- NYFF 2026: At Night, Foreign Travel, Joy of Joys (October 9, 2026)
One of my favorites at the New York Film Festival this year is “At Night,” a meditative film from British director Beatrice Gibson. “At Night” follows a group of women over one faithful night in Paris when their lives quietly intersect. The film begins with a quote from the late poet Alice Notley: “I am a tone of voice. Warming, shifting, pausing, changing, including, asserting, exulting, including, including, turning & including.” Those words perfectly describe what it feels like to sit with a film that tries to capture life’s steady pace.
We begin in a dark, still train tunnel. Slowly, the train reveals itself as Gibson’s voice creeps in, recording a message to a former collaborator, Didi. Over time, we learn that Didi not only worked on a previous film with Gibson, but also served as a nanny to her children. Didi has a son of her own and lives in a shelter, trying to build a life for them with few resources or education. Didi feels she doesn’t know anything.
But when she speaks to Gibson, she shows a deep understanding of how the world’s racial rules shape the power imbalance between them. Didi’s Blackness is a fact of life she refuses to let her friend ignore. And are they really friends? There seems to be a disconnect there. This conversation happens in a dark deli, with the power out. When the light returns, Didi is on her way, and Gibson is left alone with her thoughts once again.
We see a poetry reading, followed by a discussion of sex and love among a group of creative women. They agree for a while until a Black woman introduces the complexities of race into the discussion. This woman, like Didi, cannot allow her white cohorts to ignore differences in order to maintain a collective understanding of what it means to be a woman in the world. Through this conversation, Gibson makes her film’s intentions clear; she highlights her shortcomings as a storyteller, informed by her social and racial privilege. And like many white people, she’s not sure what, if anything, she can do about it. But I think this piece is a good start.
In his newest short feature, “Foreign Travel,” director Ted Fendt quietly observes a young German woman named Leonie over the course of a year. Beginning in May, she reads and contemplates the writing of Italian author Anna Maria Ortese. Much of the film consists of characters reading the text aloud and contemplating its meaning. At the beginning, Leonie reads one of Ortese’s most important works, the novel Il porto di Toledo. She begins in Italian, then gifts a copy to a friend for his birthday. She continues with a German translation and discusses the material’s difficulty with her friends. She agonizes over every line, trying to understand the material as deeply as possible. Her efforts lead to a loose book club focused more on intellectual engagement than entertainment.
Leonie’s quest for meaning and fascination with language mirrors an American critic’s effort to grasp both the German and Italian elements of Fendt’s film through English subtitles and deceptively mundane imagery. It demands your full attention, challenges your comprehension, and encourages you to keep pursuing a deeper understanding of your place in the world. What’s most fascinating about “Foreign Travel” is that it escapes easy interpretation.
Jonathan Glazer’s short film “Joy of Joys” is much more direct in its intentions, taking us to Abbey Road to experience the recording of HELP(2), a charity album meant to provide aid to children in war-torn areas around the globe. The album includes music from Pulp, Oasis, Arctic Monkeys, Olivia Rodrigo, Cameron Winter and Depeche Mode, among others. In the studio, a number of children are given camcorders to actively capture the process in this legendary recording studio. The film often switches to their perspective as they try to figure out the best way to showcase their experience. Their presence constantly reminds the musicians why they’re recording the album. They also serve as adorable distractions, pulling the adults out of their own heads and into the present moment.
Glazer then takes that point further by including footage shot by children in Palestine, Sudan, Yemen, and Ukraine. The director’s point is simple: These are all our children. They are the world’s children, and it is our collective responsibility to see them, listen to them, and take care of them. The children playing among the rubble in Gaza deserve the carefree lives of the children in the studio, eating snacks and running around. It’s both joyful and heartbreaking to see children around the world making the best of their lives amid unimaginable devastation and suffering. We owe them so much more than this.
- Busan 2026: Satoko Always, The First Taste of Loneliness, Shaving (October 9, 2026)
I’ve been in Busan for a couple of days now, just enough time to shake off my jet lag, try a few delicious food trucks outside the festival’s cinema center, and catch a few titles in the festival’s vaunted main competition. The three films in this dispatch, though directed by men, are all female-driven works that explore the weight of loss, denial, and roads not taken in their protagonists’ lives. Two feature three separate generations of women in inspiring tales, while the other is an outlandish Korean horror film. They all feature, to varying degrees, enlivening performances.
Often surprising and immensely delightful, writer/director Shūichi Okita’s “Satoko Always” chronicles the emotional lives of three aspiring female writers, each named Satoko, as they confront the obstacles that stand between them and their novelistic passion. For each, writing is a vocation deep in their souls—even when life tells them to focus on supposedly more pertinent issues.
The youngest is Nakai (Kashun Himeno), a third grader whose rhinitis requires her to visit a local clinic for a nebulizer. Her crush, a boy, also goes there, inspiring wistful daydreams about their potential life together. Her writerly journey, however, doesn’t begin with him; it starts when a strict teacher is impressed by Nakai’s made-up report about a recent trip to a kabuki—she was asleep during the performance—that turns out to be more prodigious than her classmates’. Wanting to impress her teacher, Nakai takes the assigned writing prompts: “write a will” and “write a love letter”—and makes them into fantastical pieces addressed to her favorite salty squid snack and inspired by her father’s athlete’s foot.
If that section is the most charming, then the third chapter, which concerns television marketing executive Nishida (Kasumi Arimura), is more sobering. She restarts her writerly ambitions when the wife of her jealous lover’s stabbing puts her in the hospital, granting Nishida a chance to write about their relationship. We see their easy love affair through the flurry of scenes Nishida pens, which ultimately swing us into the film’s last chapter, featuring the older Iijima (Hikari Ishida), a soon-to-be empty-nester housewife who feels undervalued by her husband and three sons. She conceives of a work about a bird visiting a bookshop that’s inspired by the lighthearted first meeting with her husband.
Each spontaneously articulated section earns resonance by simply depicting the joy writing brings to these three characters, who don’t imagine fame will come their way. They see the medium only as a therapeutic tool for processing the world around them. Cinematographer Kiko Ashizawa’s engaging photography heightens that purity, which shifts saturation and grading depending on the hopes felt in any given scene. And while “Satoko Always” sometimes unwinds in a way that feels like it’s making it all up as it goes along, that sense of the unplanned matches the adventurousness required to produce something special. The film itself achieves that feat.
Another film based around three women is Gu You’s sweeping melodrama “The First Taste of Loneliness.” This is the last installment in Gu’s “Shan-Shui (Landscape) trilogy,” an elemental painting style classically based around ink that inspired Gu’s other two films “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” and “Dwelling by the West Lake.” His latest take concerns a grandmother named Luna (Xi Meijuan), her daughter and single mother Jiang Yue (Xi Meijuan), and her teenage granddaughter Moon (Wang Shengdi), mourning the death of Luna’s husband following a two-year battle with cancer. All three women, who, if you haven’t connected the dots by now, have names directly inspired by the moon, wax and wane through mourning as they consider how to move forward after their monumental loss.
For Luna, a big change arrives months later when she begins dating the doting widower Mr. Xu (Xu Chaoying). Their loving relationship requires everyone to consider Luan’s emotional needs and their own futures. Moon is nearing exams and graduation. Her mother, Jiang, left her career as a fashion director in Beijing to care for her father and is thinking about returning to work. Of the three, Jiang is the most wary: Are they betraying her father’s memory by moving on? His spirit still visits all of their dreams but hers. Is it because he knows haunting her will only make it more difficult for Jiang to parse her grief?
True to the film’s artistic roots, Gu and his cinematographer, Mikiya Takimoto, visualize this shared heartache through smooth panoramic pans and drone shots that seem to majestically fall from the sky toward their melancholic subject. Is this the ghost of their patriarch visiting them by traversing over concrete landscapes and rolling hills? Is it him who animates a foggy flashback sequence where he and Luna discuss the naming of their potential daughter as they wander soul-stirring forested paths? Gu and his editor, Liu Xinzhu, don’t rush to conclusions; they let these lugubrious scenes play out, making the film feel laborious at times in its pursuit of accurately rendering the long road of mourning. Consequently, “The First Taste of Loneliness” might leave one feeling bittersweet, but this epic ode to the spiritual strength of three women comes by that bittersweetness naturally.
The cartoonish, rote psychological Korean horror film “Shaving,” from director Kim Jung-hoon, squanders the obvious potential of its hyper-meta premise. A broad take on “The Shining,” the Hong Seong-yoon and Roh Do-hyeon-penned script concerns agitated horror novelist Su-yeon (Roh Jeong-eui) and her boyfriend of nearly two years, Shinji (Show Kasamatsu), who seems lovely at first. The pair spend a rain-soaked weekend at the still-fully furnished hillside home of Su-yeon’s deceased father, where she hopes to finish her newest novel, the first since the death of her domineering boyfriend and co-author, Hyun-woo (Byun Yo-han).
The rickety two-hander starts to drift from Kim when Shinji shaves his face with an old, rusty razor blade of unknown origin after Su-yeon complains his stubble is too long for smooching. He obviously nicks himself, and Su-yeon, who’s not taking her psychiatric medicine and hasn’t seen her therapist for quite some time, begins having nightmares about a man with a black tattoo under his left ear who whistles a discordant tune. She struggles to sleep and, with each passing night, the once kind Shinji, whose abrasion appears to be growing more infected by the day, slowly becomes verbally abusive. Is his decline happening a kind of female madness, or is she truly in danger?
“Shaving” relies on familiar narrative mechanics to push its unoriginal frights forward. That painful plainness is intentional: Su-yeon needs to write an ending for her novel—she often struggles with conclusions—and often calls herself out when her writing veers toward cliches. Because her nightmares mirror the book she’s writing, the novel draws on her buried traumas and memories; it stands to reason they would follow the genre beats of the horror she’s working in. The film, unfortunately, lacks the dexterity to heighten these meta-commentaries into worthwhile observations about gaslighting, abusive relationships, and mental health.
Consequently, “Shaving” is a tiresome bore, relying on several false endings to engineer a writerly catharsis for Su-yeon. Its computer graphics are tawdry, and when the film does reach for practical effects, they’re a bit too ghoulishly cumbersome to elicit terror. Roh appears adrift in a character who’s far too hemmed in, psychologically and emotionally, when she should be far more destabilized. Show has a demonic presence, but the film never fully explores Shinji’s place as the other (he’s a Japanese man dating a Korean woman). That lack of interrogation reminds one that every cut in “Shaving” barely scratches the surface.
- Chicago History Museum to Premiere “Christian Holder: My Life is Dance” (October 8, 2026)
The Chicago History Museum, in partnership with The Joffrey Ballet, the Chicago International Film Festival, and the Gerald Arpino Foundation, presents the premiere of Christian Holder: My Life Is Dance on Friday, October 30, 2026, from 5:30 to 8 p.m. and Saturday, October 31, 2026, from 12:30 p.m. to 3:00 pm. Directed by Academy Award®-winning producer and director Brigitte Berman, the documentary follows the life and career of the multi-talented Christian Holder, a celebrated Joffrey Company Dancer of the 1970s, up to his death in 2025. The screening takes place at the Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark Street, and includes a Q&A with Berman. Admission is free; RSVP is requested at chicagohistory.org.
Revealing interviews and rare archival dance footage portray the trajectory of Holder’s career in ballet and his extraordinary achievements in choreography, theater, music, and costume design. Over the course of several years, Holder designed costumes for Tina Turner, forging a close friendship with the celebrated singer and dancer that lasted until her death.
Through Holder’s acclaimed autobiographical cabarets—which debuted in New York and London—Holder commands the stage, using the power of musical storytelling to bring his personal story to life. These cabarets form the spine of Christian Holder: My Life Is Dance.
The film places Holder’s life and artistry within the social and political forces of his time, examining the struggle for civil rights and the prejudices he confronted. The film connects Holder’s lauded dance performance of Death in Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table to his opposition to the Vietnam War and explores the devastating impact of the AIDS crisis. Featured participants include former Joffrey Company Artist Trinette Singleton; close friend, dancer and choreographer Margo Sappington; Christian’s cousin Leo Holder; Christian’s aunt and Dance Pioneer Carmen de Lavallade; and The Joffrey Ballet’s The Mary B. Galvin Artistic Director Ashley Wheater MBE, alongside former Joffrey Company Dancer Gary Chryst; Dancer and former artistic director of the Dance Theater of Harlem Virginia Johnson; Lucie Conrad, Kurt Jooss’s granddaughter; Artistic Director and Dancer Desmond Richardson and more.
“I felt deeply honored that Christian Holder entrusted me with his life story,” Berman says in her director’s statement. “I knew the film had to be guided by Christian’s own voice and perspective. His cabaret performances – those luminous, deeply personal, autobiographical works that he acted, sang, spoke, and brought to life became the natural spine of the film…It was essential to me that this film not only portray Christian as an artist and a man, but also clearly place him squarely within the charged political and social currents of his time. Art does not exist in isolation – it collides with injustice, intolerance, fear, and the need for change.”
Seven years in the making, Christian Holder: My Life Is Dance incorporates Holder’s personal archives, including photographs, paintings, drawings of costume designs, home movies, and stunning footage of Christian dancing, along with materials from personal collections contributed by friends and colleagues. The Joffrey Ballet, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Gerald Arpino Foundation, and the Jooss Archives in Germany also contributed important archival materials.
Christian Holder died on February 18, 2025. The documentary spotlights Christian Holder’s voice, spirit, and artistry, offering audiences a rare and personal glimpse into the creative vision, passion, and purpose that drove him.
Christian Holder: My Life Is Dance is directed, written, and researched by Brigitte Berman. Executive producers: Chaz Ebert and Dan Lyon. Producers and editors: Brigitte Berman and Lee Cochran. Original music composed by Ken Myhr.
About Christian Holder
Christian Holder was born June 18, 1949 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and came to London at age 2 with his father, Boscoe Holder, a famous musician, dancer, choreographer, and artist, and his mother, Sheila Holder, who danced and sang with ‘Boscoe Holder and his Caribbean Dancers’. Christian became one of The Joffrey Ballet’s most acclaimed artists during his tenure with the Company from 1966 to 1979 and spent forty-four years in New York before returning to London.
In 1963, Martha Graham offered Holder a scholarship as part of a select group of young dancers, and a year later, at the young age of 15, Christian arrived in New York, where he moved in with his aunt and uncle, Geoffrey Holder and Carmen de Lavallade. He enrolled at the High School of Performing Arts in New York City, where he was discovered by Robert Joffrey, who invited him to join The Joffrey Ballet. His performances with the Company included the role of Death in a revival of Kurt Jooss’s 1932 deeply haunting antiwar ballet, The Green Table. From 1979 to 1981, Holder appeared as a guest solo dancer with San Francisco Opera, where he also choreographed The Merry Widow and Aida. His choreographic work included Weren’t We Fools? for American Ballet Theatre and Transcendence for Atlanta Ballet. He appeared in repertory theater productions and musicals and designed costumes for ballets, including Margo Sappington’s Toulouse-Lautrec for the Ballet du Capitole in Toulouse, France.
Holder also taught ballet at Steps on Broadway, the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Kaatsbaan International Dance Center, and Peridance, as well as for Cedar Lake Dance. After returning to London, England, in 2009, he continued his creative work, writing the book and lyrics for Verse of Fortune, writing and directing Ida Rubinstein: The Final Act, and directing One Man – both staged at the Playground Theatre. In 2024, the limited-edition fine art book Boscoe Holder: Travels in Rhythm, A Life of Art and Dance, written by Christian about his father, Boscoe Holder, was published by David Roe of Rosenstiels.
About Brigitte Berman
Brigitte Berman is an Academy Award®-winning producer, director, editor and writer born in Frankfurt, Germany. She has produced and directed over 200 documentaries – both independently and with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Her films have screened at numerous international film festivals and won many international awards, including the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary, Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got.
About The Joffrey Ballet
The Joffrey Ballet is one of the premier dance companies in the world today, with a reputation for boundary-breaking performances for 71 years. The Joffrey repertoire is an extensive collection of all-time classics, modern masterpieces, and original works.
Founded in 1956 by pioneers Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino, the Joffrey remains dedicated to artistic expression, innovation, and first-rate education and engagement programming. The Joffrey Ballet continues to thrive under The Mary B. Galvin Artistic Director Ashley Wheater MBE and President and CEO Greg Cameron.
The Joffrey Ballet is grateful for the support of its 2026–2027 Season Sponsors: The Abbott Fund, Alphawood Foundation Chicago, Daniel and Pamella DeVos Foundation, The Florian Fund, Gallagher, Anne L. Kaplan, Lynda Sue Lane, M.D., and The Women’s Board of The Joffrey Ballet. Season-long sponsorship of the Company Artists is generously made possible by Margot and Josef Lakonishok.
Live Music Sponsors: Sandy and Roger Deromedi, Sage Foundation, and The Marina and Arnold Tatar Fund for Live Music. The Joffrey also acknowledges our Season Partners: ATHLETICO and Chicago Athletic Clubs.
For more information on The Joffrey Ballet and its programs, visit joffrey.org. Connect with the Joffrey on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
- “Cupertino” is a Smart Big Tech Procedural (October 8, 2026)
Movie theaters are currently inundated with major motion pictures that examine and/or indict the behavior of wealthy Silicon Valley leaders, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (“The Social Reckoning”), Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes (“You Can See Everything”), Elon Musk (Alex Gibney’s “Musk”), and OpenAI’s Sam Altman (“Artificial”). Television is in on the trend, too. In November, Netflix will remind us of the implosion of cryptocurrency fund FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, in “The Altruists.”
On CBS and Paramount+ starting Thursday, there’s “Cupertino,” a broadcast-network procedural that doesn’t zero in on a real-life tech bro, but does raise a lot of sobering questions about the industry currently attempting to cram A.I. down the throats of the global populace.
Created by Michelle and Robert King—the showrunning power couple responsible for “The Good Wife,” “The Good Fight,” “Evil,” “Elsbeth,” and ensuring that CBS still offers quality programming in primetime—the series is a legal drama about an upstart law firm that focuses specifically on clients who want to sue powerful Silicon Valley companies.
“I’m sick of people controlling my fate, and my guess is there are a lot of people out there that feel the same way but don’t have anyone to represent them,” says Michael Price (Mike Colter of “Luke Cage” and “Evil”), an attorney who co-founded, then got edged out of, an extremely successful big tech company called S-Talk.
He’s explaining his reasons for wanting to start an agency that takes on the cases against Magnificent 7-level companies that other firms are too afraid to touch. But he could just as easily be describing this show’s appeal to an American audience frustrated by the unemployment rate, the disproportionate power and wealth of the billionaire class, and the non-stop insistence that everyone get on board with artificial intelligence.
Unlike the other projects mentioned above, “Cupertino” does not focus on the idiosyncrasies/neuroses of a single, perceived “genius.” It is more general in its depiction of big tech, which enables it to feel both timely and, perhaps, more relatable to the average person.
Pictured (L-R): Rachel Keller as Olivia Siffre and Mike Colter as Michael Price. Photo: Elizabeth Fisher/CBS ©2026 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
While there are some key storylines that run throughout the first 10 episodes—the rivalry between Michael and his showboating lawyer father (Joe Morton); another, separate rivalry between Michael and his ex, also an attorney (Renée Elise Goldsberry, who co-starred opposite Colter on “Evil”); and, most importantly, an ongoing narrative about a particularly dangerous form of AI—this is largely a case-of-the-week type of show.
With its quick, plot-driven pacing, “Cupertino” is episodic, mainstream network storytelling that shows, like so much of the Kings’ output, that it’s still possible to make smart, sophisticated, digestible television within that framework.
As Michael, Colter is dignified, pragmatic and, if I’m being honest, not wildly different in demeanor from David, the priest the actor played on “Evil.” But he’s a persuasive lead in both shows, so I’m not going to complain too much about any overlap. While Michael believes in justice and the rule of law, he’s not some anti-capitalist hero who wants to burn down all of Silicon Valley. He simply sees a gap in the marketplace that needs filling. “When you’re in the middle of the ocean, you don’t sell people more water,” he explains to Goldsberry’s Nichole. “You sell them life jackets.”
His partner at the new firm, Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller), a devout Christian and gifted lawyer who also gets fired from S-Talk after being sexually harassed by the head of the company, is the bleeding heart in this pairing. Keller and Colter have an organic, friendly chemistry that, to the show’s credit, is supportive without being romantic, at least not in these early episodes.
But the standout performances in “Cupertino” come from the two actors who provide the most comedic relief in a drama that doesn’t shy away from poking fun at the always-pitching culture of venture capitalism. Ella Stiller (daughter of Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor) gets a break-out role as Christy Palladino, a third employee who gets fired from S-Talk and becomes the receptionist at Price and Siffre, where she proves to be a fantastic investigator for her attorney bosses.
Christy is particularly adept at tracking down leads and calling in favors from her extensive family of blue-collar workers; after being escorted out of the S-Talk building, she phones her electrician uncle, who proceeds to turn the power on and off in that office and enrage everyone still “lucky” enough to be employed there. Christy knows nothing about technology, but she loves to stick it to the man. Her default expression is resting “you’ve got to be kidding me” face, and Stiller has got that expression down pat.
Pictured (L-R): Ella Stiller as Christy Palladino, Mike Colter as Michael Price, and Rachel Keller as Olivia Siffre. Photo: Elizabeth Fisher/CBS ©2026 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Then there’s Busy Phillips, who’s cast as Natalia Boutella, a key investor in the new firm who also happens to be divorced from a tech executive played by Fisher Stevens who is not Jeff Bezos, but also is totally Jeff Bezos. Natalia is less interested in sticking it to the man than she is in sticking it to that particular man. When he denies that he has gained weight after she tells him he “got fat,” Natalia counters: “You dined with the president, you had a front row seat to that inauguration, you bought a billion-dollar yacht. You got fat.” Phillips utters lines like that as if they’re coated in venom.
(As an added bonus, every time she and Goldsberry appear in the same scene, it’s like a partial “Girls5Eva” reunion, and that alone deserves a fresh designation on Rotten Tomatoes.)
The Kings and co. tackle numerous zeitgeisty tech trends; one episode focuses on a teenager compelled to kill his father by a chatbot, while another, which happens to debut less than a week before the midterms, zeroes in on prediction websites used to manipulate elections.
But “Cupertino” is not a purely anti-A.I. narrative. The episodes also highlight situations where technological assistance can help. In one, Christy gets incredibly frustrated by an A.I. agent she attempts to train by making sure its knowledge of horror movies is up to snuff. (“In which state did ‘The Blair Witch Project‘ take place?” she asks. “Wisconsin,” the agent cheerfully responds. Christy: “No, Maryland, moron.”) But she’s pretty grateful for that moron when he can warn her not to take a sip of a drink that’s been spiked at a bar.
If “Cupertino” has an official position on technology, it’s that it can be very useful, but it desperately needs significant, legally enforceable guardrails. This is an opinion shared by most sentient beings with anything akin to a conscience. This series dares to suggest that there’s a world where guardrails could be put in place, and where the “little guys” in the tech world have a chance to be heard. Maybe that’s a fantasy, but it’s one that’s extremely entertaining to live in for 42 minutes every week.
The first ten episodes of season one were screened in advance for critics. An additional ten episodes are currently in production.
- Ambitious “Control Resonant” Challenges Expectations, Rewards Creativity (October 8, 2026)
Even though people often love to point out this site’s namesake’s opinion on video games, since we began this coverage, we’ve tried to write about where the form intersects with film in cinematic franchises like “Silent Hill,” “Uncharted,” and “Resident Evil.” While playing the absolutely brilliant “Control Resonant,” I kept thinking of some of the most ambitious, game-changing science fiction films of all time, obvious influences like “The Matrix” and “Inception.”
But I also found myself pondering the work of David Lynch. How do “Twin Peaks” and Remedy Entertainment’s masterpiece intersect? It’s in a creator’s willingness to push boundaries, to use the visual language of dreams, and to find emotional grounding in the impossible. Creative Director Mikael Kasurinen has said via the review guide, “We wanted to make something that provokes. Something that feels like nothing you’ve played before.” Mission accomplished.
The excellent “Control” ended with hero Jesse Faden finding her brother Dylan, cleansing him of the infection by the all-powerful Hiss, and leaving him and the place known as The Oldest House under lockdown. Jesse became the Director of the FBC (Federal Bureau of Control) and promised to figure out a way to fix whatever had broken reality in New York City, allowing enemies from an extradimensional space to invade Gotham. Come to think of it: With its reality-shaking vision of Lovecraftian creatures that might literally be from Hell, “Control” has a bit of “Event Horizon” in its DNA, too.
Seven years after the Hiss invaded the Oldest House, Jesse wakes up Dylan and promptly disappears. Dylan becomes the hero of “Resonant,” which is one of many elements that give it a different aesthetic from its predecessor. One thing that takes a bit of getting used to is that this is not “Control 2” for a reason. It is a very different experience, trading the tight location work of the Oldest House for open-world gameplay with multiple zones and far more freedom of choice.
Early in “Resonant,” Dylan aligns with an FBC agent named Zoe de Vera, a companion who speaks to Dylan through the PS5 controller. You work with Zoe to figure out how an event called the “Patterning” has divided New York City from reality, leading to the invasion by thousands of creatures that want Dylan dead. As in many open-world games, you’re free to roam as Dylan, though the developers brilliantly layer in new powers for Faden that unlock new regions, combat approaches, and different enemies. The game balances wiping out packs of routine enemies, the occasional fight with a Resonant or boss, and alternating story and main missions.
The “Resonant” developers lean into significantly more RPG elements with Dylan than they did with Jesse. Skill trees, magical items, various weapons to choose for a loadout—it’s all deeply customizable. That said, combat works similarly no matter the angle you take. It’s mostly melee-based combat with a steady flow of strike-and-dodge mechanics, but you can also unlock special powers through game progress, including summoning allies to fight alongside you and hurling projectiles.
My first few hours with “Resonant” were mixed. It truly does require you to recalibrate expectations after the relatively linear first game. I found myself wandering New York City, unsure what to do and wondering why the story missions were kicking my ass. The answer is that this game doesn’t just encourage exploration; it requires it. You can’t push through only the story missions in “Resonant” because you won’t be strong enough. You need to complete side missions to level up and become strong enough to take on enemies like Resonants, but you also need to explore the city, wandering into places like laundromats and gyms to find upgrade resources.
After a couple of hours, “Resonant” kicks into gear and doesn’t look back. Several missions in this game rank among the best of the last several years, including one where you escape a sinkhole and one where Dylan plays with shadows of himself and a younger Jesse that are unquestionably moving. This game does things narratively that would terrify most writers’ rooms in games, TV, or film. The missions can be so wildly unpredictable—one minute you’re guiding a magical cat to fight a demon and the next you’re battling mold spore creatures that look like the kin of Bloaters from “The Last of Us.”
You can never quite tell where “Resonant” is going, which gives it the storytelling power of great film or television. It’s got enough authorial decisions through customization and exploration to make you feel like you’re in “Control,” but it also contains remarkably confident writing, not just in plot but dialogue and character work as well.
And then there’s the navigation. After a few clunky hours where even getting around NYC can feel tough, Dylan gains two powers: one that can pull him to points on buildings above him, and one that can basically turn the entire world on its axis. You know that scene in “Inception” wherein Elliot Page’s character flips the city on itself and they “walk up” a street?
Now imagine that in gameplay. While it sounds almost impossibly disorienting, the developers use it in just the right places, allowing Dylan to control not just through superpowered combat but by shifting the entire world around him. It leads to some of the most stunning level design in years, especially late in the game when the entire setting becomes pliable.
What Remedy Entertainment is doing with the “Alan Wake” and “Control” games is unlike anything else on the market. They’re accomplishing what so many great artists have done: Pushing back against the rules and expectations put on their form by so many years of conforming creators. We can argue all day about the definitions of art, but the ambition in “Control Resonant” is a sibling of what we so often look for in literature, film, or theatre, too. It’s that charge we all get when we can tell something is working in a way we haven’t really experienced before. Maybe more than any game this year, “Resonant” has it.
The Publisher provided a review copy of this title. It is now available on PS5, Xbox Series, and Windows.
