Tag Archives: SIFF Reviews

Drama, Drug Culture, Family Issues, Troubled Teens

SIFF 2026: Burn (***)

May 14, 2026 Dennis Hartley

By Dennis Hartley

Makoto Nagahisa’s Burn is an ensemble piece reminiscent of the uncompromising youth subculture dramas by outsider filmmakers like Gregg Araki and Larry Clark. A teenage girl, fed up with being constantly ostracized and physically abused by her strict, ultra-religious parents, runs away from home and ends up in Tokyo’s red light district. She is welcomed into a community of street kids, who, like her, are estranged from their families and psychically damaged in one way or the other. You could call it a support system by definition, but it’s a tenuous one at best, as she eventually comes to learn. Frankly, it’s a bit of a downer, but the impressive young cast commits 100% to this realistic, brutally honest portrait of life on the fringe.

Dramedy, Family Issues

SIFF 2026: Three of a Kind (***)

May 14, 2026 Dennis Hartley

By Dennis Hartley

My favorite line from The Lion in Winter is King Henry’s quip “What shall we hang, the holly or each other?” One thing remains as true now as it did in the 12th Century: nothing evokes “family dysfunction” like the vision of a good old-fashioned holiday gathering.

Charlotte Brodthagen’s dramedy opens with a twenty-something college student (Freja Klint Sandberg) and her mother (Lene Maria Christensen) settling in to their family’s cabin in the Danish woodlands for their annual mother-daughter Christmas celebration. Everything seems to be going swimmingly, until long-estranged grandma (Birthe Neumann) crashes the party. As to what ensues next…if I may quote from I, Claudius: “Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.” Ho ho ho!

This is familiar territory; but the keenly observant screenplay (by Brodthagen and Simon Weil) is tempered with just enough deadpan Scandinavian humor to keep the melodrama from boiling over, and the three leads deliver outstanding performances.

Comedy, Horror

SIFF 2026: Assets and Liabilities (**)

May 13, 2026 Dennis Hartley

By Dennis Hartley

If you’ve been lamenting the lack of a midlife crisis horror comedy tailored for the skate punk crowd, you’ve got one now. Whether that is an asset or a liability is, I suppose, in the eye of the beholder.

Writer-director Zach Weintraub casts himself as a harried middle-age suburban Seattle dad with a corporate gig and a thousand-yard stare that suggests midlife ennui. When his wife and toddler daughter go off on a day trip, he decides to take a mental health day from work. He smokes a blunt, dons jeans, a tee and a faded flannel shirt, digs his old board out of the garage and heads for the skate park to see if he still has the moves.

At the park, he meets and bonds with a neophyte skater who obviously reminds him of his own halcyon days. He offers the young man a ride home; however once he learns the address of the house, things get weird. Then things proceed to get even…weirder.

The first half of the film (which is an amusing suburban satire) doesn’t prepare you for the second half (gross-out body horror). I was fine with the twists and turns, but Weintraub’s particular fixation with various excretory functions was a deal-breaker for me.

Drama

SIFF 2026: Silent Friend (****)

May 12, 2026 Dennis Hartley

By Dennis Hartley

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.

Comedy, Mystery

SIFF 2026: Murder in the Building (***1/2)

May 12, 2026 Dennis Hartley

By Dennis Hartley

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.

Documentary

SIFF 2026: Ghost in the Machine (***)

May 11, 2026 Dennis Hartley

By Dennis Hartley

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.

Drama, Family Issues, School Days, War

SIFF 2026: Amrum (***1/2)

May 10, 2026 Dennis Hartley

By Dennis Hartley

(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.

Documentary, On Politics

SIFF 2026: The Seoul Guardians (****)

May 9, 2026 Dennis Hartley

By Dennis Hartley

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.

We should be so lucky.

Animated, Fantasy

SIFF 2026: Another World (***1/2)

May 9, 2026 Dennis Hartley

By Dennis Hartley

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.

Culture Clash, Family Issues, Horror, Mystery

SIFF 2026: Mārama (***)

May 9, 2026 Dennis Hartley

By Dennis Hartley

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.