For two and a half hours, the lead character in Ildikó Enyedi’s multi-generational drama doesn’t utter a single word, nor move an inch. Yet, our star suggests a rich “inner life”, simply by…being. Alright, it’s a tree.
More specifically, it’s a huge ginkgo tree, housed on the campus of a venerable German university in Marburg. The ginkgo remains the constant in a triptych of narratives set at the school over a period spanning 100-plus years: the travails of a young woman at the turn of the 20th Century who is the university’s first female science grad, a shy young man who pines for a fellow student in the early 1970s, and a visiting professor from China who gets stranded on campus during the early days of the COVID pandemic.
Enyedi ties his disparate story threads together in much the same manner one nurtures a plant; he patiently observes, knows when to illuminate a plot point, and is careful not to over-water grace notes. The tree, in the meantime, says nothing; but ultimately, it stands for everything. That’s the beauty of this film.
Rémi Bezanço’s comedy-mystery is a winking homage to Rear Window (reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery). A Parisian couple-an agoraphobic mystery writer and his wife (a film professor specializing in…Hitchcock) fear they may have witnessed a neighbor doing away with his wife following a spat. A well-trod course of amateur sleuthing hi-jinks ensues; but it’s bolstered by a clever construct, lots of laughs, genuine suspense, and the charming performances by the two lead actors.
I swear, it seems like you can’t swing a dead Cat-5 around these days without hitting another hand-wringing report about our imminent enslavement by A-I (or, at the very least, a trip to the unemployment line). Not to mention environmental concerns that stem from massive amounts of electricity being sucked from the grid in order to power the huge data centers.
Indeed, those are all legitimate concerns, but thankfully not the main focus of Valerie Veatch’s documentary, which doesn’t extrapolate on A-I’s application but rather, the makeup of its disposition.
To wit: Is A-I racist?
You may (or may not) be surprised to learn that there is a sizable overlap in the Venn diagram connecting the development of A-I with the history of eugenics theory. Veatch devotes a good chunk of the film to this aspect. It’s a fascinating (if disturbing) history lesson.
It gets worse. The biggest revelation for me was a segment revealing what may be the A-I techbros’ dirtiest little secret: outsourcing and exploiting workers in African nations to do data labeling and content moderation (all at poverty wages). The interviews with workers are eye-opening…and enraging. Welcome to digital colonialism.
While it may not be the definitive overview of the A-I revolution, it will give you pause for thought the next time you cozy up on the couch to debate with Claude about whether it was Han or Greedo who shot first.
(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on May 9, 2026)
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that that nearly all Hitler era Nazis were Germans (granted, there was the odd Austrian). But it still makes people twitch when you say that not all Germans were card-carrying Nazis.
There have been films that flirt with that conundrum (Das Boot, The Good German, Schindler’s List, et. al.). Amrum is the latest film to do same. Director Fatih Akin (who also co-wrote, along with Hark Bohm) sets his story during the waning days of the war, focusing on the tenuous relationship between “mainlanders” who have fled bombed-out German cities to resettle on a resource-strained North Sea island and the resentful local residents. The narrative unfolds through the eyes of a 12 year-old boy, as he comes to grips with revelations about his family’s Nazi past.
I was reminded of John Boorman’s Hope and Glory; while that was a childhood memoir about a boy coming of age in wartime London, there is a commonality as to the effects of war on those still too young to fully grasp the concept of “borders”, much less political ideology.
Winston Churchill once said: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.” It’s tough to argue with that, especially after watching one of the most gripping political thrillers I’ve seen in some time. Actually, The Seoul Guardians is a documentary; but no less of a nail-biting thrill ride than John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May or Costa-Gavras’ Z.
On December 3, 2024, democratically elected South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, alleging political collusion between opposition party members and the North Korean government. Almost immediately, something truly extraordinary occurred- citizens, journalists, and parliamentarians spontaneously leapt into action (spoiler alert: democracy won the day).
You likely already know the gist of the story (it was all over the news), but the most dramatic and decisive moments took place inside (and outside) of the National Assembly chamber, during the course of one evening. Co-directors Jong-woo Kim, Shin-Wan Kim, and Chul-Young Cho have masterfully assembled a riveting, “fly on the wall” narrative, culled from reams of real-time footage recorded by citizens and journalists as the events of the night unfolded.
It’s like watching January 6th in reverse. Instead of an aberrant president inciting a mob of citizens to storm Congress in a brazen attempt to stop legislators from doing their jobs (thereby thwarting the democratic process), here you have a mob of citizens storming their National Assembly to help protect their elected representatives from the soldiers sent by an aberrant president to stop legislators from doing their jobs.
Hong Kong director Tommy Ng Kai Chung’s animated fantasy is an epic tale of the venerable “heaven can wait” variety (with musings on reincarnation). A young girl, unaware that she has crossed over into the afterlife, meets a spiritual guide who somewhat reluctantly flouts the restrictions of his assigned duties in order to help her find her lost brother. In the interim, suffice it to say that (to shamelessly paraphrase Yoda) she may only find what she takes with her.
This one’s not necessarily for the kids; as it deals with the darker sides of human nature, specifically with our propensity to repeat the same self-destructive behaviors for time immemorial (then again…they’ve got to learn sometime, right?). Intense and immersive.
One of my personal Rules of Cinema is that “nothing good ever happens at an isolated manor”. Rebecca meets The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith in first-time director Taratoa Stappard’s gothic horror/culture clash drama (set in 1859).
A travel-weary young Māori woman (Ariana Osborne) arrives at (wait for it) an isolated English manor. She’s made the trek from New Zealand in response to a letter from the wealthy head of the estate, who claims to have some deep background to share regarding her (apparently) mysterious past. The (initially) gracious gentleman offers her a position tutoring his daughter; tossing in room and board. However, Mārama remains palpably wary-especially once the red flags begin to unfurl.
The sociopolitical allegory is righteous and duly noted, but I should advise that the Grand Guignol climax may be a bit much for squeamish viewers. Still, it’s an impressive directorial debut, and I found the intense, unpredictable performance by Osborne compelling.
Filmmakers Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak share much more than the directing credits for this autobiographical documentary-they are longtime professional colleagues…and life partners. Those various degrees of collaboration didn’t hatch all at once; their “against the odds” relationship has rendered a love story as deeply personal and politically expansive as Reds or Doctor Zhivago.
Lebanese journalist Janay Boulos was working as a producer for the BBC (based in London) when the Syrian revolution exploded in the spring of 2011 after the brutal Assad regime reacted to widespread street protests with lethal force. At the time, Syrian activist and cameraman Abd Alkader Habak was living in Aleppo. Since reporters were forbidden from entering the city, Boulos needed a source who was already on the ground. Hence (as they say)…it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Drawn from 13 years worth of personal archives, the resulting film delivers a real-life tale of love and war that is by turns touching and harrowing, and ultimately…hopeful.
SIFF has certainly grown exponentially since its first incarnation in 1976 (in case the math is making you crazy, festival organizers “skipped” the 13th event; you know how superstitious show people get about Scottish kings and such). Compare the numbers: In 1976, the Festival boasted a whopping 19 films from 9 countries, with one lone venue. Then again, there were only 13 people on the staff in 1976.
Regardless of how large or small the staff, the one constant over the decades has been the quality of the curation. Long before “sharing files” (or even making mix tapes) was a thing, SIFF’s annual lineup reflected that sense of joy in turning friends on to something new and exciting; instilling the sense there was a tangible film lover’s community (others who enjoyed being alone together, out there in the dark).
The first SIFF event I ever attended was a screening of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, in 1993. Linklater was there for a Q&A session afterwards. That was the first time I’d ever had a chance to ask the director of a film a question right after the credits rolled (I wasn’t writing about film yet-just a movie geek). I can’t remember what I asked (some dopey query about the 70s soundtrack), but I thought that was so fucking cool (I’d recently moved to Seattle after living in a cultural vacuum for a decade-what can I say?). Another memorable event I attended that year was a tribute to John Schlesinger (with the director on hand).
This will be the 34th SIFF I’ve attended (in one guise or the other). As (an alleged) film critic, I have been covering SIFF for Hullabaloo now for 20 years (since 2007), but as always, the looming question is – where to begin? The trick to navigating festivals is developing a 6th sense for films in your wheelhouse (I embrace my OCD and channel it like a cinematic dowser).
Let’s dive in!
This year’s Opening Night Gala selection is I Love Boosters (USA). Writer-director Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You) incorporates themes of social justice into a modern-day Robin Hood story that concerns “a crew of professional shoplifters [who] take aim at a cutthroat fashion maven”.
Speaking of heists…let’s go do some crimes: Murder in the Building (France) is a comedy mystery about “a crime writer and his film professor partner [who] become caught up in a real-life mystery of their own when they witness a crime in the apartment across the courtyard of their Paris apartment building.” Also from France…Case 137, a police procedural drama that follows a female internal affairs officer as she investigates the unprovoked fatal police shooting of a young protester at a Paris demonstration (sounds depressingly familiar).
I’m particularly intrigued to see Phoenix Jones: The Rise and Fall of a Real Superhero (USA). The documentary recounts the story of Benjamin Fodor, a self-proclaimed crime-fighter who garnered local media attention when he donned a bullet-proof superhero-style costume and roamed the streets of Seattle in the 2010s “to deescalate dangerous situations and keep the peace until the police could arrive.” The SPD were not fans, labeling him a vigilante.
Another documentary that examines a “hero or criminal?” conundrum is Beat the Lotto (Ireland). Director Ross Whitaker goes back to the early 1990s to tell the story of “mathematician and avid stamp-collector” Stefan Klincewicz, who calculated a meticulously engineered method to beat the odds and (aspirationally) win Ireland’s National Lottery, involving a “syndicate” of participants who spent countless hours marking lotto cards.
Politics, politics…The documentary The Seoul Guardians (South Korea) delves into more recent history, recalling the astonishing events that unfolded after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in December 2024 (spoiler alert: Democracy won!). In J.M. Harper’s documentary Soul Patrol (USA), members of the Vietnam War’s first all-Black special operations team reunite to illuminate “a chapter of American military history that has long gone unacknowledged.”
In the documentary Birds of War (UK), “Lebanese journalist Janay Boulos and Syrian activist and cameraman Abd Alkader Habak share their extraordinary love story, told through 13 years of personal archives spanning revolutions, war, and exile”. Life under fascism: Juan Pablo Sallato’s The Red Hangar (Chile) is a political thriller set In the aftermath of the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, and Amrum (Germany) is a coming-of-age drama set in a politically-divided German farming town on a North Sea island in the waning days of World War II.
SIFF’s special revival presentations are always a treat. This year, it’s Prisoners of the Earth (Argentina, 1939) Mario Soffici’s “gut-punching work of social realism”, in which “a group of desperate men are conscripted to labor on a treacherous plantation—a situation that boils over in an explosive act of rebellion”. Sadly, the exploitation of low-wage workers remains an evergreen theme.
More drama: Burn (Japan) centers on a runaway teen who flees her abusive parents and “lands in Tokyo’s Kabukicho district, where a loose-knit group of street kids offers her a fragile sense of belonging—one built on survival, impulse, and unspoken wounds”. In Three of a Kind (Denmark), “a mother and daughter’s cozy Christmas is upended when their estranged grandmother shows up at their cabin”. And no SIFF would be complete without at least one “oil and water” road movie…Crystal Cross is the story of “a quirky Christian singer and a suicidal loner [who] road trip across America, forging an unlikely bond”.
I’m always partial to films about the music biz: Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth’s documentary Broken English (UK) profiles icon Marianne Faithfull. The Best Summer (USA) is “a found footage documentary from a concert tour in 1995 featuring live performances, candid interviews, and a behind-the-scenes view of what it’s like to be on tour with Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Beck, Pavement, Rancid, The Amps, and Bikini Kill”. Cool! Edie Arnold is a Loser (USA) is billed as “an infectiously charming coming-of-age flick about a self-proclaimed loser starting a punk band at her Catholic high school”. And Power Ballad (Ireland) stars Paul Rudd as “a past-his-prime wedding singer” who befriends “a fading boy-band star” (Nick Jonas) who “turns one of [Rudd’s] songs into a hit, reigniting his career”.
I haven’t forgotten about the midnight crowd: Mārama (New Zealand), Taratoa Stappard’s feature debut, is “an anti-colonial horror story confronting oppression while honoring the strength and resilience of Māori women”. Tacoma-based filmmaker Zach Weintraub’s Assets and Liabilities (USA) concerns “a burnt-out suburban dad who is taken on a wild supernatural odyssey when he meets a skater kid at the park who reminds him of his younger, more idealistic self”. Lady (UK) is billed as an “absurdly hilarious mockumentary”, in which “a young filmmaker agrees to film the behind-the-scenes vanity project of the obnoxiously entitled Lady Isabella, only for something unseen and quite strange to happen”. And Another World (Hong Kong) is “a harrowing, arrestingly rendered epic of revenge and redemption that announces director Tommy Kai Chung Ng as a massive new voice in the world of animation”.
Midnight movie adjacent: The documentary Boorman and the Devil (USA) is David Kittredge’s examination (autopsy?) of what went horribly wrong with the production of Exorcist II: The Heretic, and how it nearly sunk director John Boorman’s otherwise stellar career (Point Blank, Deliverance, Excalibur, et.al.) I mean, what possessed him to…oh never mind.
This year’s Closing Night Gala selection is The Invite (USA). Starring Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton, Olivia Wilde’s film is about a couple with a rocky marriage who “invite their enigmatic upstairs neighbors for a dinner party”, during the course of which (wait for it)” the night spirals into unexpected places.”. Wilde is scheduled to attend.
Obviously, I’ve barely scratched the surface of this year’s lineup. I’ll be plowing through the catalog and sharing reviews with you beginning next Saturday. In the meantime, visit the SIFF site for full details on the films, event screenings, special guests, and more.
(You can explore 20 years of my SIFF reviews here)
(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on April 25, 2026)
Right now, the Arabs have screwed us out of enough American dollars to come right back and with our own money buy General Moters, IBM, ITT, AT&T, DuPont, US Steel, and 20 other American companies. Hell, they already own half of England! So, listen to me. Listen to me, God damn it. The Arabs are simply buying us! There’s only one thing that can stop them. You! You!I want you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the phone. I want you to get up from your chairs, go to the phone and get in your cars, drive into the Western Union offices in town. I want you to send a telegram to the White House… By midnight tonight, I want a million telegrams at the White House. I want them wading, knee-deep in telegrams at the White House. I want you to get up right now and write a telegram to President Ford saying, “I’m as mad as Hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore! I don’t want the banks selling my country to the Arabs. I want the CCA deal stopped! Now! I want the CCA deal stopped! Now!”
– Howard Beale, from Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976); screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky
Last night [President Trump] motorcaded over to a dinner hosted by Paramount, which is awaiting Trump administration approval for its bid to buy CNN’s parent Warner Bros. Discovery. The dinner invite said Paramount would be “honoring the Trump White House and CBS White House correspondents.” Anti-Trump and anti-Paramount protesters held signs and wore costumes outside, some ridiculing David Ellison by name.” “Block the Trump-Ellison merger,” one of the signs said.
For purposes of the president’s travel, the dinner was deemed “closed press,” which meant the TV press pool representative (who happened to be from CBS!) and other pool journalists were not allowed inside. Some of my CBS sources are still being tight-lipped this morning. But I’m told that editor in chief Bari Weiss and president Tom Cibrowski were both there, along with a handful of CBS correspondents from the DC bureau who were invited and attended in an off the record capacity.
Yesterday underscored how much Paramount-WBD has become a political football. The day began with an anti-merger protest outside WBD’s headquarters in NYC. The city’s mayor Zohran Mamdani also added his name to the list of opponents.
Then the virtual WBD shareholder vote took place and, as expected, the deal was “overwhelmingly” approved. Trump allies like Jason Miller, who reportedly advised an investor on Paramount’s side, celebrated on social media.
Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren quickly came out and said “the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger isn’t a done deal. State attorneys general across the country are stepping up to stop this antitrust disaster. We need to keep up this fight.”
California AG Rob Bonta, appearing on MeidasTouch with Scott MacFarlane, strongly suggested that his office will sue to block the deal in the coming weeks. There are “red flags everywhere,” he said. But he also noted that “we haven’t decided yet our formal position.”
The day concluded with Trump and Ellison breaking bread together off-camera. Paramount execs continue to project confidence that they’ll receive all the necessary regulatory sign-offs between now and September…
Other questions of political influence (regarding the pending Warner-Paramount merger) have piled up. The Justice Department and company leadership have maintained that politics will not play a role in the regulatory process. But Trump himself has publicly waded into Warner’s future at times, despite backpedalling on what he once suggested his personal role would be.
Trump also has a close relationship with the Ellison family, particularly billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who is putting billions of dollars on the table to back the bid for his son’s company.
Meanwhile, Paramount has secured money from several sovereign investment funds — including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, as well as funds from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, per regulatory filings. But such investors will not have voting rights in a future Paramount-Warner combo, the filings noted. Paramount has not publicly specified how much they’re contributing.
Other countries, including European regulators, are scrutinizing the deal.
Shares of Paramount fell nearly 6 per cent on after Thursday’s vote, and Warner Bros. slipped as well.
Writing, as I do, about the movies, I am prone to frequently quote from them. And if there is one film I am prone to quote from more often than most these days (well, Dr. Strangelove aside), it is Network.
Back in 1976, this satire made us chuckle with its outrageous conceit-the story of a “fictional” TV network who hits the ratings g-spot with a nightly newscast turned variety hour, anchored by a self-proclaimed “angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisy of our time”.
50 years later, the film plays like a documentary (denouncing the hypocrisy of our time). The prescience of the infinitely quotable Paddy Chayefsky screenplay goes deeper than prophesying the onslaught of news-as-entertainment (and “reality” television)-it’s a blueprint for our age. As I wrote in a 2015 piece:
I love it. Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups: “The Death Hour”. A great Sunday night show for the whole family.
-from Network, screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky
There is an oft-repeated lament that Hollywood and/or television has “run out of original ideas”. Which is (mostly) true, but not necessarily indicative of a dearth of talent or creativity in the business. The blame for this particular writer’s block, I believe, can be laid fairly and squarely at the feet of…Reality.
Short of plundering Middle Earth or the comic book universe for ideas, it’s getting harder to dream up a scenario as “outlandish” as, say, having to undergo a security check before taking your seat at a movie theater, or as “unthinkable” as switching on the local TV news and witnessing the horror of what happened to the 2 WDBJ reporters and the interviewee while live on air last Wednesday.
You’re television incarnate, Diana. Indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer.
-from Network, screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky
While just as horrified and empathetic as anyone in their right mind should be when the WDBY story broke, I’m sad to report that I wasn’t necessarily surprised. It was only a matter of time. The on-camera assassination of two TV reporters filing an innocuous story about a mall seemed a relatively tiny jump from the random murders of two theater patrons in Lafayette earlier this month…who likely assumed they weren’t risking violent death by seeking out 2 hours of escapism at the matinee showing of a romantic comedy.
In the opening scene of Network, drunken buddies Peter Finch (as Howard Beale, respected news anchor about to suffer a mental breakdown on-air and morph into “the mad prophet of the airwaves”) and William Holden (as Max Shumacher, head of the news division for the “UBS” network) riff on an imaginary pitch for a news rating booster-“Real live suicides, murders, executions-we’ll call it The Death Hour.”
Soon afterwards, Beale shocks colleagues and viewers by going off-script during one of his nightly newscasts and soberly announcing:
“I would like at this moment to announce that I will be retiring from this program in two weeks’ time because of poor ratings. Since this show is the only thing I had going for me in my life, I’ve decided to kill myself. I’m going to blow my brains out right on this program a week from today. So tune in next Tuesday. That should give the public relations people a week to promote the show. You ought to get a hell of a rating out of that. 50 share, easy.”
The network’s initial impulse is, of course, to take Beale off the air for an indeterminate hiatus; but Howard begs Max to give him one more chance, if only to publicly apologize for what he essentially describes as a momentary lapse of reason. Reluctantly, Max acquiesces.
When the following evening’s newscast (during which Beale once again goes off the rails) attracts an unprecedented number of viewers, some of the more unscrupulous programmers and marketers at the network smell a potential cash cow, and decide to let Beale rant away in front of the cameras to his heart’s content, reinventing him as a “mad prophet of the airwaves” and giving him a nightly prime time slot. The “show” (as it can really no longer be described as a “newscast”) becomes a smashing success.
Eventually, some of the truthiness in his nightly “news sermons” hits too close to home with network brass when Beale outs a pending business deal the network has made with shadowy Arab investors, and it is decided that his show needs to be cancelled (with extreme prejudice). Besides, his ratings are slipping.
The most famous scene in the film is Beale’s “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” tirade, a call to arms (borne from a “cleansing moment of clarity”) for viewers to turn off the tube, break the spell of their collective stupor, literally stick their heads out the window and make their voices heard. It’s a memorable and inspired set piece.
For me, the most defining scene is between Beale and Arthur Jensen (CEO of “CCA”-wonderfully played by Ned Beatty). Jensen is calling Beale on the carpet for publicly exposing a potential buyout of CCA by shadowy Arab investors. Cognizant that Beale is crazy as a loon, yet still a cash cow for the network, Jensen hands him a new set of stone tablets from which to preach-the “corporate cosmology of Arthur Jensen”. I think it is screenwriter Chayefsky’s finest monologue.
Beatty picked up a Best Actor in a Supporting Role Oscar (just for that one scene!). The entire cast is superb. Faye Dunaway, who won a Best Actress statue for her performance, steals all of her scenes as Diana Christenson, the soulless, ratings obsessed head of development who schemes to turn Beale’s mental illness into revenue (“You’re television incarnate, Diana,” Max tells her at one point.) William Holden was nominated for Best Actor, for scenes like this:
Holden lost to fellow cast member Peter Finch, who was awarded with a Best Actor Oscar posthumously (sadly, he passed away shortly after filming wrapped). I have to say, that particular monologue about “primal doubts” is much more resonant to me at age 70 than it was the first time I saw Network during its first theatrical run in 1976 at age 20.
Another well-deserved Oscar went to Beatrice Straight. She had a bit more screen time than Ned Beatty, but likewise earned her statue for one particular scene (and it’s a doozy).
Robert Duvall was curiously overlooked for his indelible performance as corporate “hatchet man” Frank Hackett; but the Academy did award a statue to Paddy Chayefsky for Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. Sidney Lumet was nominated for Best Director, and the film nominated for Best Picture, but lost to Rocky in both categories.
Fans of the film will be happy to learn that it has (finally!) been given the Criterion treatment. The package features a new 4K digital restoration, which is a noticeable picture upgrade from all previous editions (I’ve owned them all), and a crisp uncompressed monaural soundtrack.
Extras include an archival audio commentary by the late director, Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words (2025), an excellent feature-length documentary about the screenwriter by Matthew Miele (it premiered last year on TCM), a six-part “making of” documentary from 2006, and an insightful written essay by writer and New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.
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