Watching the trailer for The End of Oak Street, I got T-Rex excited. An end of the world sci-fi by the It Follows director David Robert Mitchell, produced by J.J. Abrams, that ended with a glimpse of dinosaurs ticked all my boxes. I thought: this is my kind of summer blockbuster.

This hope seemed confirmed when the reviews came in. IndieWire called it “the best dinosaur movie since 1993.” RogerEbert.com called it a “movie miracle.” And then Empire’s Chris Hewitt tweeted that everyone should go and see The End of Oak Street so that Hollywood would make more films like it and we would be spared “turgid think pieces with titles like, ‘Why Don’t They Make Movies Like The End Of Oak Street Anymore?’” Within a day my feed was populated with versions of the same thought.

I did as I was told. Sorry, Chris. Here is the turgid think piece.

I could not believe how frustrating the movie was.

It starts well. A younger brother (Christian Convery) and his elder teenage sister (Maisy Stella) in American suburbia struggling with their peers and avoiding the home where their mum, Denise (Anne Hathaway), is writing a novel that is clearly based on her worsening relationship with her mid-life crisis husband, Greg (Ewan McGregor). So far, so Stranger Things.

But then things go rapidly awry. Much to Denise’s bemusement, her husband has taken a second job as a pizza delivery guy, which embarrasses her. When he arrives home, he asks his son Brian to help him take the pizza delivery sign from atop his car. Then, the next scene, the pizza sign is still on the car. An obvious signal that this movie is now being told from the imagination of one of the main characters. And we know who the writer is.

Suddenly the movie is dominated by a dissolving marriage and not the disillusionment of teenagers. From John Hughes to Steven Spielberg, classic 80s cinema is about adults who clip the wings of their kids, destroying children’s dreams before they have a chance to fly. Yet somehow these kids still dream big, despite their parents’ actions.

The twist of The End of Oak Street steals this moment from us. When the dinosaurs come, suddenly the teenagers get consumed by escaping the prehistoric creatures and their personal problems play second fiddle. To be fair, Mitchell tries to bring in some existential angst, suggesting a budding lesbian romance, a brief exchange about the existence of God, and the resolution of the son’s run-ins with a neighbourhood bully, but they feel minor next to the dinosaurs.

As my mind began to wander in the cinema, I started to note the similarities the film has with Stand by Me, and why that film is a masterpiece and the one I was watching was boring me. By a quirk of fate, I watched a 40th anniversary screening just four days before I visited Oak Street. So one of the great 80s coming-of-age stories was fresh in my mind as I lamented over the limitations of Oak Street to Emma Jones on our Cinema in One Take podcast.

Before you @ me that a dinosaur blockbuster has nothing in common with Rob Reiner’s adventure, I was mulling over the fact that both are about childhood, being curtailed by your parents’ problems, and end with the reveal that the story is told from the perspective of a writer. There is also a similar framing to one of my favourite films of all-time, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders, as well as many others. For me it’s why Mitchell reached for this format in paying tribute to the era.

This is the story that Stand by Me tells about adolescence. Four curious boys from a small town of 1,281 people want to see a dead body so badly they walk for two days along train tracks to reach it, speaking about their hopes and dreams as they go. Gordie is trying to come to terms with the loss of his elder brother, an American-football star, and living in a house where his father’s grief has made him ugly towards his living heir. Gordie has been made to feel worthless, and only his friend Chris (River Phoenix) tells him that he’s wrong and shows true belief in his talents as a writer. The story is set in 1959, but framed as the memoir of a writer in the 1980s, its power comes from the way it captures the mindset and imagination of young children and the struggles they have to overcome.

The film is about emotional damage. The adventure is just the mechanism through which inner turmoil comes to the fore.

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My problem with The End of Oak Street is that the dinosaurs signal the moment in the adventure where survival instinct overtakes the emotional turmoil.

The Platt family problems still exist, but now they are things to resolve: through a fight, the meeting of a potential same-sex love interest, a mother who gets to create the husband she wants. It sounds great, but these are all told as outward action scenes; because, of course, the melancholy, the lamentations, the dreaming cannot exist when dinosaurs are about to eat you alive.

The recreation of the dinosaurs was great for the many chase moments — I especially loved the giant worm wiggling through the house, and the ferociousness of the creatures and willingness to gobble up humans — but there are way too many of these scenes and so most of them blend into one. The non-stop action, which is possibly why a lot of people are praising it, comes at the price of human emotion. And for me, adolescents being able to show their hopes and fears is the hallmark of so many classic 80s movies from E.T. to The Breakfast Club.

Those movies took a child’s disappointment seriously enough to leave it unresolved. Spielberg’s divorced parents in E.T. do not phone home. Gordie’s father does not soften. The usual Monday will follow the unusual Saturday in The Breakfast Club. The films are not comfort blankets.

The End of Oak Street is not only a film of happy resolutions; it also dismisses the frustrations of a mother who, in this movie’s logic, only has to fantasise her husband as a hero for him to become one. His son looks up to him no matter what he does, and there is an almighty family forgiveness that isn’t earned. The framing turns every moment where a reconciliation could happen into the fabric of someone’s imagination. It is the exact type of redemption arc that these 80s movies are railing against.

The problem for me was that the pen was put into the wrong hand in Oak Street. In The Outsiders and Stand by Me, it’s the kid telling the story as an adult: Ponyboy writing the essay we have just watched, Gordie typing it out decades later. Oak Street starts on the kids, then veers to the mother, whose own story doesn’t make sense unless it’s about how foolish a woman is in accepting a miscommunicating husband. The irony is that Abrams produced this film, and Mitchell has made the mistake Abrams himself avoided in his own 80s sci-fi tribute, Super 8, where it’s the adolescents who tell the story, albeit with a video camera rather than a pen.

Now some may posit, rather charitably, that what Mitchell is arguing is that the story of children is written by their parents. And I agree with that sentiment to some extent, but the reconciliation at the end of this movie doesn’t make that possible. Suddenly the poor family is made rich by the successful author, and make believe reality is a substitute for real emotions. It’s too hollow.

Oak Street is a film that gets some period detail right, but not much else.

This is not a plea for the old days. The films that have punched above their weight at the box office this year — Obsession, Backrooms and, the closest comparison to this, Project Hail Mary — all pushed inner emotional turmoil as hard as they did the action. They are not movies about heroes, but people who, even if they do amazing feats, still struggle with the everyday.

Have you seen The End of Oak Street? I am braced for the argument, especially as so many critics love it. Do you think it really belongs in the tradition of the great blockbusters of yesteryear, or has nostalgia blinded us to what made those movies great?

This week’s episode of Cinema in One Take is out now: the death of Hayden Panettiere and what Hollywood does to its children, Israel’s investigation into the killing of Hind Rajab and whether Kaouther Ben Hania’s film forced it, and why Warner Bros. will not pay for a Barbie sequel. Next week, Emma and I take on De Gaulle: Résistance.

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On the Cinema in One Take podcast this week, Emma and I discussed how Elon Musk has criticised the casting of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. We wondered whether engaging with him merely gave more oxygen to provocative posts designed to generate debate.

But colour-blind casting is an important topic, so we dealt with his wayward position on Lupita Nyong’o, Homer and “historical accuracy”. If you want to hear what we said, you can listen to the Cinema in One Take podcast. I encourage you to do so.

What I am more interested in highlighting here is how Musk turns an ideological attack on a movie into a business strategy aimed at boosting the value of the companies he controls.

Whatever else his tweets are designed to do, they turn the grievance into publicity for one of his businesses. In the instance of The Odyssey, that business is Grok Imagine.

The way I look at his tweets is heavily shaped by Jo Piazza’s incredible book, Celebrity, Inc.: How Famous People Make Money. I met Piazza at a film festival in Aruba, in 2010 I think, and she told me about the book she was about to publish and sent me the galleys. Little did I know it would become a bible on the mechanics of social media before social media became all-pervasive.

Essentially, it broke down how famous people’s public behaviour, especially their “fights”, was designed — often by marketing and publicity teams — to drive up their personal revenue. The chapter I was most taken by was about the 2007 “beef” between 50 Cent and Kanye West, who just happened to be releasing albums on the same day. What appeared to be some public dick waving was actually marketing. It did not matter who sold more records, because they both won.

Remember Barbenheimer? The same thing. Would Nolan’s film beat the summer blockbuster from the studio he had walked out on? Or should we go and see both movies? You decide. The result: the best weekend at the box office for years. Everyone happy. Barbie took more cash, Nolan more Oscars. Job done.

Movies have known this for a long time. Ryan Murphy’s excellent Feud: Bette and Joan relayed how Robert Aldrich cast Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? so that he could use their decades-old animosity to feed tidbits to gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, keeping the film in the news. It was box-office gold, and they even used the feud in the subsequent, successful Oscar campaign.

When I was growing up, it was all about Schwarzenegger versus Stallone. I had posters of Rocky and the Terminator next to each other on my bedroom wall in the 1980s. Who had the biggest muscles, killed more people onscreen and was the better actor were hot topics in the school playground.

The rivalries can be real or fake. It does not matter, because the old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity holds true. If you can become the story, it will give whatever you are pushing value. Entertainers know it. Musk knows it.

So this is the frame I would hang around Musk’s proclamation that Grok Imagine will make a “historically accurate” version of The Odyssey — note that even he does not have the brass balls to say “better”. One only has to look at the clip created by Grok Imagine to know that it has TV movie written all over it.

Not that I think Musk particularly cares how good the film will be, should it materialise. His single post — “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer” — created a story about Grok Imagine that news outlets around the world repeated on his behalf, giving him and his tool thousands of column inches of free publicity.

He has framed the debate around the supposedly “woke” nature not just of Nolan but of Hollywood as a whole, calling the casting an insult to Homer, who he claims described Helen as “fair skinned, blonde”. In doing so, he has positioned his AI platform as the director that will right the wrongs not merely of the movie business but, given the political movements he supports, the wider social order he believes has gone astray.

Disputes over casting, race and “wokeness” are far more interesting to write about than a software update.

The timing of all this is well worth sharing because it is so convenient.

On 12 June 2026, SpaceX, the company that owns xAI, one of whose products is Grok, listed on the Nasdaq in the largest initial public offering in stock-market history, making Musk, on paper, the first trillionaire in recorded history.

Musk has made billions, by understanding that attention is fungible. A dispute he starts over a film can reinforce his identity as a technological insurgent, create engagement on X, promote Grok and remind investors that they should buy into his companies.

The bigger the battle, the larger the story. So, if you are going to take on the movie business, there is currently no director more bankable than Christopher Nolan. Unlike, say, James Cameron, he is a director who holds a traditional belief in what film is, and a credible and powerful voice against the idea that generative AI can or will replace human creativity. On brand, but perhaps not the best analogy, Nolan has dismissed AI as a “Trojan horse”.

Nolan’s proof is The Odyssey, shot entirely on IMAX film — the first film ever made entirely with IMAX cameras — using actors, physical locations, huge sets and practical production methods wherever possible. It is a box-office smash. Its success makes all the campaigning Musk has been waging about it being “woke” and inauthentic to the art of Homer seem ridiculous. Audiences have clearly not been listening to him.

That success makes Nolan the ultimate counterexample to the story Musk is selling.

But that is not to say Nolan has won, because Musk does not have to prove his product is better than Nolan’s, only that it can coexist in the same space and possess merits of its own. He knows that cheaper production costs are not really a badge of honour in the movie business, so instead he is selling the idea that Grok will not pander to modern sensibilities around colour and transgender casting.

That is the cultural dividing line Musk is trying to sell.

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So Musk is no longer merely saying that Grok Imagine can generate audiovisual images. He is saying that it can correct Hollywood: faster, cheaper and without the ideological compromises he tells his audience have corrupted the existing industry, no matter how false the dichotomy.

It is the shark going after the biggest boat in the water, not because the boat did anything to it, but because attacking the biggest boat is the most visible thing a shark can do.

What is worrying here is that Musk is going after artists who have no interest in, or anything to gain from, being part of his game. 50 Cent and Kanye West were mutually benefiting from their feud. Nolan made a film. Nyong’o accepted a role. Neither agreed to become material for someone else’s AI-product launch. Neither will gain from it; worse still, they will most likely become targets of abuse.

Musk gets the upside. They absorb the noise.

Let us also not forget that Musk controls the company where the dispute begins. X was folded into xAI in 2025, which was then acquired by SpaceX. The provocation promotes Grok while also generating engagement for X, creating value across the same corporate structure.

Musk might argue that Nolan’s Odyssey benefits from the attention too. The difference is that Nolan and his cast never volunteered their work as material for Musk’s product campaign.

It is hard to dismiss the irony in hearing this particular company owner speaking the language of fidelity and respect.

Grok has spent much of this year under regulatory and legal scrutiny because users were able to create manipulated and sexualised images of real people without their consent. Regulators in Britain and the European Union have opened formal investigations, while people whose images were allegedly manipulated have filed lawsuits against xAI. It seems Musk chooses when authenticity is a must-have ingredient for audiovisual creations.

The promise of a respectful, authentic Odyssey is arriving from a technology that has not yet established that it can consistently respect living people.

Whether Grok Imagine ever delivers a version of The Odyssey is secondary. Musk has already taken somebody else’s years of work, attached himself to it to promote his own product, and correctly calculated that the media would market that product for free because the controversy generates clicks.

The next time a famous story is cast or adapted in a way that can be framed as cultural betrayal, watch for the same sequence: grievance, announcement, AI solution, authenticity claim, media coverage, investor attention.

The argument will appear to be about the artwork.

The ideology may be sincere, but the machinery underneath it is financial.

Does treating outrage as a marketing channel change how you read these disputes when they appear in your feed? Leave a comment. We read all of them.

And for the actual argument about Homer, Helen of Troy and what “historically accurate” was hiding, Emma and I covered it in full this week on Cinema in One Take — wherever you get your podcasts.

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Some of the women of ‘The Odyssey’ : L-R Lupita Nyong’o, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya and Samantha Morton/Universal Pictures

Christopher Nolan’s films are about extraordinary men: magicians, vigilantes, astronauts, spies, superheroes and scientists, often consumed by an idea that threatens to swallow everything around them.

One criticism has followed his career: that the women in his films rarely receive the same depth, agency or dramatic space as his male characters (and one film, Dunkirk, has no named female characters at all, although given the setting, we’ll give him that one.)

But the criticism isn’t actually straightforward. Mal in Inception may exist largely as the embodiment of Cobb’s guilt, but Marion Cotillard gives her tragic force. Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle is one of the sharpest and most autonomous characters in The Dark Knight Rises, while Amelia Brand in Interstellar is allowed both intellectual authority and an emotional argument the film ultimately takes seriously. In the same film, Murph ( Jessica Chastain) becomes the scientist who completes the work her father began. Emily Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer, although she spends much of the movie just being his “wife”, cuts through the self-mythologising around her husband in a few electrifying scenes (but then the remarkable real life Jean Tatlock, played by Florence Pugh, is reduced to being Oppenheimer’s lover in the same movie.)

So Nolan’s films are definitely not without memorable women. The question has always been whether they exist beyond the arc of the men at their centre.

When Kaleem Aftab and I recorded this week’s podcast episode of Cinema in One Take, we both praised the women of The Odyssey . Not because Christopher Nolan has suddenly abandoned the themes that have always fascinated him. The Odyssey is primarily about how another obsessive hero, Odysseus (Matt Damon, never better) loses himself for a decade because of his shame about the war in Troy.

However, the multiple female characters linger in the memory as much as he does - in fact, Odysseus’s wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and the witch, Circe (Samantha Morton) steal the heart of the film. Which made me wonder - is this thanks to Christoper Nolan’s writing, or Homer’s?

Homer’s Odyssey is populated by women who shape its hero’s journey home. Penelope preserves Ithaca through intelligence and strategy as much as patience. The goddess Athena guides, manipulates events and protects. The sorceress Circe transforms from terrifying obstacle into teacher and lover. Even Calypso, often reduced in popular culture to “the woman who keeps Odysseus captive”, is given one of the poem’s most modern speeches, railing against the double standards that allow male gods sexual freedoms denied to goddesses. Clytemnestra, the twin sister of Helen of Troy, duly murders the all-conquering Greek King Agamemnon, on his first night home after the ten year war, for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia to get a fair wind for Troy.

Those women give Nolan an extraordinary starting point. The interesting question is what he chooses to do with them.

‘The Odyssey’/Universal Pictures

Anne Hathaway’s Penelope is the most obvious success. Rather than existing simply as the lonely wife waiting at home, she becomes the emotional anchor of the film, holding a kingdom together for twenty years while not knowing if her husband is dead, using her guile to rebuff the vicious men who want to share her bed. She also has an outburst, not in Homer, asking the question most modern viewers want to know - why on earth does her young son, Telemachus, have to be King; why can she not rule, as she’s already proven to be such an adroit leader?

This is now the third time Nolan has entrusted Anne Hathaway with one of the richest female roles in his career, after The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar. Whether that’s because he writes particularly well for Hathaway, or because Hathaway has an exceptional ability to uncover emotional complexity within Nolan’s restrained style, is difficult to say. Either way, it’s becoming a pattern. Because of her, Penelope is as much a main character as Odysseus.

Where Homer turns the sorceress Circe into Odysseus’s guide, lover and teacher, Nolan takes her in another direction. His Circe (Samantha Morton) is marked by violence inflicted by men long before Odysseus reaches her island. She’s seen - and probably experienced - what soldiers do to women. Her witchcraft becomes less an expression of selfish power than a means of survival. She is still dangerous, but danger has become her defence. It’s a reinterpretation rather than a reproduction of Homer, replacing the poem's emphasis on seduction and transformation with a more explicitly psychological portrait of survival.

As we say in the podcast, the minutes occupied by Sam Morton (one of Britain’s best actors) might be the greatest. character moments of the entire film. And Circe may be a Nolan female character who feels like she exists independently of the hero, even if she occupies a small section of the movie.

I also love what Nolan has done with Zendaya’s portrayal of the goddess Athena: rather than Homer's constantly intervening strategist, Nolan makes her a more elusive, symbolic presence of our hero’s guilt, even adopting the face of a young priestess murdered at Troy. The result is less an active goddess directing events than a haunting embodiment of memory and conscience, becase the heart of Nolan’s story is the unerasable actions of the Greeks at Troy. Once you’ve seen the whole film, her role becomes enormously significant.

‘The Odyssey’/Universal Pictures

Does the Lack of Female Desire Matter in ‘The Odyssey’?

Calypso, played by Charlize Theron, is perhaps the film's most intriguing alteration. Three thousand years ago, Homer gave her an extraordinary modern speech, condemning the gods' double standards over female desire, while her relationship with Odysseus is unmistakably erotic. Nolan removes that sexuality (as he does with Circe). Instead, Calypso appears to offer Odysseus something else entirely: oblivion. Rescuing him after shipwreck, she becomes less a temptress than the keeper of forgetfulness, allowing a traumatised soldier to escape the memories of Troy until he chooses to remember again. She loses Homer's political voice but gains a distinctly Nolan-esque psychological function. The trouble is, by removing her speech on female desire, Calypso’s only real function is to help Odysseus - more familiar Nolan territory.

Kaleem and I also talked about the lack of sex in this film. It’s very much present for the women of the original text. Homer gives us women with sexual desire, exercising their sexual power for personal and political reasons, and complaining of the sexual double standards women are held to. That sounds very relevant for now.

I think Hollywood is far more prudish than the ancient Greeks, but I believe Nolan’s choice to remove the sex (apart from Penelope’s frustrated desires after twenty years) is more because those scenes would distract from his main themes. I also think he might have received many more complaints had both Circe and Calypso’s functions been primarily sexual, because he was fiercely criticised, as Kaleem pointed out, over the character of Jean Tatlock in Oppenheimer. For too long women on screen functioned as sirens (and there’s actual Sirens, of course, in this story) and given that ‘female power’ is still often basically about women’s desirability, this directorial choice gives the women more agency in my eyes.

Nolan also introduces Helen of Troy (Lupita Nyong’o) to the story, to help audiences understand this tragic war the Greeks and Trojans fought. Not though, according to Nolan, over Helen getting taken by another man to Troy, but underneath that pretence, over trade routes, making male choices far more calculating than offended sexual pride It’s a shame that her twin Clytemnestra - a character who deserves her own film - only has mute seconds to act out her narrative arc; but that astonishing story would deviate too far from his central narrative.

Having said all that, in The Odyssey Nolan is still giving us women that exist largely in service of his male protagonists, because with the exception of Circe, almost every female character in The Odyssey still derives her dramatic purpose from Odysseus’s journey, just as they largely do in Homer. This remains, unmistakably, his-story.

But Nolan doesn’t merely inherit Homer’s women; he chooses which parts of them to preserve, which to discard and which to reinvent. Penelope is given a modern political voice, Athena becomes a haunting symbol of memory, Circe is transformed into the film’s richest psychological creation, while Calypso exchanges sexual politics for the temptation of oblivion. They reveal a filmmaker less interested in rewriting Homer for contemporary audiences than in filtering these ancient women through the themes that always interest him in cinema : memory, trauma, identity and survival.

Cinema in One Take is also a podcast hosted by Kaleem Aftab and Emma Jones focused on the biggest stories world cinema. Hear what we made of ‘The Odyssey’ in this week’s episode, along with Kaleem’s adventures at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, on Apple and Spotify.

This week gave us something close to a controlled experiment in how Hollywood launches a movie in 2026.

The conditions could hardly be better matched. Both films had their release dates set in stone years in advance, as tentpoles now must. Both have run the full traditional campaign—teasers, trailers, saturation marketing, star-laden premieres. On every conventional measure of hype, they are the same movie. Where they diverged is on a single question: who gets in the room first, critics or influencers?

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey premiered in London after largely avoiding the dedicated influencer circuit. Disney took the opposite approach with its live-action Moana, feeding the film into the vast advance-publicity machine of screenings, social reactions and instant verdicts. It received no protection in return. By the time the film opened, the conversation surrounding it was already brutal.

That would have been unthinkable not long ago.

In the version of film journalism Emma and I entered, films were shown to critics, critics reviewed them for newspapers and magazines, and those reviews appeared shortly before release. The internet gradually dismantled that arrangement, but the decisive change came with Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Newspapers moved online and lost some of their cachet. Suddenly, institutional critics were competing with individuals who could speak directly to millions of viewers.

Studios quickly spotted the opportunity. Influencers could be invited, flattered and flown around the world. Unlike critics, they had no established code of conduct, no institutional expectation of distance and every incentive to maintain a friendly relationship with the people providing access. The screenings were not really designed to produce criticism. They were designed to produce content, preferably accompanied by the word “wow.”

I remember sitting in an early screening of the first Black Panther and thinking: I don’t recognise half this audience.

That was the moment the shift became visible. These rooms were being built to generate reactions, not analysis.

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The Nolan position

Nolan has never hidden his contempt for the machinery surrounding modern film distribution. He publicly attacked Warner Bros over its decision to release its 2021 slate simultaneously in cinemas and on HBO Max, then took his next film to Universal. He makes cinema—70mm, IMAX, the lot—and remains committed to the old-fashioned idea that a film should first prove itself as a film.

That extends to how he wants to be judged. Show it to people who know what they are looking at and let them decide whether it is any good.

It is a confidence play. Nolan probably wins that bet 90 per cent of the time.

There is a wrinkle, though. The people I know who have already seen The Odyssey are neither conventional critics nor influencers. They are BAFTA members who will be voting when awards season arrives. I cannot say whether their membership is what got them through the door, but quietly seeding a film of this scale among awards voters would make perfect sense.

The first public reactions have been near-ecstatic, as first reactions during embargo season generally are. One friend told me, “I thought it was epic”—and something in the way he said it made me wonder whether he suspected I might not agree.

We will find out next week.

The Moana problem

Disney, meanwhile, invited the advance-publicity ecosystem in for Moana and discovered that access no longer guarantees gratitude.

The response has been rough. The trailer already suggested why. The joke that lands most cleanly is Dwayne Johnson sending up his character’s magnificent wig—possibly the best movie wig since There’s Something About Mary—and, to his credit, he has taken the ribbing well. But the songs seem to have lost some of their force, the effects lack the tactile pleasure of the animation, and the whole film arrives at a moment when audiences appear exhausted by live-action remakes.

The most common objection is not that the film is disastrously made. It is that nobody can explain why it needed to exist.

What interests me is the loss of control. Studios once treated influencers as the friendly alternative to critics: enthusiastic, access-dependent and unlikely to jeopardise the next invitation. That distinction is becoming harder to sustain.

Some creators have now attended enough premieres to stop feeling grateful merely for being admitted. They have built audiences of their own and discovered that a negative video can travel further than a positive one. Their loyalty is increasingly to the viewer—and, inevitably, to the algorithm—rather than to the studio.

The red line dividing influencers from critics is evaporating.

I will go further. I watch a great deal of film criticism on YouTube now, and the best YouTubers are often sharper than what I read in newspapers, where too many critics arrive at the same approved position in slightly different prose. The old hierarchy has not merely been disrupted. In places, it has been deservedly reversed.

Doubt blunts Hollywood’s instruments

Put these two launches next to a third case: Supergirl.

DC reportedly held repeated test screenings and eventually ran competing cuts of Craig Gillespie’s film against each other—one shaped by the director, another by the studio. Here the immovable release date becomes the trap: with the film dated years in advance, there was no time to fix what the screenings said was broken, only to choose between versions. After all that testing, measuring and recutting, it still ended up with a costly flop.

The lesson is not that test screenings are always useless. It is that they cannot solve a film by committee, and they cannot turn uncertainty into certainty simply because the results have been converted into numbers.

That is the larger pattern. Influencer screenings no longer guarantee enthusiasm. Test screenings cannot prescribe a hit. Critics can be delayed or circumvented, but not permanently avoided. Every mechanism Hollywood developed to de-risk a release is becoming less reliable because audiences no longer behave in ways the machinery can predict.

Two of the year’s defining breakout successes, Obsession and Backrooms, were barely present in the industry conversation in January. Neither arrived with the air of a pre-approved cultural event. Audiences made them into one.

At the highest levels of filmmaking, risk aversion is not simply an aesthetic preference. It is a corporate survival strategy. Decisions are made so that, if the film fails, everyone involved can tell the person above them: “We tested everything. I followed the process.”

But the process no longer offers protection.

To borrow the language of Netflix, Hollywood needs a different algorithm. Better still, it may need to stop searching for one.

I think that is the best news cinema has had in years. When the machinery designed to manufacture certainty stops working, conviction becomes valuable again. Studios may have to back filmmakers, accept that audiences cannot be reverse-engineered and make movies strong enough to survive an uncontrolled response.

I said it on the podcast and I will say it here: I see a boom coming.

Emma and I get into all of this—plus my dispatch from Karlovy Vary—on this week’s Cinema in One Take. Next week is our Odyssey special, when we find out whether the film survives contact with two actual critics. The Hollywood Reporter’s report on the competing Supergirl cuts is here.

If you have stopped trusting critics, or started trusting YouTubers, tell us why in the comments.

At the end of June, film culture staged a revolt. A24 — the studio of *Moonlight*, *Everything Everywhere All at Once* and roughly half the tote bags in Brooklyn — announced a $75 million partnership with Google DeepMind, and the internet responded as if the studio had personally deleted independent cinema. The backlash was so fierce that A24 issued a statement four days later, promising this wasn’t generative filmmaking, that they simply wanted “a seat at the table,” that the money was for workflows and storyboards. Kane Parsons, whose *Backrooms* has just become the studio’s biggest ever hit, says he hates generative AI and would get rid of it tomorrow if he could.

That same week, a horror romance called *Obsession* was quietly continuing one of the summer’s most remarkable word-of-mouth runs. Critics like it. Audiences love it. My own co-host prefers it to *Backrooms*, a position I’m still recovering from.

I went to see it. It’s fun. It’s well written. The dialogue zips, I laughed a lot, and Curry Barker is clearly a talent. It is also built, almost end to end, from some of the oldest comic-horror tropes about women and almost nobody seems interested in asking what that means.

Consider what the film actually asks us to enjoy. A man gets to define his entire relationship with a woman through a wish. The wish transforms her into the craziest woman imaginable, and her derangement is the joke: we’re invited to laugh at the bunny-in-the-microwave girlfriend for the entire second half of the movie. The violence, when it comes, is violence against women; the big twist is that it’s woman-on-woman violence, staged in a horrific car scene, also played for laughs. The female characters are mostly one-dimensional. The cool girl who is obviously right for our hero sacrifices herself to help him, largely off screen, her story delivered to us in a line or two of dialogue — before she is finally given room to breathe and come alive in a party scene, only so her murder feels even more horrific in the next. It’s the same machinery I disliked in torture porn, minus the extremity, which perhaps is exactly why it goes down so easily.

There is, of course, a smarter defence of the film. My co-host Emma reads *Obsession* not as a misogynistic joke but as a revenge tragedy: a man wishes to be loved, gets exactly what he asked for, and is destroyed by the moral shape of his own desire. She never felt the violence was voyeuristic. The woman isn’t an object; she’s the instrument of the punishment. It’s a genuine reading, and it made me like Emma’s version of the film more than the one I watched.

But that is exactly my point. The film requires a reading. It invites argument. And film culture, this week of all weeks, mostly declined the invitation.

Because here is the thing I can’t get past. The A24 backlash was about a tool. Not a film, not an image, not a single frame anyone has seen but an investment in technology that, whether we like it or not, is likely to become entangled with production in the way CGI once did. I say this as someone with skin in the game: we used AI tools on our last film, and chances are we won’t use them on the next, because every film calls for different means and it’s hard enough to make a movie that I can see why filmmakers feel the need to do it by any means necessary. The filmmakers who don’t want to touch generative AI never will, and that’s perfectly fine. The anger at A24 isn’t really about A24. It’s about jobs, everyone’s jobs, in every industry, with AI coming around the corner, and cinema happens to be the platform where that very real anxiety gets to stage its protest. I understand it. I even sympathise with it.

But it means we now have a film culture that will boycott a studio over “workflow” software while handing a box-office endurance run to a comedy about a woman driven murderously insane for our amusement. The outrage economy polices how films are made and shrugs at what’s actually in them. Kane Parsons would snap his fingers to abolish the automated technology. Nobody is snapping their fingers at a woman bludgeoned to death for laughs.

I want to be precise about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying *Obsession* should be boycotted. I had a good time watching it, and a 26-year-old getting this kind of debut word of mouth is good news for original horror. I’m not saying the A24 anxiety is illegitimate — the fear underneath it is the most legitimate fear in the industry. And I’m certainly not calling for more backlashes; we have plenty.

What I’m asking is why the alarm only rings on one side of the building. If the worry about AI is ultimately a worry about the human element in cinema — the hands, the choices, the moral attention — then the content of films is where that human element lives or dies. A film made entirely by humans can still be lazy about half of them. A studio investing in machine workflows can still put profoundly human films on screen; A24’s whole catalogue is the evidence. The tool tells you nothing. The film tells you everything.

So by all means, watch A24 like a hawk. Ask what the DeepMind money actually buys, and whether “workflows” quietly becomes “backgrounds” becomes something more. That scrutiny is healthy. But bring the same scrutiny to what we cheer. This week, film culture proved it can still mobilise, still make a studio blink in four days flat. Imagine if it noticed — and discussed — what was playing. Cinema would only be better for it. Now that is my cultural obsession.

Kaleem Aftab co-hosts Cinema in One Take with Emma Jones. This piece grew out of their 2 July episode, where Emma makes the case for Obsession far better than he does here — listen to it, then argue with both of them. Listen on Apple or Listen on Spotify

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Effi O Blaenau/CREDIT: Met Film Distribution

When Effi o Blaenau became the mst successful Welsh language film ever in the UK and Ireland, the headlines understandably focused on the record. But if, like me, you’re a Welsh speaker, this is far more emotional than just a financial landmark. Just hearing the language I grew up with on a big screen feels like the equivalent of winning the World Cup (which is just as well, because Wales didn’t actually qualify for the FIFA one.)

Kaleem Aftab and I have championed Effi on our weekly podcast Cinema in One Take , but even we couldn’t predict how it’s resonated with local audiences in Wales. After a premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival, it’s screened in every single Welsh cinema, as well as major art house venues across the UK, and has had sufficient success that proves it could have a shelf life beyond this country.

Effi o Blaenau, directed by Marc Evans, is a bold reimagining of Iphigenia at Aulis, a tragedy by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides, via an incredible book and play called Iphigenia in Splott by Gary Owen. Splott is an area of the Welsh capital Cardiff, but the film transports the story to Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales, an ex slate-mining town in the Welsh-speaking heartlands, and puts the story into the Welsh language.

Leisa Gwenllian plays Effi, a young woman yearning to escape her life. The film is told in Welsh, but rooted in one of the great universal tragedies which tells of the sacrifices women are forcd to make, whatever era they live in.

Its success feels significant not simply because it has sold tickets, but because of what those tickets represent.

For years, the assumption was that if a film truly wanted to travel internationally , it had to be accessible to English speakers, especially for the US market. But now some of the films travelling the furthest in terms of impact do so precisely because they are rooted in their own language, landscape and culture.

Europe is a patchwork quilt of countries and languages that exist beyond English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and the Nordic languages. I grew up in North Wales, my family speaks Welsh as their first language, my school educated me through the medium of Welsh. Around half a million people in Wales speak it, yet even British people are still astonished to hear that it’s a thriving, living language in the 21st century, that people choose to speak it instead of English - and the same is true (on a smaller scale than Welsh) of Irish and Scots Gaelic. Even the Cornish language - closely related to the Welsh language, and as old - is having a remarkable resurgence in speakers.

People want to speak these languages, and if you speak a language, you want to see it represented on screen. But historically, as far as cinema goes, we’ve been neglected. As a kid in the 1980s, though we had a fledgling Welsh language TV channel in S4C, not once was I ever aware of a contemporary Welsh language film at my local cinema. Indeeed, there was only one ot two released during the entire decade - one being 1986’s Rhosyn A Rhith, which screened at Cannes and was the first Welsh language film to ever get a theatrical release.

The 1990s finally brought the first trickle of movies that reached beyond cinephile circles, among them 1992’s Hedd Wyn, the first ever Welsh language film to be Oscar nominated, about one of our greatest poets, and 1999’s love story Solomon and Gaenor, starring Ioan Gruffudd. But it would be another twenty years before another critically notable Welsh language film came along, the 2021 folk horror by Lee Haven Jones, Y Gwledd or The Feast, which got a SXSW festival premiere and a UK cinema release.

Yet something significant was happening throughout Europe during those twenty years between 1999 and 2021. Around the same time as Y Gwledd, an Irish language film, An Cailín Ciúin or The Quiet Girl, became the first Itish language film to get an Oscar nomination, in 2022. It was followed by the international box office success of Kneecap, a 2024 biographical comedy drama about the rise of the real life Irish language band, who have a significant following.

The Irish started seriously investing in Irish language storytelling around 2017. Cine4 was launched as an initiative to fund original Irish-language feature films. Before that, Irish-language features were rare. But Cine4’s explicit goal was to ensure there would be a steady pipeline of professionally produced films in Irish. A mere five years later, The Quiet Girl walked onto the world stage, giving Ireland a priceless cultural boost. Screen Ireland’s future strategy now includes €5.5 million specifically earmarked for Irish-language production. It recognises storytelling in that language is culturally important and commercially viable.

Meanwhile, Basque, Catalan and Galician film bodies were created to support their own national identity and language through the medium of cinema even earlier, back in the 1980s. It has paid off with with one of cinema’s greatest prizes, the Golden Bear at Berlin, going to Carla Simón’s Catalan-language Alcarràs in 2022, while the 2014 and 2017 films Loreak and Handia were cultural triumphs for the Basque language. The latter won 10 Goya Awards, meaning Catalan and Basque cinema is now part of the cultural mainstream. The Galician language film Fire Will Come also won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2019.

And in northern Europe, Sámi filmmakers seized the initiative with the creation of the International Sámi Film Institute in 2007, frustrated that their filmmakers were being bypassed for funding by mainstream Nordic Film Institutes. I first became aware of the Sámi language and people through the film Sámi Blood in 2016, which was the first fiction film financed by the ISFI, while in 2026 the visually magnificent film Árru showed at Berlin.

Around the success of Y Gwledd in 2021, Wales become another part of Europe to realise the creation of a dedicated pathway for indigenous language filmmaking is an essential part of preserving a national identity, language and history. It has set up the Feature Film Production Fund and Sinema Cymru, specifically designed to develop Welsh-language feature films with international theatrical potential.

This year six new Welsh language feature projects have been announced: meaning Effi O Blaenau hopefully won’t be a one off. But what is really unique is that every single cinema in Wales agreed to show the film on its opening weekend of release; they didn’t leave it to one or two arthouses in London’s West End. There is now widespread cultural support to see local stories on screen, and that’s not a movement just confined to Wales.

And although Scots Gaelic film production is still young (a call has gone out to find film scripts in Scots Gaelic with a view to making them) BBC Alba, the Scottish language service, has just had enormous commercial success with the £1 million-an-episode Gaelic crime drama, An t-Eilean, which sold internationally. The same funding and initatives could also be done for Breton and Occitan language scripts in France. There’s no doubt the audience will turn up if the product is good : worrying about subtitles on screen in the age of international streaming is a thing of the past. Far from being a barrier, language has become a mark of cultural authenticity for a story.

Those who’ve spent decades pouring their heart into this kind of filmmaking identified the huge prestige factor only cinema can bring long ago. A hit TV series is one thing, but cinema is on a different scale. It’s an art form. Any time cinema in a minority language breaks through to enter the mainstream, take if from me that it’s incredibly precious for the people who speak that language. As with me watching Sami Blood for the first time, seeing a movie is sometimes the first time the viewer becomes aware a people and their language even exist, even on the same continent as them. And a film’s success gives pride to the people who speak it, who can feel their culture, and their way of life, is finally seen, heard, and recognised.

European cinema will be more vibrant, with even richer and more diverse stories, if we acknowledge those corners of our countries that have a history and language out of the mainstream. We have not always been recognised, and if you speak a minority lanugage in 2026, your ancestors almost certainly had to be tenacious in holding on to it, even in some cases risking imprisonment for it.

Now this resurgence in our own cinema gives my generation the luxury of asking not whether the Welsh language will survive, but whether we will produce cinema fit for the world stage. And thanks to Effi O Blaenau, the answer might well be yes.

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When France’s CNC announced a dedicated support service for filmmakers facing pressure to restrict their freedom of expression, my first reaction was scepticism. My second was something closer to hope. This piece is an attempt to work out which one is justified and what would need to be true for the hope to win.

The CNC — the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée — is France’s national film agency. It funds, regulates and promotes French cinema, and its reach extends across the entire ecosystem: production, distribution, festivals, archives. When the CNC speaks, the French film industry listens. It is not a peripheral body issuing a polite statement. It is the institution that holds the keys.

Two weeks ago I wrote that the real failure in the Nadav Lapid affair was not the boycott. It was the institutions. Festivals and funding bodies that lacked the courage to stand by their decisions, to put the conflict in public where it belongs, and to stop transferring the cost of their fear onto the artist.

CNC president Gaëtan Bruel said it plainly: “Creative freedom is not defended only when it is comfortable or consensual. It is defended precisely when it becomes difficult.”

It is almost exactly what I argued for. So the question is not whether the gesture is welcome. It is whether it becomes something more than a gesture.

The credit

“The reason so many festivals and cultural institutions in our country receive support from central government and local authorities is precisely that they fulfil a public interest mission,” said Bruel. “As such, they bear a particular responsibility: that of ensuring the conditions are in place for the circulation of works, for debate, and for the exchange of viewpoints.”

He is right. Publicly funded cultural institutions exist precisely to protect the conditions for free expression, not just when it is easy, but when it costs something. That principle is worth defending, and the CNC is defending it.

But there is something in Bruel’s language worth sitting with. Festivals fulfil “a public interest mission.” Using that logic, a festival such as FIDMarseille should serve France. The CNC clearly does not think it did and is now intervening to say so.

And France, like every state, has interests.

So the question the CNC’s new support service cannot quite answer in advance is this: whose freedom of expression does it exist to protect, and whose pressure does it exist to resist?

There is an unspoken dimension to this intervention. The CNC does not merely advise French festivals. It funds them. When it says festivals bear “a particular responsibility” to ensure the conditions for debate and the circulation of works, it is not offering a philosophical observation. It is reminding its dependents of the terms of their relationship.

Read that way, the support service is also a chastisement: a signal to every French festival that the CNC is watching how it handles the next difficult case, and that how it handles it may have consequences.

The criteria

The service is open to all: filmmakers, artists, producers, festival organisers, artistic directors. Anyone facing attempts to restrict their freedom of expression can contact the CNC directly and receive tailored advice, support and expertise. On paper, that is genuinely broad. A Palestinian filmmaker dropped from a French festival under pressure would, in theory, qualify.

It will be instructive to see how the CNC administers judgment in practice.

The doubt I have is not about stated intention. It is about the structural pressures that shape institutional decision-making before anyone reaches a conscious choice. Unconscious bias is real. So is the gravitational pull of knowing where funding comes from, which relationships matter, which controversies a state body can afford, and which it cannot.

The CNC may act in complete good faith and still find that its support service, in practice, activates more readily for some kinds of pressure than others.

That is not a cynical reading. It is what institutions do. And it is also part of what makes the boycott argument harder to dismiss than its critics allow. Decades of experiencing exactly this pattern have made Palestinian filmmakers and their allies deeply sceptical of institutional good faith.

There is, however, a sharper version of this doubt. The CNC did not intervene primarily because it cared about Lapid as an individual. It intervened because a French-funded festival yielding to external pressure as FIDMarseille did represented a visible failure of the principles French cultural life is supposed to rest on. Lapid was the occasion. The argument is laïcité — the secular framework under which French cultural institutions operate according to French law and French principles, not according to pressure campaigns whose logic is external to that framework.

That is coherent and internally consistent. But it means the CNC is defending France — its own cultural authority, its own secular model — rather than defending a filmmaker. The fact that the beneficiary happens to be an Israeli dissident is almost incidental. Which raises the harder version of the consistency question: France will apply this principle readily when the pressure conflicts with laïcité. The question is what happens when it doesn’t.

What France makes possible that Germany cannot

The Cannes poster this year illustrates the difference precisely.

Thelma & Louise: Sarandon and Davis choosing their own fate over surrender to a system that will not give them justice. I should say plainly that reading this as a statement about Gaza is my own interpretation: Cannes made no such claim. But Sarandon had been in the news for the damage her pro-Palestinian stance had done to her career, and the image arrived inside that context. That is exactly the point. Neutral cultural symbols are never entirely neutral. They arrive inside a political context, and audiences read them there.

One could read that poster as feminist defiance, Hollywood memory, cinephile nostalgia, or a coded political image about refusal and abandonment. The fact that all of those readings can coexist is what makes it useful. It shows how cultural institutions can carry political meaning while preserving plausible deniability. A political position expressed as an aesthetic choice is hard to attack, because the attacker has to admit they understood the meaning.

That is not a side issue. It is exactly the terrain on which the CNC’s initiative will operate. A support service can present itself as neutral, procedural, technical: advice, expertise, defence of expression. But it too will be read politically, because every case it chooses to support, and every case it does not, will acquire meaning.

France has room for that kind of ambiguity. Germany has much less.

The Berlinale operates in closer proximity to a state whose position on Israel is not merely a policy preference but part of the country’s postwar political architecture. Staatsräson — the doctrine that support for Israel’s security is a German reason of state — places a heavy thumb on the scale. Berlin can open debate, but it cannot pretend the debate takes place in politically neutral conditions.

The contradiction between programming films like No Other Land and governing under Staatsräson was always going to surface publicly.

FIDMarseille had more room than Berlin and did not use it. The festival’s director signed the Le Monde letter, expressed solidarity, said the right things, but signing a statement is not the same as acting on its principles when the moment arrives. The filmmaker-first approach was available: stand by the invitation, put the conflict in public, let the withdrawing filmmakers withdraw.

Instead, the quieter path was chosen, and the cost was transferred to Lapid.

The witness

What the CNC’s gesture cannot quite reach is the specific human position Lapid occupies and why that position matters for the argument being made.

His films are themselves a political statement, made over years at real cost. Ahed’s Knee is named after a Palestinian teenager imprisoned for slapping an Israeli soldier. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2021. It is about an Israeli filmmaker facing censorship from his own government. He put her name in the title of a film his own state would prefer did not exist. Synonyms is about an Israeli man who moves to Paris and tries to shed his Israeli identity entirely the psychic cost of being that, the impossibility of escaping a state that attaches itself to you whether you want it to or not.

Lapid is not a confident outsider crossing a boycott line. He is the thing being boycotted. He is Israeli, and after FIDMarseille he said very little. A silence with its own quality. Not defiance, not self-justification. Something more like the silence of someone who understands why the trap exists even as he is caught in it.

His function is not to build bridges. It is to be a witness, to make Israeli dissidence visible in international cultural space, to keep the internal fracture open, to demonstrate that resistance to the state exists inside the society being boycotted. That matters strategically, even when it matters uncomfortably. The boycott that caught him did not remove a representative of the Israeli state. It removed the most visible evidence that opposition to that state exists within it.

Which is why the CNC’s initiative, for all its untested criteria, exists in more fertile ground than anything Germany could launch. France has the political and cultural architecture to make it mean something. Whether it chooses to is the question.

The wider picture

European institutions have shown how quickly support can be built when political will exists. After Russia’s 2022 invasion, Ukrainian filmmakers were met with emergency residencies, co-production funds, festival slots and public solidarity. Those interventions mattered.

But the unevenness is hard to ignore. Palestinian filmmakers have been displaced for decades. The equivalent infrastructure — emergency funds, dedicated residencies, support services — either does not exist or exists in far more limited form. The contrast is not explained by complexity alone. It is explained by geopolitics.

Which is why Kaouther Ben Hania’s refusal in Berlin mattered.

During the Berlin Film Festival period in February 2026, at the Cinema for Peace gala (an institution-adjacent event that presents humanitarian and politically minded film awards alongside the festival ecosystem, but is not part of the Berlinale itself) the Tunisian director of The Voice of Hind Rajab refused to take home the Dove for Most Valuable Film of the Year. She left the trophy in the room.

“I refuse to let their deaths become a backdrop for a polite speech about peace,” she said. “Not while the structures that enabled them remain untouched.”

An institution reaching toward Palestinian cinema with one hand while providing, in her words, “political shelter” to the structures enabling genocide with the other. The CNC’s new support service will need to answer the same question Ben Hania was posing in Berlin: which side of that contradiction does it actually sit on?

What comes next

The conditions exist in France for this to mean something real. The political architecture, the cultural tradition, the diplomatic positioning, none of that exists in Germany in the same way. But architecture is not policy.

Tricia Tuttle, the Berlinale’s director, has articulated a position that sounds remarkably similar to what the CNC is now proposing: a festival that defends artistic freedom, stands by its filmmakers, and refuses to let politics dictate programming. Berlin’s position collapsed not because Tuttle was insincere, but because when the moment came, the weight of the German state fell on one side.

The CNC has more room than Berlin ever did.

This is where advocates of strong positions — including those calling for boycotts — perform an unlikely but necessary function. Constant pressure, constant demands for justification, force institutions to account for their decisions rather than retreat into comfortable neutrality.

The question is not whether the CNC shares those advocates’ conclusions. It is whether, faced with their challenges, it can demonstrate that its decisions are being made without political bias.

For that to be testable, the CNC needs to publish records: who it has supported, on what grounds, and how it navigated cases where the political pressure ran in the other direction. Not a policy document. A track record.

That is the only thing that turns a gesture into a structure.

Cinema in One Take is a podcast and a substack about culture, cinema and the ideas that connect them. Hosted by two film insiders.

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On the day tickets went on sale for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, 28,000 people booked seats at the BFI IMAX alone, breaking the venue’s first-day sales record. The year before, the BFI had released four opening-weekend screenings in advance. They sold out. This time, it put more seats on sale. Those sold out too.

Nobody has reviewed the film. There is no word of mouth. No festival raves. Not even any memes. There is a huge cast, a famous text, and a vast marketing machine. But the reason people are booking now is bluntly obvious: it is a Christopher Nolan film.

And that auteur pulling power is unique in cinema today.

On the podcast this week, Emma and I were asking a simple question: which directors can genuinely put audiences in seats on their name alone?

It is a shorter list than Hollywood would like to admit.

Martin Scorsese is one of the greatest filmmakers who has ever lived. But Scorsese has a longer career, and a longer career means a more complicated relationship with the audience. Gangs of New York divided people. Hugo confused them. People admire Scorsese. They revere him. They study him. But they do not necessarily pre-book premium IMAX tickets because his name is above the title. The same could also be said of Spielberg, whose name still has cache, but no one was pre-buying tickets for Lincoln the way they did for Oppenheimer.

My view is that there are only two truly bankable directors left in cinema: Christopher Nolan and James Cameron. Denis Villeneuve may be the closest to joining that list: Dune Part Two felt like a genuine event, but Dune is IP. The real test will be what he does next without an existing universe behind him.

Everyone else, however talented, however acclaimed, relies on something else. Cast. Genre. Subject. Timing. The fact that the film is about someone audiences already care about. Nolan and Cameron need none of that. Who cared about Oppenheimer before Nolan made Oppenheimer? Outside a small circle of historians and physics obsessives, almost nobody. Nolan made the world care.

Cameron is the parallel case. Titanic. Avatar. The highest-grossing film of all time, twice. He owns 3D the way Nolan owns IMAX — not merely as a format, but as an argument about what cinema is for. Both men are evangelists. Both sell scale, immersion, and theatrical experience as moral propositions. Both have bypassed the festival circuit almost entirely, choosing to make their case directly to audiences rather than through the critical gatekeeping of Cannes or Venice.

And both have built something studios have spent decades trying, and failing, to manufacture by other means: trust.

But the comparison is not perfect. Cameron has The Abyss. Nolan has Tenet. The difference is that Cameron’s near-mythic reputation rests on fewer swings, each one later absorbed into the story of his technical genius. Nolan has had to build his brand in public, across a much denser modern release calendar.

And that is how he has won audience respect.

What happened to Nolan around his break-up with Warner Bros says everything about how American studios value directors now.

Which is to say: they mostly don’t.

In America, the auteur theory is just that: a theory. Studios like the romance of the singular filmmaker when it sells tickets, wins Oscars, or gives a franchise prestige. But the moment that filmmaker becomes difficult, expensive, stubborn, or ideologically opposed to the latest corporate strategy, the romance turns sour.

Tenet became part of that story.

In another timeline, it might simply have been discussed as a difficult, ambitious, slightly chilly Nolan film: admired by some, resisted by others, argued over in the usual way. Instead, it became the film that tried to reopen cinema during the pandemic.

That was too much weight for any movie to carry. Tenet arrived in the summer of 2020, when cinemas were operating under restrictions, audiences were anxious, and nobody really knew what movie going was supposed to look like anymore. It still made $363 million worldwide, which was both an impressive number and an impossible one to interpret.

What followed was one of the worst business decisions in modern Hollywood.

The breakdown was not really about Tenet’s box office. It was about the streaming wars. In December 2020, Warner Bros announced that its entire 2021 theatrical slate would be released day-and-date in cinemas and on HBO Max in the US. Nolan, a filmmaker who shoots in 70mm IMAX because he believes cinema demands the largest possible canvas, was being asked to accept the logic of the phone screen. He objected publicly and forcefully. The relationship collapsed.

Now they have to make do without the most bankable director in the world, who took his talents to Universal and made Oppenheimer: a three-hour historical drama about nuclear physics that grossed more than $950 million worldwide and won seven Academy Awards.

Consider what Warner Bros would give for that film to have been theirs.

This is where the Superman comparison is kryptonite. Warner Bros has greenlit multiple failed Superman films without losing faith in the man of steel. That is because Superman is an asset on a balance sheet. The film can fail, but the brand survives. You can always reboot it. Recast it. Retitle it. Put on new red pants.

Nolan is not like that. Nolan is a human being with opinions, leverage, taste, stubbornness, and a very specific vision of what cinema should be: spectacular, bold and original. When he became inconvenient, Warner Bros let him go.

That asymmetry reveals everything about how studios think.

IP is forever. Filmmakers are disposable.

What is also significant is that the wider landscape seems to be shifting. Audiences are growing tired of franchise movies in a way studios are only beginning to acknowledge. The Marvel machine, which once seemed unstoppable, has produced a string of underperformers. DC has been rebooted so many times that even devoted fans struggle to keep track. The IP-forever strategy is proving short-sighted.

What remains reliable, it turns out, is exactly what studios spent a decade devaluing: the pull of a filmmaker audiences genuinely trust.

This does not mean IP is dead. It means IP is no longer enough on its own. The market is changing. Audiences are still willing to turn up for familiar worlds, but they are also beginning to reward original stories when those stories arrive with a clear promise attached. Sometimes that promise is a concept. Sometimes it is a star. Sometimes it is a studio identity. But at the highest level, it can still be a director. That is what Nolan represents: not nostalgia for the auteur age, but evidence that the director may once again become one of the most valuable commercial signals in cinema.

There is a particular irony in what happened next.

Barbenheimer — the cultural phenomenon of summer 2023, when Barbie and Oppenheimer opened on the same weekend and turned cinema-going into a participatory event — was partly Warner Bros’ doing. Barbie was their film, and a genuine triumph. The decision to open opposite Oppenheimer, whether strategic or accidental, helped create the sense that both films were unmissable and reminded people that Warner Bros no longer had Nolan on its slate.

Nolan’s relationship with IMAX is worth understanding properly, because it is not just a technical preference. It is a philosophy made visible.

Cinema has always survived by becoming more than what came before it. Talkies, colour, widescreen, CGI — each technological leap was a response to the same existential threat: why leave the house? Nolan and Cameron are answering that question for the streaming era the way Cinerama answered it for television in the 1950s. They have not resisted new technology. They have weaponised it on cinema’s behalf. And like haute couture responding to fast fashion, they have made the premium version so desirable that audiences don’t just accept paying more — they associate the price with the quality. The label becomes the promise.

Nolan has pushed the format further with each film, and The Odyssey is the first feature film shot entirely with IMAX film cameras. Those 28,000 BFI tickets were not cheap seats. They were premium bookings for the most expensive, immersive version of the adventure available.

That is what Nolan has built: an audience so committed to his idea of cinema as a physical, communal, irreplaceable experience that they will pay a premium to reserve their place before the marketing machine has even fully started. Cameron has done something similar with 3D. Nolan has done it with IMAX.

Film festivals have spent decades asserting the primacy of cinema with limited success. Nolan makes the same argument by shooting films that feel diminished on a laptop — and then watching audiences agree. In a business that has spent twenty years treating audiences as demographics to be managed by algorithm, there is something almost radical about that.

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The Warner Bros decision should not have come as a surprise. The writing had been on the wall for directors for a long time. Until Oppenheimer, even Nolan had only reached nuclear-level box office with Batman.

In 2009, I wrote a piece for The Independent called “Whatever Happened to the Great American Film Director?” The argument was simple: Hollywood no longer had bankable directors in the old sense. The director’s name had once been enough to sell a film. A new Kubrick, Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Altman, or Malick could feel like an event. By 2009, that power had largely migrated elsewhere — to franchises, superheroes, sequels, remakes, stars, producers, and intellectual property.

What I did not predict — what nobody quite predicted — was that the answer to my question would not be American.

Nolan is British. Cameron is Canadian. The two filmmakers who rebuilt the case for the director-as-event, who proved that audiences would follow a name rather than a brand, who demonstrated that trust in a single human vision could outperform any franchise — neither came from Hollywood. They came from outside it. And perhaps that is precisely why they could see what studios had stopped being able to see: that audiences were hungry for a filmmaker to believe in.

American studios had convinced themselves they no longer needed big directors. Marvel had proved you could build the biggest cinematic machine in history without a single bankable filmmaker at its centre. The director was interchangeable. The brand was the brand.

Then Oppenheimer happened. Then the pre-sales for The Odyssey started.

The demand for the filmmaker-as-event never went away when studios stopped cultivating it. It waited. And when Nolan gave it somewhere to go, it went there with extraordinary force — at the premium end of the market, in the most expensive seats, months before anyone knew whether the film was any good.

The great director never disappeared.

Hollywood just stopped seeing them as valuable to their current business model.

The Odyssey will be enormous. The predictions, as Emma put it on the podcast, are off the wall. And when it opens, the conversation will turn — rightly — to whether the film itself justifies the expectation.

That is as it should be.

But the more important story has already happened. Before a frame has screened for critics, before a review has been written, before the usual machinery of consensus has begun, Christopher Nolan has demonstrated that a filmmaker with a bold vision, consistency, and a commitment to the primacy of the theatrical experience can create a fanbase that will follow them anywhere.

Warner Bros knew this, but prioritised streaming over a director’s belief in cinema.

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I watched Disclosure Day on the night it opened. I came out frustrated — not because it is without pleasures, but because it so tantalisingly sets up a question about humanity’s place in the universe and then refuses to answer it.

The film follows Daniel, a cybersecurity expert who has stolen an alien archive from a shadowy government organisation, and Margaret, a TV weather forecaster who discovers she has been unknowingly gifted with extraterrestrial abilities. Together they are hunted while trying to expose an eighty-year cover-up: Roswell, crop circles, congressional testimony, all of it true, all of it suppressed. Along the way they encounter Jane, a woman who trained as a nun, left the convent but kept her faith, and who represents the film’s most interesting question: what does confirmed alien life do to belief?

It is a question the film raises and then does not quite want to face.

In the run-up to release, Spielberg told CBS News: “Is God our God only on this planet? Or is God a God for every system where there’s civilisation and intelligent life, and even developing life?” The trailer promised something similarly seismic: “The truth belongs to eight billion people.” The posters, the press, the interviews — all of it positioned Disclosure Day as a film that would finally reckon with what it means for humanity if we are not alone.

Then Jane is quietly sidelined. Her storyline is subordinated to the revelation that Daniel and Margaret were somehow linked by a childhood event, a connection that feels less like an emotional payoff than a piece of machinery being dragged into place. By that point, the film has asked us to invest far more heavily in Daniel and Jane: in their arguments, in her faith, in the possibility that the alien archive might force a reckoning not just with governments but with God. Jane feels like the film’s most authentic character because she is the one person responding to disclosure as a human being rather than as a plot function. Margaret may be the film’s chosen vessel for empathy, but Jane is the character through whom empathy becomes inquiry.

If Jane is us — the ordinary believer, sceptic, or frightened citizen trying to understand what this revelation does to the world — then the film’s decision to abandon her perspective before the ending is not a minor structural flaw. It is a major fissure.

A character invokes the opening lines of Genesis to argue that alien life is not incompatible with religious doctrine, pointing out that Genesis only stipulates humans as the supreme beings on Earth, not in the universe. It is the most direct answer the film offers, and it arrives at the end of the second act. But frustratingly, that is the apex of this particular theme. The film ends precisely at the moment when interrogating humanity’s supreme place in creation is the only place the plot can go, retreating instead into individual psychology, childhood wounds, and family.

You could say it becomes a quintessential Spielberg movie. The problem is that it does so by forcing some of its least convincing plot lines to the front.

On the Cinema in One Take podcast, I suggested this was a failure of nerve. With more contemplation, I’ve come to think it is something more deliberate — and more revealing about Spielberg’s cinema. But that does not absolve the film. Spielberg’s retreat to childhood may be his answer to Nietzsche, but that does not mean it is a satisfying dramatic answer to the film he has made.

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Nietzsche declared God dead in 1882. What he meant, essentially, was that the Enlightenment — science, reason, the systematic dismantling of mystery — had made the divine harder to sustain as the organising principle of modern life. Much of modern Western literature seemed to agree. Modernism, existentialism, the absurd: the great intellectual movements of the 20th century all grappled, in their different ways, with the universe Nietzsche left us. God was gone, or at least no longer self-evident. What do we do now?

Cinema, especially popular cinema, became the most significant art form of the last hundred years partly by convincing us to believe in the impossible again. And few filmmakers have done more than Spielberg to make wonder feel like a form of knowledge.

It is no coincidence that the most famous cinematic invocation of Nietzsche is the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, scored to Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. Kubrick’s film treats contact with higher intelligence as awe-inspiring but also cold, evolutionary and inhuman. Reason and technology do not comfort humanity; they threaten to replace it. HAL is not merely a malfunctioning computer but the Enlightenment dream curdled into something pitiless.

Spielberg has spent much of his career filming the opposite possibility. For him, the unknown is rarely only indifferent. It may terrify us, overwhelm us, or expose our smallness, but it also reaches back. Where Kubrick imagines the cosmos as sublime and unreadable, Spielberg keeps returning to the hope that the universe wants contact.

It is there even in Jaws — ostensibly a film about a shark. Quint’s Indianapolis speech is the moment the ocean stops being a predator and becomes an indifferent universe, something that kills without reason or malice. Quint faces it alone, through will and obsession, and it destroys him. Brody — terrified, clinging to friendship, instinct and domestic love — survives. The man who believes in nothing but himself dies. Spielberg was already filming the limits of godless self-reliance at twenty-seven.

In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, contact with the alien is not terror but rapture — the final scenes are ecstatic, transcendent, bathed in light. E.T. is, among other things, a resurrection story. In A.I., even in a world of machines, the longing for unconditional love is treated as something sacred and real. And now, in Disclosure Day, when the film touches the possibility that confirmed alien life would shake human faith, a character says — almost in passing — that God is bigger than all of this. That belief and the cosmos can coexist.

Spielberg’s argument is that science and wonder are not enemies. That the universe being vast and strange confirms rather than destroys meaning. He does not argue this so much as film it: in the light through the window, in the child’s face looking up at the sky, in the inexplicable conviction that contact is possible.

This is why he retreats to childhood. It is not simply sentimentality, even though I have often parsed his narrative arcs as schmaltzy. Childhood is where Spielberg locates the reconciliation of science and faith — where wonder lives before reason arrives to interrogate it. It is no accident that The Fabelmans, his most autobiographical film, returns to the same terrain: a Jewish boy learning to reconcile the rational world of his engineer father with something less explicable, finding his answer not in doctrine but in the act of filming itself.

But this is also where Disclosure Day falters. The problem is not that the film refuses a theological thesis statement. The problem is that it builds a story around disclosure — around the revelation that humanity’s understanding of itself is incomplete — and then narrows the frame just when the consequences should expand. Jane’s faith, the Genesis argument, the alien archive, the promise that “the truth belongs to eight billion people”: these are not incidental details. They are the architecture of a much larger film.

When Disclosure Day turns away from them, the move is recognisably Spielbergian, but it is also evasive. Worse, it is evasive in a way that exposes the seams of the screenplay. Daniel and Margaret being entwined through childhood should feel revelatory, but it lands as exposition because the film has not made that relationship its emotional centre. The emotional centre, however briefly, is Daniel and Jane. It is Jane’s attempt to reconcile faith with evidence, belief with knowledge, Genesis with the alien archive. To push her aside is to push aside the very audience surrogate the film most needs.

That is the tension I missed when I first walked out frustrated, and the one I keep returning to now. Spielberg has always believed that wonder can answer questions reason cannot. At his best, that belief is not a shortcut but a form of cinematic grace. Here, though, the grace arrives before the argument has been fully faced.

This is, I think, the real reason he is the most beloved popular filmmaker of the last fifty years. Not just craft, though his craft is extraordinary. Not just spectacle. Other directors have been equally great, and sometimes greater. But Spielberg rarely asks audiences to grieve the loss of meaning. He assumes the universe is meaningful and invites us in.

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Eight billion people, the trailer says, deserve the truth. And the truth Spielberg keeps giving us, film after film, is that the cosmos is not indifferent — that there is something out there that wants to connect with us, that the child looking up is not looking at nothing.

You could call this evasion. I did, walking out of Disclosure Day, annoyed that Jane was sidelined just when her storyline had become the most interesting thing in the film, that the Genesis argument was never followed through, that the film ended just as it promised to become profound.

But maybe Disclosure Day’s structural choice — the retreat to the personal just as the cosmic question opens up — is Spielberg’s answer, and he is asking us to take a leap of faith with him. To return to our childhood state, before we learned to be cynical. The question of whether God survives the revelation of alien life cannot be resolved in an archive, or a press conference, or a film’s third act. It can only be felt.

That may be true. It may also be too convenient. The very instinct that has made Spielberg beloved is the instinct that weakens Disclosure Day. Feeling has always been Spielberg’s great subject, but Disclosure Day makes the mistake of treating feeling as an escape route from the story’s own implications. It asks whether humanity can survive the collapse of its central mythologies, then answers with childhood, family, and a plot connection that feels imposed rather than discovered.

He has been making his argument for fifty years. Nietzsche said God was dead. Spielberg has spent his career politely disagreeing, in the guise of blockbuster entertainment. But Disclosure Day reveals both the beauty and the limitation of that disagreement. Wonder may be Spielberg’s answer to the modern world. It may not be enough of an answer to this film.

Cinema in One Take is a podcast and Substack about film, culture, and the ideas that connect them. Listen to Emma Jones and Kaleem Aftab debate Disclosure Day, Cultural Boybotts and Marjane Satrapi on Spotify and Apple

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On this week’s Cinema in One Take, Emma and I got into the Nadav Lapid affair at FIDMarseille, and I found myself doing what journalists are meant to do, though perhaps not often enough: I made the other side’s argument properly. Emma said she felt that the treatment of Lapid was baffling. I played devil’s advocate, and said I was doing so. I also said this needed a written piece, because a podcast is a bad place to leave a position that complicated.

That, at its best, is what Cinema in One Take is for: letting cinema complicate the positions people arrive with.

Audio is slippery. Clips travel without the context that framed them. And given my own history — critic, programmer, former director of international programming at the Red Sea International Film Festival — I do not want any ambiguity about where I stand.

What happened to Nadav Lapid in Marseille was wrong.

A filmmaker withdrew from being on the jury of a film festival not for anything he had made, said or done, but because a small portion of his latest film’s budget came through an Israeli public fund. For those unfamiliar with Lapid’s work, his cinema has been among the fiercest, most lucid attacks on the Israeli state produced by any Israeli artist. To silence him in the name of Palestine is not a victory over Israeli power. It is a gift to Israeli power.

The Israeli culture ministry would quite like Nadav Lapid to shut up.

In Marseille, that wish was granted.

Now that I have said that clearly, I can say the rest. Because the rest is where the story becomes uncomfortable. Almost everything about this affair is grey, and the people pretending otherwise — on either side — are the real problem.

The facts

Lapid, a Golden Bear winner who has lived in Paris since 2021, by his own account for political reasons, was invited onto the jury of FIDMarseille. The festival runs July 7–12. Campaigners demanded that he be removed as part of the cultural boycott of Israel over Gaza. Around a dozen filmmakers withdrew their films in mid-May. Lapid left the jury in late May. Offered instead a screening of his 2011 film Policeman and a masterclass, he withdrew altogether.

Then came the letters. One in Le Monde, signed by more than 350 filmmakers, including Justine Triet, Claire Denis and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, described the pressure as “a campaign of intimidation.” Another, with Natalie Portman and Jacques Audiard among its ten names, argued that “no one should be reduced to a passport.” The pro-boycott collective La Palestine Sauvera le Cinéma replied with a statement of its own: “Yes, Cinema Is Political.”

It is. That is precisely why this cannot be reduced to slogans.

It is easy to be cynical about those letters. Three hundred and fifty signatures gathered in days; in French cinema, defending Nadav Lapid — the most garlanded dissident in European film — is the consensus position, and a signature costs nothing. But the cynicism would be unfair: the letters do not merely defend a famous director, they call his government’s conduct criminal and argue that relentless invitation is a sharper political lever than erasure. The hardest position in this affair belongs, remarkably, to Lapid himself. He has refused to call the boycotting filmmakers enemies, describing their actions as “powerlessness, anger and immense frustration at the political inaction around Gaza.” He has supported genuine political sanctions against Israel for years. Sit with that: the boycotted man believes in pressure on his own state more concretely than many of those boycotting him — he only rejects the version that lands on artists instead of governments.

The boycott argument deserves to be taken seriously

The case for the boycott is stronger than many of its critics allow. Refusing to engage with it is not moral clarity. It is laziness.

At its core is an argument about false equivalence. To programme Palestinian and Israeli films side by side, as if they were symmetrical cultural products from two equal sides of a dispute, can erase power, history and material reality.

Berlin learned this the hard way. The Berlinale’s long-standing defence — we programme the films, we show every perspective, we let the audience decide — fell on its sword in 2024, when No Other Land, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, won the documentary prize and its directors used the stage to denounce the occupation. German politicians declared the ceremony antisemitic. Pro-Palestinian filmmakers accused the festival of censorship. The festival kept insisting it was a neutral platform, and nobody on either side accepted the claim, because the claim was never quite true. Festivals are very good at pretending that balance is neutral. It rarely is. A programme is an argument, even when the catalogue note says otherwise.

There is also the South Africa precedent. The cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa was broad. It caught dissident artists too. History has not generally treated that as a disgrace. The argument then, as now, was that exceptions for the “good” artists allow the system to continue with a cleaner conscience.

And, on paper, the boycott criteria are institutional rather than ethnic. The objection to Lapid was not supposed to be that he is Israeli. It was that Yes received money from the Israel Film Fund. Narimane Mari, one of the filmmakers who withdrew, put that case at its cleanest: “We are not condemning a human being — we are refusing a cultural and political model that continues to be maintained.”

It also leads to the Russian comparison, which European cinema has never quite managed to answer. After the invasion of Ukraine, festivals moved quickly against films with Russian state funding. That position was widely accepted as principled. At the same time, dissident Russian filmmakers without state money remained welcome. Cannes gave its Grand Prix to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, and rightly so.

Dissident artist: yes. State money: no.

So the obvious question is: if Russian state funding is disqualifying, why not Israeli state funding?

That is a serious question. The answer is not to pretend the parallel does not exist. The answer is to examine if the parallel holds true.

And it breaks at the institution.

The Israel Film Fund is a public body, but not simply a government office. In the case of Yes, its contribution was 12 per cent of the budget. The fund has financed Palestinian as well as Israeli filmmakers, and its history runs through some of the most government-unfriendly cinema Israel has produced: Waltz With Bashir, Lebanon, Lapid’s own work.

Boycott advocates dispute the independence of such bodies. They argue that state-linked money is state-linked money. That is a coherent position. But it is not a simple one. The exact relationship between fund, ministry, state and artist is the kind of institutional plumbing on which everyone suddenly has a very loud opinion and very few verifiable facts.

That ought to make people a little less certain than they sound.

The contradiction is there in Lapid’s Ahed’s Knee. The film is a furious attack on the Israeli culture ministry, and it carries that ministry, and the Israel Film Fund, in its credits. Its central scene comes from Lapid’s own experience: invited by the ministry in 2018 to present The Kindergarten Teacher in Sapir, he was required to sign a form restricting what he could discuss in the Q&A.

That is state pressure. No ambiguity there.

And yet public money helped finance the film that denounced it.

This is not an isolated absurdity. From 2017, the Rabinovich Foundation required filmmakers to pledge that their work would not “harm the good name of the State of Israel.” More than a hundred filmmakers, including Lapid and Ari Folman, boycotted the fund until the clause was dropped in 2022. Around the same period, 250 Israeli filmmakers protested the creation of the Shomron Fund, designed to encourage films shot in the West Bank — production money as political whitewash. Last year, the culture minister moved to defund the Ophir Awards after The Sea won Best Film.

So both things are true.

Israeli film funds have been independent enough to finance cinema that attacks the state. The Israeli government has also repeatedly tried to discipline, redirect and intimidate those same cultural structures.

Anyone who tells you the Israel Film Fund is simply free has not been paying attention. Anyone who tells you it is simply an arm of the state has not been paying attention either.

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Who gets caught

The part of the story that has received far too little attention is this: the filmmakers most damaged by institutional boycott criteria are often Arab.

Scandar Copti, who famously refused to "represent" Israel when Ajami became its Oscar entry in 2010, had no say in that submission — the film won the Ophir, Israel's top film award, which made it Israel's entry automatically. Ajami was a joint Palestinian-Israeli production; Copti's subsequent film Happy Holidays was structured entirely through Palestinian and European funding, precisely to avoid that bind. But the bind itself is real: a Palestinian filmmaker's work, made in Haifa about Palestinian life, entered the boycott's crosshairs not through any political choice he made but through the mechanics of how Israeli awards work.

Under boycott criteria, that makes Copti’s Palestinian story boycottable.

Baher Agbariya, the Haifa-based Palestinian producer of The Sea, has called the boycott “collective punishment.” His film, about a West Bank boy, so angered Israel’s culture minister that he moved to defund the Ophirs. So here is the absurdity in its purest form: a film the Israeli government wanted punished, and the boycott criteria would keep off-screen.

Then there are the less famous cases: filmmakers in the West Bank, filmmakers who have lived in Gaza, Palestinian citizens of Israel, all navigating funding structures that are compromised, limited, often infuriating, but sometimes the only route to getting a film made.

This is not theoretical. Palestinian filmmakers get trapped by criteria designed, in theory, to protect Palestinians. And unlike Lapid, they cannot simply relocate their professional infrastructure to Paris.

Lapid has options. Many of them do not.

This does not mean Palestinian filmmakers are united against the boycott. They are not. Annemarie Jacir signed the boycott pledge. Agbariya opposes it. Neither position is unjustifiable. “The boycott hurts Arab filmmakers” and “Arab filmmakers support the boycott” are both true. Anyone who gives you only one of those sentences is selling you a position, not describing the field.

The impossible test

The tempting answer is to exempt the dissidents. Let in the “good Israelis.”

That sounds reasonable until you try to administer it.

Who decides how much dissent is enough? Is a petition enough? A film? A speech? A refusal of public money? For Israeli residents, does political purity now mean not working at all? The moment festivals start deciding which Israelis are acceptable, they become tribunals of conscience. They do not have the legitimacy for that. Nor, frankly, do they have the competence.

You also create a grotesque performance economy: say the right thing, at the right time, in the right venue, and you may be permitted entry. Say the wrong thing two years later and what then? Is the invitation revoked? Are previous statements reviewed? Does every retrospective require an ideological audit?

This is why the boycott chose institutional criteria in the first place. Judge funding, not souls. It is cleaner. It is checkable. It avoids the good-Israeli/bad-Israeli circus. Except it does not: the institutional test simply moves the unfairness one step away. It still catches Copti, Agbariya and Lapid. And in Marseille, the distinction between institution and individual collapsed anyway. Whatever the formal language, the demand in practice was that this man should not be there.

So let us tally the available tests.

The passport test defines everyone as one national whole.

The ideology test is inquisitorial.

The funding test punishes people trapped inside the very structures it wants to oppose.

Nobody passes.

That is the tragedy. This is not a debate with a clean winner. It is a structure that keeps failing human beings.

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The binary machine

War makes people stupid. Not intellectually stupid, necessarily, but morally over-efficient. It compresses categories. It turns contradiction into betrayal.

Lapid is Israeli and anti-government. Copti is Palestinian and funded through Israeli institutions. These are not exceptions. This is what the cinema actually looks like.

But binary systems cannot process mixed cases. Boycottable or not. Complicit or not. Us or them.

Lapid is both Israeli and dissident.

The machine cannot process him, so it expels him.

Anyone who knows Lapid’s cinema will recognise the territory, because it is exactly where his films live. Yoav in Synonyms refuses to speak Hebrew on the streets of Paris, trying to scrub the Israeli out of himself, and cannot. The director in Ahed’s Knee rages against the state whose money sits in his credits. The musician in Yes agrees to soundtrack the regime he despises. Lapid’s protagonists are people who will not resolve into one thing — Israeli and anti-Israeli, fleeing the country and carrying it everywhere. That unresolvable doubleness is not a weakness of the films. It is their engine, and the reason juries keep giving them prizes. The boycott has achieved what no critic ever managed: it has trapped Lapid inside one of his own films. A body of work that says, over and over, I cannot be reduced — answered by a campaign that reduced him.

This is why festivals matter. At their best, they are not consensus machines. They are places where contradictions sit in the same room. On the podcast, Emma and I began some distance apart and ended closer, not because either of us surrendered, but because the complications were allowed to breathe.

That is what a festival is supposed to do at scale.

Which is why excluding artists from it is so self-defeating.

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What festivals owe us

My sharpest criticism is not for the boycotters. It is for the institutions.

Lapid put it well: “The problem first and foremost is cinema institutions that aren’t courageous enough.”

If FIDMarseille believed in its invitation, it should have stood by it. Let the withdrawing filmmakers withdraw. Let them say why. Put the conflict in public, where it belongs. Instead, the burden was shifted onto Lapid: here are the names pulling out, here is a reduced offer of a screening and a masterclass, now you decide.

That is institutional cowardice dressed up as sensitivity.

The festival’s director signed the Le Monde letter and has spoken clearly about the wider danger — but that came after the fact. The relevant test came earlier, and it was failed.

The more damaging version, though, is the one no one sees: festivals and distributors anticipating trouble and quietly not selecting the film, not inviting the filmmaker, not taking the meeting. No open letter. No controversy. No fingerprints.

I have sat in those rooms. I have heard a prominent festival director tell me it is too much trouble to programme films from Israel today. Not a judgment on a film. Not a position anyone will defend in a press release. Just trouble, weighed against convenience, with the artist paying the difference. I have heard programmers calculate that a single Israeli film in the line-up could cost them a dozen Arab filmmakers. That is the Marseille arithmetic, done quietly, in advance, with no one watching. It is happening constantly. And it is worse than Marseille because at least Marseille happened in public. At least we can argue about it.

There is no clean solution, but there is a professional obligation.

I studied law before I gave my life to cinema, and the first thing law school teaches you is that every rule produces anomalies: cases the drafters never imagined, where applying the letter of the rule defeats its purpose. The law’s answer was not only to write better rules. It was judgment: equity, the principle that the intent of a law matters as much as its text. Festivals are now learning the same lesson the hard way. No boycott criteria will ever be drafted finely enough to separate Lapid from a state mouthpiece, or Copti from his funding. The only instrument that can is the one every rulebook secretly depends on: a person, weighing a case, and answering for the decision.

Programmers must programme. They must make decisions case by case, defend them openly, and refuse to outsource their judgment to whoever applies the most pressure. Not every Israeli film deserves a platform. Not every Israeli institution is innocent. Not every boycott demand is illegitimate. But the decision belongs to the festival, and if the festival cannot defend it, it should not have made it.

What it must not do is transfer the cost of its fear onto the artist.

I said on air that I like Nadav Lapid, and some of my sympathy is personal. Fine. I will own that. But the argument does not depend on liking him.

It depends on Lapid in Paris, Copti in Haifa, Agbariya with a film neither side wants to claim — none of them abstractions, all of them cinema.

They are the people both sides say they are fighting for.

And if our politics cannot make room for them, then it is not the artists who have failed the test.

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We had just finished recording last week’s podcast when my co-host Emma Jones sent a text: Marjane Satrapi has died. Age, a ridiculous 56.

I shouted through to my wife: “Oh no, Satrapi has died.”

She called back: “That doesn’t bode well for us then, does it.”

My wife has a gift for saying the thing that is funny and awful at exactly the same time. But this one stopped me cold, because my wife and I met at a screening of Chicken with Plums, Satrapi’s film about a man who decides to die of a broken heart. Satrapi was there that night, on stage, smoking, joking, holding the room in the palm of her hand. And now she was dead, and the family’s account of her death — that she had died of sadness, just over a year after losing her husband and the love of her life, Swedish producer Mattias Ripa — sat almost impossibly close to the story she had already told in that film.

My wife, I should add, is also Swedish. I don’t know what to do with that coincidence except put it down here, because it feels too strange to leave out. Satrapi’s life and work had become tangled up with mine in ways I could never have imagined when I first sat down to watch a black-and-white animated film about a girl in Tehran.

It was art imitating life, except Satrapi’s power was that she made it feel the other way around.

Satrapi’s impact on me goes well beyond cinema. I am a second-generation British Pakistani, which is to say I was raised between worlds, belonging fully to neither, fluent in that east-west negotiation that never quite resolves. My wife’s family fled the Balkan war when she was a child and built a new life in Sweden. Between us, we carry versions of the story Satrapi told so well: displacement, the question of where home is, the experience of a culture being yours and not yours at the same time.

When Persepolis makes 1980s Austria feel more foreign than 1980s Iran, it is not just a formal trick. Anyone who has lived across cultures recognises it instantly. Satrapi made that feeling visible, and better than that, she refused to make it niche. She was not simply a filmmaker we admired. She had found a way to say something many of us had been circling for years.

Since that text arrived, my sadness has been heavier than I expected.

I have been thinking, inevitably, about the first time I encountered her work.

It was Persepolis that first brought me into Satrapi’s orbit. I was at Cannes in May 2007, serving on the Palm Dog jury — the prize, created by critic Toby Rose, that recognises the best canine performance in any film screening at the festival. Normally it goes to an actual dog, which seems only fair. Our jury, however, decided that Yuki — the terrier-like family pet in Persepolis, inspired by Satrapi’s own real dog — had delivered the finest canine performance of the festival. Yuki became the first animated dog to win the coveted diamanté collar.

Satrapi and Paronnaud collected the award in person at the beachside ceremony. Paronnaud barked with joy. Satrapi was delighted. Not professionally amused. Not politely indulgent. Delighted. She thought the whole thing was terrific, a ridiculous, joyful prize in what had been a bruising week at Cannes.

That told me something about her. She could make a film of enormous political and emotional weight and still take real pleasure in winning a dog prize. She knew that joy and seriousness were not enemies. She built a career on that knowledge.

I was thrilled to have had a hand in giving it to her.

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When I came to write about the film for The List, Scotland’s listings magazine, the review became less a record of first impressions than an attempt to fix in words what the film had already done to me. I wrote that it was “an exceptional and exceptionally moving piece of animated filmmaking.”

Satrapi had adapted her own autobiographical graphic novel for the screen with her collaborator Vincent Paronnaud. The black-and-white 2D animation preserved the stripped-down, expressionistic style of the graphic novel, and in 2007 that felt like a quiet act of defiance. Cinema was rushing headlong into CGI. Disney and Pixar had announced that their future productions would be made in 3D, and at the time it sounded less like an innovation than an eviction notice for a form I loved. Satrapi and Paronnaud made the best possible counter-argument. Their film popped off the screen without any plastic glasses, most memorably when little Marji bops along to “Eye of the Tiger” with the sort of joy no technology can manufacture.

Satrapi’s great gift, visible across her work, was her refusal to wallow. Persepolis begins in 1978, when Marji is eight years old and the Islamic Revolution is about to reshape Iran beyond recognition. Her liberal outlook, her love of punk music and boys, her refusal to behave as instructed, all come into conflict with the new order. At fourteen, her parents send her to Vienna — exile disguised as protection — and there she finds herself more lost than she ever was at home.

The film’s masterstroke is that Austria feels stranger than Iran. Not because Iran is softened, or because the regime is excused, but because home is not a postcard or a border. Home is texture, rhythm, argument, food, family, jokes, habits, smells, music. Home is the place that can wound you and still remain yours. Satrapi understood that better than almost anyone.

The humour in Persepolis is not decoration. It is armour. The cartoon images make the story accessible, but accessibility is not the same as simplification. The comedy is how Satrapi refuses sentimentality. She loves Iran without airbrushing it. She condemns the regime without flattening the people living under it. The laughter and the brutality arrive together, as they often do in life.

It was hard to imagine, I wrote then, any actor creating the same affection for Marji that those pencil lines achieve.

Twelve years later, I was given the chance to programme Persepolis. In September 2020, BFI Southbank reopened after the long Covid closure, cautiously and with reduced capacity. I had been asked to curate Redefining Rebellion, a season built around Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine, tracing the films that fed into it and those that followed in its wake.

Persepolis was an obvious choice. It is a film about agitators and outsiders, about young people pushing back against authoritarian power, about the costs of refusing to behave. But it is also about what rebellion feels like from the inside. Not as slogan or pose, but as family argument, teenage humiliation, exile, loneliness, survival.

Watching it with that audience, in that strange half-return to public life, I was reminded that rebellion is not always loud. Sometimes it is simply the refusal to disappear.

Chicken with Plums (2011), which Satrapi again co-directed with Paronnaud, is a stranger, more delicate film. Adapted from her graphic novel about her great-uncle Nasser Ali Khan — a renowned musician in 1950s Tehran who, when his beloved tar is broken beyond repair, decides to stay in bed until he dies — it is a tragicomedy about romantic devastation and an elegy for a pre-revolutionary Iran Satrapi knew through family stories, photographs and longing.

Mathieu Amalric gives one of his finest performances as the musician in slow collapse. Satrapi frames the whole thing with the knowing artifice of someone who understands the danger of sentiment. Handled badly, this material could have curdled into sentimentality.

I saw the film at Emir Kusturica’s Kustendorf Film Festival in Serbia, where Satrapi came to do a Q&A. I had no idea what to expect. What I got was one of the great post-screening conversations. She was funny, smoking on stage, completely unguarded, a person from whom authenticity seemed to leak. She talked about love and art and Iran and loss with the same blunt warmth that runs through her work. The audience was hers within seconds.

It was brilliant.

I did not know it at the time, but sitting right next to me was the woman who would become my wife. We were sharing that moment — a film about a man who chooses to die rather than live without the love of his life — without yet knowing what we would become to each other.

I have thought about that often since. Satrapi would, I think, have appreciated the symmetry: a story about the devastation of love, witnessed by two people on the edge of finding theirs.

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Then there was The Voices (2014), still the most underrated film in her catalogue. Ryan Reynolds plays a factory worker with unmedicated schizophrenia whose talking pets — a cheerful dog and a sardonic cat — lead him, step by hallucinatory step, towards murder. It is a deeply odd film: a black comedy that takes seriously both the horror of mental illness and the sadness of a man who wants, more than anything, to be liked.

Reynolds, freed from the usual business of being Ryan Reynolds, is terrific. Satrapi, working in English for the first time from a script by Michael R. Perry, brought the same mix of dark humour and compassion that animated Persepolis. The film baffled some audiences and disappeared too quickly. It deserves a second life.

When I interviewed Gemma Arterton, who plays one of Jerry’s victims, she described Satrapi as “the coolest chick in the world” and remembered the experience of working with her as “such an incredible experience.” Arterton recalled Satrapi’s advice: believe in the story, and find people you love to help you make it. It sounds almost too simple, but coming from Satrapi it felt less like advice than a working method.

I also spoke with Anna Kendrick, who plays the film’s other doomed love interest. Her reason for signing on was telling: “Ever since I saw Persepolis,” she said, “I knew I had to work with her.” She called Satrapi a genius. In junket rooms, that word is often useless. Here, it landed.

Satrapi had the rare ability to make actors feel they were not simply taking a part, but joining an adventure.

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In 2019, at the Zurich Film Festival, I sat down with Satrapi to talk about Radioactive, her Marie Curie biopic starring Rosamund Pike. She had been drawn to Curie since childhood.

“My mother was not an independent woman,” she told me. “Her life’s dream was that I would become an independent woman, someone like Marie Curie, who became a role model for me to such an extent that I even wrote in Persepolis, ‘I really want the destiny of my life to be that I catch cancer researching science.’”

It was a perfect Satrapi line: funny, extreme, and entirely serious.

What she admired in Curie was not sainthood, but refusal. “She never really overstated her womanhood,” Satrapi said. “It was like she thought, ‘Do I need to prove I’m better? I already know I’m better, so what do I have to prove?’”

Satrapi had deliberately avoided making Curie straightforwardly likeable. “I like that she is sometimes not likeable, because these are things that we accept very easily when it comes to men. Take Picasso, for example, who was such an arsehole with women, but he was such a genius, so it was overlooked. But as soon as it comes to women, we have to be great mothers and lovers, dance well and cook well, and you must always be kind. I’m not always kind, and I don’t know any woman who is always kind — not a single one. The temper of women is like the temper of men; we are just human beings.”

It remains one of the sharpest accounts of the double standard I have heard. There was no self-pity in the way she said it. No plea to be understood. Just the cheerful certainty of someone who had considered the matter and found the world wanting.

The reason she loved Curie, she said, came down to one thing: “I love her because she doesn’t compromise.”

It occurs to me now that she was also describing herself.

Satrapi once said that “nothing is scarier than the people who try to find easy answers to complicated questions.” Her whole body of work is an argument against those easy answers. She refused them about Iran, exile, identity, womanhood, family, freedom, grief, and what it means to love a country that has not always loved you back.

In a 2009 essay for The New York Times, she wrote: “I call Iran home because no matter how long I live in France, and despite the fact that I feel also French after all these years, to me the word ‘home’ has only one meaning: Iran.”

She had lived only eighteen of her fifty-six years there.

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Her final major project, Woman, Life, Freedom, brought together seventeen Iranian and international comic artists to honour Mahsa Jina Amini and the feminist uprising that followed her murder in 2022. Satrapi called what was happening a revolution, not a revolt, not a movement — “the first really feminist revolution,” she said, and one supported by men. There was hope in that statement, but not the cheap kind. Satrapi knew too much history for that. Her hope was harder won.

I hope the films she left behind — funny, furious, undeceived and alive — find the audiences they deserve, now that she is no longer here to make new ones.

And I hope that, after a life spent thinking so fiercely about exile, love, freedom and belonging, she has found her way home.

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Listen to Kaleem Aftab and Emma Jones discuss Backrooms on Cinema In One Take Podcast on Apple and Spotify

Toronto during the 2021 film festival was a ghost town.

COVID made travelling a logistical nightmare of tests and mask wearing. It was a gathering stripped of its congregation. I was sitting opposite the TIFF Lightbox with Amanda the Jedi, a YouTube creator with hundreds of thousands of followers. A very well-known publicist approached our table. She greeted me warmly. She barely acknowledged Amanda, even after a glowing introduction.

Amanda had direct access to the audience that traditional media had been haemorrhaging for years. She spoke to a generation of young North Americans who were not discovering cinema through newspaper critics, festival dispatches or glossy magazines, but through YouTube essays, reaction videos, fan communities, horror explainers, TikTok edits, Letterboxd, Discord, Reddit, memes and recommendation algorithms.

Yet here was someone whose entire job was to understand cultural reach, and she had trained herself to see Amanda as a footnote. In that moment, I saw a cultural divide that could lead film festivals into irrelevance.

The entire establishment of how cinema is discovered, championed and legitimised was still operating to analogue rules, in a digital age. It would take years for cinema to log on.

The Model Was Already There

It is hard to fathom, but one of the clearest lessons about the state of cinema and the box office success of Backrooms and Obsession comes from Saudi Arabia. A place where, for decades, there was no public commercial cinema exhibition. When cinemas reopened in 2018, the assumption was that the established television and streaming players would naturally become the new theatrical power brokers. They had the infrastructure, the relationships, the capital and the professional habits of screen production.

But something else materialised.

The creators who had learned to make work for online audiences came to the fore. They understood how to speak directly to viewers. They had spent years making material for audiences who were bored of the traditional way of doing things.

Hisham Fageeh is a useful example. Before he was starring in Saudi films such as Barakah Meets Barakah, he was known internationally for No Woman, No Drive, the viral YouTube skit that turned a Bob Marley song into a piece of comic performance sharp and funny enough to travel across borders. Fageeh arrived through the internet: through short-form performance, direct audience recognition and a fluency in how a joke, a gesture or a cultural pressure point could impact young people.

Telfaz11 tells the larger industrial version of the same story. It began as a digital-first creative force, making online work for an audience that traditional Saudi screen culture had not properly served. But when the theatrical space opened, Telfaz11 did not have to unlearn the old rules of theatrical prestige because it had not been formed by them. It knew how to build an audience, sustain a relationship with it and turn familiarity into trust.

But the Saudi example also shows the limit of the argument.

The first transition was not from YouTube straight into world cinema. It was from YouTube into a local and regional screen culture that already understood the references. Some of the films that emerged from that internet model were significant because they spoke directly to Arabic-speaking audiences, especially on streaming platforms, but they did not necessarily appeal to international audiences.

The international leap required something else. It required the internet model to become more cinematic.

That is why Telfaz11’s evolution is intriguing. The same digital-first ecosystem that could produce viral sketches, online comedy and streamer-friendly hits would, over time, become one of the most important forces in Saudi screen culture. The wider industry has now reached the point where a filmmaker such as Tawfik Alzaidi, heavily associated with that rising creative ecosystem, can make Norah, the kind of drama that travels all the way to Cannes.

The internet was not cinema. But it was a training ground. A way of developing performance, timing, tone and cultural trust outside the institutions that normally decide who gets to make films.

The leap to cinema was an expansion of scale. But the films only really began to travel when the internet model mutated into cinema.

The Saudi example shows what can happen when cinema culture is in transition. When new audiences have to be tapped, it is not always the legacy players who are the strongest. Sometimes it is the people who have been building audiences outside the approved system all along.

That was the lesson I took from it: when cinema has to find younger audiences, web-native creators are better placed than the institutions that assumed the audience would come to them.

The American Wake-Up Call

Everything Everywhere All at Once was made by the Daniels, creators who had spent years experimenting with visual language in music videos, online shorts and comic forms. The film that emerged was not an adaptation of existing franchise IP. It was an original vision: maximalist, cine-literate, formally adventurous, built from ideas and images that felt native to the internet age. Multiverses. Absurdism. A mix of internet know-how with old-world movie stars.

The film won Best Picture. It proved audiences could still respond to original ideas with the force usually reserved for franchise cinema. But the industry misread this as an anomaly rather than as evidence of where a new cinematic language was coming from. The Daniels’ work had been developing in plain sight, just not always in the places cinema had trained itself to look.

Then came Curry Barker.

Curry Barker is the internet personality behind the sketch comedy channel that’s a bad idea, co-created with Cooper Tomlinson. He spent years honing his filmmaking and building his audience on YouTube — first with short films such as The Chair, which drew millions of views, then with Milk & Serial, a 62-minute found-footage horror film he released for free on YouTube in 2024. It cost $800 to make.

When Obsession premiered at TIFF in September 2025, Focus Features bought it for a reported $15 million — one of the biggest genre deals in the festival’s history. But this was not a leap of faith. It was validation. His audience was already built. The studio was acquiring a movie and a pre-existing fanbase. Obsession has now passed $148 million worldwide, a return of nearly 200 times its production cost.

Barker could not secure traditional distribution for Milk & Serial, so he released it on YouTube and the audience found it. Cinema did not create that momentum — the audience did. But cinema paid a premium to catch up. And that is where the old world is still important: when crossover happens, the big profits are from theatrical release. That is why studios still matter.

And now Backrooms arrives, opening to $81 million domestically and making the pattern harder to ignore.

The film pairs Kane Parsons — a young director formed inside internet visual culture — with Chiwetel Ejiofor, a BAFTA winner and Oscar nominee, and Renate Reinsve, the darling of European cinema after starring in both the Best International Feature Oscar winner Sentimental Value and the Palme d’Or winner Fjord.

But more importantly, Backrooms emerges from internet lore with an audience already there, already invested, already primed. The attraction is not simply a plot. It is a feeling: endless yellow corridors, bad lighting, impossible space, the dread of being trapped somewhere banal and wrong, and then seeing something there that should not be.

Everything Everywhere All at Once, Obsession and Backrooms are not the same kind of case. The Daniels made an original vision that won Best Picture: proof that audiences want ideas, not only franchises. Barker built his audience on YouTube, and forced the industry to catch up paying top dollar. Parsons arrived with an audience already built into the internet mythology itself, not needing to prove anything, just needing distribution and stars credible enough to carry it.

Put together they make it harder to pretend nothing is changing.

They point towards the same larger shift: internet culture is one of the places cinema now comes from.

For years, Hollywood treated the internet as a promotional tool. A place to drop trailers, court influencers, manufacture buzz, monitor backlash and harvest pre-awareness. But the internet was also doing something else. It was training filmmakers. It was building story worlds. It was creating shared atmospheres, jokes, nightmares and emotional reference points. It was becoming not just a distribution system, but an idea factory.

The most interesting model now emerging is not replacement, but recombination. Pair actors who understand how to make an audience emotionally invest with creators who understand how contemporary audiences process atmosphere, ideas and visual information.

Acting on film is not something the internet has made obsolete. There is no algorithmic substitute for a face that can register interiority. This generation of creators grew up with the whole history of moving images available to them at once: Hitchcock scenes, Kubrick corridors, The Blair Witch Project, analog horror, video games, VHS aesthetics, YouTube essays, TikTok edits, liminal-space photography and experimental cinema circulating freely online.

The industry misread the Daniels. It missed the early signal from Barker. It, or at least A24, seems to have understood what works with Backrooms.

Listen to the discussion on Backrooms on Cinema In One Take Podcast on Apple and Spotify

Cannes, CinemaCon and the Split in the System

This is also where the festival question becomes unavoidable.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the growing split between Cannes and CinemaCon, between the old prestige model and the new audience-facing industrial model. For years, the system was linear: critics saw the film first, wrote about it, distributors shaped the campaign, audiences arrived later. Prestige could amplify a film through theatrical release.

Films emerging from internet culture work in the opposite direction. The audience is already there. The references have already circulated. The atmosphere has already been shared. The pre-awareness exists before the festival has had a chance to confer legitimacy.

That is why Backrooms is such a revealing case.

In one sense, it is exactly the kind of film Cannes should want to show: a genre film with a strong visual concept, a young filmmaker, cinephile credentials, great actors and a direct connection to the way younger audiences now experience moving images. It sits at the intersection of horror, internet mythology, arthouse atmosphere and mainstream theatrical potential.

But the fact that a film like that does not necessarily need major film festivals may be the more important point.

If a distributor believes the audience is already reachable, major film festivals are no longer the only place where importance is manufactured.

That is a profound change for films with major distribution in North America. For films like Obsession, with no distributor attached, film festivals are still fit for purpose. But these examples are becoming rarer.

This is not simply a business shift. It is a cultural one.

Festivals need to attract films like Backrooms and Obsession to stay relevant. These are films that do not always look like festival discoveries. They look like genre films, internet phenomena, youth objects, memes, atmospheres, fandoms. But underneath that, they may be carrying some of the most important changes in contemporary film culture.

This Is Not the Death of Cinema

The easy version of this argument would be to say that the internet is replacing cinema.

I do not think that is right.

Cinema is not being destroyed by internet culture. It is being forced to negotiate with it. The old institutions still matter, festivals, critics, distributors, theatrical release, but they are no longer the only places where legitimacy is created.

That changes the pathway.

The old model was: get discovered, get validated, get distributed, find an audience.

The new model can be: build an audience, prove a language, create a world, then force the industry to catch up.

That does not mean everything online deserves to become a film. Most of it does not. Recognition is not the same as cinema. Virality is not the same as form. Pre-awareness can open a door, but craft is what keeps an audience inside the room.

But it does mean the industry has to stop treating the internet as merely a marketing department for cinema. It is now one of cinema’s talent pools, one of its story engines, and one of its most important idea factories.

The publicist at TIFF did not snub Amanda because she was cruel. She snubbed her because the old map of power had trained her eyes badly. She recognised the journalist, the festival circuit, the familiar machinery of prestige. What she could not yet see was the audience sitting beside me.

That audience is now old enough to buy tickets.

And cinema is beginning to learn where it has been all along.

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The Palme d’Or has long been drawn to films about outsiders trapped inside the logic of institutions convinced of their own moral authority. In recent years, that tendency has become especially pronounced. Again and again, Cannes has rewarded stories about people who are judged by systems that claim to know better than they do: the poor family in Parasite, the improvised household in Shoplifters, the accused woman in Anatomy of a Fall, the welfare claimant in I, Daniel Blake. The pattern is clear. What has changed is the target. These films were once more likely to expose the violence of old authority — the patriarchal family, the authoritarian state, the oppressive church. Now, they have begun to question newer forms of power: systems built in the language of progress, protection and care. Judging by some of the mixed reviews for this year’s winner, Fjord, it is not a change that everyone finds easy to accept.

In Fjord, the trap is set with deceptive simplicity: a bruise on a child’s body, a teacher’s concern, a welfare system doing what it believes itself designed to do, and a Romanian family suddenly forced to explain itself in a country where every explanation already sounds like a defence. What follows is not a thriller of revelation, nor a courtroom drama waiting for its decisive piece of evidence. It is something more corrosive: a study of suspicion once it has acquired institutional form, and of how care, when fused with certainty, can become a mechanism of erasure.

This is why Fjord matters at this precise moment. For decades, contemporary cinema has mounted necessary critiques of traditional institutions: the patriarchal household, the authoritarian state, the oppressive church. But many of those critiques carried an implicit faith that secular liberal systems represented an escape from such violence. Mungiu closes that escape hatch. He asks what happens when systems designed to protect the vulnerable begin to reproduce their own forms of domination — not through open cruelty or prejudice, but through procedure, expertise and the language of concern. In Fjord, religious faith becomes part of that problem of interpretation: not simply a belief system, but a set of signs the welfare state struggles to read without suspicion.

Listen to Emma Jones and Kaleem Aftab discuss Fjord and the Cannes Film Festival awards on the Cinema In One Take Podcast. Available on Apple and Spotify:

The setup, in its brutality, is almost classical. A Romanian father, played by a physically transformed Sebastian Stan, has relocated to Norway following the death of his mother. He arrives with five children he has had with a Norwegian woman, Renata Rensiev, one of the film’s quietly destabilising presences. At school, one daughter, who practises wrestling, bears the marks of contact sport on her body. A Norwegian teacher, trained to read such signs as potential evidence of abuse, grows concerned. A casual, perhaps playful comment made by her brother compounds the suspicion. A welfare apparatus begins to move. Procedures initiate. The family is placed inside a frame of suspicion from which there is no escape. The formulation could stand for Mungiu’s cinema as a whole: he does not make films that tell audiences what to think. He makes films that remove the exits.

In 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, about an illegal abortion under communism, Mungiu showed how authoritarian states could force private desperation into public illegality. In Beyond the Hills, examining a young woman’s death within a religious community, he showed how faith, care and institutional authority could become fatally entangled. In Fjord, the system is neither communist bureaucracy nor religious discipline, but the progressive welfare state: rational, humane, procedural, confident in its own benevolence. Its agents do not behave like villains. The teachers, social workers and officials are attentive, articulate, trained. They believe they are protecting children. And that conviction, that inability to imagine their own goodness as a form of power, is where the terror begins.

The obvious version of this story would be easy: progressive Norway versus traditional Romania, liberal bureaucracy versus immigrant family, the cool rationality of the North against the warmer chaos of the South-East. Mungiu is too rigorous a filmmaker for such comfort. He does not give us a parable of Norwegian arrogance or Romanian innocence. He gives us systems of belief colliding at low speed, each convinced of its own decency, each capable of harm. The film is not an attack on child protection. It is an attack on the assumption that good intentions purify power.

Everything in the film becomes evidence once the family has been placed inside the frame of suspicion. A bruise is never just a bruise. An accent is never merely an accent. Prayer is never simply prayer. Silence is never silence. The father’s dignity reads as calculation. His anger reads as danger. His faith reads as fanaticism. His discipline reads as abuse. Even love, once translated into the bureaucratic language of the case file, begins to look like control. The film’s unease lies in how quickly ordinary signs of family life, culture and belief can be reorganised into symptoms.

Mungiu stages this process with a restraint that makes it more inescapable. Scenes unfold in rooms where people speak carefully and listen badly. The camera rarely insists on what we should notice; it waits, allowing a pause, a glance or a withheld answer to gather weight. The film’s long takes do not create neutrality so much as pressure. We are made to sit inside interviews, thresholds and family conversations until we recognize we are doing what the system does: interpreting ordinary moments through a frame of suspicion.

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Sebastian Stan’s performance is central to this mechanism. He does not play the father as an innocent martyr, nor as a concealed brute. He gives us a man permanently aware of being watched, a man whose dignity has hardened into defensiveness. His humiliation is visible, but so is his capacity for control. Stan plays him as someone both alert and exhausted, dignified and cornered, capable of tenderness and intimidation. It is a performance built on the discomfort of not knowing which reading to trust.

Renata Rensiev’s character, the children’s mother, reveals how subtle the film’s critique is. She is Norwegian by passport, yet she too becomes vulnerable to the system’s judgment. Her nationality offers little protection because the suspicion surrounding the family is not only cultural but spiritual. Despite her official belonging to Norway, her religious devotion — shared with the Romanian father and children — makes her less legible to the progressive apparatus than her passport might suggest. She is not simply foreign, nor simply native; not simply mediator, nor simply victim. She occupies the unstable space where citizenship, motherhood, faith and institutional trust cease to align. If she is a bridge, she is one that reveals how little can actually cross.

The Norwegian setting is filmed not as landscape but as moral architecture. Mungiu’s camera has the patience of a witness and the severity of a file note. The clean interiors, pale light and administrative calm create an atmosphere of rational confidence. Nothing appears brutal. No one raises a voice without consequence. Yet this composure is exactly what makes the machinery unsettling. Against this order, the Romanian household appears warmer, louder, more tactile, more chaotic. Mungiu refuses to romanticise either side. The state’s care can become coercive. The family’s warmth can become opacity. The film lives in the chill between those two truths.

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Throughout Fjord, Mungiu withholds the answer that would allow the audience to settle comfortably into judgment. Has abuse taken place? Is the family being persecuted by cultural prejudice? Is the father protecting his children, controlling them, or both? The film does not maintain this uncertainty as narrative coyness. It is the ethical structure of the work itself. Mungiu understands that systems do not need to be malicious to be frightening. They need only be confident. They need only mistake their categories for reality.

The question in Fjord is not whether the Norwegian authorities are right or wrong. It is whether any institution can see a family whole once it has begun to see it as a case. This is the real crisis the film articulates: not that humane institutions sometimes fail, but that their very mechanisms — the language of procedure, the apparatus of care, the faith in their own benevolence — can make it nearly impossible for them to recognise the violence they may inflict.

What makes Fjord particularly urgent is that it forces us to be suspicious of the institutions many viewers instinctively trust: the ones that speak in the vocabulary of safeguarding, inclusion and care. The film does not allow progressivism the comfort of its own righteousness.

Mungiu’s achievement is to make both positions feel morally incomplete. Those who distrust welfare institutions find their suspicions confirmed — but only partially. The family is never purified into innocence. Those who trust child protection recognise the necessity of intervention — but cannot unsee how quickly concern can harden into suspicion, and how easily suspicion can attach itself to faith, foreignness and family life.

This incompleteness matters because it mirrors our actual historical moment. We are living through the collision of competing moral certainties, each claiming the authority of protection, identity, tradition, justice or progress, and each reluctant to acknowledge the violence contained in its own righteousness. Fjord is a film about that impasse. It suggests that progress, like tradition, can become a force of erasure when it stops questioning itself, when it mistakes its categories for truth.

Mungiu leaves us where his characters are: inside the trap, surrounded by people doing what they believe is right, unable to know whether justice has begun or already failed. Fjord is not built to comfort its audience. It is built to make comfort look like another form of avoidance, to suggest that moral certainty, whatever form it takes, might be the real enemy we struggle to acknowledge.

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When Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won at Cannes, the result felt less like a surprise than a confirmation. The film had arrived fully formed: complete, devastating, witty, political, emotional, and formally immaculate. You didn’t merely predict that it would win. The film seemed to predict itself.

This year, Cannes has not produced that kind of moment.

Instead, as Emma Jones reports from the festival, the race has become something more interesting: a field of strong contenders without a single film pulling decisively ahead.

“It’s not like a year when you watch Parasite and you come out going, your life has changed,” Emma says. “It could be any number of films.”

That uncertainty is the story.

The Barrage

The final days of Cannes have delivered a rush of major films, each persuasive in a different way.

There is Fjord, Christian Mungiu’s meditation on faith, belonging, and the racism buried beneath Nordic civility, anchored by an almost unrecognisable Sebastian Stan as a Romanian father fighting Norwegian authorities.

There is Minotaur, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s savage allegory about power and conscription in Putin’s Russia, structured around a wealthy businessman whose wife’s infidelity becomes a lens for examining how the powerful decide the fate of the powerless.

And there is Coward, Lucas Dant’s visually stunning love story set against the mechanised death of the First World War. Told through the eyes of two young soldiers and the theatrical performances staged for troops, it is less interested in spectacle than in intimacy, beauty, and survival.

Each has a credible claim. None has become inevitable.

That is unusual. And it may tell us something larger about the state of cinema now.

A Festival Without Consensus

A Cannes with no obvious winner matters beyond the usual awards-season horse race. It suggests that the old consensus moment — the single film that arrives and seems to gather the whole conversation around itself — may be harder to come by.

This year’s strongest films are not competing in quite the same register.

Fjord is about faith, state power, belonging, and the hypocrisies of liberal tolerance. Its reception has been divided, but Emma notes that it has found passionate defenders, particularly among women viewers who connected with its politics and emotional texture.

Minotaur may be the strongest all-rounder: formally controlled, politically urgent, sharply acted, and darkly funny. It has the craft, the relevance, and the moral seriousness that often appeal to Cannes juries.

Coward, meanwhile, refuses the expected shape of a First World War epic. Rather than scale and spectacle, it offers visual poetry, tenderness, and an unknown lead performance from Emmanuel Macchia that may prove one of the discoveries of the festival.

These are not variations on the same idea of greatness. They represent different arguments about what cinema can do.

That makes the Palme d’Or harder to predict. It also makes the festival more alive.

The Timing Question

Emma also points to one of those Cannes details that sounds trivial until it suddenly doesn’t: timing.

A journalist she spoke with noted that Palme d’Or winners have often emerged from films screened Monday to Wednesday in the festival’s final week. This year, some of the strongest contenders arrived after that informal window.

Does that matter? Maybe. Maybe not.

But in a year without a consensus favourite, every pattern starts to look meaningful. The absence of an obvious winner creates space for speculation: about jury taste, festival momentum, political relevance, emotional response, and whether Park Chan-wook’s jury will reward craft, feeling, audacity, or urgency.

That is what makes this year’s race so compelling. It is not simply unclear who will win. It is unclear what kind of film the jury wants to crown.

So What Should You Watch?

If you are following Cannes this year, don’t wait for the jury to tell you what matters.

Watch Fjord for its uncomfortable examination of faith, belonging, racism, and state authority.

Watch Minotaur for Zvyagintsev’s political clarity, dark humour, and ability to turn private betrayal into a portrait of corrupted power.

Watch Coward for its beauty, restraint, and belief that intimacy can survive even in the machinery of war.

The fact that any of these could win — and that none feels preordained — is not a weakness. It may be the defining feature of Cannes 2026: a year in which excellence did not consolidate around one film, but scattered across several.

Maybe that means the culture is fragmented. Maybe it means the festival is more open to different kinds of greatness. Probably both.

Either way, Emma Jones is there, reading the room before the jury makes it official.

The awards will be announced on May 23. On Monday, we’ll have our full Cannes appraisal: what won, what should have won, and what the results mean for the rest of the cinema year.

Then we shall digest how right Emma is?

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The Cannes Film Festival does not have twelve days to prove its importance. Not anymore. The first weekend is where the festival either becomes the cultural story or risks becoming one story among many. It is when the red carpets, the reviews, the market, the stars and the early competition films combine to tell the world: this is what matters now. That is why this opening weekend felt revealing.

On the films, Cannes still looked strong. There was James Gray’s Paper Tiger, an elevated American thriller with Adam Driver, Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson. There was Hirokazu Koreeda’s Sheep in the Box, a tender and strange AI grief story that arrived with Palme d’Or expectations and divided critics. There was Hope, a huge, bonkers Korean genre film from Na Hong-jin that may have sat more naturally at midnight in another era. There was Gentle Monster, built around what Emma Jones described as a knockout Léa Seydoux performance. In other words, the cinema was there.

But Cannes has never been only about cinema. It is also about amplification. It is about making films feel like events. That is where the weekend exposed a weakness. Scarlett Johansson was not able to attend the Saturday night red carpet for Paper Tiger. Barbra Streisand then pulled out of her Cannes appearance because of an ankle injury. These things may sound like celebrity footnotes, but they matter. Cannes glamour is not decorative. It is part of the machine. It turns a festival into a global headline. As Emma noted, Cannes needs that glamour to translate into headlines. Without it, the conversation risks staying inside the Croisette, among critics, buyers, programmers and exhausted journalists.

The more interesting shift, though, was in the films themselves. Paper Tiger is a thriller. Hope is a large-scale action film with sci-fi and monster-movie elements. Both suggest Cannes is loosening its prestige hierarchy. The boundary between “serious cinema” and genre cinema is becoming harder to police. That is not a weakness. It may be one of the ways Cannes stays alive. The old Cannes could afford to put genre at midnight and seriousness in competition. The new Cannes has to admit that thrillers, action films, horror, comedy and commercial cinema are also where major filmmakers now work. The festival is still a temple of cinema, but the definition of cinema it protects is changing.

Then came the story that explained the whole weekend. Away from Cannes, James Bond casting news began cutting through. It had nothing to do with the festival, yet it was exactly the kind of entertainment story that can now dominate the conversation while Cannes is still unfolding. That is the new reality.

Cannes still matters. The films still matter. The red carpet still matters. But none of it is automatic anymore. The festival used to gather the world’s attention and then decide what to do with it. Now it has to earn that attention first. That is why the first weekend matters. It is no longer just the beginning of Cannes. It is the test of whether Cannes can still become the story.

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On Friday, while Emma Jones was reporting from Cannes and I was sitting at home reading reviews, scrolling through updates, and waiting for her next message from the Croisette, something in our conversation stood out.

It was not just the films, though there were plenty of those. Emma had seen Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, which she admired for its austerity, its portrait of Erika Mann, and Sandra Huller’s typically extraordinary precision. She had also seen A Woman’s Life, which she thought offered another superb showcase for Lea Drucker, even if the film itself did not entirely convince her. And she had a more generous take than most critics on Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales, a film that seemed to be receiving the kind of Cannes kicking that can sometimes become its own form of groupthink.

But the part of the conversation that stayed with me came later, when we drifted away from the films and onto the atmosphere of Cannes itself.

Emma was tired. Cannes tired, which is its own category of exhaustion. She was on the terrace of the press room, surrounded by journalists filing copy, filming links, recording podcasts, and trying to stay upright. And yet beneath the usual fatigue, there seemed to be something else: a sense that this year’s festival did not quite have the old charge.

“I do kind of agree with you,” she said, after I suggested that the 79th edition of Cannes seemed to lack some of its usual spark. “Thank God for Demi Moore basically.”

That line sounds throwaway, but it says a lot.

Because Demi Moore was not at Cannes as part of the old ecosystem of movie glamour, or at least not only that. She is on the Official Jury and had appeared at one of the side events that now shape the festival’s public image almost as much as the official selection itself. Emma had also been at the Red Sea Women in Cinema event, one of the many gatherings around Cannes where luxury, celebrity, funding, politics and soft power now meet.

She described a red carpet with Diane Kruger, Chloe Zhao, Demi Moore and Alicia Vikander. But the Red Sea event was not happening in isolation. Cannes now has a whole ecosystem of women-focused events around it. Kering’s Women in Motion, Chopard, L’Oreal and others have all, in different ways, made the celebration of women central to their festival presence.

This is not some flimsy marketing trend that appeared overnight. It comes after #MeToo, after years of pressure on the film industry, and after last year’s overdue reckoning in France, where the country’s own culture of silence around sexual abuse and power finally began to crack open. The focus on women has been the biggest revolution in cinema culture in the last decade. It has changed not only film, but entertainment more broadly, and then moved beyond entertainment into the workplace itself.

So when Cannes celebrates women, it is not merely chasing optics. It is responding to a real cultural transformation, one that has made the industry better.

This is where things become interesting. Because Women in Cinema is not empty. Emma was very clear about this. What she likes about the Red Sea event is that it honours women from developing film markets, including filmmakers from Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Rwanda and Morocco. They receive publicity, support, and help with funding. “It does actually do what it is setting out to achieve” she said. “Putting its money where its mouth is.”

She is right.

I know this from experience. I was involved in that event for many years, and I have always valued its focus on Asia, Africa and the Arab world. The filmmakers who are selected are not props. The money is not imaginary. The visibility can be transformative. In an industry where access is often the hardest currency to obtain, these events can open doors that would otherwise remain firmly shut.

So this is not an argument against Women in Cinema.

It is an argument about why Women in Cinema has become the cause that Cannes can so comfortably celebrate.

The old Cannes glamour was built around excess. When I first started coming to the festival, and even more so in the years before, the mythology of Cannes was inseparable from the villa party. The sales agents, the studios, the streamers, the brands, the magazines, the yachts, the hills above Cannes, the coaches taking people into the night and bringing them back at dawn. It was absurd, wasteful, seductive, and often useful. Films were sold there. Relationships were made there. Careers were advanced somewhere between the second drink and sunrise.

That world has faded. Not disappeared but faded. Emma and I talked about it on the podcast. Netflix is not at Cannes in the same way. Budgets are smaller. The huge villa parties are rarer. The beach parties are more cramped. The extravagance has shrunk.

But Cannes has not lost glamour. It has changed the kind of glamour it wants to project.

The festival’s new glamour is moral glamour.

It is the red carpet with a cause attached. It is the luxury brand that can describe itself as a patron of progress. It is the celebrity who can speak about sisterhood. It is the geopolitical player who can present itself as a champion of women filmmakers from underrepresented regions. It is the film industry congratulating itself not merely for being beautiful, rich and influential, but for being on the right side of history.

And here is the uncomfortable part: it works because the cause is legitimate.

Women in Cinema matters. Gender equity matters. Funding filmmakers from countries with less developed film infrastructure matters. Giving visibility to women from Asia, Africa and the Arab world matters. I do not want less of that. I want more of it.

But I also think we need to ask why this particular form of activism has become so easy for the festival world to embrace.

Women’s rights, at least in the broad, non-specific language of the red carpet, has become the one cause that almost everyone can support without giving up too much. Luxury brands can support it. Studios can support it. Festivals can support it. Governments can support it. Celebrities can support it. Even institutions that disagree on almost everything else can gather under the same banner and feel progressive.

That does not make the banner false.

It makes it useful.

At a world cinema event, the harder political questions are everywhere, whether Cannes wants to foreground them or not. Palestine. Iran. Censorship. Authoritarian regimes. State funding. Cultural diplomacy. Which countries get to tell stories, which stories travel, which filmmakers are useful to power, and which become inconvenient.

Those questions are much harder to stage at a gala dinner.

You can celebrate an Iranian woman filmmaker without talking too directly about Iran. You can support a Palestinian director without making Palestine the subject of the evening. You can honour filmmakers from the Global South without asking why so many of the structures deciding their visibility are still controlled from Europe. You can talk about representation without talking about power.

That is the genius of the new Cannes activism. It is not fake. It is selective.

And because it is not fake, it becomes almost impossible to criticise.

Any scepticism about the framework can be mistaken for scepticism about the cause. Any question about why this issue receives so much institutional space can sound like a complaint that women are receiving too much attention. That is not my argument. It is the opposite.

My argument is that Women in Cinema has become central to the festival’s self-image because it does several things at once. It produces real opportunities. It photographs beautifully. It attracts stars. It gives luxury brands a moral vocabulary. It lets festivals present themselves as progressive. And it allows everyone involved to feel politically engaged without necessarily entering the more dangerous territory of politics itself.

That is why Emma’s “Thank God for Demi Moore” line stayed with me.

In an edition of Cannes that feels, from a distance at least, a little less glamorous than usual, the glamour has not vanished. It has migrated. It has moved from the old villa decadence into the branded activist event. It has shifted from champagne in the hills to solidarity on the red carpet.

That may be an improvement. In many ways, it probably is.

But it is also a strategy.

Cannes has always understood the power of spectacle. The mistake is to think spectacle only means movie stars, gowns, flashbulbs and parties. A cause can be spectacle too. A panel can be spectacle. An honouree prize can be spectacle. A photograph of famous women supporting other women can be spectacle.

The question is not whether the support is real. Sometimes it is.

The question is why this is the support the industry knows how to perform so well.

I do not have a neat answer. And Emma, who was actually there, may well push back on this as she’s attended many Cannes events over the years aimed at promoting women in the industry. She saw the event from the inside. She saw the filmmakers being celebrated. She saw the purpose of it more directly than I did from home.

But perhaps that is exactly why the conversation is worth having.

Women in Cinema is one of the few areas where the festival world can still tell a convincing story about progress. It is visible, necessary, emotionally persuasive and institutionally convenient. Cannes can celebrate it loudly because it asks something of the industry, but not too much. It demands recognition but not rupture. It allows the festival to look brave without becoming too dangerous.

That does not make it meaningless.

It makes it Cannes.

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Opening Night is the evening with the most flashbulbs, the most formal wear, the most institutional self-mythologising and, paradoxically, often the least attentive audience. As Kaleem Aftab, Cinema in One Take co-host, put it, drawing on his experience programming the Red Sea International Film Festival, opening night can be one of the hardest slots to fill precisely because everyone wants to be there, but not necessarily for the movie.

“When I was programming for the Red Sea International Film Festival, one of the hardest nights to program was opening night,” Kaleem explained. “And part of that reason was because people want to come. It’s the first night. They want to see their friends and they’re not necessarily interested in staying through the whole ceremony. And you see a lot of people leave after the ceremony takes place. And there’s not as many people as you would expect who stay for the film.”

This is the opening night paradox: the night with the highest attendance is often the night with the lowest engagement with the actual film.

The Competition vs. The Spectacle

The tension is hard to fix. Opening night serves two competing purposes. It is a ceremonial occasion a chance to celebrate cinema, honour achievements, and create the glamorous visual spectacle that defines festival culture, it is a big occasion to invite sponsors and dignitories and a film premiere, where a movie should be experienced on its merits.

The problem is that these interests are not always compatible.

Festival attendees, especially on opening night, are often there to network, to reunite, to be seen, to attend the dinner or the party or the next thing. The Red Carpet is “the event’ for many. The film can become secondary: the official reason for the gathering, but not always the emotional or practical centre of the evening.

That is why, as Kaleem notes, the experience of opening night cinema is inherently compromised. “It’s a very hard slot to fill,” he acknowledges.

The festival director is left choosing between two imperfect options: program a major competition film that deserves a fully attentive audience, but risk having the evening’s ceremonial machinery overwhelm it; or program something lower-stakes, out of competition, that can absorb the strange energy of the occasion without seeming diminished by it. Realistically, for a major film festival, this choice ends up making itself and it’s always the out of competition film that makes more sense, especially as you often don’t want to give one competition film special treatment.

The Cannes Workaround

Cannes has, in recent years, increasingly treated opening night less as a pure critical statement and more as a hybrid event: part ceremony, part broadcast, part national showcase, part theatrical launch.

This year, the festival opened with Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss, a French romantic comedy screening out of competition and released in French cinemas the same day, which very few people in the international film community were highly anticipating. The logic is clear. The opening film is not only for the audience inside the Palais. It is also for the French cinema-goers watching the ceremony from elsewhere, who can then see the film in their local multiplex.

“I think with Cannes doing it this way, it promotes a French film that might not otherwise have a big reach, so it helps the home industry,” Kaleem observed. “And it also means that if you do want to go to the party, you don’t feel like you’re missing much.”

That last line gets at the brilliance and the awkwardness of the strategy. Cannes has found a pragmatic solution to the opening night problem: choose a film that can benefit from the spotlight without being damaged by the peculiar inattentiveness of the slot.

It makes the festival feel more accessible beyond the Côte d’Azur. It gives the French industry a national platform. It prevents a major competition title from being swallowed by ceremony and champagne.

But it also creates a different problem. If opening night is supposed to announce what matters, what does it mean when the first film is, by design, not where the festival’s deepest artistic stakes are placed?

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The Case for Competition

Emma Jones, Cinema in One Take co-host, was not entirely convinced by the workaround.

“I mean, this is Cannes for goodness sake,” she pushed back. “Surely there will be less people leaving the ceremony and not staying to see the movie? If you want your festival to start with an éclat — to use the French word — then I think that you’ve got to start off the competition.”

She has a point. Even though Kaleem disagrees that it’s a practical solution.

There is something deflating about an opening night that feels like a sideshow, no matter how elegantly mounted. The opening film should not just survive the evening. It should define it. It should announce to the world: this is what matters, this is where cinema is headed, this is the conversation we are about to have.

Look at what sits in competition this year: Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved, Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s A Woman’s Life, Koji Fukada’s Nagi Notes. These are the kinds of films that, at least on paper, seem capable of making Cannes’ first statement feel like an artistic one rather than a logistical one.

Of course, that is easier to say than to programme. Opening a festival with competition gives the night symbolic force, but it also places a serious film in a deeply unserious viewing context. The audience is dressed for ceremony, distracted by reunion, and already thinking about where it needs to be next.

So the dilemma remains: should opening night protect the film from the spectacle, or should it insist that the spectacle serve the film, and is it any different from a musician having opening acts at a concert?"

The Real Problem

Maybe the issue is not simply what film to programme on opening night. Maybe the issue is that we have designed opening nights to do too many things at once.

We ask them to be cinema and ceremony, artistic declaration and industry mixer, national showcase and international broadcast, red carpet and serious viewing experience. Then we are surprised when the film itself struggles to remain the centre of gravity.

That is why opening night is so hard to programme. Not because festival directors do not know what they are doing, and not because the films are necessarily wrong, but because the slot itself is almost impossible.

It is the most visible night of the festival, but not always the most cinematic one.

For more on Cannes opening night, The Electric Kiss, and what came next, listen to our full Cinema in One Take podcast series, dropping throughout the festival.

Episode 1: Full Discussion on Apple and Spotify

This piece focuses on one question from our opening episode of Cinema in One Take, recorded on day two of the festival. In the full podcast, Kaleem and Emma dive into:

· The opening ceremony: Jane Fonda, Peter Jackson’s honorary Palme d’Or, and what it says about where cinema is headed

· Why young talent is missing from this year’s competition

· The jury dynamics: Demi Moore on AI, Park Chan-wook’s influence, and how Cannes is handling politics better than Berlin

· First film review: Koji Fukada’s Nagi Notes and why it could be a prize contender

· Music and cinema: The Billie Eilish concert film, Iron Maiden’s documentary, and why fans keep showing up for these experiences.

· What’s coming next: Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland and the films that will define the competition

New episodes drop throughout the festival.

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Stuart, played by Kenneth Branagh, is a brand-new husband for Miranda Priestly. He’s a successful musician but still takes the dog out while his wife takes a work call, entertains her guests, and flies across a continent to support her in her hour of need. Property developer Peter (played by Peter Brammall) is Andy’s new love interest. He’s solvent and emotionally stable, single-handedly answering the question ‘where have all the good men gone?’ They’re sitting in a sales suite in a Manhattan duplex just waiting for their meet-cute, apparently.

And not to neglect the return of Nigel (Stanley Tucci) Miranda’s eternally trustworthy second-in-command, and even Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux) can’t be taken entirely seriously as an evil tech billionaire, because he’s mainly there for the purposes of buying Emily a new magazine and to make his ex-wife, played by Lucy Liu, look philanthropic and principled.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 /Disney

I’ve spent years watching supporting female characters fail the famous Bechdel test (that’s whether a film contains two of more women and whether they talk about anything other than a man.) I’ve yet to watch another studio film like Prada 2 where multiple men are so clearly supporting the female characters without losing their own agency.

What’s striking about The Devil Wears Prada 2 is how comfortable these men are around female power. The men (even Benji Barnes) aren’t threatened by the women around them. Stuart, Peter and Nigel aren’t interested in being the centre of attention.

For decades, mainstream cinema has struggled to portray ambitious female characters unless their success came attached to emotional punishment. Status meant romance or motherhood, intimacy or likability would have to suffer. Take Diane Keaton’s Baby Boom – the message that she was inherently unhappy until a baby came her way unexpectedly. Take the original The Devil Wears Prada too and its idea that Miranda’s success meant divorce was inevitable for her. She was also held as a warning sign to Andy – the boss from hell, one of the most successful women in America, but a living nightmare to be around.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 softens Miranda considerably, even if her spoken lines have lost little of their bite. She herself acknowledges to Andy, towards the end of the film, telling her to write the Miranda Priestly biography, that her career has come with a cost, that there is a sacrifice involved.

That is realistic; but her line “I just love working,” said with a smile, is one of the most important things a mainstream female character has said to me in cinema. It’s an endorsement fo every woman watching who needs their own work to truly live a fulfilling life. It’s an acknowledgement from cinema that being absorbed a profession does not mean a woman is secretly empty inside.

Stanley Tucci’s Nigel : the ultimate supporting male character /Disney

What also feels different now is the men’s relationship to female authority. Nate, Andy’s partner in the original film, struggled with Andy’s growing absence from his life. His behaviour felt normal in 2006. But Prada 2 shows a world where men orbiting around powerful women resent that dynamic far less, without suggesting they’re submissive. Peter tells Andy what he wants from the relationship and lets her figure her out her own life.

That cinema’s now recognising this is almost certainly thanks to TV – series such as The Good Wife, Hacks, Ted Lasso, Parks and Recreation and later-era Mad Men increasingly presented men who were competent, intelligent and emotionally secure without needing to dominate female-led environments. An early prototype for a (fairly) secure man comfortable around a powerful (and wealthier, in this case) female is the original Sex and the City’s Steve, Miranda’s eventual other half.

Perhaps TV adapted faster because long-form storytelling offered time for audiences to grow comfortable watching multi-layered female characters hold power in law firms, media empires and even the White House without gender being the constant source of tension or them having to atone for their ambition with a miserable personal life. Scandal, The Morning Show and The Diplomat have offered a fresh vision of female power.

But cinema has been much slower to catch up, despite the ear-grating phrase, “strong female character.” It’s been less common to see female authority and men who are emotionally secure within it.

Film has historically built itself around Westerns, geniuses, antiheroes, gangsters, warriors and tyrants whose power drives the entire narrative engine. Even now, prestige cinema remains fascinated by difficult, obsessive male ambition and recently films like Maestro, Ferrari, The Brutalist and Oppenheimer continue returning to the figure of the brilliant, difficult man consumed by work, legacy or vision.

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Women characters, by contrast, are still more likely to be asked whether success has made them emotionally incomplete – but nobody asked whether Jordan Belfort had the ideal work-life balance in The Wolf of Wall Street. Tár, one of the few recent films to place a woman inside the traditional “male genius” template, has provoked fascination because Lydia Tár is a very rare example of a female character getting to be brilliant and difficult in ways cinema has kept for men.

There’s almost certainly commercial anxiety underneath Hollywood’s lack of risk. When culture is itself unsure of what good ‘masculinity’ now is and is constantly debating it, Hollywood still seems to worry that a supportive husband or emotionally adaptive boyfriend can easily be seen as weak or sexually diminished. That’s why, until Prada 2, figures like Paul Child in Julie & Julia (Stanley Tucci again!) or Waymond Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once stand out so strongly. Their support and emotional openness are not framed as weakness.

That is why the men in a box office giant such as The Devil Wears Prada 2 feel groundbreaking. They are successful, attractive, socially competent male characters who do not need to dominate the leading female characters, in order to preserve their own identity. And every New York apartment sales suite should contain one.

When Damien Hauser, the 25-year-old Swiss-Kenyan filmmaker behind Memory of Princess Mumbi, first showed me what he was building visually, I was struck less by his use of AI than by the scale of cinematic ambition it suddenly made possible. In the context of African filmmaking, it felt less like a story about technology alone than about access: who gets to build worlds, at what scale, and with which tools. I offered to help him finish the film and bring it to wider audiences, becoming its co-producer.

For me, the real story about Memory of Princess Mumbi isn’t that it used AI. Cinema technicians have long relied on evolving digital and computational tools to manipulate images, build worlds, and refine what audiences see on screen. What matters here is how that power is changing, who gets to use it, and what kind of filmmaking it makes possible when used to expand, rather than replace, a filmmaker’s vision.

That’s what Emma Jones and I discovered on this week’s Cinema in One Take podcast. A conversation about Damien’s film quickly became a wider discussion about labor, financing, and the way technology has always shaped cinema itself. It soon expanded into questions of Oscar rules, climate anxiety, and the future of film.

Memory of Princess Mumbi is being released in Switzerland ahead of wider releases later this year. The film premiered at Venice, won Best Film at Istanbul, and was described by Variety as marking “the first time a feature made with AI has won a top award at a prominent film festival.”

The Specifics Matter More Than the Technology

The AI debate in cinema is often discussed in sweeping hypotheticals. In our conversation, we were talking about something much more specific: a micro-budget film by a Swiss-Kenyan filmmaker using widely available tools.

Without AI, Damien would almost certainly have encountered the familiar independent-film barrier: can this make its money back?

And that question can stop ambition before it has a chance to take root.

Instead, Damien made his fourth feature by the age of 25. He did not wait for institutional permission, perfect financing, or a conventional production structure to catch up with his imagination. He used what he had learned from film school and practice: green-screen techniques, imaginative editing, AI imagery, and the resourcefulness that has always defined his filmmaking.

This was not a case of technology replacing a traditional production model that was readily available. It was AI enabling a futuristic African story at a scale that otherwise may not have been feasible at all.

AI as Matte Painting, Not Movie Machine

One of the questions I’ve repeatedly heard is: why not just hire matte painters?

The question is not just about aesthetics, but about economics, workflow, and the much wider anxiety at the heart of the “humans are losing jobs to computers” debate.

Traditional matte painting involves the cost of creating those paintings, integrating them convincingly into moving cinematic environments, synchronizing them with live-action footage, compositing them properly into backgrounds, and often hiring additional specialized crew to execute all of that at a professional level.

For a micro-budget filmmaker, this can be an insurmountable financial and technical barrier, particularly in film industries where that level of infrastructure, crew, and budget is simply harder to access.

In Memory of Princess Mumbi, AI was used primarily the way matte paintings once were in classical Hollywood: to extend visual worlds that would otherwise be financially impossible. The film is set in a future Africa in 2093, following two documentarians reporting on war before morphing into a love triangle that questions the authenticity of human emotions.

Damien used AI largely for environmental and background work: futuristic landscapes, visual extensions, and world-building elements that served the story without replacing its human core.

This was not “type a prompt, make a movie.”

More specifically, it was part of a long cinematic tradition: filmmakers using emerging technologies to expand what can be shown on screen. Rear projection, miniatures, green screen, digital cameras, CGI, compositing — cinema has always evolved through tools that initially seemed threatening.

What made Damien’s process distinct is that he was working from his own aesthetic language, using real-life locations, architecture, and environments as the foundation for imagining his future world. He was not outsourcing imagination to a machine. He was drawing from physical spaces, personal visual references, and his own creative instincts, then using technology to scale a cinematic vocabulary he had already built.

The same was true of the music. Rather than relying on generative tools to invent an entirely external sonic identity, the process began with Damien’s own compositions and creative ideas. Technology functioned as an extension of authorship, not a replacement for it.

In many ways, this approach represents less a radical break from cinema’s visual history than an evolution of it: a new form of computational power, akin to earlier advances in CGI, digital compositing, or editing technology, but increasingly placed in the hands of filmmakers who may previously have lacked the budgets, infrastructure, or studio systems to deploy those tools at meaningful scale.

That is part of what makes this moment so significant.

The Funding Barrier

For independent filmmakers, ambition is often treated as a financial problem.

Suddenly, people are not evaluating the vision first. They are asking whether the investment can be justified.

That is not an unreasonable question. Film financing has always involved risk. But it is also a question that shapes culture. It determines which stories are allowed to reach an audience.

This is especially relevant in industries or regions where speculative filmmaking has historically faced greater structural barriers.

Just as digital cameras once lowered barriers for filmmakers working outside expensive celluloid infrastructures, generative tools may now lower barriers for filmmakers whose visual ambition has historically outpaced available capital.

That possibility matters.

For Damien, AI did not replace a studio. It allowed him to move without one.

The New Auteur Question

Damien has always worked with unusual creative autonomy. He writes, directs, shoots, and produces his own films. For him, AI became useful partly because it reduced the gap between what he imagined and what he could realistically execute. The process is tied to authorship, not automation.

Traditionally, independent filmmakers with expansive visual ideas face a difficult compromise: either secure resources at the cost of independence, or translate their vision through multiple collaborators, technical departments, and budgetary limitations.

AI, in this case, helped him overcome both of those hurdles, preserving control over visual elements, from environments to costume, without immediately expanding costs, crew requirements, or logistical complexity.

That does not mean collaboration disappears, nor should it.

But it may give some filmmakers new ways to protect what makes their vision distinct.

This is why the AI debate in cinema is not just about technology. It is about who gets the chance to bring ambitious visions to screen.

Labor Will Change — And That Transition Matters

This is where the conversation becomes more complicated.

Some forms of traditional VFX labor may absolutely shrink. Ignoring that reality helps no one. Technological shifts have always created both opportunity and disruption, and generative tools will likely be no different.

But “some jobs may change” is not the same thing as “cinema becomes jobless.”

New workflows will still require taste, judgment, technical oversight, and people capable of shaping technology into coherent cinematic language.

The skill set may evolve from handcrafting every visual layer to directing, refining, customizing, and integrating generative systems.

That evolution will not be painless. Industry transitions rarely are.

The Environmental Question Matters Too

Environmental concerns are also part of this conversation. AI’s reliance on large-scale computing power, data centers, and energy-intensive infrastructure raises legitimate questions about sustainability.

That concern should be taken seriously, but it is also larger than cinema alone. This is not simply a question about one filmmaker’s tools, but about the broader environmental costs of contemporary computing, from cloud systems to streaming to digital production more broadly.

Cinema itself has rarely been a particularly green industry, and recent sustainability efforts such as the UK’s Albert standards are important steps forward. I say that as someone who has written about environmental issues before and takes them seriously.

But here too, nuance matters. AI’s energy demands deserve scrutiny, but so do the environmental costs built into traditional filmmaking. If certain technologies reduce travel, physical production, or secondary resource use, the question becomes one of overall environmental impact.

We’ve Been Here Before — But Not Always in the Same Way

Film history is full of technologies initially dismissed as threats to artistic integrity. Digital cameras were criticized for lacking the texture of celluloid. CGI was derided as artificial.

But technological shifts do not affect all filmmakers equally.

For filmmakers in historically underfunded industries, new tools can sometimes represent not merely aesthetic change, but infrastructural change.

In the same way digital lowered certain production barriers globally, generative tools may lower some visual barriers for filmmakers whose ideas have historically exceeded what available financing structures would support.

Why the Podcast Conversation Matters

That is why I hope people listen to the full Cinema in One Take conversation.

Emma pushed the right questions: Was AI necessary? Did it take work away from artists? Is there a generational divide in how filmmakers approach it? How does this sit alongside the Academy’s new guidance on AI and Oscar eligibility? And where do we draw the line between a technical tool and an artistic substitution?

Those are not simple questions, and they do not deserve simplistic answers.

Emma also raises another provocative point: that the initial cultural panic around AI may already be giving way to something more practical—questions not simply of fear, but of use. I’m not entirely convinced she’s right, particularly as labor strikes, streaming platforms, and institutions like the Academy are still actively negotiating what AI means for authorship, labor, and recognition. But it is precisely that tension which makes the conversation worth having now.

But they are exactly the questions we should be asking now, not after the technology has already reshaped the industry, but while filmmakers are still figuring out what it can and cannot do.

Cinema in One Take Podcast available on Apple and Spotify

To Critique the Tool, You Have to Understand It

Another criticism voiced around both Memory of Princess Mumbi and Radu Jude’s Dracula is that using AI to critique AI can sound suspiciously self-serving, as though the tool’s use is being justified by the critique itself.

Its initial use came from curiosity: a desire to understand what this technology could actually do, rather than simply accept either utopian promises or apocalyptic fears from a distance.

That curiosity evolved into something more practical and artistically rigorous: a firsthand understanding of AI’s possibilities, limitations, and contradictions.

To critique or defend an artistic technology through direct engagement is itself a creative and intellectual choice.

Once you do, the debate becomes less abstract and more practical.

How does it affect authorship?

How does it alter budgets?

How does it shift labor?

How does it expand or diminish creative possibility?

Those questions are far more interesting than blanket declarations that AI is either salvation or catastrophe.

What This Film Opens Up

Memory of Princess Mumbi forces us to ask real-world questions about how AI is being used.

The film industry has always adapted to new tools, and cinema has been defined by how filmmakers use them.

If generative AI becomes a shortcut for soulless imitation, audiences will reject it.

But if it becomes, as it was here, a way for filmmakers with limited resources to realize visions that would otherwise remain impossible, then it may represent something closer to democratization and authorship.

The future of AI in cinema will not be determined by algorithms. It will be determined by artists.

Technology does not replace vision. In the right hands, it can expand what filmmakers can bring to screen.

AI may challenge parts of the industry as we know it, but it may also give a 25-year-old filmmaker the chance to tell the story only he can tell and in the way he wants to tell it.

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The Devil Wears Prada 2/Disney

This article is inspired by the discussion we had on our weekly podcast. You can listen to it on Spotify here and on Apple here

In 2006, The Devil Wears Prada offered a glossy, yet sharply observed, portrait of power. It was set in the fashion world, but it was also about who decides what matters, what gets seen, what gets written about. Runway editor Miranda Priestly was instantly recognisable as symbolic of the elite tastemakers of the time.

In 2026, that system doesn’t quite exist anymore.

In our latest podcast episode of Cinema in One Take, Kaleem Aftab and I talk about the film’s sequel, and very quickly found ourselves talking about journalism, because Anne Hathaway’s character Andy Sachs is one, and Runway magazine, like real life Vogue, prides itself on the celebrated journalists who’ve worked there. We were talking not about journalism’s disappearance, but its dismantling, since the first film.

Kaleem puts it plainly to me. When he started out, he says, writing three film articles a month for a national newspaper was enough to cover rent and food. Today, he estimates, it would take fifteen to twenty features to reach the same point.

That’s not a shift in taste. It’s a collapse in value for journalists and the job they do. And it’s the right place to begin when thinking about what’s changed since The Devil Wears Prada in 2006.

The sequel makes that shift explicit almost immediately. In the first scene, Andy Sachs, now an established journalist, wins an award, moments after being made redundant, along with the rest of her table of award-winning colleagues. Stability is no longer built into the profession. Success doesn’t guarantee continuity. The journalists are not even shocked.

The original film was about gatekeepers. The sequel is about what happens when the gates are still there, but the authority behind them is tenuous.

The Devil Wears Prada 2/Disney

You see it most clearly in Miranda Priestly herself. In the original, her authority was absolute: a look, a pause, a line, could make or break a career. Here, that control is no longer secure. Her exchanges with Emily, (played sublimely once more by Emily Blunt) once her drudge, now a rival for power, are some of the film’s best moments.

Early on in our conversation, Kaleem and I state the obvious: what articles get clicks now determines what gets commissioned. It represents a fundamental rewiring of many good journalists’ editorial instincts.

Journalism used to begin with judgement; what matters, what’s worth telling people, what might prompt greater understanding. Now it often begins with prediction: what will travel, what will get shared. Essentially, what will perform?

That shift has consequences beyond headlines. It shapes what gets covered at all. In film journalism, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain interest in the topic we love, world cinema, unless it’s validated by a major prize or an Oscar nomination. Stories that might once have been commissioned for their cultural value or curiosity now have to justify themselves in terms of reach. If an editor doesn’t believe a film will “sell” the article, it becomes harder to argue for why it matters.

The Devil Wears Prada 2/Disney

The film returns Andy to Runway with a mission that feels anachronistic; that is, to bring back “real journalism” in a system now driven by algorithms and traffic. But even her breakthrough, the big interview the magazine believes will deliver clicks and sales, depends on celebrity appeal.

That shift runs through the film. The proposed takeover of Runway by a tech billionaire, a figure that feels suspiciously familiar, isn’t just a plot device. It reflects a broader reality: media organisations increasingly absorbed into larger corporate structures where editorial priorities are subordinate to profit.

As I put it in the podcast, there’s a line describing Runway as “the last plank of wood floating around the Titanic.” For me, it was the most poignant line of the film, because it rang so true.

What’s striking, though, is that the film doesn’t present this as a total collapse. Their offices are still immaculate. The fashion shows are still extravagant, if anything, more so, tipping at times into something that feels gaudy in a way that catwalks in 2006 did not. The Runway brand still carries weight. Fashion houses still want to collaborate. Indeed, across journalism, legacy institutions still exist, but their role has shifted.

As Kaleem says, many publications are no longer simply editorial operations. They run events, panels, experiences. They are “360 businesses.” Reporting is part of what they do, but no longer the centre of it.

Authority hasn’t disappeared, but it’s been diluted as other voices have moved into the space.

Miranda Priestly, the last of her kind?/Disney

We talk about influencers. As Kaleem says, some are insightful, excellent at their job. But their authority is built differently. Where journalism once relied on expertise, access and critical distance, influence relies on visibility and connection. Those two models can both exist, but they don’t produce the same kind of work. It highlights that what’s changed since 2006 is not just who gets to speak, but whose voice is counted as valuable.

There’s a moment in our conversation where Kaleem expresses frustration at how digital media evolved; how, in its early phase, content was effectively given away without a sustainable model for the people producing it.

At the same time, new forms have emerged. We mention platforms like Substack, not as a solution, but as a response. A way for individual writers to reclaim some independence, even if that independence comes with its own financial precarity. There is still an audience for long-form, thoughtful criticism. And we certainly love discovering the voices on this platform and being discovered ourselves. But can that audience sustain a system at scale?

Journalism exists now in a split state. On one side, content designed to capture attention . On the other, slower, more considered work that might struggle to find consistent support. Many writers live in both worlds. There are few jobs such as Andy Sachs’s job as Features Editor of Runway – and as you’ll see in the film, hers is just as precarious, despite her large pay cheque.

None of this amount to the “death” of journalism. If anything, more people are writing about film and culture than ever before. Platforms like Letterboxd have turned criticism into a mass activity. And, as we mention, that too is likely to suffer a corporate takeover imminently.

But it also raises its own question: if everyone is a critic, what distinguishes criticism? Who is qualified to be a tastemaker? The Devil Wears Prada 2 ponders it, alongside the couture and the spectacle.

Journalism hasn’t disappeared. But it has been reshaped. No wonder aspects of the film for me felt mournful, even elegiac: Miranda Priestly is definitely the last of her kind.

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