- Female Filmmakers in Focus: Sophy Romvari on “Blue Heron” (April 1, 2026)
An emotionally autobiographical work in line with the filmmaker’s previous short films, which straddle the world of creative nonfiction, Sophy Romvari’s debut feature film “Blue Heron” mines her family’s own painful history to craft a tender film that expands the potential of what a coming-of-age film can be.
Blurring the lines between the past and the present, the film follows eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), who, along with her Hungarian immigrant parents and her three siblings, has relocated to Vancouver Island in the late 1990s. As the family adjusts to their new surroundings, her oldest brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) begins to display potentially dangerous behavioral issues.
A Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker based in Toronto, Romvari has spent the last decade making powerful, personal films that explore the tenuous connections we all have with time and with memory itself. Romvari studied film at Capilano University and holds an MFA from York University. Her highly acclaimed short film “Still Processing,” which was her thesis film at York, examines the unresolved grief held by her family over the death of her two older brothers. Her short films have screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Hot Docs, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and True/False. They have been featured as a collection on Criterion Channel and in a retrospective at the Museum of Moving Image.
Writing out of the film’s world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival, where it won the Swatch First Feature Award, Robert Daniels praised the unique structure of “Blue Heron,” finding that it was made with a “startlingly raw vulnerability” and that it “hits with such precision, it could break you open from the inside.” A few weeks later, the film had its Canadian premiere as part of the Centrepiece program at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the Best Canadian Discovery Award.
“Blue Heron” has played festivals all over the world, including the Vancouver International Film Festival, the International Film Festival of India, the Bangkok International Film Festival, and the San Sebastián Film Festival, and was named the Best First Feature and awarded the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award from the Toronto Film Critics Association.
For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Romvari over Zoom about how images and image-making impact our experience of time and memory, why making short films is the best way to build up your filmmaking prowess, and being part of a lineage of women who use personal filmmaking as a way to reflect on issues of society at large.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
I first saw your film at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall. I didn’t know the plot going in, and it quietly destroyed me because when I was a teenager, I also had emotional issues, and I ended up in foster care. I was like Sasha’s brother. I was like Jeremy. So, watching this film brought up a lot of emotions and made me think about what it was like for my brother to be my sibling while I was going through all of that.
I think this is a movie that taps into some deeply unnameable emotions. You’ve taken this film around to several festivals, so I wondered if you’ve had other people come up to you and talk about how it touched them in similar ways, even though it is so personal to your experience?
Thank you for sharing that story with me. It means a lot to me, especially when people who relate more to Jeremy than to any other character connect with the film. Because I think that was the intangible thing that I couldn’t know. When you’re representing an experience outside yourself, you don’t know how it’s gonna be reflected for other people. So it means a lot that you felt a reflection in that experience.
It has actually been a very heavy film to release, for obvious reasons, but also because of the reactions from the people who have been watching it. I feel like I’m carrying a lot of emotional response, which is such a gift, but it’s also very heavy, because it almost comes with guilt, in a way. I’m seeing people’s very emotional reactions, and people are telling me very difficult things that maybe were locked inside them, and to make something that allows people to have that response is a privilege. But also as a human being, I’m like, whoa.
I feel like the only other film that hits on this deep of a level, and I mean this as the highest of compliments, is Spielberg’s “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.” Every time I watch that movie. I don’t know what it evokes, but I have to, like, hold myself in a corner for a few days. I had the exact same experience both times I watched your film.
“A.I.” makes me sob every time too. I just re-watched it, actually. I wouldn’t say it was a reference, but there’s a spiritual connection. It’s funny because I believe it was the first film I ever saw in a movie theater.
Wow.
Because I grew up on a really tiny island, not Vancouver Island, another smaller island where there wasn’t a movie theater. So it wasn’t until I was older that I started going to movie theaters. I watched that film with my mom. So it definitely had an effect on me, and Spielberg in general. The way he shows life and the world from a child’s perspective. “A.I.” is one of the best movies.
I really tried to focus on depicting my point of view as a sibling, because that was a perspective I hadn’t seen this kind of story be told from, and it also was the perspective I felt I had the most authorship over, and I didn’t want to speak for my brother or my parents. But obviously, I can’t depict my own experience in a vacuum. So, it’s been interesting to see people respond in relation to all of the different characters like this. There are the siblings who respond, having related to that experience; there are the Jeremys; and then there are the parents.
The parents are really difficult. Those conversations have been quite difficult. I’ve met quite a few people who’ve lost children. Or siblings who have lost siblings. There is a communal catharsis that I feel occurs. During Q&As, people are vulnerable and open up about these, like, really difficult things, which is so beautiful. But as a filmmaker, I don’t always have the tools to respond the way I want to. I know they’re responding to the movie, but I want to respond to their response in a way that validates their emotional experience, yet I don’t always feel like I have the right words. So it’s been an interesting and heavy experience for that reason.
Do you feel that through the making of your shorts, you were able to process a lot of the emotions in order to get to a point where you can make this feature film?
I do think I couldn’t have made this film, had I not made all the short films, both artistically and emotionally. I think I was trying all sorts of things and different filmmaking approaches in my short films, which helped me build confidence as a director. That experience gave me a lot of time to become comfortable with the topic, and I can talk about it much more easily now. That was the point from the beginning, not wanting to repress these feelings and experiences. I spent so long making those short films that I really, by the time I got to make the feature, I felt like I could really focus just on the craft.
There are some edits in this film that are so beautiful, where you feel like you’re in one moment, and then it reveals you’re actually different. Like when you think you’re watching the heron fly, but it’s actually Jeremy watching the heron fly on the TV. You do that a couple of times, where the edit unmoors the viewer.
I think I’m always interested in moments in films that upend your expectation of what you’re watching. Whose perspective is it? Where is the point of view coming from? I think that’s why I was excited about the structure: I could have just told the whole story from the past and watched this family come undone. But it was the perspective being switched from child to adulthood, which I experienced, and we all experience, that I found to be interesting. Because I could actually play with the expectations of the coming-of-age genre.
I think coming of age is not something that happens when you’re a child or a teenager; it happens when you’re an adult. Where you start to have self-awareness about your past and how it made you into the person you are. That’s my understanding of coming of age. I don’t think I really came of age until my twenties, when I started looking back on my past and understood why I became the person I am. The movie is, for me, as much about Jeremy and grief as it is about what makes a person who they are. I think I started to understand the obvious reasons why I became a filmmaker when I had that self-awareness.
There’s a scene where Jeremy’s making it snow with flour for his siblings while the Dad is taking photographs. When he is developing the film, he says, “Time is going backwards. It’s a time warp.” I love the way you incorporate film and photography, not only to capture time but also because an image can be an emotional time warp; you are then playing with all the different philosophical aspects of image-making. I’d love to hear how that’s part of you as an artist, and how it’s reflected in the film.
I love that you pointed out that scene, because I think it’s such an important moment. I think image-making is something I’m naturally drawn to because of my Dad and the way I grew up around someone who was always documenting everything around him, including me as a subject. So I think the photographic image became a part of my acknowledgement of reality, of that time existing. I think of documentation as a way of bearing witness to reality. Sometimes I really question my own reality and memories. I think photographs, the photographic image, feels like proof. My Dad has this huge archive of our family that proves that there was a time before everything happened that was so beautiful. Those images are so precious to me now.
When I made “Still Processing,” I was studying the photographic image, its impact, and how it depicts mortality. This has been written very eloquently by people far more academic than I, but it’s something I studied because I think it’s about the impact of seeing those images for the first time, for me, versus seeing the video images, and the video content was very different.
I think that’s why all of my films have been about characters who are obsessed with looking at the past and looking at old photographs, looking at old videos, and trying to come to terms with the past. I think “Blue Heron” is the first film where I finally feel it’s more about accepting than processing. Sasah comes to a place where she ultimately can’t do anything about the past anymore, and she’s just coming to a place of acceptance. The photographs thematically are part of that story.
When you come to accept the past, you still carry bits of it with you, right? For Sasha, there’s the blue heron keychain that Jeremy gave her, and she also has her mom’s evil eye in her car. So she’s carrying her whole family and that whole thing with her, even as she moves forward as a person.
You’re the first person to point out the evil eye. No one else has noticed that. We tried to infuse subtle inheritances. Things that she had from her past. She’s wearing a t-shirt that Jeremy wore earlier in the film when she’s making breakfast. These little things that were hand-me-downs or from her parents.
I really was trying to show, in her childhood, the things her parents were teaching her, and then, in the second half, you see them being applied. So she’s cooking with her mom as a kid, and then later, you see her making her own breakfast. Little parallels like that. Or in the first half of the film, you see the mom recording the conversation with the psychiatrist without his knowledge. Then Sasha does the same in the second half, using her iPhone while speaking with her parents. The dad literally handing her the camera is just a very literal metaphor of this being handed down to her.
So I was trying to show the ways that you are shaped by your circumstances, but also by your parents and who they are. I think a lot about nature versus nurture, especially in relation to my brother, who grew up in the same environment but had such different outcomes in our lives. I feel like I carry a lot of survivor’s guilt in that I wonder why my life turned out this way, and his turned out that way. He did have a different father, but we grew up in the same circumstances. It’s something I feel like I can’t help but grapple with.
That is why I wanted to show the siblings’ point of view. But it was important that I admitted this is not a depiction of this person. This is just a fragmented attempt to show what I experienced. Jeremy’s only line in the movie, pretty much, is just, “I think there are a lot of things you don’t remember.” I acknowledge that this is a surface-level, impressionistic view of a person. This character is so dissimilar from my brother. There’s no way I could even begin to depict my brother. So it’s just emotionally autobiographical, and unless it’s actually footage of him, it’s never going to be accurate.
I think that line is really perceptive, just from my experience. My brother is a little bit older, but I remember everything that I went through because I went through it. But he doesn’t remember very much. I feel like his mind helped him get through it by just putting it in a box. So whenever I’m still working through stuff, he’s like, “Why are you still thinking about this?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. Why aren’t you?” It’s interesting how, with siblings, going through a lot of difficult emotions at a young age helps the body and mind develop coping mechanisms.
I thought about that a lot. I would write scenes that I had a vague memory of, but then I would speak to my parents, and they would say what I had written was so misremembered. They were like, “That’s not how that happened at all. It was much more extreme.” There were just variations, and I couldn’t believe how much I didn’t remember. Once I realized that, I decided it didn’t matter. It’s about what makes sense narratively and cinematically, and how I am going to depict it to move the story forward. It didn’t matter anymore if it was true or exactly how it happened, because if you honor that too much, then you’re creatively limiting yourself. So I just threw that out the window.
There are some needle drops in this film that are literally two of my favorite songs of all time. When King Crimson’s “I Talk To The Wind” came on, I gasped in the theater. But also “Some Things Last a Long Time” by Daniel Johnson at the end was just so beautiful. Every song by him makes me cry.
I could do a whole lecture on music supervision, because it’s so hard to find songs that you can even relatively afford. And music was so important to me. The entire atmosphere of the film stemmed from the diegetic music playing in the house. When I looked back at the videos my dad had taken, there was always music playing in the background that sounded like a musical score. So I tried to implement that in the film in the same way, where the music is coming from a source, and it’s not a musical score in the movie, but it creates the atmosphere of a musical score in the household. That was a big part of the dad’s character in the film. He’s always at a distance, but he’s creating an artistic atmosphere for the kids to live within.
So all the music was based more or less on my dad’s taste, which obviously became my own. I was talking a lot to my brother about things we remember Dad playing, and just how our tastes have all melded together. Like, I went to see the movie “The Devil and Daniel Johnson” with my parents in a theater. They loved Daniel Johnson as well. So I think all the music was little hidden love letters to my parents and acknowledgements of the impact that their tastes have had on me. Both of them are very artistic people who also love movies, and it had a big impact on me. But it was hard because it was very expensive, so we had to raise extra funds just for the music.
You bring a touch of quasi-documentary filmmaking to the scene with the social workers. I think one of the main things most people don’t have to grapple with, if they don’t have issues as a teenager, is the social services system. But having gone through it, I can say it’s a horrible system. I think it’s horrible everywhere. I don’t know why, I don’t know if there’s an answer. I like that you didn’t necessarily look for an answer. You just looked for various ways it can fail, or for the fact that there are so many variables in these kinds of situations that the system can’t cover them all.
It’s so complicated, and from a systemic perspective, we just do not have an answer. I think having grown up with a heavy presence of social services coming in and out of my house with different suggestions and solutions that never really brought any kind of relief to anybody, but also witnessing really caring, loving people who were trying to do their best within their limited roles, I really wanted to show that juxtaposition. The people within those systems are often well-intentioned, but within government systems and their limitations, all these things converge and create a very broken system where it’s so easy for people to fall through the cracks. I did so much research on social services and on psychology. I spoke to various experts while writing the script, and every single person said the same thing: there was no good answer for these things.
I even spoke to a specialist whose entire psychological research was around siblings who grew up with siblings who had extreme behavioral issues. That was his exact focus. He has a child who is very similar to my brother, who is like Jeremy. This is his entire focus, and yet, as a parent, it still happened in his family. I really wanted to show a very specific example of it, which is my own, but I know that it’s not that unique, you know? I think everyone feels isolated in their experiences. Parents, especially, feel very isolated in their experiences. They feel like they fucked up. They ask, “What did we do wrong?” And the system forces you to feel that way. Then, as someone like yourself, going through the system, you feel like you’re the scapegoat for the problems. It really is a problem that I think there is nowhere to really place the blame, except for potentially the government.
It was important to me that the social workers in the film were real social workers and experts, because I wanted them to speak for themselves, which is why we cast them. It wasn’t because I wanted a documentary aspect to the film. I need them to speak from their professional experience. I did a test shoot with social workers, and I played Sasha. We did the whole conversation, which ended with them saying, “Even now, twenty years later, we don’t have a much better response to this.” It was important that it was actually baked into the reality, not just me writing a script.
Your film is wonderfully empathetic with how the parents feel. Even though they’re trying to get help and social services are trying to help them, they still feel like they’re bad parents. She says social services thinks she’s a bad mom. When I was a teenager, I didn’t think that my parents felt like they were bad parents, but I realized when I got older, I was in foster care. Of course, they felt like they were bad parents. You have to get older to realize how your parents even felt about you growing up, let alone how you felt about your parents. I think this is a film that had to have been made when you were older, so that you could have that perspective. I’m glad you waited until you had that perspective, so that it could be a fuller portrait.
If I had made this when I was twenty-five, it would have been much more angry and confused and in the middle of everything. I think I needed the time and the space to actually make the film, not just emotionally, but artistically as well. Back then, it wouldn’t be as coherent. I think a lot of people are rushing to make their first feature before they’re thirty, or whatever, but I highly recommend making shorts until you feel you actually have something to say.
How do you hope people will feel when the film is over?
I hope they feel okay. I’ve been asked, “What do you want people to take from it?” But I don’t want people to feel a certain way. If they happen to feel moved by it, I hope they feel open to it and accepting of those feelings, however they choose to process them. It’s a very personal film that I think I’ve opened up to the world, and I made it with the hope that people could connect to it, and it’s so clear to me that this film is emotionally resonating with a lot of people, but it would be strange if it did that for everybody.
Were there any films by other women filmmakers that either inspired you or that you think not enough people have seen?
A film I only discovered while prepping this film, after a friend recommended it, was Martha Coolidge’s 1976 “Not A Pretty Picture.” I bring it up specifically because you said it’s underseen. It was only restored in 2022 and had such a small release. Watching it now, it’s crazy to me how much of an impact it clearly had, even somehow subconsciously, on so many filmmakers. It’s doing the hybrid techniques so elegantly, and it’s from fifty years ago. There are some films made before it that are hybrid, of course. But I think the way she’s balancing the fiction, the emotional catharsis, and the personal filmmaking is incredible.
I’m in a long line of women, specifically, who make work based on processing their pasts, especially within systemic harm and societal issues, using themselves as a vessel to discover those things. When I saw that film, it just made me feel like I was in conversation with a film that I had not even seen. It made me feel like there is something very specific and special about the way that women use film. There’s a whole history behind that, and it’s an honor to be in a historical conversation with these other films that, for some reason, women are drawn to making.
Coolidge’s film also helped me feel more confident in my own film’s structure. Because I think the way that she’s using cross-cutting makes a lot of sense for that movie, but it made me realize that what I was trying to do was actually different. I really wanted to show time being ripped away from someone. I think when you cross-cut, you actually cradle time, and you don’t have that same effect of time disappearing. That’s why I wanted to avoid cross-cutting between the two timelines. I wanted it to be a jarring bifurcation in the middle where you’re suddenly in adulthood. Sometimes it’s affirming to watch something you love, doing something in a way that affirms a decision to do the same thing differently.
- The Unloved, Part 148: High-Rise (April 1, 2026)
(Editor’s note: If you have the time/money, please help Scout finance his independent film “Stubborn Beast” in the wake of an investor dropping out last minute. Details at his GoFundMe.)
My friend Jim Gabriel died in 2023, and a curious thing happened. His many friends and fans were forced to center their grief as a wave of text online, as almost none of us lived near him. It’s a peculiar thing that happens now in the age of social media. There’s a sort of absence now in the grieving process because we meet so many people who come to mean so much to us, and we may never ever sit across from each other. I met him in person only once, at a party in Brooklyn in 2015, I think. His face beamed, joyous under the beard and the ubiquitous cap. He struggled with illness, he had money troubles, and he was like any of us. There were ups and downs, but Jim was always Jim, and he was thus always a pleasure.
His righteous anger at hypocrisy and the horrible lows of the American experiment were a small beacon in a fog. He was always so much fun to talk to and not just about the thing that brought us into each other’s orbit in the first place, some 15 years ago: movies. Jim went to bat for the obscure and the beloved alike: “The Right Stuff,” “Thief,” “Trainspotting,” “All That Jazz,” “Sherman’s March,” “Drugstore Cowboy.” But we bonded, as I must with my peers, about the stuff nobody liked. And it was, I have no trouble admitting, just Jim’s love of the movie “High-Rise” that got me to reconsider it.
For years after seeing it, I had this nagging feeling that the movie, which struck me as running on fumes by the end, when I went to a New York press screening, was maybe more than the sum of its parts, but I couldn’t see it. Jim could. He spoke about the innovations of screenwriter Amy Jump, the peculiarity of Ben Wheatley’s direction, the combined force of their quirky sensibility and love of hard human comedy, with author J.G. Ballard’s sleek prose and despairing vision of an anemic England entering the future with no idea what it meant or where physically that meant they were headed. I couldn’t see what Jim saw, but that Jim saw it was enough, and so for years my memory of it changed, improved, and then finally I watched it again. And again. And again.
And not only did I start to see its charming overreach as essential to its success, but I also felt like I was watching a movie with my pal, something I never got to do. Art can always be a bridge from the other side, if we allow ourselves ways of seeing. It’s a privilege to have this film to share with him, in his memory. And it’s made me love Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump even more.
- “Help Me To Find Kokumo”: A Guide To Beyond Chicago (March 30, 2026)
Since its inception in Los Angeles in 2013, Beyond Fest has gone on to establish itself as the largest film festival in the United States focusing primarily on horror, science fiction, fantasy and related genres, presenting a consistently strong program of new releases (including a number of premieres), retrospective screenings, shorts programs, special guests and the proverbial much, much more. For those of us not based on the West Coast, their programs have been a consistent source of envy for many movie fans.
To that end, Beyond Fest has at long last decided to spread its goodness into a different time zone. From April 2-5, they, in conjunction with MUBI, will be presenting Beyond Chicago, a program of 30 titles ranging from the first local looks at a number of highly touted films to a number of cult classics, a number of them presented in the miracle of 35MM, all of which will be showing at the city’s most hallowed movie palace, the Music Box Theatre.
The festival kicks off on April 2 with the local premiere of “Obsession,” the new film from Curry Barker, who made a splash in 2024 when his $800 YouTube feature “Milk & Serial” garnered a lot of attention from the horror press, who wondered what he might be able to accomplish with a larger budget. For his follow-up, he gives us the story of an amiable goof (Michael Johnston) who is desperately in love with his childhood friend/co-worker (Inde Navarette), but while she cares for him, it is clearly only as a friend.
One day, he goes into a novelty shop and finds a “One Wish Willow,” a tchotchke that allegedly grants the user one wish. As it turns out, a.) the thing actually works and b.) wishing for someone to feel undying love for you without any sort of consent is perhaps not the wisest of ideas. Judging from the response that the film has already received following its screenings at Toronto (where it was the center of a bidding war that saw it sold to Focus Features, who will be releasing it on May 15) and SXSW, it would seem as if he has indeed lived up to the promise of his earlier work.
For the Closing Night slot on April 5, the fest will be holding the World Premiere screening of another eagerly anticipated title, “Faces of Death,” Daniel Goldhaber’s reimagining of the 1978 “Mondo Cane” riff that was little more than a collection of scenes of people dying in any number of gruesome ways that, if you believed the hype from everyone from moral watchdogs to the kid on the playground who snuck a look at an older sibling’s copy, were real. (Spoiler Alert: Most of them were obvious fakes.)
Rather than redo the faux-documentary schtick, Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei (both of whom will be on hand for a post-screening Q&A) have reconceived it as an overtly fictional narrative, in which a video platform moderator investigates whether or not a series of apparent snuff videos are merely fakes or something much worse, starring the likes of Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Jermaine Fowler and—because you can hardly say to have a major film festival in 2026 without her appearing on your screen at some point, the increasingly-ubiquitous pop goddess Charli XCX.
Among the other major titles on the program, Ben Wheatley’s “Normal” (4/3) finds Bob Odenkirk (who will be appearing along with co-writer/producer Derek Kolstad) once again stepping into the role of unlikely action hero, this time as the sheriff of a seemingly bucolic Midwestern town who finds himself running afoul of all the locals (including the likes of Henry Winkler and Lena Headey) in the wake of a bank robbery that goes sideways.
The carnage continues with Kenji Tanigaki’s “The Furious” (4/4), a martial arts thriller about a seemingly ordinary father (Xie Miao) whose daughter is kidnapped by child traffickers and who teams up with a journalist (Joe Taslim) to rescue her and other abducted children in the most bone-crunching ways imaginable.
In “One Spoon of Chocolate” (4/4), the latest work from musical icon-turned-writer/director RZA (scheduled to take part in a post-screening Q&A), a former military veteran (Shameik Moore) is released from prison and relocates to his small Ohio hometown to make a new life, only to run afoul of a group of local racist goons in a series of confrontations that quickly and violently escalate in the tradition of the classic blaxsploitation films of old.
Even more blood spills in “Over Your Dead Body” (4/5), a remake of the Norwegian dark comedy “I Onde Dager” from Jorma Taccone (currently scheduled to attend) about a couple (Jason Segel and Samara Weaving) who go off to spend some time at a secluded cabin to fix their fraying marriage, not realizing that a.) each is actually planning to do away with the other and b.) an unforeseen twist will force them both to put their plans on hold, at least temporarily.
On the documentary front, “Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth And Nothing Butt” (4/2) recounts the story of the legendary 1980s underground band co-founded by Gibby Hanes and Paul Leary, both of whom will be on hand for the screening along with director Tom Stern, and charts the ways in which they would go on to influence alternative culture for years to come.
Of the bigger new titles, perhaps the most intriguing is “Rose of Nevada” (4/2), the latest work from Mark Jenkin, whose last film, “Enys Men” (2022) was a quietly but deeply unsettling low-fi thriller about a wildlife volunteer whose stay on a supposedly uninhabited island to observe a rare flower begins to take on the form of a waking nightmare. In this one, which, like its predecessor, was shot in 16MM to give it a grainy, tactile look, an empty fishing boat (whose name supplies the film’s title) turns up on the shore of a fishing village in Cornwall 30 years after it set out and never returned.
Although the fates of those on board remain a mystery, the boat’s owner (Edward Rowe) nevertheless elects to put it back to work, a move that seems like a spectacularly bad idea even before the discovery of the words “Get off the boat now” carved into the wood below deck. However, two young men—financially struggling family man Nick (George McKay) and drifter Liam (Callum Turner)—sign on for some quick and much-needed cash and ship out with an appropriately grizzled captain (Francis Magee) for a few days of fishing.
What happens next, I will not even hint at to allow you to discover for yourself. Suffice it to say, something happens—something strange and disturbing that the two men find themselves responding to in increasingly different ways. Although one could easily imagine the basic elements gathered here being put to the service of a traditional horror narrative, that is not what Jenkins has given viewers. Instead, as he did so memorably with “Enys Men,” he is less concerned with creating standard-issue “BOO!” moments designed to get viewers jumping than with creating a moody cinematic dreamscape where the line between reality and nightmare is so blurred that the audience is just as baffled as the characters are regarding which is which.
Those who are in the mood for cheap shocks and gallons of gore may grow frustrated with the film’s enigmatic tone and low body count (unless you include the fish). However, those looking for something that is both undeniably strange and quietly disturbing—particularly if you were an admirer of “Enys Men”—should make an effort to check this one out.
On the retrospective front, the festival is offering up a canny mix of fan favorites and odd obscurities. Before appearing at the screening of “Normal,” Bob Odenkirk will be hosting a showing of a 35MM print of “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” (4/3), Joseph Sargent’s enormously entertaining thriller about a New York subway train being held for ransom featuring Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Jerry Stiller and one of the greatest final moments in screen history.
Similarly, before his screening of “One Spoon of Chocolate,” RZA will be presenting “The Kid with the Golden Arm” (4/4), Chen Chang’s 1979 period martial arts epic about members of a security firm transporting a fortune in gold taels through a stretch of land filled with a wide assortment of dangerous criminals intent on stealing it all.
The festival will also host the world premiere of the new 4K restoration of the 2008 screen adaptation of “Speed Racer” (4/3), with co-writer/director Lilly Wachowski participating in a pre-screening Q&A.
Iconic Japanese cult actress Meiko Kaji will be making her first Chicago appearance for screenings of three of her classic films—the world premiere of the 2K restoration of “Silver Butterfly 2: She-Cat Gambler” (4/3), a revenge thriller in which she co-stars with Sonny Chiba, and a double-feature of “Lady Snowblood” and “Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41” (4/4), two visually stylish and super-bloody action epics that would serve as key influences for Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” saga.
For the late-night crowd, there will be a midnight screening of Paul Morrissey’s still-jaw-dropping horror-comedy hybrid “Flesh for Frankenstein” (4/4), in the miracle of 3D, to serve as a tribute to the late, great Udo Kier, who delivered one of the most unhinged performances of his career—which, if you are familiar with his career, says a lot—as the mad doctor looking to create a new master race with the help of the severed head of Joe Dallesandro.
If that wasn’t enough, thanks to sponsor MUBI, the festival will also be presenting a number of free screenings, though tickets are still required for admission. “Camp” (4/3) tells the story of a seemingly cursed young woman who goes off to work as a counselor at a camp for troubled youth but cannot shake her sense of doom. “The Yeti” (4/3) follows a team assembled to search for a tycoon and an adventurer who have gone missing in a harsh stretch of northern Alaska, only to find themselves in the territory of the titular creature.
“Flush” (4/3) is an outrageous French entry in which a guy runs afoul of the wrong people and finds himself left for dead with his head stuck in a squat toilet and struggling with everything from possible drowning to an attack by a drug-addled rat. “Phase” (4/4) is a British sci-fi film about a pregnant woman who, after being exiled from a space station, goes off in search of the father of her child.
“Bulk” (4/4) is another film from Ben Wheatley, this one a sci-fi mind-bender in which experiments in string theory go wildly out of control with increasingly surreal results. In “Imposters” (4/4), after a couple’s infant son is kidnapped, the mother discovers a way to bring the child back, but over time, the father becomes increasingly convinced that what she has brought back is not their son.
“The Kirlian Frequency” (4/5) is an Argentinian chiller about a radio show whose spooky and ostensibly fictional on-air tales are becoming a grisly reality. The first film produced by the company belonging to Indonesian action star Iko Uwais (best known here for the “Raid” films), “Ikatan Darah” (4/5) about a martial artist whose career was cut short by injury who is forced back into action when her brother runs afoul of a criminal syndicate.
“Cruel Hands” (4/5) is an Australian thriller about a woman who, along with her young son, escapes from her abusive husband to a remote farmhouse, where she eventually has to defend them against her husband, the police, and raging brushfires.
A trio of older titles is also part of the free series. “Blood Brothers (& Other Delights)” (4/4) is a collection of super-gross, zero-budget films made in the 1980s and traded through the mail by Mike Diana, an underground cartoonist whose self-published work, Boiled Angel, would lead to his conviction in the 1990s for artistic obscenity. “Small Kill” (1991) is an almost indescribably weird thriller about a degenerate psychopath—played by none other than Gary “Radar” Burghoff (who also co-directed the film—who goes around kidnapping children and killing them if their parents don’t cough up the ransom.
“Sheila and the Brainstem” (4/5) is a strange 1989 sci-fi satire about a guy who travels to a subterranean world where he finds the Brainstem, which he believes holds the power of immortality, only to have it stolen in a convenience store by a trio of punks who mistake it for beef jerky. In addition, there are two blocks of short films, “Strange Frequencies” (4/4) and “And Then What” (4/5).
As tantalizing as most of these titles may seem, I have saved the most notable part of the lineup—one that may go down as one of the must-see screening events of the year—for last. On April 5, the festival will be presenting the local premiere of “Boorman and the Devil,” the eagerly anticipated film from director David Kittredge (who will be in attendance) chronicling the wild history behind one of the strangest would-be blockbusters of the 1970s, “Exorcist II: The Heretic,” John Boorman’s infamous follow-up to the groundbreaking 1973 horror classic “The Exorcist.”
Presumably realizing that anyone watching “Boorman and the Devil” will then immediately want to seek out “Exorcist II” to see it for themselves, the festival is following up the documentary with a rare screening of an original 35MM print of the film, marking its first appearance on a Chicago screen in a long time. Although it received much derision back in the day and is usually regarded as one of the worst sequels ever made, its reputation has begun to improve over the years, with no less an authority than Martin Scorsese making a case for its worth.
Personally, I think the film is a straight-up masterpiece, one of the most audaciously bizarre American films of the Seventies—particularly for one produced on such an immense scale—and one that continues to look better with each passing year. (Disclaimer: Both I and fellow critic and Music Box’s own Steve Prokopy are featured in the doc.)
Scoff if you must, but I can assure you that it is a film that, once seen, you will never forget, and yes, I mean that in a good way. Besides, now that films like “Heaven’s Gate” and “Sorcerer” have gone on to finally receive the acclaim they deserved, we need another once-scorned auteurist epic reclamation project. I cannot think of a more deserving work.
Beyond Fest Chicago runs April 2-5 at the Music Box Theatre (3733 N. Southport). Tickets for the main screenings are on sale now. Tickets for the free screenings will be available to Music Box members on April 1 and to the general public on April 2. Tickets can be purchased online at musicboxtheatre.com. For additional information on the festival, go to beyondfest.com.
- Home Entertainment Guide March 2026: Anaconda, The Housemaid, Killers of the Flower Moon, More (March 30, 2026)
10 NEW TO NETFLIX
“Anatomy of a Fall““The Bad Guys 2““Blackberry““The Bling Ring““The Creator““Night Catches Us““Nobody 2““Nuremberg““Sisu: Road to Revenge““The Unknown Country“
10 NEW TO BLU-RAY/DVD
“Anaconda“
It’s almost impressive how much this movie devolves into something that’s ultimately significantly less fun or funny than the Ice Cube & Jennifer Lopez original. It starts promisingly enough, with Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Steve Zahn, and Thandiwe Newton playing old friends who try to rekindle their love for B-movie filmmaking by rebooting 1997’s “Anaconda,” but end up making an action movie themselves. When the movie turns to try to become a sort of A-budget B-movie, it collapses. The humor disappears, the action is bad, and the ensemble falls victim to their worst instincts. Watch the original instead.
Special Features
Hiss-terical Outtakes & Bloopers
Deleted & Extended Scenes
A Ride Into Chaos with Jack & Paul
Friends in the Wild: The Cast
The Snake Charmer: Tom Gormican
Reinventing the Legend: Anaconda
“The Blade” (Criterion)
One of the more wonderfully unpredictable inclusions in the Criterion Collection lately is this Tsui Hark banger, a movie that was once named one of the top 50 action films of all time in a Time Out poll but hasn’t really found an audience stateside. Hark, the director of classics like the “Once Upon a Time in China” series and the writer of “The Killer,” is one of the most widely recognized action masters of all time, and it’s nice to see Criterion recognize that with one of their strongest releases of the year so far. They commissioned an informative commentary by an expert on Hong Kong cinema and a new video essay, and accompanied them with a documentary featuring Hark and a Q&A from the 2011 New York Asian Film Festival.
Special Features
New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
New audio commentary featuring Hong Kong cinema expert and producer Frank Djeng
Action et vérité (2006), a documentary featuring director Tsui Hark, coscreenwriter Koan Hui, and actor Xiong Xin-xin
New video essay by filmmakers Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou (Every Frame a Painting)
New York Asian Film Festival Q&A with Tsui from 2011
Alternate English-dubbed track
International-version opening and end credits
Trailer
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by author Lisa Morton
“Hallow Road“
The director of the incredible “Under the Shadow” returned in 2025 with this mind-f*ck of a movie that seems to either work for you or it doesn’t. (It didn’t work for our very own, Matt Zoller Seitz.) I saw it back at SXSW in 2025 and found it remarkably effective, a chilling two-hander with great work from Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys as parents who believe they are going to a hit-and-run involving their daughter, but may be on a very different kind of road. Blending folk horror, parental anxiety, and maybe even elements of an old-fashioned ghost story, Anvari never lets the film stray too far from its greatest asset: the deep skill sets of his talented stars.
Special Features
Making of Hallow Road
“The History of Sound“
It sinks a bit too deep into its own pretentious melancholy, but there are still so many wonderful choices in Oliver Hermanus’ follow-up to his Oscar-nominated “Living.” It’s another tentpole in Josh O’Connor’s insane 2025 in which the hardest-working actor in indie cinema stars alongside another of the strongest performers of his generation, Paul Mescal. The two play lovers who travel the American Northeast “collecting songs,” recording folk tunes from various regions in the early 20th century. It’s a delicate, character-driven piece with gorgeous craft, including fluid, lyrical cinematography from Alexander Dynan and music from Oliver Coates. The MUBI Blu-ray has a perfect video transfer, but, sadly, includes no special features. It’s nice to see that a streaming service that also releases its films on physical media gives people who want to own them a tiny bit of bonus material.
“The Housemaid“
This is one of the most fascinating hits of 2025, a movie that no one on Earth would have guessed would gross close to $400 million worldwide at the box office. It turns out that the often overly serious awards season and increasingly depressing world headlines lead people to crave well-done escapism. A throwback to the domestic thrillers of the ’80s and ’90s, this entertaining flick stars Sydney Sweeney as a housemaid who takes a job with a couple played by Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar. At first, the woman of the house seems to be a bit unhinged, but this adaptation of the hit novel has more secrets to reveal. It’s imperfect, but it’s also a lot of fun, which Hollywood blockbusters seem increasingly rarely allowed to be.
Special Features
Audio commentary with Director Paul Feig
Audio commentary with Paul Feig and Creative Team
A Peek Inside – Featurette
Deleted Scenes
From Page to Panic: Making The Housemaid
Theatrical Trailers
Secrets of the Winchester House: a Housemaid Tour
“Is This Thing On?“
Bradley Cooper followed up his Oscar bait “Maestro” with a more personal, nuanced, frankly better dramedy that’s loosely based on the life of John Bishop. Will Arnett does his best film work to date as Alex, who is ending his marriage amicably with Tess, played by Laura Dern. When Alex wanders into a comedy club one night, he decides to take the open mic, discovering that he’s got a knack for the art form. When Tess discovers he’s sharing their family secrets on stage, her response isn’t what you might expect. It’s a bit too long, but Arnett and Dern are so wonderfully likable that they make it worth a look.
Special Features
Mic Drop: Making Is This Thing On? — Go behind the scenes as filmmakers and cast open up about the inspirations behind this story of love, loss, and starting again. Get a glimpse into working with a remarkable ensemble and hear about how the team developed their comedy sets.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” (Criterion)
Thank God. It looked for a long time like the best film of 2023 would never have a physical release, stuck in the limbo of streaming originals that have kept so many of the best Apple and Netflix offerings from ever getting the treatment they deserve. Criterion’s release for Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” is their best of the year. It has a gorgeous 4K master that looks richer than it does on Apple TV, joined by informative, enlightening special features that gather not just the main players like Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone but the film’s cultural advisors and experts. As Scorsese shoots his follow-up with DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, go back to revisit one of the best films of its era, now on physical media.
Special Features
New 4K digital master, approved by director Martin Scorsese, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack
One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features
New documentary featuring Scorsese, actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone, author David Grann, Osage Nation Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear, Osage cultural consultant John Williams, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and other members of the cast and crew
“WahZhaZhe”: A Song for the Osage, a new documentary illuminating the film’s final shot, featuring Scorsese, Chief Standing Bear, and six members of the Osage Nation
Excerpted archival interview with director of photography Rodrigo Prieto
Excerpts from the 2023 Cannes Film Festival press conference featuring Scorsese, DiCaprio, Gladstone, Chief Standing Bear, and actor Robert De Niro
Short program on Noah Kemohah’s cover art
Trailer
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing and English descriptive audio
PLUS: Essays by critic Vinson Cunningham and film programmer Adam Piron
“Lurker“
I don’t love that MUBI is releasing bonus-free Blu-ray discs, especially when it’s for a film like Alex Russell’s “Lurker,” a thriller that feels like it would be enhanced by a commentary or featurette unpacking its fascinating themes. We’ve seen stories about obsession in the tech era, but none quite like Russell’s, which suggests that there’s a more symbiotic relationship here than a typical stalker-celebrity dynamic. Theodore Pellerin plays an ordinary guy who gets access to the inner circle of a celeb played by Archie Madekwe. This unique film won Independent Spirit Awards for Best First Screenplay and Best First Feature. Yeah, it’s that good.
“The Spongebob Squarepants Movie: Search for Squarepants“
Our esteemed editor-at-large’s 4-star review of this animated hit was one of the most popular of 2025, an ode to the boundless joy of well-done children’s entertainment, along with, well, butts. It’s crazy to think that SpongeBob SquarePants has been part of the pop culture firmament for over a quarter-century now, and that he still has enough fans for this movie to succeed at the multiplex. Sure, it’s no “Zootopia 2,” but SpongeBob still has its fans, some of whom were kids when the show was on Nickelodeon and can now show it to their own rugrats. After all, butt humor is for all ages.
Special Features
The SpongeBob Ensemble: The Veteran Voices: Returning cast in the voiceover booths.
The SpongeBob Ensemble: The New Crew: New cast members in the voiceover booths.
The Flying Dutchman: Animated Artistry + Live Acting: The cast and crew on creating the Flying Dutchman.
From Bikini Bottom To The Underworld: The production designers on animating the Underworld.
“Big Guy” by Ice Spice: Ice Spice music video
“Zodiac Killer Project“
When Charlie Shackleton’s project about one of the most famous cold cases in history fell apart, he decided to deconstruct the entire true-crime genre, making a movie about a movie that never was, illustrating the techniques filmmakers use to elevate stories of real violence. The result is one of the most captivating documentaries of 2025, a movie that doesn’t mock the true crime genre as much as pull back the curtain to reveal how it works. As a huge fan of the world of true crime, I found it a fascinating piece of work, and Music Box Films has accompanied it with several great special features that allow Shackleton to unpack his approach even further.
Special Features
Charlie Shackleton Q&A from the Chicago Premiere
Director Uncommentary Track
Full Evocative B-Roll Reel
Rejected Sundance Meet the Artist Video
Camera test Short Film
Letterboxd Videos about Paint Drying
Theatrical Trailer
- Apple TV’s “For All Mankind” Takes Bold New Leaps in Space and Scope in Its Fifth Season (March 27, 2026)
It’s wild to think, going into the fifth season of Apple TV’s lush, sorely underrated science fiction series “For All Mankind,” that Ronald D. Moore‘s alt-history saga began with a simple premise: What if the Russians beat us to the Moon by just a few weeks back in the 1960s? In the seasons since, Moore, along with current showrunners Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, has extrapolated a vastly divergent timeline from that simple fracture, including radical shifts in the political winds (a lesbian POTUS? A moon base by the 1980s? The USSR still standing strong in the 21st century?).
Now, in its fifth season, the show’s infamous time jumps have taken us to an alternative 2012 in which Mars has not only been colonized, but might well be on the cusp of asserting its independence from Earth. It’s not quite the near-future fantasism of “The Expanse,” but as the years go by, it’s getting pretty damn close. And, blissfully, it’s carried all of its human heartache, expansive scope, and staggering production values into that great beyond, as mankind reaches further out into the stars than ever before, bringing all of its relatable foibles with it.
After the usual flurry of news headlines that accompanies the start of a new season (including hilarious Easter eggs like a still-alive John Lennon and Jay-Z collaborating on the hit “Grey Album”), “For All Mankind” gets its wheels and asteroids spinning fairly quickly. Years after the Happy Valley colony hijacked the Goldilocks asteroid in Mars’s orbit and defied Earth’s greed, the Martian colonists live in an uneasy peace with their terrestrial neighbors (thanks to a multinational coalition called the M-6 that manages the colony, alongside Costa Ronin’s Russian governor, Leonid Polivanov). And, of course, it’s still 2012, so the kids are still doing flash mobs and “Gangnam Style,” even in space.
For All Mankind (Kevin Estrada/Apple TV)
Astronaut Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman, rocking some of the show’s signaturely crunchy old-age prosthetics), now in his hobbling eighties, enjoys his final years in exile on the station, as a new crop of Martian kids—including his grandson, Alex (Sean Kaufman)—usher in the first generation of young adults who’ve grown up completely on the Red Planet. Meanwhile, Helios founder Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi) advances his plans to turn Mars into a self-sustaining colony, with none of those pesky supply runs from Earth required. On top of that, a small group of political activists, dubbing themselves the Sons and Daughters of Mars, and led by Season 4 man of the people Miles Dale (Toby Kebbell), begins murmurs of their own “Free Mars” independence campaign.
Like so many situations in “For All Mankind,” the colony is a powder keg just waiting for a match, and the first of many arrives in the form of a mysterious dead body found outside the habitat, which is quickly pinned on beloved Martian citizen (and North Korean defector) Lee Jung-Gil (C.S. Lee), who’s arrested by Martian peacekeeping forces (led by Mireille Enos, who gets to reunite with her “Killing” co-star Kinnaman this season). A hasty attempt to bust Lee out of prison sets off a chain of events that tests the Happy Valley colony more than ever before, forcing the hands of both Earth and Mars as the colonists begin a sincere bid to overthrow their Terran masters and strike out on their own.
Meanwhile, the spirit of exploration that dominated previous seasons of “For All Mankind” lingers, as Ed’s daughter, Kelly (Cynthy Wu), and Helios CEO Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña) begin a race to the next frontier: The moon of Titan, which might well be the first step in looking for new life in the universe. For all the domestic and, forgive me, terrestrial concerns that follow the show’s emphasis on Mars this season, it’s this eternal stretch further into the frontier that keeps the show’s bittersweet, humanistic idealism churning.
For All Mankind (Kevin Estrada/Apple TV)
As always, the show’s far-flung environs manage to stay grounded in the personal and political wrinkles of our age; this season touches on everything from immigration (intergalactic refugees known as “Craters,” so called because they sneak inside supply crates) to the threat of automation to the endless fight for workers’ rights. Corporations fight amongst each other to be the first to reach Titan, all while competing governments squabble for the fate of Mars and the people living on it.
And all of these concerns are informed by a rapidly expanding and shifting cast of characters as expansive as they are endearing; this far into the future from the show’s alt-’60s remit, it’s astonishing that Wolpert and Nedivi are able to realistically keep some of its oldest characters around, while introducing new faces each season who fit seamlessly into the show’s ornate fabric. (Alongside Kinnaman, we also see series stalwart Wrenn Schmidt as the now-imprisoned Margo, still dispensing advice to Aleida about her Titan mission.) Enos and Sanchez stand out as some of the best new faces this season, and Ines Asserson excels as a young Earth marine with a chip on her shoulder related to some complicated characters from previous seasons. Even Kebbell’s Miles grows in prominence and passion as an everyday guy thrust into a leadership role by sheer entropy.
For all the elegantly rendered visual effects and meticulous NASA-core production design of the show, what wows most is the incredibly relatable human drama that plays out in between. The show’s third episode is a heartstopper, a moment of transition that feels like the end of an era, not just for the families who’ve poured multiple generations into this story (the Baldwins, the Stevenses, the Dales), but for all of humanity. Love, loss, maturation, all of these things play out in the brittle walls of spaceships and extraterrestrial habitats as strongly as they always have. While this review can’t speak to the final two episodes of the season, the first eight episodes elegantly set up a conclusion that should speak to the show’s interest in human endeavor at both the micro and macro levels.
At the end of the day, “For All Mankind” is a lush testament to humanity’s dogged desire to better itself, whether in individuals and communities finding the strength to build something where they stand, or in braving the unknown. With knowledge that this is the show’s penultimate season, and a Russian-set spinoff, “Star City,” is on its way, it’s tempting to hope that the whole series will stick the landing. No matter where it ends up, it’ll be worth the ride.
First eight episodes screened for review. New episodes air Fridays on Apple TV.
