1. A New Hollywood Takes Shape

Paramount Gets Court Green Light on Warner Bros. Deal, Names Mattel’s Kreiz Co-CEO Reuters reports that a US judge has approved the settlement allowing Paramount’s US$110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition to proceed. The agreement requires at least 30 films annually in US cinemas for five years and an additional US$300 million in annual domestic production spending, while Mattel chief Ynon Kreiz will join David Ellison as co-CEO.

David Ellison Renames Combined Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery as Skydance The merged corporation will take the Skydance name when the transaction becomes effective on 6 October, although Paramount and Warner Bros. remain as consumer-facing studio brands. Ellison is targeting roughly US$6 billion in savings from a company carrying close to US$80 billion in debt.

Warner Bros. Film Chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy Expected to Depart After Merger Paramount Pictures co-chairs Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein are expected to oversee both film studios once the transaction closes. The move begins answering one of the merger’s largest creative questions: whether Warner and Paramount will remain genuinely distinct production operations under a common parent.

CNN Chief Mark Thompson Asked to Stay Following Paramount-Warner Merger David Ellison has asked Thompson to remain at CNN, while the antitrust settlement requires independent editorial oversight structures across CNN and CBS News. The provisions demonstrate how a merger primarily discussed through films and streaming is also remaking one of America’s largest news businesses.

2. The Theatrical Recovery Turns Into Investment

North American Exhibitors Invest $1.2bn in Cinema Upgrades Over Past Year Cinema United reports that exhibitors invested US$1.2 billion in renovations, premium formats, seating, projection, food-and-beverage operations and other improvements over the past year—and US$2.7 billion over two years. The spending follows a record unadjusted US$4.77 billion summer box office and suggests exhibitors are betting materially on theatrical rather than simply celebrating its recovery.

Spanish Oscar Entry ‘La Bola Negra’ Breaks Local Box-Office Records Oliver Laxe’s film opened to approximately €4.7 million, selling more than 600,000 tickets and setting records for an independent drama and its local distributor. Its success is particularly significant ahead of Netflix’s 47-day US theatrical window, linking festival prestige, national box office and the streamer’s changing exhibition strategy.

September UK-Ireland Box Office Rises 3% Year-on-Year September generated £73.3 million, while the year-to-date total reached £976.6 million—21% ahead of the equivalent period in 2025. The numbers provide another market-level indicator that this year’s theatrical growth extends beyond the extraordinary performances of Spider-Man and The Odyssey.

3. Streaming, AI and Distribution Mutate

Netflix Strikes Curated Content Deal With Spanish Arthouse Streamer Filmin Filmin will programme rotating ten-film collections for Netflix Spain under a one-year licensing deal, beginning with “October Mysteries”. It is an unusual acknowledgement by the world’s largest streamer that specialist human curation itself can carry commercial value.

Mubi CEO Says Company Will Use AI Everywhere Except the Films Efe Cakarel says Mubi will deploy artificial intelligence across engineering, finance, forecasting, operations and customer service while staying “as far away from AI as possible” in the creative work it distributes and produces. The position offers one possible industry distinction between AI as business infrastructure and AI as artistic authorship.

AGC Launches Digital Division to Turn Creator IP Into Film, TV and Microdramas AGC Digital will develop, finance and monetise projects originating with creators who already possess substantial online audiences, spanning features, series, children’s content and vertical formats. The strategy effectively treats social-media audiences as an alternative development and audience-testing pipeline for conventional entertainment.

Black Bear Launches Digital Networks Business, Hires Dan Cohen The rapidly expanding independent studio has brought in former Paramount executive Cohen to lead television distribution while simultaneously entering digital networks. Black Bear’s growth across financing, production, sales, theatrical distribution and now digital operations increasingly resembles the structure of a miniature vertically integrated studio.

Zygi Kamasa’s U.K. Film Distributor True Brit Entertainment Files for Administration Due to ‘Extremely Challenging Market Conditions The collapse of the young distributor provides a sobering counterpoint to this year’s theatrical optimism, particularly for British independent films still struggling to secure viable marketing and distribution economics despite stronger aggregate cinema attendance.

Canal+ Warns French VAT Increase Could Cost It €200m a Year Canal+ says a proposed doubling of television VAT from 10% to 20% could force price increases, job losses and reductions in investment. That matters well beyond television: Canal+ is one of France’s largest private film financiers and has committed €980 million to French and European cinema between 2028 and 2032.

Award-winning Gaza doc ‘NAZA’ lands UK-Ireland deal The film will first receive commercial theatrical distribution before becoming freely accessible through The Guardian. The staged rollout continues experimenting with the idea that theatrical and free online circulation need not be competing endpoints.

Why international sales agents are embracing Dutch films The national showcase brings sales companies, distributors and festival programmers into direct contact with Dutch projects at various production stages. Such curated national export initiatives are increasingly operating as intermediary markets between local film ecosystems and the international circuit.

4. Financing and Markets: Follow the New Money

What did this year’s Screen Summit reveal about the UK indie film industry? Screen’s annual summit placed financing at the centre of the British independent sector’s problems, with speakers arguing for greater private investment alongside government support. Proposed P&A tax relief is especially noteworthy: production incentives can help films get made without solving how those films reach audiences.

Zurich Summit Asks Whether Pre-Sales, AI and Traditional Risk Models Still Work Producers, financiers, sales agents and distributors used the industry summit to debate AI, the health of pre-sales, social-media marketing and awards strategy. The breadth of the discussion reflects an independent sector in which almost every stage—from financing through audience acquisition—is simultaneously being reconsidered.

Rome’s MIA Launches European Investment Hub The October market is creating a dedicated structure to connect private investors and financial institutions with producers, alongside 104 selected projects from 43 countries. It is another indication that European screen financing is actively looking beyond conventional public funds, broadcasters and pre-sales.

Red Sea Fund Announces 30 New Recipients The Saudi-backed fund selected production and post-production projects from Arab and African filmmakers after receiving a record number of submissions. Supported titles include projects already circulating through Cannes, Toronto and other international development ecosystems, demonstrating how multiple public and festival funds increasingly stack across a film’s life cycle.

Producers Group The Creatives Brings in Minority Investor with Formalised Alliance The collective of European production companies has formalised its alliance through outside investment, continuing a broader trend towards independent producers pooling scale and resources without simply selling themselves outright to major studios.

European Work in Progress Awards More Than €100,000 in Support FilmFest Hamburg’s platform awarded finishing, sound, subtitling and post-production support across its selected projects. Unlike cash-only funding schemes, its prize structure shows how work-in-progress markets can solve specific technical bottlenecks separating unfinished films from international festival and sales circulation.

BFI London Film Festival Selects Eight Works in Progress for Industry Showcase Eight UK projects will be presented directly to distributors, buyers, sales agents and programmers during LFF. The programme increasingly gives the festival an industrial role before films are completed rather than simply after they enter exhibition.

Iberseries & Platino Industria Attendance Grows as Buyers Slowly Return The Madrid industry event attracted 1,504 participating companies, up 15%, and 211 international buyers, up 11%. Producers nevertheless report a more cautious acquisition environment than during the streaming boom, with US buyers only gradually returning to the market.

Iberseries Executives Say Latin American Films Need Better European Curation and Financing Routes Industry figures argue that Europe still lacks sufficiently curated platforms for Latin American work, while private funds are increasingly entering projects as equity investors rather than merely gap financiers. Feature films also remain significantly easier to structure as international co-productions than series.

5. Asia: The Autumn Circuit Moves East

‘Arrested Memory’ and Shu Qi’s ‘Girl’ Lead Golden Horse Nominations Sabu’s Arrested Memory leads with 11 nominations, followed by Shu Qi’s Girl with ten and Double Happiness and We Are Born Good with nine each. The awards received 587 submissions this year, reinforcing Golden Horse’s continuing position as one of the most significant institutions connecting Chinese-language and regional independent cinema.

Tokyo Film Festival Expands to 204 Films for 2026 Edition Tokyo grows from 183 films last year to 204, with seven world premieres among its 15-film competition and eight among the ten-title Asian Future programme. Southeast Asian titles from Indonesia and the Philippines feature alongside films from India, Korea and elsewhere across the region.

Tokyo to Honour Mipo O and Mohammad Rasoulof With Kurosawa Akira Award The award recognises filmmakers considered capable of shaping cinema’s future, giving the Japanese director and Iranian filmmaker prominent positions within Tokyo’s expanding autumn festival profile.

Asian Academy Creative Awards Announces 335 National Winners Across 18 Territories The awards span 39 categories across film, television, streaming and digital production. Feature winners range from China’s The Shadow’s Edge and India’s Bison Kaalamaadan to Indonesia’s Levitating, Malaysia’s Forbidden Night and Singapore’s The Violinist.

‘Final Payment’ and ‘Congo Boy’ Take Top Prizes at Pingyao Pingyao International Film Festival also recognised filmmakers including Xu Zao for Light Pillar and Filipino director Rafael Manuel for Filipiñana. The festival remains particularly valuable as an intersection between emerging Chinese cinema and international independent filmmaking.

Korean Romance ‘My Killer Crush’ Heads to Busan Market With Barunson E&A Barunson will introduce the Kim Jae-won and Chung Su-bin project to international buyers at Busan’s Asian Contents & Film Market ahead of its planned 2027 release, using ACFM as an early sales launch rather than waiting for a completed-film festival premiere.

Bangkok Film Festival Closes Despite Flooding, With Singapore’s ‘Ah Girl’ Among Major Winners The revived festival screened more than 150 films across 15 days. Elephants in the Fog won the Grand Prix, while Ang Geck Geck’s Ah Girl took both New Voices and Best ASEAN Film and 9 Temples to Heaven received a special mention.

‘The Assassin(s)’ Leads South Korean Chuseok Box Office Hur Jin-ho’s historical action film recorded more than 1.1 million admissions over the three-day holiday weekend and around 41% of theatrical revenue. Its strong domestic run arrives just weeks before the film opens SGIFF.

China Box-Office Leader ‘Traces of Justice’ Lands UK-Ireland Release Trinity CineAsia acquired UK, Ireland and Malta rights after the Chinese thriller took roughly 40% of ticket sales on the first day of the National Day holiday. Its international rollout continues the recent growth of commercial Chinese films being exported theatrically on the strength of domestic box-office performance.

Myanmar Film Collective Returns With ‘What Happened To My Country, What Happened To Me’ The underground collective behind Myanmar Diaries is developing a follow-up documentary using black humour alongside clandestine filmmaking. Its continued production under military rule demonstrates an entirely different kind of regional film infrastructure: anonymous, decentralised and designed around survival.

6. In Singapore

Five Singapore Films Receive Golden Horse Nominations Singapore has an unusually strong presence across this year’s Golden Horse Awards. Anthony Chen’s We Are All Strangers receives seven nominations—including Best Narrative Feature, director and Yeo Yann Yann for leading actress—while The Violinist and Ah Girl receive three each, and shorts Fruit (Buah) and She Said are both nominated.

IMDA and TikTok Launch Singapore Microdrama Programme Twenty accredited local media companies will participate in the first run, developing series of roughly 50–100 episodes lasting one to three minutes each over six to nine months. Separate live-action and AI-enabled animation tracks will cover production, cliffhanger and paywall structures, monetisation and distribution through TikTok’s ecosystem—making this one of Singapore’s clearest institutional bets on vertical storytelling yet.

Singapore Title Magic Atlas Selected for Tokyo International Film Festival Competition Sun Xun’s Singapore film is among the 15 titles competing at Tokyo, placing another Singapore production inside a major international festival competition only weeks after the unusually strong showing of local films at Toronto.

Singapore Leads Asian Academy Creative Awards Company Tally as The Violinist Wins National Feature Category Mediacorp collected 23 national wins, the highest company tally announced this year, while The Violinist was named Singapore’s national winner for Best Feature Film. The regional gala will take place at Capitol Theatre on 3 December.

Jonathan Choo’s ‘Pace’ Opens in Singapore Cinemas on 8 October The local Mandarin drama marks Choo’s feature directorial debut and stars Desmond Tan as a rehabilitated former drug offender alongside Zaki Hussain and Simonboy. Its opening gives October another Singapore theatrical release immediately alongside The Sandbox.

Singapore’s Ah Girl Wins Best ASEAN Film and New Voices at Bangkok Ang Geck Geck’s debut continues an unusually extensive international run following Rotterdam and Toronto, taking two prizes at the revived Bangkok International Film Festival. Singapore co-production 9 Temples to Heaven also received a special mention, while Nelson Yeo’s The House on the Moon closed the festival.

Watching Red Stars Upon the Field (2025) can feel a lot like walking face-first into a whirlwind of chaos with only tidbits of contextual information to keep the audience following along. The film unapologetically traverses nearly a century of German history, staging the film in a grand narrative that threads together different time periods in a variety of genres, typefaces and aspect ratios.

It is an ambitious film that may sometimes feel exhausting or overloaded, especially when it leans into its navel-gazing intellectual pretension, but the boisterous nature of the film also captures a spirit of rebellion and a streak of desperation that reflects the earnest attempt of a filmmaker who has seemingly vowed to put it all on the line in her feature debut.

The film opens with our heroine Tine (Hannah Ehrlichmann) on the run after her successful political demonstration, replacing the rooftop German flags of the Reichstag with red banners, bringing national attention to her “art terrorist” group, the Aesthetic Left. She returns to her rural hometown of Bad Kleinen, a small East German village only for the locals to soon discover a mysterious skeleton in the local bog. Histories then collide as Tine searches for the truth behind the ancient body and instead uncovers unruly truths about both her community and her family’s personal history.

Red Stars Upon the FIeld oscillates wildly between genres, bringing disparate elements from the crime thriller and detective procedural to the surrealist comedy genres into a blend of pastiche references –– sometimes taking the form of fourth-wall breaks and meta-cultural callbacks. In other times, the film takes on the spectres of grief and laments the tragedy and loss which line the halls of Germany as it earnestly reflects on how the present is shaped by the past and how histories intersect.

Director Laura Laabs puts the activist of the modern day in conversation with her country’s lineage, and as the film progresses, increasingly finds the present struggles of Tine mirrored in the tangled web of historical secrets and the phantoms that roam within them. The film paints these figures as martyrs of their crusades, figures of struggle who are defined by their defeats rather than their victories. In that way, the film seemingly challenges the idea that history is written by the victors as it shows how even the skeletons buried in the bog can find their way to the surface and how the spirit of rebellion can ripple across space-time and emerge once again.

Laabs seems to remind us that neither life nor film can be ahistorical and that engaging with history does not mean merely studying or lamenting the past. It is less passive than that. Grasping with your place in the present and realising the potential future ramifications of your actions today. The tides of history are very much in our hands.

Red Stars Upon the Field screened on 2 October 2026 at Filmhouse as part of the German Film Festival.

Written by Adrian Ho, edited by Daryl Cheong.

1. Reviews of Singapore Films

• Given time to find his voice, an artiste brings the Singapore Story to life — The Straits Times

  Raphael Millet compares Ervin Han’s The Violinist with the director’s decade-old short The Violin, finding in their differences an evolution in how Han imagines the “Singapore Story”. The film becomes an argument too for what can emerge when local filmmakers are given enough time to develop their voices.

2. Latest Criticism from Festivals: New York

• Godzilla Minus Zero review – spectacular Japanese action continues franchise’s winning streak — The Guardian

  Jesse Hassenger finds Takashi Yamazaki unwilling to turn his Minus One sequel into a simple monster rematch. The spectacle gets bigger, but so does its unease around post-war technological optimism, American intervention and what happens when Japan attempts to harness forces it cannot control.

• The Day She Returns — Hong Sang-soo — In Review Online

  Chris Mello approaches Hong Sang-soo through the problem of familiarity: after enough films, the recurring actors, conversations and structures begin to blur like memories. The Day She Returns is another exercise in repetition whose apparent ordinariness conceals an increasingly elaborate formal game.

• The Remotes — John Torres — In Review Online

  John Torres stretches techno-noir across 150 minutes without offering the stable pleasures of plot, turning detectives, crimes and suspects into increasingly uncertain propositions. Michael Sicinski finds the film initially frustrating before its opacity becomes precisely the atmosphere to surrender to.

• Bitter Christmas — Pedro Almodóvar — In Review Online

  Pedro Almodóvar turns autofiction back onto itself: a director borrows from the lives around him for a film whose characters begin resembling their creator. Christian Craig reads the resulting nesting dolls as both confession and defence—an artist admitting the damage caused by transforming life into cinema without promising to stop.

• You Can See Everything review – Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes doc is a modern masterpiece of deceit — The Guardian

  Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim move in with Elizabeth Holmes and her family, ostensibly to document the disgraced Theranos founder’s life. Adrian Horton finds a three-hour hall of mirrors where documentarians and subjects repeatedly attempt to manipulate each other, and greater access only makes the truth harder to locate.

3. Spotlighting New Titles

• Tom Cruise Is a Scream—and a Gas—in Digger — The New Yorker

  Justin Chang finds Tom Cruise gleefully weaponising his movie-star persona as an oil tycoon in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s ecological apocalypse. Yet the film’s satire and visual grandeur appear locked in combat: extraordinarily elaborate filmmaking in service of ideas determined to announce themselves.

• Cotton Queen review – mystery, matriarchs and magic in pioneering Sudanese debut — The Guardian

  Suzannah Mirghani becomes the first Sudanese woman to direct a feature with a film where cotton, colonial inheritance and the futures available to women converge in one village. Its matriarch’s declaration—she decides her own past—becomes a fitting organising principle for a film preoccupied with who gets to write history.

• Extra Geography film review – droll coming-of-age story captures the pains of girlhood — Financial Times

  Two schoolgirls decide to deliberately fall in love, only to discover that friendship, class and desire are considerably less controllable than their experiment suggests. The FT finds Molly Manners’ debut strongest in its sharp dialogue and its refusal to treat adolescent female intimacy as something simple or easily categorised.

• Crushed review – Steve Oram is priestly lead in harrowing Bangkok-set child-abduction thriller — The Guardian

  Simon Rumley places a priest searching for his kidnapped daughter inside a Bangkok thriller that keeps threatening to become a revenge film but resists the easy satisfaction. The tension sits instead between spiritual forgiveness and horrors that make forgiveness seem impossible.

• Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie review – terrifying and inspiring story of survival — The Guardian

  Alex Gibney reconstructs Salman Rushdie’s life before and after the 2022 attempt on his life using Rushdie’s memoir, his narration and intimate footage shot during his recovery. What Peter Bradshaw finds most forceful is not the violence itself, but Rushdie’s continued insistence on literature and imagination after it.

4. Discourse of the Week: What Makes an Adaptation Good?

Virginia Woolf moves from London to Lagos in Clarissa. Resident Evil jettisons the video game’s most recognisable characters while trying to replicate the experience of playing it. Verity tests how much of Colleen Hoover’s lurid machinery survives the screen, while another generation of filmmakers returns to Jane Austen. Fidelity is clearly only one possible measurement—so what exactly are we asking an adaptation to preserve?

• What Makes an Adaptation Good? — The New Yorker

  Writing earlier this summer amid arguments over The Odyssey, Richard Brody rejects adaptation as a simple spectrum between faithful and unfaithful. Moving from Truffaut to Mizoguchi, Welles, Godard and Nolan, he argues that filmmaking itself is always already an act of adaptation: even an original screenplay has to be transformed into images, bodies and sound.

• Clarissa — Arie Esiri, Chuko Esiri — In Review Online

  The Esiri brothers relocate Mrs Dalloway to contemporary Lagos while finding cinematic equivalents for Woolf’s movement through memory and consciousness. Robert Stinner argues that the change in geography does not discard Woolf’s concerns with class, gender and trauma, but gives them another political history through which to move.

• How Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil stands out from all other game adaptations — The Guardian

  Zach Cregger leaves Leon, Claire and other franchise icons behind—and Keith Stuart argues this may make the film more faithful. What it adapts is not plot or character but mechanics: scarce ammunition, fragmented information, increasingly dangerous spaces and the sensation of being an ordinary person trying to survive a game.

• Verity film review — this twisty Colleen Hoover adaptation is a convoluted dud — Financial Times

  The opposite problem: Verity retains plenty of the novel’s twists, confessions and psychosexual intrigue but still fails to cohere onscreen. Fidelity to incident means little if the translation cannot find a cinematic logic for the material.

• I’m so sorry, this new Sense and Sensibility is simply dull — The Times

  Hadley Freeman’s complaint against Georgia Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility is not that it changes Austen but that it drains away her comedy. Another measure of fidelity emerges: perhaps an adaptation can alter plot, setting or dialogue freely while still failing if it loses the temperature of the original.

5. Beyond Words

• Critics Academy x NYFF Shorts #2 — The Film Comment Podcast

  Four emerging critics take over Film Comment to discuss NYFF shorts including Kamal Aljafari’s Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo, Camilo Restrepo’s A Stolen Movie and Heather Landsman’s ee. A welcome instance of festival criticism spending sustained time on shorts rather than treating them as a sidebar to the feature programme.

• James Gray and Jim Jarmusch on Paper Tiger, the Mafia, and Capturing New York City — Film at Lincoln Center

  James Gray and Jim Jarmusch compare approaches to New York, genre, rehearsal and the crime film after Paper Tiger. Their conversation moves beyond the new film into the practical question underlying both careers: how does one make recognisably personal cinema while working inside familiar forms?

• Old Movies vs. New Movies: How Avengers: Endgame Encore Beat Brad Pitt, Robert Pattinson, and an Awesome Weekend Movie Lineup — The Big Picture

  Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins ask what it means when a rereleased Avengers: Endgame can outperform an unusually busy slate of new films, before moving through Heart of the Beast, Forgotten Island, The Weight and The History of Concrete. John Wilson later joins them to talk about why feature documentary currently feels strange to him.

Imagine the coming-of-age cringiness of Booksmart (2019) meets the party-induced amnesia of The Hangover (2009), married to the act of forgetting in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), all set to the fast-paced Gen Z rhythms of The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2019).

Long-time best friends Jo (H.E.R.) and Raissa (Liza Soberano) grew up together in the Philippines, bonding over their shared love of mythology at a time when few other children still believe in it. Now grown up, Raissa prepares to leave for Caltech in America. Upset, Jo finally finds the gateway into the forgotten mystical world of Nakali. There, they wake to find their memories wiped after a wild night, journeying together to recover their memory alongside a “Wild Pack” of impossible sidekicks: a charming but secretive were-dog Raww (Dave Franco), a tiyanak baby demon named Bungi (Manny Jacinto) and an insincere Mermahn. Together, they encounter a Batibat specialising in memory (Jenny Slate) and the dreaded vampire-like Manananggal (Lea Salonga).

This is probably what Marvel diehards felt watching Avengers: Infinity War (2018). The many tributes and easter eggs to Filipino mythology may feel overwhelming, but essentially rebuild a lived-in world. Yet for a Singaporean audience, much of this mythology also carries a sense of regional familiarity. Though different in name and form, many of the mythological creatures these characters draw from find close counterparts in the Malay-speaking world: the tiyanak baby demon recalls the toyol, while the manananggal shares certain characteristics with the pontianak. The quintessential characters and motivations remain familiar to us.

The film particularly stands out as an emotional story of love, loss and growth. In a sequence reminiscent of Up (2009), the death of one character is told simply in mere twenty seconds through the rich symbolism of the moon and puppet theatre. Much of the plot, after all, hinges on what the two girls are willing to sacrifice for each other: the friendship, their memories, and one’s future. As a work of entertainment, the story is emotionally evocative and never misses a beat.

A particular standout of the film is the empathetic treatment of its antagonists. Awe-inspiring and terrifying, their vengeances are also contextualised. Yet, maturely, the film never encourages you to forgive or overlook their shortcomings. Instead, it provides reason and allows the characters remedy, all while grounding their individual arcs in the narrative’s larger themes. Such considered writing paired with the impressive world-building is a testament to the excellence of the filmmakers.

Following its first weekend, the film has reported struggling box office sales. It is baffling considering that this is a thoughtful and well-constructed story rooted in universal ideas of friendship and loss. For the same audiences who hungered for the representation in Crazy Rich Asians (2018), Westworld or Hacks, this film offers meaningful representation that engages sincerely with the mythologies and cultures of a people.

Written by Daryl Cheong, edited by Phyllis Chan

The perfect conduit for a soul-searching journey is the trope of the road trip. Nobel Prize-winning German writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) has been based in the United States since 1933, evading Germany’s interwar disintegration. He goes on a road trip through Germany with his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller). First, to Frankfurt, West Germany, to receive a Goethe prize whilst announcing that he will receive a second Goethe prize in Weimar, East Germany. Western journalists warn him that should he travel to the East, he may be barred from re-entry into America.

Pawlikowski’s narrative works on two layers: the father-child dynamic and that between nation and citizen. For better or worse, the relationship and conversations between Thomas and Erika can both be interpreted easily through personal and nationalistic lenses. Thomas justifies his journey by propagating Goethe’s belief in a “Good Germany” amidst what he perceives as moral decay in a “horrible” country with “horrible” people. Erika, conversely, sees Thomas as a mere “ornament”, whose prizes are easily co-opted by the politicians and elites to turn him into a symbolic figurehead without prompting any real national soul-searching. Thomas, like Germany, appears morally ambiguous: when faced with the death of a loved one, he decides not to suspend his journey to commemorate loss, but insists upon the road ahead.

The film works on a simple premise, while cinematographer Łukasz Żal’s continued collaboration with Pawlikowski retains their trademark wide shots, with tragic ramifications lurking beneath veneers of simplicity. Paired with its short runtime, the film asks a simple question: which version of a person, and a nation, one must choose? At a time defined by binary demands to choose a side (“Stalin or Mickey?” Socialism or consumerism?), the film’s choice to begin with Erika’s brother Klaus Mann (August Diehl), a man burdened by his lack of beliefs in a world demanding ideological conviction, is significant.

Perhaps too neatly, but nonetheless poignant, the film ends as it begins: Bach. Erika, another of Hüller’s exemplary performances, remarks that Klaus almost believes in God when listening to Bach. Where contemporary ideologies inspire indifference, art and culture aspire to spirituality and perhaps transcendence. As Thomas traverses Germany hoping his words can inspire a new way of thinking, the film’s conclusion almost suggests that the answer might have been there all along — not with his writing, but through and within the words themselves. The shot’s imagery is symbolic on both personal and political counts, with father and daughter sitting on the rubbles of a church, looking up at an organ being played.

Where Erika accuses Thomas of living in a “castle of words [he] can hide in,” and not the reality of a divided Germany that does not care for his awards or writing, these words are all that defend a purity of belief apparently stagnant in the Germany of then, and perhaps, of today too. After all, as the film acknowledges, the “idea” is corrupted in reality. Perhaps in the distance of the arts, the idea lives on.

Then again, the film also acknowledges that Goethe is closer to Marx than Hegel, when the former focuses more on empirical knowledge than the abstract. The film affirms this philosophy by the conclusion, recentering the journey from the political onto the personal. Where the abstractions of ideology provide no comfort, the realities and “erotics of the arts”, à la Sontag, are what we need: the spirituality of music and art, the dynamic of father and daughter, and the culture and humanity of a nation.

Fatherland will be screened on 1 and 14 October 2026 at Filmhouse as part of the German Film Festival.

Written by Daryl Cheong, edited by Phyllis Chan

Babai follows a teenager’s journey as he flees from Kosovo to Germany to look for his father, while Exile unveils the alienation experienced by an immigrant. Where Babai looks at the act of crossing the border, Exile exemplifies what comes after.

Exile’s psychological drama unfolds the mental state of Xhafer (Mišel Matičević), a victim of xenophobia who moved from Kosovo to the suburbs of Germany. The film opens with a dead rat strung in front of Xhafer’s house, triggering his musophobia. He suspects his colleagues of the disturbance, reminded of the many dead rats he has encountered at the chemical engineering company where he works. The antagonism is rooted in him replacing a former colleague. As Xhafer hunts down the perpetrator, he grows increasingly paranoid.

Xhafer’s sense of alienation is caused by the hostility of his colleagues: he is excluded from the internal emails and important meetings, mocked during the meetings because of his Kosovan identity, and looked down upon by his mother-in-law. The cornering of Xhafer is also mirrored in the claustrophobic cinematography.

Beyond the external pressures, Morina reveals one’s mental state from the invisible and ineffable discrimination faced by new immigrants assimilating into a new environment through a focus on Xhafer’s internal state. The film is concerned with immersing the audience into the breathlessly suffocating experience of an everyday immigrant.

Beyond these societal and internal pressures, Xhafer continues to struggle at home too. Even with a German wife (Sandra Hüller) and three children, he struggles at home. It is almost as if alienation is unavoidable in the process of assimilating into a new society.

However, at the climax of the film, Xhafer’s accusation of an alleged perpetrator is met with a severe consequence. This Dostoevsky-esque development reflects on the parallels between Xhafer and a German, which might have diverted from the xenophobic commentary. However, this actually strengthens the film’s commentary: the simultaneously double-edged violence vis-a-vis the immigrant.

One must not overlook the performance of Mišel Matičević. Mišel’s subtle yet powerful performance punctuates an immigrant’s alienation and the pains of integration through a stoic silence accumulated from internal age and the abstruseness he experiences. Through him, the film channels its emotions and message powerfully.

Overall, the Kafkaesque depiction of the character’s mental journey adds a surrealistic touch to the film, but the issues encountered by the character remain realistic. After all, the film is deeply rooted in the director’s personal experience as a Kosovan immigrant moving to Germany as a teenager. Exile extracts elements of psychological thriller and touches of surrealism to integrate them meaningfully within the discussion on identity, alienation, and sense of belonging for a migrant particularly.

Exile will be screened on 11 October 2026 at Filmhouse as part of the German Film Festival.

Written by Lee Peng Ming, edited by Daryl Cheong

Through philosopher Marsilo Fincio’s interpretations of Platonic ideals, one is reminded of the universal necessity of truth as a human quality. Yet, in many cinematic conceptions of unravelling the truth, most commonly found in the mystery genre, truth is positioned as the goal to be attained at the end of the film. Yet, what is striking about Fincio’s writing is the recognition of human limitations in “understand[ing]” an ambiguous end (“some”). It is therefore refreshing when a film encourages a re-examination of truth.

Having premiered at the Berlinale’s Panorama section, Sophie Heldman’s The Education of Jane Cumming (2026) takes the true story of Marianne Woods (Clare Dunne) and Jane Pirie (Flora Nicholson), previously documented by American lesbian historian Lillian Faderman in the novel Scotch Verdict, and refreshes it for the screen.

The premise? Edinburgh, 1810: Illegitimate India-born Jane Cumming (Mia Tharia) is sent to a boarding school by her aristocratic grandmother, Lady Cumming Gordon (Fiona Shaw). Finally finding belonging amongst the wisdom and openness of Woods and Pirie, Cumming concocts the rumour that her teachers are lesbian lovers.

The film is rendered exceptional by Heldman’s sensitivity to the characters’ complexities. For half the film, the story is considerate of Jane’s perspective, tracing her movement from alienation and silence towards belonging and comfort. In a breakthrough debut performance, Mia Tharia’s eyes glimmer with both raw honesty and the promise of an exciting career, allowing us to feel the warmth of a new life Jane desires. Simultaneously, Fiona Shaw, as always, shines in quiet stoicism and the minute portraiture of her face’s gestures. Her character’s snobbish and difficult attitudes are made human. The film therefore does not seek to villainise any character, but to provide a lens of empathy.

When Jane eventually betrays her trusted teachers, the film allows us distance from her. In doing so, all four women are made equal for us to consider the societal and intersectional pressures weighing on their difficult decisions. With few male characters, the film allows the women to express internalised patriarchal viewpoints: the mothers and guardians see the point of educating women to the extent of “helping [the girls] with the finances” at home, juxtaposed with the teachers’ liberal philosophies of developing curiosity and “inquiring minds”. The girls are referred to as “scholars.” Heldman finds reasons for the women’s actions through the circumstances of the time period. By the film’s end, where each woman ends up worse than before, we are reminded of the social values that enable such tragedy. Heldman finds few faults in the individual characters.

Already brimming with admirable qualities, the film is made especially exceptional with its intersectionality. It grapples with larger ideas of homophobia, race, class and imperialism. These further the aforementioned patriarchal circumstances by providing further perspectives that complicate the real story. Watching today amidst more intersectional discourse, it feels as if we finally can get closer to the full objective capital ‘T’ Truth of a scandal like this.

It is straightforward filmmaking when a work seeks to discover the truth. It is much more respectable when a film decides to chart a new path in understanding why the truth is what it is instead. Across its intentions, competent filmmaking and awe-inspiring performances, The Education of Jane Cumming cements itself as a brilliant work, inspiring us, in all our unimaginativeness and ignorance, to desire deeper truths.

The Education of Jane Cumming will be screened on 17 October 2026 at Filmhouse as part of the German Film Festival.

Written by Daryl Cheong, edited by Phyllis Chan

1. Paramount-Warner Bros. Clears Its Biggest Hurdle

Paramount Settles Antitrust Case With 12 State Attorneys General, Clearing Path to Warner Bros. Deal Variety reports that the settlement removes the biggest remaining obstacle to Paramount’s US$111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, the largest merger in Hollywood history. The transaction could now close within weeks, subject to court approval.

Settlement Requires 30+ Theatrical Films Annually and US$1.5 Billion in Additional US Production Spend The five-year consent decree turns several of David Ellison’s promises into enforceable commitments: at least 30 theatrical releases annually, rising to 32, an additional US$300 million in domestic production spending each year, preservation of the Paramount and Warner studio lots and penalties for non-compliance.

Writers Guild Drops Its Own Antitrust Challenge After States Settle The WGA maintains that the merger could damage writers and the wider industry but says continuing a multi-million-dollar antitrust case without government backing is no longer practical. It is a revealing distinction between accepting a settlement and endorsing consolidation.

Cinema United Says Paramount Settlement Achieves Many of Exhibition’s Objectives The exhibitor trade body highlights provisions around increased production, theatrical exclusivity, wide distribution and continued catalogue access. After initially opposing consolidation, exhibitors have increasingly prioritised enforceable theatrical guarantees.

Paramount and Warner Employees Brace for Mass Layoffs Despite Production Guarantees Variety reports that employees at both companies expect multiple rounds of redundancies as duplicate corporate operations are combined. The contrast is important: the settlement protects production output more clearly than it protects existing corporate jobs.

What Will a Combined Paramount-Warner Actually Mean for Independent Film?Screen asks whether a company compelled to release more than 30 films annually could create new opportunities for independent producers, acquisitions and co-financing—or simply increase production within an even more concentrated studio system.

Federal Judge Raises Questions Over Paramount Settlement Before Giving Final Approval Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín questioned elements of the consent decree at a 24 September hearing and did not immediately approve it. The merger is therefore politically cleared but still technically awaiting its final legal hurdle.

2. Countries Fight Harder for Production

US Lawmakers Introduce First Federal Film and Television Production Incentive Bipartisan legislation proposes a transferable 20% federal tax credit on qualifying labour, with 5% uplifts for independent productions, rural shoots and work in Los Angeles County. Crucially, the federal incentive could stack with existing state rebates.

France Responds by Expanding Its International Production Rebate France’s TRIP scheme will now cover expenses including non-EU actor salaries and accommodation while retaining its 30% rebate, rising to 40% for qualifying VFX-heavy productions. The timing—one day after the US bill—makes the global competition for mobile production especially visible.

Spain Film and TV Production Spend Reaches Record €5.68 Billion Production spending has risen 45% since 2022 following sustained public and private investment, while international projects including Tangled, Tomb Raider and Murderbot have shot in the country.

Screen Yorkshire Wants to Move Beyond Being a Production-Service Economy Its new three-year plan explicitly argues that attracting outside productions is insufficient. The regional agency wants more locally originated projects, IP ownership, companies and long-term value to remain in Yorkshire—an interesting alternative to incentive policy built only around incoming shoots.

Film London Production Finance Market Selects More Than 60 Projects Producers from the UK, Ireland and continental Europe will pitch directly to financiers and screen agencies at the October market. The programme also introduces a new strand specifically for emerging producers.

3. Distribution Keeps Changing Shape

Black Bear Buys Worldwide Rights to Laika’s Live-Action Film Atmosphere Black Bear will co-finance the film, distribute it theatrically in the US and its own territories and handle international sales. The arrangement demonstrates vertically integrated independents increasingly combining financing, sales and direct distribution.

Sony Acquires Michelle Yeoh Thriller The Surgeon Following TIFF Premiere Sony Pictures picked up North America, China, Hong Kong, Italy and Latin America following a competitive post-Toronto sale. Most other territories had already been pre-sold from Cannes 2025, demonstrating a film’s sales lifecycle stretching across multiple markets and festival editions.

Venice Winner NAZA Will Move From 50+ Theatrical Territories to Free Online Streaming Following its international cinema run, the documentary will be made freely available through producer The Guardian. The model treats theatrical distribution as the first stage of circulation rather than the endpoint, followed by unrestricted digital access.

AFM Will Put Ordinary Moviegoers Into Market Screenings The American Film Market is partnering with AMC A-List and B-List Movie Club to allow selected sales companies to screen films simultaneously for buyers and frequent cinemagoers. More than 5,000 Los Angeles movie-club members may participate, giving sellers live audience feedback alongside conventional buyer screenings.

France Creates a Single Portal Connecting Seven National Cinema Archives CNC’s new Garance platform brings films, photographs, magazines, costumes, cameras, sets and archival documents from seven institutions into one searchable resource. The project treats access to film heritage itself as cultural infrastructure.

4. Festivals After Toronto: What Comes Next?

Five Talking Points From TIFF 2026 Screen’s post-Toronto analysis looks at the awards race, acquisitions and the impact of TIFF’s first formal market. Particularly useful for assessing whether the festival’s new industrial infrastructure actually altered buyer behaviour in its inaugural year.

San Sebastián Industry Awards Back Projects Across Europe and Latin America Projects emerging through WIP Latam, WIP Europa and the Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum received finishing, distribution and development support, maintaining San Sebastián’s importance well before finished films enter its competition.

Ten Talking Points From San Sebastián 2026 Screen assesses the festival’s industry mood, private investment initiatives and the extraordinary momentum surrounding La Bola Negra after Toronto and Cannes. San Sebastián increasingly functions as both a Spanish theatrical launchpad and an international financing platform.

Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care Wins San Sebastián’s Golden Shell Leigh’s feature took best film, screenplay and leading performance after travelling through Telluride and Toronto, providing another example of films strategically moving through several autumn festivals rather than relying on one premiere.

Sundance, IDFA, Venice and London Programmers Head to Dutch Showcase NL Wave Thirty-five Dutch features will be presented as early-stage pitches and works in progress directly to programmers, distributors and sales companies. It is another example of national industries building curated export platforms between filmmakers and the international festival circuit.

Red Sea International Film Festival Postpones Next Edition Until 2027 Organisers say the Jeddah festival will return with a “renewed vision,” while year-round programming is set to begin in November. The pause comes as the Gulf festival ecosystem continues rapidly changing, including Dubai’s previously announced return.

5. Asia: Markets Build Infrastructure, Not Just Festivals

Bangkok’s Talad Nang Market Experiments With Buyer-First Meetings Instead of sales companies renting booths and waiting for buyers, nearly 30 international buyers—including several from Singapore—were given dedicated stations for Thai companies to visit. Buyers reported productive back-to-back meetings, making the model worth watching for smaller regional markets.

Thailand’s Sahamongkolfilm Launches Pha Jaan: Deathbound to International Buyers The veteran Thai studio used Talad Nang to launch the supernatural romance internationally ahead of its November domestic release. Sahamongkol’s recent Undertaker films have grossed a combined US$32.6 million locally, giving its new slate significant commercial credibility.

Taiwan Creative Content Fest Adds Buyer-Focused Spotlight Screenings TCCF will screen finished Taiwanese projects immediately before market meetings, while its market grows to 107 exhibitors from seven countries. Particularly notable is the 13% rise in publishing, comics and character-IP exhibitors as adaptation rights become increasingly central to screen-business strategy.

Singapore-Taiwan Series See You At 11pm Chosen for TCCF Spotlight The Mediacorp and Three-Giant Production fantasy romance will be screened directly for international buyers, with Singapore performers Mark Lee, Gavin Teo and Hong Ling among its cast. It provides another concrete example of Singapore content entering regional co-production and market infrastructure.

South Korean Remake of The Intern Knocks The Odyssey From No. 1 The local remake drew 275,183 admissions over the weekend, ending The Odyssey’s six-week run atop Korea’s admissions chart. The result also offers another useful data point for the continuing industrial viability of cross-border remake rights.

Na Hong-jin’s Hope Opens at No. 8 in North America The Korean genre film earned around US$3.31 million in its opening North American weekend according to KoBiz, providing a relatively substantial mainstream theatrical launch for a Korean-language feature rather than a limited festival-led release.

Contents Panda Takes Teen Cop to Busan’s Asian Contents & Film Market The Korean sales company has acquired worldwide rights and will launch the film alongside Shaving, Final Interview and several genre projects at ACFM, demonstrating how Busan remains a key commercial launch point for upcoming Korean titles.

Busan Expands Its Conversation Around AI, Animation and Microdrama KoBiz previews BIFF’s growing focus on technologies and formats reshaping Asian cinema, including artificial intelligence, animation and short-form storytelling. It further broadens Busan’s role beyond discovering finished Asian features into debating how they may be produced in future.

Rolf de Heer Named Tokyo International Film Festival Jury President The Australian filmmaker will lead Tokyo’s International Competition jury, while the festival also presents an Australia Spotlight in partnership with the Australian Embassy in Japan.

Tokyo Adds Mizoguchi Retrospective and Animation Symposium Tokyo announced a Kenji Mizoguchi programme alongside an animation symposium at TIFFCOM and the tenth anniversary of its Teens Cinema Workshop, combining industry activity with film heritage and audience-development initiatives.

Asian Academy Creative Awards Adds Microdrama and Feature-Film Directing Categories The Singapore-based awards body is expanding beyond its traditional television and streaming remit as short-form vertical storytelling and theatrical film become increasingly important to Asia-Pacific screen industries.

6. In Singapore

SGIFF 2026 to Open With Hur Jin-ho’s The Assassin(s); Aamir Khan and Hirokazu Koreeda Receive Honours The 37th Singapore International Film Festival runs 21 October–1 November, more than a month earlier than its traditional slot. Aamir Khan will receive the Screen Icon Award alongside a 25th-anniversary Lagaan screening, while Koreeda receives the Cinema Honorary Award and presents Look Back.

The programme also brings more than 25 internationally recognised Singapore productions and co-productions home, including Ah Girl, 9 Temples to Heaven, Four Seasons in Java and The Burning Giants. All four compete in SGIFF’s Asian Feature Film Competition, illustrating the scale at which Singapore producers and craftspeople are now embedded in regional co-production.

Lan Hongchun’s Teochew-Language Back To Love Gets 1 October Singapore Release Clover Films will release the earlier feature by Dear You director Lan Hongchun, with around two-thirds of its dialogue in Teochew. It is one of the first obvious commercial consequences of Singapore’s newly liberalised rules around Chinese-dialect film screenings.

Real-Life Sandbox Stunt School Closes Weeks Before The Sandbox Opens in Cinemas The stunt school on which James Thoo’s SGIFF-premiering mockumentary is based handed back its physical space on 24 September because of rental costs. The film opens theatrically on 8 October, turning its fictional story about keeping a struggling Singapore arts business alive into a particularly direct reflection of the real production ecosystem.

HYBE Expands Cine Fest to More Than 1,100 Cinemas, Including Shaw Theatres Singapore The October event includes three concert films, BTS live broadcasts and a sing-along programme across more than 50 countries. For Singapore exhibition, it is another example of cinemas increasingly relying on event content that sits outside conventional feature-film distribution.

Two CNA Documentaries Receive International Emmy Nominations The nominations provide another international industry marker for Singapore factual production, alongside the country’s increasing activity in feature co-production, animation and regional television partnerships.

Opening the programme, Łodz Film School’s Polish graduation short Dying of the Young Deer (dir. Angelika Cygal, 2025) centres around a young girl leaving her family home to journey to her husband’s house, accompanied by her mother’s quilt and eccentric experiences with villagers. Shot on analogue film, the story develops an ethereal and timeless quality, apt for a predicament familiar to newly engaged women: to leave the familiarity and comfort of one’s childhood home for an entirely new life shaped by patriarchal expectations. Helka Rząsa’s leading performance is wordless yet powerfully embodied, becoming a conduit for the atmosphere of uncertainty.

Joe Hsieh’s animation Praying Mantis (2025) has travelled the festival circuits since its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival and is supported by film veteran Yonfan as executive producer. A mother mutates her son and herself into a praying mantis to allow his survival after a difficult birth, with both entrapping men to feed their appetites. The story had great potential to reflect queer and feminist realities, particularly when she remarks — “no matter what, he is still my boy” — words queer people fantasise hearing from their family. The parallels drawn between orgasm and death also allow for psychosexual discourse. However, the film’s ending creates a lacklustre conflict between the mother and the nurse, who had mutated them, to argue for what true motherhood is. A mother’s sacrifice is also rendered senseless by an ungrateful and unaware son. These elements betray the film’s seemingly noble intentions with lofty veneers of complication and maturity to disguise its reckless illogic.

This human-mutant motif continues in Bulgarian Mira Yankova’s experimental animation Disturbia (2024) as a human-bird hybrid transforms itself amidst tensions of “economical, ideological, military and climatic threats.” At first watch, the synecdoche of the playful elements does not immediately read as these monumental topics. That is perhaps the film’s strength. With energetic vitality and whimsical animation, Yankova situates an audience in a world that is unstable, uncertain and full of threat. Hence, when the film’s resolution gestures to the filmmaker’s possible pessimism, its disturbing qualities affect the audience beyond its tight six-minute runtime.

Developed at the Locarno Film Festival Spring Academy, Malaysian filmmaker Mickey Lai’s At February’s End (2025) uses a short runtime of nine minutes to evoke an entirely new world to realise a fantasy of queer being. Wordlessly, a cleaning lady encounters a mysterious woman and begins a passionate affair of dance and beauty. With wide shots of breathtaking landscapes, ancient castles alluding to histories, and volatile, dazzling choreography, Lai challenges conventional associations of the setting by conceiving new imaginations for queer possibilities. The only words in the film come from a meaningfully composed haiku: “Hands scrub in silence / Soft echoes slip through the cracks / The stain breathes beneath.” Like the haiku, the film finds subversion in its sexy sibilance, beckoning for a new form of queer essence between mundane gestures and grand, ancient traditions.

Closing the programme, Filipino JT Trinidad’s Honey, My Love, So Sweet is one of the most exciting Southeast Asian shorts from 2025. A beautiful ode to cinema, childhood, and queer innocence, the film follows a young boy, Life, as he grows up in a decaying cinema in Manila, finding growth through the discovery of films, a new friendship, and his blossoming affection for the friend’s father. JT never seeks to romanticise any of these elements, instead allowing the synthesis of these individual arcs to feel everyday and transient. Life, then, feels accidental, much like the experience of childhood, still too nascent and ignorant to fathom a moment’s significance.

The films of the ‘Adore’ programme are concerned less with what is desired. Rather, they are interested in what becomes of us through desiring. Like the homophone of the programme title, to ‘Adore’ is perhaps not dissimilar to ‘A door’: In desiring, and opening ourselves up to desire, what seems forbidden and uncertain affords us a new way of being.

Written by Daryl Cheong, edited by Phyllis Chan

1. Reviews of Singapore Films

The Violinist

• The Violinist Review (TIFF 2026) — GateCrashers

  Zee finds music the film’s strongest centre, but wishes its romance, politics and wartime narrative had more bite. Particularly interesting on the film’s uneasy position between Japanese and American animation traditions, and the care given to actually animating violin performance.

• TIFF 2026 Review: Raul Garcia and Ervin Han’s Resonant “The Violinist” Speaks to Life in Singapore Under Occupation — The Moveable Fest

  Stephen Saito is warmer, finding an epic of friendship within the film’s reconstruction of pre-war Singapore. The straightforwardness of its drama occasionally works against it, but becomes unexpectedly powerful when the film widens from Kai and Fei towards Singapore’s longer post-war history.

• TIFF 2026 — The Violinist Review — CGMagazine

  Brendan Frye is considerably harsher, calling the animation inconsistent and the wartime narrative meandering even while praising its music. Three reviews later, a faultline is becoming clearer: critics broadly respond to the film’s ambition and score, but disagree sharply over whether its animation and dramatic simplicity can carry that scale.

2. Latest Criticism from Festivals: Toronto & San Sebastián

• Atonement Review: A Powerful War Drama of Guilt, Forgiveness, and American Accountability — The Playlist

  Reed Van Dyk adapts the true story of an American soldier seeking forgiveness from the Iraqi family whose relatives his unit killed. Ankit Jhunjhunwala finds the feature debut unusually willing to make American culpability, rather than war’s abstract tragedy, the centre of its reckoning.

• Alpha Gang Is a Silly, Charming, High-Concept Sci-Fi Comedy — The Film Stage

  David and Nathan Zellner send an alien biker gang to Earth only for them to acquire human emotions. Jourdain Searles finds something increasingly rare in American independent cinema: a high-concept comedy allowed to remain deeply silly.

• San Sebastián 2026: What Remains — Cineuropa

  Yeşim Ustaoğlu follows a poet who abandons her partner and child and simply starts driving. Fabien Lemercier finds a road movie suspended between realism and poetry, where landscape becomes part of a woman’s attempt to recover some form of freedom.

• San Sebastián 2026: Erratics — Cineuropa

  Thomas Woodroffe returns to footage shot by French military photographer Paul Castelnau in early-20th-century Tierra del Fuego. The film revisits an archive inseparable from colonial observation, asking what contemporary cinema can do with images produced by another historical gaze.

• San Sebastián 2026: Tender Loving Care — Cineuropa

  Mike Leigh turns to two social workers navigating other people’s crises in what may be his final feature. Cineuropa describes it as a spirited accounting of both the good and bad in ordinary life—a suitably Leigh-like proposition for a possible farewell.

3. Spotlighting New Titles

• 9 Temples to Heaven Review: Superstition and Spiritual Doubt Haunt Thai Family Drama — Slant Magazine

  Longtime Apichatpong Weerasethakul collaborator Sompot Chidgasornpongse follows an extended Thai family through rituals of faith, death and superstition. Anzhe Zhang finds the film most compelling in the friction between religious inheritance and the realities of modern family life.

• Primetime Review: Robert Pattinson Goes Full Monster — Slant Magazine

  Lance Oppenheim fictionalises the machinery surrounding To Catch a Predator, with Robert Pattinson turning its Chris Hansen analogue into something closer to a carnival barker. Rocco T. Thompson finds a media satire less interested in sober moral accounting than in the grotesquerie of turning punishment into appointment television.

• All of a Sudden Review: Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Moving Drama About the Virtues of Camaraderie — Slant Magazine

  Hamaguchi Ryusuke shifts from the bleakness of Evil Does Not Exist towards a Paris nursing home and the people trying to care properly within a system built around bottom lines. Keith Uhlich finds its eventual generosity earned rather than sentimental.

• Forgotten Island Review: A Wildly Imaginative Fantasy About the Magic of Friendship — Slant Magazine

  DreamWorks ventures into Filipino mythology through manananggals, karaoke, tinikling and two childhood best friends. Justin Clark is taken by how confidently the film draws from a body of folklore that mainstream American animation has barely touched.

• Take Off — Peng Fei Song — In Review Online

  A mainstream Chinese feel-good film begins by quoting Hegel—twice—before following a man trying to build his own flying machine. Joshua Polanski reads its individual aspiration alongside the national one, even noting that one of its supposedly Hegelian quotations probably isn’t Hegel at all.

4. Discourse of the Week: Is Cinema Becoming a Format War?

After years of asking whether audiences would return to cinemas, Hollywood may have found an answer: make the cinema itself part of the product. The Odyssey continues selling out 70mm IMAX screenings months after opening; Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday now share a December release date; and the fight for premium screens has become important enough that Disney has introduced its own large-format certification. But if Barbenheimer emerged unexpectedly from audiences, can studios manufacture the same excitement on command?

• Moviegoers are showing up for the biggest screens possible. Buckle up for ‘Dunesday.’ — The Washington Post

  Lucas Trevor looks at how format itself has become a reason to leave home: audiences travel for 70mm, compare projections and repeatedly watch the same film across different screens. Cinema’s answer to streaming increasingly appears to be something streaming cannot reproduce.

• Dunesday: will this be Barbenheimer on steroids – the biggest weekend of cinema ever? — The Guardian

  The Guardian is much more suspicious of the branding exercise. Barbenheimer was funny because two radically different films accidentally collided; Dunesday arrives already named, marketed and embroiled in an IMAX turf war. Can virality remain viral once the studios start scheduling it?

• Experiences beat buying stuff — and cinemas are box office again — The Times

  The larger context is a surprisingly strong year for theatrical exhibition, with UK admissions surging and spectacle increasingly folded into a broader “experience economy”. Perhaps cinema has not defeated streaming so much as repositioned itself: not as the default way to see a movie, but as an event worth leaving the house for.

5. Beyond Words

• Why Movies Feel Written Now — Elliot Frame

  Frame asks why certain films feel constructed while others appear to simply happen, moving through Good Will Hunting, Dead Poets Society, Lost in Translation and Before Sunrise to argue for omission and trust in the audience. It also prompted a useful rebuttal this week over whether “feeling written” is actually a defect—or merely another way of describing deliberate filmmaking.

• Resident Evil, The Uprising, The History of Concrete — Breakfast All Day

  Christy Lemire and Alonso Duralde move between Zach Cregger’s stripped-down Resident Evil, Paul Greengrass’ medieval revolt and John Wilson’s concrete fixation. A useful criticism roundtable precisely because three wildly different approaches to genre and form are allowed to rub against one another.

• The Devil’s Backbone (2001) | Dir. Guillermo del Toro — Scene by Scene

  Two filmmakers return to del Toro’s ghost story to break down its manipulation of audiences, horror iconography and depiction of the Spanish Civil War as something largely unseen but permanently present. Less review than close reading of how the film is actually built.

Rajdip Ray’s The First Bite (2025) takes a conventional premise and form to effectively punctuate an everyday experience of grief. A young husband, Sharma (Tanmay Dhanania), changes his own diet to journey alongside his wife, Neeta’s (Naina Sareen), cancer diagnosis. The images are straightforward: tiffin carriers are a symbol of his commitment, and a montage of mundane experiences together reflects joy amidst tragedy. Yet in their simplicity, Ray allows expression for difficult feelings that a stoic culture may find hard to express. The jokes that Neeta hails from a lineage of “warriors” whom even Death would be scared of, reflect an emotional restraint one often associates with Asian cultures. Particularly surprising was the film’s capacity for political commentary: In a scene where Sharma struggles to hail an ambulance, the class divide is revealed through privileges that only the powerful have access to. With its powerful emotional core and capacity for political commentary, this was an exceptional work.

Baadarane (2025) is as powerful as it is tragic. Faced with his mother’s death, a young boy believes that her death was “punishment” from God. Consequently, he commits a series of heinous acts in hopes of being struck to death and reuniting with her. Director Samah El Kadi’s ingenious premise is matched only by the awe-inspiring images that evoke a sense of spirituality. In the film’s opening scenes, the boy cycles to catch up with an ambulance amidst the harsh winter landscape: a powerful reminder of one’s smallness and the inevitability of death. Using the motif of a donkey, El Kadi finds room for God in a world that struggles to hold onto faith. With the evocative writing and imagery, the film compels a reaction as sincere as a child’s uncertainties about death.

Moving from narratives, documentarian Angeline Teh’s Our Birthdays (2026) allows meaning within the in-betweens: between phone and camera footage, between past and present, between life and death. Through interspersed episodes, an audience may not realise till later that the Belgian family depicted had suffered the death of their second son five years prior. Yet, cut with images of the son’s birth, Teh seems to offer the synchronicity of existence across conception and demise to argue that meaning and love need not have a beginning or end. Instead, time is simultaneous. Teh’s directorial vision elevates an ordinary story of loss into one that finds hope through a re-imagination of time and existence.

Taiwanese docufiction Paper Houses and Horses (2025) extends this in-between state by turning the gaze on a Taiwanese mortuary that houses the bodies of abandoned children. Set alongside experimental and double-exposed images of effigies burnt as part of Teochew practices, the film recalls Choānn’s Scent of the Gods (2024) in its use of thermal heat images to evoke the experience of an afterlife. These fictional liberties are creative expressions of death, but they do lead one to wonder whether their imposition on a straightforward documentation of a mortuary’s efforts is more aesthetic than necessary. At times, they risk subtracting from what could have been a moving celebration of their work, or a deeper reflection of child abandonment.

Finally, the programme closed with Chheangkea’s Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites (2025) that has already travelled much of the festival circuit. In it, Grandma Nai leaves the afterlife to observe her favourite grandson’s upcoming engagement with a woman despite his queer identity. Whilst not subtle, the film relies on the unsaid and implied to express the difficulties of abandoning a life: a grandson resisting his queerness, a grandma resisting her death. No matter one’s position, Chheangkea’ sympathetic lens explores the challenges in accepting a new phase of life.

Screened together, the five films trace movement from life to death, whilst exploring the in-betweens. The films, particularly the bookends, demonstrate that even at death, the amplifications of our loved ones’ absence (or presence) continue to pervade. And whether an afterlife exists, that love has become its own entity, rendered alive and singular. Love, in all its nobility, is what we are about.

Written by Daryl Cheong, edited by Phyllis Chan

1. Theatrical Cinema Keeps Breaking Records

‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Becomes Biggest US Box Office Hit of All Time Screen Daily reports that Spider-Man: Brand New Day has passed Star Wars: The Force Awakens to become the highest-grossing film ever at the North American box office, reaching more than US$936 million after 47 days. Its run has now produced records across opening weekend, opening week and numerous cumulative milestones.

Global Box Office Reign for ‘Spider-Man’ and ‘The Odyssey’ Ends as ‘Practical Magic 2’ Takes Top Spot Screen Daily reports Practical Magic 2 ending an eight-week stretch in which either Spider-Man or The Odyssey topped the worldwide chart, opening to US$46 million globally. Its softer-than-expected result also shows that the theatrical recovery continues to be highly uneven between titles.

‘Practical Magic 2’, Oasis Documentary and ‘Pressure’ Lead UK-Ireland Box Office Three new releases occupied the top three positions in the UK and Ireland, while The Odyssey and Spider-Man continued their record-setting runs beneath them. The weekend provides a healthier picture of theatrical diversity than the event-film-heavy global chart alone.

2. TIFF’s First Market: Sales, Scale and Growing Pains

Sales, Few Packages and Badge Lines – Attendees Assess Inaugural TIFF: The Market Screen Daily’s post-mortem on Toronto’s first formal market is essential reading. TIFF recorded 7,010 delegates from 92 countries, 1,473 buyers, 238 exhibitors and more than 116,000 attendances at market events, surpassing its original delegate target—although buyers and sellers reported limited new packages and significant first-year logistical problems.

Universal, Blumhouse Atomic Monster Take TIFF Midnight Madness Hit ‘River’ The first major acquisition of TIFF saw Universal and Blumhouse Atomic Monster closing a deal reportedly worth more than US$10 million for Josh Giuliano’s River. Particularly notable: Independent Film Company and Shudder already held US rights before buyers began pursuing the film following its premiere.

AGC Reports Robust Sales on TIFF Crowdpleaser ‘Babies’ Lauren Miller Rogen’s Babies, starring Anna Kendrick and Seth Rogen, closed deals across the UK, Latin America, Germany, Canada, Australia-New Zealand, Scandinavia and numerous other territories after its Toronto world premiere.

Trudie Styler’s ‘Up Against It’ Scores Additional Sales Ahead of Toronto Premiere Beta Cinema expanded sales of Up Against It to more than 50 territories before its TIFF Gala premiere.

Killer Films’ Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler Talk Mid-Budget Films at TIFF The veteran producers behind Carol, Past Lives and Todd Haynes’ work discussed the increasingly difficult environment for mid-budget independent cinema. Their conversation is a useful counterpoint to Toronto’s expansion as a marketplace: more market infrastructure does not necessarily make difficult films easier to finance.

‘La Bola Negra’ Wins TIFF People’s Choice Award, ‘Angh’ Takes Platform Netflix-backed La Bola Negra wins Toronto’s audience award ahead of its unusually long 47-day theatrical window, while Indian feature Angh wins Platform. Significantly, Platform’s new Academy recognition means qualifying non-English-language winners now have a potential route towards the International Feature Oscar independent of national-selection committees.

3. Governments Want Production Back

US Federal Incentive Could Generate $125bn in Extra Production Spend, Study Finds An MPA-commissioned Olsberg SPI study argues that a proposed federal production incentive could generate US$125 billion in additional US production spending between 2027 and 2035. Its model assumes a transferable 20% federal credit that could be stacked with existing state incentives, reflecting growing concern over productions leaving the United States.

UK and Canada Sign Updated Co-Production Treaty The two countries have modernised their longstanding treaty to encompass digital platforms while allowing greater flexibility around financing, copyright, revenues and distribution. Official co-productions can continue accessing domestic funding and tax incentives in both territories.

West of England Launches £4.5m Production Fund The new Greenlight West fund will provide non-recoupable grants of between £50,000 and £500,000 to commercially viable productions generating regional spending, employment and skills development. It is another example of sub-national governments competing directly for mobile film and television production.

TorinoFilmLab Selects Three Features for €50,000 Co-Production Fund Grants TorinoFilmLab selected projects from the Philippines, Kosovo and Myanmar from more than 140 applicants, providing each with €50,000 and consultancy support. Burmese filmmaker Sein Lyan Tun’s The Beer Girl in Yangon is produced across Indonesia, France, Singapore and Japan, illustrating precisely the kind of cross-border financing these programmes enable.

European Work in Progress Unveils 25 Projects for 2026 FilmFest Hamburg’s industry platform selected 25 projects from a record 270 submissions for pitching to distributors, programmers and sales companies. The slate includes projects from Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia, including Indian filmmaker Suman Sen’s Eka.

Paramount and California AG in Advanced Talks to Settle Warner Bros. Antitrust Suit Paramount and California Attorney General Rob Bonta reportedly resumed negotiations over the US$110 billion Warner Bros. transaction, including discussion of temporarily operating the two film studios separately. The possibility of structural separation shows how production and theatrical commitments are becoming central components of merger negotiations.

4. Festivals Are Rebuilding Their Industrial Roles

San Sebastián Opens With Werner Herzog Donostia Award San Sebastián opened its 74th edition on 18 September, moving the autumn festival circuit onward from Venice and Toronto. The festival continues to combine Competition premieres with one of Europe’s increasingly important co-production and project-development ecosystems.

Rotterdam Managing Director Clare Stewart to Step Down Clare Stewart will leave her management position after IFFR 2027 but continue developing the Cate Blanchett-led Displacement Film Fund. The leadership transition is worth watching for a festival that has increasingly intertwined exhibition, talent development and project financing through CineMart and the Hubert Bals Fund.

Dubai International Film Festival Set to Return in 2027 DIFF will return after a decade-long absence, with the revived festival promising a particular focus on Arab cinema and an industry platform connecting filmmakers with investors. Its return potentially reshapes a Gulf festival environment now also occupied by Red Sea and Doha.

5. Asia: Production Support, Markets and New Circulation Routes

Korea Boosts Production Support for 16 Projects With Nearly $20m The Korean Film Council will distribute KRW25.7 billion across 16 mid-budget films as part of an initiative launched to revive domestic production and box office. Eight supported films are by first-time directors, while projects include Koji Fukada’s Korea-Japan co-production Grateful and Um Tae-hwa’s next feature.

Finecut Scores Sales of Features Based on Short-Form Series With K-pop Stars South Korea’s Finecut has begun selling theatrical feature versions of three productions originally conceived as short-form series. After-School Exorcism Club: Girls’ Night has already sold to Singapore, Indonesia and Taiwan, while other titles have secured Japan, Hong Kong and regional deals. The movement from micro-format to theatrical feature is particularly noteworthy.

Chinese Box Office Hit ‘Once Upon A Time In The Middle East’ Lands North American Distribution Well Go USA acquired Wen Muye’s US$318-million Chinese hit for North American theatrical release. The deal provides another example of commercially successful Chinese cinema finding international theatrical circulation beyond the diaspora-specialist release model.

Zhang Yimou to Lead Busan Competition Jury Zhang will preside over a pan-Asian jury including Bi Gan, July Jung, Kei Ishikawa and Vietnamese producer Tran Thi Bich Ngoc. More consequentially, Busan’s best-film winner can now qualify for the International Feature Oscar following BIFF’s new FIAPF recognition, increasing the stakes of its recently created Competition.

AGBO Executives to Deliver AI-Themed Keynote at TIFFCOM Tokyo’s content market is putting artist-led AI and machine learning at the centre of its industry conference, with AGBO executives Chris Brearton and Dominic Hughes delivering the keynote. TIFFCOM will also release anime-industry research and stage an international anime co-production conference.

Cate Blanchett Brings Displacement Film Fund Premieres to Tokyo Tokyo will host the Japanese premieres of five shorts backed by Blanchett’s Displacement Film Fund, including works by Mohammad Rasoulof and Shahrbanoo Sadat. The fund is supported by IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund and represents an interesting collaboration between philanthropic funding and festival infrastructure.

‘The Age of Goodbyes’ and ‘The Scar-Faced Cat’ to Bookend Golden Horse Film Festival Malaysian filmmaker Edmund Yeo’s Taiwan-Malaysia co-production The Age of Goodbyes will open Taipei’s Golden Horse Film Festival following its Toronto premiere. The festival will close with Taiwanese feature The Scar-Faced Cat: Way of Asura, continuing Golden Horse’s position as a major platform connecting Chinese-language cinemas across borders.

Weta FX and Netflix Bring AI, Financing and Story Development to Busan’s Creative Asia Netflix, BIFF, the Asian Film Commissions Network and MPA are expanding Creative Asia at Busan, adding workshops with Netflix executives alongside an AI panel involving Weta FX. Sessions explicitly address how projects get developed, financed and bought, positioning the initiative increasingly as professional-development infrastructure rather than a promotional event.

TorinoFilmLab Funds Filipino and Myanmar Projects Martika Ramirez Escobar’s Daughters of the Sea and Sein Lyan Tun’s The Beer Girl in Yangon were among only three projects selected globally for TorinoFilmLab’s €50,000 co-production grants. The latter brings together Indonesian KawanKawan Media, France’s In Vivo Films, Singapore’s Momo Film Co and Japan’s Loaded Films.

‘Angh’ Wins TIFF Platform Award Theja Rio’s Nagaland-set Indian feature wins Toronto’s Platform competition at a moment when the prize has acquired new industry significance: qualifying international-language Platform winners can now become eligible for the International Feature Oscar. For smaller film industries and minority-language cinemas, that creates an additional path around national selection systems.

European Work in Progress Selects Indian Project ‘Eka’ Among Record Submissions Suman Sen’s Indian feature is among 25 projects selected for Hamburg’s work-in-progress market from 270 submissions. Its presence is another example of Asian projects increasingly using European finishing and sales platforms rather than relying only on Asian project markets.

6. In Singapore

‘The Violinist’ Opens in Singapore Cinemas on 17 September Annecy Cristal winner The Violinist began its commercial Singapore run this week through Golden Village Pictures, in both English and Mandarin versions. The release follows Toronto Centrepiece and precedes Busan, making its campaign an unusually clear example of a Singapore film coordinating major-festival prestige with a domestic theatrical launch.

CNA used the release to argue that the film’s international success demonstrates that Singapore stories do not necessarily need to dilute local history or identity to travel. The film moves across colonial Singapore, wartime Malaya and the Japanese Occupation while remaining designed for international audiences.

Mediacorp Expands Korean Collaborations With ‘Collateral Romance’ and Four Microdramas Mediacorp announced a 12-episode Singapore-South Korea co-production with Korean investment company Blintn, alongside a separate agreement with SBS subsidiary Studio S and short-form platform Soonshot to make four microdramas using Singaporean and Korean talent. Collateral Romance will film across both countries and premiere in 2027.

The microdrama partnership is particularly worth tracking after the format’s rapid global growth this year. The first project adapts Korean romantic comedy Still 17 and is targeted for release by the end of 2026, with distribution planned across Mediacorp and Soonshot platforms internationally.

Singapore’s Momo Film Co Joins TorinoFilmLab-Funded ‘The Beer Girl in Yangon’ Singapore’s Momo Film Co is co-producing Burmese filmmaker Sein Lyan Tun’s debut alongside KawanKawan Media, In Vivo Films and Loaded Films. The €50,000 TorinoFilmLab award adds another European financing layer to a project that has previously passed through Locarno Open Doors and Cannes’ Cinéfondation ecosystem.

Ervin Han Joins TIFFCOM Anime Co-Production Conference Following The Violinist’s Annecy win and Singapore release, co-director Ervin Han has been announced for an international anime co-production session at Tokyo’s TIFFCOM. His inclusion places Singapore animation directly within a wider conversation around how Asian animated features can be structured internationally.

‘Avengers Endgame: Encore’ Heads Back to Singapore Cinemas Marvel will re-release Avengers: Endgame locally from 24 September with exclusive Avengers: Doomsday footage, including additional material for IMAX and the new Infinity Vision premium format. The release is another example of catalogue titles being repackaged as event cinema to market upcoming franchise films and premium screens.

The film follows Den Bhagseng, who leaves for Southeast Asia in the 1950s in search of work to support his family, eventually settling in Thailand. His wife, Iap Sogriu, remains behind in China, waiting endlessly for his return. Their longing is transformed into strokes of ink across qiaopi—letters and remittances exchanged between overseas Chinese migrants and their families—carrying their affection across thousands of miles.

For decades, narratives of the Nanyang migration into Southeast Asia have remained largely absent from Chinese-language cinema, whether because of the enormous scale required to reconstruct such history or the practical challenges of production. Directed by Lan Hongchun, Dear You stands apart. Yet despite grounding itself in historical events, it conspicuously “edits out” some of the most sensitive aspects of that history. In remembering the past, it simultaneously forgets—and perhaps even resists—it. The more important question, therefore, is not whether the film is historically accurate, but how it uses cinematic images to naturalise a carefully selected historical experience as the “history” audiences come to believe.

At least half of the film unfolds through flashbacks, presenting audiences with a moving account of the hardships endured by overseas Chinese migrants. Yet the film’s extensive use of flashbacks is not merely a narrative device; it constitutes a form of memory politics. There is nothing inherently problematic about approaching grand historical events through the perspective of an ordinary individual. On the contrary, it is often one of cinema’s most effective storytelling strategies. The problem arises when the history being constructed is stripped of its complexity. At that point, are viewers participating in the construction of a collective memory of the Nanyang migration, or are they simply accepting a carefully curated narrative of suffering?

The politics of flashback in Dear You reveals cinema’s remarkable ability to shape collective memory. But whose memories do these flashbacks actually belong to? Are they Den Bhagseng’s, or Iap Sogriu’s? Presented from an almost omniscient perspective, these sequences gradually elevate Den Bhagseng’s personal experience into something representative of an entire historical era. In doing so, the film invites audiences not only to empathise with this past but also to internalise a specific historical imagination informed by each perspective’s own biases.

The China depicted in Dear You resembles a historical space emptied of politics and social conflict. Although the narrative spans the period from the 1950s through the 1970s, the characters appear to inhabit a parallel world untouched by the Great Leap Forward, the Great Chinese Famine, the Cultural Revolution, or the ideological tensions of the Cold War. These events need not dominate the narrative, but their near absence deprives the historical setting of much of its social and political complexity. As a result, history becomes little more than the backdrop for nostalgia and personal suffering, rather than the very force shaping the characters’ lives. Such selective narration inevitably invites political readings.

Ultimately, Dear You gestures towards something far more complex than a simple story of migration to Nanyang. It raises broader questions about the relationship between history, memory, and cinematic construction. As flashbacks transform individual memories into historical narratives, and as history itself becomes selectively organised and narrated, what the film constructs is not merely a story about the past but a collective historical imagination.

Outside the cinema, the political debates surrounding Dear You continue to unfold, with accusations of United Front influence remaining fiercely contested. When the historical imagination constructed by the film diverges from lived historical experience, audiences are placed in an uncomfortable position. Southeast Asian viewers may readily identify with their ancestors’ painful experiences of migration to Nanyang, yet how can they grapple with the political implications embedded within the film?

What Dear You ultimately leaves behind is not a complete history but a carefully selected—and carefully sanitised—historical imagination. As the complexities that resist the film’s narrative are continually set aside, the controversies surrounding it are repeatedly reduced to the single word “politics.” Yet it is precisely this invocation of “politics” that obscures the more urgent questions: How do we remember history? And who gets to decide how history should be remembered?

Thinking about where Teochew cinema can go, Dear You might have charted new heights and possibilities but central political questions deserve to be considered too.

Written in Chinese and translated by Lee Peng Ming, edited by Daryl Cheong.

1. Theatrical Cinema Breaks Records and Netflix Budges

US Summer Box Office Breaks All-Time Record With $4.76 Billion Variety reports that the 2026 US summer box office surpassed the previous record set in 2013, reaching $4.76 billion between May 1 and September 7. The achievement comes with caveats around inflation and a longer summer season, but marks another milestone in the post-pandemic theatrical recovery.

2026 US summer box office becomes biggest of all time Screen Daily provides the industry data behind the record, with Rentrak confirming the $4.765 billion season.

‘The Odyssey’ Becomes Universal’s Highest-Grossing Film of All Time Variety reports Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey reaching approximately $1.68 billion worldwide, overtaking every film in Universal Pictures’ 114-year history. Its success further reinforces Nolan’s ability to turn auteur filmmaking itself into event cinema.

Netflix to Report Box Office Numbers for 6 Upcoming Movies as Streamer Escalates Theatrical Plans Variety reports a remarkable shift in Netflix’s theatrical strategy: the streamer will disclose grosses for six upcoming releases, including La Bola Negra, Narnia, David Fincher’s The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Box-office reporting places Netflix closer to conventional distribution practice after years of keeping theatrical performance private.

‘The Odyssey’ Crosses 10 Million Admissions in South Korea, Breaks IMAX Records Screen Daily reports that Nolan’s film has earned around $83 million in South Korea alone, passing 10 million admissions and setting multiple IMAX records.

2. Studios Take Risks While Consolidation Continues

WB Heads Talk Risk at TIFF: “The Hedge Against the Unknown Is Embrace the Unknowns” Warner Bros film chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy describe their strategy of operating across multiple budget levels while using new label Clockwork to scout acquisitions, independent films and emerging filmmakers. It suggests a major studio attempting to rebuild an acquisition pipeline alongside its blockbuster operation.

Court to Hold Paramount-Warner Bros. Settlement Conference in Late October Variety reports that a two-day settlement conference has been scheduled in the continuing antitrust dispute over Paramount’s $111 billion Warner Bros. acquisition. Paramount begins owing Warner shareholders a $7 million daily ticking fee from October 1 if the transaction remains unresolved.

Why US Financier Merino Films Is Backing Features by Mike Leigh, Kitty Green and Paul Thomas Anderson Screen Daily profiles a new independent financier investing minority equity in films budgeted between approximately $1 million and $15 million. Its slate demonstrates how private capital is filling financing gaps across prestige independent cinema.

Toronto’s Elevation Pictures Moves Into Documentary Pre-Sales Canadian distributor-producer Elevation Pictures is moving upstream into documentary financing and pre-sales, focusing on projects with easily communicated IP or personalities. It illustrates distributors increasingly participating earlier in the production cycle.

Nicolas Cage Thriller ‘Parish’ Scores Territory Pre-Sales at TIFF Screen Daily reports numerous territory deals for the $20 million post-apocalyptic thriller before production begins. Private investors are financing the project through Archetype Media Finance, offering a useful example of packaging cast, genre and pre-sales to reduce production risk.

3. Toronto Becomes a Market

Is the US Indie Sector Ready to Embrace TIFF: The Market? Toronto launches its first official market with a reported 6,000 industry delegates, more than 800 buyers and 225 exhibitors, backed by C$23 million in federal funding. Screen Daily asks whether the industry actually needs another major market just six weeks before AFM.

Toronto’s Cameron Bailey and Charles Tremblay Talk New Market and Platform Section’s Oscar Boost TIFF leadership explains the multi-year effort to transform the festival’s informal dealmaking culture into formal market infrastructure. The move puts Toronto more directly into competition with Cannes, Berlin and AFM.

TIFF Preview: Are Buyers Changing How They Spend at Markets? Mubi and Manifest Pictures executives argue that buyers increasingly “decouple” annual acquisition budgets from individual markets. That raises an important question for TIFF: whether creating another formal market actually produces more spending or merely redistributes existing meetings.

In Focus: Ontario Creates’ International Financing Forum Becomes Part of TIFF: The Market TIFF absorbs Ontario Creates’ long-running financing forum into the new market, with 51 projects meeting potential financiers and collaborators. Projects come from territories including the Philippines, Taiwan, Iraq and Zimbabwe, expanding the market beyond straightforward finished-film sales.

Buyers Weigh in on Toronto’s Revamped Oscar-Qualifying Platform Section TIFF’s Platform competition now provides an alternative route into the International Feature Oscar race: eligible winners can qualify without being selected by their national committee. The change potentially makes festival prizes more consequential to distribution and awards strategy.

‘Evil Genius’, ‘Everybody Wants To F*ck Me’ in TIFF Buyers’ Sights Screen Daily surveys the films generating acquisition interest, while A24 is privately showing buyers three titles including Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Theranos documentary. The piece offers a useful snapshot of the actual buying activity surrounding TIFF’s new formal market.

15 TIFF Acquisition Titles to Tempt Buyers Screen Daily identifies the available festival titles positioned for sales, illustrating the interaction between festival premieres, agencies, sales companies and domestic distributors at the market’s inaugural edition.

Indie Sales Scores Worldwide Deals on ‘All About Corinne’ Starring Isabelle Huppert The Locarno-closing industry satire has sold across Canada, Australia, Germany, Korea, China and numerous European territories ahead of its TIFF gala, demonstrating how festival circulation can steadily accumulate distribution markets.

New Zealand Set to Unveil Tri-Nation Indigenous Co-Production Initiative at Toronto New Zealand, Australia and Canada are creating a filmmaking initiative connecting Māori, Aboriginal and Canadian Indigenous filmmakers through co-development and co-production. The scheme foregrounds shared cultural practice rather than beginning with conventional financing incentives.

Netflix Picks Up Australian Documentary ‘2.6 Seconds: Death in the Outback’ Ahead of TIFF Premiere Netflix acquires global rights to the Blackfella Films series before its Toronto premiere. The project began through Australian public-service broadcasters SBS and NITV with Screen Australia and Screen NSW support, offering a useful example of publicly supported local nonfiction moving onto a global commercial platform.

4. Venice Closes, Awards Season Begins

‘Woman Unknown’ Wins Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival 2026 May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown takes Venice’s top prize as the festival closes, with NAZA and Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love also among the major winners. Venice once again functions simultaneously as an auteur showcase and the first major staging ground for awards season.

Venice Film Festival Takeaways: Political Movies Dominate Buzz and More Variety assesses a Venice edition in which politically charged films played an unusually prominent role alongside the usual awards-launch machinery.

“The International Oscar Definitely Changes Lives” – TIFF Panel Talks Academy Rule Change TIFF industry figures discuss the expanded route through which festival prize winners can qualify for the International Feature Oscar. For films from countries with politically or institutionally restrictive selection systems, festival qualification potentially opens a significant second pathway.

5. Asia: Festivals, Financing and Regional Circulation Expand

Lumière Summit Unveils Independent Cinema Support Plan, €1bn France-Korea Pact France and South Korea announced a €1 billion cooperation pact at the Lumière Summit alongside measures intended to support independent cinema. The agreement is notable for linking cultural-policy intervention with international industrial cooperation at considerable scale.

Tokyo Film Festival Adds New Awards and Southeast Asia Focus Tokyo International Film Festival is introducing new Japanese-film prizes, an honorary award recognising women in cinema and a strand devoted to Southeast Asian filmmaking. The latter gives SEA cinema another formal platform within a major Asian festival.

Tokyo Gap-Financing Market Reveals 2026 Lineup, Partners With Frontières on Genre Titles Tokyo’s financing platform selects 24 projects and partners with Fantasia’s Frontières market to expand its genre-film slate. Projects include films from Thailand and Nepal alongside Latin American and international titles.

Banjong Pisanthanakun Horror ‘Inherit’ Scores Wave of Sales Ahead of Toronto Premiere The Thai horror film has sold across Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea, Australia, New Zealand and other territories before its TIFF premiere. GDH559 and Korea’s Barunson E&A are jointly dividing Asian and international sales duties, creating an interesting cross-border sales structure.

Toronto Reveals Increase in Asian Submissions Aiming to Boost Exposure TIFF says it has seen increasing submissions from Asia after Korean films such as Harbin and The World of Love translated festival attention into domestic commercial success. This suggests international festival premieres increasingly function as marketing assets back in Asian home markets.

Toronto-Bound ‘Long Long Night’, Hong Sangsoo’s ‘Nowhere To Lay My Eyes’ Land Sales International deals continue on Asian titles entering Toronto, including Hong Sangsoo’s latest film. The activity shows the autumn circuit serving not merely as exhibition but as a sales continuation after Cannes and other earlier festivals.

One Cool Pictures Boards Soi Cheang-Produced Busan Competitor ‘Dead End’ Hong Kong’s One Cool Pictures takes sales on the suspense drama before its Busan Vision-Asia screening. The deal demonstrates Hong Kong companies continuing to position themselves as financing and sales bridges for Chinese-language independent and genre cinema.

‘Magical Girl Revolution’ Starring ‘Train To Busan’s Kim Su-an Begins South Korea Shoot Choi Hana’s new feature begins production for a planned 2027 release. The project is one of several Korean productions this week demonstrating continued activity outside the country’s larger franchise and studio titles.

Korean Occult Feature ‘The Uninvited’ Makes TIFF Market Debut With CJ 4DPlex CJ 4DPlex is bringing Heo Jung’s upcoming occult feature starring Byun Yo-han and Ahn Jae-hong to buyers at TIFF: The Market, showing Korean genre cinema continuing to leverage international sales infrastructure alongside domestic exhibition technology companies.

John Torres’ Toronto-Bound ‘The Remotes’ Boarded by Diversion Bangkok-based sales company Diversion boards Filipino filmmaker John Torres’ feature ahead of its TIFF Wavelengths premiere. It is another example of Southeast Asian specialist sales companies building regional catalogues around festival-driven independent cinema.

Pang Brothers’ Horror ‘The Mage’ Acquired for Taiwan, Southeast Asia Release CJ ENM Hong Kong acquires the US$3 million Cantonese-language horror title for much of Southeast Asia and Taiwan, with releases planned across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. The acquisition illustrates the continuing viability of regional theatrical circulation for Asian genre films.

6. In Singapore

Anthony Chen’s ‘We Are All Strangers’ Selected as Singapore’s Oscars Entry for 2027 Anthony Chen’s We Are All Strangers will represent Singapore in the Best International Feature Film category at the 99th Academy Awards. It is the latest stage in a campaign that has already included Berlin Competition, a Singapore theatrical release and further international festival circulation.

Asia Pacific Screen Awards 2026 Nominees Include Yeo Yann Yann, ‘The Violinist’ and Singapore Co-Productions CNA reports a substantial Singapore presence at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards: Yeo Yann Yann is nominated for We Are All Strangers, The Violinist for animation, while Singapore co-productions 9 Temples to Heaven, Four Seasons in Java and Hearing receive further nominations.

AI Can Now Help Make Entire Films. What Does That Mean for Singapore’s Film Industry? CNA returns to Singapore’s generative-AI debate, this time treating it as an industrial question rather than merely controversy surrounding individual AI-produced films. The discussion is increasingly relevant as Singapore producers experiment with AI to reduce costs while conventional production budgets remain constrained.

‘The Violinist’ Begins Singapore Sneaks Ahead of 17 September Release Annecy Cristal winner The Violinist began its Singapore theatrical rollout with sneak screenings during the week, including a Filmhouse presentation with producer and co-director Ervin Han, ahead of its nationwide Golden Village Pictures release on 17 September.

‘Inherit’ Secures Singapore Theatrical Distribution Through Golden Village Singapore is among the territories picked up in the first major sales wave for Thai director Banjong Pisanthanakun’s new horror feature. The deal is another useful indicator of Golden Village’s role not just as exhibitor but as an active distributor of regional Asian commercial cinema.

Pang Brothers’ ‘The Mage’ Set for Singapore Release on 15 October CJ ENM Hong Kong’s regional acquisition includes a 15 October Singapore theatrical release. Alongside Inherit, it gives Singapore exhibitors two significant Southeast Asian/Hong Kong horror releases entering the market through regional rather than Hollywood distribution pipelines.

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Badii speaks to three main characters: a Kurdish soldier serving his military service, an Afghan seminarian devout to his religion, and an Azeri Turk working as a museum taxidermist. Kiarostami’s choice of these profiles extends the film beyond its central existentialism by situating Badii’s crisis within the social and economic disparities within Iranian society.

The Kurds: A people hailing from Kurdistan, which extends across Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. The Kurds have faced political repression and contested sovereignty where specifically after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Kurdish movements seeking autonomy clashed violently with the new Iranian state. The film’s Kurdish soldier can therefore be read as someone compelled to serve a state that has historically subjugated his own people, participating in the very apparatus through which this authority is exercised. His timidity and fear towards Badii’s intentions is poignant when considering this marginalisation.

The Afghans: After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ensuing decades of conflict, Iran hosted millions of Afghan refugees, many of whom faced economic precarity and social discrimination. The Afghan seminarian’s rejection of Badii’s offer emphasises the depth of his faith. Despite his own material lack, he refuses the financial incentive because his religious conviction prevents him from assisting in an act of suicide.

Finally, the Azeri Turks: Sharing Iran’s dominant religion of Shia Islam, this Azerbaijani ethnic minority in Iran are rather assimilated into the country’s political and cultural life. Bagheri, the taxidermist, has himself attempted suicide, and therefore offers Badii experiential wisdom. Yet he ultimately accepts Badii’s proposal in hopes that the money would pay for his sick grandchild’s treatment.

Across these encounters, Kiarostami uses different positions in Iranian society to expose the privilege inherent within Badii’s desire for death. The working-class landscapes he traverses and the underpaid labourers he approaches reveal the economic imbalance within his request: Badii possesses enough money to turn his death into a transaction, asking to compromise one’s morals or faith in exchange for what he can afford to give them.

The transaction also complicates the existential question at the film’s centre from an economic lens: Bagheri accepts the offer because he remains bound to life through responsibility for another person. Where Badii can spend his money to leave the world, Bagheri needs that same money to care for someone who remains in it.

Midway through the film, one man remarks to Badii: “We all have our own responsibilities.” Badii’s existential crisis is made possible by a privilege to withdraw from society and obligation, but the people he encounters cannot easily do the same when their lives are structured by subjugation, faith, family and care.

A Taste of Cherry therefore invites consideration into the socio-economic conditions of Iranian society that divides the classes. Who can afford this existential crisis? Beyond questions of whether life is worth living, it is worth considering: what responsibilities bind a person to the material world?

Through the people Badii encounters, the film transcends the abstractions of life and death to also consider the material realities of survival, and ultimately, what we owe to one another.

Taste of Cherry will be screening at Filmhouse on 6 and 26 September 2026 as part of the Cinematic Voids programme presented in collaboration with the Singapore Art Museum.

Written by Daryl Cheong, edited by Phyllis Chan

Close to a decade has passed.

Rewatching the film on Filmhouse’s big screen, my sentiments have not changed. But my experience has.

There is no need to rehash another review of Stalker. For the unacquainted, the film follows the titular Stalker who leads a Writer and Professor into the mysterious Zone, where a mythical Room supposedly grants its visitors their deepest wishes. Rather than take a straight path towards it, however, they must respect the Zone and navigate its treacherous, inexplicable terrain.

What ensues is a film about desire, faith and meaning: how our declared wishes may differ from our subconscious desires; how devotion to the mystical Zone parallels religious experience; and how meaning might be found by believing in hope and purpose within an increasingly broken world. For a first-time viewer, Stalker promises a spiritual exercise that, with patience, permits transcendence.

But watching it theatrically offered not simply a greater appreciation of these ideas, but an experience that embodies them.

Stalker proposes that we surrender to what we cannot understand. The theatre facilitates this surrender. Before the enormity of the screen, our minute presence gives itself over to the experience. Even when explanations remain elusive, sitting with discomfort and uncertainty becomes transformative in itself. Our doubts, questions and curiosities are not obstacles to the film’s potential transcendence, but necessary conditions for it.

Early in the film, a tracking shot introduces the Stalker, his wife and child. From the convenience of a laptop, I remembered it merely as exposition for the characters. On the big screen, its duration becomes an experience of discovery. Crossing the threshold into the bedroom shifts us from the social towards the familial and intimate; tracking back and forth across the bed continually reconsiders who is looking, what is being seen, and therefore what we thought we had understood. The essence of Stalker lies not only in its central concerns, but in experiencing a form that primes us for spiritual ascendancy.

For Tarkovsky, surrender becomes a spiritual necessity. Belief, and then faith, require precisely what cannot first be proven or understood. Stalker demands the same submission from its audience: transcendence becomes possible only when our desire for certainty is relinquished. It recalls Kierkegaard’s conception of faith becoming meaningful precisely where objective certainty fails. To demand that the Zone explain itself would therefore be to deny its possibility.

Perhaps that is why Stalker invites revisiting on the big screen. The Zone may remain unchanged, but we do not. A decade later, I entered the same film carrying different desires, doubts and experiences. Its mysteries had not been resolved. Instead, like those of the Zone, the film and life itself, these mysteries are renewed experiences that have shifted with me.

Written by Daryl Cheong, edited by Phyllis Chan.

My mother had excitedly informed me that he cried during the film. To say the least, this came as a pleasant surprise. My father is usually the one laughing whenever my mother or I shed even the slightest tear at the cinema. But Lan Hongchun’s Dear You had caught him somewhere neither of us expected. Despite the Teochew sounding different from what he was accustomed to in Singapore, hearing it brought him back to his younger days and memories of his grandmother. My mother even caught him singing along to the folk songs in the film.

For my father, Dear You marked the first time he had heard his language on the big screen.

The film had been all the buzz in China and Southeast Asia, but in Singapore, there was a particular excitement surrounding its release. Many older Singaporean Chinese were looking forward to hearing Teochew in the cinema, a language that, despite Teochews being the second-largest Chinese dialect group in Singapore, has rarely had much of a presence on our screens.

Hokkien speakers have long had Taiwanese dramas and films to turn to, and Cantonese travelled through Hong Kong cinema, TVB dramas and Cantopop, to the extent that even I, who cannot speak a lick of Cantonese, can sing along to Beyond’s “海闊天空” (Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies). Teochew never developed quite the same presence here.

Perhaps that explains the frenzy surrounding Dear You. Tickets to screenings of the original Teochew version sold out within hours. “It made me anxious,” my mother told me. For once, it was the older generation experiencing the peculiar anxiety of fighting for tickets to something popular.

Yet Dear You does something stranger than simply offering Teochew audiences the pleasure of hearing themselves. For my mother, what felt unfamiliar was seeing the Southeast Asian Chinese experience imagined from the other side — from Chaoshan looking towards those who had left.

Towards the end of the film, Sogriu travels to meet Thai-Chinese Lamgi, who had financially assisted her husband and his family who remained in Chaoshan. However, by the time they meet, Lamgi has dementia. The reunion arrives, but memory does not. The two women possess a shared past without being able to share it in the way they might have wanted. It was an ending my parents had not expected, and one that left them both in tears.

There is something painfully apt about this somewhat failed reunion. The relationship between South China and its Southeast Asian diaspora has not disappeared entirely, but the people, languages and memories that once held together that relationship are gradually disappearing.

My Hokkien mother remarked that Dear You felt different from the Taiwanese media she had grown up watching, or even Singapore’s own dialect films. There was a different imagination of the past at work. Southeast Asia was not simply looking backwards towards China as an ancestral homeland, but China was also looking out towards the people who had left its shores, and towards the lives they had built elsewhere.

Perhaps this is why Singapore’s recent attempts to rehabilitate dialects leave me with mixed feelings.

If I could surmise Singapore as a nation, perhaps it is one that looks at the past with regret. At this year’s National Day Rally, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong announced a further relaxation of longstanding restrictions surrounding dialect content. Although acknowledging that many now see dialects as “a cultural heritage worth preserving”, he also stressed the need to protect the “hard-won gains” of the Speak Mandarin Campaign.

But preservation is a strange word for a language.

It makes me think of something already on its way to becoming an artefact.

There is a particular irony in being told that dialects are now our cultural heritage when many Singaporean Chinese of my generation can barely string together a sentence in the languages of our grandparents. Some can no longer understand them at all. In spite of the nation’s focus on Mandarin, not all Singaporean Chinese are well-versed enough to carry a conversation.

As someone who has already lost her own tongue, hearing our national leaders speak of dialects as something to be preserved leaves me with a certain resentment. Perhaps that sounds pessimistic, but the reversal feels painfully late. With every generation, there are fewer opportunities for these languages to be passed down—not only within families, but through the films, television, radio and popular culture that allow a language to exist beyond the home. For communities with fewer speakers and even less media representation, such as Hainanese and Hokchew, that future feels even more precarious.

Dear You cannot reverse that loss. But for two hours in a cinema, Teochew was no longer something relegated to conversations between grandparents, half-understood phrases or memories of a Singapore that no longer exists. It filled the theatre with a language that was suddenly alive again.

Written by Phyllis Chan, edited by Daryl Cheong

1. Reviews of Singapore Films

The House on the Moon

• The House on the Moon — Nelson Yeo [Locarno ’26 Review] — In Review Online

  Morris Yang reads Nelson Yeo’s reworking of Chang’e and Hou Yi through the distance between myth and mortal feeling, finding something productive in the film’s refusal to make its mythology entirely legible. One of the more theoretically engaged responses to Yeo’s second feature.

• ‘The House On The Moon’ review: Singapore’s Nelson Yeo turns Chinese moon goddess myth into ponderous flight of fancy — Screen Daily

  Amber Wilkinson is considerably less convinced, admiring the film’s scale and visual ambition while finding its storytelling difficult to penetrate. Is the film’s opacity part of its mythology or an obstacle?

• House of the Moon (2026) by Nelson Yeo Film Review — Asian Movie Pulse

  Panos Kotzathanasis similarly finds Yeo’s wuxia-science-fiction collision difficult to follow, occasionally tipping into pretension, while still recognising the ambition behind it.

2. Latest Criticism from Festivals: Locarno & Edinburgh

• Locarno Film Festival 2026 — Dispatch 3: Object a, The House on the Moon, Brave New Love — In Review Online

  In Review Online closes its Locarno coverage with Objet a, The House on the Moon, Brave New Love, O Jacaré and Our Time Will Come.

• EIFF 2026: The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight — The Skinny

  Jamie Dunn gives Theodore Schaefer’s 16mm New York triptych five stars, locating much of its energy in Gus Birney’s three different performances.

• EIFF 2026: Pretty Babies — The Skinny

  Ross McIndoe is taken by the dreamier stretches of Tyler-Marie Evans’ tale of two teenage girls heading towards Hollywood, but less by the film’s use of sexual assault to push its story forward.

• EIFF 2026: Snapshot — The Skinny

  Snapshot imagines itself as a Victorian found-footage film, supposedly uncovered alongside wax-cylinder recordings that turn it into cinema’s first talkie. Jamie Dunn finds the conceit imperfect but the attempt thrilling.

• EIFF 2026: I Want Your Sex — The Skinny

  Gregg Araki returns to sex, power and queer provocation; Katie Driscoll finds a film that talks incessantly about sex without being especially sexy.

3. Spotlighting New Titles

• Sweet Milk Lake review — a rewarding film about a trans man mistaken for his twin brother — The Guardian

  Harvey Zielinski uses the familiar homecoming drama for something stranger: Jake returns to his hometown and is mistaken for his twin brother, but chooses not to correct anyone. The film apparently works because it resists turning transness into a single revelation, allowing memory, family and recognition to remain messier.

• Waves Turn review — the exhausting, joyful, boring, wondrous realities of new motherhood — The Guardian

  Josephine Ahnelt films five new mothers on 16mm, interested as much in boredom, repetition and ambivalence as the more photogenic pleasures of parenthood. The home-movie texture becomes a rebuttal to the composed image of motherhood inherited from art.

• Mad Rush review — an intricate phone scam isn’t quite enough to drive this very Melbourne movie — The Guardian

  Luke Buckmaster is less interested in whether Maddelin McKenna turns a phone scam into a convincing thriller than in how decisively the film belongs to Melbourne. A useful defence, with reservations, of films whose geographic specificity may ultimately matter more than their plot.

• The End of Oak Street film review — Financial Times

  David Robert Mitchell moves from It Follows and Under the Silver Lake to suburban dinosaurs. The question running through much of the criticism is whether this is merely Spielberg pastiche or whether Mitchell can smuggle his own strangeness into the machinery of an Amblin blockbuster.

• Toons Have Seldom Been Loonier Than in Coyote vs. Acme — The New Yorker

  Justin Chang finds the film considerably better than its near-erasure by Warner Bros. might have suggested. Ironically, a story about Wile E. Coyote taking a giant corporation to court now carries another story around with it: the corporation that nearly prevented audiences from seeing the film at all.

4. Discourse of the Week: Who Owns The Odyssey?

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has been out for a month, but criticism around the film has moved beyond whether it is simply “good” or “bad”. This week, the more interesting disagreement was over adaptation itself: what fidelity means, whether classicists have special authority over Homer, and what happens when an ancient text becomes mass culture again.

• The Odyssey Belongs to All of Us — Dissent

  Sukaina Hirji pushes against Emily Wilson and other classicists who judge Nolan primarily against Homer, arguing that the film is engaged not only with the original poem but with nearly three millennia of people interpreting it. The more provocative argument is about authority: why should scholars determine which conversations with Homer count as legitimate?

• Why Homer will outlast us all — Financial Times

  The FT similarly treats Nolan as another participant in an extremely long history of people rewriting Homer, from Virgil to Joyce. Fidelity is perhaps the wrong measurement for a story whose cultural survival has always depended on mutation.

• The Cost of Returning to Oneself — Shrine Magazine

  Tatiana Eva-Marie hates Nolan’s film, then does something more interesting than continuing to argue about it: she builds a four-film programme around nostos, or homecoming, through The Best Years of Our Lives, The Last Flight, The Burmese Harp and Rolling Thunder.

• “I felt so inspired”: Guardian readers on trying Homer’s epics after seeing The Odyssey — The Guardian

  Perhaps the most consequential result of all the fighting over fidelity: people are reading Homer. The film has driven readers towards the poem, competing translations and other retellings.

5. Beyond Words

• How Chinese Movies Depict the Rest of the World — Accented Cinema

  Accented Cinema reverses the much more familiar conversation about how Hollywood represents Asia: how does Chinese cinema imagine everybody else?

• Summer Blockbusters Joanna Coles Is Obsessed With — Obsessed: The Podcast

  The Odyssey discourse continues in audio, this time shifting attention from textual fidelity towards the racial backlash around Lupita Nyong’o’s Helen. The discussion argues that the film’s more interesting problems lie elsewhere—including an overstuffed star cast and uneven chemistry—rather than in a mythical Greek woman being played by a Black actor.

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