- San Diego Asian Film Festival 2026: The Seoul Guardians, Tycoon, Genevieve’s Garden (November 13, 2026)
When I spoke with Brian Hu, the artistic director of the San Diego Asian Film Festival, he told me the various “sections” the films are broken into were introduced when he joined the team. They have become a helpful way for attendees to curate their experience: if you want to see older films restored in their cinematic glory, you can watch the four titles under “Classics Restored.” If you’re here only for films from marquee directors who had their splashy debuts at European film festivals, “Masters” is for you. In watching the film’s line-up, it has been fun for me to come up with even more categories within what has already been established. “Tycoon,” “The Seoul Guardians,” and “Genevive’s Garden” may share little by way of plot or theme, but they are among the best films I screened here at the festival, gems whose passion rips through the screen, and whose defiance lies in the very act of existence. This dispatch is a love letter to those who have found a way where there was no way.
“The Seoul Guardians,” from directors and journalists Cho Chul-young, Kim Jong-woo, and Shin-Wan Kim, runs at seventy-one minutes and is more thrilling than features double its length. It is a striking piece of boots-on-the-ground journalism, a courageous act of documentation whose vitality is matched only by its craft; films like these are why the words “immersive” exist. That it packs so much in so little time is also a testament to the director’s journalistic commitment to let the story speak for itself. There are some occasional flourishes, from a heavy-handed score to a dramatically edited opening, that detract from it slightly, but the two Kims and Shin know the blazing power of the story they’ve captured; they just have to give it a place to burn.
The film documents arguably the most shocking six hours in modern Korean history, when, in 2024, South Korean president Yoon Sukyeol declared martial law, accusing the Democratic Party of collaborating with communists from North Korea. In reality, Yoon was frustrated by the blockage of his budget plans and stoked the nation’s tensions and fears against the North to divert attention away from his personal gripes. The politicians seek to gather to strike down this motion and attempt to gather at the National Assembly to vote, but while they are en route, Yoon deploys the military to stop the vote from being able to happen, so that martial law can continue. The two Kims and Cho bring their cameras and crew and race to the Assembly building, where lawmakers were already being blocked from entry by local security, to document the moment.
Whether they meant to or not, “The Seoul Guardians” has the rhythm of the most invigorating action films. As viewers, we’re immediately thrust into a storm of bodies, phones, and weapons, as we see citizens do what they can to let government members get through, who are in turn blocked by military and security forces. What is striking is the clarity with which we see these images, and despite the chaos of what unfolds, the film never feels nauseating or disjointed. It is the fact that this miscarriage of justice is captured in such crystal-clear clarity that makes it transportive and gut-wrenching. The film is propelled by its own sense of escalation; once enough lawmakers make it in to have a quorum, they swiftly begin to try to vote, with civilians standing outside the Assembly chambers, barricading entry by Yoon’s soldiers using everything from sofas, chairs, and their own bodies. That a coterie of teenagers, elders, journalists, YouTubers, and lawmakers (read: civilians) were able to hold their ground leaves you inspired by the power of collective action, and that we can witness what resistance looks like to abusive power up close.
This is a thrilling piece of filmmaking that has admirable scope beyond just the events it depicts. Cross-cutting with what we see on-screen in the present day is footage of the Gwangju massacre, where military forces were deployed against students and civilians by President Chun Doo-hwan. We have the opportunity to learn from the ghosts of the wrongly butchered, and it seems Korea, and the world at large, still need to take better care to listen. It is also ironic that once martial law is overturned and Yoon is on trial, his supporters who call for his innocence wave Korean flags intertwined with American ones. Though ironically, if Korea was looking at the deteriorating state of US democracy as an exemplar, perhaps it should not surprise what transpired.
An ode to saran wrap, wheelies, and well-cooked eggs, a riveting handmade visual style characterizes Charlotte Zhang’s “Tycoon,” which feels like it teaches you how to engage with it as you watch it. It made me want to grab a MiniDV and shoot something forbidden and intimate, and crosscut it with the wackiest images saved to my camera roll.
“Tycoon” may limit what it shows on-screen, but Zhang’s film, set in 2028 Los Angeles as the city prepares to host the Olympics, has all the apocalyptic trimmings of the most transgressive visions that depict how the common folk are to find some cool in a burning world. In Zhang’s version of the future, documentation is vengeance and reclamation, a way to paper over society’s attempts to white out your story by making sure yours exists on a DCP somewhere. In this way, her work is as much an act of bearing witness as it is a “how-to” guide for survival.
This prophetic narrative is grounded by focusing on outlaw-entrepreneurs (how different are those vocations, really?) Miguel Padilla-Juarez and Jon Lawrence Reyes see the city’s physical deterioration and moral rot as an opportunity to score big. In this world, viruses have eliminated meat and poultry production, which means eating roaches is the most viable way to get protein. Where there’s need, there’s exploitation, and Zhang is quick to highlight how we can be so quick to label the CEO of cockroach protein powder as an entrepreneur whose inordinate prices for product are a sign of innovation, while swiftly condemning Padilla-Juarez and Lawrence Reyes as criminals worthy of punishment when they take advantage of the city’s cockroach infestation to steal said powder. The fluidity of identity, based on one’s wealth status and high standing (or lack thereof), is a core provocation of Zhang’s film; the battle for her characters to remain whole takes on an existential tenor as they oscillate between the love they experience in their home communities and the city at large that only values them for their invisibility.
Zhang’s film moves with a convulsive rhythm, the joy of which comes from seeing how she imbues a sea of images with a singular action. Take a moment where the duo is running away from a score, and she juxtaposes their fleeing with diagrams of a dissected human body in flight, tying their story to a larger one of migration and movement. It kept me on my feet with its urgent editing, and yet I never felt like I was lost because the script would pepper in anchoring profundities, delivered with nonchalant profundity by Padilla-Juarez and Lawrence Reyes; lines like “It’s not about winning. It’s about coming up with ways to never lose,” are prayers of blessing as much as they are articulations of philosophy. “Tycoon” is a project remarkably comfortable with silence as well, for as livewire as its energy may be, capturing the gleeful feeling of being unnoticed in a city gripped by insomnia, where you come alive in its unpredictable slumber. As Zhang’s film shows, sometimes, the thrills of a well-executed plan are only matched by the thrills of getting caught.
What has pleasantly surprised me about SDAFF’s programming is that, of the 190+ films in the line-up, a good number of them are shorts. There are so many shorts that each shorts block has its own theme. Many filmmakers screening their feature-length works at SDAFF are alumni of the shorts program, and director Katie Colosimo’s debut, “Genevieve’s Garden,” falls into that category. It is a quirky, lo-fi comedy that manages to resonate emotionally amidst the laughs, because it sands down the more sensationalized elements that a lesser story might have focused on to obfuscate any narrative shortcomings. This has the bones of a cult story, but where the drama comes is from the characters’ embrace of their circumstance, rather than trying to escape.
Colosimo’s script is quick to remind us why wellness spaces are so attractive to the wounded and lacking in their promises, in that they offer dramatic and quick relief to wounds that need time to be soothed. We witness Lily (Chynna Walker, who from beat one is in lockstep with this film’s deadpan register) confusingly weeping over why she’s being broken up with. Through an evangelism that is refreshingly modern, while doomscrolling, Lily stumbles upon Genevieve’s (Laura Hetherington) videos, inviting anyone whom the algorithm has recruited to join her on her retreat. She meets four other attendees at Genevieve’s “center” (read: her house) upstate, and they may never bloom beyond the archetypes they play; each one is memorable, particularly Hannah Marianetti’s Olivia, who remains sardonically unimpressed with the cloying claptrap Genevieve espouses.
Indeed, while Hetherington plays a believable wellness guru, a retreat leader you would happily endure all sorts of uncomfortably directionless yoga for, the clever joke is that from the start, Lily and all the wellness attendees can see through Genevive’s act, despite her poise. They realize from the start that they have spent a whole lot of money to essentially just hang out with strangers, clean her house for the sake of “getting more in touch with their bodies,” and be off their phones. They are all good sports about it because they know that opportunities to unplug and unwind are few and far between, and for Lily, who begins to catch feelings for one of the attendees, Charlie (Jose Duran), she’s determined to find some form of salvation from this sham.
The film’s humor comes from a deep understanding that our modern-day rhythms ill-equip us to deal with the aches of our hearts. Cinematographer Jacob Mallin captures the breezy beauty of Genevieve’s home, but his lens also centers the discontent of the characters’ faces, which stands out as they go through the motions of yoga. Their visages betray the peace their bodies are trying to summon into being. Walker, in her adorably awkward and sincere yearning, captures the ways we can so easily look to what’s novel and new to be our salvation, evidenced by her going head over heels for Charlie, despite their lack of chemistry. The curse and blessing of modern life is its noise, with its endless distractions always providing an out for us to never fully contend with the deeper discontent within. “Genevieve’s Garden” dignifies silence, offering a picture of how to gracefully engage with the histories we have deemed shameful. Colosimo’s film may not give definitive answers to a question as eternal as the problem of suffering, but she knows that it certainly will not be solved by isolated wallowing. Better to shit talk and unsuccessfully flirt in a real, embodied community.
- Legendary Game Returns in Remake of Nintendo’s “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” (November 13, 2026)
As I’m writing this, I realize I’m one of the rare official game critics who never played the original “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.” My first “Zelda” game was actually “The Minish Cap” on the Game Boy Advance when I was a kid, and that was only because I briefly borrowed it from a friend in daycare.
While I don’t remember too much from that game, my most recent memories of the series are with the more free-flowing “Breath of the Wild” and “Tears of the Kingdom”. Going from those to the classic “Zelda” formula in this “Ocarina of Time” remake was a welcome transition that left me satisfied without being overwhelmed. Even without any nostalgic rose-colored glasses, “Ocarina of Time” on Nintendo Switch 2 is a beautiful adventure that feels retro, while also avoiding feeling dated.
The story in “Ocarina of Time” should be familiar to those who’ve played other “Zelda” games. As Link, you’re tasked with saving the world from the evil Ganondorf. The unique mechanic in this entry is that Link can travel between the past and the future, transforming between his child and adult self while venturing out in Hyrule. Certain actions like planting seeds in the past, grow into colorful platforms that assist Link in reaching new areas upon returning to the future. This mechanic makes for fun exploration when finding new secrets, such as hidden heart containers that increase Link’s maximum health.
While the exploration pales in comparison to “BOTW”and “TOTK” regarding sheer open-world vastness, their rewards come quicker. It’s easy to get inundated with huge areas and endless checklists, but “Ocarina of Time” keeps it simple. In the classic style dungeons, there’s often just one single solution to the puzzle, compared to the DIY approach in “BOTW” and ”TOTK.” But it’s equally as enjoyable.
The combat feels sharp but eventually dulls its blade. Link has an arsenal of weapons, including swords, bombs, bows, and boomerangs. It’s an impressive armory, but rarely do his opponents match up to him in equal measure. The game is far too easy. Most of the time, you’re never fighting no more than 2-3 enemies at once, and bosses rarely pose a challenge once you get their attack patterns down. Part of the difficulty back in the 1998 original was dealing with navigating wonky 3D spaces. While I never played the original “Ocarina of Time,” I did play a few games on the Nintendo 64 console, and only having just that single stick on that controller was frustrating.
Video games have come a long way since then, and with the power of not one, but two control sticks this time around on my Switch 2 Pro controller, made maneuvering the camera much easier and the combat much more manageable. Additionally, animations have improved considerably, and thus the moment-to-moment gameplay is simply just more readable when it comes to anticipating enemy attacks.
Other recent Zelda games on Switch such as “Echoes of Wisdom,” the “Link’s Awakening” remake, and the “Skyward Sword HD” port all have Hero Mode, which amps up the difficulty. It’s conspicuously missing in this “Ocarina of Time” remake and would’ve made for a more compelling experience.
However, “Ocarina of Time” looks absolutely gorgeous. The environments are quite varied between the volcanic Gorgan City and the aquatic Zora’s Domain, and the striking art direction makes every corner look lively. This game also runs at a smooth 60 fps, with essentially no lag or performance problems.
“The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” is a welcome change of pace for those who were introduced to the series through the open-world games. Its structure has just enough freedom for fulfilling exploration while also keeping you on a relatively streamlined adventure. Zelda veterans may argue that more could’ve been done with this remake while others are glad that their favorite childhood memories remain intact. But as someone who didn’t play the original, this remake is a comforting dish rather than an enormous buffet. [90/100]
- A Special Kind of Tough Guy: Stacy Keach (1941-2026) (November 13, 2026)
The passing of Stacy Keach on November 10th marked the end of a 62-year career that started with an appearance on the TV series “Channing,” but millennials like me came to Keach’s work when he was older, playing father figures like the surly Ken Titus in the FOX sitcom “Titus” and the mentor to Ed Norton’s neo-Nazi in “American History X.” He was classically trained, and versatile enough to move between Shakespeare, hard-boiled thrillers, westerns, and character-driven Hollywood dramas.
Keach’s intimidating bearing hearkened back to Old Hollywood stars, and, on first glance, he seemed every bit the Old Hollywood leading man. But if you looked closer you might have seen that Keach had a cleft lip and partial cleft palate. This was something that I noticed right away because Keach often presented himself without the signature mustache that covered the scars by the time I started watching him. Keach may not have been a wheelchair user like me, but he was different-looking, and that was enough for me to gravitate towards his performances. Too often, Hollywood beauty standards focus on the elimination of any perception of disability or disfigurement, even minor scarring. To not be flawlessly beautiful is to not be a star.
As a child, Keach underwent numerous surgeries as a means to correct his lip and cleft palate. He often wore a mustache from young adulthood until well into his forties. He’d eventually become honorary chairman of the Cleft Palate Foundation and present himself as an advocate for insurance companies to cover corrective surgery.
When Keach broke through in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, in such films as “Fat City,” “The New Centurions” and “The Killer Inside Me,” he often already had the mustache on-screen. If you didn’t know about his cleft palate, you might think the mustache was meant to advertise him as an actor who could play the sorts of characters he fantasized about in his youth. Facial hair denotes you are a man, not a boy, and signals virility and toughness. Keach’s mustache sold him as a hardened man who’d lived a life. And it connected him to such earlier movie stars as Clark Gable and William Powell, as well as contemporaries like Burt Reynolds and Tom Selleck who pursued a similarly nostalgic stardom.
The other, more important reason Keach wore a mustache was shame at his scars. Disability in Hollywood remains an under-discussed topic, and people today would struggle to name disabled performers during Keach’s time. Keach, alongside the likes of Peter Falk (who wore an artificial eye due to childhood cancer), set up some of the earliest concepts of disability on-screen for people who had zero interaction with it.
Keach had acting in his blood. His father, Stacy Keach Sr., was theater director, acting teacher, and performer in his own right with credits dating back to 1942. Keach’s mother, Mary, was also an actress. Keach’s older brother, James, became a performer as well. As the young Keach grew up, acting became paramount in his life. He’d eventually study dramatic art and English at UC Berkeley, and later attend the Yale School of Drama.
A Fulbright scholarship would take him to London’s Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where he’d meet Sir Laurence Olivier. This moment is important in looking at Keach’s career. The collapse of the studio system in the 1960s often left actors adrift. Gone were the days of making small programmers to see whether one even had leading man qualities or perhaps being signed to a studio contract and given lessons on acting, singing, dancing stage fighting, and other essential skills. So actors turned to the stage, to learn what they needed to know, and prove they could be both artists and entertainers.
Many discovering Keach’s work today begin with his features from the 1970s. The decade marked a turning point for Hollywood, not just in terms of the films made but the actors who became stars. Filmmakers of the studio system, like John Huston, were joining new up-and-comers like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola who had gained unprecedented freedom to make gritty, adult-oriented cinema.
And yet, for as nuanced and new the movies were, Keach often found himself in movies that would have fit comfortably in the 1940s. His three big features in the 1970s: “Doc” (1971), “Fat City” (1972) and “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean” (1972) put Keach in heavy roles in a boxing drama and two Westerns.
As Doc Holliday in “Doc,” Keach brings a melancholy, cynical quality that comes partly from his own experience. Keach was aware that the real Doc also had a cleft palate and a partial cleft lip. That personal connection informed the performance. The movie became, as The Guardian lays out, an attempt to debunk a western myth. John Huston’s “Fat City” showcased one of his most indelible performances as washed-up alcoholic fighter Billy Tully. Huston initially wanted Marlon Brando, but after Brando took too long to respond Huston moved to Keach, who was still a relative unknown.
“Huston was a wonderful director,” Keach said in a 2015 interview with The Film Stage. “Being an actor himself, he understood the process actors go through. He had very simple directions. He would say inevitably, ‘A little less,’ or, ‘A little more.'” But Keach was a stickler for perfection, and working with a filmmaker as revered as Huston put pressure on him. In that same interview, he said, “I always felt very uneasy because I would see myself in one take that I liked and then when I saw the final cut that take was not used, and it would make me sad. Now I just do the work and forget about everything else.”
How much of Keach’s unsparing view of himself and his performance stems from childhood bullying he experienced as a result of having a cleft lip? ”Only when I was maligned and teased by kids did it bother me,” he said in an interview with Fox News, “[but] I became an overachiever as a result of that. I had to excel in sports to make up for that. It was a motor. It gave me an incentive to do better.”
This is something a lot of disabled kids deal with, myself included: the desire to be perfect everywhere. so that others can’t find fault with anything but what you can’t change about yourself. Though Keach’s experiences aren’t on par with those of a wheelchair user, they do show the interconnectedness of disability with facial disfigurement and other types of physical differences.
As Keach said later in life, he eventually became comfortable showing off his scars, particularly in roles where the character had to showcase a baseline of vulnerability. Without Keach, it’s hard to imagine the lengthy and varied filmography of a star like Joaquin Phoenix, who has let his cleft lip scar be visible from the earliest years of his career.
Keach’s biggest success as an actor was on “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer,” a vehicle that combined all his talents and skills. It’s a tough private eye performance in the vein of Humphrey Bogart, who became a star despite childhood nerve damage from a botched surgery that gave him a lisp, reduced his expressiveness, and left him with a visible scar in the right corner of his mouth. In all of these success stories, Keach’s included, an actor turned a difference into a distinction.
Keach never stopped working. He always continued to experiment and play interesting characters. His was not necessarily the conventional trajectory of a Hollywood star. He endured personal setbacks, including a cocaine addiction that got him arrested and jailed in London in 1984 and shut down the production of “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer” for more than a year. He frequently moved between illustrious projects and decidedly less prestigious fare.
But it will always be impossible for me not to think of Keach in the context of what he tried so hard to hide. It’s wonderful that he came to accept his facial differences. Many disabled performers saw that cleft lip and palate as a validation, however small, of their desire to act.
- The Fluidity of Grief: Sophie Okonedo on “Clarissa” and “Mouse” (November 12, 2026)
Every time Sophie Okonedo appears on screen, she shifts the tenor of the movie she’s in. Her work is always a form of elevated disruption, where the film’s subtext and unspoken emotional tenor crystallize in her piercing gaze, warm eyes, and striking figure. She would be the first to tell you that her intentionality of performance and the groundedness with which she carries her body are qualities she brings to all her parts, no matter how big or small.
She has two performances this year, from two different directing duos, in the films “Clarissa,” from brothers Chuko and Arie Esiri, and “Mouse,” from Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, which feels like a cumulative pronouncement of what has made her past work so striking. At the same time, she charts a bold new chapter of earthy, subdued, and vibrant performances in her career.
That both projects, despite being so different formally and geographically (it’s hard to think of a place farther away from Lagos than Arkansas), yet feel similar in their themes, is also thanks to the way Okonedo wears the long, unspoken histories of both characters on their faces. In Esiri’s film, she plays Clarissa, a woman of nobility who is organizing a party for many of her old friends, flames, and family.
In the throes of her preparation, she reflects on the road to her present circumstances, as the film oscillates between Okonedo’s wise, weary performance and India Amarteifio, who plays a younger version of her. Clarissa is a character we see come alive again throughout the film, the bones of her latent dreams and buried hopes resurrecting in the moments she allows herself to dance and be merry.
A different kind of resurrection is also present in “Mouse,” although Okonedo’s Helen is a character best defined by her aching grief. She loses her daughter at the start of the film, while forming an intense bond with her daughter’s friend, Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), who reveals a side of Helen that she did not have access to.
Okonedo understands that the type of pain that Helen experiences does not manifest in vociferous ways; it is in the piercing glances one gives when looking at “long-lasting candles” in the grocery store or the quick escape one takes when a well-meaning but ignorant co-worker suggests adoption as an option to salve grief.
“Clarissa” and “Mouse” are films about regrets, about lives lived, about the lives that could have been lived, about how the choices we least expect or do not give much thought to come to define us most significantly. For Okonedo, as she rightfully and cautiously affords herself the deserved encomium of dual roles, she remains consistently humble and curious. “I never feel like I arrived. I always feel like I’m learning and I feel like it’s hard to crystallize what I do,” she admits.
While Okonedo was in town to receive the film’s Spotlight Award, she tried her best to crystallize some element of the film’s art. RogerEbert.com spoke with her in person about the visual, thematic, and spiritual synergy between her two roles, experiencing homecomings in going to Lagos (and, in turn, being part of O’Sullivan’s homecoming), and calibrating micro-movements to communicate depth of emotion.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I’m trying to think of the last time you had to promote two projects around the same time, and it was with “Wild Rose” and “Hellboy.”
Sophie Okonedo: Well, I was also doing Anthony and Cleopatra when those movies were coming out. I didn’t have major parts in those films, but with “Clarissa” and “Mouse,” these roles are much more substantial. With these roles, it feels like I’m doing what I really want to do, playing parts I really want to play. They were filmed a year apart, so it is a coincidence that they’re coming out at the same time. They are both indie movies that can easily get lost.
What I find serendipitous about this moment is that you not only have these two intimate character studies, but you are working with two pairs of co-directors.
What is powerful about both is that in both sets, one of the directors–Chuko for “Clarissa” and Kelly for “Mouse”–wrote the script. These are top-level writers who direct and work with their brother or husband. I’m script-based, so I’malways going about the story, what it is, what stories make up the characters, and such. I was led to both of these projects not only because of the wonderful stories, but also because of the arc of the particular character I was playing. I loved playing complex, unusual human characters that have multiple things going on at the same time.
You’ve spoken before about how you’re often asking writers to take dialogue out of your scenes. With “Clarissa,” you don’t have many speaking lines, and even in “Mouse,” so much of what makes Helen work is in those beats of silence. Did you find yourself drawing on similar skills when embodying them both? What did one demand of you that the other did not, and vice versa?
I have an expressive face, and in a lot of my roles, I’ve had to say a lot without saying anything. I’m always doing this kind of work where I use silence to my advantage, but whether it gets captured is another thing. You have to have the roles, and even when you get the roles, the camera may not be on you because you are not the lead or for another reason. You can be working away in the background, but it’s looking elsewhere. In that respect, it is easier to play the lead, but harder to play a small part, because the relief of playing a lead is that everything of yours can be captured. What’s challenging is playing minor roles and trying to create something out of them.
With both of these films, I did what I’ve always done, but Chuko, Aire, Alex, and Kelly have given me the chance for it to be seen. I’ve been working the way I have for many years, but it has taken a couple of sets of young directors to put me in front of their lens and go, “We want to watch what you do. We know you can do it. We now just want to watch you do it.”
You shared that when you and the older counterparts for “Clarissa” first got to Lagos, you did a table read where you and the older actors read the younger parts. Can you speak more to that read: what did it mean to play an older Clarissa while reading and performing what India ultimately ended up performing?
Yes, the younger versions of us had not all been cast yet, so we oldies thought, “Let’s just read the whole script because we’ll never get this opportunity again.” That was when I got the power of the story; I understood the power of looking back. If I did a stage adaptation, I would have probably tried to play both. That’s the magic of theater.
It was nice to start our filming experience with something I would do in a theater, to quite literally swing between different versions of myself. I really felt the reward of this when David Oyelowo and I rehearsed the breakup sequence our younger counterparts were set to do. It was heartbreaking; we were in tears. So when our characters reunite in the film, it helped that we had the beautiful, tragic memory of saying the words of rejection because we could tangibly understand what we had lost.
Rehearsals are a tricky thing because you have to know how to rehearse. Not all theater directors work like this, but some will improvise around moments you talk about in the play. I remember one moment where, in a given scene, a character says, “Do you remember the day we got married?”
The director stopped the rehearsal and had all of us improvise and create a wedding scene, freestyle a bit, and play different characters, then go back to filming the play as is. Then, for the entirety of the play’s run, I’ll be thinking of that wedding, and I can draw from it and improvise something in the moment based on a scene that doesn’t end up in the final film. Nothing is wasted, and rehearsals like that help ground the improvisation in something specific.
What were the rehearsals in “Mouse” like, especially since you are working with people like Tara Mallen who share a similar theater background?
I remember reading through the script, but because, as you said, Tara and Katherine Mallen Kupferer are theater people, a lot of rehearsal time wonderfully transitions into asking questions. It’s less “here’s how I’m going to say this line,” but more “What is Helen’s emotional state in this scene? How did something someone said a few beats ago manifest right now?” Sometimes for myself, I hardly ever say a scene out loud until a director says “action.”
What I cherish about both experiences is that because they were so close together, they became examples of building and sustaining chemistry. For “Clarissa,” I’ve known David, Nikki, Jude, and Danny for years. Just because you know each other does not mean you have chemistry. The beauty of Chuko and Arie’s script is that it made us all say, “This is true … what we’re going through feels true to me,” and we were able to meet each other in that truth.
That’s all chemistry really is, isn’t it? It is about the same truth that you recognize in yourself vibrating in the frame of another. Contrast this with “Mouse,” where I didn’t know my collaborators for as long, but we still formed camaraderie.
I’ve heard Chuko’s script is quite literary. I believe it is only eighty pages, but the film itself is one hundred and twenty minutes, which speaks to what you are saying about letting scenes breathe.
The way Chuko writes scene descriptions is extraordinary. It has a rhythm. Sometimes, when you read the mise en scene for crappy movies, you can think, “My brain is dead, and I’m drifting off,” because they are describing everything that should really be in the story but isn’t. They are trying to make you feel something when you’re reading it that’s not actually there inherently.
There are lots of jobs I do where they don’t withstand deep thinking because it’s just not there in the writing. So I have to take a slightly different approach with material. It is no diss to those roles. With “Mouse” and“Clarissa,” I have been thinking about the type of material that rewards deep interiority, stories that do not disintegrate when you think deeply about them but become, in a way, more joyous.
Your work always has a way of coming back. When I think of Helen and Clarissa, I see people looking for vessels to place their pain. Then, to comment on your work as a whole, I think of the film you did with Tom Harper, “War Book,” and how pertinent that feels in light of renewed anxiety around atomic warfare.
I’m happy you mentioned that film; Tom and Jack Thorne are still my friends, and we’re working on something now. I don’t think intellectually about why I choose certain jobs, but I do get an instant feeling about things and honor what my body tells me when I read something. When I choose projects, perhaps selfishly, I’m hoping it helps me make sense of the world we live in. That’s what stories do; they help me feel less alone as I try to understand. It’s weird how I often choose things that, on some level, have something to do with what’s going on with me right then.
With “Clarissa,” I had just finished doing a play, “A Month in the Country,” and both of them are looking back at one’s life and asking those questions we may be afraid to hear the answers to: “Have you married the right person?” and so forth. What I’ve found is that I often do a play, and that leans into the next part.
In “Mouse,” I’m struck by the scene between you and Tara. It takes place in this darkened school, where there’s little light. Walk me through the execution of that moment, or how the setting complicated what you are usually supposed to do as an actor in trying to “find your light.”
It was less about light and more about being present. What is interesting about that moment is that we did it in so many ways–I’d love to see the different takes. Tara and I did not really rehearse that scene. There was no green room or trailers, and we were sitting in someone’s car because it was quite cold out and we just ran the lines so we knew the cues; that was the only rehearsal. Then Alex and Kelly were like, “You can do what you want.” To freestyle is my favorite thing.
In the script, Helen leaves, then Barbara says “asshole,” and then Helen turns. I don’t turn around till I hear her say that. One day Tara said the line a bit later, and so I had already exited the building. When I heard “asshole,” I turned around to open the door, but the doors were locked, and I could not get back in. I do not stop acting until I hear “cut,” so the two of us kept carrying on, shouting at each other through the windows of the building. So there is a version of this where we filmed the whole scene through the door. It was wonderful to work with someone like Tara because of her theater background; you do not stop until the curtain is down.
On stage, I always try to do certain performances differently. A couple of times I have done shows that have had to be stopped for one reason or another. I remember I was doing Medea and an audience member was ill, so we had to stop the show. We went back to our dressing rooms and then came back on stage and then started from the top of the stage that was interrupted. I thought, “Oh, this is fun. I’m going to do the scene completely differently, and the audience is going to get double for their money.” When I performed the scene anew, I could feel the audience laugh because they recognized that we were doing it differently. It is fun to tell the same story with variation, and so it made the set of“Mouse” feel so much more like theater in that scene.
Each take presents you as an actor, with the opportunity to use a different point of concentration to inform that performance. One of the things I used when playing Medea was focusing on the fact that she is an outsider; she’s not from that land, and so I’d really keep that at the forefront of my mind when playing her. Sometimes, with different takes, you can do something similar.
Is it difficult to tap into those registers of rage or fear?
The thing is, though, I’m never “playing” emotion, or rather, I’m not thinking “This is where I cry or this is where I get angry.” I’m just trying to make sense of my life at that particular time. With Chuko and Kelly’s scripts, and also with Annie Baker’s for “Janet Planet,” I didn’t delete the directions because they were beautifully written. Sometimes as an exercise I’ll delete those physical directions from a script. What unites Chuko, Kelly, and Annie is that they are never telling me how to feel. In the not-so-good movies, they are constantly telling both performer and audience memory what the emotional tenor of a given moment should be.
You filmed “Mouse” first, and for Kelly, that was a homecoming for her because you filmed in Arkansas. Then, in 2025, you filmed “Clarissa,” which you have described as your homecoming. Tell me about experiencing these returns to home.
What I had been doing before I did “Mouse” was Medea, and in that, she kills her children. I found that to be one of the most exhausting parts I’ve ever played. I did ten weeks of playing eight shows a week, and I do not think Greek plays are meant to be done for that long.
You had to become quite close to infanticide.
I got to do the grief bit in “Mouse,” the bit I couldn’t do on stage with Medea, because that character is the perpetrator and is cutting away a part of herself. That was an emotional year with those parts. It was quite a bit before I did “Clarissa” because I was waiting for it to enter production. I just learned to wait if you can afford to.
That was a lesson “Clarissa” taught me even before the cameras rolled. If you can financially afford to, wait for the parts that really speak to you. My craft is so precious to me, and I want to wait for the right things, and I don’t want to waste time. I also love being at home, seeing my family, and being with my friends, so waiting isn’t agony for me. There are so many interesting things happening in this crazy world because we’ve got so much to talk about. There’s so much to talk about in the world we live in now, but I want to talk about it through the lens of the great filmmakers.
I read that two days before you went to Lagos, you walked the path Mrs. Dalloway took through London in the novel. Obviously, Lagos is quite different, but I’m wondering if you can bring yourself back to that moment, what you learned from that time, and how that prepared you for your work in “Clarissa?”
Sometimes, when you do an adaptation, reading the source material isn’t always that helpful. Sometimes the writers take it in a way that is wildly different from the source material and then, rather than being present, you think, “Why are these writers doing something different from what I expected?” When I read the book, I didn’t get it, but then in my fifties it resonated. She makes lifetimes appear in the breadth of a sentence.
I do not live in London; I live in Sussex, Virginia Wolffe country. As I did my walk in London, I wrote a line down in the script and kept it in my mind as I walked: “She felt very young and remarkably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything and at the same time was outside looking on.”
Whenever I might have lost sense of who she was, I kept coming back to that line, that duality, that she is two things at once. She’s young and aged, and looking at London, it is a city with those same contradictions. It made me feel more connected not just to the character, but to the physical place this character originated from in Virginia’s mind.
Has working on these films made you think about the way you process grief, or the ways human beings create rituals, as honest and as arbitrary as they are, to contend with prickly emotions?
I’ve thought a lot about Federico García Lorca’s plays, and the grieving that goes on, how the wailing is a part of the grief, and how other cultures are so welcoming of that release. We have stepped out of that. At my age, I have friends who have gone. I think what I love about “Mouse,” in particular, is the way these characters help each other in their grief, even though they do it in different ways. Minnie and Helen, they’re the most unlikely couple, aren’t they? You’renot expecting those two at the beginning of the thing to get together … you’re not expecting that to be the movie.
What also unites these movies is the exploration of how class impacts the romantic and platonic relationships you’re able to form with others. It is a bit more pronounced with “Clarissa.”
What was liberating about “Clarissa” is that you do not see upper-class Nigerians represented much on screen. I remember a few years back, as I was discussing the film with Chuko and Arie, thinking, “What accent will my character have?” The two of them, with their thick British accents, said: “Well, you’ll sound just like us.”
I think other actors thought they would have to do a Nigerian dialect, whatever that is. David, I know, questioned it because there’sthat instinct to placate a Western audience, but I remember Chuko at dinner saying, “If people don’t get it, it’s not my business. I’m making this for my friends and me.” The difference between me and David is that, because he’s also a director, he thinks about the audience. I do not consider that as much. This is probably why I have never directed because I don’t have that bird’s-eye view (laughs).
Mr. Murdaugh says, “Helen is mourning the future that Callie won’t have.” It made me think of that line about “Clarissa,” where she says, “We put our best futures behind us and settle.”
Both of those lines are such complicated and sensitive notions about grief, aren’t they? It makes me think about how lucky I am to be in these films, with filmmakers who have a deep sensitivity to what’s happening in the world without drumming any particular overt message down. Those films remind me of the fluidity of grief, how we experience sadness at a particular point in time, but it ripples back to the past and future.
“Mouse” is in select theaters via IFC. “Clarissa” is in select theaters on December 11, via NEON.
- Season 3 of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” Feels Like Butter Scraped Over Too Much Bread (November 10, 2026)
“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” is one of the streaming era’s most impressive and frustrating creations. The most expensive television series ever made, it is ambitious in scope, beautiful in execution, and clearly made with a deep love and respect for its source material. And while showrunners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay have certainly made a fair amount of changes to the letter of author J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional world, the show has managed to remain remarkably true to its spirit. But as the series enters its third season, it’s also increasingly weighed down by the scope of its own ambition.
With just eight episodes to work with and a tremendous amount of Second Age history still to cover, “The Rings of Power” sacrifices nuance for expediency, embracing a darker, more uncomfortable tone as Sauron’s power over Middle-earth grows. But while this season delivers several key losses and devastating setbacks, it also struggles to explore what its major twists mean to those who experience them.
Five years have passed since the dramatic events that closed Season 2, which means “The Rings of Power’s” third outing is something of a soft reboot. Its opening episodes involve a lot of table-setting, including a “The Fellowship of the Ring”-esque Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) voice-over that lays out the new stakes of the ongoing War of the Elves and Sauron and the two human kingdoms (Ruhn and Númenor) that have yet to choose a side.
Charlie Vickers as Sauron
In Mordor, Sauron (Charlie Vickers) attempts to forge a master ring—One to Rule Them All, if you will—and is repeatedly frustrated by his inability to crack the secrets of the now-dead smith Celebrimbor’s (Charles Edwards) elven rings. Tempting various human rulers with the promise of rings of power of their own, he uses his newly created Nazgnagôl to scour Middle-earth for those who might know the elven smith’s work as he frets over his repeated failures.
In the Elven strongholds of Lindon and Rivendell, Galadriel, Elrond (Robert Aramayo), and Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker) attempt to find a way to thwart Sauron’s ambitions, ultimately turning to a strange orc, Marnûkh (Adam Young), who insists he has left the Dark Lord and can provide them with the key information they seek.
Among the dwarves, Durin’s (Owain Arthur) rule in Khazad-dûm is threatened by the arrival of his brother Thrain (Eddie Marsan), and the political wrangling in Númenor has burst into all-out civil war amongst Ar-Pharazôn’s (Trystan Gravelle) controlling faction, and the exiled Faithful led by former queen Míriel (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) and legendary warrior Elendil (Lloyd Owen) who are attempting to mount a resistance. Finally, Gandalf (Daniel Weyman) learns his true identity and tries to figure out what to do about the still-unnamed Dark Wizard (Ciarán Hinds) in Ruhn.
To say this season has a lot going on is maybe the understatement of the year. To its credit, “The Rings of Power’s” third season has learned from (some of) its earlier mistakes. It rejects the puzzle box storytelling that plagued Seasons 1 and 2, jettisons several characters it never really knew what to do with, and even retcons some of its more questionable earlier narrative decisions. And the spectacle is as impressive as it’s ever been, from bloody fight sequences to the sheer scale of some of its visuals. The Rings of Power has always excelled at depicting the scope and majesty of Tolkien’s world, and it continues to do so here.
Yet Season 3 is repeatedly hamstrung by uneven, disjointed pacing. With over a half-dozen major subplots and twice that many main characters, multiple episodes can pass without an update on a specific arc or storyline. Left to develop in fits and starts, characters lack depth, and the season struggles to build anything that really feels like narrative momentum or cohesion. (There is also, admittedly, just too much focus on political strife in Numenor and Khazad-dûm, which simply isn’t as interesting as the show wants it to be.)
Still, “The Rings of Power” has some satisfying tricks up its sleeve, along with a couple of genuine surprises as alliances shift, break, and reforge across the seven episodes available for review. The series’ ensemble remains game for anything and is better than much of the material they’re given. Vickers is delightfully menacing throughout, letting an occasional flash of self-doubt color his otherwise unhinged attempts to create the One Ring, which feel as much about forging him into the monster we recognize from Tolkien’s trilogy as about creating a fancy piece of jewelry.
Jamie Campbell Bower as Celeborn
Clark, for her part, deftly portrays an increasingly wan Galadriel, ground down by the stresses of war and haunted by her own failings, including her temptation at Sauron’s hands. And, finally freed from the multi-season deception meant to hide his character’s true identity, Weyman comes into his own as Gandalf, exuding a warmth and determined goodness that makes it apparent why he was chosen for this role.
New cast member Jamie Campbell Bower adds a welcome jolt of energy as Galadriel’s presumed-dead husband, Celeborn, though he doesn’t get as much screen time as some of us (read: me) might like. Still, he and Clark have lovely chemistry, and it’s surprisingly nice to have something that feels like a genuine romance on this canvas. (I’m not sure we’ve ever seen Clark get the chance to smile as often as she does in her scenes with Bower.)
Unfortunately, the sheer size of its cast means that many of “The Rings of Power’s” best performers are left with little to do. Lloyd Owen looks every inch a hero, but despite wielding Tolkien’s most famous weapon, Elendil is barely present in Season 3. Aramayo’s Elrond has matured as a leader in the five years since Eregion fell, but the actor’s most impactful moments come from playing opposite himself as his twin brother Elros. And while Gravalle is clearly having a blast playing Pharazôn in his dictator era, the Numenor plot spins its wheels for most of the season, until a significant event in its penultimate installment finally shakes things up.
Of course, the season finale could still bring all these disparate plot threads together in a way that feels both purposeful and satisfactory. (Or that at least ties some of them together in more concrete ways.) But while “The Rings of Power”’s third season is made with love—no one could craft a world that looks this close to Tolkien’s descriptions otherwise—it also no longer feels confident about what it’s trying to say.
Seven episodes screened for review. Premieres November 11 on Prime Video.
