Streaming ate the theatrical window, but it never touched the gatekeeping. Why Cannes, Venice and Berlin still decide what cinema we'll be watching a year from now — including the films that end up on a platform.
Read the essay →With its full 2026 schedule now live at 293 titles, Toronto has become less a selection than a transit map — yet it still hands the festival's first frame, at nine in the morning, to Ryūsuke Hamaguchi.
By seating Pablo Larraín's four-part Netflix series in the same competition as Mike Leigh's stated final film, San Sebastián has quietly redefined the unit it awards.
As its 79th edition opens with a promise to free the spectator from predictive viewing, Locarno stages the exact contradiction the rest of the circuit would rather not name.
With his twelfth feature since 2020 premiering in Locarno's International Competition, Hong Sang-soo keeps proving that the auteur film need not be a rare and expensive event to be a serious one.
Venice will open its 83rd edition — in competition, not the safe gala slot — with Danny Boyle's portrait of Rupert Murdoch buying The Sun, and the choice is an argument before it is a film.
With a single female director among twenty competition titles, Venice has answered the parity question by reframing it — and the reframing tells us more than the number.