What is in the News?

For generations, Indigenous women in Mexico have understood the vast power of mushrooms—medicinal, culinary, spiritual, toxic. Their knowledge has been calibrated and passed down matrilineal channels, not unlike the mycelial network that connects individual mushrooms to one another underneath rich soil.  In Daughters of the Forest, Mexican filmmaker Otilia Portillo Padua documents two specific women, Lis and Juli, who reside with their families in these verdant enclaves. While they both possess a wealth of ancestral knowledge about mushrooms, Lis and Juli hope to distinguish themselves within academia. But there is no tension between homeopathy and science here. Instead, the women Source

Rachel Mason’s gripping true crime doc My Brother’s Killer is, first and foremost, a love letter. My Brother’s Killer emerged, in part, from Rachel Mason’s previous documentary Circus of Books, named after her parents’ West Hollywood gay porn bookstore, where she grew up enamored by the men who frequented it. Her latest film is also an ode to West Hollywood’s famed yet notorious stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard of the 1990s. Moreover, it is a love letter to a VHS era; a magazine era; a video awards era (ushered in by the likes of Chi Chi LaRue); a cyberpunk era Source

Filmmaker is heading to the 40th edition of SXSW, where myself and several talented contributors will be on the ground filing interviews and dispatches from various corners of Austin’s city limits. This year’s lineup is massive—with 119 feature films alone—and we happily assume the daunting role of covering buzzy world premieres and hidden gems alike.  Speaking of world premieres, there’s an expected emphasis on genre fare among this year’s crop. Irish low-budget maverick Damian McCarthy scales up with Hokum, a folk-tinged rental house horror that provokes chills through its trailer alone. This releases via Neon just two and a half Source

In the opening beats of The Bride!, the second feature written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the ghost of Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) mutters to herself from some dark corner of the subconscious ether. She rasps about the sequel to her most iconic work, Frankenstein, that she never got to write before she died in 1851. What would this hypothetical book be, she wonders: “Is it a horror story, a ghost story, or, most frightening of all, a love story?”  What follows is a cat-and-mouse road movie, a jewel-toned Jazz Age thriller, a romantic caper following Frankenstein’s monster—who goes by Source

The Columbia, Missouri-based True/False Film Festival kicks off its 23rd edition, one that boasts a particularly exciting lineup of non-fiction films, musical performances, and coinciding art installations.  Running from March 5–8, the theme for the 2026 program is “You Are Here,” chosen by visiting artistic director Yance Ford. The director of acclaimed docs Strong Island (2017) and Power (2024) is intimately familiar with the politics of place: Nominated for an Academy Award, Strong Island documents the racially-motivated killing of Ford’s brother in Long Island; more broadly, Power charts the creation of modern American policing.  Both films have screened at previous Source

“I found a way to look into the universe,” says non-fiction Australian filmmaker Josef Gatti in his feature debut Phenomena. Paradoxically, it turns out that the wonders of the universe are perceptible right here on Earth—so long as one has a laissez-faire approach to homemade (and often dangerous) science experiments and access to high-tech camera equipment capable of capturing molecular reactions in real-time.  These reactions, subatomic as they may be, possess a staggering beauty. Guided in part by his father, a physics professor, Gatti trains his cinematic eye on the hypnotic (and yes, most would say downright “trippy”) visual effects Source

Thursday, March 5 marks the voting deadline for Oscar voters. For The Secret Agent, it’s the end of a long road. The Brazilian Oscar contender is a contender in four major categories, including Best Picture, a stunning outcome for the unique period drama set in the days of Brazil’s military dictatorship.  Meanwhile, another voting deadline looms around the corner in the movie’s home country.  In October, Brazilians will vote in the first round of presidential elections for the first time since their previous president, the far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro, lost to the Workers’ Party candidate Luis Inácio Lula da Silva Source

As we come to the end of a long awards season—the Oscars are, miraculously, less than two weeks away, and final voting closes this Thursday—it’s remarkable that the race feels as up-in-the-air as it did many months ago, before the contenders began screening for pundits and voters. The sure-things have now become the maybes; there’s only one performer whose acting trophy is a sure thing. I take pride in my ability to predict the winners at the Academy Awards. It’s a dubious skill I’ve been honing ever since I won my local video store’s Oscar pool back in high school. Source

“The Napa Boys—you’ve always known them, and they’re back.” It’s the kind of premise you could imagine only a very tired person nodding along with, but the way The Napa Boys—the new comedy from comedians Nick Corirossi and Armen Weitzman, the former directing and both serving as co-writers—went from this vague concept to a wide release with Magnolia Pictures somewhat beggars belief.  “I don’t know if [Magnolia] lost a bet…” Weitzman laughs in our interview. The most concise description of The Napa Boys might run something like “Sideways 4: Beta House,” with all the various and contradictory associations—Fox Searchlight dramedies, Source

Stellan Skarsgård is a celebrated Swedish actor whose career spans more than five decades across European and Hollywood cinema. He first gained attention in Scandinavia before becoming an international screen presence in films such as Breaking the Waves and Good Will Hunting. He went on to deliver acclaimed performances in movies like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Dune, Dune Part 2, and television series like Andor and Chernobyl. In his latest, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, Skarsgård gifts us with perhaps his most robust and richest work in the form of Gustav, a once-prominent filmmaker struggling to mend fractured ties with his daughters. On this episode, he details the environment Source

A bullet grazes the shin of matriarch Sohni Ammi (Farazeh Syed) at her beloved son’s wedding. It was a celebratory bullet; shooting guns into the air replaces fireworks in this part of provincial Pakistan. Even though Sohni Ammi just needed stitches, the groom’s family blamed the freak mishap on the ongoing curse of Zeba, the bride (Mamya Shajaffar), whose previous two marriages never materialized because the grooms-to-be died under mysterious circumstances. Her last fiancé was stung by a scorpion when the couple was making out on a dune, Zeba would later admit to her new husband, Sajawal (Channan Hanif), who Source

The Academy Awards are still three weeks away, but this is a vital week for the contenders. We’re approaching the end of campaigning, with the final Oscar voting opening on Feb. 26 and closing March 5. In between those dates are two key precursors: the Producer’s Guild Awards on Feb. 28 and the Actor Awards (formerly the SAG Awards) on March 1. Both events have strong—though not infallible—track records of foretelling the eventual Oscar winners. If Sunday’s BAFTAs ceremony proved anything, it’s that surprises and upsets can still happen. I’m not talking about the controversy that overshadowed the ceremony when Source

Before the Berlinale announced its official selection, it presented a remarkable retrospective entitled Lost in the 90s. Spanning wide geographies, with particular emphasis on narratives surrounding the Soviet collapse and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it brought together an eclectic cohort of documentaries and fiction—from Farocki and Godard to an underscreened Belarusian doc Orange Vests and the first fiction feature on the Chornobyl catastrophe Collapse.  Such a politically charged program of films by formally daring directors with an activist spirit could serve as an inspiring point of departure for the festival to adopt an openly political rhetoric. More precisely, Source

Amir Naderi is on the move. I connected with the Iranian filmmaker over WhatsApp on a chilly February morning, or at least morning where I am. He’s calling me from Rome, which is the second stop on his tour through Europe teaching classes on filmmaking. In every country he visits, he tells me, he shapes the curriculum around that nation’s cinema history. It’s a pedagogical approach that aptly reflects the cosmopolitanism of a filmmaker who has shot films in the United States, Japan, and Italy, and who hopes to potentially make a film in Australia. “If I can do it,” Source

One year after camera giants Nikon and RED Digital Cinema merged, their first collaboration comes with the release of the Nikon ZR full-frame digital cinema camera. The ZR differentiates itself from its mirrorless competitors—whether Panasonic’s LUMIX line, Sony’s FX line or Blackmagic cinema cameras—with its unique ability to record 12-bit REDCODE RAW (R3D NE), internally at up to 6K and 60 frames per second. And it’s available at the enviable price point of only $2,199. (By comparison, Sony’s full-frame FX3 costs nearly twice as much.) Surveying the camera body, its large 4-inch screen immediately stands out. The addition of an Source

Drumroll: Amy Adams stares at you. It’s intense—not haunting, but certainly not inviting. The camera pulls away, and it’s her character Laura who’s playing the drums. It’s daytime, there’s unremarkable company around. Music, no dance. Soon, she will leave the facility. Soon, she will return to her Cape Cod home, to her devoted yet frustrated husband Martin (Murray Bartlett), to her barely tolerant teenage daughter Josie (Chloe East), to her young son Felix (Redding Munsell) who scurries away from her embrace, to her dance company that made her famous but which she now wants to quit, and to the forbidden Source

Lady, the titular lead of Olive Nwosu’s neo-noir feature debut about a taxi driver’s gradual solidarity with a group of Lagosian sex workers, possesses a piercing gaze. She’s not scanning you as much as she is preemptively fending you off. In her red taxi she stalks the nocturnal streets of the largest city in Nigeria, very much her own person, the only lady cab driver in a city on the verge of revolution around eradicating gasoline subsidies. Played with fiery commitment by Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah, Lady doesn’t even necessarily care that she’s a “woman in a man’s world,” or if Source

“I have never seen the problem with fetishizing objects and fetishizing people as though they were objects,” director Amanda Kramer tells me in a conversation ahead of the release of her latest film, By Design. “It doesn’t mean we don’t also see the person for their soul…They elicit romance. They elicit seduction. There’s something drawing you in, compelling, alluring, and the object itself is not necessarily lesser-than because it’s looked at in this way.”  Kramer’s provocative theory is instructive. Her latest film, By Design, about a lonely woman named Camille (Juliette Lewis) who swaps bodies with a beautiful chair and Source

In a big studio-backed awards season, it’s rare to see much overlap between the Film Independent Spirit Awards and the Oscars. A west coast cousin of sorts to the Gotham Awards, the Indie Spirits often celebrate the movies that the Academy skipped over with its nominations. The ceremony itself is also more fun (there’s some day-drinking involved) than the more staid guild awards that dot the homestretch ahead of the similarly serious Academy Awards.  Having said that, the Indie Spirits still matter quite a bit to campaign strategists and the people who employ them. They take place in the heart Source

Samantha Smart is the lead actress, writer and producer of Charliebird, the feature debut of director Libby Ewing, which won the top prize at the 2025 Tribeca Festival, calling it “a deeply affecting portrait featuring grounded and complex performances.” On this episode, Smart describes the process of writing it, getting to a crisis point of wondering if she could still play the character she was creating for herself, and miraculously finding young Gabriela Ochoa Perez who skillfully plays Charlie. She details the fine-tuning that needed to happen with the central scene, how the camera operator’s energy affects actors, talks about her Source