Everyone is going to see Christopher Nolan's THE ODYSSEY this week.
BEST BETS for the week: (Titles in Bold denote openings this week)
DISCLOSURE DAY
THE ISOLATE THIEF
PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MAN
ROSE OF NEVADA
STEAL AWAY
THE ODYSSEY
FILM REVIEWS:
23000 LIVES (23000 LIBEN)(Germany 2026)***
Directed by Markus Goller
23000 LIVES (23000 LIBEN)(Germany 2026)M***
Directed by Markus Goller
A story that needs to be told? The filmmakers think it is.
Inspired by the true story of ‘Jugend Rettet’, 23 000 Lives tells the story of a group of young people who no longer want to stand by and watch as countless refugees die in the Mediterranean on their way to Europe. With no experience in sea rescue, they launch a crowdfunding campaign, buy an old fishing vessel, and go on to save the lives of more than 23,000 people. And hence the title. But what begins as a shared mission full of hope and determination soon puts their understanding of law and justice to a severe test.
Jugend Rettet is a non-governmental organization (NGO) from Berlin. Its goal is to save drowning persons in the Mediterranean Sea. From 2016 to 2017, the organization operated the Dutch-flagged rescue ship Iuventa, which, according to the organization, rescued around 23,000 people. Hence the film title. The ship was seized by Italian authorities in August 2017. The ensuing criminal proceedings against former crew members on suspicion of aiding illegal immigration ended in April 2024 with the case being dismissed, and the ship was returned in July 2024.
The NGO organization is divided into three divisions. First, there is the Iuventa crew, with the straplines "Solidarity at Sea" and "Solidarity is not a Crime”. The name Iuventa originates from the Roman god of youth and courage. Second, there is a department to encourage political awareness of certain issues. Third, there is a discussion platform for the right of asylum. The film briefly shows the three divisions
The film should be praised for its humanitarian message and emotional impact, while there are reservations about its dramatic structure. Note that this is not a doc; the entire film is a reenactment.
Performances from Louis Hofmann, Mala Emde and the ensemble cast are effective in portraying idealistic young activists whose optimism is gradually replaced by exhaustion and legal uncertainty. Their performances help humanize what could otherwise have become a purely political drama. Also impressive is the authentic recreation of rescue operations. The sea-rescue sequences are depicted with realism and aid in the film’s emotion and credibility.
There is so much more to the story of Jugend Rettet, and one can easily learn more online. Director Goller’s film concentrates primarily on the human aspect, aided by credible rescue segments,
23000 LIVES (23000 LIBEN) begins streaming on Netflix Friday, July 17th.
Trailer:
BARRIO TRISTE (Colombia/USA 2025) **
Directed by Stillz
The new crime drama is called BARRIO TRISTE. Many already know the word triste, which in French means sadness. In Spanish, "Barrio Triste" literally translates to "Sad Neighbourhood". It is a term used to describe impoverished and historically marginalized shantytowns in the city of Medellín, Colombia, that have been heavily impacted by poverty and systemic violence. Because of its vivid, poetic name and haunting real-world history, it has become a prominent fixture in Latin American cultural and artistic storytelling: The Film BARRIO TRISTE gained international attention as the title of the acclaimed found-footage crime-drama directed by Colombian-American filmmaker Stillz. The movie follows marginalized teenagers documenting their lives in the 1980s and 1990s.
For his feature directorial debut, STILLZ, best known for his music video work with artists like Bad Bunny, delivers a bold and hallucinatory vision that marks him as a filmmaker to watch. Fans of American auteur Harmony Korine might recognize his thumbprint here (TRASH HUMPERS, KIDS, GUMMO, SPRING BREAKERS), although this is the first film made by Korine’s production house without him at the helm. STILLZ is a photographer and director who has worked on countless music videos for artists including Bad Bunny, Rosalía, Rauw Alejandro, Omar Apollo, and more. He directed the short film in 2023, Doesn’t It Feel Like This Was the Beginning? Barrio Triste is his feature directorial debut. The non-stop soundtrack was composed specifically for the film by avant-garde provocateur ARCA, and it makes the highs and lows of the narrative all the more enthralling.
Th film is not really found footage. A gang of youths steal a filmmaker’s camera at the beginning of the film and start filming themselves and also a robbery they partake. The film looks like cinema verite with a loose narrative and handheld camera techniques, making the film look like found footage. This kind of film can be annoying to many, but it encapsulates a certain realism.
There are a few segments that work well, the one with the bonfire and the two guys wrestling in the background, while others, like the segment with the camera following the light in a dilapidated building with flickering lights, turn out to be repetitive. Some segments make no sense, with the camera just following an imaginary person around corridors in a building in the dark. At times, the film feels and looks like the famous found footage horror film THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.
The feature debut is from Bad Bunny collaborator STILLZ and features the first original score by Arca; BARRIO TRISTE is a generational portrait of Colombia’s forgotten youth, both personal and specific in its perspective, yet unclassifiable in its formal audacity.
BARRIO TRISTE premiered in Toronto last year at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film opens at the TIFF Lightbox on July 17th.
Trailer:
DESIRE (DESEO) (Mexico 2026) ***
Directed by Teresa Simon
Lucero (Ludwika Paleta), a successful lawyer with an apparently perfect life, allows herself to be swept up in an intense affair with her daughter's young swimming coach. What begins as a forbidden desire soon turns into a threat to the fragile balance of her marriage and her career. As her world falls apart with tragic consequences and puts her love for her family to the test, Lucero discovers how far she is willing to go to protect her own.
DESIRE is another take, a female take on FATAL ATTRACTION with a female director, female protagonist, and many female characters in the story. But the film, which takes a while to establish its thrilling momentum, is predictable to a fault. The film has a different feel in its first half compared to the second, which is more thrilling. The film benefits from both Paleta’s convincing performance and director Simon’s stylish rendering of her film. The film also stresses Lucerno’s fall from grace more due to her loneliness than her sexual desire. The actors portraying the couple are also quite hot in their looks.
DESIRE is a Netflix original film that opens Friday, June 17th. Entertaining, guilty watch with nothing much to gain or lose by watching it!
Trailer:
THE ODYSSEY (UK/USA 2026) ****
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan’s ambitious and this year’s most anticipated epic fantasy is a success. Running at almost 3 hours, Nolan, who wrote and directed the epic, follows Homer's Greek poem ODYSSEY in the order of the chapters.
The story of the epic poem takes place over the final weeks of the journey and is divided into three distinct sections and shown chronologically in Nolan’s film.
1. The Telemachy (Books 1–4)
Ten years after the fall of Troy, Odysseus is still missing and presumed dead. In his home of Ithaca, a rowdy group of noblemen—the "suitors"—have overrun his palace, drinking, feasting, and demanding that his wife Penelope choose one of them to marry. Odysseus's son, Telemachus, is powerless to stop them. Encouraged by the goddess Athena, who guides him in disguise, Telemachus leaves home to seek news of his father, visiting other Greek heroes like King Nestor and King Menelaus.
2. The Wanderings (Books 5–12)
The narrative shifts to Odysseus, who has been trapped for several years on the island of the nymph Calypso. Thanks to Athena's intervention, Zeus orders Calypso to release him. Odysseus builds a raft but is shipwrecked by Poseidon (who is angry because Odysseus blinded his son, the Cyclops Polyphemus). Washing up on the island of the Phaeacians, Odysseus is welcomed as a guest and recounts his harrowing adventures over the past decade, including:
The Lotus-Eaters: Men who ate the intoxicating lotus flower forgot their desire to return home.
The Cyclops: Trapped in a cave by Polyphemus, Odysseus and his men blind the monster and escape.
Circe: The enchantress who turns Odysseus's crew into pigs.
The Underworld: Odysseus travels to the land of the dead to seek advice from the blind prophet Tiresias.
The Sirens & Monsters: Odysseus ties himself to the mast to hear the Sirens' deadly song without steering off course, and later navigates between the deadly six-headed monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis.
The Cattle of Helios: After ignoring warnings, Odysseus's crew slaughters the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios, resulting in the destruction of their ship. Only Odysseus survives.
3. The Return to Ithaca (Books 13–24)
The Phaeacians safely transport Odysseus back to Ithaca while he sleeps. Upon arrival, Athena disguises him as an old beggar so he can sneak into his palace undetected. He reunites with his son, Telemachus, and a few loyal servants. Penelope, finally exhausted by the suitors, announces a contest: she will marry the man who can string Odysseus’s massive bow and shoot an arrow perfectly through the holes of twelve aligned axe heads. None of the suitors can even bend the bow, but the "beggar" steps up, easily completes the task, and reveals his true identity. Alongside Telemachus and his loyal servants, Odysseus slaughters the suitors and reclaims his kingdom.
Nolan’s use of minimal CGI is noticeable in the film. His film looks epic and real. The majority of the sea voyage was filmed on a full-size sailing vessel in the Mediterranean, Scotland, and Iceland rather than against green screens. The actors learned to sail and row, and the production incorporated the real crew into many scenes. The production built full-scale ships, practical sets, and animatronic creatures whenever possible instead of relying on computer-generated environments. But CGI was used in areas like the giant Cyclops and in the removal of the rigs and safety equipment of the filmed shots.
Nolan elicits superb performances, especially from Matt Damon in the lead role, who reportedly went on a gluten-free diet and worked out to obtain a lean 168 lb. muscled body. He is also reportedly spent a year growing his beard. An unrecognizable John Leguizamo steals the show as Eumaeus, Odysseus's faithful servant and blind swineherd as does as does Samantha Morton as the witch Circe. Robert Pattinson also deserves mention for his role as the villain.
THE ODYSSEY marks the world’s best filmmaker at his prime, telling one of the oldest and most mesmerizing stories of all time. The film, costing $250 million to make, should end up with a solid profit. ODYSSEY opens everywhere July 17th,
Trailer:
REMAKE (USA 2025) **
Directed by Ross McElwee
REMAKE is a documentary supposedly on the remake of the documentary hit in 1986, SHERMAN’S MARCH. The film was a huge success in Toronto, opening at the repertory cinema, the Bloor, instead of the first-run cinemas. It was a lengthy 155-minute film with equally long lines of people lining up to see the movie.
This is what SHERMAN’S MARCH is about. Director Ross McElwee initially planned to make a film about the effects of General William Tecumseh Sherman's Civil War campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas, the Georgia portion of which is commonly called his "March to the Sea". A romantic breakup that the director experienced before filming made it difficult for him to separate personal from professional concerns; however, he shifted his focus to create a more personal story about the women in his life, romance, and religion. Other themes include the threat of nuclear war amidst the Cold War and the legacy and complexity of Sherman's own life.The film follows a repetitive narrative pattern: McElwee becomes enamoured with various women, eventually developing feelings for each of his subjects, only to have his romantic hopes dashed. McElwee stated the film is a personal essay blending fiction and nonfiction.
Remake (2026) is not a fictional remake of an earlier film, but a deeply personal documentary by acclaimed filmmaker Ross McElwee. It revisits his own life, his landmark 1986 documentary Sherman's March, and, most importantly, the life and death of his son, Adrian.
The film opens with Ross McElwee reflecting on the extraordinary way his career began. In the 1980s, he set out to make a documentary about General William T. Sherman's Civil War campaign, but the project gradually transformed into the autobiographical Sherman's March, a film about his own failed relationships and family life. Decades later, a Hollywood producer purchases the rights with the intention of turning Sherman's March into a scripted feature film.
SHERMAN’S MARCH is not a very good film. But it is a decent and sincere film, a point that polarized the film, with audiences able to connect with the subjects. The question is why the need to remake a mediocre documentary? REMAKE follows the same way SHERMAN’S MARCH does. It focuses on the family of Ross, particularly focusing on his son suffering from PTSD, who has a drug problem and dies in the process of making the film. For those who thought SHERMAN’S MARCH was a classic. There are clips of SHERMAN’S MARCH included in REMAKE, with many of the characters in the original film interviewed in REMAKE. REMAKE also documents the breakup of Ross’s marriage and his connection with his new girlfriend, also a documentary filmmaker, who allows him to film her, but not her face. Again, it is not very interesting,
At best, REMAKE covers the themes of grief, addiction, family, memory, autobiography, filmmaking, and the limits of documentary as a means of understanding those we love.
REMAKE opens on Friday, July 17th at the TIFF Lightbox.
Trailer:
ROSE OF NEVADA (UK 2025) ***** Top 10
Directed by Mark Jenkin
“We are going to stop tart fishing again,” says the drifter’s girl, to which the reply comes ‘Something’s going on.” Surely these words are a premonition that something odd is really going to happen.
Director Mark Jenkin made the most awesome debut years back with a film called BAIT, also set in a Cornish fishing town, that put him on the filmmaking map. That film never reached North America, but I managed to catch it on a video sent to me via internet from a British friend. That film was scratchy deliberately, with director Jenkin saying that he rubbed the film on the floor to achieve the scratchy marks on the screen that resembled old film stock. Like Jenkin's earlier films (Bait and Enys Men), Rose of Nevada was shot on 16mm film using vintage equipment, giving it a grainy, dreamlike quality. Its eerie sound design and fragmented storytelling create an atmosphere that is haunting and unsettling rather than focused on jump scares or action. The film takes time to settle, requiring a bit of patience, but Jenkin’s films have both a marvellous and mysterious look and feel about it. This time, the story blends folklore, grief, and science fiction into an atmospheric story rather than a conventional thriller. Aided by George MacKay’s moody performance, the film also makes an emotional turn that is more important than the time travel. ROSE OF NEVADA is the best film I have sen this year,
Thirty years ago, a fishing trawler called the Rose of Nevada vanished at sea with all of its crew. The tragedy devastated the village, whose fishing industry never recovered. Shops closed, families moved away, and those who remained were haunted by the loss.
One day, the long-lost boat mysteriously reappears in the harbour, looking as though nothing has happened. The villagers believe its return may be a sign that their fortunes can finally change.
Two men join the new crew:
Nick (George MacKay from 1917), a struggling husband and father desperate to provide for his family.
Liam (Callum Turner), a mysterious drifter hoping to escape his troubled past.
Along with veteran skipper Murgey, they take the boat out to sea. The voyage is successful, and they return with a full catch. But when they dock, they discover something impossible has happened—they have travelled back roughly 30 years, to the time before the original disappearance. The people in the village greet them as if they are the original crew of the Rose of Nevada
ROSE OF NEVADA is also set in a Cornish town with fishermen as subjects. Jerkin feels that fishermen have a lot to do in common with real life. Jenkin’s second film, ENYS MEN, also never reached (I have not seen this one), though it premiered at Cannes, and ROSE OF NEVADA is the first film reaching North America that demands to be seen. The film, at the time of writing, has scored a 95% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Though the film has an American-sounding title, it is a totally British film, the title of which is the name of the boat that disappeared at sea.
ROSE OF NEVADA, the first of three Jenkin films opening in Canada, opens at the TIFF Lightbox July 17th.
Trailer:
STEAL AWAY (Canada/Belgium 2025) ***1/2
Directed by Clement Virgo
STEAL AWAY is the new 2025 drama film, directed by Clement Virgo. Adapted from Karolyn Smardz Frost's non-fiction book Steal Away Home, the film stars Angourie Rice as Fanny, a naive teenager in a purposely ambiguous country, whose illusions about the world are shattered when she forms an intense bond with Cécile (Mallori Johnson), a refugee taken in by her family.
The film begins with Once Upon a Time, like a fairy tale and a very grim one at that. Evil lurks everywhere. This is Canadian director Clement Virgo’s most feminine film, based on a female-based story written by a female as well. There are plenty of female touches, and director Virgo has done his homework, as can be seen in the childbirth scene, water broken, cutting of the umbilical cord, and all.
Director Virgo creates and maintains the chilling gothic mood of this psychological thriller from start to finish, keeping the twists in the story (not to be revealed in this review) at the very end.
The story follows Fanny (Angourie Rice), a sheltered and naïve teenage girl whose wealthy family takes in Cécile (Mallori Johnson), a mysterious young refugee. At first, Fanny is fascinated by Cécile's confidence, independence, and enigmatic past. Their friendship quickly deepens into an intense and obsessive relationship, stirring feelings of admiration, jealousy, sexual awakening, and rivalry.
As the relationship grows more complicated, Fanny begins to question the seemingly benevolent world in which she has been raised. The film gradually reveals that the family's comfortable existence rests on hidden systems of exploitation and oppression. Cécile and Fanny discover that they are trapped in a society whose rules are designed to maintain inequality and control, and they must decide whether to challenge those forces or become complicit in them.
The credits say that the films inspired by the book. The book is a work of narrative nonfiction based on the true life of Cecelia Reynolds, an escaped enslaved girl, whereas the film changes the tone to a fictional psychological thriller with allegorical and fairy-tale elements.
The original story is set in Kentucky, Canada (especially Toronto), and the U.S. South between the 1840s and post-Civil War years. It is set in an unnamed, ambiguous fairy-tale-like world that combines elements of the antebellum American South and contemporary Europe.
As there are already so many films based on black slave history, this fairy tale approach makes the film more intriguing, with director Virgo carefully reconstructing real historical events through archival research. Symbolism, dream logic, suspense, and horror to explore race, gender, and power. The film is also a coming-of-age story of Fanny, with the film focusing first on Cécile and then fanny coming into the picture.
Why the film is called STEAL AWAY is understood at the end of the film.
The film was shot in English, French, and Lingala – spoken by Cécile and other Congolese characters, emphasizing their cultural identity and refugee experience.
The film was shot entirely in Thuin, Belgium – a notable medieval town in Wallonia whose streets and architecture help create the film's timeless setting.
STEAL AWAY premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival and opens in theatres on July 17th.
