• Pressure is a WWII drama about the 72 hours before D-Day, centered on the meteorologists whose weather forecast determined the invasion
• Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser play rival forecasters — Scott as British meteorologist James Stagg, Fraser as his American counterpart
• The film is directed by Anthony Maras and based on David Haig’s 2014 stage play
• Reviews are largely positive, with Andrew Scott drawing particular praise for his performance
• The Wrap is the main outlier, calling it “middling” — most critics land between “absorbing” and “superb”

You have probably never spent much time thinking about the meteorologists of D-Day. Pressure would like to change that.

The new WWII drama — directed by Anthony Maras and based on David Haig’s 2014 stage play — focuses on the 72 hours before June 6, 1944, and specifically on the clash between two rival forecasters: James Stagg, the British meteorologist played by Andrew Scott, and his American counterpart played by Brendan Fraser. General Eisenhower needed a weather window. The two men couldn’t agree on when — or whether — one was coming. The fate of the Allied invasion hung on whoever he believed.

It is, as IGN put it, “compelling, quality dad content” — which is a better compliment than it sounds.

The Reviews

Variety called it “handsome and efficient,” saying the film doesn’t quite claim that a weatherman won the war but “wouldn’t mind one bit if that’s what you came away believing.” The Hollywood Reporter praised Scott specifically, calling his performance “superb” and the film “tense.” Deadline described it as “thrilling” and noted that Eisenhower’s impossible choice between the two men generates genuine dramatic pressure.

The lone significant dissent comes from The Wrap, which found the historical anecdote too thin to sustain a full feature. It’s a reasonable concern — the premise is narrow — but the majority of critics seem to feel Maras and his cast make it work.

Scott vs. Fraser

The matchup is interesting on paper and apparently delivers in practice. Scott has been on a remarkable run since Ripley and All of Us Strangers; Fraser, following his Oscar win for The Whale, continues to make deliberate choices. Putting them across a table from each other in a room where the stakes are genuinely enormous turns out to be a good idea.

Pressure is in theaters now.

The post Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser Fight Over the D-Day Weather Forecast in ‘Pressure’ appeared first on Cream.

• Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters opens in theaters Friday from distributor Neon, rated R and running 115 minutes
• Keke Palmer leads an ensemble that includes Demi Moore, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Eiza González, Poppy Liu, LaKeith Stanfield and Don Cheadle
• The $20 million film — the largest production investment in Neon’s history — premiered at South by Southwest in March before a Bay Area premiere at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater
• Reviews are split: some critics call it irresistible summer fun, others find the comedy doesn’t always land and the third act goes off the rails
• Riley, a self-described communist for 30+ years, made the film as an explicit Marxist satire about fast fashion, workers’ rights and corporate greed

There is no one else making movies like Boots Riley right now. That much, at least, every critic agrees on. His follow-up to the 2018 cult hit Sorry to Bother You is a candy-colored, teleportation-powered, Marxist fashion heist comedy starring Keke Palmer — and it is exactly as wild as that sounds. I Love Boosters, which opens in theaters Friday via Neon, has been making audiences laugh so loudly at screenings that they drown out lines of dialogue. Whether it fully sticks the landing is another conversation. But as a piece of sheer cinematic ambition, it’s pretty hard to look away.

Palmer plays Corvette, a struggling Bay Area fashion designer who supports herself by boosting — stealing designer clothes from boutiques and selling them cheap to people who couldn’t otherwise afford them. She and her crew, the Velvet Gang — Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) — have built a whole operation around it. Mariah calls it “Triple F”: Fashion Forward Filanthropy. “She knows how to spell philanthropy,” she deadpans. “This is branding.”

Their target is Christie Smith, a billionaire fashion mogul played by a gloriously self-absorbed Demi Moore, who has not only stolen one of Corvette’s designs but runs an empire built on underpaid factory workers getting sick from sandblasting denim. (These are, as the film pointedly notes, all real things.) When Poppy Liu’s Jianhu — a Chinese factory worker who teleports herself to the Bay Area — joins the crew, the film’s second half kicks into a revenge caper that zips through time, space and dialectical materialism with gleeful abandon.

The ensemble also pulls in Eiza González as a vaping, revolutionary-minded retail worker named Violeta, who is literally forced to buy her own uniform out of her paycheck. Don Cheadle, buried under prosthetics and practically unrecognizable, plays a potbellied life coach. Will Poulter is magnificently fussy as a catty store manager. And LaKeith Stanfield — who first worked with Riley on Sorry to Bother You — plays a mysterious figure described variously as a discount brand model with a strange accent and a hypnotizing stare, and, in the Detroit News’s more colorful assessment, a sex demon. Stanfield says Riley pitched him the character before the script was even written: “He just said that it’s going to be a character unlike any character you played, which is true. And that it’s someone that is trying to find a way to connect to others. And this guy has been alive since the beginning of time. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is very interesting.'”

A Feast for the Eyes

Whatever you think of the story, the movie is a visual knockout. Costume designer Shirley Kurata — who brought her Oscar-winning imagination to Everything Everywhere All at Once — goes full maximalist here, decking the Velvet Gang in feathers, satins, silks and avant-garde color while Christie’s boutiques enforce a single color per month (the entire cast garbed in pea-soup green for one memorable sequence). Production designer Christopher Glass (Ms. Marvel, The Jungle Book) and set decorator Lizbeth Ayala (Civil War, Atlanta) round out a below-the-line team clearly operating at the top of their game.

The sight gags are something. Christie’s trendy atelier has a dramatically sloped floor — for aesthetics, presumably — which the designer navigates gamely but Corvette, who’s snuck in, cannot get out of without hilariously sliding backward. Store employees are given exactly 30 seconds for a lunch break, so they sprint from starting blocks. And Corvette, leaving a boutique after boosting a mountain of clothing stuffed under her tracksuit, hobbles out looking like an inflatable parade float on incongruously tiny heels. There’s also a teleportation device powered by Marxist dialectics, villains rendered in stop-motion animation, and a miniature car chase. Riley worked with cinematographer Natasha Braier (The Neon Demon) to make every frame feel as handmade and specific as possible. “For me, I’m heightening contradictions,” Riley says. “That’s also something I bring from music. You can talk all the time about what technically should work, but what matters is making you feel a certain thing.”

The score, by music duo Tune-Yards, punctuates the comedy with an eclectic pluckiness that fits Riley’s world perfectly.

The Man Behind the Movie

Riley, 55, has been calling himself a communist for more than 30 years without apology. He grew up in Oakland, got into activism young, and spent years as a musician — his long-running rap group the Coup released a song literally called “I Love Boosters” on their 2006 album Pick a Bigger Weapon, with lines like “Most of it was made by children in Asia / The stores make money off of very low wages.” The film isn’t a direct adaptation, he says, but they come from the same place.

At $20 million, I Love Boosters is the biggest production investment Neon has ever made. Riley is clear-eyed about what he wants from it. “The world that I hope to see created is one in which the people democratically control the wealth that they create with their labor,” he said during a recent interview, conducted while he was driving from his Oakland home to a San Francisco hotel for a full press day. “Now, why do I want that? That has to do with people. I like people and I think there’s a way that we can get there in order to counter those in power just doing whatever they want to do.”

He’s also been running a college promotional tour since the film’s South by Southwest premiere in March, and figures he’s seen it with audiences more than 25 times. “It’s always like a rock show,” he says. “I’ve been taking it back to the indie music days and just beating the cement.”

The film has drawn some online scrutiny over Riley’s collaboration with producer Megan Ellison, daughter of tech billionaire Larry Ellison. Riley doesn’t flinch. “So there’s no getting out of it. And also, that’s not my goal. That never was part of my goal. My goal is to help create class struggle and help to create this mass militant, radical labor movement.” He’s also been showing up to press events in a rotating collection of oversized hats — six of them, sourced from London shop Uptown Yardie — a habit he picked up around 2022 and briefly considered retiring before reconsidering. “I read a thing with Godard talking about how he had to make himself this character to sell his movies,” Riley says. “And you don’t think about Godard thinking about marketing. And so for me, I was like, ‘I gotta sell this movie. Let me bring the hat back out.'”

What Critics Think

Reviews have landed all over the map, which is probably exactly what Riley expected. The Seattle Times calls it “just the thing for summer” — funny, raunchy, and dressed in a rainbow-bright array of costumes, praising Palmer’s “wise and endearing” Corvette and Moore’s amusingly self-absorbed villain. (One particular highlight: the way Christie hands her chewed gum to her assistant like it’s a gift.) IGN goes further, calling the film “the cinematic equivalent of a song of the summer” and praising it as an improvement on Sorry to Bother You, with Palmer’s performance keeping the wackiness grounded when it needs to be.

The Associated Press is more measured, giving it two and a half out of four stars. That review admires Riley’s imagination and the film’s genuine style-and-substance combination but finds the laughs don’t quite land — “amusing and clever” rather than genuinely funny — and the climax more mind-numbing than rousing. The Houston Chronicle lands somewhere in between: a long, strange trip that’s about 15 minutes too long but still fuses pointed humor with a bold sense of the absurd. The Detroit News gives it a B, calling Palmer “a perfect fit for Riley’s world” and Stanfield’s mysterious energy another layer of bizarro fun.

The consensus thread, even among the more skeptical reviews: this is a film with something to say and a genuinely original way of saying it. In a marketplace full of franchises and IP, that counts for something.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cO3MrHffZDA%3Fsi%3DFpq6M1QWOEo_P8nc

Palmer, for her part, is the reason almost everyone agrees the film works as well as it does. Her comedic timing, her delivery of throwaway lines like “Now is not the time for nuance, Sade!” — she makes Corvette feel real inside a world that is anything but. Riley himself has described her as feeling like she’s “from the future.” After watching her carry a Marxist fashion heist comedy on her back with this much charisma, it’s hard to argue.

The post Keke Palmer Steals the Season in ‘I Love Boosters’ appeared first on Cream.

• Lukas Dhont’s third feature Coward premiered in competition at Cannes 2026, distributed by MUBI
• The WWI-set queer romance follows two Belgian soldiers — one stoic, one flamboyant — falling for each other behind the front lines
• Dhont was inspired by a real black-and-white photograph of a soldier cross-dressing in a sandbag skirt to perform for his unit
• Critics are split: Variety calls it his most mature film to date; The Hollywood Reporter says it’s hollow and emotionally fraudulent
• Leads Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne are making their major festival debuts in the film

Few directors working today generate quite as much passionate disagreement as Lukas Dhont. His first two films — Girl, about a trans teenager pursuing ballet, and Close, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature — were both acclaimed and contested in roughly equal measure, with admirers praising his emotional precision and detractors accusing him of exploiting vulnerable subjects for maximum tearjerker effect. With Coward, his third feature and his most ambitious by a wide margin, that divide hasn’t closed. If anything, it’s gotten wider.

Premiering in competition at Cannes 2026, Coward is a World War I love story between two Belgian soldiers: Pierre (Emmanuel Macchia), a broad-shouldered farmboy who barely speaks and flings himself into the violence of the front with grim determination, and Francis (Valentin Campagne), a willowy, theatrical tailor who forms a performing troupe to boost his fellow soldiers’ morale — dressing in elaborate drag costumes made from hessian sacks and parachute cloth. The two are drawn together first through the stage, then in something much harder to name in 1914.

The film is being released by MUBI, and was co-written by Dhont and his longtime collaborator Angelo Tijssens.

Where the Idea Came From

Dhont, 34, has been sitting with this story for four years. The spark was a single photograph. “It’s based on a black-and-white photograph I found four years ago of a young man right behind the frontlines dressed up in a sandbag skirt performing for the other soldiers,” he told Deadline at Cannes. “And I thought that it was something so modern in that picture, even though it was black and white, but seeing this young man cross-dressed, smiling in front of all these other men really inspired me to create something.”

The history of soldiers entertaining their comrades in drag troupes is well-documented — a form of bravery hiding in plain sight inside the most aggressively masculine environment imaginable. That tension is exactly what drew Dhont in. “It’s a part of history that I hadn’t seen portrayed before,” he told Variety. “That got my ideas flowing. I thought, ‘Wow, it would be really special to see these men creating a theater piece while in the background, there are explosions and the war is still going on and there’s death all around them.'”

He’s also acutely aware of where he lives. “I live in Flanders, so I live on the soil on which the First World War was fought,” he said. “When I drive around, I go past the cemeteries filled with the bodies of young men who gave their lives in order to fight. Making this film was nearly a transcendental act of bringing those stories back to life.”

What the Film Is Actually About

The title is doing a lot of work. On its surface, Coward refers to the soldiers who desert — men so broken by the carnage that they flee the trenches, even knowing execution awaits if they’re caught. But Dhont is after something bigger than a verdict on those men. “I wanted to examine our notions of heroism,” he said. “In war films, masculinity is portrayed in a very narrow way. There’s this idea that fighting for our country is always a noble goal, and the fear of being a coward has broken a lot of people or led to their deaths.”

He’s also thinking about the present. With war ongoing in Ukraine and the Middle East, and conversations about national service requirements resurfacing across Europe, Dhont says the film’s questions feel uncomfortably current. “I’m talking about the past but there’s a sense that I’m telling a story about something in the present. It makes you think: What would you do? Would you fight for your country? Or would you try to resist that circle of violence?”

And then there’s the queerness of it — which, for Dhont, is inseparable from the film’s central argument. In an era when homosexuality was criminalized, Pierre and Francis might never have found each other at all without the war throwing them together. The extreme danger of the front strips away social convention in ways peacetime never could. “What’s really interesting is that in those darkest of times, they are more free than society allows them to be, or that they will be when the war ends,” Dhont said. “Heroism throughout history has often been linked to a man’s ability to be brutal. I wanted to turn that upside down and talk about the amount of courage it takes to love.”

At Cannes, he put it even more plainly: the film questions “what it actually means to be brave… in choosing the truest parts of ourselves; in choosing to express ourselves, even when the world around us expects us to behave or to act in a certain way.”

It was, he admits, the hardest thing he’s ever made. “I was making a war film, but I needed to find a way to keep the intimacy that I love from my previous work,” he said. “It was an exercise in trying to create a scale and a world, which is much more ambitious in its production elements, but try to keep it truthful to the emotions of the characters.”

What the Critics Are Saying

Here’s where it gets complicated. The reviews out of Cannes are genuinely polarized in a way that feels almost designed to illustrate the ongoing Dhont debate.

Variety’s Guy Lodge is firmly in the admirer camp, calling Coward “pleasingly like a step forward” and “his most satisfying film to date” — notably because it pulls back from the battering-ram tragedy tactics that made Girl and Close so divisive. Lodge singles out a first kiss between Pierre and Francis as “among the most purely romantic gestures the movies have seen in a minute,” shot with “rapt, blissed-out, time-stopping intensity.” He praises Dhont’s “rich, tactile sense of how men — queer men especially, but not exclusively — watch other men,” and argues the film “thrives on that understanding.”

He also has warm words for the two leads. Macchia — making his screen debut — is described as “a gently stoic, aptly unformed presence with a stolid sadness in his trudging gait, who can go from boy to man with a slight shift in the light.” Campagne, Lodge writes, is “far more vocal” and “focus-pulling,” and the chemistry between them is “visible almost entirely in the different ways their bodies move and balance each other: one still, one quicksilver; one molded by the men around him, one brazenly opposing that physicality.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney lands in a very different place. He calls Coward a film that “reeks of manneristic affectation and phoniness,” and says Dhont “strains for lofty emotional peaks in moments that instead come off as hollow and artificial.” Where Lodge sees a swooning love story, Rooney sees leads with “minimal chemistry” — one inexpressive, one “archly theatrical” — and a director so enamored of his own formal elegance that the film never generates genuine heat. “I found this movie obstinately unaffecting,” he writes.

Rooney is particularly pointed about the film’s performance sequences, which he describes as escalating to the point of exhaustion — “Oh no, another f**king song?” — and notes that the WWI setting feels underpopulated and cramped, rarely conveying the true scale of the conflict. He compares it unfavorably to recent queer military films like Oliver Hermanus’ Moffie and Elegance Bratton’s The Inspection, as well as Hermanus’ recent The History of Sound, which also uses WWI to frame a queer love story.

Both reviewers, at least, agree on the visual quality of the film. Cinematographer Frank van den Eeden — Dhont’s regular collaborator — shoots the trench sequences in crisp, wheaten daylight and the performance numbers in floaty, powdery pastels that feel deliberately otherworldly, a visual shorthand for the suspension of normal life that the stage represents for these men.

The Bigger Picture

Whether Coward is a triumph or a misfire, it’s clearly the film where Dhont makes his play for a larger stage. The production is bigger, the historical canvas is wider, and the love story is front and center in a way his previous work never quite allowed. That MUBI is distributing suggests a path to audiences who followed Close to its Oscar nomination — and to a new generation of viewers drawn to queer cinema that doesn’t shy away from either the sensuality or the stakes.

Whatever the final verdict, Dhont’s ambition here is not in question. “[‘Coward’] was the most challenging film I’ve ever made,” he said simply. The Cannes competition will have a say in how that challenge is judged.

The post Is ‘Coward’ Lukas Dhont’s Best Film Yet? appeared first on Cream.

• Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival
• The film adapts Honobu Yonezawa’s 2021 novel, set during 16th-century Japan’s Azuchi-Momoyama period
• Stars Masahiro Motoki and Masaki Suda, who previously worked with Kurosawa on 2024 thriller Cloud
• Janus Films will release the film in U.S. theaters
• Critics are divided — some call it a mesmerizing epic, others find it plodding but worthwhile

Kiyoshi Kurosawa has never been easy to pin down — the Japanese auteur behind unsettling modern thrillers like Cure and Cloud has now planted himself firmly in feudal Japan, and the result is one of the more intriguing films to come out of Cannes 2026. The Samurai and the Prisoner, an adaptation of Honobu Yonezawa’s 2021 novel, is part murder mystery, part political chess match, and part deeply human story about what it costs to lead — and what it means to be truly free.

It’s a genuine curveball from a filmmaker whose work has always carried the chill of the contemporary world. But Kurosawa doesn’t abandon his instincts here — he just dresses them in a kimono.

A Castle Under Siege, and the Mysteries Within Its Walls

The story begins in winter of 1578, inside Arioka Castle, where Lord Araki Murashige — played with conflicted charisma by Masahiro Motoki — has made the fateful decision to rebel against the powerful warlord Oda Nobunaga. The castle is surrounded. Defection is spreading. And then people start dying in ways that don’t make sense.

A boy killed by an arrow that passes through a crack in a door and then vanishes. A decapitated head that goes missing in spring. A prized tea kettle stolen in summer. A man struck by lightning at the exact moment he’s about to reveal a secret in autumn. Each death carries the whiff of divine punishment — and each one rattles Murashige, a man who has recently and very deliberately rejected the old samurai code, instructing his retainers “do not die for me.”

Unable to explain what he’s seeing, Murashige keeps doing the one thing that makes no sense by any measure of feudal protocol: walking down to the dungeon to talk to his prisoner.

That prisoner is Kuroda Kanbei, played by Masaki Suda in a reunion with Kurosawa after their collaboration on Cloud. Kanbei arrived at the castle as Nobunaga’s envoy, expecting to be executed when his peace overtures failed. Instead he’s been locked away — a move that is simultaneously an act of mercy and a calculated propaganda play, since Nobunaga will assume that a living Kanbei must have switched sides. It’s the kind of double-edged decision that defines Murashige at every turn.

Locked in darkness, Kanbei becomes something Murashige never expected: the only person he can really talk to. Their conversations, which begin as cold tactical briefings and slowly become something warmer and more destabilizing, form the emotional spine of the film. As one critic put it, you start to sense that Murashige doesn’t have anyone else he can truly confide in — and when that’s pointed out to him, “he rejects this a bit too strongly.”

What the Critics Are Saying

Cannes critics came out of the film with notably different reactions — which, honestly, feels appropriate for a movie this layered.

The Wrap called it “remarkable, restrained and ultimately riveting,” praising Kurosawa’s ability to merge the procedural and the profound, and drawing a comparison to the best parts of a Knives Out film transplanted into feudal Japan. The review singled out the way Kurosawa shoots the film — “in each mesmerizing move of the camera or precisely-framed shot, he draws us in closer and closer” — and noted that despite its nearly two-and-a-half-hour runtime, the film “feels like it’s constantly hurtling onwards.”

Variety was equally warm, praising the film’s “absorbing, clean-lined” approach and calling it “a satisfyingly linked series of rousing whodunnits” that doubles as “a trenchant, often rather moving, exploration of the nature of true leadership.” DP Yasuyuki Sasaki’s camerawork gets a specific shoutout — particularly the dungeon sequences, “lit by shafts of light that slice through the cracks in the walls like laser beams.”

IndieWire was the most measured, acknowledging the film’s thematic richness while finding the plotting “tedious” and the first three mysteries amounting to “a mild shrug.” The review drew an interesting parallel between Kurosawa and his own protagonist — suggesting the director, hired to faithfully adapt the novel, may have felt as constrained as Kanbei in his dungeon, his particular genius both an asset and a liability. Still, IndieWire conceded that the film “gains a curious strength” in its final stretch, and that its closing grace note — a leader who finds that opting out of the future might be the only way to change it — is pure vintage Kurosawa.

The film’s four-chapter seasonal structure and its contained, almost abstract castle setting give it the feel of prestige television at times — a comparison Variety raises directly, noting that in the era of Shogun, that’s not necessarily a knock. The cast is large and well-differentiated, though fans should be warned: as the seasons pass, the ranks thin considerably. Kochi Yamato, who broke out as the unsettling Walking Man in the 2025 videogame adaptation Exit 8, appears here — and viewers are advised not to get too attached.

Kurosawa in a New Register

What’s striking about The Samurai and the Prisoner is how fully Kurosawa commits to the classical form of the jidaigeki — the traditional Japanese period drama — without letting it swallow him whole. This isn’t a deconstruction. There’s none of the eerie, reality-bending experimentation of his horror work. It’s a straight-faced, handsomely mounted historical drama that just happens to be made by one of cinema’s most restless minds.

And yet his fingerprints are everywhere. The Buddhist phrase invoked repeatedly throughout the film — “advance to paradise, retreat into hell” — is a theme Kurosawa has circled his entire career, the idea that the worst outcomes often come from pressing forward rather than questioning why we’re moving at all. Here, he gives his protagonist the rare chance to consider a different path. Murashige, shaped by a year of conversations with the man he imprisoned, begins to understand that loyalty can be forged through surrender as much as through victory.

It’s a quiet, unusual kind of heroism for a samurai epic. But then, this is a quiet, unusual kind of samurai epic.

The Samurai and the Prisoner premiered at Cannes and will be released in U.S. theaters by Janus Films. No release date has been announced yet.

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• Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur received a ten-minute standing ovation at its Cannes 2026 world premiere
• The film is Zvyagintsev’s first in nine years, following a near-fatal COVID illness that left him temporarily paralyzed
• An adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 thriller, it’s set in 2022 Russia and serves as a searing indictment of Putin’s war against Ukraine
• Shot entirely in Latvia, the film stars Dmitriy Mazurov and Iris Lebedeva, with MUBI acquiring rights for North America, the UK, and beyond
• Critics are calling it one of the strongest films of Zvyagintsev’s career and a frontrunner for Cannes prizes

Andrey Zvyagintsev is back — and Cannes knows it. The Russian auteur’s Minotaur received a heartfelt ten-minute standing ovation at its world premiere in Competition at the 2026 festival, one of the longest of the event so far, and the critical response has been just as emphatic. After a nine-year absence from cinema and a brush with death that few people fully recover from, Zvyagintsev has returned with what many are already calling the defining film about Russia’s war against Ukraine — and he never once uses that word.

That’s part of what makes Minotaur so quietly devastating. Russia calls it a “special military operation,” and so does everyone in this film. The war hums in the background — on laptop screens quickly clicked away from, on propaganda billboards celebrating fallen “heroes,” in the faces of men on the street missing limbs — before it slowly, relentlessly moves to the center of everything.

A Crime Thriller Wearing Russia’s Soul

On the surface, Minotaur is an adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 melodrama La femme infidèle — the same source material Adrian Lyne turned into the glossy erotic thriller Unfaithful with Diane Lane in 2002. A jealous husband. A restless wife. A situation that escalates, badly. It’s a story we know. What Zvyagintsev and co-writer Simon Lyashenko have done is strip it down to its bones and rebuild it inside the rotting architecture of Putin’s Russia in autumn 2022, finding in a domestic betrayal the exact same logic — entitlement, intimidation, denial — that drives a nation to invade its neighbor.

Gleb Morozov (Dmitriy Mazurov), CEO of a shipping company, lives in a sprawling modernist home on the wooded outskirts of an unnamed Russian city — all tall windows and no curtains, the kind of house where you can watch people eat dinner in silence from the street. His wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) has been unreachable for months, her otherwise drawn face lighting up only when a text arrives from someone she’s not supposed to be texting. Their teenage son Seryosha (Boris Kudrin) is quietly absorbing everything. When Gleb’s parenting advice to the boy involves grabbing him by the lapels and demonstrating how to physically intimidate a bully — “whoever starts a fight loses for being stupid,” he says, words that will echo back at him — it’s played almost as dark comedy. Almost.

Gleb, it turns out, already knows about the affair. He just tends to let things lie. But the year is 2022, and the town’s mayor (Vladimir Friedman) has just summoned him to submit a list of 14 male employees for military “recruiters” — men who will be shipped to the front with barely any equipment or protection. That detail alone, were the film made inside Russia, could land the filmmakers in prison. The fact that Zvyagintsev put it in anyway tells you everything about where he is now, and what he’s willing to say.

The Personal and the Political, Inseparable

One of the film’s most striking sequences involves Gleb driving with suspicious cargo in his car, stopping at a railway crossing to let a train pass. The train isn’t carrying passengers. It’s tanks. Cinematographer Mikhail Krichman — Zvyagintsev’s longtime DP, who has shot every one of his films — superimposes the reflection of those tanks onto Gleb’s face through the windshield. The political has invaded the personal. Then, in the film’s long, uncomfortably detailed cleanup sequence following a sudden act of violence, the logic reverses: the personal invades the political. Russia, the film suggests, has always been thorough in its silencing — it just calls it sanitation.

Krichman shoots Minotaur with the same meticulous widescreen command he brought to Leviathan and Loveless, though the visual register here is harder, colder. There’s less overt beauty and more desolation — concrete streets, half-empty office suites, housing estates so eerily unpopulated that, as Variety noted, you feel you could practically commit a murder in broad daylight. Latvia fills in for Russia with uncomfortable persuasiveness, conveying both the country’s aggressive vastness and its eerie depopulation, by people either fleeing or being called to battle.

The film runs 141 minutes and doesn’t waste a frame of them. A throwaway restaurant comment about the last time Gleb cleaned his own house becomes a plot thread. Photographs of characters at younger, happier ages become clues and totems simultaneously. A 20-minute mid-film sequence is described by The Hollywood Reporter as “gruesome, comical and crucial.” Nothing is accidental, not even the background figures glimpsed on the street with missing limbs — survivors, perhaps, of Chechnya, Georgia, or Donbass.

Lebedeva Is the Film’s Electric Heart

If Mazurov is the film’s rugged, morally compromised center — and he’s excellent, lending Gleb a dry physical comedy at his most desperate moments — Iris Lebedeva is its most volatile and alive presence. Critics have compared her less to a Chabrol heroine than to someone from Antonioni: a forcefield of ennui wrapped in an elegant trenchcoat, her face transformed only by the private thrill of her secret. She makes her way several times a week to her lover Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk), a 33-year-old photographer living in the kind of rundown social housing estate that a woman of her wealth would ordinarily never enter. It’s somewhere to feel something.

Her longest outburst in the film — drunk, abandoned, raging at her husband and son for ordering margherita pizza again, “Order something else for once! I can’t stand this!” — lands somewhere between absurdity and heartbreak. And then there’s the moment, late in the film, when she turns to Gleb and asks, simply: “Where’s me?” She expects no answer. She gets none.

Variety called her “the film’s most electric, volatile presence.” IndieWire said she feels “astonishing” and “cut out of Antonioni.” It’s the kind of performance that tends to stay in a jury’s mind.

A Filmmaker Returned From the Edge

The backstory behind Minotaur is almost as dramatic as the film itself. Zvyagintsev, now 62 and living in exile in France, contracted COVID in 2020 and spent time in a coma before being left temporarily unable to move. He was still recovering when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 — the same month in which his film is set. He has said publicly that he decided while he was ill that he would not return to Russia while it pursued a war that shamed him. He has not.

The film was shot entirely in Latvia and is officially a French-German-Latvian co-production, with MK2 Films handling international sales. MUBI has acquired Minotaur for North America, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, and Latin America, with a release expected later this year. Zvyagintsev has been reunited with most of his regular collaborators — Krichman, production designers Masha Slavina and Andrey Ponkratov, and composers Evgeni and Sasha Galperine — all of whom, notably, now also live abroad.

The Cannes pedigree is formidable. Loveless won the Jury Prize here in 2017. Leviathan took Best Screenplay in 2014. Elena earned the Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize in 2011. Given that track record, expectations were already high before a single frame screened. The ten-minute ovation, and the reviews that followed, suggest those expectations were met.

Deadline’s Stephanie Bunbury called it “a great piece of work.” The Hollywood Reporter called it “grippy-as-a-live-squid.” IndieWire wrote: “Andrey Zvyagintsev, welcome back. We missed you, and we need you.”

The film ends, as Zvyagintsev films tend to, without comfort or resolution. Two detectives, presented with hard evidence that could break their case wide open, shrug it off. “Why do we bother?” one asks. “F-k if I know,” says the other. “Let’s have lunch.” And then there is a final image — characters floating above clouds, high above everything — that offers the appearance of escape while making clear, with quiet devastation, that things are about to get worse than anyone thought possible.

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• Manuela Martelli’s The Meltdown premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar at the 2026 festival
• The film follows a 9-year-old girl at a Chilean ski resort in 1992 whose teenage friend mysteriously vanishes
• Newcomer Maya O’Rourke stars alongside Saskia Rosendahl (Babylon Berlin) as the missing girl’s desperate mother
• The film uses the mystery as an allegory for Chile’s collective silence in the aftermath of Pinochet’s dictatorship
• It is currently seeking U.S. distribution

The image that opens The Meltdown is one of the stranger true stories in recent history: grainy camcorder footage of a 60-ton Antarctic iceberg being hoisted out of a frosty sea, bound for Chile’s pavilion at the 1992 Universal Exposition in Seville. It was meant to announce a country reborn — modern, ambitious, free from the shadow of Augusto Pinochet, who had finally been voted out of power four years earlier. Director Manuela Martelli has a very different reading of that iceberg. For her, it’s a nation trying to separate its gleaming tip from the cold, dark mass of history still lurking just beneath the surface.

That’s the kind of film The Meltdown is: precise, layered, and quietly devastating in its implications. It premiered in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, marking Martelli’s first appearance in the official selection after her debut, Chile ’76, launched from the Directors’ Fortnight in 2022. That earlier film — a taut, critically acclaimed thriller about a bourgeois housewife’s political awakening under the Pinochet regime — established Martelli as one of the most distinctive voices in Chilean cinema. Her follow-up is equally elegant, if somewhat more elusive.

A Child’s-Eye View of a Country Learning to Forget

The year is 1992. Two years have passed since Pinochet left the presidency, but he still commands the military, and the nation exists in a strange in-between — officially democratic, inwardly paralyzed. Inés (Maya O’Rourke), a watchful, precocious nine-year-old, is staying at her grandparents’ remote Andean ski lodge while her parents are abroad, part of Chile’s delegation at Expo ’92 in Seville. She has the run of the place: befriending the hotel dogs, sleeping in the rooms of staff members she’s grown fond of, hanging at the front desk with receptionist Sonia (Paula Zúñiga), trading hellos with bartender Genaro (Luis Uribe) — a man who goes quiet whenever someone mentions his missing brother, one of Chile’s desaparecidos. Inés barely bats an eye. She was born into a world of strange ellipses.

What she’s not prepared for is losing someone she actually knows.

That someone is Hanna (Maia Rae Domagala), a 15-year-old German skiing prodigy who has come to Chile to train. She’s the only girl on her team, gets bullied relentlessly by her male teammates, and receives a little too much attention from her coach, Alexander (Jakub Gierszal). Maybe that’s why she takes so quickly to Inés, despite the age gap — sharing her dark nail polish and broody music, letting the younger girl sleep in her room, confiding in her the way you confide in a diary. Hanna tells Inés that her mother is from East Germany, or as she puts it, “a country that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Then one morning, Hanna is gone.

The disappearance triggers a search, and soon Hanna’s mother Lina (Saskia Rosendahl, best known from Babylon Berlin) arrives — wild-eyed, ferocious, guilt-ridden, and absolutely unwilling to accept the official indifference around her. Rosendahl is extraordinary here, a former East German figure skating champion who channels every ounce of that competitive fury into finding her daughter. She and Inés form an unlikely alliance: a daughter who needs a mother, a mother who needs a daughter, with Inés serving as translator as Lina tears through the Andean resort demanding answers that nobody seems to want to give.

Inés, you see, knows something. She saw something, late one night, pretending to be asleep in Hanna’s room. And her grandmother Techa (Paulina Urrutia), a hyper-capitalistic woman laser-focused on selling a defunct military outpost on the mountain to a couple of Spanish investors and expanding the resort, has made it very clear: keep quiet, or the authorities will start asking questions about Inés’ teenage cousin Sebastián (Lautaro Cantillana), who also had an eventful evening with Hanna before she vanished.

What the Iceberg Really Means

Martelli, who is herself an accomplished actress, has spoken openly about drawing on her own childhood for this film. “I was 9 years old in 1992,” she told The Hollywood Reporter, describing a time “permeated by this transition in Chile, which was a very weird and complex moment. For me, it was interesting to overlap the transition of a kid and the transition of a country and the world as well.” The Berlin Wall had just fallen. The GDR was gone. Chile was, at least on paper, moving forward. And yet.

“The idea of horror was so present for me in this period of history, because there was something hidden there,” Martelli explained. “I had this idea of walking over dead bodies, because people disappeared, and you didn’t know where they were. They could be anywhere. I wanted everything to feel ambiguous. It’s not that it’s a horror movie, but it kind of flirts with that.”

That horror-adjacent quality comes through in Benjamín Echazarreta’s muted, evasive cinematography — light that seems to scurry away from the lens — and in María Portugal’s score, which swings between Bernard Herrmann-esque bursts of discordant strings and something more ominously quiet underneath. The production design by Nohemí González and Carolina Espina’s costumes are immaculate, period-perfect without ever feeling like a museum display. (One hand-stitched sweater Inés wears, reviewers have noted, is almost heartbreaking in its brightness.)

The snow globe-like setting does exactly what Martelli intends: the powder and the clouds are the same shade of white, earth and sky bleeding together, the world beyond the resort feeling almost impossible to imagine. It’s a hermetically sealed innocence that the film both celebrates and indicts. Inés has been raised to not ask certain questions. The hotel staff has learned to not mention certain names. The grandmother has learned to not discuss certain political figures. And now a girl is missing, and everyone’s instinct is still — silence.

Where the Film Stumbles

The parallels are genuinely powerful, and O’Rourke’s performance is a remarkable piece of work — watchful and uncertain and deeply felt, never cute, never precocious in the annoying way. Martelli raves about her young lead: “She has such a presence. I was really amazed. She had to act in English and Spanish; she had to act in the snow. It was really hard for her, but Maya was amazing. She’s a real warrior.”

But the film’s insistence on filtering everything through Inés’ deliberately limited perspective eventually becomes a constraint. Children do stress-test their realities — constantly, frustratingly — and The Meltdown increasingly has to sideline Inés entirely to keep the tension alive, because her passivity, while thematically intentional, creates a chilling drag on the story’s forward momentum. The adults around her, meanwhile, are mostly content to remain passive in their desire to sweep things under the rug, which is sinister in its own right but leaves the film with limited dramatic options.

A few directorial choices overreach. An opening sequence lingers on blood spiraling down a bathroom sink — from a lost baby tooth, as it turns out — in a way that feels like foreshadowing with the volume cranked too high. A later close-up of a shattered glass of milk lands as distraction rather than resonance. These are quibbles, but they’re symptomatic of a film that occasionally mistakes restraint for withholding.

The iceberg Chile shipped to Seville, it’s worth remembering, started melting before it even arrived. By the time the expo ended, only the main body remained — invisible to the naked eye, but hard as a fact. That’s the image Martelli leaves you with, really. The past doesn’t disappear. It just gets covered up, sometimes not even all that well.

The Meltdown is currently seeking U.S. distribution. It is produced by Ronda Cine, Cinema Inutile and Wood Producciones, with international sales handled by Les Films du Losange.

The post ‘The Meltdown’ Review: A Cannes Mystery Worth Watching appeared first on Cream.

• Is God Is, adapted from Aleshea Harris’ Obie Award-winning 2018 Off Broadway play, opens in theaters May 15 via Amazon MGM Studios.
• The film stars Kara Young and Mallori Johnson as twin sisters on a revenge mission, with Sterling K. Brown, Vivica A. Fox, Janelle Monáe, and Erika Alexander in supporting roles.
• Tessa Thompson and Janicza Bravo produced the film, and cinematographer Alexander Dynan shot it with what critics are calling an “icy daylight severity.”
• Early reviews are calling it one of the best films of 2026 and a major breakout vehicle for its two leads.

Let’s skip the hedging. Is God Is — playwright-turned-filmmaker Aleshea Harris’ feature directorial debut — is one of the best movies of 2026. Not “impressive for a first film.” Not “promising.” One of the best, full stop.

A Southern-fried road trip thriller drawing from Greek tragedy, 1970s Blaxploitation, Quentin Tarantino’s pulpy lyricism, the structural cool of spaghetti westerns, and — at a literary level — the rugged vernacular of Toni Morrison, Is God Is is the kind of film that arrives fully formed and completely its own. It opens in theaters on May 15, distributed by Amazon MGM Studios, and it has the feel of something people are going to be talking about for a long time.

Harris adapted the screenplay from her own celebrated play, which debuted Off Broadway at Soho Rep in 2018, ran for five weeks, and won three Obie Awards — including Playwriting for Harris herself. Two years before that, the play had won the American Playwriting Foundation’s Relentless Award, accompanied by a $45,000 prize that allowed Harris to stage readings around the world. All of that pedigree is visible on screen. But so is something rarer: a filmmaker who has completely shed the constraints of her source material and made something that lives and breathes as cinema.

What Is God Is Is Actually About

Racine the Rough One (Kara Young) and Anaia the Quiet One (Mallori Johnson) are Black twin sisters in their early twenties, both physically and psychologically scarred from a fire set in their childhood home by their father. Racine carries burn marks on her hand, arm, and neck; Anaia’s scars cover her face, making her the target of casual cruelty from strangers. The fire, they’ve long believed, killed their mother. It did not.

When the sisters receive a letter from Ruby — their mother, played by Vivica A. Fox under four hours of prosthetic burn makeup made elegant with lace bandages and pearls — it turns their world upside down. Ruby, attended to by three women braiding her hair in focused silence, is God to her daughters, and Harris frames her that way: a vision of female wrath and resilience holding court from her sickbed. Her ask is simple and enormous. Their father (Sterling K. Brown, credited only as “Man” or “Monster”) set that fire deliberately. He’s moved on. Started new families. And Ruby wants him dead. “Make your daddy dead — real dead,” she tells them, handing the film its irresistible tagline.

Racine accepts this divine mission without flinching. “She made us,” she shrugs, as if that settles it. Anaia is less certain — “We ain’t killers,” she pleads, and Racine’s response is two words: “I am.” But her devotion to her sister wins out, and the two set off across America, following their father’s messy trail from the hard-up Bible Belt to nouveau riche California.

What they find along the way is a gallery of people shaped, broken, or discarded by the same man. Erika Alexander plays Divine, a self-made evangelical preacher radiating authority in a white gown — both frightening and desperately sad, still waiting on a man who abandoned her long ago. Mykelti Williamson is the sketchy lawyer who got the Monster off, now haunted by his own near-fatal encounter with him, functioning in the story like a horror movie oracle. And Janelle Monáe has a brittle, sharp cameo as a trophy wife who makes the mistake of flaunting her wealth in front of two women with nothing left to lose.

Harris rarely uses the characters’ names — a deliberate choice, keeping the audience from getting too comfortable rooting for anyone, since most of them are operating somewhere outside of easy moral categories. This is not a film interested in girlboss feminism or tidy justice. It’s interested in something messier and more honest: the way violence ripples across generations, how a man who wanted to kill their mother raised daughters who want to kill him, and what that inheritance costs everyone it touches. “We come from a man who wanted to kill our mama,” Racine says matter-of-factly, “and a mama who wants to kill that man.”

The Cast Is Extraordinary, Start to Finish

Young and Johnson are the engine of this film, and they are sublime. Young plays Racine with a ruthless, unapologetic rage — the kind women, and especially Black women, are constantly pressured to suppress. Watching her explode with a blunt object in hand is cathartic in a way that’s uncomfortable to admit, which is exactly the point. Johnson, working largely through expression and physicality beneath her facial scar prosthetics, conveys Anaia’s deep hurt and hard-won resilience without a word. Together they’re a beautifully calibrated hot-and-cold double act, and this should be a major breakout for both of them.

What’s even more impressive is that they hold their own opposite a cast stacked with far more established names. Fox is spellbinding as the wounded God. Alexander is beguiling. Williamson brings a dark, haggard humor to the lawyer. Monáe makes every second of her limited screen time count. But Harris saves the best for last.

Sterling K. Brown, for most of his screen time, exists only in fragments: a pair of grasping hands, a set of fleeing feet, a smile — big, white, and menacing. The effect is mythic, building the Monster into something larger than life, a demon the twins have to slay rather than a man they once knew. By the time he’s fully revealed, sitting in his sprawling ranch house making a sandwich and speaking in a soft voice, the restraint is more terrifying than any snarl could be. It’s a masterclass in how to weaponize charm.

Harris the Filmmaker Is the Real Revelation

Harris didn’t direct her play when it ran Off Broadway — that was Taibi Magar. So her confidence behind the camera here is all the more striking. Shot by Alexander Dynan (whose credits include First Reformed and The History of Sound) with what Variety describes as “icy daylight severity” that tips into comic book noir at key moments, and cut to a crisp 99 minutes by editors Blair McClendon (Aftersun) and Jay Rabinowitz (Requiem for a Dream), the film moves with complete authority.

The road movie structure never feels stagey — remarkable given the material’s origins. The twins’ journey through sweltering Southern landscapes, a humble church, a deserted highway, and finally that beige-walled California ranch house feels genuinely cinematic. Harris uses decay in the frame during fight scenes to reflect the grubby reality of what revenge actually costs. A soundtrack of funky percussion, flute, and guitar scores the chaos. And the twin-speak — the telepathic communication between Racine and Anaia, rendered with subtitles popping up over sharp glances — is a clever theatrical holdover that translates beautifully to screen.

Produced by Tessa Thompson (who recently starred in Hedda) and Janicza Bravo (director of Zola), Is God Is arrives with serious artistic credibility behind it. That pedigree shows in every frame.

The film doesn’t offer easy resolution or moral comfort. It ends as it lives — on its own terms, in the space between what’s right and what’s righteous. But sitting with it in the days after, what lingers isn’t the violence. It’s those two sisters, looking at each other across everything that’s been done to them, deciding who they’re going to be. Harris has made something mythic out of that question. And she does not let you go.

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