YNOT at the Movies

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.

The premise picks up frame-for-frame where the first film ended. Grace discovers she hasn't escaped anything; she's merely advanced to the next level of a far larger and older game. As it turns out, the Le Domas family was only one of several elite dynasties bound together by a supernatural pact, and whoever hunts down Grace and claims the High Seat of the Council controls it all. Four rival families are now competing to do just that: the old-money Danforths, the opportunistic El Caídos, the calculating Wans, and the blustery Rajans. They are hunting Grace, but also actively trying to sabotage each other, since only one family can claim the throne. On paper, this sounds like delicious anarchy. In practice, it's a crowded and unwieldy contraption whose rules keep shifting just when you're trying to care about any of it. The game felt menacingly specific in the first film; here it feels like mythology that exists primarily to justify more carnage rather than generate genuine suspense.

The original film's genius was its economy. One house. One bride. One terrible night. Everything escalated within a closed pressure cooker, which is precisely why it worked. The sequel sprawls across hospitals, country clubs, golf courses, and a gothic temple built inside an abandoned church, but spatial grandeur doesn't replace the claustrophobia that made the first film tick.

Then there are the eruptions. The first film's wicked signature joke was watching characters suddenly explode in a full-body burst of blood, equal parts grotesque and absurd. Used sparingly, it landed with perfect comic horror timing. The sequel, which reportedly deployed around 325 gallons of stage blood through a custom-built 360-degree air cannon, treats the gag as a recurring main course. By the third or fourth time someone goes off like a geyser of crimson, the shock has curdled into a numbing routine. The brilliance of those moments was always their surprise; you cannot repeatedly sell an audience something they now fully expect.

Samara Weaving remains a force of nature, and her commitment to Grace is beyond reproach. But the film asks us to accept that a woman absorbing injuries that would hospitalize anyone simply keeps sprinting and brawling with barely a pause for consequence. The first film made Grace's survival feel desperate and earned. Here, the physical accumulation becomes an unintentional comedy of its own, though not quite the kind the filmmakers intended.

Faith (Kathryn Newton), Grace's estranged sister, is brought to life with energy and genuine comic timing, and the chemistry between the two leads has real warmth. But the sisterhood subplot keeps pulling the brakes on the film's momentum. Every time the violence machine begins to generate heat, we're redirected to the sisters' unresolved feelings. Neither thread gets quite enough room, and the horror-comedy engine and the emotional reconciliation story run on different rhythms that never fully synchronize.

This horror movie is not without pleasures, and fans who want more of everything the first film offered will find it served in heaping portions. But excess is not the same thing as intensity, and the sequel mistakes scale for stakes. The original's wit came from knowing exactly when to pull the rug. Here, the rug has been pulled so many times there's nothing left beneath your feet but chaos.

"Ready or Not 2: Here I Come" opens in theaters on Friday, March 20, 2026.

Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle school science teacher, wakes up on a spacecraft light years from Earth, his memories returning in slow, disorienting fragments. As he pieces together the truth, one thing becomes clear: he is humanity's last, best hope of stopping the sun from going dark. It's a fascinating setup, intimate and eerie, and for its first act the film makes superb use of that solitude. Grace alone in the void, rationing his wits alongside his oxygen, conjures the same stripped-back tension that made "Gravity" (2013) so viscerally effective.

Then Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz) arrives, and the film becomes something else entirely.

Rocky is a spider-like, rock-armored alien who has traveled from his own star system chasing the same solar mystery. The craft involved in bringing him to life is genuinely remarkable, puppetry work that reportedly pushed the limits of what has ever been built for cinema. If you have a soft spot for multi-limbed, faceless creatures, Rocky will win you over. If not, no amount of personality will overcome the instinct to recoil.

The friendship that develops between Grace and Rocky is earnest, and the filmmakers clearly love it, treating it as the beating heart of the film. The intention is sweet. The execution, though, never quite achieves the emotional altitude it reaches for. The bond is charming rather than moving, and it never delivers the gut-punch the third act demands. Instead of drawing its power from something raw and primal, as "Gravity" did by stripping its story down to one person's pure will to survive, "Project Hail Mary" places all its emotional weight on a friendship that, despite everyone's best efforts, remains at a certain remove.

Part of the problem is that Grace himself is difficult to feel the full weight of. Ryan Gosling is excellent, funny and physically committed, doing precisely what the role asks. But the film struggles to make us feel the crushing burden of his mission, or what truly drives this unlikely hero to keep going when every rational option has run out. Without that core conviction, the stakes, however planetary in scale, drift.

Greig Fraser's cinematography is stunning in its warmth and intimacy, and the production design, a ship assembled by multiple nations with each capsule built by different hands, is one of the film's genuine triumphs, visually inventive and thematically coherent. However, at 2 hours and 36 minutes, the film also outstays its welcome. There is a tighter, more piercing version of the movie inside this one, a film that earns its emotional ending rather than simply arriving at it.

What remains is a movie with a genuinely big heart, impressive spectacle, and a belief in human connection that feels both sincere and, in the current moment, necessary. It just doesn't quite stick the landing it's been running toward for nearly three hours.

"Project Hail Mary" opens in theaters on Friday, March 20, 2026.

The premise is heartfelt: Kenna Rowan (Maika Monroe), released after seven years in prison for an accident that killed her boyfriend Scotty Landry (Rudy Pankow), returns to Laramie hoping to reunite with Diem (Zoe Kosovic), the daughter she has never been allowed to raise. Scotty's grieving parents, Grace (Lauren Graham) and Patrick (Bradley Whitford), guard the girl like a fortress. Into this minefield walks Ledger (Tyriq Withers), Scotty's oldest friend and local bar owner, who finds himself drawn to the very woman the family blames for their son's death. It is a genuinely rich setup. The film, unfortunately, does not know what to do with it.

To the screenplay's credit, there is not a villain in sight. Every character here is drawn with a recognizable decency: Kenna carries her guilt without self-pity, Grace's cruelty comes entirely from grief, Ledger's conflict is rooted in loyalty, and even the most obstructive characters are acting from a place the audience can understand. That generosity of spirit is genuinely disarming, and it earns the film a measure of goodwill early on. The trouble is that sympathy and resonance are not the same thing. We understand these people, we do not begrudge them, but we cannot quite feel what they feel. Their grief stays at arm's length. Their longing does not pull at us. Their hope, when it finally surfaces, registers as a plot development rather than a release. The film secures our sympathy with ease, then mistakes that for emotional connection, never doing the harder work of making us truly inhabit the story alongside them.

The film charts this territory in a mostly linear fashion that is easy enough to follow, perhaps too easy. The storytelling rarely surprises, and scenes that should accumulate into something devastating too often tick by at a pace that feels not just unhurried but sluggish. A significantly tighter cut would have helped. What the script mistakes for restraint repeatedly reads as stalling, and the film's two-hour runtime begins to feel like a test of patience well before the third act arrives.

More damaging is how thoroughly the script undermines its own surprises. Kenna's maternal longing is so overwhelming and so constant that every plot turn becomes predictable long before it arrives. The emotional revelations the film builds toward, the moments meant to catch the audience off guard, land with a familiar thud. All its cards are on the table within the first half hour.

The relationship between Ledger and the Landry family compounds the problem. For a man established as Scotty's oldest childhood friend, Ledger is conspicuously absent from any depiction of Kenna and Scotty's life together. The film offers no explanation for this gap, no falling out, no distance, nothing. Then, without acknowledgment of the inconsistency, Ledger has assumed a near-paternal role in young Diem's upbringing. It is a thread the screenplay never bothers to untangle, and it quietly undermines the emotional logic the entire story depends on.

Maika Monroe works hard in the lead role and occasionally breaks through, giving Kenna a worn, interior quality that suggests a performer capable of more than the material demands of her. Tyriq Withers is likable and physically credible. But these are performances in service of a script that has not done the necessary work, and the gap between what the actors are reaching for and what the writing actually provides becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

This film tries very sincerely to break your heart, and there is something almost poignant about watching it fall short. It populates its world with people worth caring about, then fails to build the bridge that would make us care deeply. Sympathy without resonance is a lonely thing to sit with for two hours. The film reaches toward something real, stumbles over its own construction, and never quite recovers.

"Reminders of Him" opens in theaters on Friday, March 13, 2026.

Set in 1930s Chicago, the film follows Frank (Christian Bale), a lonely and ancient monster who travels to the city seeking a companion. He enlists the help of the brilliant, unconventional scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) to revive a murdered young woman. The woman, first seen as Ida (Jessie Buckley), is reborn as the Bride: newborn, electric, and ferociously alive. What follows is part gothic romance, part radical awakening, as the Bride refuses to simply become what Frank and the world around her expect. Together, the two find themselves as outlaws on the run, their volatile romance echoing the legendary recklessness of Bonnie and Clyde, careening through the night with law enforcement in pursuit and a growing cultural movement forming in their wake.

Jessie Buckley is simply magnificent in the dual role. Playing Ida as a sharp and tenacious woman ground down by a world that only permits a sliver of her, and then the Bride, reborn with an almost supernatural hunger for truth, autonomy, and love, she carries the film on her considerable shoulders. Where Elsa Lanchester's iconic original bride character was given barely three minutes and not a single coherent word in "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935), Jessie Buckley's Bride is a force of nature: fierce, vulnerable, irrational, sexy, and utterly ungovernable all at once. It is a performance that contains multitudes, and you cannot take your eyes off her.

Christian Bale is equally compelling as Frank, a monster who has been alive for over a century and has spent most of it quietly bleeding with regret. He brings a startling gentleness to the role, buried beneath 25 individually applied prosthetic pieces that reportedly took up to seven hours to apply each day. The chemistry between Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley crackles from their first scene together. Their relationship, built on a lie, sustained by genuine need, and eventually detonated by truth, is the beating heart of the film.

Where the film stumbles is in its second half, when detectives Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz) move closer to the foreground. Penélope Cruz brings wit and quiet dignity to a woman perpetually underestimated by the men around her. But the procedural mechanics of the investigation feel like they belong to a different, slightly more conventional film. Each new scene tracking their movements risks deflating the anarchic, romantic momentum that Frank and the Bride have built. The story of the Bride simply does not need much competition for our attention, and the film would benefit from trusting that more fully. Trimming this subplot would sharpen it considerably.

Writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal's passion for cinema runs through the film like a live wire. One of its most charming conceits is that Frank finds solace and joy in the movies, specifically in the golden-age musicals and matinee idols that play out on the screens of 1930s Chicago. Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), a fictional Hollywood star, becomes Frank's window into another, brighter world. The film wears its love of cinema openly and warmly, referencing Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and the mythic outlaw glamour of Bonnie and Clyde, and these touches give the otherwise gothic narrative a surprising and delightful lightness.

Cinematographer Lawrence Sher's innovative use of IMAX, expanding the frame not for spectacle but for emotional and surreal effect, is genuinely new. Sandy Powell's costume work is an instant gallery of icons: the Bride's vivid orange dress punk and alive against the dark Chicago nights, and Penélope Cruz's sharp scarlet dress so boldly, passionately red it feels lifted straight from the world of Pedro Almodóvar.

This movie is wild, romantic, monstrous, and deeply human all at once. It is a film about saying "I would prefer not to" and meaning it, about the parts of ourselves we try to lock away, and about learning to love them. Maggie Gyllenhaal has made something genuinely new from one of the oldest stories in the book.

"The Bride!" opens in theaters on Friday, March 6, 2026.

In this animated eco adventure, animal loving teen Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda) discovers that her beloved glade is slated to be bulldozed for a new highway by reelection hungry Mayor Jerry Generazzo (voiced by Jon Hamm). To save the natural environment, Rather than waiting for permission, Mabel barges into her professor's top secret lab and impulsively transfers her consciousness into a robotic beaver. Now navigating the pond from the inside, she befriends the relentlessly upbeat King George (voiced by Bobby Moynihan) and attempts to unite the animal kingdoms against the looming human threat.

The film spends some time explaining the mechanics of "hopping," the key fantasy about the lab equipment function invented by the anxious professor and ecological research team. It wants us to understand the rules. That insistence on plausibility makes the later flights of absurdity feel even stranger. When a shark suddenly soars through the sky to chase a moving car, physics is tossed aside for a gag. The careful scaffolding collapses into cartoon logic, and the tonal balance wobbles.

The characters are undeniably cute. King George radiates genial optimism, a beaver who believes in Pond Rules and communal aerobics. Mabel is all righteous spark and skateboard grit. Mayor Jerry has a polished comic rhythm that keeps him from becoming a complete caricature. They are likable in the way plush toys are likable. Soft edges, bright eyes, easy smiles. What they lack is magnetism. No one quite transcends their function in the script.

The central conflict feels similarly lopsided. The film preaches harmony between people and animals, hammering home Pond Rule number three: we are all in this together. Yet the human threat boils down to building a highway through this fragile glade, an almost cartoonishly blunt metaphor. The moral math is so simple it barely qualifies as arithmetic. Development is bad, nature is good. The nuance that might have made Mayor Jerry's dilemma genuinely thorny is smoothed away like one of those digitally painted leaves.

Like most Pixar animations, the movie is often lovely to watch. The aspen groves glow in autumnal yellows, night scenes shimmer with carefully calibrated exposure. There is craft here, and plenty of it. But craft without coherence becomes decoration.

Ultimately, this movie feels like a bedtime story told with a megaphone. Sweet, brightly colored, intermittently funny, and determined to reassure us that the world can be mended if we just listen to the beavers. For very young viewers, that may be enough. For everyone else, the leap of faith might be a bit too long, even for a hopping machine.

"Hoppers" opens in theaters on Friday, March 6, 2026.

The moors have rarely looked this wet, this cruel, or this inviting to ruin. Director Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" (UK/USA 2026 | 136 min.) is another adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel that has been made into films many times, and this version treats the story less as heritage drama and more as an emotional battlefield where love, jealousy, revenge, and regret are pushed to their breaking points.

The film follows Cathy Earnshaw (Margot Robbie), a headstrong and volatile young woman raised in isolation at the crumbling Wuthering Heights, and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), the orphan her father brings home who becomes her closest companion and eventual obsession. As they grow older, Cathy is seduced by the wealth and refinement of Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), while Heathcliff disappears and later returns transformed. Their once-inseparable bond fractures, and the consequences ripple outward, poisoning friendships, marriages, and loyalties. Watching from the edges is Nelly (Hong Chau), Cathy's childhood companion, whose presence hovers over much of the drama.

The film strikingly incorporates the Yorkshire landscape to full effect, with rain lashing against faces, fog swallowing bodies, and wind scouring the moors. There are an extraordinary number of close-ups, faces filling the frame, skin gleaming with rain or tears, breath and texture magnified to utmost intimacy. The result is frequently breathtaking, a tactile, immersive experience where emotion feels carved into stone and mud.

But the film's emphasis on provocation sometimes interferes with its storytelling. The flirtations with BDSM imagery feel more designed to shock or provoke a chuckle than to deepen our understanding of the characters. The central romance, despite committed performances from Robbie and Elordi, never fully convinces. Heathcliff is initially presented as disheveled and almost vagrant in appearance, which makes his later transformation into a wealthy, well-groomed gentleman feel not just dramatic but strategic. One cannot help but wonder: if he had not returned rich and polished, would Cathy's passion have reignited with the same force? The film never quite grapples with that uncomfortable question.

More crucially, the transition from childhood friendship to adult, all-consuming love is never convincingly realized. We are told their bond is elemental, that they are halves of the same being, but the emotional evolution between those stages feels abrupt rather than inevitable. The film insists on epic passion; it does not always earn it.

Hong Chau's Nelly, meanwhile, is given frustratingly little to do. For such a pivotal figure in the novel's architecture, and for an actor of Chau's depth, the role feels reduced to a peripheral observer, a wasted opportunity in a film otherwise so attentive to aesthetic detail.

After more than two hours of running time, the film is most persuasive as a spectacle. It is filled with beautiful images and a charged atmosphere, a storm you can almost taste. As a love story, however, it remains more impressive than persuasive, its emotional thunder rumbling loudly without ever quite striking home.

"Wuthering Heights" opens in theaters on Friday, February 13, 2026.

Set in 1990s Iraq under sanctions, the film follows nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef) after she is selected in her class to provide a cake in honor of the President's birthday, a task that sends her across the city in search of ordinary yet nearly impossible-to-find ingredients. What begins as a child's errand quickly becomes a test of survival, as Lamia navigates markets and police checkpoints alongside her grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), her loyal friend Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), and her pet rooster Hindi. Eggs, flour, sugar: each item carries risk, and each step forward tightens the film's grip.

Director Hasan Hadi tells an arresting story that draws deeply from personal memory. The film feels neither schematic nor didactic, but shaped by recollection and observation. Elements of myth and lived reality intertwine, allowing innocence and danger to coexist without ever canceling each other out. The world is never explained to Lamia, only endured, and that perspective gives the film its devastating power.

What makes the film so affecting is its refusal to flatten experience into political messaging. The politics are unavoidable, yet never preached. Instead, the film is devoted to ordinary endurance: how children absorb danger without fully naming it, how adults shield them imperfectly, how love and friendship persist under pressure. The cake itself becomes a fragile vessel for hope under tyranny, something almost too delicate to survive the weight placed upon it.

The performances, drawn from non-actors, feel astonishingly alive. Faces register fear, resolve, and fleeting joy with unguarded honesty. Lamia's journey unfolds as both adventure and ordeal, shaped by a sense of destiny that feels inescapable. And yes, Hindi the rooster deserves special mention: a scene-stealing presence whose perfectly timed cries puncture the tension like a living alarm bell.

Shot entirely in Iraq, the film carries the gravity of place in every frame. Locations do not serve as backdrops but as witnesses, holding history in their walls and dust. The images find beauty without softening reality.

Winner of the Directors' Fortnight Audience Award and the Camera d'Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best International Feature representing Iraq, this film is one of my top ten films of 2025: heartbreaking, mesmerizing, and indelible.

"The President's Cake" opens in the San Francisco Bay Area on Friday, February 13, 2026.