- KVIFF 2025: Awards and Wrap-Up (July 16, 2025)
Experiencing it for the first time during its 59th edition, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival proved—at least for this critic—both formidable and revitalizing. The same can be said for the very best of the films that screened all week long in this scenic spa town in the Czech Republic. Still, there was ample energy to be harnessed even outside of the movies, from goings-on about town to Karlovy Vary’s blend of awe-inspiring architecture and natural splendor.
That thousands of spectators descended each day on the historic city centre, between pop-up tents and colonnades, never quite disrupted the town’s idyllic qualities. However, one can imagine that Karlovy Vary feels very different—less lively, more lulling—outside of the festival. Going to see films each day between the Grandhotel Pupp and the Hotel Thermal, walking riverside beneath vibrant facades of various spas, restaurants, and hotels, I often encountered groups of passerby queued up to sample mineral waters from the city’s springs, alongside others in line to secure free glasses of Prosecco or mugs of Pilsner Urquell that festival sponsors kept flowing. So ubiquitous is the latter around Prague that it’s cheaper here to drink beer than bottled water.
Coinciding with the end of the school year, the festival attracted an energetic crowd of students from throughout Europe, who see Karlovy Vary as an ideal destination to see films, catch up with friends, and party around town—often all in one evening, which accounts for why an ambient buzz of activity subsisted long into the night, every night. Scores of young attendees took advantage of this summer atmosphere and pitched campsites in a designated “tent city” area not far from the promenade. Most of them spent more time watching films than sleeping under the open sky; the day breaks early in Karlovy Vary, and birds had started singing by the time most of these cinephiles returned from late-night showtimes to recharge their batteries.
Each day, ticket offices drew lines that stretched back hundreds of meters; some slept in line to improve their odds. Not all of the cinemas showing films around Karlovy Vary are as sprawling as the 1131-seat Grand Hall in the Hotel Thermal; indeed, three venues in another area of the hotel, which also host press screenings, all seat between 63 to 70, and the hillside Husovka Theatre, a short climb away from the city centre, seats 96 adjacent to a snug outdoor bar. There’s a charming makeshift quality to such venues, all of Karlovy Vary making whatever modifications necessary to amplify the communal enthusiasm for cinema that enlivens this festival.
At Karlovy Vary, Celebrating Film In All Its Forms
As a newcomer to Karlovy Vary, it was striking to experience excitement on the ground for film in all forms—not just Cannes-premiered awards contenders, like Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” and Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident,” or starry retrospectives like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” presented by producer Michael Douglas and co-producer Paul Zaentz on its 50th anniversary. Here, boundary-pushing works in the Imagina section, from Mark Jenkin’s “I Saw God’s Face in the Jet Trail” to Ondřej Vavrečka’s “1+1+1” (on Super 8 and 16mm, respectively), animated as many discussions as titles in Pragueshorts and the films in Afterhours (a midnight section where 4K restorations of “The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre” and “Hellraiser” screened alongside the likes of “Dangerous Animals”). Others told me they had been devoting their time to watching the works of American actor John Garfield, ten of which were presented in a festival sidebar. (“It’s a pure masterpiece,” one critic raved to me of “Body and Soul,” a chiaroscuro boxing drama of bloody noses and punch-drunk fatalism that Garfield made with Robert Rossen.)
Over 130 films screened during the festival, which has accrued a reputation as a “programmer’s festival” in that it brings together breakout titles from Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, Venice, and more to showcase a veritable cream of the crop. For critics and film-industry professionals alike, it’s an invaluable opportunity to catch up.
Outside of competition titles reviewed in the previous dispatches, I was most enthralled by “Dreams (Sex Love),” the Golden Bear winner at Berlin this year. From Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud, who has made two other films that form a thematic trilogy, this electrifying and elastic ode to the creative process follows a teenager whose hopeless crush on a teacher compels her to spill everything she has experienced into a novella. With her writing related in voiceover narration, truth blurs with fiction, and the reality of what happened is left up to a growing number of readers. While others debate the nature of the heartache she expresses in lyrical prose, “Dreams” reflects on the meaning we create from memories as we make art that turns them into something else entirely.
From Ira Sachs, “Peter Hujar’s Day,” which I’d missed at Sundance, similarly draws seismic emotion from a monologue, as the renowned photographer (Ben Whishaw) tells his friend, the journalist Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), about the previous day’s events. Mundane and contained though it was, Hujar’s remembrance of one day in 1970s New York becomes an exhumation of that time and place, the people who moved through it, and his own role in their passage: observing, recounting, preserving.
Another kind of memorial is Akinola Davies’ debut “My Father’s Shadow,” which relives a day in 1990s Lagos through the eyes of two young brothers (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo, Godwin Egbo) finally getting to know the father (Sope Dirisu) they’re about to lose; it’s a gorgeous, mournful gesture of a film, like a handprint that lingers on skin, reflecting as “Aftersun” did on dynamics of absence and presence in all the agonized, unfinished relationships we share with our fathers.
Hlynur Pálmason’s “The Love That Remains” similarly sees filmmaking as sculpture, and time as its raw clay; working with immediate surroundings, the Icelandic filmmaker cast his children in this tragicomic portrait of a family coming apart, resulting in a film—shot piecemeal over years—that’s as loosely structured as it is precisely composed, with some of the strangest images anywhere at the festival.
“Better Go Mad in the Wild,” “Sand City” Triumph at Karlovy Vary’s Awards Ceremony
Films competing for the Crystal Globe premiered across the week, and the ultimate winner only screened in the festival’s final days. As announced during the festival’s Saturday-night closing ceremony, Slovak filmmaker Miro Remo’s charming docufiction hybrid “Better Go Mad in the Wild,” about two eccentrics in their sixties living in the forests of Sumava, won the section’s Grand Prix, becoming the first homegrown title to earn top honors at the fest in eight years.
Jurors Nicolas Celis, Babak Jalali, Jessica Kiang, Jiří Mádl and Tuva Novotny said in their jury statement that Remo’s “delightfully inventive documentary” doubled as “a funny valentine to the fading art of being true to yourself,” adding, “‘Better Go Mad in the Wild’ feels like a gulp of fresh, woody air, or a quick dip in an outdoor pond, or a moment of contemplation as a cow chews on your beard. In short, it feels like being free.” On stage, joked Remo, “If I knew it would be such a huge event, I would have worn a bowtie.”
A special jury prize, meanwhile, was awarded to “Bidad,” Soheil Beiraghi’s account of a Gen Z singer’s one-woman resistance to Iranian authority. “I thank Iranian women for not being afraid; they taught me not to be afraid,” he said through a translator. “They don’t need to be pitied — they need to be applauded,” he added, prompting a standing ovation. In a surprise twist, the jury split their best-director prize between 33-year-old Lithuanian director Vytautas Katkus for “The Visitor” and 25-year-old French director Nathan Ambrosioni for “Out of Love,” honoring two films “that represent opposite ends of the spectrum in approach yet are each, individually, deeply impressive directorial statements,” per their statement.
Norwegian actress Pia Tjelta took home best actress for “Don’t Call Me Mama,” about a teacher who has an affair with one of the refugees she mentors at a local asylum centre, while Spanish actor Àlex Brendemühl won best actor for “When a River Becomes the Sea,” in which he plays the stoic father of a woman recovering from sexual assault. A special jury mention was awarded to Czech newcomer Kateřina Falbrová, who was first cast in “Broken Voices” at age 12, in the role of a singer preyed upon by her choirmaster. Finally, the Právo Audience Award went to “We’ve Got to Frame It! (a conversation with Jiří Bartoška in July 2021),” the festival’s opening title.
Jurors for the Proxima sidebar section included Yulia Evina Bhara, Noaz Deshe, Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias and Marissa Frobes. In Proxima, the Grand Prix winner was “Sand City,” a visually striking tone poem set in the city of Dhaka, by first-time Bangladeshi feature filmmaker Mahde Hasan, while the special jury prize was awarded to “Forensics,” by Federico Atehortúa Arteaga, which uncovers connections between stories of the disappeared in Colombia. Special mention was awarded to Manoël Dupont’s “Before / After,” from Belgium, about two men who bond over their receding hairlines while traveling to Istanbul to visit a hair-transplant clinic there.
At the ceremony, Stellan Skarsgård—star of “Sentimental Value,” which he discussed with RogerEbert.com—was also presented with the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Contribution to World Cinema. “I’m not dead yet,” he joked on stage. “I thought I was too young for this.” Another milestone moment came as the festival bestowed a KVIFF President’s Award on the legendary Czech editor Jiří Brožek—its first such recognition for an editor. Earlier in the week, the festival had him introduce a screening of Karel Kachyňa’s “The Death of the Beautiful Deer,” a Czech classic, in the historic Karlovy Vary Theatre.
Dancing with Ghosts, as KVIFF Comes to a Close
After one final screening of Jay Duplass comedy “The Baltimorons,” the closing-night party got going an hour before midnight, as the halls of the Grandhotel Pupp turned into a free-for-all of food, drink, and festivity. Members of the juries, sworn to secrecy during deliberations, could finally cut loose amid a sea of stars. A downstairs dancefloor at the intimate Bechers Bar—a late-night VIP haunt throughout the week, though all of its tables were exclusively reserved this year for sponsors who largely left them unoccupied, making for a curious visual most nights of the festival—filled up as the night went on, reaching peak capacity around four in the morning.
Empty chairs at empty tables, in another context, reflected Karlovy Vary’s overarching tribute to Jirí Bartoska, its late president, whose death in May hung heavy over the festival. Since 2008, KVIFF screenings have all been prefaced by cinematic trailers featuring past laureates of the festival’s major awards. Czech actor Bolek Polívka appeared in this year’s film, in which Polívka—a long-time friend of Bartoska—sits at a table in a bar and orders whiskeys for himself and an unseen acquaintance. As the camera turns, the audience realizes nobody is sitting across from him, and that Polívka is addressing the late Bartoska, sliding a photograph of the actor across the table and telling him, “to hang it up somewhere, there.” At the closing-night ceremony, Bartoska’s remembrance was met with sustained applause; many were seen wiping away tears.
In a tragic turn of events, hours after “Better Go Mad in the Wild” won the Grand Prix—Crystal Globe in Karlovy Vary, one of its two subjects—Czech poet František Klišík—was found dead in a pond in the Czech village of Ohrobec, where he’d been celebrating the film’s success. Klišík’s death is still under investigation, but word of his unexpected passing at 62 reached Remo as he returned home the next day, still buzzing from victory. In a public statement addressed to Klišík, a grief-stricken Remo turned to his subject’s words, from one of the poems that featured in their film: “Life is a momentary illusion, a cry into silence, a foolish effort, a cup forced upon you, a sip of delicious taste, a prerequisite for death, which then is our certainty, a prerequisite for life.”
It’s hard to know what to say about a celebration like Karlovy Vary concluding with such stark and successive notes of legacy and loss, other than that reminders were everywhere this week of the role cinema plays in helping us make sense of mortality. At its best, the projector’s flickering light can immortalize; its pictures of ghosts make the past present once more. Paying tribute to a late luminary who made the festival what it is today, Karlovy Vary looked back even as programmers trained their gaze forward, making for a headlong rush of a festival in which it was nevertheless easy to feel suspended in time: savoring every second at the end of one era, caught between gratitude and heartbreak at the onset of another.
- Our Minds Have Been Colonized: Ari Aster on “Eddington” (July 16, 2025)
It may be about time, or perhaps far too soon, to craft a movie that explores the realities of living through Summer 2020. Regardless, director Ari Aster’s pugnacious and genre-pliant “Eddington” is here, and it offers up the best approximation of the unique hell of that time.
Bristling with natural ease, Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, sheriff of the quaint town of Eddington, New Mexico, who rebuffs the mask mandates and 6 feet distancing that have become mainstays of his town. Skeptical of whether the virus exists and equally doubtful of whether its veracity is worth causing conflict between Eddington’s residents, a disgruntled Joe decides to run for mayor against incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Cross’s act coincides with the divisions running rampant across the US at large, as Eddington’s youth begin to protest in the wake of George Floyd’s brutal murder, which puts them in conflict with the town’s meager but combative police force.
“Eddington” acts as Aster’s well-intentioned and imperfect attempt to make sense of the absurdity of life five Summers ago. As he wraps his creative arms around the political unwieldiness and racial tensions of the time, his reach may exceed his grasp, but that’s not a knock on Aster’s filmmaking skill as much as it is an affirmation that even nearly half a decade removed from lockdown, the world still hasn’t found a way to properly process the collective grief, estrangement, and alienation of that time. That the final product is divisively messy is more of a feature than a bug. COVID, as presented here, is the inciting force that shattered any semblance of unity in this country, breaking the last link to a democracy built on the consensus of the most fundamental truths.
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Additionally, across his first three films, “Hereditary,” “Midsommar,” and “Beau is Afraid,” Aster has explored how the capitalist mindset has infected our rhythms of grief. Consider Annie’s (Toni Collette) monologue in “Hereditary,” where she mourns the “waste” of her daughter’s death because it didn’t, at the very least, bring her family closer together. In a world where jokes abound about the ways we have to “get ready for our 9-5 jobs” because we were “too shy to dance on TikTok in 2020,”—as if the disruption of the pandemic was something we had to “take advantage of” instead of just survive—the film is a mournful reminder that the no one was ever equipped to endure the level of tragedy caused by COVID, let alone process it perfectly. When tragedy becomes insurmountable, we often return to the well of capitalist thought to similarly “not waste” our suffering. “Eddington” condemns those defaults while wondering if there’s a better way forward.
Speaking of the ways the characters of Eddington live so proximate to each other yet could not see the world more differently, Aster told RogerEbert.com, “all of these people are kind of living on the Internet and they are sort of all seeing the world through these strange, individualized windows.” Indeed, Aster’s worry is not just that we live in a world divided; there’s a paucity of concern, let alone curiosity, about attempting to mend the split or learn from the past. “Eddington” serves as a poignant and emphatic call for embodied engagement with one another, amidst the temptation to retreat behind a digital veneer.
Ahead of a sold out advance screening of the film at the Music Box, Aster jumped on the phone for a few minutes to discuss his prevailing interest in dolls throughout his filmography, the ways popular music precede moments of violence in his projects, and how the movies—despite being on screens—may be the thing that help us learn to reconnect with each other.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. This interview contains mild spoilers for “Eddington.”
To jump back a bit in time: I know you had toyed with the idea of making a Western for your debut, some eight years before you made “Hereditary.” Watching “Eddington” in its final form now, though, it’s hard for me to believe that a version of this story could have existed since the provocations and questions are so specific.
To be honest, the original version of this wasn’t the most interesting. I grew up in New Mexico, and my family still lives there. For a long time, I’ve always wanted to make a story set there, and I had written something that was something of a Western that was about two feuding locals. I lost interest in it though after failing to get it made, and then in the early Summer of 2020 when I was writing this story, I realized that the basic structure of that old script–with its emphasis on the siloing of communities and breakdown of communication–would be a decent kind of framework for a movie about COVID. Joaquin’s character–even his wardrobe–is modeled after one of the sheriffs I interviewed in preparation for this project.
On the note of filling out a framework, you populate your films with characters who are looking for vessels to house their pain. There were dolls in “Hereditary,” and also Emma Stone’s Louise–who plays Joe’s wife–uses dolls to cope with trauma in “Eddington.” What draws you to dolls and figurines as mediums and siphons?
I do like dolls–I designed the ones you see in “Eddington”–and find that craft quite fun. It made sense to include them in “Eddington” because Joe doesn’t have access to Louise in the film. Because the audience is aligned with Joe, we likewise don’t have access to her that we might want or need to fully understand her. For me, a lot of her history and the trauma that she’s processing and trying to work through are evident in the art that she’s making.
I view Louise as someone who was probably put through art therapy at a certain point in her life, and is somebody who has a history of abuse, and those experiences have left her confused. Over the course of the film, we find that she’s being manipulated by Austin Butler’s character, which adds another layer to her attempts to process. Ultimately, though, her artwork was a way of painting a picture of her inner self, from her emotions to her imagination, given that she’s somebody who is removed from us.
Phones in this film, but also writ large, act as a home for humanity’s worst impulses and attempts at processing affliction. Maybe we should switch to doll making.
Well, I tried not to judge any of the characters. If anything, I was trying to pull back as far as I could and provide the broadest possible picture of the landscape. I don’t mean just the physical landscape of the town, but rather also a sense of the ideological sense of the community. All of these people are kind of living on the Internet, and they are sort of all seeing the world through these strange, individualized windows.
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Speaking of the Internet, at Cannes, Austin Butler shared that in the early discussions with you, he approached playing the cult leader, Vernon, as if he were “the embodiment of the Internet.” It’s not lost on me that this religious language is grafted onto this internet surrogate, which correlates in some ways with your reflection of how those ushering in AI talk about it like it’s a God. Was that an intentional parallel?
Vernon is a Pied Piper figure. He’s someone who sees what is happening, especially in America, and is capitalizing on it; there’s no telling how sincere he is. I’ve talked to some people who saw the film, and they viewed him as being sincere, which I found very interesting. But he is someone who, in some ways, collects people. Louise is somebody who has a very ugly history, and he’s providing her with answers. Really, in the end, he’s a salesman, and he’s a good one.
Very much like a traveling preacher in some respects. I noted how Katy Perry’s “Firework” here operated similarly to No Genre’s “Sledge Hammer” and Modeselektor’s “Dark Side of the Sun” in that these songs not only evoke the tortured interiority of your protagonists but often precede moments of violence.
It’s funny because the first song that we used there was Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind.” That really made me laugh, given that it’s a New York anthem that’s being played at this fundraising party in this tiny town of New Mexico.
We weren’t able to secure the rights, and I really wasn’t expecting to because it’s such a huge song, but then we spent a lot of time experimenting with different songs in that scene, and “Firework” just fit.
I didn’t know it after all my years of listening to it, but Perry was inspired, in part, by Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” for that song. “Firework” is just as Americana as “Eddington.”
That’s interesting. I didn’t know that. In the end, I was just trying to find a song that felt emblematic of the culture and sounded like American pop music right now, which, as a genre, has a sound that hasn’t changed in a long time. It’s a great song, and it evolved perfectly with the scene. It’s a song that’s very heavy on the bass, and that was important because we cranked the bass in that scene so that you would feel it in your chest and your stomach. When you push the bass on that song, it makes it queasy, which worked for my purposes.
I hope the official soundtrack comes with the bass-boosted remix of “Firework.” You’ve cited Nietzsche, and how we’re living in a time now where the oversaturation of our history leads to detached spectatorism instead of actual engagement. Where do you see the role of cinema as a way to help people re-engage with each other?
I appreciate that. There are a lot of movies, more on the tentpole side, that encourage a retreat from reality. Even thinking about social media, that’s designed for a type of disassociated consumption. Hollywood has always been about escapism, and I believe in escapism; I hope my movies are fun and enjoyable, and don’t just feel like work.
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Thinking of what Roger Ebert said about movies being empathy machines, the medium of cinema can be a way to foster a more intentional engagement than the way something like doomscrolling might do.
The thing is, I don’t see movies as the problem, for those reasons you described. I see something insidious about the way social media works, and in the way it keeps you siloed off from your neighbors, and just the way it functions as an echo chamber. The reasons for this system are not particularly sinister, but the results are. Social media is all about keeping your engagement and attention, which is how money is made. Our minds have been somewhat colonized, and so, if anything, part of making “Eddington” was about underscoring just how divided all these people are and how artificial the process of connecting through the screen is. It’s also kind of about how the virtual tends to make reality more fake. This is what it means to be a people who live on the internet.
What you’re saying reminds me in some ways of the ending of a film you produced: Kristoffer Borgli’s “Dream Scenario,” where our very dreams become invaded with unskippable ads; there’s this sense that once we commercialize that space, we can become further siloed in our sleep.
Yeah … that’s sort of our situation right now. I think any film that’s trying to achieve any sort of modern realism has to contend with our division and how those voids are only getting wider.
“Eddington” opens in theaters on July 18th from A24.
- KVIFF 2025: Sand City, The Visitor, Better Go Mad in the Wild (July 15, 2025)
It’s always surprising, when watching films from all over the world at a festival as diverse as this year’s 59th Karlovy Vary International Festival, how strong thematic parallels start to emerge.
Between the festival’s main competition, with 12 feature-film premieres competing for the prestigious Crystal Globe, and its sidebar Proxima section, dedicated to bold works by emerging filmmakers and established auteurs, there was an abundance of films that reflected upon the secret relationships between people in search of meaning and the places they find themselves.
One strength of an international festival lies in how it provides attendees with a passport to see the world, and the films in this dispatch—“Sand City,” winner of the Proxima section’s Grand Prix; “The Visitor,” which earned best director ex-aqueo in the Crystal Globe competition; and “Better Go Mad in the Wild,” which ultimately won the Grand Prix in the Crystal Globe competition—traveled far, from the sand-swept city of Dhaka to the bracing Baltic coastline and the forested massif of Šumava in the Czech Republic. Yet in all three films, the focus is not mere sightseeing but a richer sort of emotional cartography, elucidating the inner worlds informed by one’s individual experience of locations and landscapes.
Mahde Hasan’s gently beguiling “Sand City,” which competed in Proxima, follows two strangers in the densely populated city of Dhaka, whose paths cross only momentarily but whose lives are inextricably linked in deeper, existential ways. In the vaguely post-apocalyptic sprawl of Dhaka, sand is ever-present, swirling with surface dust in the polluted air and ingrained within rapid urban development. Opening quotations from William Blake (“To see a world in a grain of sand”) and T.S. Eliot (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”) spell out the film’s central idea: that sand itself shapes the realities, desires, and destinies of people seeking permanence in an impermanent place, citizens still in search of a city.
Telling parallel stories and opting for a deceptively spare style that gestures at myriad possibilities for overlap between the two but leaves these largely unrealized, “Sand City” moves back and forth between Emma (Victoria Chakma), a woman from an ethnic minority group in Dhaka, and Hasan (Mostafa Monwar), a man who belongs to the majority population. Sunken into daily routines that offer no reprieve from their loneliness and desolation, both characters have started stealing sand. While riding her scooter home from a nondescript office, Emma gathers just enough for her cat’s litter tray. At the same time, Hasan—who labors each day in a glass factory—aims to steal enough silica sand and equipment from his workplace to make his own glass, with the idea of eventually starting a business.
For both of them, sand is a foundational element of life in Dhaka, fueling the city’s construction while also reflecting its transience, as it slips through their hands as they reach out to grasp it. When Emma finds a woman’s severed finger in the sand, its nail painted red, she’s transfixed by the mystery of who she was and what grisly fate befell her; it becomes some kind of keepsake or talisman, the vestige of another lost soul. As Hasan grows brazen in his efforts to melt sand into glass for his entrepreneurial gain, elsewhere, he risks job insecurity and perhaps more.
Shrouded in shadows and blanketed by smog, “Sand City” finds moments of shimmering beauty in Dhaka’s crepuscular melancholy, the film’s richly tactile and thoughtfully composed images tumbling slowly together like so many shards of glass in a kaleidoscope. Shot by gifted director of photography Mathieu Giombini (“Lingui: The Sacred Bonds”), this hypnotic film accumulates an overpowering sense of mood and texture, its spectral atmosphere of anomie and alienation lingering even as its fine, fleeting grains of narrative start to blow away in the wind.
Hasan cites Pedro Costa and David Lynch as conscious influences but, as critics on the ground at Karlovy Vary started to buzz about this Proxima section standout, one colleague most aptly compared it to early works by Tsai Ming-liang, whose supple evocations of urban drift have been similarly populated by ghosts and sensitive to spaces, public and private, where they struggle to assume form.
A similar sense of solitude—and, certainly, Tsai’s influence—pervades Vytautas Katkus’ “The Visitor,” a feature directorial debut that competed for the Crystal Globe in Karlovy Vary’s main competition. But what ails protagonist Danielius (Darius Šilėnas) as he returns to his native Lithuania after a long absence is less a yearning to put down roots than its opposite: a quiet acceptance that you can’t go home again. A new father in Norway, he’s traveled back to the small resort town where he was raised, following his father’s death a year earlier, with a clear goal in mind: to sell his parents’ home, relinquishing this claim to a place he’s long since left behind. Severing ties won’t take much, Danielius seems to think, so it comes as something of a surprise when he decides to extend his stay.
Exploring the Baltic coastline, encountering the locals he used to know, this stranger in a familiar land wanders through his surroundings as if he’s a patient awoken from a coma, recovering memories everywhere that he must reconcile with the emotions these changed circumstances now elicit from him. There’s a profound sadness in his pilgrimage, but Danielius also appears to find solace in revisiting the community that raised him, tracing back over some internal map of the places that shaped him in ways he’d never been fully conscious of.
An accomplished cinematographer in Lithuania, Katkus—who also co-wrote the script with Marija Kavtaradze (“Slow”)—brings a gentle, contemplative sensibility to “The Visitor,” which plays out in artful long shots of people moving through spaces until they quietly start to inhabit them. Often, it feels like Katkus is simply bringing his camera with him on a long walk through an area he knows intimately, coming to rest on what captures his interest or draws some deeply buried feeling back to the surface. Danielius has returned to this region at the slow close of its summer season, and the sensation of a resort town emptying before his eyes is one he savors more now—perhaps guiltily—that he has reason to identify with the tourists as well as the locals.
Paradoxically, as Danielius navigates the inevitability of his departure from this place, our affinity for the people who live there starts to deepen. Two prospective buyers come to look at the flat, then ask if they can stay a while; it’s important, one says, to take time before making a decision that will inform the shape of things to come, and Danielius agrees that they can live there with him until the place starts to feel like home. An encounter with Vismante (Vismantė Ruzgaitė), a neighbor out walking her dog, later leads him to strike up a friendship with her father (Arvydas Dapšys), following him like a shadow through the woods, content to be led in a direction rather than walking aimlessly by himself.
“The Visitor” alights on tranquil moments of these characters sojourning in nature, falling asleep at the beach, carrying on conversations at a vacant karaoke bar as night falls around them. The film’s wistful sadness grows funny and peculiar as Danielius attempts to exist for a time outside of his life alongside people who are actually living theirs, even checking in to stay in a hotel “with the option to extend,” still unable to let go, at least until he’s dwelled in this place long enough to again feel it in his bones.
“Better Go Mad in the Wild” is also about the sacred relationships between people and place, though Miro Remo’s docufictional approach to inviting his audience into the unconventional lives of twin hermits living deep in the Šumavan forests of the Czech Republic makes for endearingly sprightly, warm, and endearing portraiture.
Remo’s film, which won the Grand Prix from Karlovy Vary’s Crystal Globe competition, is less a biographical account of František and Ondřej Klišík, identical brothers in their sixties who have spent their entire lives in the same small village close to Czechia’s southern borders with Austria and Germany, and who rarely seem to leave the dilapidated farmhouse where they share most everything. The brothers would occasionally bring women back to their ramshackle abode and so erected a partition to give each other at least the semblance of privacy. But those days have long since passed on account of their unusually close relationship; the women, sooner or later, all seemed to realize that “separating twins is like breaking a mirror,” we’re told.
Bald and grizzled, with beards that billow out like nimbus clouds, the twins are only easily told apart because František—who refers to himself as Franta and his brother as Ondra—lost an arm years earlier in a sawmill accident. This detail is brought into focus, with a dash of magical realism, through voiceover attributed to Nandy, a majestic bull. The intimacy of the twins’ bond with their animals, whether it’s the cow delightedly chewing on Ondra’s beard or the faithful dog that’s always running back and forth between them, feels like a crucial part of what lightens and sustains their eccentric existence.
The twins spend their days in mutual seclusion, whether drinking, smoking, or engaging in arm-wrestling, and they share a voracious appetite for philosophical musings, reflecting on cycles of death and life with a poet’s grandiloquence. Whether strolling through primeval forests or swimming in glacial lakes, these crusty curmudgeons often prefer to wander naked through wilderness, at their most comfortable, exposed to the elements.
A Slovak filmmaker, Remo and his crew spent 60 days with the twins across a five-year period, though “Better Go Mad in the Wild” was inspired before that by one story within a book of the same name by Czech journalist and author Aleš Palán, who’d journeyed to the region to relate the lives of hermits living away from society. The book offers more insight into how this came to be, though Remo includes archival footage that eventually clarifies the twins played a role in the Velvet Revolution, pamphleteering to mobilize support against the Communist regime, and were even decorated for their actions during this period, only to declare their overriding belief in ideals of another kind by spending their lives away from the civilization this movement ushered in.
For the most part, though, Remo’s film holds this history out of frame, preferring instead to luxuriate in the bucolic, absurd, and sometimes melancholic qualities of the twins’ alternative lifestyle, listening to their simple wisdoms and observing their rambunctious behavior with clear fascination. “Better Go Mad in the Wild,” consequently, becomes both a pungent and poignant type of regional folktale, conjuring little moments of magic by slowing down for long enough to notice all the details of two born outsiders who turned nature into their own private sanctuary.
- Book Excerpt: It Can’t Rain All the Time by Alisha Mughal (July 15, 2025)
We are extremely proud to present an excerpt from a new book about “The Crow,” available today. Alisha Mughal, who has written pieces for us about “Fatal Attraction,” “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” and more, has written It Can’t Rain All the Time. Get a copy here.
The official synopsis:
It Can’t Rain All the Time weaves memoir with film criticism in an effort to pin down The Crow’s cultural resonance.A passionate analysis of the ill-fated 1994 film starring the late Brandon Lee and its long-lasting influence on action movies, cinematic grief, and emotional masculinityReleased in 1994, The Crow first drew in audiences thanks to the well-publicized tragedy that loomed over the film: lead actor Brandon Lee had died on set due to a mishandled prop gun. But it soon became clear that The Crow was more than just an accumulation of its tragic parts. The celebrated critic Roger Ebert wrote that Lee’s performance was “more of a screen achievement than any of the films of his father, Bruce Lee.”In It Can’t Rain All the Time, Alisha Mughal argues that The Crow has transcended Brandon Lee’s death by exposing the most challenging human emotions in all their dark, dramatic, and visceral glory, so much so that it has spawned three sequels, a remake, and an intense fandom. Eric, our back-from-the-dead, grieving protagonist, shows us that there is no solution to depression or loss, there is only our own internal, messy work. By the end of the movie, we realize that Eric has presented us with a vast range of emotions and that masculinity doesn’t need to be hard and impenetrable.Through her memories of seeking solace in the film during her own grieving period, Alisha brilliantly shows that, for all its gothic sadness, The Crow is, surprisingly and touchingly, a movie about redemption and hope.
A depressive episode begins as a slow and steady sinking feeling, like being lowered inch by inch into a grave. I feel it build over the course of a couple of days or sometimes even a week. I grow irritable, and my moods begin to turn putrid as negative thoughts lay roots. As my body grows tired, the thoughts become a forest. The episode has set in.
When I was younger, I was consumed by the muck of sadness, and many times, I almost didn’t make it out. Now I’m on medication, which doesn’t completely stop the episodes but does allow me a remove, a distance from which I can make decisions to help myself. I’ve learned that the only thing I can do is to let these episodes play out, allow them to peak and then fade and then, eventually, recede. This takes time. Sometimes I watch movies as the hours pass.
The first time I watch The Crow is during a depressive episode at the beginning of the summer I turn 29. Scrolling through the horror streaming platform Shudder, I see the film’s poster image one empty evening. It’s still light out, and I hear sounds that never fail to make me feel like the loneliest person in the world: people laughing, children playing. I vaguely recall the film’s association with some kind of catastrophe, which I learned about from online critic Marya E. Gates years ago. In the state that I’m in in my darkening bedroom — my eyes sore and my mouth feeling like it’s stuffed with cotton balls — I can’t recall much else about the film.
As I’m staring numbly at the screen, my sleepy attention is piqued by the poster’s suffocating darkness stained with the red gash of a title: it’s a heavy black relieved only by the lead actor’s name and a steely gray-white light, like a doorway just opened onto something magnificent. “Believe in angels,” the film’s tagline, framed in the light, advises. On the threshold, a small and menacing figure is visible as if in relief, his arms hang as a sentence cut short, flexed at his sides, making him look like a panther about to pounce — he is as dark as the velvety black on the poster’s body. He is walking toward the viewer, perennially. It is a moody image, sinister and gothic, and, on this empty evening, it complements my melancholic insides, so I press play.
A horror overcomes me. I see Brandon Lee’s Eric Draven lying dead on the street after being thrown from his apartment window and then crawling his way out of a muddy grave moments later, screaming and wailing from the pain of a macabre rebirth. When I hear Eric speak for the first time in the movie — he whispers his cat’s name, Gabriel — his voice low and gravelly from the strain of life so recently shocked into him, I turn the film off and weep. I can’t finish it. Not yet.
Lee’s stature, his voice, his rain-sodden hair — it all reminds me of a person I am trying very hard to forget. “It hurts to watch because you look so much like him,” I say when I manage to see him a few weeks later, the first time in a year. The Boy I Was Trying to Forget isn’t exactly the direct cause of my sadness. It’s my own unreciprocated and unbearably heavy feelings for him that leave me feeling unmoored, which then feed into the loneliness that characterizes my depressive episodes. Everything becomes so dire, so tangled, because of and within my mind.
It might seem anticlimactic or boring or unimportant, maybe even anti-feminist, to say that my fascination with The Crow was first sparked by a man who didn’t like me back. But it’s the truth.
Later that summer, it finally dawns on me that he, the person whose loss I ought to be able to deal with, would never change his mind about me. And it is only at this point, when I understand that my hope will not be enough, that I will have to deal with the finality of his indifference to me — that I sit myself down and watch The Crow in its entirety.
And then I watch it again, and again, and again. Every night that I am sad and weeping, every night that I feel as lonely and meaningless as a lace handkerchief lost at sea (so much elaborate intricacy, so much feeling, all wasted), I put it on. The first time I visit one of my dearest friends in San Francisco, I talk her into watching it with me. It is her first time. We suck gin gimlets through puckered lips, and I become teary-eyed watching Eric Draven twirl and charge and weep and wail.
Now two years have gone by, and I’ve come to realize that I turned to The Crow so often that first summer because it was a way to avoid reality, a way to avoid countenancing and mourning and moving on from the end of a connection. The film allowed me closeness with a person who was far away and would never come near. He wasn’t dead, but this was worse, I once thought with self-pitying conviction. When a loved one dies, you at least have the assurance that there had been love. But this, of course, was a false comparison; it is objectively not preferable to lose someone to death. Still, that certainty I once felt was deeply, pleasingly maudlin, a kind of gothic romanticism. Just like everything I love about The Crow.
Directed by Alex Proyas, The Crow is based on a graphic novel of the same name by James O’Barr. It was released in 1994 after a fraught production period beleaguered by time constraints, delays, and mishaps. Hurricanes tumbled through the miniature city Proyas had built, crew members suffered accidents, and, most notably, lead actor Brandon Lee died on set due to a misfired, misloaded, and mishandled prop gun. During filming, in the face of so many accidents, many on set thought the film was cursed.1 It was well-received by critics, with nearly everyone noting the irony of a lead actor dying during production for a film about a character brought back from the dead. Roger Ebert stated that Lee’s performance is “more of a screen achievement than any of the films of his father, Bruce Lee.”2 The critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is that the film is “filled with style and dark, lurid energy,” and that it carries “a soul in the performance of the late Brandon Lee.”3
It made a lot of money, was considered a sleeper hit at the box office, and spawned three standalone sequels that are, honestly, very terrible. Today, the film has a devoted cult following. At screenings, some fans dress up as Eric Draven, painting their faces black and white and caping their bodies in a glossy black flowing trench coat. Sometimes, they adhere a prop crow to their shoulder in honor of the talismanic animal that serves as a shepherd and guide and spiritual conduit for Eric’s soul. There are some critics, though, who wonder whether this movie would still have a devoted following were it not for the real-life tragedy.
The first time I saw the film in a theater, some audience members laughed during scenes that, to me, were never very funny. At one point, Eric, after arming himself with all manner of weapons at a pawn shop (where he also recovers his dead fiancée’s ring), picks up an electric guitar. The unplugged guitar moans: its strings, as Eric carries it away, vibrate, creating a ghostly boing-oing-oing. Watching the film with an audience, I could see how that scene, the juxtaposition of guns with a guitar, could seem a bit funny — a man arming himself ahead of battle takes only the most important things. Surely a guitar is a bit too extravagant? But at the same time, I wanted to shush everyone. Couldn’t they see that the guitar is important to Eric, a musician, just as much as the ring? To laugh is to misunderstand Eric, for whom nothing is trivial or extravagant, and everything is significant. People laughed nonetheless, and at other moments, too, when things became a bit clunky and ludicrous.
“Very bizarre situations are often darkly funny,” said supporting cast member David Patrick Kelly in a behind-the-scenes interview for The Crow,4 reinforcing that the wry humor was purposeful and necessary. The film was pieced together under traumatic circumstances, and this sometimes comedic overwrought-ness is central to its ethos. The Crow is all about a romantic and melancholic pain like an exposed nerve, which the film prods and pokes with the same macabre curiosity that prompts us to press on a tender bruise and can also make us laugh in discomfort or dismay.
In The Crow, there is a pain that is too much; it throbs and glistens with lifeblood, even in and around so much death, appearing on characters in ways that rail against logic’s expectations. The curious thing is that, although this heavy darkness is easy to slip into when sad, it’s not an easy watch precisely for this heft. The film’s pain ricochets through me during every one of my rewatches, reawakening and corralling to the surface all my own fanged memories, which can be, in a sort of paradox, a celebration of life. Pain is messy, emotions are gooey, and they bleed into one another. But ultimately, and most importantly, tears, fear, laughter, and grief are signs that we are alive, a truth that The Crow is a brave and relentless reminder of.
1 “The Crow,” IMDb, accessed May 3, 2024, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109506/trivia/?item=tr2585918&ref_=ext_shr_lnk.
2 Roger Ebert, “Reviews: The Crow,” movie review and film summary, RogerEbert.com, May 13, 1994, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-crow-1994.
3 “The Crow,” Rotten Tomatoes, accessed May 3, 2024, https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_crow.
4 “Behind the Scenes «The Crow» (1994),” YouTube, January 27, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmaimTyH56g.
Excerpted in part from It Can’t Rain All the Time by Alisha Mughal. Copyright © by Alisha Mughal, 2025. Published by ECW Press Ltd. www.ecwpress.com
- 30 Minutes On: “Nashville” (July 15, 2025)
For this series, MZS starts writing on a chosen film and stops 30 minutes later. On a film turning 50 this year…
Robert Altman’s “Nashville” is a portrait of the United States on the eve of the Bicentennial, but at times it seems to be describing the United States fifty years later. I saw it on a big screen during its fiftieth anniversary re-release and was knocked out again by its audacity and perceptiveness.
As is the case with most Altman films, “Nashville” is an ensemble piece, boasting about two dozen recurring characters, and nearly as many bit players floating through. The opening credits sequence mimics TV ads for compilation albums that were popular at the time, with an announcer shouting each performer’s name as their face appears onscreen. The introductory section cuts between musical performances in two studios: jingoistic country-western star Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) performing a Bicentennial themed song that leans heavily on his family’s military record, and white gospel singer Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin) recording a song with the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, a historically Black university. These two characters are among the film’s many indelible creations and stand alone as individuals. But they also communicate the cultural divide separating factions that had been battling for control of the United States since the Civil War, and that are still fighting today. One is reactionary, looking nostalgically backwards at times that never existed. The other is progressive, looking forward to a truly egalitarian democracy that didn’t quite exist then, and seems more remote now than it did in 1975.
The movie takes its time introducing all of the other characters and organizing them around a Bicentennial-themed concert that is to be headlined by Barbara Jean (Ronnee Blakely), who is making her triumphant return to performing after surviving what was described to the public as a burn accident but was really a nervous breakdown. Jeff Goldblum has one of his earliest attention-getting roles as a seemingly mute hippie who rides into town on a gigantic motorbike and is introduced doing magic tricks at a counter in a diner. Keith Carradine plays arguably the most successful musician of the bunch, a singer-songwriter and Casanova who beds several female characters in the cast and lies by omission to convince them that his catchy love song “I’m Easy” (written and performed by Carradine, and the future winner of a Best Original Song Oscar) is about each of them. Ned Beatty is Delbert Reese, Linnea’s husband, and a political organizer and lawyer. Delbert’s fixation on making everything work out no matter how weird and bad things get makes him seem like a cousin of another great political enabler from movie year 1975, the mayor of Amity in “Jaws.” He doesn’t want to solve problems, he just wants them to magically go away.
Altman worked from a script by regular Altman collaborator Joan Tewkesbury, based on her observations from visiting Nashville as an outsider. In time-honored Altman tradition, these ended up serving as more of a set of suggestions than a closely followed blueprint, though some core elements remain, including a pileup on the freeway that causes a traffic jam. You could make the case that the visiting English radio reporter (Geraldine Chaplin) who superimposes her own preconceived notions onto the city is a lightly satirical nod to how the source material came about.
“Nashville” was shot in and around Nashville in the summer of 1974, more than a year after the last American combat troops were withdrawn from a defeat in Vietnam that tore the country apart politically. This was also the summer that then-President Nixon—whose fascistic beliefs had driven the country to the brink of constitutional crisis—got impeached and decided to resign rather than face conviction and removal. (“If the president does it, that means it is not illegal,” he told interviewer David Frost.)
The climax, an enormous concert gathering nearly all of the major characters together, was shot in Centennial Park in Nashville on August 28, twenty days after Nixon quit in disgrace and Gerald Ford, his vice president, replaced him (and controversially pardoned him). We think of the United States circa 2025 as a place that’s violent to the core, with some of the most shocking brutality carried out by agents of the state. But that’s what the late 1960s and early 1970s were like, too, in their way. There were politically motivated bombings and robberies of banks and armored cars; terrorist attacks and airplane hijackings; strikes and protests that escalated into violence through police misconduct; assassinations and attempted assassinations of public officials, and a collective fear that new horrors lurked around each corner.
This took a toll on the body politic. “Nashville” captures this. Numbed exhaustion courses through every frame of the movie, along with its twin, nihilistic hedonism. People are addicted to alcohol, drugs, sex, attention, and maybe worst of all, hope. It’s all a distraction from misery. A publicity team for a third-party presidential candidate drives through the city in a sound truck spouting self-contradicting nonsense. He’s against the Electoral College, the National Anthem, oil companies, and do-nothing lawyers in Congress, but we never hear what he’s for.
Haven Hamilton’s wife Lady Pearl (Barbara Baxley) sums up the malaise that would define the second half of the seventies, and that originated in the bloodshed and dashed dreams of the sixties, when she drifts into a reverie about Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, one of many representatives of hope who were shot to death during that era. “I worked for him,” she says. “I worked here, I worked all over the country, I worked out in California, out in Stockton. Well, Bobby came here and spoke and he went down to Memphis and then he even went out to Stockton California and spoke off the Santa Fe train at the old Santa Fe depot. Oh, he was a beautiful man. He was not much like John, you know. He was more puny-like. But all the time I was workin’ for him, I was just so scared – inside, you know, just scared.”
The myopia of “Nashville”’s characters is funny and poignant. They’ve been knocked around by life and retreated into themselves—and it appears that the times themselves are partly responsible. The utopian fantasies of the sixties were bludgeoned into submission by retrograde elements of the culture, paving the way for the 1970s, wherein the counterculture’s political fire was extinguished, leaving only lifestyle-based rebellion. It was called The Me Decade for a reason. The politics of resentment are all the characters have, if they want to be political at all. Most don’t, aside from wishing that the world wasn’t so cruel. Barbara Harris’s character Albuquerque, an itinerant singer, warns, “If we don’t live peaceful, there’s gonna be nothin’ left in our graves except Clorox bottles and plastic fly swatters with red dots on ’em.” The closing song, also written by Carradine, is an anthem about giving up and checking out, titled “It Don’t Worry Me.” One of the lyrics is, “You may say/That I ain’t free/But it don’t worry me.” It’s the anthem of the frog in the pot who keeps revising the amount of heat he can endure.
This was my first viewing of Nashville on a properly large screen (all the other times had been on home video or in a classroom) and the scale not only revealed little details I had never noticed but made me realize I was wrong about its point-of-view. The director has a reputation as a cynic or misanthrope. That’s not right. A friend who saw “Nashville” said afterward it was a more compassionate movie than he remembered. I felt the same way.
