YNOT at the Movies

Opening Night on October 1 belongs to "Wild Horse Nine" (UK/USA/Chile 2026 | 118 min.), the fifth film from writer-director Martin McDonagh, fresh off premieres at Venice and Telluride. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play CIA officers dispatched from Santiago to Easter Island just before the 1973 Chilean coup, and Rockwell sticks around the following day to receive MVFF's Actor Tribute.

The Centerpiece film, "I Play Rocky" (USA 2026 | 127 min.), is Peter Farrelly's account of how Sylvester Stallone talked his way into starring in his own script. Anthony Ippolito has drawn raves for his uncanny turn as the young Stallone.

The festival closes on October 11 with Jesse Eisenberg's "The Debut" (USA 2026 | 105 min.), his third feature as writer-director. Julianne Moore plays a shy New Jersey housewife who loses herself in a local musical production, opposite Paul Giamatti as the domineering director who pushes her there.

Beyond the Big Nights, The MVFF49 runs a full slate of Spotlight and Tribute programs pairing filmmakers and actors with onstage conversations around their new work, plus a tribute with a live performance to songwriter and producer Linda Perry. The MVFF49 also debuts two new sections, New Directors and Animation, spotlighting first-time and emerging filmmakers alongside animated features.

Documentaries have an unusually strong presence this year, including new work from veteran nonfiction filmmakers: "When A Witness Recants" (USA 2026 | 112 min.), Dawn Porter's account of three Black Baltimore teens wrongfully imprisoned for 36 years; "Union Town" (USA 2026 | 106 min.), Barbara Kopple's look at New York City delivery workers organizing against UPS and Amazon; "Musk" (UK/USA 2026 | 225 min.), Alex Gibney's exhaustive portrait of the tech billionaire; and "My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile" (USA 2026 | in Russian | 355 min.), Julia Loktev's continuation of her chronicle of Russian journalists in exile. They're joined by "Everest: The Other Side" (USA/China/Nepal 2026 | 110 min.), about ski mountaineers attempting Everest's North Face; "Burgundy" (France 2026 | in French | 90 min.), a portrait of the French wine region's winemakers and workers; and two directorial feature debuts: photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti's "The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer" (Argentina/USA 2026 | in Spanish | 94 min.), tracing two cousins growing up in the Argentine Pampas over 25 years, and musician Sean Ono Lennon's "threeasFOUR: Full Circle" (USA 2026), a portrait of the avant-garde New York fashion collective. The festival also just added the West Coast premiere of "NAZA" (UK 2026 | 80 min.), Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor's Venice Special Jury Prize winner examining the systems behind Israel's killing of civilians in Gaza.

And within the broader lineup, Asian cinema has an especially strong showing this year, led by two returning masters. Hirokazu Koreeda brings the Bay Area premiere of "Look Back" (ルックバック | Japan 2026 | in Japanese | 100 min.), a live-action adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto's manga about two middle-school girls, the outgoing Fujino and the reclusive Kyomoto, who bond over drawing and grow up together as manga artists. Alongside it is Lee Chang-dong's "Possible Love" (가능한 사랑 | South Korea 2026 | in Korean | 164 min.), his first feature in eight years, which won the Grand Jury Prize and FIPRESCI Prize at Venice this fall and is South Korea's Oscar submission; it arrives at the MVFF with an Auteur Award and Spotlight slot on October 2. Rounding out the sidebar: "Elephants in the Fog" (तिनीहरू | Nepal 2026 | in Nepali | 103 min.), Abinash Bikram Shah's debut about a Kinnar community, which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes this year; and "A Girl Unknown" (China/France 2026 | in Mandarin | 125 min.), Zou Jing's Cannes Critics' Week-winning debut about China's one-child policy. Both of the latter land in the New Directors section.

Other masters have work in the festival too. Pedro Almodóvar's "Bitter Christmas" (Amarga Navidad | Spain 2026 | in Spanish | 111 min.) screens as part of the lineup. James Gray is on hand with a Spotlight Program of his own for "Paper Tiger" (USA/Brazil/Italy 2026 | 115 min.), his Cannes-selected crime drama starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Miles Teller as a Queens family entangled with the Russian mob in 1986.

The festival also leans into its Bay Area roots, with local films screening alongside the bigger premieres, including Beth de Araújo's "Josephine" (USA 2026 | 121 min.), shot in San Francisco and starring Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan as parents of a young girl, Josephine (Mason Reeves), coping with trauma after witnessing a violent crime.

Awards season regulars know to watch Mill Valley's lineup closely, and the MVFF49 won't break that habit. It's the same story every year: a run of international discoveries deep enough to make the whole festival feel like a treat for Bay Area film lovers, not just an Oscar preview.

What follows are reviews of a few films from this year's program.

Click on each film title or poster to view showtimes and ticket details on the MVFF49's official website.

• Flies (Moscas | Mexico/Spain 2026 | in Spanish | 99 min.)

  

  Between the two masters getting Auteur Awards this year, it would be easy to miss the film that might be the best thing at the MVFF49 entirely: Fernando Eimbcke's arresting fifth feature "Flies," which won two prizes out of Berlin this year and hasn't lost an ounce of its charge since.

  Olga (Teresita Sánchez) has built a life out of routine, alone in a sprawling Mexico City apartment complex across from a hospital, until money troubles push her to rent out a room. Her new tenant (Hugo Ramírez) turns out to have smuggled in more than his luggage: his nine-year-old son, Cristian (Bastian Escobar), whose mother is in the hospital across the street. What starts as an intrusion Olga never agreed to slowly becomes the first real connection she's let herself have in years.

  Escobar, in his acting debut, is the film's live wire as the mesmerizing young boy Cristian, who escapes into an invented arcade game called Cosmic Defenders Pro whenever the real world gets to be too much. He gives Cristian a curiosity that refuses to be dimmed by circumstance, and his determination to see his mom cracks Olga open scene by scene. Ramírez, a veteran stage actor making his feature film debut, gives a natural performance as Cristian's father, and his every move and word carries the weight of a man trying to stay hopeful through something genuinely terrible. He shows the deepest affection to Cristian and brings him hope while doing his best to survive.

  

  The bond that eventually forms between Olga and Cristian recalls Walter Salles's "Central Station" (1998), another story of a guarded woman and a young boy finding in each other something neither expected to need. Eimbcke doesn't chase that film's scale, and the film is better for staying small: shot in black and white by cinematographer María Secco, it finds its poetry in apartment hallways, hospital waiting rooms, and the ordinary rhythms of two strangers slowly becoming family.

  "Flies" won the Berliner Morgenpost Readers' Jury Award and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at this year's Berlinale, and it's not hard to see why: this is a film that earns its emotion honestly, without ever reaching for it. It's easily one of the best films at the MVFF49 this year, and not one to miss.

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• The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (USA 2026 | 88 min.)

  

  Noah Segan's elegantly crafted sophomore feature "The Only Living Pickpocket in New York" is one of the most satisfying films at MVFF49, a captivating, thrilling tour through all five boroughs and a true love letter to both New York City and the movies that have loved it before. It's centered on an extraordinary performance from John Turturro as Harry Lehman, an old-school pickpocket still lifting wallets and watches in a city that's moved on to credit cards and cell phones, and still caring for his disabled wife back in the Bronx.

  Turturro hasn't been given a showcase this rich in years, and he makes the absolute most of it, finding both the comedy and the quiet heartbreak in a man who's outlived his own profession. This is easily one of the best films of the year, the kind of confident, lived-in New York filmmaking that doesn't come around often anymore. The film opens in theaters November 19, 2026.

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• Iron Boy (Le Corset | France/Belgium 2026 | in French | 90 min.)

  

  Louis Clichy's solo directing debut, "Iron Boy", which won the Special Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes this year, is a deeply personal project for the former Pixar animator: like his young hero Christophe (voiced by Clichy's own son, Gary Clichy), Clichy grew up on a farm and wore a back brace of his own. When Christophe starts collapsing without warning, a doctor fits him with an iron corset, pulling him away from farm work and his stern father, Jean (Dimitri Colas), and toward a new friend, Clara (Brune Moulin), and a passion for the church organ under a kindly old organist, Michel (Alexandre Astier).

  The film's visual style is genuinely striking, hand-drawn in ink and watercolor, with a loose, painterly quality that gives the flat farmland of rural France its own strange beauty. It's just a shame the story underneath that style doesn't hit as hard as the images do; the beats of Christophe's coming-of-age feel familiar in a way the animation never does, and the film coasts more on mood than on momentum. Worth seeing for the craft alone, even if the story doesn't fully earn it. The film opens in theaters October 14, 2026.

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• Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad | Spain 2026 | in Spanish | 111 min.)

  

  Another year, another Pedro Almodóvar film built around a constellation of women in crisis, and "Bitter Christmas" has all the trademarks: the color, the melodrama, the tangle of women loving and losing in equal measure. Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), an advertising director mourning her mother during one long, unraveling weekend in 2004, turns out to be the autofictional creation of Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a blocked screenwriter mining his own life, and his longtime assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), for material twenty-two years later.

  What's missing is the momentum. Almodóvar's usual rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue is all here, but this time it doesn't move the story forward so much as spin in place, and the film runs long stretches without the campy humor that's usually there to leaven his melodrama. The result is a movie that looks and sounds like prime Almodóvar without quite earning its length. Bitter Christmas opens in select cities November 13, 2026, and nationwide November 25, 2026.

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• Bedford Park (USA 2026 | in English/Korean | 119 min.)

  Stephanie Ahn's "Bedford Park", winner of the Special Jury Award for Debut Feature at Sundance this year, is a lived-in portrait of Korean immigrant life in America and the friction between the generation that arrived and the one that grew up here. Audrey (Moon Choi) is a physical therapist still tethered to her parents' expectations. After a car accident, she crosses paths with Eli (Son Sukku), a former wrestler carrying his own guilt and baggage, and the two slowly build a bond neither expected. Both performances are excellent, finding real tenderness in two people who don't quite know how to ask for what they need, with strong support from Won Mi-kyung and Kim Eung-soo as Audrey's parents.

  

  Where the film comes up short is holding the audience's attention. Long stretches of Audrey and Eli's story struggle to pull you in, even though nothing about the filmmaking itself is sloppy or slow on paper. It's less a matter of pacing than of engagement: the story keeps you at arm's length when it should be drawing you closer. Still, the performances alone make the film worth catching.

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• Josephine (USA 2026 | 119 min.)

  Another Sundance winner in this year's lineup, Beth de Araújo's "Josephine" took home both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award this year, and it tackles a genuinely difficult subject with San Francisco as its backdrop: an eight-year-old girl, Josephine (Mason Reeves), witnesses a violent assault on a morning run with her father, Damien (Channing Tatum), and the film follows the fallout through her eyes as her parents, including her mother, Claire (Gemma Chan), struggle to help her process it.

  

  The most mesmerizing performance by far comes from Reeves, who plays Josephine's innocence, vulnerability, and eventual bravery all with equal conviction for a first-time child actor. But the film has an engagement problem in its storytelling that keeps it from landing with the full force it's clearly aiming for, and it could have used a tighter edit to keep that momentum up. Josephine opens in theaters December 4, 2026.

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• Elephants in the Fog (तिनीहरू | Nepal/Germany/Brazil/France/Norway 2026 | in Nepali | 108 min.)

  

  Abinash Bikram Shah's directorial debut, "Elephants in the Fog", winner of the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes this year, is the first Nepali feature ever selected for the festival. It opens with villagers marching through the forest at night, torches lit, painting eyes on tree trunks and setting off firecrackers to keep wild elephants from destroying their crops. At the center of the village is a house of Kinnar women, an ancient South Asian third-gender community bound by a vow of celibacy in exchange for the power to bless or curse, led by the matriarch Pirati (Puspa Thing Lama). Among the women in her care is Apsara (Aliz Ghimire), whose disappearance later drives the plot. Meanwhile, Pirati herself is secretly carrying on a relationship with a mustachioed drum player, Master (Aashant Sharma), who lives in a nearby city.

  

  The elephants in the title are more than a backdrop. The villagers fear them enough to burn firecrackers and paint eyes on tree trunks to keep them away, and the elephants, in turn, are just as wary of the humans encroaching on their forest. That same mutual fear defines how the village treats Pirati's community: revered as spiritual figures whose blessings and curses carry real weight, yet held at arm's length and quietly despised. By the film's end, it's the elephants circling the village, not the society meant to be her own, that Pirati's house seems to have more in common with, two groups the village fears without ever trying to understand.

  The plot kicks into gear when Apsara disappears one night and the police respond with cold indifference, forcing Pirati to investigate on her own. Her search leads her to MJ ( Sanjay Gupta), a man she believes Apsara was with before she vanished, and at one point, while interrogating him in the forest, he suddenly bolts and the film breaks into an actual chase scene, a tonal swing so abrupt it plays as almost absurd rather than tense.

  Moments like that aren't isolated. The Gurumata, a guru who speaks in a thin, mosquito-like whisper, is treated with the deference of a cult leader without the film ever establishing why she commands that kind of authority. Scenes like these accumulate until some stretches feel less like they're building toward something than skipping a step to get there.

  There's no denying "Elephants in the Fog" offers a refreshing look into a community rarely, if ever, shown on screen, and Puspa Thing Lama's lead performance carries real dignity throughout. But the mystery at the film's center resolves itself in a way that feels less like an earned revelation than a trick being played on the audience, and between that and the logical gaps along the way, the film never quite earns the sympathy it's clearly asking for.

  In the end, this is a film with more conviction than control: it knows exactly who it wants you to root for, but it hasn't quite figured out how to get you there.

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• Look Back (ルックバック | Japan 2026 | in Japanese | 100 min.)

  

  Hirokazu Koreeda has two films out this year, and they couldn't be more different. The first, "Sheep in the Box" (2026), premiered in competition at Cannes this year and was an original story, the kind Koreeda almost always writes and directs himself. The second, "Look Back", is neither: it's a remake, a live-action version of the acclaimed 2024 animated film of the same name, itself adapted from Tatsuki Fujimoto's one-shot manga.

  The story spans thirteen years. The young Fujino (Furi Nanase) is a popular grade-schooler celebrated for her comics in the class newspaper. The young Kyomoto (Rokka Okada) is a reclusive classmate whose artwork is good enough to spark Fujino's jealousy, then her admiration, then a full creative partnership. When the story jumps ahead, the adult Fujino (Natsuki Deguchi) and adult Kyomoto (Aju Makita) take over.

  Nanase and Okada carry the film's early stretch well, with an easy, believable rhythm to their scenes together. You feel two kids figuring out how to be friends, then how to be collaborators, and it's the strongest material in the film. Deguchi and Makita take the baton smoothly when the story jumps ahead; the seam between the two sets of actors barely registers.

  The images throughout are genuinely beautiful, composed shot after shot as if lifted straight off a manga page, with clean lines and deliberate white space. There's real craft in how faithfully the film honors its source material's visual rhythm. But that fidelity may be exactly the problem: if the goal was to replicate the look of a manga panel this closely, it raises an obvious question, which is why make this live action at all instead of animating it again.

  

  The bigger issue is the story itself. We're told, again and again, that Fujino and Kyomoto love making manga together, and we watch them do it, but the film gives us little beyond the fact of their happiness. When their partnership ends and the two go separate ways, it should land like a gut punch. Instead it happens fast, almost off-handedly, and it's hard to feel the loss the film clearly wants us to feel. We're told this bond mattered enormously to both of them. We're never quite convinced of it ourselves.

  That gap shows up again in the back half, when the two are estranged for years before an ending pulls them back together. It's meant to be devastating, and on paper it should be, since it borrows the manga's own bittersweet final turn almost beat for beat. But because so little time was spent building the friendship that's being mourned, the ending plays more like a well-executed idea than an earned emotion.

  This is a film occasionally striking, and never less than handsomely made. But from a filmmaker of Koreeda's caliber, working from a story this beloved, watchable isn't enough. This may be a rare case where the original is simply better left alone.

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Link for this review. Posted by Tony An @ 7:26 AM