YNOT at the Movies

The film reunites the original cast as Runway Magazine faces an existential threat from a crumbling print media landscape. Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) finds herself presiding over a legacy empire with an earthquake beneath her feet, while Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), twenty years after throwing her phone into a fountain and walked away from Runway, is pulled back into this glamorous, treacherous world. Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) has landed a senior position at Dior with all the power she always craved, and Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) is still plugging away in an industry that has transformed beyond recognition around him.

Meryl Streep navigates Miranda's evolution with breathtaking precision, finding new vulnerability in the character without sacrificing an ounce of her formidable armor. Anne Hathaway's Andy returns as a woman who chose integrity over ambition and has no regrets: professionally confident, clear-eyed about who she is, and still the most relatable person in any room she walks into. Emily Blunt is an absolute riot, completely unhinged in the best possible way, while Tucci grounds every scene he is in with a dry, lived-in ease that feels utterly effortless.

What truly elevates the film is how seamlessly the new additions slot into the ensemble. Amari (Simone Ashley) is less cowering supplicant and more Miranda-in-training: a razor-focused assistant who has absorbed both the best and worst of her boss, which makes her both formidable and unsettling to watch. Charlie (Caleb Hearon) is the wide-eyed newcomer who clearly grew up reading Runway under his bedcovers and still cannot quite believe he is there. Jin (Helen J. Shen) is all coiled ambition beneath a thrift-store aesthetic, angling to prove herself in a magazine world that is running out of time.

What is particularly remarkable is how the film handles its newer power players: none of them dominate the screen, and yet not one of them feels like a prop. Stuart (Kenneth Branagh) is a composer and violinist who owes Miranda a personal debt and is, unusually for the men in her orbit, not afraid of her, and every moment he is on screen carries a distinct, considered presence. Jay (B.J. Novak) turns up in expensive synthetic activewear as the kind of tech entrepreneur who thinks of himself as perpetually modern and perpetually on the move.

The film's sense of occasion is significantly bolstered by a parade of real-life fashion luminaries and musicians, including a memorable appearance from Lady Gaga, lending scenes set in the world of high fashion an authenticity that no amount of set dressing alone could achieve.

When the film moves to Milan for its spectacular second half, it fully ignites. The Runway fashion show, staged at the grand Accademia di Brera, is a genuine showstopper: a feast of Italian couture from the likes of Prada, Fendi and Dolce & Gabbana, set to the pulse of Madonna's Vogue, which floods the sequence with an electric, euphoric energy that will have audiences grinning from ear to ear.

And then there are the clothes beyond the runway itself. Costume designer Molly Rogers has outdone herself here. With Andy alone logging upwards of 47 outfit changes, the wardrobe is a film unto itself: archival Jean Paul Gaultier, Armani Privé, Dolce & Gabbana, a one-of-a-kind Balenciaga ballgown for Streep, and an inspired "feminine menswear" throughline for Andy that perfectly captures who she has become. This is costume design as pure storytelling, and an Academy Award nomination next year would be thoroughly deserved.

This sequel justifies its own existence, not by repeating the past but by reflecting honestly on it. It may not be quite as deliciously mean as the original, but it is sharp, wise, and arguably emotionally satisfying. Go see it on the biggest screen you can find.

"The Devil Wears Prada 2" opens in theaters on Friday, May 1, 2026.

The story follows a flock of sheep who, after years of their shepherd reading them detective novels each night, have secretly developed the ability to solve mysteries among themselves. When their beloved owner George Hardy (Hugh Jackman) is found dead one morning, the flock takes matters into their own hooves.

On the human side, an ambitious young reporter Elliot Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine) abandons his assignment covering a local cultural festival to chase the murder story, while the awkward Officer Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun) stumbles through the official investigation.

The arrival of Rebecca Hampstead (Molly Gordon), George's previously unknown daughter, immediately raises suspicions, as does the sharp-tongued lawyer Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson), who sweeps into the village in a Mercedes-Benz to read George's will and ends up far more entangled in the mystery than she expected.

Lurking in the background are the village butcher Ham Gilyard (Conleth Hill), who makes no secret of wanting the sheep for himself, the neighboring shepherd Caleb Merrow (Tosin Cole), with whom George had an unresolved quarrel before his death, and Beth Pennock (Hong Chau), who is secretly in love with George. It's a classic whodunit setup, and the film leans into it with genuine affection for the genre.

The sheep themselves are the undisputed stars. Brought to life through photorealistic CGI by a London-based visual effects studio specializing in computer-generated characters, they're undeniably cute and fluffy, with advanced body simulation tools used to capture the natural movement and texture of real sheep. The voice cast makes them even more compelling. Lily (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the self-described smartest sheep in the flock, leads the investigation with sharp intelligence and warmth, while Sebastian (voiced by Bryan Cranston), the brooding loner sheep , provides a sidekick. Sir Ritchfield (voiced by Patrick Stewart), the elder statesman of the flock , delivers his lines with magnificent pomposity, and Ronnie and Reggie (both voiced by Brett Goldstein), the rowdy sheep brothers, steal every scene they share with rapid-fire bickering.

Nicholas Braun is a comic highlight as the hapless Officer Derry, and Emma Thompson brings an effortless authority that elevates every scene she's in. Hugh Jackman, by contrast, has comparatively little to do, the unfortunate consequence of playing the murder victim. He's warm and charming in his limited screen time, but George exists primarily to be mourned and investigated rather than truly known.

Director Kyle Balda, whose previous work was entirely in animation including "Minions" (2015, makes his live-action directorial debut here, and handles the transition with confidence. The Oxfordshire setting is picturesque without being distracting, and crucially for younger viewers, the accents never veer into incomprehensible British thicket territory.

This film is unambiguously aimed at school-age children, and on that front it largely delivers. It's an entertaining popcorn movie, the kind you happily sit through with a kid on a weekend afternoon, occasionally laughing louder than they do.

"The Sheep Detectives" opens in theaters on Friday, May 6, 2026.

"Michael" (USA 2026 | 127 min.) is a cinematic portrayal of one of the most influential artists the world has ever known, tracing his extraordinary journey from a young boy discovering his gift as the lead of the Jackson Five to his ascent as the biggest entertainer on the planet.

The film follows Michael (Jaafar Jackson) from his childhood under the iron grip of his domineering father Joe (Colman Domingo), through his breakout years with his brothers, and into his explosive solo career, highlighting both the iconic performances that defined an era and the personal cost of a life lived entirely in the spotlight.

But a spectacle is largely what remains. The film chronicles that rise while completely scrubbing away the sexual assault allegations that have shadowed Jackson's legacy for decades—not a whisper, not an acknowledgment, not even a fleeting shadow of doubt. That calculated omission transforms what could have been a genuinely complex portrait into a sanitized celebration that prioritizes tribute over truth.

This is a film made for the faithful, not the curious. And in that sense, it carries a quiet irony: it cannot escape the controlling hands behind it, suffering the same fate it depicts young Michael escaping from his father, never quite free enough to become the bold, searching work its subject deserved.

Jaafar Jackson is a remarkable physical presence and bears an almost uncanny resemblance to his uncle, but too often we seem to be watching a gifted impersonator rather than a fully inhabited human being.

Colman Domingo, a formidable talent, plays Joe as a controlling and greedy patriarch, yet the character stays frustratingly on the surface. We never truly understand what drove him beyond naked ambition, and the film offers little psychological depth to make him a villain worth grappling with. The rest of the supporting cast is given even less to work with, drifting in and out without leaving much of an impression.

When the music plays and the choreography ignites, the film earns its keep. The recreations of iconic performances carry genuine electricity, and hearing some of the greatest hits in a theater is its own reward. But when the curtain falls, we realize we have learned very little about the man himself.

This film is not a biopic so much as a nostalgic rerun, a greatest hits package dressed up in cinematic form. For fans wanting to relive the magic, it delivers. For anyone hoping to understand what lay beneath it, it keeps that door firmly shut.

"Michael" opens in theaters on Friday, April 24, 2026.

Now in its 69th year, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the longest-running film festival in the Americas, returns April 24 through May 4, 2026, for eleven days of cinema spanning the full breadth of human experience. This year's program brings together 79 programs from 40 countries, a genuinely global slate ranging from intimate family dramas and experimental poetry films to crackling genre thrillers, urgent political documentaries, and animated adventures for the youngest moviegoers.

Across narrative features and documentaries alike, filmmakers grapple with displacement and belonging, addiction and recovery, colonial legacy, queer identity, ecological grief, and the quiet heroism of ordinary people. There are films rooted in Gaza hospitals and Scottish villages, Congolese refugee camps and suburban Tokyo, the streets of San Francisco and the highlands of Montenegro. Several titles carry the heat of the present moment, touching on immigration, the Palestinian conflict, and political resistance, while others find their power in the timeless: grief, ambition, and love in all its crooked forms.

Opening Night returns to the newly restored Castro Theatre with an audacious double feature. Director Kent Jones's "Late Fame" (USA 2025) sets a warmly witty tone before director Olivia Wilde's "The Invite" (USA 2026), a San Francisco-set story screening on 35mm with the director attending in person, closes the evening on a wilder, more transgressive note as a genuine hometown celebration.

Closing Night on May 4th could not be more perfectly timed. On a date that fans everywhere celebrate as Star Wars Day ("May the 4th be with you"), "Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back" (USA 1980) screens at the Castro Theatre with actor Anthony Daniels in conversation.

The 2026 SFFILM Festival is exclusively in theaters and event spaces in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley including the Castro Theatre, the Premier Theater at One Letterman, the Marina Theatre, the Presidio Theatre, the Roxie Theater, the Grand Lake Theatre, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Here is a closer look at a few of the films at this year's festival.

• The Fox King (Malaysia/Indonesia 2025 | in Malay/Indonesian | 94 min.)

  

  Having previously brought "Monday Morning Glory" (2005) and "Woman on Fire Looks for Water" (2009) to the SFFILM festival, Malaysian filmmaker Woo Ming Jin returns with "The Fox King", his most poetically charged work yet.

  Fraternal twin brothers Amir (Hadi Putra) and Ali (Idan Aedan) grew up in the shadow of their mother's death in childbirth, and as teenagers find themselves displaced again when their father remarries and takes a new wife. Left to fend for themselves, the brothers work for a local fisherman who provides them with basic shelter.

  The two could not be more different. Amir is a young man of few words who communicates largely through animal names, yet his deep love of books forges an unlikely bond with Lara (Dian Sastrowardoyo), a new English teacher carrying wounds of her own. As that connection grows, Ali's jealousy quietly festers, and what began as two brothers against the world slowly curdles into something more painful and complicated. Against a backdrop of human trafficking and their father's murky schemes, a looming kite flying competition becomes the test where everything between them finally comes to a head.

  Woo Ming Jin captures the tenderness, rivalry, and fierce love between the two brothers with extraordinary sensitivity. These performances, naturalistic and unguarded, are the film's beating heart. The storytelling is captivating and at times genuinely heartbreaking, grounding its fable-like quality in the textures of a world, rural Malaysia with its sand beach and shadowy undercurrents, that cinema rarely visits. If the ending feels somewhat deflating given the emotional stakes so carefully built, it is a minor frustration in an otherwise arresting piece of work. This film is exactly the kind of film a festival like SFFILM exists to bring to light.

  ---

• Filipiñana (Singapore/UK/Philippines/Netherlands/France 2026 | in Tagalog/English | 100 min.)

  

  "Filipiñana" is a visually sumptuous and thematically rich debut from Rafael Manuel, using the manicured lawns of a Manila golf club as a subtly damning canvas for exploring class, colonialism, and power in the Philippines, and there are moments where its slow-burn atmosphere genuinely crackles with intrigue. But the film too often lets its deliberate pace tip into stagnation, and a handful of tonal missteps, comic beats that sit awkwardly against the film's otherwise cool, unsettling mood, keep it from fully cohering into the sharp social fable it clearly aspires to be. It's the kind of film that will find devoted admirers on the arthouse circuit, and rightly so, but for all its creative vision and impressive cinematography, it ultimately remains a little too remote and uneven to leave the deep impression it deserves.

  The film is slated for a later theatrical release by Kino Lorber.

  ---

• Elder Son (Hijo mayor | Argentina/France 2025 | in Spanish/Korean | 118 min.)

  

  Winner of the Best Emerging Director Award at the Locarno Film Festival 2025, director Cecilia Kang's debut feature "Elder Son" comes to the SFFILM with considerable festival pedigree and an ambition that is immediately evident on screen.

  Structured in three distinct parts, the film is clearly a deeply personal excavation of the filmmaker's own identity and family history. The first part centers on a young Korean Argentinian teenager Lila (Anita B Queen) grappling with her sense of belonging, caught between two cultures, two languages, and two worlds. The second shifts into a reenactment of her father Antonio's (Sang Bin Suh) journey, a young Korean man who left his homeland behind and built a new life in South America, capturing the particular loneliness and quiet resolve of the immigrant experience. By the third part, the director abandons narrative filmmaking altogether, moving into documentary territory as if the weight of the story could no longer be contained by fiction alone.

  That structural boldness is both the film's greatest strength and its most significant liability. The intimacy of Cecilia Kang's inquiry, watching a filmmaker search for herself through the lives of those who came before her, gives the film its most affecting moments. Yet the film drifts constantly between its three registers without always giving the audience enough emotional footing to follow. The meditative pace occasionally tips into inertia, and the episodic structure, while intentional, creates a detachment that keeps viewers at a distance precisely when closeness is most needed.

  Cecilia Kang's visual instincts are assured and the Locarno recognition is well deserved. But as a cinematic experience, this film feels more rewarding as a personal artistic statement than as a story that draws you in and refuses to let go.

  ---

• Two Pianos (Deux pianos | France 2025 | in French | 115 min.)

  

  "Two Pianos" is a film that promises a duet but delivers a solo, following the brooding Mathias (François Civil) as he returns to Lyon and confronts the unresolved mysteries of his past, a journey that is intermittently compelling but ultimately too opaque to fully resonate. Director Arnaud Desplechin crafts the film with his characteristic literary sensibility, drawing on a story rooted in impossible love and the weight of solitude that connects all his characters, yet the emotional payoff feels elusive. The title itself proves a little misleading: rather than a true two-hander between Mathias and Elena (Charlotte Rampling), the legendary pianist who serves as his former mentor and guiding force, the film is largely consumed by Mathias's inner turmoil, leaving Charlotte Rampling's formidable presence as little more than an afterthought, never given enough screen time to justify her place as the so-called second piano of the title. François Civil carries the burden of the story with magnetism as Mathias, but the film around him never quite rises to meet the depth it reaches for.

  The film is slated for a later theatrical release by Kino Lorber.

  ---

• Who Moves America (USA 2026 | 87 min. | Documentary)

  

  Directed by Yael Bridge, the documentary "Who Moves America" embeds itself within the lives of UPS Teamsters as they inch toward a potential historic strike, marking it as one of the more essential portraits of contemporary America in this year's lineup. Following workers across California, New York, and Kentucky, the film foregrounds the grind of organizing, not as a triumphant march but as something more tangled: a tug-of-war between solidarity and self-interest, between collective hope and individual survival. Archival fragments from the 1997 strike echo through the present, giving the story a sense of cyclical struggle, like footsteps retracing and reshaping an old path.

  The film succeeds most in humanizing the "brown uniform" workforce, turning what is often an invisible labor force into a mosaic of specific lives. You begin to see the delivery not as convenience, but as consequence. In that sense, it accomplishes its core mission: to make the audience reconsider the hands behind the packages.

  Yet for a story rooted in one of the largest labor negotiations in North America, the film oddly pulls its punches when it comes to scale. We're told these workers are vital to the U.S. economy, that their decisions could ripple across global supply chains, but the magnitude remains more stated than felt. The documentary stays close to its subjects, sometimes so close that the broader picture blurs out of view. A wider lens could have better conveyed just how deeply these workers are woven into everyday consumer expectations.

  There's also a lingering sense that the film could have dug deeper into its own characters. The access is there, the stakes are there, but the storytelling doesn't always press hard enough to uncover the more revealing contradictions or emotional undercurrents. As a result, the narrative can feel less gripping than its subject matter promises, occasionally settling into observation when it might have benefited from sharper excavation.

  This documentary is a thoughtful, well-intentioned look at labor in motion, one that sparks reflection even if it doesn't fully ignite. It opens the door, but doesn't quite walk us all the way through.

A young painter and sometime-forger named Lori (Michaela Coel) is hired by the estranged children of aging artist Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) to infiltrate his cluttered London home and complete a series of long-abandoned canvases. The series, known as The Christophers, represents some of Julian's most personal and unfinished work, its incompleteness tied to a past love whose absence haunts both the paintings and the man himself.

Julian's children's scheme is straightforward enough: get the canvases finished, get them sold, and secure an inheritance before the old man dies. What unfolds from this decidedly corrupt arrangement is one of the most captivating exchanges between two characters you're likely to see on screen this year. Savvy audiences may find themselves ahead of the story at times, as certain turns telegraph themselves early, but the journey remains compelling enough that predictability rarely diminishes the pleasure of watching it unfold.

Ian McKellen delivers what can only be described as a masterclass. As Julian, caustic, brilliant, broken, and achingly lonely, he inhabits a man reckoning with mortality, irrelevance, and a lifetime of self-imposed emotional exile. Every line lands with the weight of decades behind it. He can be devastating and darkly funny within the same breath, and watching him dissect his own character's subtext feels like witnessing something genuinely rare. This is acting at its most fearless and most human.

Michaela Coel more than holds her own opposite him. Her Lori enters the story under false pretenses, yet she makes her completely magnetic, sharp, guarded, and electrified by the world she has stepped into. The chemistry between the two artists is the film's beating heart, and their exchanges crackle with intelligence, antipathy, and a strange, grudging tenderness that neither character quite knows what to do with.

What's refreshing, genuinely and deeply refreshing, is Steven Soderbergh's confidence in restraint. Working from Ed Solomon's tightly crafted screenplay, he trusts that two extraordinary people in a room talking is more than enough. There are no elaborate set pieces, no narrative pyrotechnics. Just faces, words, and the weight of what goes unspoken. A reported 33-minute dialogue sequence in the film's second act could feel like a risk; instead, it feels like a gift. His camera, handheld inside Julian's house and deliberately steady outside it, keeps you subtly unsettled without ever calling attention to itself, direction so assured it disappears into the storytelling.

The house itself functions almost as a third major character: a monument to self-imposed seclusion, packed with the accumulated detritus of a brilliant life half-lived. Production designer Antonia Lowe has crafted a space that feels genuinely inhabited and genuinely haunted.

The film is a reminder, one we apparently need, that a film can be intimate in scale and enormous in emotional scope. It is funny, sad, morally thorny, and largely satisfying despite its occasional predictability. In an era of relentless visual noise, the filmmakers have made something genuinely radical: a story about art, legacy, family, and fraud that trusts its audience completely.

"The Christophers" opens in theaters on Friday, April 17, 2026.

From the opening minutes, Nadav Lapid signals that conventional storytelling is not his priority. The camera moves with restless, dizzying energy, and the soundscape is deliberately overwhelming, designed to leave viewers feeling unmoored. This is a conscious artistic decision, and there is a certain integrity to that commitment. Whether it translates into a rewarding experience, however, will depend enormously on what you are looking for from a film.

Those hoping for a clear narrative thread may find themselves adrift. The movie moves freely between musical sequences, satirical set pieces, and moments of genuine provocation, with little interest in traditional story logic. Y. is written as a passive figure who composes rather than speaks and submits rather than resists, while Yasmin channels her own complicity through movement and dance. As a thematic statement about artistic complicity in wartime, this makes sense. As a viewing experience across two and a half hours, it asks a great deal of patience from its audience.

There are genuine highlights here. The film's musical tragedy elements have real energy, and film brings an undeniable visual boldness to several sequences. Naama Preis as Leah, Y.'s former lover and arguably the film's only true voice, offers a grounded and compelling performance that stands apart from the surrounding chaos. These moments hint at what a slightly more disciplined version of this film might have achieved.

Ultimately, this is a work that prioritises ideology and sensation over connection. Nadav Lapid's anger at the state of modern Israel is sincere and deeply felt, and that sincerity deserves acknowledgment. But a film that intentionally disorients, shocks, and withholds narrative coherence will find only a narrow audience willing to meet it fully on its own terms.

"Yes" opens in the San Francisco Bay Area theaters on Friday, April 10, 2026.

Anna (Halle Bailey) is a drifting twenty-something in New York who has abandoned her dreams of becoming a chef and lost her housing after a disastrous house-sitting job. A chance encounter with charming Italian Matteo (Lorenzo De Moor) leads her to impulsively fly to Tuscany to crash at his empty villa, just for one night. When Matteo's mother Gabriella (Isabella Ferrari) and grandmother Nonna (Stefania Casini) show up unexpectedly, Anna panics and pretends to be his fiancée. The lie unravels further when Matteo's cousin Michael (Regé-Jean Page) arrives, and Anna finds herself falling for entirely the wrong person in entirely the right place.

To its credit, that shameless escapism is precisely the film's engine. On paper, Anna could easily read as a con woman, a liar who breaks into homes and strings people along. Yet, the film's feel-good spirit is a masterclass in audience manipulation, in the best possible sense. That is because Anna is so disarmingly charming that you forgive her every transgression and you want her to get away with it, and so she does, again and again. The audiences don't come to a romantic comedy for legal plausibility; they come to root for someone.

Michael, steadfast and kind, runs the family vineyard while his cousin gallivants around the world, and provides exactly the kind of smoldering counterweight the story needs. Their chemistry is undeniable. The supporting Costa family, warmly drawn and enthusiastically performed, gives Anna's deception real emotional stakes, which is more than the script strictly deserves.

Then there is Tuscany itself. The film is absolutely gorgeous: sun-kissed vineyards in Val d'Orcia, a UNESCO-listed Pienza streetscape, the grandeur of Cinecittà Studios reimagined as an elegant family home. Cinematographer Danny Ruhlmann captures Italy not as a postcard but as a living, breathing world. The food, prepared by a Michelin-level chef, looks extraordinary. If the film's only ambition were to make you book a flight to Florence, it would be a resounding success.

But the film has a language problem, because it is a persistent, nagging one. The film's characters slip between Italian and English as though the two languages are interchangeable, which anyone who has spent time in rural Tuscany will tell you is far from the reality. The film's constant switching between English and Italian never finds a coherent logic. Why would a Tuscan father argue with his son in English? The answer, of course, is so that audiences don't have to read subtitles. But this kind of contrivance breaks the spell of the authentically Italian atmosphere the production worked so hard to create. For a film that pushed its cast and crew to embrace genuine regional detail, and that boasts real Italian locations and an Italian-born lead actor, the language treatment feels oddly lazy and strangely random.

This is not a film that will ask anything of you; not belief, not logic, not patience with subtitles. It is beautiful people in a beautiful place doing implausible things, wrapped in warmth and good food. Depending on what you need from a weekend night, that may be exactly enough. But a story this unbelievable, told this prettily, earns admiration for its charm and gentle contempt for its craft.

"You, Me & Tuscany" opens in theaters on Friday, April 10, 2026.

Based on Kotake Create's wildly popular indie video game, the film follows a man known only as The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya), trapped in an endless underground passage and forced to spot subtle anomalies in its repeating design in order to inch closer to the exit. It is the kind of high-concept that feels urgently cinematic: claustrophobic, surreal, ripe with dread.

The early sequences deliver on that potential. The sterile corridor hums with unease, and Kazunari Ninomiya carries the film almost entirely on his face, his bewildered stillness pulling you into the loop alongside him. Each repetition lands with a low, creeping dread, slightly off in ways that take a moment to place.

But cinema is not a video game. Where the game's loop functions as an interactive puzzle and the player determines the repetition meaning and resolves the tension, the film asks its audience to be passive witnesses to the same corridor, again and again. What feels intriguing and enigmatic in the first act calcifies into tedium by the second. Without a hand on the controller, the looping loses its power. It becomes not a mechanism of dread but a structural crutch.

Director Genki Kawamura attempts to open the world by introducing additional figures: a robotic The Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), a mysterious The Woman (Nana Komatsu), and a confused The Boy (Naru Asanuma). These characters appear as potential anomalies, as possible keys to the puzzle. But the screenplay offers them little to do beyond existing as visual riddles. They orbit The Lost Man without deepening his story or meaningfully expanding the film's themes of guilt and eternal recurrence.

Sensing that atmosphere alone cannot sustain a 95-minute feature, the film pivots in its third act toward outright horror: grotesque imagery, jarring sound design, incidents that lean into the bizarre and the shocking. But these moments register more as gross than terrifying. They feel less like organic escalations and more like a filmmaker rattling the cage of his own limitations, reaching for sensation when the story has run out of ideas.

The film wants audiences to feel they have "wandered into one of M.C. Escher's optical illusions," and structurally, the film does echo Escher's impossible staircases. The trouble is that an Escher drawing is something you study and then leave. The film locks you inside one for an hour and a half.

After the accumulation of loops and strangeness, the resolution arrives with the emotional weight of a shrug, as if the corridor simply stops repeating without ever explaining why it mattered that it did. The film is formally faithful to the source material's setting and rules, but it captures little of what made the game compulsive. In a game, failure sends you back to the beginning with new resolve. In this film, you just go back to the beginning, waiting for a way out that never quite materialized.

"Exit 8" opens in the Bay Area theaters on Friday, April 10, 2026. Director Genki Kawamura will be in San Francisco for a Special Q&A screening on Sunday April 12, 2026.

The premise is deceptively simple. Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) are blissfully engaged and the wedding is just days away. They sit down to finalize the wine selection for the wedding reception with the bride's maid Rachel (Alana Haim) and Rachel's husband Mike (Mamoudou Athie), also Charlie's long time friend. A game, What's the Worst Thing You've Ever Done?, is all it takes. Emma reveals a moment from her adolescence, an episode from when she was fifteen years old, and the atmosphere in the room shifts irrevocably.

From here, the filmmaker engineers a masterfully escalating second act. The revelation itself is withheld just long enough to let dread pool in the silence before it finally lands, and when it does, the film's already-taut emotional architecture begins to crack in every direction at once.

What makes the film so compelling is how scrupulously it refuses to take sides. It presents both Emma and Charlie as people we genuinely like, which makes their unraveling truly painful to watch. Emma, shaped by a difficult Louisiana childhood and a lifelong hunger to belong, is sympathetic without being a saint. Charlie, buttoned-up and fragile behind his charming British composure, is believably both decent and flawed. The film asks a very difficult question: how much of a person's past are we entitled to judge? And it has the integrity to leave it unanswered.

Zendaya brings a genuine warmth to Emma, a woman who has spent a lifetime trying to earn the love of rooms she was never sure she deserved to be in. Every flicker of insecurity, every brave attempt at openness, registers with aching specificity. Robert Pattinson, meanwhile, does what few actors can: he makes repression fascinating. Charlie's slow implosion, his inability to simply feel something and let it pass, is as funny as it is heartbreaking, a portrait of a man who has never had to confront anything truly hard until now. Together they are a couple you believe in completely, which means you feel every fissure as the ground shifts beneath them.

But not everything lands with the same conviction. A subplot involving Charlie and a coworker feels somewhat perfunctory, the character dynamics too thinly sketched to be convincing. It reads less as an authentic strand of the story and more as scaffolding, a mechanism put in place to nudge the plot toward where the film needs it to go toward the climax.

Threading through it all is Daniel Pemberton's score, a miracle of restraint and it never swells manipulatively to tell us how to feel. It doesn't mimic the film's mood or condescends to the audience; instead it breathes alongside the characters, rising and retreating with an intuition that feels almost novelistic. There is not a single cue that overstays its welcome or arrives a beat too early.

This is a film that trusts its audience enough to sit with discomfort, and generous enough to leave something tender beneath all the turbulence. A few awkward plot mechanics aside, it is a sharp, funny, and surprisingly captivating piece of work.

"The Drama" opens in theaters on Friday, April 3, 2026.

The film assembles an impressive roster of interviewees. Tech leaders such as Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) appear alongside skeptics, historians, and ethicists including Yuval Noah Harari and Tristan Harris. The access is striking, the conversations urgent, the stakes framed in nothing less than existential terms.

Yet for all its formidable lineup and apocalyptic rhetoric, the film often circles its subject rather than pinning it down. We hear repeated warnings that AI could spiral beyond human control, that corporate incentives favor speed over safety, that a geopolitical race dynamic could accelerate catastrophe. The sound bites are ominous, but the dangers remain largely abstract.

Concrete examples are surprisingly scarce. While the documentary speaks in sweeping hypotheticals about extinction level risk and runaway systems, it avoids sustained engagement with documented incidents in which AI systems have already caused harm, including reported cases of chatbots encouraging self harm. Without these illustrations, the alarm can feel abstract. We are told the is near, but rarely shown the terrain beneath our feet.

The film also leans heavily on handmade animation, stop motion, and collage. The tactile aesthetic is designed to counterbalance the cold logic of code with something recognizably human. At times, the craft is inventive and charming. At others, the constant visual embellishment distracts from what could have been a tighter, more coherent argument about AI safety and governance.

The film's guiding philosophy, "apocaloptimism," proposes a carefully measured hope, a call for regulation and democratic oversight rather than blind acceleration or fatalism. But after nearly two hours of polarized camps and high stakes speculation, viewers may leave feeling less galvanized than adrift. The documentary insists that we still have agency, yet offers few specifics about how that agency might realistically be exercised. The suggestion that lobbying politicians might solve the problem hardly feels convincing.

This documentary is undeniably timely and asks urgent questions about technology, power, and responsibility. What it lacks is the granular evidence and structural clarity that might transform unease into understanding. It leaves us at that crossroads, fully aware of the fork in the road, still squinting for signposts.

"The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist" opens in theaters on Friday, March 27, 2026.