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.