- Peacock’s “The Five-Star Weekend” Is Way More Than Pedestrian Housewife Melodrama (July 6, 2026)
We certainly have a glut of these shows—you know the ones where thin white people convene on a cold beach to compare notes and solve intrigues. Nicole Kidman has practically made a cottage industry out of them: “Big Little Lies,” “The Undoing,” “The Perfect Couple.”
But somehow, “The Five-Star Weekend” manages to surprise, even though so many of its beats are predetermined.
Adapted from the Elin Hilderbrand novel of the same name by developer Bekah Brunstetter, Peacock’s latest series takes us to that favorite place in the white imagination (a character literally calls it “a white-person clam island”): Cape Cod. Jennifer Garner is the queen bee there, as Hollis Shaw, a recently widowed baking influencer who grew up on the island. Now she’s back, trying to figure out this grief thing by hosting a grown-up sleepover with four friends from various stages of her life. Together, they’re “the five stars”—get it?
And no, Hollis does not find a dead body in that first episode, uncover a local cult, or learn that her husband was part of some international crime syndicate. Based on a book of the same name, “The Five-Star Weekend” goes for more quotidian drama. Its concerns are the five-and-a-half women (Hollis’s nearly grown daughter comes, too) and the personal inflection points they’re facing.
That might make for a dull miniseries. But after just a few episodes, it’s easy to find yourself caring for these women despite yourself (and the genre trappings of amazing outfits, soft lighting, and a bucolic setting).
THE FIVE STAR WEEKEND — Pictured: (l-r) Jennifer Garner as Hollis, D’Arcy Carden as Brooke, Regina Hall as Dru-Ann, Gemma Chan as Gigi, Chloë Sevigny as Tatum — (Photo by: Greg Gayne/PEACOCK)
Certainly, the stacked cast goes a long way in selling this journey of middle-aged discovery. There’s Regina Hall (a standout) as Dru-Ann, a sports agent who’s facing cancellation during her weekend on the Cape. Hall gives her plenty of hard edges and doesn’t forsake them even as she reveals the heart behind Dru’s tough love.
Chloë Sevigny embodies another difficult woman with some soft spots. As Hollis’ childhood friend is left behind, Tatum is quick to judge and happy to play the bad guy—even though she’s the only one in the bunch in a healthy romantic relationship. And the scenes of her husband supporting her are some of the show’s most poignant, even as Sevigny turns her signature difficult-to-love vibe up to eleven.
D’Arcy Carden plays the insecure-mom friend who needs to figure out who she is, while Gemma Chan is the newbie with something to hide in the show’s one and only attempt at a (very-guessable) twist. They’re all easy to root for adults who make mistakes but soldier on.
And in the center is Garner, playing the type of woman other women say “has it all together.” And “The Five-Star Weekend” does something smart here—it doesn’t argue that Hollis is secretly a mess or should be. The series never pushes Hollis past the breaking point.
Instead, “The Five-Star Weekend” investigates what it costs to have it all together—how Hollis’ control hurts her relationship with her daughter, how it makes her a less reliable friend, and how it may make it harder for her to achieve happiness. Because Hollis is a woman who makes a detailed agenda for this five-star weekend, including Instagrammable meals and outings, and uses that agenda as a crutch. What should you do when your sense of peace has shattered? The next thing on the agenda—even if it’s as ill-fitting to the occasion as a pizza party! There’s always another photo shoot-worthy attraction ahead.
THE FIVE STAR WEEKEND — Pictured: Timothy Olyphant as Jack — (Photo by: Seacia Pavao/PEACOCK)
And in this way, “The Five-Star Weekend” gently nudges Hollis to confront herself. She has to ask whether the whole order still suits her, or if she gives herself some leeway to be less than perfect? And it’s a daunting question not only because her livelihood depends on a high-level of curation. These questions are asking her to buck so many of the promised rewards of her particular brand of femininity – she’s figured out how to be the fit, beautiful homemaker and monetize it. She’s achieved the zenith of white womanhood, and it is not enough.
Which is to say “The Five-Star Weekend” is a show for grown-ups. It has plenty of humor, beauty, and fancy things to covet, but mostly it’s a gentle look at the human condition; don’t let its prestige casting and setting fool you. These women are not antiheroes; they’re just people trying to make their way. And that basic struggle is big enough to propel this eight-part series along (and maybe power more—the book doesn’t yet have a sequel, but the show leaves the possibility open).
More than powering the plot, though, the show’s focus on the regular problems people face – when to switch careers, how to deal with loss, how to trust yourself – is downright refreshing, particularly given the cast’s female focus. Here are a few hours spent in a narrative that takes women’s internal lives seriously! Perhaps it’s not new, but it does feel different in our wash of murder mysteries everywhere, from teen dramas to white bourgeois affairs.
And that newness, along with the sheer talent radiating off this small screen, is enough to tune in and keep watching. Oh, and the beautiful shots of food help too.
- KVIFF 2026: The Guest, Dao, The Match (July 6, 2026)
The 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is still in its early stages, but it’s already showing a wealth of wonderful films. In this dispatch, you’ll find three films of differing origins. One is a world premiere in the festival’s main Crystal Globe competition, while the others previously debuted at the Berlinale and Cannes. They also, interestingly, concern memory and the heirlooms of the past we carry within ourselves.
One of the great early discoveries of this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is Mads Mengel’s deeply uncomfortable Nordic family drama “The Guest.” Playing in the Crystal Globe Competition, the film is set at a seaside resort where eager parents, Emilie (Mette Klakstein Wiberg) and Karl (Simon Bennebjerg), have invited family to christen their newborn baby Elliot. As mother and father settle in, the invitees—Emilie’s parents, Frank (Peter Gantzler), and Kirsten (Petrine Agger), along with Karl’s sister, Rikke (Josephine Park)—arrive. The resort they occupy is pristine and manicured, with no unwanted detail left for the eye to capture. That is, until Karl’s estranged mother, Vibeke (Trine Dyrholm), arrives unannounced with a flurry of energy that seems to make the air shift direction.
It doesn’t take long before we learn why Karl didn’t invite his own mother to her grandson’s christening: Unsolved trauma and buried angst belonging to a difficult childhood helmed by a mentally ill mother soured Karl on Vibeke long ago. And despite many around him, including his own wife and sister, telling him to empathize with her plight, the bridge between mother and son might as well be on two different continents.
Consequently, “The Guest” takes a nuanced interest in forgiveness, understanding, and the kind of emotional and personal growth that urges one not to pass the scars of the past on to the people of the present. This taut, controlled, crucible of empathy, which relies on cutting cross zooms to up the sadness of the situation, is supremely well acted: from a restrained Bennebjerg, who acutely counter-balances the frayed Park, to the charged Dyrholm, whose depiction of this bellicose yet vulnerable woman never crosses over into the overwrought. These feel like the right people, delving into real pains, with a cautious openness that treats the difficult obstacles in their way with the complexity and respect they deserve.
Mengel’s feature directorial debut, therefore, is a stunner not solely because of the tough situation it presents, but primarily because it moves beyond an engaging premise to become a work whose well-drawn characters invite hard-earned poignancy without begging for easy forgiveness.
Arriving at KVIFF from the Berlinale, writer/director Alain Gomis’ soulful, three-hour epic family drama “Dao” moves with an immense awareness of time, culture, ancestry and kin. It begins, cheekily yet sweetly, as a documentary: Gomis speaks with the actors during their auditions about what parts they’d like to play. As the film progresses, these documentary segments cue the film’s hefty topics (there’s an instance where each actor is asked about their relationship to their father).
From this form, Gomis often pivots in and out of something formless. In fact, it might be better to say that he slips into spaces, moments, and memories with the suddenness of a breeze that passes through two events. The first, set in France, concerns a wedding between Nour (D’Johé Kouadio) and James (Mike Etienne). The second follows Nour and her mother, Gloria (Katy Correa), as they travel to the latter’s village in Guinea-Bissau for a ceremony commemorating the one-year anniversary of Béa’s father’s passing. It’s not immediately clear whether Gomis wants to contrast these ceremonies (one is clearly more Western-infused, while the other is steeped in a different tradition) or to parallel how both inspire community.
Oftentimes the score’s plaintive jazz motif (the director’s previous film was the Thelonious Monk documentary “Rewind & Play”) signals an abrupt jump between spaces: the countryside cathedral that’s the site of Nour and James’ wedding and the colorful village that’s filled with indelible individual faces. Conversely, by the final third of the picture, the score binds these ceremonies together through the common occurrences that happen whenever varied friends and family mix past lives with booze.
Gomis, of course, dives into more than these characters’ interpersonal dynamics. There’s the imperativeness of oral storytelling, the specter of the slave trade (particularly as it relates to the diaspora), the multifacetedness of Blackness—which can traverse through bi-racial or bi-ethnic categories—caused by colonization, and the struggle of retaining traditions and finding success faced by those who decide to emigrate to the West.
With such sprawling interests, Gomis hasn’t rendered a plot-based film. Nor does he move with a conventional rhythm. Scenes digress, the camera imperfectly roves, and the pace speeds and slows without any concern for how these narrative or temporal choices might be perceived. Much like one of the film’s best scenes, a near acapella wedding rendition of the Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” whose stirring immersion recalls Steve McQueen’s “Silly Games” scene in “Lover’s Rock,” the film translates the lived experience of Blackness into practice. What does that mean? “Dao” understands that Blackness is never still and rarely controlled; it’s unconventional only to outside eyes, but it never lacks interest in how the moment relates to one’s kin. “Dao,” therefore, is a beautiful communion with the cinematic and ancestral spirits.
In June 1986, an event with wide-ranging ramifications occurred: Argentina faced England in the World Cup quarter-final. The game would feature one of the most infamous goals in soccer history, “The Hand of God,” delivered by its brightest star: Diego Maradona. More than a sporting contest, the confrontation was the culmination of a fractious relationship between two countries and the leveling of a long-uneven geopolitical playing field. Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco’s entertaining documentary, “The Match,” which originally premiered at Cannes, recalls that game and the context surrounding it through the recollections of those who lived it.
English striker Gary Lineker and Argentine forward Jorge Valdano provide the accessible frame for this poppy blast from the past. They, along with their former teammates, watch the projected footage with nostalgia, admiration, and sometimes pain. Lineker also guides us through each sequence’s key bullet points, recalling the earlier 1966 meeting between England and Argentina, the 1982 eruption of the Falklands War, and the doom that Thatcherism wreaked on both countries. References to these historical components are often inspired by whatever is happening in the match, causing the film’s continuum, which operates similarly to “The Last Dance,” to shift back and forth between the past and the present subject.
Sometimes the heavy narration can make one feel like “The Match” doesn’t remotely trust its audience, dragging one from subject to subject with the subtlety of a ball to the head. But these overworked explanations do fold in neatly with the consciously overcooked use of music, which often matches soaring classical music to the game’s highlights—inciting a cheeky grandeur to take hold. Other highlights include the breakdown of the “Hand of God” evidence (did Maradona commit an illegal handball?) and some marveling by the subjects of what’s often considered the goal of the century. All of the former participants respect Maradona, even as some still hold a grudge against him for not personally admitting that he cheated (tellingly, John Barnes, the only person of color among the Englishmen, is the most forgiving).
At its worst, “The Match” is repetitive and circular in ways that don’t always serve the material. But when it’s humming, which it often is, Cabral and Franco’s ode to soccer glory is as earthshaking as its absorbing subject.
- You Have to Commit: Robert Richardson on “Robert Richardson: The White Devil” (July 6, 2026)
In Czech director Jana Hojdová’s raw, brazenly honest documentary, “Robert Richardson: The White Devil,” the legendary director of photography finds himself in a curious position. After decades capturing a plethora of towering films: “Platoon,” “Born on the Fourth of July,” “A Few Good Men,” “Casino,” “Kill Bill: Volume I & II,” “Shutter Island,” “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” and many more—the three-time Academy Award winner finds himself in front of the camera.
In “Robert Richard: The White Devil,” which, after six years of filming, had its world premiere at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the cinematographer forms an unlikely friendship with Hojdová that begins when the Czech filmmaker emails him to request an interview for her Master’s thesis. What started out as a simple project soon evolved into a personal excavation of the filmmaker that involved searching through his personal archive of home movies, storyboards, scripts, and journals.
The result, partly born from Hojdová and Richardson hunkering down during COVID, when a lockdown kept the filmmaker from returning to her country, is a truthful summation of an artist, a father, and a spouse—one that features words from his long-time collaborators Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino, to show the heavy toll achieving cinematic greatness can often exact.
Robert Richardson sat down with RogerEbert.com during KVIFF, where he was on hand to receive the festival’s Crystal Globe for outstanding artistic contributions to world cinema. He reflects on his archives, the weight of winning Oscars, and the cautionary tale he hopes this film provides.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In the film, you mention that when Jana [Hojdová] reached out to interview you for her Master’s thesis, you responded because the questions she sent were personal rather than technical. Most creatives today would prefer to shy away from the personal. Why did that draw you in?
I’ve found that’s true in most interviews. Even when I would do the ACR articles, American Cinematographer, they’re constantly searching for questions about the lighting, this, that, or what have you. I’d rather you interview the production designer, the editor, the director. You can talk to the gaffer.
I don’t just want to talk about which lenses I chose. I prefer that you talk about what inspired us to make this movie rather than how we shot it. So, when I got the first series of questions from Jana, I was all in.
How long did you correspond before you met her?
A couple of years. She told me she has 400 pages worth of our conversations.
She could make a docuseries!
She wants more. She has her thesis and wants to turn it into a book.
This film began as her written thesis. How did it jump from that framework into a documentary?
Well, we hadn’t met initially. She actually traveled across the States and ended up meeting me in New Zealand. I was finishing “Adrift” with Baltazar [Kormákur] and Shailene [Woodley] when she arrived. And while she was there, she asked more questions and did some behind-the-scenes shooting. I was like: Shooting behind the scenes? What are you doing? [he responds as Jana in a hesitating voice] Well, I’m, I’m, I’d like to, would you? I told her to get it out. What do you want to say?
She wanted to make a documentary. By that point, I’d already told her everything about my life, so I thought, let’s go for it. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But six years later….
Six years and COVID later! She arrived to interview you at your Cape Cod home for what she thought would be a week or two, but ended up staying with you for three months because of the lockdown in the Czech Republic. What was it like having the camera follow you around?
What was great about it was that I had a downstairs, which you see in that scene in the documentary when we’re walking down, and I had archives that included boxes that I hadn’t looked at in years. Suddenly, she was yanking out some of the films I’d been searching for that my grandfather had shot in 16mm. We had boys’ and girls’ camps on the water, and he had done a lot of work with the camera. So, I bought a projector, and we put it up and started looking at the footage.
She also found boxes and boxes of tapes, from Hi8 to cassette, to et cetera, et cetera. She’s watching all those, and she’s making me even project them on the wall. And when she started, it never stopped. She just did not stop. She took all my books out of the boxes and put them on the shelves. So for me, it was like a plus because with her doing that, I didn’t have to do anything.
The scene you’re talking about is when you enter your basement: all the boxes are lined up in a row, and later we see you sitting in front of shelves now filled with the contents of the boxes, holding your journal.
Before she arrived, there were only boxes and some empty space. The boxes also had DVDs, laser discs, and books. I bought shelves, and then she put up four of them and started filling them with books—they’re all film books.
The journal you’re holding is one of your personal diaries. Throughout the film, there are also a lot of home movies you shot of your wife at the time and your daughter. Were you conscious of keeping a personal archive?
I just never threw stuff away because a lot of them are family tapes. They just get stored because at a certain point you lose any way to actually move them over. You’ve got a MiniDV, and then your sizes change, your Hi8, your this, your that. But I always carried a camera. I filmed everything all the time.
There’s so much home material shot by you.
And sometimes it’s too much! But a lot of those things let you see how some things started. There are little films there that I made with cuts in the camera. I also had footage of my father; I had John Lennon’s voice.
You also have storyboards in your basement, like the moment when you pull out the storyboard for “Platoon.” There’s another moment when you talk about being hired on “Casino” and sending a 10-page memo to Scorsese with suggestions.
Scorsese basically said he received my notes and he would never read them. Though he did offer that when he finished the script, he would send me every shot. When I first got his phone call after the memo, I actually thought I was getting fired.
You thought you had crossed some creative boundary?
I don’t know. I had asked the AD, who he had worked with on many different films, and the producer, who is now his ex-wife, Barbara De Fina, and they told me to send it.
They laid a trap for you?
I don’t think he did. I think she might have. But I don’t know what happened.
You talked about always having a camera on you, and as I said, you have these diaries. It seems like every day of your life, you’ve either journaled by hand or digitally. Where does that desire to keep a record of your life come from?
It stems from two different worlds. The camera is the way I want to see all the time. I just love having a camera and seeing through a camera. It’s often a way of protecting myself from the event. Keeping me back here. [puts his hand over his face like a lens] Not over there. The journals are always devoted to the film. So as you start, it’s like pre-prep and this and that. And then you do Polaroids. So back then, that’s how you calibrated your lighting, with the Polaroids through gray scale. I would take pictures of things and then make notes.
Then there would always be the thought of how the day went, what happened on that day, or what the attitude was. Sometimes it would be a series of very personal things. Sometimes observations about people who were on the set. They just collided, and then they meshed. That’s just the process I went through.
But it wasn’t intentional —like, I want to record my life—it was more like, this is how I live. I shoot all the time. I’m either making a film and taking notes on it, or I’m at home taking pictures, or on vacation, or whatever. Now we do it with this [he picks up my phone]. You shoot all the time. I’m sure you do. It’s the same idea. Except if you have a video camera.
There’s a moment in the film where you talk about the stages of winning Oscars: the first is recognition, and the second is that people are afraid of you. What did you mean by the “afraid of you” part?
The first nomination actually is the opening for people to respect you. I got a second one with “Born on the Fourth of July,” and then when the first came through with “JFK,” there was this: Ah, okay. Then you get called more, and that’s when Marty began to consider me, along with other directors, like Rob Reiner. You’re moving up the ladder and getting acceptance from certain directors. I worked with John Sayles on two films, and then suddenly I’m with a different director, in a different sphere, with bigger budgets and this and that.
But when you win that second one, then only a certain tier of directors wants to make a call. People are more assured: He’s a two-time Academy winner. Would I feel comfortable asking Meryl to do my movie? He must cost a fortune. We can’t call him. When it’s your third, you might as well just go hang yourself for a while until a top-notch [director] shows up, somebody who really is not afraid of anything.
That’s actually happened before. I did “A Private War” with Matthew Heineman, and it wasn’t even a vague question mark. Just come on, let’s make this low-budget film. Even Baltazar doesn’t care. I mean, he’s a serious man. He just didn’t care about my accolades. He just wanted to work with me. Those are the kind of people you need. Because it starts to take away the question marks people have about you: Can I handle this? Do I want to deal with this? What kind of person are you? Are you an asshole? People worry about your attitudes.
They’ll say: I hear he’s an asshole. He’s really hard on this crew. Thank you. My crew has been with me for 40 years. How hard could I be? Quentin [Tarantino] said that I’m really hard on my crew. Well, Quentin, those people have been with me for 20 years before they even got up to you. I might have been an asshole, and I didn’t see it. It’s highly likely he’s correct.
In the film, Quentin mentions that you softened to your crew in between “Kill Bill” and “Inglourious Basterds.” Do you think you changed?
Here’s what happened on “Kill Bill.” We decided to shoot the film three perf. I didn’t know Quentin well enough at the time, and the producers didn’t help with this decision. We did three perfs because you saved almost one-quarter of your budget by doing three perfs instead of four. But he likes to print everything and then project it. With three perf, that doesn’t work. You can project three perf, but it’s a much more complicated situation. So, I now take that upon myself as an issue. Because it’s great for going to the DI, but he’s a printer. You can print, but you have to go through a whole different process: three perf, then you make a dupe, and so forth. That whole process was different for him, and he prints every take that he selects. So, that caused friction between us that we got through, but it was not so cool.
I assume you’ve seen the film…
I haven’t! I’ve seen various parts of the film in different manifestations. I haven’t seen the final mix or the film’s final formatting.
Do you have a hope of what other people will think when they see the film?
I do. I want it to say that when you make a career choice, and you do it with utter abandon, my life is what happens. Here are the consequences you’ll run into. They’re not all positive. You’re damaging people along that route. Marty says it very beautifully at some point in the movie where he says: You’re going this direction and you hope the other person comes this direction with you. It doesn’t happen.
Quentin says something like: When you’re climbing Mount Everest, no one else is going with you on that trip. I think that’s the case. During that time, the loss of my family was what was taking place. I lost all my family and relationships with my daughters that I’ve never retrieved. To this day, the two oldest daughters are still angry at me. I hope this makes others know that you can make choices. But if you do take them, you take them, and you live with them. You commit to it.
- Fifty Years After the Bicentennial, A Declaration of Independence for American Filmmakers (July 3, 2026)
July 4th marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America. Speaking as someone old enough to have personally experienced the 200th anniversary way back in 1976—talking to my children about history, I used to add “When cave-kids rode dinosaurs to school”—I’m bummed out that it’s not a bigger deal.
But I understand. Whoo, boy, do I understand. The people are exhausted and bummed out when they aren’t seething with resentment at how far we’ve fallen in the world’s esteem and in our own estimation.
We’ve spent the past ten years having to look at and listen to one of the worst humans ever to occupy the Oval Office—a man who carried on like he was still president even when he was out of office, and who, in his second term (nonconsecutive, which somehow makes it worse) has seemed even more racist and sexist, more casually belligerent, and less interested in the details of governance than he did the first time around.
He seems to become genuinely engaged only when being flattered and bribed by American tech patrons or foreign nationals; pointing out the latest faux-gold ornamentation added to the White House; or presenting concept drawings for one of his numerous, self-aggrandizing architectural projects, such as the bunker-slash-ballroom he wants built for the low, low price of $600 million, or a triumphal arch that looked better in the original German.
No wonder his public approval ratings are lower than any president’s since public approval started being measured, and his “National State Fair” couldn’t even book has-beens to perform and draws fewer daily visitors than a child’s lemonade stand.
The thing is, we were in a similar place fifty years ago, though nowhere near as dire. The progressive utopia that seemed to be brewing in the 1960s was wiped away by the 1968 election of Republican president Richard Nixon, who promised to “restore law and order”—a dog-whistle euphemism for crushing dissent, especially by leftists and people of color—but who ended up resigning in disgrace six years later for ordering a politically motivated burglary and covering it up. The most notorious abuse of the Chief Executive’s pardoning power up until that point happened after his successor, former Vice President Gerald Ford, was sworn in and used his constitutional authority to inoculate Nixon against being prosecuted for any of his crimes. (Now I hear Homer Simpson telling Bart, as in “The Simpsons Movie,” “The most notorious abuse of the Chief Executive’s pardoning power so far.”)
Robert Altman’s “Nashville.”
The many great movies of that era were among the factors that kept Americans from feeling as if the country had completely given up on trying to live up to its professed ideals. In the run-up to the Bicentennial, there were numerous classics that analyzed America through history and metaphor: “Bound for Glory,” “Nashville,” “Taxi Driver,” “Killer of Sheep,” “Rocky,” “Chinatown,” two “Godfather” movies, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Cooley High,” “Car Wash,” “Shampoo,” “The French Connection,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” and too many others to list here.
What’s most striking about such films is that a lot of them were made outside the established channels. Some were made within the Hollywood system, which by the seventies had been in decline for three decades and was a shadow of its former self. An outsized portion came from one studio, Paramount, which was then run by Robert Evans, a former actor and sleazy hustler who nevertheless loved movies and respected film history; among other classics, he greenlit the “Godfather” movies and “Chinatown.”
But many more were developed and/or funded independently of the studios and then picked up for distribution. One independent company, BBS Productions, put out some of the sharpest, most uncompromising films of the late ’60s and early ’70s, including “Easy Rider,” “Harold and Maude,” “The Last Picture Show,” “Five Easy Pieces,” and “The King of Marvin Gardens.”
The great Robert Altman often developed his films in isolation and hoped they got picked up and distributed by a bigger fish: “Nashville,” arguably his masterpiece, was originally a United Artists movie, but when UA pulled out, Altman somehow cobbled together funding from Paramount and ABC. His 1970s comedy “Brewster McCloud” was originally financed by MGM, but Altman needed additional money to finish it and got it from one man, record producer Lou Adler. “Killer of Sheep” was a senior thesis film by Charles Burnett, made for spare change to fulfill a master’s degree requirement at UCLA Film School.
Charles Burnett’s ‘Killer of Sheep.”
The point is, the entertainment industry is arguably even more shallow, purely acquisitive, and disinterested in anything but profit now than it was back then, which is really saying something, but somehow, meaningful, relevant popular art still got made.
The same miracle is possible today.
Sure, it might be more difficult to get work that’s genuinely challenging or critical of the status quo through the mainstream production pipelines, thanks to the tremendous amount of media consolidation that’s happened in the past ten years (Disney buying 20th Century Fox, tech mogul Larry Ellison almost certainly ending up owning both Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount, and so on).
To be fair, something like the pre-Bicentennial cinema flowering only occurred because by the ’70s, the previously dominant system was in disarray, and studio bosses realized the old-style stuff wasn’t drawing young audiences or making older ones excited enough to leave their TV sets and buy a movie ticket.
But here, too, you can see parallels between then and now. Every few months since the economic devastation of 2020, a “Cinema, Dead or Alive?” type article has appeared in some major media outlet. But lately, to my relief, the pendulum has definitely swung towards “alive.”
According to recent news, this year North American box office receipts may finally match those from 2019, before the pandemic disrupted production of new movies and economically destroyed moviegoing, along with almost every other industry dependent on people leaving their homes and becoming part of a crowd. The most devoted theatrical moviegoing audience is Gen Z, and repertory and arthouse business is booming in some cities.
Both are unexpected developments that some observers have attributed to the growing popularity of Letterboxd, which “gamified” movie watching by making users feel as though they were competing in a global race to see as many films as possible. Related: the rise of so-called microcinemas—independently booked theaters with as few as twenty to fifty seats, where overhead is small enough that there’s freedom to book micro-budgeted, undistributed, and otherwise non-mainstream movies.
NEON’s “Obsession,” one recent (and potent) example of the YouTuber-to-filmmaker pipeline.
On top of all that, the most widely used platform for viewing new content, bigger than broadcast, cable and streaming audience numbers combined, is YouTube: every year, 2.8 billion people worldwide watch “content” on it, and while that might sound dispiriting at first, mainly because so many hugely successful videos are along the lines of “Watch This Jerk Get Owned in Waffle House Brawl,” it’s about twice the size of the entirety of global cinema put together.
And, as pretty much any modern filmmaker (who will likely hate being called a “content provider”) will tell you, the metric of success for non-mainstream, micro-budget or otherwise anti-commercial moviemaking is quite different from that of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm or DC. If a direct-to-YouTube (or Vimeo) movie gets more than 500,000 hits, it’s enough to make a well-off person who feels like putting a little bit of money into a movie take the filmmakers’ next project seriously.
It’s sort of a corollary of what happens in different areas of book publishing. If the new Stephen King novel sells only a million copies, it’s considered a disappointment. But if an independently published horror novel by a first-time author sells more than 50,000 copies, it’s considered enough of a success to be a viable candidate for film, TV, or streaming adaptation. (Many post-millennium hits, including “Fifty Shades of Grey,” “Beautiful Disaster,” “The Celestine Prophecy,” and “The Martian,” originated as self-published books.)
So yeah, things are tough out there, and the state of the world seems awfully bleak from certain angles. But just as there’s cause for cautious optimism ahead of the 2026 midterm elections and beyond, the future of cinema, whatever forms it ultimately takes, is the brightest it has been since the 1970s, when the old ways were falling apart and new ways were being born.
And so: independent filmmakers, if you’re reading this, go out and make your mark. It’s your time. As the THX Sound tagline used to put it, the audience is listening.
- 2026 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Preview: 10 Films We Can’t Wait to See (July 3, 2026)
It’s the 60th edition of Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, a cinematic event, running from July 3-11, that combines world premieres from across Eastern Europe, with festival highlights from Sundance, Berlinale, and Cannes, along with rare restorations and the major luminaries of cinema. This year promises to be an exceptional anniversary for one of the world’s oldest festivals, whose picturesque mountainous surroundings act as a visual cue for the steadiness of this institution.
This year, I will cover the festival once more (Thanks to Isaac Feldberg for covering for me last year), and I can’t wait to dive into all that KVIFF has to offer. Come back starting Monday morning, July 6, for my coverage, which will include many of the 10 films below.
“Dao”
One of the major films from Berlinale 2026, Senegalese director Alain Gomis’ “Dao” takes its latest bow at KVIFF. The three-hour family epic oscillates between ceremonial family gatherings happening in France and Guinea-Bissau to two women in two different variations of the same culture. Gomis’ intermingling of European and African values leaps over into his kinetic filmmaking sensibilities, wherein “Dao” mixes narrative film elements with documentary aesthetics for a picture that takes pleasure in exploring the destabilization of tradition and identity.
“Black Money for White Nights”
Following “Triumph,” which starred Maria Bakalova as a psychic used by the Bulgarian army to search for an alien artifact, the directing duo Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov are back. Their latest is an equally bleak tragicomedy about an elderly couple whose hopes of visiting Russia to experience the White Nights, a moment of perpetual twilight, are dashed when the country invades Ukraine—rendering their trip null and void. The harsh turn of events, allow for harsher secrets to be revealed, upending what appeared to be a happy, stable marriage via two frank lead performances.
“Hijamat”
Nader Saeivar, a longtime creative collaborator of Jafar Panahi—the pair co-wrote “It Was Just an Accident” and “3 Faces”—arrives in the Crystal Globe competition with his fourth directorial work: “Hijamat.” Edited by Panahi, the film, seen through the eyes of its conflicted protagonist Murat (Kida Khodr Ramadan), considers the limits of queerness within a traditionalist Islamic culture. A ruminative work filled with silences that are both revealing and looming and built on the measured expressions of its lead actor, Ramadan, the film positions itself as a cinematic fight for internal peace.
“The Match”
With the World Cup ongoing, Karlovy Vary is remaining on brand by screening Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco’s “The Match” as their opening night film. Cabral and Franco’s direct documentary employs the 1986 edition to the sporting event—when Maradona had his legendary ‘Hand of God’ goal—to dive into the impact the Falklands War had on Argentina. The sport, therefore, becomes a battleground where old geopolitical wounds can be healed and an unleveled playing field is rebalanced to heart pounding results.
“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York”
Some premises immediately catch your eye: In Noah Segan’s “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York,” John Turturro stars as a thief incarcerated since the 1980s, who upon release into a modern world, discovers his livelihood wholly altered. Re-teaming Turturro with past collaborators, like Steve Buscemi and Giancarlo Esposito, the reflective picture is a minor key interrogation of the passage of time.
“There’s a certain bleak finality to [the film] that serves Turturro’s acting style well. He… almost seems to relish being opposite former acting partners like Buscemi and Esposito, with whom he starred in one of the most essential New York films of all time: ‘Do the Right Thing.’ Looking at them again, almost four decades later, feels like a vision of a changing city, adding another grace note to a film that’s full of them,” wrote Brian Tallerico out of the film’s Sundance premiere. It’s KVIFF’s closing night film.
“Paris Paris”
Premiering in the Proxima competition, Isabelle Tollenaere’s allegorical immigrant drama follows three men: Yi-En from China, Junior from Congo, and Hamzah from Palestine—as they traverse the cultural, economic, and language barriers they encounter in Paris. Consequently, the trio share a dilapidated apartment in a building set to be demolished, a metaphor of displacement that mirrors their journeys into a new country. Tollenaere’s ruminative conception of these characters and her dashes of magical realism further open a narrative that deeply considers the impermanence of creating a home when the one you’ve been forced from looms large in your psyche and in your heart.
“Robert Richardson: The White Devil”
One of cinema’s great cinematographers has the camera turned on him. It all began when Jana Hojdova, a graduate of FAMU, reached out to Robert Richardson—the three-time Academy Award winner known for lensing “Platoon,” “JFK,” “The Aviator,” and more—to interview him for her master’s graduate project. To her surprise, he agreed. To her even greater shock, her interview request turned into an entire film. Hojdova diligently captures Richardson as he goes through his priceless archives of photos and storyboards and reveals parts of his life that had previously been unknown.
“Rose”
It feels like no one is riding a higher high than Sandra Hüller. While the German actress has always been well respected, garnering praise for “Toni Erdmann,” the double-hit of “The Zone of Interest” and her Oscar-nominated turn in “Anatomy of a Fall,” sent her into the stratosphere. In this year alone, she has starred in the box office smash “Project Hail Mary” and premiered Paweł Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland” at Cannes, and has Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger” still waiting in the wings. “Rose,” which premiered at Berlinale 2026, netting her the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance, is a 17th-century set period piece that sees Hüller disguising herself as a male soldier and heir to an estate. It’s a shapeshifting role for an actress who appears capable of playing anybody.
“The Story of Documentary Film – 1980s”
Northern Irish documentary filmmaker Mark Cousins is one of those hyper-active creators whose persistently evolving filmography causes you to wonder if they sleep. A couple of years ago his ode to British artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things,” took home the festival’s top Crystal Globe prize. This year, he’s back with a segment from his survey of the history of documentary film. While a previous part covering the 1970s premiered at Cannes 2026, KVIFF will host the section recalling the 1980s. His latest filmic essay figures to feature the hallmarks of his expressive style—from his poetic prose narration to his keen curiosity—and a wealth of new insights.
“Tainted Horseplay”
One of Věra Chytilová’s lesser-seen films, “Tainted Horseplay” (“A Hoof Here, A Hoof There”), is an oddball tragicomedy set in Karlovy Vary. It follows three friends who balance their lives by trading off mundane days for exciting sexually liberated nights. Their explicit fun is interrupted with the advent of AIDs. The touchy subject doesn’t deter Chytilová’s sense of frivolity and her love of poking at the male ego. Nor did it stop the Czech Republic (at the time Czechoslovakia) from submitting it for the 62nd Academy Awards. A digital restored version of the film is set to screen at KVIFF.
