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Mike D'Angelo - AFI Fest 2026: Day One
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About This Title
"Hilariously," my dad, who's in the hospital being treated for terminal pancreatic cancer (but has been stable for the past week; they're just monitoring him due to internal bleeding of uncertain origin), insisted that I attend AFI Fest as scheduled, saying "Take a little break from watching me die." So off I went, and the first film I saw was about someone dying of cancer and the second film I saw was about an old man watching his life be taken away from him and the third film I saw was about someone dying of AIDS. Movies! Now more than ever.
Flies (Fernando Eimbcke): 67
Thought I'd finally found an Eimbcke to love (Club Sandwich came close, 70/100), but he winds up pushing this generally excellent slow-thaw dramedy just a little too far. Obviously, the cranky middle-aged loner who resents her temporary guests—the building's directly across from a hospital, and everyone rents rooms to patients' family members, though Olga had been a stubborn holdout until needing extra cash for ingrown-toenail surgery (a typically wry Eimbcke touch)—will eventually bond with the adorably rambunctious kid who can't see his ailing mom while Dad's away at work. That this winds up happening over their shared passion for Space Invaders (or rather for a fake equivalent with magnificent period-accurate music that I'd happily pay $1.99 to download) was unexpectedly eccentric enough; I didn't need the maudlin revelation about whose initials accompany the machine's previously unbeatable top score. Even when he's erring, though, Eimbcke's instincts for tonal balance are strong, such that weaker moments aren't as deleterious as they'd likely be in other hands. And strong moments abound, not just via the filmmaker's established gift for amusingly offbeat details and images (here he returns to monochrome for the first time since Duck Season, I believe), but courtesy of an unusual serial shift of perspective, from Olga to Cristian + Tulio to Cristian only to Cristian + Olga. Is there another director on the international fest circuit whose every film qualifies as a delightful sleeper? Glad he's suddenly sprung to life again.
The Loneliest Man in Town (Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel): 54
Hard to avoid Kaurismäki comparisons, given a subject (Austrian blues musician Al Cook, born Alois Koch) who phlegmatically resists the tide of modernization while obsessively collecting American cultural memorabilia from the '50s. This is the first Covi-Frimmel joint I've seen to the end (due to NYFF completism), having bailed on La Pivellina and Mister Universo; they'd never quite managed to pique my interest in the folks whose lives they choose to quasi-fictionalize, and they still didn't entirely pull it off here, though it's hard not to empathize with Cook's Aquarius-style mission to remain in the apartment building where he's lived his entire life and built a cluttered recording-studio-cum-shrine-to-Elvis. This is the kind of film that I find difficult to write about, because there's nothing wrong with it per se—I just never got particularly excited by anything it does (a phrase that inaccurately suggests it does more than one thing). Always pleasant, but that's a low bar to clear.
Elsinore (Simon Stone): 42
Bold move to open with Daniel Day-Lewis' infamous onstage meltdown, even if that is why Ian Charleson got tapped to play Hamlet at the National—by the end, I dearly wished to have just watched an entire film about that production instead. Though I wouldn't trust either Stone (whose little-seen 2015 Ibsen adaptation The Daughter, while not great, was far superior to this lachrymose tribute) or screenwriter Stephen Beresford not to botch that, either, since Elsinore depicts theater as an artistic pursuit almost exclusively devoted to actors memorizing their lines. Lost count of how many lame montages we get in which every shot shows Charleson running his fucking lines with someone else who's holding a dog-eared copy of Hamlet—it was probably only two, actually, but that's two too many. Stone has an extensive theatrical background and clearly knows what rehearsal actually entails; he's deliberately pandering to the groundlings here, asking us to marvel at the fact that Charleson was dying yet still remembered everything he was supposed to say. Andrew Scott's a fine actor, but the awards buzz around this performance is very Hamnet-esque, with folks being unduly bowled over by raw intensity. (See every "it's not called Most Acting" diatribe.) I don't love what ludicrously little we see of Scott's Hamlet, either (unclear to me whether he's reprising his own celebrated West End performance or attempting to replicate Charleson's), and the less said about Olivia Colman's doctor learning that there's more to treating disease than just mechanically prolonging life, the better. Scenes featuring a testy Derek Jarman are quite good, though. Glad to see Juliet Stevenson still has enough stature to land a "with" designation in the cast list; wish they'd given her (and the other Hamlet cast) more to do.
(Oh, and if you can't predict exactly how this sucker's gonna end the moment said ending is related in dialogue near the beginning, maybe you'll be more moved by it than I was after nearly two hours of awaiting the inevitable. Plus of course "flights of angels" does double duty too.)
Gentle Monster (Marie Kreutzer): 50
More intriguing and less risible than Corsage, but so damn clumsy. Right from the jump, Seydoux's character has for some reason been allotted a bizarre artistic vocation—she reinterprets male-composed pop songs ("Would I Lie to You?"*, "Boys Don't Cry"**) on solo piano and other weird instruments in a classical-concert setting—that has no particular function within the narrative and never gets explored in any detail. It's just random quirkiness. Then the plot kicks in, and while in theory I appreciate the emotional whirlwind generated thereby, some individual moments ring totally false. e.g. Kreutzer cutting from Lucy fleeing her in-laws' palatial estate without a word of explanation to Lucy talking to Philip's mother, who now knows what her son's been accused of but is totally calm and composed, speaking as if she'd just learned that he neglected to file federal income tax for fiscal year 2013–2014. (I also do not believe for a second that Philip would choose the screen name gentle_monster87 for his excursions into pedophile chat groups. Just let the title be vaguely poetic.) Clunkiest of all are Kreutzer's efforts to draw a parallel between Lucy's reluctance to believe the worst and the investigating officer making excuses for her dementia-addled father's sexual harassment of his nurse, with the latter stopping just short of adding helpful text: SEE HOW SHE'S DOING THE SAME THING? Hard to completely whiff when you give Léa Seydoux a role offering her this much emotional dynamism, but NYFF passed on it for a reason.
* Charles & Eddie, not the Eurythmics.
** We initially just hear Lucy playing the song's melody on her piano, sans lyrics and at a much slower tempo, and I was distracted for the next 10-15 minutes trying to figure out what it was. Knew I owned it and had heard it a zillion times, but couldn't place it out of context.
"Hilariously," my dad, who's in the hospital being treated for terminal pancreatic cancer (but has been stable for the past week; they're just monitoring him due to internal bleeding of uncertain origin), insisted that I attend AFI Fest as scheduled, saying "Take a little break from watching me die." So off I went, and the first film I saw was about someone dying of cancer and the second film I saw was about an old man watching his life be taken away from him and the third film I saw was about someone dying of AIDS. Movies! Now more than ever.
Flies (Fernando Eimbcke): 67
Thought I'd finally found an Eimbcke to love (Club Sandwich came close, 70/100), but he winds up pushing this generally excellent slow-thaw dramedy just a little too far. Obviously, the cranky middle-aged loner who resents her temporary guests—the building's directly across from a hospital, and everyone rents rooms to patients' family members, though Olga had been a stubborn holdout until needing extra cash for ingrown-toenail surgery (a typically wry Eimbcke touch)—will eventually bond with the adorably rambunctious kid who can't see his ailing mom while Dad's away at work. That this winds up happening over their shared passion for Space Invaders (or rather for a fake equivalent with magnificent period-accurate music that I'd happily pay $1.99 to download) was unexpectedly eccentric enough; I didn't need the maudlin revelation about whose initials accompany the machine's previously unbeatable top score. Even when he's erring, though, Eimbcke's instincts for tonal balance are strong, such that weaker moments aren't as deleterious as they'd likely be in other hands. And strong moments abound, not just via the filmmaker's established gift for amusingly offbeat details and images (here he returns to monochrome for the first time since Duck Season, I believe), but courtesy of an unusual serial shift of perspective, from Olga to Cristian + Tulio to Cristian only to Cristian + Olga. Is there another director on the international fest circuit whose every film qualifies as a delightful sleeper? Glad he's suddenly sprung to life again.
The Loneliest Man in Town (Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel): 54
Hard to avoid Kaurismäki comparisons, given a subject (Austrian blues musician Al Cook, born Alois Koch) who phlegmatically resists the tide of modernization while obsessively collecting American cultural memorabilia from the '50s. This is the first Covi-Frimmel joint I've seen to the end (due to NYFF completism), having bailed on La Pivellina and Mister Universo; they'd never quite managed to pique my interest in the folks whose lives they choose to quasi-fictionalize, and they still didn't entirely pull it off here, though it's hard not to empathize with Cook's Aquarius-style mission to remain in the apartment building where he's lived his entire life and built a cluttered recording-studio-cum-shrine-to-Elvis. This is the kind of film that I find difficult to write about, because there's nothing wrong with it per se—I just never got particularly excited by anything it does (a phrase that inaccurately suggests it does more than one thing). Always pleasant, but that's a low bar to clear.
Elsinore (Simon Stone): 42
Bold move to open with Daniel Day-Lewis' infamous onstage meltdown, even if that is why Ian Charleson got tapped to play Hamlet at the National—by the end, I dearly wished to have just watched an entire film about that production instead. Though I wouldn't trust either Stone (whose little-seen 2015 Ibsen adaptation The Daughter, while not great, was far superior to this lachrymose tribute) or screenwriter Stephen Beresford not to botch that, either, since Elsinore depicts theater as an artistic pursuit almost exclusively devoted to actors memorizing their lines. Lost count of how many lame montages we get in which every shot shows Charleson running his fucking lines with someone else who's holding a dog-eared copy of Hamlet—it was probably only two, actually, but that's two too many. Stone has an extensive theatrical background and clearly knows what rehearsal actually entails; he's deliberately pandering to the groundlings here, asking us to marvel at the fact that Charleson was dying yet still remembered everything he was supposed to say. Andrew Scott's a fine actor, but the awards buzz around this performance is very Hamnet-esque, with folks being unduly bowled over by raw intensity. (See every "it's not called Most Acting" diatribe.) I don't love what ludicrously little we see of Scott's Hamlet, either (unclear to me whether he's reprising his own celebrated West End performance or attempting to replicate Charleson's), and the less said about Olivia Colman's doctor learning that there's more to treating disease than just mechanically prolonging life, the better. Scenes featuring a testy Derek Jarman are quite good, though. Glad to see Juliet Stevenson still has enough stature to land a "with" designation in the cast list; wish they'd given her (and the other Hamlet cast) more to do.
(Oh, and if you can't predict exactly how this sucker's gonna end the moment said ending is related in dialogue near the beginning, maybe you'll be more moved by it than I was after nearly two hours of awaiting the inevitable. Plus of course "flights of angels" does double duty too.)
Gentle Monster (Marie Kreutzer): 50
More intriguing and less risible than Corsage, but so damn clumsy. Right from the jump, Seydoux's character has for some reason been allotted a bizarre artistic vocation—she reinterprets male-composed pop songs ("Would I Lie to You?"*, "Boys Don't Cry"**) on solo piano and other weird instruments in a classical-concert setting—that has no particular function within the narrative and never gets explored in any detail. It's just random quirkiness. Then the plot kicks in, and while in theory I appreciate the emotional whirlwind generated thereby, some individual moments ring totally false. e.g. Kreutzer cutting from Lucy fleeing her in-laws' palatial estate without a word of explanation to Lucy talking to Philip's mother, who now knows what her son's been accused of but is totally calm and composed, speaking as if she'd just learned that he neglected to file federal income tax for fiscal year 2013–2014. (I also do not believe for a second that Philip would choose the screen name gentle_monster87 for his excursions into pedophile chat groups. Just let the title be vaguely poetic.) Clunkiest of all are Kreutzer's efforts to draw a parallel between Lucy's reluctance to believe the worst and the investigating officer making excuses for her dementia-addled father's sexual harassment of his nurse, with the latter stopping just short of adding helpful text: SEE HOW SHE'S DOING THE SAME THING? Hard to completely whiff when you give Léa Seydoux a role offering her this much emotional dynamism, but NYFF passed on it for a reason.
* Charles & Eddie, not the Eurythmics.
** We initially just hear Lucy playing the song's melody on her piano, sans lyrics and at a much slower tempo, and I was distracted for the next 10-15 minutes trying to figure out what it was. Knew I owned it and had heard it a zillion times, but couldn't place it out of context.
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