaction. How do you as a documentarian make them feel comfortable enough to have you there?
In the aftermath of John’s death, I was very immediately in touch with his mother and have stayed in touch with her. I also have a good relationship with his lawyers. Because I had made “Downfall,” I had a good amount of credibility for family members and whistleblowers to trust that I was going in there in a way that would represent their stories fairly. I think all of that contributed to their trust in me and their willingness to let me document very intimate moments.
How do you calibrate the kind of re-enactments you include?
I try to minimize reenactment. When you’re making a documentary, you’re always thinking “What is the visual storytelling?” I really prioritize archive research. And I have a really fantastic team who helps me do that. But there are parts of storytelling where there’s just no footage. I’m trying to make a film and a story that is, most importantly, true and at the same time try to make it, for lack of a better word, entertaining, like engaging, keeping audiences invested.
Visual storytelling, whether I’m using graphics or recreations, is an important part of helping audiences understand what’s happening. But I always try to distinguish it stylistically so audiences know what’s recreation and what is archive. I try not to mesh them and confuse people.
One of the most compelling parts of the film for me was the Senate hearing. Senator Blumenthal uses the word “preventable,” and Senator Hassan uses the word “systemic.” Both are powerful and very clear that Boeing is responsible. And yet nobody’s really done anything to make any changes. Who is in a position to address this? And how do you hope they will see this film?
Part of the story is that this is one of the all-time great companies in American history, a company that I’ve long admired. I’m rooting for Boeing, right? I want Boeing to be successful and to do what it has done historically: make some of the greatest, safest aircraft known to man.
Many people can do something. You can get a CEO in there who is an engineer and says, “We’re going to focus on excellence, and we’re going to focus on safety.” There’s a saying that a fish smells from the head, right? But from the head, you can create something good that trickles down, and you feel throughout this institution. Having a CEO and board who really prioritize that would make a world of difference. But then there’s also the Department of Justice. The previous Department of Justice had held Boeing accountable, and Boeing had agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges. Then a new administration comes in and says, “Actually, we don’t need you to plead guilty.”
Those choices affect whether a company is incentivized to do the right thing. And if you’re holding the CEOs who have killed 346 people accountable and they have to go to prison, that sends a very powerful message that any other CEO who comes into that company is going to be like, “I’m going to focus on safety because I don’t want to go to prison.” We can financially support the FAA, the regulatory agency that is responsible for enforcing safety at Boeing. Instead, a lot of FAA funding has been gutted, and its authority to oversee what’s happening at Boeing has been pulled back. There’s also a revolving-door situation where people work at the FAA, and then get hired by Boeing, and vice versa. And so, you know, they’re not fully incentivized to do the right thing.
These are choices that people in elected office are making. And so, with an election coming around the corner, it behooves people to research who they’re voting for and whether they have a record of supporting the agencies that regulate corporations.
- Locarno Film Festival 2026: 17 Urgent Hollywood Blacklist Films (August 18, 2026)
Bold. Radical. Urgent. Those words could describe the last few years the Locarno Film Festival has screened its daring classic retrospectives. But they’ve never been felt more than in the latest edition curated by filmmaker, writer, and programmer Ehsan Khoshbakht.
Last year’s postwar Britain program included 45 films made in England between 1945 and 1960. The year before that, their Columbia 100 celebration “The Lady With the Torch” showcased 44 films made by the studio between 1929 and 1959. Like those two programs, this year’s retrospective—“Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist”—also offers keen insights into a certain era of filmmaking, but with a distinctly political urgency. The 50 films in this series are not limited to pictures made within the Hollywood studio system; rather, they run the gamut from early American independents to international cinema stained by the blood of the blacklist.
Watched in short succession, these films paint a bleak portrait of artistic resilience amidst an onslaught of political attacks from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and even those within the film industry itself. The retrospective, along with a six-episode podcast series and a nearly 300-page book featuring essays by film historians and critics like Imogen Sara Smith, Farran Smith Nehme, and Phuong Le, offers both an incisive look at the horrors of the recent past and also holds up a mirror to the startling parallels to the rising tide of fascism today.
By the time I arrived at the festival, about half of the screenings had already taken place. However, it felt like I had arrived at just the right time. Practically sprinting from my train, I made it to the GranRex cinema just in time for the world premiere of a documentary about blacklisted filmmaker Abraham Polonsky by the Czar of Noir himself, Eddie Muller. This powerful new film proved to be the glue that held the whole retrospective together for me. With that, here are seventeen striking films I watched over six days rife with hopeful idealism, righteous anger and indignation, and even melancholic regret for a world that’s lost its way.
“Dangerous Citizen: The Life and Times of Abraham Polonsky” (2026)
Written and produced by noirchaeologist Eddie Muller, this documentary portrait of trailblazing blacklisted filmmaker Abraham Polonsky used excerpts from Polonsky’s films, archival interviews with Polonsky and long-time collaborators like “Odds Against Tomorrow” star and producer Harry Belafonte, plus new interviews with Muller, historian Imogen Sara Smith, David Mament, Oliver Stone, fellow blacklistee Lee Grant, and Julie Garfield, whose father John Garfield worked multiple times with Polonsky on films like “Body and Soul” and “Force of Evil,” to survey a key figure in a politically fraught time in Hollywood—and American—history that seems to largely be forgotten today. The doc thoroughly uses film clips to serve both as a slick overview of Polonsky’s career for those uninitiated, and as encouragement to rewatch his work with fresh eyes.
The film also offers a deft introduction to the history of the Hollywood Ten, of which Polonsky was a member. The doc doesn’t stop at the rise of the blacklist; it also surveys Polonsky’s later career, like his return to filmmaking with “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here” in 1969 and his time as an instructor at various film schools. While the interviews with his film students are illuminating, as are the archival clips of Polonsky himself, the film’s most powerful moment belongs to Julie Garfield. While discussing the death of her father from a heart attack at the age of 39, just a year after he made his last film “He Ran All The Way,” she says, “I’m 72 years old, and I’ll never get over it.” It’s a reminder that while filmmakers like Polonsky had their careers deferred, others, like Garfield, lost their lives to the madness that HUAC wrought. Muller’s film was paired with a screening of Polonsky’s anti-capitalist noir “Force of Evil” (1948), featuring one of Garfield’s most nuanced and complex film performances.
“The Hollywood Blacklist: The Survivors Tell Their Stories” (2026)
A few days later, I watched another world premiere documentary: Marie-Dominique Montel and Christopher Jones’s “The Hollywood Blacklist: The Survivors Tell Their Stories.” The film is crafted from archival footage shot by film historian Pat McGilligan, who says, because of McCarthyism, “Hollywood was traumatized, and it changed forever,” during a reunion of about a hundred or so blacklistees who came together one day in Los Angeles in 1983. The rushes were improperly stored for decades, causing significant damage. The filmmakers entrusted Blake Jones to digitally restore the footage, using new software he designed for the task.
While the restored footage is sometimes wonky, the candid interviews it preserves with blacklistees like Ben and Norma Barzman, Jules Dassin, Sam Jaffe, Lester Cole, Karen Morley, Ring Larder, Jr., and Lionel Stander are invaluable for their insights and their righteous fury. The film itself feels like it was made for television, and often spends too much time foregrounding the history of the blacklist in its most basic terms, rather than using the oral histories this footage contains. As I watched, I kept wishing it were structured more like “Once Upon A Time In Harlem,” and just let the interviews and the footage of the reunion speak for themselves. This doc was shown as a double feature with filmmaker and actual Soviet spy Irving Lerner’s “City of Fear,” which is what Hollywood had become with the cloud of HUAC hovering over its head.
“The North Star” (1943)
A film made during World War II to remove distrust between the American people and the Soviet Union, who were our wartime allies, “The North Star” became controversial after the war and was re-edited to remove its propagandistic opening sequence of communal harmony on a collective farm. Described by Khoshbakht in his introduction as the “reddest director in Hollywood,” the film’s director, Lewis Milestone, was of Ukrainian-Jewish descent and firmly believed in the virtues of collectivism, as seen in the film’s true ensemble nature. Deemed by Khoshbakht as the closest Hollywood got to fully endorsing a Marxist-Leninist way of life, “The North Star” was written by Lillian Hellman, who was blacklisted for her communist views and political activism.
The first half of the film is very much a collectivist fever dream, presenting an idyllic vision of communal farm living as we’re introduced to its inhabitants, who include a pair of strong-willed school girls (Anne Baxter and Jane Withers), a pilot (Dana Andrews), an esteemed doctor (Walter Huston), a love mother (Ann Harding), an idealistic high school graduate (Farley Granger), and a wise old man (Walter Brennan, putting a singular spin on his beloved wise fool persona). This harmony gives way to the dissonance of invasion, and eventually the abject brutality of occupation. Children we saw at play in the first half are gunned down by the Nazi invaders and left to die alone in the cool stream that flows through the village. An oddity of the era, Milestone’s film is a social-realist wartime musical that, at its heart, is about what it takes to have the courage of your convictions.
“Salt of the Earth” (1954)
Screened on 35mm with an insightful introduction by critic Phuong Le, who also wrote about Jarrico in the retrospective companion book, this milestone of American independent film encapsulates several of the socialist themes that pulsate throughout the retrospective: workers’ rights, women’s rights, and immigrant rights. A collective work made equally by its director Herbert J. Biberman, screenwriter Michael Wilson, and producer Paul Jarrico, the film doesn’t just tell the stories of striking miners; it was made in collaboration with them as well. Although the cast is led by a few professional actors, like Rosaura Revueltas and Will Greer, most of the striking mineworkers and their wives depicted in the film were non-actors who actually worked the mines and fought for their union rights.
Shot in a style reminiscent of Italian neorealism, “Salt of the Earth” centers on a group of miners and their wives working in a mine in Zinc Town, New Mexico. Although their people had lived on this land long before the territory became part of the United States, they are treated like second-class citizens. Their homes do not have hot water, their contract with the company is not equal to that of the white unions, and their mine is considerably more dangerous. When they finally go on strike, the men have to learn to let go of their misogyny and let the women be equal participants in their shared future, or as one of the women says, “If we win we’ll win more than just the strike, we’ll win hope.” A resounding success of social criticism and artistic expression, the film was hampered financially by the theaters that owned the means of distribution and the studios that pressured them not to screen it. However, its spirit lives on in films like “Harlan County, U.S.A.” by Barbara Kopple and even Lucrecia Martel’s “Nuestra Tierra.”
“Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman” (1947)
As with “Salt of the Earth,” many of the films programmed focused specifically on the lives of women. I missed screenings of pivotal films like “Tender Comrade,” “Caged,” “Woman in Hiding,” and Ida Lupino’s directorial debut “Not Wanted,” but thankfully I had seen them before (although I would have loved to see them on the big screen and think about them in the context of the retrospective). However, I did catch a pristine 35mm screening of the subversive Susan Hayward weepie “Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman,” a film I had only seen once, years ago via a terrible rip on YouTube. Based on a story by Dorothy Parker with a screenplay co-written by blacklisted John Howard Lawson and directed by Stuart Heisler, the film was the first of several vehicles for Hayward in which she embodied a new kind of independent woman. She specialized in characters who bucked against the chains of patriarchy or found themselves crushed by its crippling weight.
On its surface, “Smash-Up” is a prototypical Hollywood melodrama with big emotions, crushing drama, and a star-crossed love affair. Yet, Parker et al use this template to smash up conventions and explore complex themes like female isolation, the rise of rampant consumerism, and the suffocating grasp of patriarchy in post-war America. Loosely based on the tumultuous life of Bing Crosby’s first wife Dixie Lee, Hayward stars as Angie Evans, a popular nightclub singer who gives up her promising career to support the dreams of her husband Ken (Lee Bowman) and raise their child. Soon finds herself drawn into despair and alcoholism after the demands of Ken’s rising radio stardom lead him to neglect her emotional needs. The glamorous Hayward is unafraid of pushing herself to the limits of this part; her body becomes at times a limp rag, ravaged by alcoholism, while at other times she rages with the fury of self-hatred. For this fearless performance, she received her first of five Oscar nominations for Best Actress (eventually winning the award in 1958 for “I Want to Live!”). Along with Hayward’s gripping performance, Marsha Hunt, who would later be blacklisted for her staunch beliefs, offers a counternarrative to Angie’s miserable housewife, as a radio executive who also finds herself eaten up and spit back out by the cold indifference of patriarchy.
This screening was preceded by a 35mm print of the short musical film “Symphony of Swing,” featuring bandleader and clarinetist Artie Shaw, who went into self-imposed exile in Spain after being blacklisted in 1953.
“The Young One” (1960)
This rarely screened gem from the early days of Luis Buñuel’s Mexican era was a collaboration between blacklisted writer Hugo Butler and producer George P. Werker. Screened on 35mm from a print on loan from the Harvard Film Archive, this film was a real highlight in the middle of the retrospective, inspiring many spirited discussions from the nearly sold-out crowd afterward.
A parable about the insidious, festering nature of American racism during the mid-century mixed with Buñuel fascination with both the power and fragility of female virginity, the film centers on three main characters: Traver (Bernie Hamilton), a Black clarinetist on the run after he’s accused of raping a white woman; Hap (the always great Zachary Scott), the irascible game warden of a private island off the Carolina coast: and his ward Evvie (Key Meersman), whose recently deceased grandfather was the handyman on the island. The filmmakers use these three characters to explore the complex balance of power in American society. Hap, an illiterate grouch, holds both Evvie’s and Traver’s future in his greasy hands. Evvie, whose “innocence” is taken by Hap the first chance he gets, is the only person who can help Traver make it off the island alive, while Traver must rely on Evvie to do the right thing and help him escape.
These power dynamics are distilled in two powerful sequences. In one, Traver explains that “It’s easy for him to kill me, but hard for me to kill him so he still has the power.” In the other, Traver needs Evvie to untie him so he has a chance to flee while Hap and his cronies are distracted by drink. When Evvie hesitates, saying “They’ll hit me,” he replies, “If they get me to town, they’ll kill me.” The church also catches strays in the form of a priest (Claudio Brook) who is willing to give Travers the benefit of the doubt about his innocence, but won’t sleep on the same mattress as him. The slippery subject of systemic racism and the violence it evokes was also explored in other retrospective selections like “Native Son,” in which author Richard Wright stars in the filmic adaptation of his own novel, and the William Faulkner adaptation “Intruder in the Dust,” which features a trailblazing turn from Juano Hernandez.
“Stranger On The Prowl” (1952)
“They’re all waiting for me to die. I have a right to be hungry. I have a right to eat. I have a right to live,” says the unnamed stranger (a wonderfully restrained Paul Muni) in blacklisted director Joseph Losey and screenwriter Ben Barzman’s insightful spin on Italian neorealist drama. Muni’s stranger finds himself trying to make money for a boat fare in a bombed out post-war town where another lost soul, a young boy named Giacamo (Vittorio Manunta) hopes to earn enough from playing marbles to attend a traveling circus. Soon these two lives collide as the film explores the hopeful innocence of childhood and the hopeless frustration of a new generation of forgotten men.
A film that finds itself in a curious liminal space between the class conscious films of Losey’s later career, like “The Servant” and “The Go-Between” (minus the psychosexuality) and the post-war Italian neorealist films like “Shoeshine,” “Rome, Open City,” and “Bicycle Thieves,” it also at times harkens back to another social realist film starring Muni, the depression era prison reform drama “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.” After Muni’s stranger accidentally kills a cheese shop owner out of hunger and flees the scene, a cop asks a bystander why he did not report that the stranger had a gun, admonishing him because he “might have prevented a murder.” The man retorts, “Why didn’t you give him some cheese? You might have prevented a murder.”
The 35mm screening began with an emotional Q&A between Khoshbakht and Losey’s son Gavrik Losey, who tearfully asked: “How do you sum up a life in ten minutes?”
“He Who Must Die” (1957)
Also co-written by Barzman, along with fellow blacklist-exiled director Jules Dassin, “He Who Must Die” adapts Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1948 novel “Christ Recrucified” into a parable about modern-day hypocrisy, rife with socialist and pro-immigrant themes, as well as anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist ideology. Set in the 1920s during the Turkish occupation, the film centers on a small Greek town preparing for its annual passion play about St. Elijah. Their preparations are interrupted by a group of starving refugees, the only survivors of a village that resisted occupation, who have set up camp on the outskirts of town. While the town at first seeks to give them shelter, their corrupt priest (Fernand Ledoux) and collaborating leader (Gert Froebe) oppose the act of charity.
The humble, stuttering shepherd (Pierre Vaneck) picked to play Christ in the passion play becomes Jesus incarnate, advocating for the poor and the weary, while a war widow turned sex worker (Melina Mercouri) is tapped to play Mary Magdalene, showing a courage of conviction that proves to be much stronger than those who judge her for how she earns her living. The sharp script not only cuts to the hypocrisy at the center of the church, the aristocracy, and the occupying forces who are “just following orders,” but also a whole world that has turned its back on Christ’s socialist teachings. In the film’s dynamic climax, one stalwart young man decries the feckless priest, insisting that “If Jesus came back to Earth today, he’d be crucified again and you would lead the way.”
“Welcome Mr. Marshall!” (1953)
Directed by Luis García Berlanga and co-written by Juan Antonio Bardem (Javier Bardem’s uncle), this Spanish satire sees a Castilian village desperately pretend to be an Andalusian village in an attempt to seem “authentically Spanish” after they hear that American officials in charge of allocating funds via the Marshall Plan will be passing through. In his introduction, Khoshbakht said he wanted to screen this film for one thirty-second sequence in which a bigoted priest has a nightmare about the impending Americans that imagines them as a HUAC-like tribunal dressed up in hoods that evoke the KKK.
The dream sequences in the film not only parody popular American films like noir, westerns, and backstage musicals, but also criticize Spain’s colonial past and the parallels between McCarthyism in the U.S. and the Spanish Inquisition. Ultimately, the film uses its sharp humor not only to examine both the false hope that is the “American Dream” and its own country’s hypocrisy and damaging attempt at homogenization of its rich and varied culture, but also to make the case that Spain should not allow itself to be dependent on aid from the United States. It proudly declares that the Spanish people unite with all their specificity intact as they stand proud and walk into the future on their own.
“Spain Again” (1969)
Blacklisted screenwriter Alvah Bessi, a member of the Hollywood Ten, mined his own experiences during the Spanish Civil War for this melancholic drama. Director Jaime Camino keeps this largely forgotten gem humming along in a striking, yet minor, key and offers a wonderful showcase for Mark Stevens, who himself could be described as largely forgotten. One of the industry’s first triple threats, Stevens was a popular television actor during the 1950s and also directed several singular genre films, including the Alaska-set noir “Cry Vengeance.” He stars as a soulful neurosurgeon, Dr. David Foster, who has returned to Spain for a medical conference, his first time back in the country since he fought as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.
While a romantic subplot where Foster finds himself drawn to the daughter of his one-time lover, played by flamenco dancer Manuela Vargas, doesn’t really hold up all that well, the film’s politics remain as sharp as ever. When Foster says it was his duty as a doctor to go and serve in the war, his colleague disagrees, asserting that “medicine and politics don’t mix.” It’s hard not to see the scene through the parallel lens of contemporary films like the documentary “American Doctor,” which follows three surgeons who traveled to Gaza to aid those injured by the ongoing genocide. “We helped people who were suffering,” Foster retorts. In another scene, a colleague mournfully declares he hopes those crazy times won’t ever come back; Foster ruefully reminds him that they have “in Vietnam.” A tender elegy for the broken ideals of this country’s leftist past, Camino’s film reminds us that history is indeed a circle, and that fascists will rise again if we don’t keep fighting.
“We Were Strangers” (1949)
This John Houston joint was described by Khoshbakht as one of the “forgotten films of the Red Scare era.” A critical and box office failure, it’s a curious mixture of staunch political commentary and traditional Hollywood adventure filmmaking. Featuring yet another tremendous turn from the great John Garfield, already looked ravaged by the stress of HUAC persecution that would in just a few years claim his life, the film is set in 1933 during the waning days of Machado’s dictatorship. Inspired by a true story, Garfield plays a Cuban-American who returns to Havana and joins a subversive group of guerrillas plotting to liberate his country.
The film looks back at the pre-WWII leftist liberation movements much like “Spain Again” does, but with a still hopeful eye towards the future. Although star Jennifer Jones affects a creaky accent to play China, a bank employee radicalized after she sees her younger brother gunned down on the steps of his university by a seedy government official (a never-better Pedro Armendáriz) solely for passing out leaflets, she gives a typically fiery performance (and even gets to wield a machine gun in the film’s gonzo finale). The film also features a standout supporting turn from heartthrob Gilbert Roland as a beefy partisan and silent film legend Ramon Novarro as the leader of the underground movement. As the group begins to lose heart after their plot goes awry, China reminds them that failing is not a disgrace; it’s only a disgrace if you don’t try.
“Point of Order” (1964)
Introduced by RogerEbert.com Associate Editor Robert Daniels and screened on 35mm, Emile de Antonio and Dan Talbot’s fiery archival documentary uses hours of footage from the kinescope recordings of the televised 1954 Army–McCarthy hearings to examine what was then a dark plot on America’s recent past. A dizzying feat of editing, the filmmakers craft a gripping courtroom drama from this footage, out of testimonies by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Senator Stuart Symington, and other key figures from the hearings, which, when it was first broadcast live on television, had been watched by approximately 27 million viewers. A decade later, when the film hit theaters, McCarthy was dead, the blacklist had largely been broken, and screenwriters like Dalton Trumbo and other blacklistees were working regularly again in Hollywood.
It’s hard not to look back at this footage and see nothing but a circus full of pompous men, whose unchecked lust for power and lack of decency destroyed countless lives across the country, the impact of which still reverberates to this day. It’s easy to see parallels in how politics play out in our country today, where hearings are still full of obfuscation, personal vendettas, and perversions of power, rather than any real concern for the well-being of the citizens these people are meant to govern. The echoes of McCarthy’s attacks not just on Hollywood, but anyone on the American Left, including those who worked in higher education, can be seen today with Governor DeSantis’ dismantling of free speech at New College in Florida. Films like “Point of Order” give us a glimpse back at a time that seems a long time ago, and urge us not to forget the sins of the past lest we be doomed to repeat them.
“Red Hollywood” (1996)
Another feat of editing, Thom Andersen and Noël Burch’s 1996 documentary “Red Hollywood,” which is narrated by the great Billy Woodberry, weaves archival interviews, new interviews, and clips from over forty movies made by blacklisted artists like Paul Jarrico, Alfred Levitt, Ring Lardner, Jr., and Abraham Polonsky, into a showcase of just how ideals of the Hollywood Left were reflected in the cinema they made. The film is structured in sections about war, class, race, the sexes, and crime as it looks at the way these filmmakers tried to address the fractured social systems that had been failing the people of this country at least since the Great Depression (but honestly, probably always if you were a rich white man). You’ll walk away from this film with a massive watch list of subversive classic films; you’ll also be reminded of just how smart studio-made Hollywood films used to be. These filmmakers made movies for adult audiences about adult themes. Films that were entertaining and made you think all at the same time.
While talking about the crime pictures he wrote, Polonsky shares maybe my favorite tidbit from any of the films I watched during this retrospective: “All films about crime are about capitalism, because capitalism is about crime. I mean, quote-un-quote, morally speaking. At least, that’s what I used to think. Now I’m convinced.” Watching these formerly blacklisted filmmakers speak so eloquently about the work they made and their careers that were deferred or outright destroyed by McCarthyism, one feels the loss of intellect in American pop culture acutely.
“High Noon” (1952)
Adapted by Carl Foreman from John W. Cunningham’s 1947 short story “The Tin Star,” “High Noon” is probably one of the most well-known films screened during the retrospective. A winner of four Oscars, including Best Actor for star Gary Cooper as the iconic Marshal Will Kane, a man who must stand alone when his town turns its back on him after a murderer he sent to jail has been set free. Returning on the noon train, Kane spends the hour after his wedding to a young Quaker named Amy (Grace Kelly) trying ( and failing) to raise a posse to face the killer and his gang, despite Kane having helped make the town a place where a “decent woman can walk down the street alone.”
It’s hard not to read the film as an allegory about the filmmakers who found themselves caught up with HUAC (and many books have been written on this very subject). Screenwriter Foreman was called to testify during the film’s production, and although he finished his work on the film, he was eventually labeled “uncooperative witness.” He fled to the U.K., where he could still find work, although he often had to use a false name. A few years later, Foreman co-wrote the screenplay for “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” with fellow blacklistee Michael Wilson (who also penned the retrospective title “Salt of the Earth”). The two did not receive official recognition from the Academy until 1984. Allegedly, Foreman was only told he’d finally be recognized for his work on the Best Picture winner the day before he died from a brain tumor.
“Silver Lode” (1954)
Looking at the plot of “Silver Lode,” this Allan Dawn western appears to be a knock-off of “High Noon.” However, viewed within days of each other, it proves to be a much richer film than that would imply. This was a film I had seen many years ago back when I did weekly Sunday Morning Western screenings; I was excited to rewatch it not just because it was screening on 35mm, but also because I had never thought of the film in terms of the blacklist before its inclusion in the retrospective (despite the lead villain’s name being McCarty!). Written by Karen DeWolf, whose own blacklisting is a point of contention among scholars, the subversive genre flick is a personal favorite of director Martin Scorsese.
The always underrated John Payne stars as Dan Ballard, a relative newcomer to the titular small Nevada town, who is set to marry Rose (Lizabeth Scott), the daughter of its most prominent citizen, on the Fourth of July. Before the wedding can take place, an alleged Marshal named Fred McCarty (Dan Duryea) arrives with two deputies accusing Ballard of murder and theft. At first the townspeople stand by Ballard, but soon, as McCarty’s lies spread, they turn their back on him one by one. At one point Ballard has to shoot his good friend in order to defend himself, and the townspeople ask, “How can you trust someone who will shoot his best friend?” The film, however, asks, “How do you trust someone who would turn on his best friend?”
“Crossfire” (1947)
Based on a novel by Richard Brooks, “Crossfire” is both a seminal post-war film noir and an awards-worthy social picture. A B-film that ultimately netted RKO five Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture and one for Robert Ryan’s incredible performance, it’s a curious film that straddles many strains of Old Hollywood political history and censorship. In Brooks’ original novel, the victim of the hate crime at the center of the story was homosexual. Due to the Hays Code, this had to be changed, as homosexuality was considered “sexual perversion” and forbidden on screen. Although this subtext is hinted at, the victim is changed to a Jewish man, allowing the film to address growing antisemitism and xenophobia in the post-war years, all while transfixing the audience with J. Roy Hunt’s bewitching high-contrast black and white cinematography.
Both screenwriter John Paxton and director Edward Dmytryk were blacklisted shortly after the film became an unexpected success. One of the infamous Hollywood Ten, men who refused to name names and spent time in jail for contempt of Congress, a few years later, when called again before HUAC, Dmytryk named over fifteen individuals. This included screenwriter Arnold Manoff, who died before he ever saw his real name used again on screen; screenwriter John Howard Lawson; and director Jules Dassin, who fled to Europe to keep working. Years later, Dmytryk and Abraham Polonsky were both professors at USC, where it’s said you never wanted to be in a hallway with both of them at the same time. While Dmytryk’s story shows the shame of being the man who betrays his friends, his continued success, as well as others who named names, remains one of Hollywood’s biggest stains, even if the industry refuses to actually contend with it.
“The Front” (1976)
One of the last films screened during the retrospective, this new restoration played to a sold-out afternoon crowd. Written by blacklisted screenwriter Walter Bernstein, directed by blacklisted director Martin Ritt, and starring several one-time blacklistees (Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi, and Lloyd Gough, after watching “The Front,” even with its studio-imposed comical tone, you’ll see why someone like Polonsky would never want to be in a room with someone like Dmytryk, who lost the courage of conviction (or maybe never had it to begin with?) and named names in order to keep his career. While the witty bon mots of star Woody Allen, who plays Howard Prince, a restaurant cashier and small-time bookie turned front for a bevy of blacklisted screenwriters, haven’t aged all that well, the serious undertones of the film still carry weight.
It is particularly felt in Mostel’s melancholic performance as Hecky Brown (real name Herschel Bronstein), a popular television comic who loses more than just his career to the blacklist. Inspired by his real-life friend Philip Loeb, who died by suicide after being blacklisted, Mostel’s performance acutely distills just how violent the blacklist really was. Years later, he told his biographer he did the film because “It’s part of this country, and a lot of kids don’t even realize that blacklisting ever existed.” I watched “The Front” on my last day at Locarno, but this quote had me thinking about something Eddie Muller said during his introduction for “Dangerous Citizen” on my first day. He told of a young man who came up to him during a screening of a Polonsky film and couldn’t believe that the blacklist was real, that our government would really jail its own citizens and punish them for their free speech. Muller said that night he knew his job was not done.
Khoshbakht ended his final introduction saying he hoped that “good, old American sense” would come back. As an American whose roots in the country date back to the 1600s, I’m not so sure we ever had it to begin with, although we’ve always been good at selling that illusion of ourselves. My takeaway is that retrospectives like this one, filled with films made by fearless artists who saw the motion picture as an art form that could push for social change and who were then punished by their own government for their ideals, remind us that the American Dream is a fragile, if not a completely false, notion. And that history must be kept alive, or else we are doomed to repeat it.
- Gorgeous Platformer “Duskfade” Has Echoes of “Kingdom Hearts” (August 18, 2026)
At the end of last week, gamers lost their minds at the reveal of some new footage from the monumentally anticipated “Kingdom Hearts IV,” a title that fans of the legendary Disney franchise have been hoping to play for years now. The clip included not just some nice Goofy and Donald Duck action, but the reveal that the world of “Coco” would factor into the gameplay. The small problem is that we’re probably not playing around in this Square Enix sandbox until the end of 2027, more than a year from now.
Until then, fans should spend some time in the throwback 3d action-platformer “Duskfade,” now available on multiple platforms, and clearly inspired by “KH”. There’s no Mickey Mouse here, but there is a sword that can be used as a key, and combat that feels super “Hearts,” alongside platformer elements that reminded me of formative early PS2 games like “Jak & Daxter” and “Ratchet & Clank.” It’s got some janky combat, but if you’re an old-fashioned (or just old) gamer like me, one who would put the upcoming “Rayman Legends: Retold” high on a list of anticipated games, then this is a good pick-up, especially at a relatively low price.
Developed by Weird Beluga and published by Fireshine Games, “Duskfade” is the story of Zirian, whose sister is trapped in a Clock Tower that has somehow fractured reality. Chains attached to the clock tower need to be destroyed to free her, sending Zirian to different regions to do so, where he learns new powers to navigate the terrain and destroy the enemies in front of him.
The game’s strongest asset is its look, which sometimes resembles Square Enix games like “Kingdom Hearts” and “Final Fantasy,” but also has a hand-drawn, painter-like aesthetic that recalls my personal favorite animation house, Studio Ghibli. Every problem one has with this game washes away in the beautiful backgrounds that the developers keep refreshing in terms of style: In one level, you’ll be deep in a forest; in another, high above the clouds. It’s a game of constant movement, like a lot of platformers, and the space you’re moving through is so lovingly rendered that the clunky aspects don’t poison the overall experience.
To be fair, they’re definitely there. Zirian has a “clockwork sword” that he uses to defeat the mostly blue-hued creatures who come his way, but the combat is truly inconsistent, both in mechanics and physics. As the game progresses, Zirian gets more powerful with new toys and weapons, but the combat, even in repetitive boss battles, never feels as refined as one would hope. It’s a game that works better in exploration—jumping, grapple hooking, riding rails—than it does swinging swords at enemies that don’t feel particularly 3D.
As for the storytelling, there are some strong cut scenes that shift “Duskfade” into a coming-of-age story, a tale of a young man forced into heroism for the first time, and it’s effective for the game’s relatively modest ambition. At first, I didn’t care much about the story, but it develops nicely, especially for a game that seems slight on storytelling at the start.
At $30, this isn’t something meant to take over your life for the long term, but it’s a nice appetizer to one of the busiest gaming seasons in history. As “Wolverine,” “Control Resonant,” “Grand Theft Auto VI,” and a dozen more titles of interest loom on the horizon, it’s nice to have a game that reminds players of the worlds that made them gamers in the first place.
The publisher provided a review copy of this title.
