Touch of Leather

Her Private Hell (2026) - Refn Her Private Hell is Refn's new feature since 2016's Neon Demon, and after his stint in streaming platform: miniseries Too Old to Die Young for HBO Max and Cocaine Copenhagen Cowboy for Netflix, with increasingly patient-trying style where pretty pictures moving in snail's pace and nothing much happens during the hour duration of each episode. Gone are his mystique and art-for-art's sake haydays of the early 2000s and 2010s, Her Private Hell crumbles like a candy within a few minutes in candy colored neon lights and artificial fog. I do not want to invoke style over substance and give Refn a pass as a visual stylist. I just can't, any longer.

Elle (Thatcher) and her step mother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu) live on a high sky scraper above the clouds. It's all neon colors of blue and red everywhere. It's supposed to be Japan because of the subplot involving American GI Private K (Charles Melton) and two MC characters who appear in tandem? Anyway, a new bright eyed girl, Hunter (Kristine Froseth) just moves in with Elle and Dominique. There's a strange father/daughter dynamic with Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), who's always busy traveling but says some cryptic things to the girls. It's Johnny Thunders, he is the most powerful, fascinating man, etc, etc... we are told. 'Johnny Thunders is gonna protect you and take care of you.' Whatever that means. There's a mysterious entity who kills women on the loose and Private K journeys through the yakuza underworld shrouded in the mist, to find his daughter who was abducted. It doesn't really matter if the two parallel stories connect or not. It's not really the point. But why do we need a point when we have pretty faces in gaudy makeup and colorful lights? Well, not enough.

The vacuous pretty images of Her Private Hell belong to perfume and fancy handbag commercials, not the entirety of the duration, in narrative storytelling. Refn really has a knack for making a 1 hour 50 minutes film feeling like 5 hours. Thatcher and Liu along with Melton, walk, pose and lie around like they are in a fashion shoot. They are pretty but whenever they try to act with the stilted deliveries of hilariously bad dialogue, it shatters the movie illusion, where you get lost in the imaginary world, created by a good filmmaker. It's bad. It doesn't even work as a satire, like Neon Demon was. With its slow pace and total lack of suspense, it also fails as a homage to giallo. The only thing that is lost in this movie is unfortunately Thatcher. She has the looks, but she can't act for shit. Or at least she hasn't found the right role to shine yet. And this movie ain't it.

Unfinished

Franz (2025) - Holland Seasoned Polish director Agnieszka Holland's biopic of perhaps the most celebrated Czech writer Franz Kafka shares much unconventionality in filmmaking as Peter Watkins' Edvard Munch biopic - with jumbled timeline - Vonnegut style, breaking the 4th wall with protagonists glancing at the camera, etc. Like Watkins's Munch, Holland relies on these dizzying formalist filmmaking - unruly zoom-ins, shallow focuses, to accentuate the craziness of early 20th century hurtling towards world wars and nazi Germany.

In Franz, Kafka (Idan Weiss), is a man of words, writing strange short stories in the household of gregarious industrialist patriarch, Hermann (Peter Kurth). Growing up with 3 sisters and an obedient mother and later, suffering from consumption (which he died of at the age of 40), in many film versions, Kafka is treated as an effeminate and sickly man, a complete outsider who couldn't deal with outside society. Not in Holland's version - here, he is depicted as a well-rounded, vigorous young man who enjoys the company of women, physical exercises and being sociable when he wants to. He even enlisted in WWI in support of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

It's his words on many letter exchanges with women that gets him in trouble. First with Felice Bauer (Carol Schuler), whom he was hastily engaged with, then her best friend Grete (Gesa Schermuly) and later, his best friend and publisher Max Brod (Sebastian Schwarz)'s wife Milena (Jenovéfa Boková). In many ways, Kafka is depicted as an everyman who happens to be a great writer with a very dark imagination. As a tour guide to Kafka museum in present day explains, Kafka wrote only a handful of short stories and novels but himself is a subject of millions of writings.

But I think Holland's cinematic approach to Kafka's genius was taken for granted too much. The only time we see one of his writings coming to life is Penal Colony in the beginning. It is appropriately shocking and gruesome - an accused is bound on a board face down. And countless beds of needles press down on his bare back to write his crimes on his skin for hours. As Kafka reads giddily in front of live audiences, the half of the crowd, sickened by the story, walk off. I just wished she used more of his writing imagined on screen, throughout the film.

With a kaleidoscopic depiction of the life of the famous literary figure, what Holland is trying to get at with Franz, is that it is impossible to present someone truthfully. It is true that Holland's Kafka is not a caricature of the famous writer but more of a person, but in doing so misses the mystique about the man who was one of the most influential writers of all time.

Past Future Perfect

Rose of Nevada (2025) - Jenkin Mark Jenkin, a Cornish purveyor of celluloid art, has been shooting his films exclusively on 16mm film on Bolex camera, now comes up with time traveling, seafaring film with great efficiency and intrigue with two big movie stars, George MacKay and Callum Turner, as a couple of hired fishermen off the Coastline where Jenkin comes from.

Rose of Nevada, a small fishing boat that disappeared 30 years ago, returns to the harbor. The declining fishing community is still reeling from the loss of Alan, the fisherman who set out to sea on that boat, and Luke, whose guilt of not accompanying Alan that day drove him to suicide. The boat's owner/businessman Mike recruits young family man Nick (MacKay), who happens to be the next door neighbor of Luke's grieving parents and Liam (Turner), an interloper who needs a job. The boat is steered by a seasoned, mysterious snarling seaman Murgey (Francis Magee), who might or might be the connection between the past and present.

After a successful haul, Nick and Liam return home and find themselves to be regarded as Alan and Luke by the townsfolk thirty years earlier. The Richards - Luke's parents, think their son is having some sort of mental breakdown from stress and Alan's fidgetty wife regards, he is having one of those moody episodes. As they go on another fishing trip and things remain stuck in the past, Nike is having a hard time accepting a new reality than Liam, who slowly embraces his role as Alan, a family man with wife and daughter.

Nick refuses to go on board for yet another fishing expedition because he can't go on without seeing his wife and young daughter because like himself, they are not born yet in 1993. He contemplates suicide by jumping off the cliffs, like Luke did, thus, completing Terminator/Twelve Monkeys like self-fulfilling profecy. But he thinks better of it. He accepts fate and joins the Richards as Luke.

Featuring working class characters and their circumstances that Jenkin is familiar with growing up, he beautifully crafts a sort of low-fi sci-fi with sodden social realism with Rose of Nevada. The details of the fishing village is vividly captured in glorious 16mm with vibrant colors, blemishes and grains. I gotta check out Jenkin's other films now.

Self Discovery Through Slasher Genre

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) - Schoenbrun A mousy, Sundance winning filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) has been given a chance to direct a reboot of the Camp Miasma, the 80s slasher franchise, reminiscent of Sleepaway Camp, Friday the 13th, Burning and the like. Miasma franchise is now a butt of a joke to everyone who remembers it being steeped in blatant homophobia, transphobia, gore and titillation of the flesh. Still, it’s a cult classic to diehard horror weirdos.

Kris is keenly aware that her new hot status as an indie darling, plus being a queer filmmaker, landed the job because the studio desperately wants to be seen as woke by hiring them. They understand the fact that the Hollywood ecosystem is a mutual exchange of who's using who.

Under the microscope of a gaggle of Hollywood producers and moneymen, Kris has to get the project off the ground, soon. They are obsessed with the starlet of the first Miasma movie, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson). They keep watching the VHS copy of the movie over and over again.

In a hilarious pitch zoom meeting with the executives, using their newly earned auteur clout, Kris tries to dictate the project the way they wanted, not in the studio's terms. It doesn’t go well to say the least. While their team tries to smooth over the aftermath, Kris has to convince reclusive Billy to partner up with them to realize the grand vision of the complete and utter transformation of the dead franchise. Little do they know, it is Billy, the Final Girl of the first Miasma movie, who lost her virginity in it, the sultry recluse, ends up helping them to give The Little Death (La Petite Mort - euphemism for orgasm in French), the spear wielding boogie-person of the franchise, the correct backstory and transform them into a sympathetic character.

With two previous somber films, We are All Going to World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun explored desire, fantasy and missed opportunities in an emotionally resonant search for queer identity. In turn, Camp Miasma is a campy, tongue-in-cheek, gory, meta rendition of nostalgia ridden romp. It’s a tale of self-discovery and joyful celebration of queer sex, guided through the great Gillian Anderson, who embodies Billy, Kris’s desire and myth personified, in the Dolly Parton drawl.

With intentionally fake production design, and the great mix of Bob Ross inspired matte paintings, over the top cartoon violence and campy humor, Schoenbrun seems to be finally letting it loose and just having fun- embracing their queerness fully and sexuality all out in the open, matching the main theme of the movie - self-acceptance and showing who they really are. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is great fun.

Thoughts on Theater of Thought

Theater of Thought (2022) - Herzog At age 83, Werner Herzog, legendary filmmaker, seems he has no plans to slow down. Over 80 films in his filmography, he continuously churns up one or two films every year or so, with widest variety of subjects one can imagine. For a moment, please set aside your misgivings about his aggressively grandious and what can be seen as culturally insensitive films he is best known for, from the 70s and 80s. Without much public attention or interests, he's been quietly building his reputation as a documentary filmmaker in parallel with his narrative works, especially from the 90s to present.

Objectively speaking, he is one of the few established filmmakers, who is in a position (well, he has no scrupples taking on a role in Mandalorian to finance his films), can and will choose to make films about what he is interested in.

His documentary work lately though, has been inclined to science and technology. And there, he has been exploring subjects with child-like wonder and curiosity, which he professes are and should be the bases of all filmmaking. In Theater of Thought, he explores technology and human brain and its philosophical and ethical implications by asking neuroscientists, industrialists and medical doctors and using his reputation as a legendary filmmaker, gains extraordinary access to their work.

It is not really possible to objectively critique Herzog's films in its filmmaking merits anymore - especially on his documentary inclined work. What interview technique or his framing or music choices are not the focus of his films. But his unending curiosity to human experience is. Keeping that in mind, here are some of my thoughts on Herzog's Theater of Thought:

At its infant stage, the advancement neuroscience has two big implications to the world we live in- to help disabled individuals to experience human life to more fully, and dangers of government/coporate manipulations of individual rights and freedom.

Human brains are too complex and fickle, it is impossible (for now, and probably not in our lifetime) for AI to replicate it fully.

Herzog never wavers in his curiosity about human existence and experience. That's why he never looks back in his films. Because there are still so much to explore. Nostalgia is not his game.

Theater of thoughts, again, as all of his films, is an invigorating, fascinating and thoughtful inquiry into our existence. I really hope Herzog keeps making these until the end.

Time Machine: Cinema as Therapy

Blue Heron (2025) - Romvary It's the 90s. A family of 6- mother and father, 3 boys and one girl, of Hungarian heritage, moves into a house in British Columbia, Canada. It's summertime. Just like any other young family, we see the family dynamics playing out. There are laughs, there are arguments, there are beautiful little moments. Daughter Sasha (played by Eylul Guven and later Amy Zimmer), is our main observer, as she is getting acquainted with the surroundings. There's a bit of prejudice against her among her young playmates in the neighborhood - maybe it's her slight accent or her status as the new girl in town, as she is left playing in the neighbor's pool covered in tarp, while other girls giggle in the distance. But that doesn't deter her sunny disposition.

It is clear that the eldest son Jeremy (Edik Beddos), a tall, lanky blonde with square thin rimmed metal glasses, has behavioral issues and the parents don't know what to do with him. He is constantly in trouble for shoplifting and violent outbursts. There are no government health authorities to help them cope with his deteriorating conditions. But we see the gentle side of Jeremy with his younger siblings as he silently watches over them. With dad always on the computer for work, the duty of taking care of children during the summer falls on mom, and with Jeremy constantly acting out whatever he is experiencing mentally, falls on her to deal with. And she is on wit's end.

After the social worker's visit, there are things that are revealed about Jeremy. He wants to be rich and famous. He loves drawing maps. He loves the idea of time travel- typical teenager stuff, and also the yearning for structure and perhaps a re-do.

In the halfway point, we are introduced to a filmmaker Sasha (Zimmer) in the present day. After her brother's passing, with her memories of her childhood fading and unreliable at times, she is in the process of making a film about her older brother who passed recently.

In a very poignant moment, past and present intersect: we see a grownup Sasha visiting the family as a social worker and telling her distressed parents that nothing they would do for Jeremy would make any difference - therapy, medications, foster care, institutions. That the outcome of Jeremy's life trajectory really wasn't their fault. While all of the children are watching TV, the present Sasha whispers something in her younger self's ear and smiles while Jeremy's eyes are fixed on blinking TV lights.

Sophy Romvary's semi-autobiographical debut feature beautifully displays yearning for understanding and closeness that was never meant to be. Some people in our lives are unreachable however we try, but it doesn't mean we don't love them any less. Astute observations of life's complications and emotions, Blue Heron is one of the most emotionally resonant films in recent years.

All the World's a Stage

W's Tragedy (1984) - Sawai Shizuka (played by Hiroko Yakushimaru, Sailor Suit and Machine Gun), is a 20-year old aspiring stage actress, not afraid to sleep with an older actor who is in business in the hopes of getting rhe role of Mako, a heirless of the wealthy Watsuji family, who is accused of murdering the family's partriach/her grandfather. But the role goes to her classmate and she as an apprentice and prompter girl behind the curtain. Disappointed but still determined, Shizuka confides in Akio (Masanori Sera), her suiter and former actor who has given up the profession.

During the production tour, the star actress Yoshiko (Sho Hatori), who plays Mako's mother in the play finds herself in a pickle - the producer of the production dies of a heart attack during sex with Yoshiko and confides in Shizuka, who happens to be stopping by her hotelroom door. It would be a big scandal for the star and it will surely end her career. But maybe Shizuka can say that the dead man was with her. It would be less of a scandal with her youth and innocence, the press will be more forgiving. In exchange, Yoshiko can help her career.

After the media conference about the death and Shizuka taking the blame, in exchange for the role of Mako, Akio wants an explanation. Is Shizuka that ambitious to get the role of a lifetime, and be willing to sacrifice her reputation and self dignity? Shizuka has no explanation for him but begs him to attend her big performance in Tokyo. The real life starts mimicking the stage production.

80's J-pop idol, Yakushimaru shines as a likeable, ambitious aspiring acccress who would kill for a role. Her deer in the headlight expression with her small mouth and big hairstyle, leg warmers and pastel colored wardrobe are all quintessential 80s Japan. The smooth dolly movement and muzak playing in the background add to that artificial 80s aestehtic. But W's Tragedy is a fun film built around the charm of Yakushimaru as she carries the film.

Proof of Existence

Mother, You Have Not Died Yet. But You Will. And When You Do, You Will Finally be Alive Again (2026) - Beni \ With perhaps the longest movie title that I've encountered, South African filmmaker Advik Beni's impressionistic film examines the post-apartheid Indian township of Cato Manor, near Durban, South Africa, still simmering with ethnic tension. It is told through Lishana, an Indian descendent who is caring for her aging, dying mother and her family history.

Lishana describes her grief after the hindi funeral ceremony, as she feels the void of her mother's presence in her everyday life - everything and nothing has changed at the same time. As memories of her mother, Leela, doing mundane things with her - cooking, tending to the garden, having conversations and eating together, persist, it's like the line between the past and the present is blurring.

Everyone deals with grief differently- Lishana delves into her art practice: portrait photography. With her relative's barbershop in town, she takes pictures of her neighbors and citizens of Durban - young, old, black, indian. And her photographs are physical links to the sordid history of colonialism, immigration, and apartheid.

Lishana's family history is an interesting one - Her grandmother was one of thousands of Indians brought in to South Africa to work in the sugarcane plantations, an indentured labor force by the Colonial British Empire. Lishana, who never had been to the homeland of her ancestors, nevertheless kept her Indian traditions and hindu culture within the working class neighborhood of Cato Manor. Her imagined India created a lore in her mind, much grander than the reality.

There has always been violence in KwaZulu-Natal province and the city of Durban both under apartheid and post-apartheid period. The 1949 Durban riot was against Indian settlement, then the unrest in 2021 amid economic hardship during COVID-19 and the imprisonment of former president, Jacob Zuma. Accompanied by archival footage, Lishana recounts the region's checkered history and ongoing tension and violence.

Shot on grainy film stock and shaky handheld camera, Mother... has the looks and feels of old ethnography documentaries of the bygone era. Beni also incorporates a multitude of art/film techniques that include stop motion, drawings, immersive sound design and reenactments. The filmmaker portrays a picture of an immigrant enclave using impressionistic film language, often focusing on life's little details - the color, sounds, ephemeral qualities of everyday life.

Merging past and present, personal and historical, the film has a quality of a lucid dream, where memories and imaginations merge and create new reality personalized for its subject. Mother, You Have Not Died Yet. But You Will. And When You Do, You Will Finally be Alive Again, is a beautiful audio visual experience. Mother, You Have Not Died Yet. But You Will. And When You Do, You Will Finally be Alive Again, enjoyed its world premiere at FID Marseille 2026 where it won the Audience Award. Visit the film's page at the official festival site for more information.

NYAFF 2026 Preview

Funky Freaky Freaks - Han Yong-gi, Jisook and Dumbo are foul mouthed, troubled highschool friends. When not in class, they engage in various mischief - including selling dirty underwear and pretending to be a girl online. The film's rough, handheld aesthetics and with jumpcuts, mixed media formats, and urban decay settings give it an energetic, edgy feel to the trio's shenanigans. Everything changes with the arrival of Woojoo, a handsome Judo champ transfer student from a rich family. Much to the distress of Yong-gi, Jisook's childhood friend who has been carrying a flame for her, Jisook destructively falls for Woojoo, who is a known womanizer.

After Woojoo unceremoniously dumps Jisook, they devise a plan to kill him - lure him into a deserted building. But Dumbo never shows up and Woojoo gets spooked and runs away. Jisook chastises Yong-gi and drives him to kill Woojoo in school.

Funky Freaky Freaks features the social media saturated environment and its pressure to conform in the most artificial ways, where looking good means everything and deception becomes the weapon of choice for the outsiders and non-conformists. It's a stark, uncompromising debut.

Kinki - Shiraishi Kinki is a south central region of the mainland of Honshu, also known as Kansai. So despite how it sounds, it's not that kind of film. The found-footage horror master Shiraishi Koji (Noroi), directs this Lovecraftian horror that has a lot of creepy imagery and jump scares, also touching on Japanese folk horror involving torii gates, a cult group and resurrection.

It plays out as a missing persons case involving a reporter on a big mystery case. The mountains of clues in physical media- videotapes of interviews, folklore, anime, CDs and newspaper clippings and thumb drives, throw a young journalist and a friend of a missing reporter deep into the mystery, where peoples head vends back in unnatural ways, disappearing limbs, falling deaths, etc. It's a good throwback to early 2000 Japanese horror.

Human Resource - Thamrongrattanarit Fren works at the HR department of a company situated among the glass and steel towers in Bangkok's business district. She discovers she is in early stages of pregnancy, but her feelings on expecting a baby are ambivalent at best. The world is a scary place according to the news which is bombarding the airwaves every day in her commute. Her husband, Thame, is a sales person for an anti-stabbing protective gear company. Fren and her co-worker interview many young people for an entry level position in her company, vacated by a young woman who failed to show up to work for several days now. The applicants are all overqualified and demanding. But in this economy, it is hard to be choosy. The company wants someone who can work 6 days a week with low salary, under a tyrannical boss, whose bad temper goes unchecked.

The threat of the everyday world escalates in a monstrous traffic jam in Fren's neighborhood and confrontations become more frequent. Fren's stress and exhaustion results in a fenderbender and Thame finally finds out that they are expecting a baby. He is overjoyed and busies himself to provide for his family - enquiring about the elite international school, decluttering the house, etc. But for Fren, often seen in silhouette or in profile at night, something is eating at her.

With constant overhead shots of the urban jungle combined with long static shots of inanimate objects and great sound design, Human Resource shares the universal concern of treating human beings like resources, leaving humanity behind.

Montreal, My Beautiful - He Joan Chen stars in this queer drama set in Montréal. She plays Feng Xia, a dutyful housewife of Wang, an immigrant who has a convenience store business. They have two kids - daughter just started college and son is in elementary school. She is having hot flashes and irritability due to menopause. Her daughter's refusal to translate anymore in public forces Feng Xia to take up French classes, after living in Montréal for 14 years. With the encouragement of a gay Cuban classmate who finds the city liberal and open, Feng Xia joins a dating app and finds Lisa (Charlotte Aubin), a stunning 30 year old blonde, working as a server in a cafe. Feng Xia has a secret love in her youth with another girl.

Forbidden love, duty, culture clash all take part in Chinese Canadian filmmaker Xiaodan He's immigrant story. Joan Chen, at 65 is still luminous and plays Feng Xia, a woman trapped between tradition and desire, gracefully. Aubin, as a young woman still trying to figure out herself and finding love is also commendable.