Featured Films Archives – Page 2 Of 63

Roommates, Revolution, and Reverie: Rediscovering Visconti’s ‘Conversation Piece’

February 17, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

This month, a revival worth savoring is headed back to the big screen: Conversation Piece, the late-period chamber drama from acclaimed Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, returns in a new 4K restoration courtesy of Kino Lorber. If you’ve never encountered this strange, elegant, faintly scandalous film, this theatrical reissue is the ideal way to step inside its rarefied, decaying world.

Catch Conversation Piece in its much-anticipated re-release beginning February 20th at the Laemmle Royal.

Set almost entirely inside a grand Roman apartment—a practical concession to Visconti’s waning health—the film unfolds like a live-in painting: fitting, since its unnamed protagonist, a retired American professor played by Burt Lancaster, specializes in collecting “conversation pieces,” those intimate group portraits of domestic life. His own life, however, is all but sealed off: books, art, routine, and a heavy dose of solitude. That carefully controlled environment is suddenly upended when the Countess Bianca Brumonti (played with Circean glamour by Silvana Mangano) bullies her way into renting the upstairs flat, bringing along her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend, and her volatile young lover Konrad, portrayed by longtime Visconti muse Helmut Berger.

What follows is less a traditional narrative than an all-out invasion, as noise, sex, politics, emotional turbulence, and generational upheaval flood the professor’s cloistered existence. Renovations begin without permission; parties erupt; strangers roam the halls. The professor protests (albeit mildly), yet inexorably finds himself drawn into their disorder, especially toward Berger’s Konrad, whose swaggering vulgarity and wounded intelligence combine to create a dangerous gravitational pull.

Visconti, working after a debilitating stroke and reportedly directing portions of the film from his wheelchair, turns such limitations into style. The film’s confined setting becomes a pressure cooker of class tension, erotic charge, and ideological debate. At times it plays like tragic farce, at others like philosophical confession, resulting in a tonal high-wire act—stately composition colliding with emotional disarray—that gives the movie its peculiar, lingering power.

Lancaster’s casting is part of the fascination. Long associated with physical dynamism and outward force, here he is turned inward: restrained, observant, aching. Whether you view the performance as daringly subdued or intriguingly misaligned, it’s impossible to look away. Berger, by contrast, is all sharp edges and dangerous charm, strutting and smirking through the film like a beautiful provocation.

Conversation Piece is about aging, envy of youth, sexual politics, class hypocrisy, and the uneasy coexistence of radical ideas with decadent taste. It’s also, not incidentally, wickedly funny in stretches, with Visconti allowing the absurdity of his characters’ self-justifications to show through the gilt frame.

Seeing this film restored in 4K reveals the tactile richness of its interiors—fabrics, paintings, skin, candlelight—while accentuating the painterly intent behind every composition. Like the artworks the professor cherishes, this restoration rewards close viewing and theatrical scale.

In short: a film about people who shouldn’t live together, restored so beautifully that you’ll be very glad they do.

(At least for two hours.)

Fathers, Sons, and a Broken Election: Inside ‘My Father’s Shadow’

February 10, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow, the first-ever Nigerian film to be recognized among the Cannes Film Festival’s Official Selection, plays like a remembered daydream stretched across a political fault line. Set during Nigeria’s fraught 1993 presidential election crisis, the film filters national upheaval through the perspective of two young brothers who’ve been granted a rare day with their mostly absent father. The result is both a coming-of-age story and an act of cinematic reclamation: personal memory reframed as national history.

Catch My Father’s Shadow in theaters beginning February 13th at the Laemmle Royal.

Told from the perspective of eight-year-old Akin and his older brother Remi (played by real-life siblings Godwin Chiemerie and Chibuike Marvelous Egbo), the film begins in a rural village where routine boredom is broken by the sudden return of the boys’ father, Folarin (Sope Dirisu). Charismatic, imposing, and emotionally opaque, he arrives without explanation and impulsively decides to take the boys with him to Lagos. Their mother is absent; the boys readily obey.

Folarin’s mission is simple: collect months of unpaid wages before the country’s political uncertainty curdles into chaos. But the errand swiftly becomes a wandering circuit. The boys encounter men who treat Folarin with peculiar deference, calling him “boss” and “leader.” They are told to show respect to strangers presented as quasi-uncles. Davies smartly keeps exposition thin; political crisis is not explained, but is overheard, glimpsed, felt.

What gives the film its emotional core is the gradual reshaping of the boys’ image of their father. Folarin begins as a near-mythic figure: commanding, sharply dressed, unquestionable. Over the course of the day, however, he becomes both more human and more contradictory. He is strict, evasive, possibly unfaithful, and frequently distracted, yet he is also attentive in bursts, showing them city landmarks, recounting his courtship of their mother, teaching Akin to swim, and bending rules to let them explore forbidden spaces. His philosophy of adulthood—that everything is sacrifice, and one must pray not to sacrifice the wrong thing—lands with tragic force in the context of both family and nation.

The film’s governing question emerges when one of the boys repeats his mother’s strange dictum: that their father’s absence is proof of love, because he is away earning money for them, just as God, who also loves them, remains unseen. Is absence love? The film does not provide an easy answer, but lets the question echo against images of political upheaval, paternal limitation, and inherited memory.

By its end, My Father’s Shadow has outgrown its original container as a story about one family on one day into an ambitious exploration about how children assemble identity from partial knowledge, how nations fracture private lives, and how cinema can serve as an instrument of emotional archaeology. It turns political rupture into family myth—and family myth into something like scripture.

“British-Nigerian film-maker Akinola Davies Jr makes a strong directorial debut with this deft and intriguing tale of an absent father briefly reunited with his two young sons.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Akinola Davies Jr. announces himself as a major cinematic voice.” – Murtada Elfadl, Variety

“The historic crisis [of Nigeria’s annulled 1993 election] makes the personal tale reverberate with an inner immensity.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Carmen Maura Shines in Maryam Touzani’s Tender ‘Calle Málaga’

February 3, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

For generations of moviegoers, Carmen Maura’s face is inseparable from the films of Pedro Almodóvar, beginning with their first collaboration forty-five years ago and continuing across seven defining features of modern Spanish cinema. In Calle Málaga, Maura reminds us why she remains one of the screen’s most expressive and emotionally generous performers, delivering a luminous late-career lead performance that is by turns funny, sensual, stubborn, and deeply moving.

Catch Calle Malaga on the big screen beginning February 13th at the Laemmle Monica and Town Center theaters.

Director Maryam Touzani’s film centers on María Ángeles, an elderly Spanish widow living in Tangier, Morocco, where she has built a comfortable life of routine, friendship, and hard-earned independence. Her days are filled with small but sustaining pleasures: greeting market vendors by name, tending balcony flowers, listening to romantic boleros, and visiting the cemetery where her husband and friends are buried. When her daughter arrives from Madrid with urgent financial troubles and a plan to sell the apartment, María Ángeles is suddenly confronted with the loss not just of her home, but of her autonomy.

The premise may be simple, but its execution is rich in both detail and feeling. Touzani, working from a script co-written with her husband and fellow filmmaker Nabil Ayouch and inspired by her grandmother’s actual experiences, treats domestic space as emotional territory. Rooms, objects, and streets are not background but biography, containers of memory that cannot be easily boxed up and sold. The film understands how profoundly place and identity intertwine, especially later in one’s life.

Maura carries the film with masterful aplomb. The shifts in her inner life register instantly: pride wounded, resolve rekindled, mischief flashing back into her eyes. She never reduces María Ángeles to a stock “feisty elder” archetype, instead grounding her resistance in believable portrayals of dignity and desire. Even moments that do threaten to tip into sentimentality remain anchored by her naturalism and innate charm.

The mother-daughter conflict is drawn with melancholy sharpness, capturing how love and resentment can calcify over time. Yet the film makes room for surprise and renewal. After a forced move into assisted living—and a quick, cleverly engineered escape—María Ángeles begins rebuilding her prior life on her own terms, launching a small neighborhood soccer-night and gradually forming an unexpected bond with a local antiques dealer. What follows includes one of the film’s most refreshing elements: a tender, late-life romantic and sexual awakening, portrayed with warmth and wit.

Above all, Calle Málaga stands as a worthy showcase for Carmen Maura, an icon revisiting familiar themes of womanhood, independence, and reinvention, while proving she remains as captivating now as at the zenith of her career.

“A sweet star showcase that belongs unequivocally to the incandescent Maura, whose earthy naturalness, sly humor and tenacious spirit feed a direct link back to her Almodóvarian glory days.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“A bright, light confection about resilience and joie de vivre into old(er) age.” – Boyd van Hoeij, Screen Daily

A Poet: A Darkly Comic Fable About Art, Failure, and the Cost of Belief

January 21, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet is a caustic, unexpectedly tender portrait of artistic failure and the uneasy hope that comes with believing in someone else. Set in Medellín, the film follows a middle-aged, alcoholic poet whose early promise has long since calcified into bitterness and artistic paralysis. When he encounters a gifted teenage student from a working-class background, he seizes the chance to reinvent himself as a mentor, projecting his lost ambitions onto her raw natural talent. What unfolds is a sharply observed fable about ego, exploitation, and the uneasy line between nurturing one’s art and using it as a lifeline.

Catch A Poet in theaters beginning January 30th at the Laemmle Royal, or at Glendale beginning February 6th.

Oscar Restrepo (portrayed by newcomer Ubeimar Rios with remarkable authenticity) is introduced as a man at war with the world and himself. He drinks too much, picks arguments about poetry with strangers, and torpedoes rare professional opportunities through self-sabotage and disdain. Yet Soto never treats Oscar as a punchline alone. His failures are rendered with specificity and compassion, revealing a man who grasps the general shape of the life he wanted, even as he proves incapable of living it. Oscar’s volatility is inseparable from his sincerity; his tragedy is not that he lacks talent, but that he cannot reconcile art with adulthood.

The film’s emotional axis shifts when Oscar begins teaching at a public high school and encounters a student, Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade), whose writing displays clarity, intelligence, and an unvarnished sense of voice. Unlike Oscar, she approaches art pragmatically, weighing its value against economic reality and familial obligations. Their relationship is neither inspirational nor redemptive in the traditional sense: Oscar is an erratic, often irresponsible guide, while his protégée resists being molded into a passive, yielding symbol. Their bond is defined less by uplift than by friction, an uneasy negotiation between belief and self-preservation.

A Poet sharpens its satire as the pair enter elite literary spaces, where well-funded institutions eagerly embrace the young writer as a marketable emblem of authenticity. Here, Soto skewers the art world’s hunger for narratives that flatter its own virtue, exposing a system in which mentorship, patronage, and diversity often function as performance. The film’s critique is pointed but never smug, grounded in lived contradiction rather than broad caricature.

Shot on grainy 16mm, A Poet has a tactile, slightly unmoored quality that suits its blend of farce and melancholy. Bursts of music heighten the absurdity of Oscar’s misadventures while allowing moments of genuine tenderness to land unforced. In charting the gap between artistic idealism and material reality, Soto delivers a film that is funny, bruising, and quietly devastating—a story not about succeeding in art, but about what it costs to keep believing in it at all.

“Rios is so believable as Oscar, you’d think this film was a documentary of his life.” – Murtada Elfadl, Variety

Culture Vulture: Big-Screen Art, Ideas, and Performance at Laemmle

January 13, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Culture Vulture is Laemmle Theatres’ ongoing invitation to experience world-class art, performance, and cultural storytelling on the big screen and with an audience at your side. Curated from across the ballet, opera, theatre, fine art, and documentary landscapes, this series brings exceptional works to the Laemmle Glendale, Monica, and Town Center locations on Saturday and Sunday mornings at 10:00 a.m. and Monday evenings at 7:00 p.m.

Below are the next five Culture Vulture presentations, each offering a distinct outlook on history, creativity, and human expression:

The Hell of Auschwitz: MAUS by Art Spiegelman (January 24)
Blending humor, rigor, and deep emotional intelligence, this documentary explores Art Spiegelman’s landmark graphic novel Maus, a work that permanently transformed how the Holocaust could be represented. By recounting both his father Vladek’s survival of Auschwitz and their fraught father-son relationship in postwar New York, Spiegelman forged a new artistic language, one that made space for memory, trauma, and inherited silence. Director Pauline Horovitz approaches Maus not just as cultural history, but as a personal reckoning, examining its enduring impact through the lens of the “second generation.”

Accompanied by: EGG CREAM (short)
Screening alongside Maus is this affectionate documentary short about the iconic New York City drink that contains neither egg nor cream. Through family stories, archival material, and neighborhood rituals, “Egg Cream” is a meditation on Jewish-American identity, immigration, and the bittersweet pull of nostalgia—small pleasures standing in for much larger histories.

Hamlet – National Theatre Live (January 31)
Shakespeare’s most enduring tragedy returns in a filmed presentation from London’s National Theatre. This production emphasizes Hamlet’s psychological intimacy and moral uncertainty, bringing fresh immediacy to a timeless play about grief, power, and the impossibility of clean action. Captured live for the screen, it preserves the electricity of theatre while granting audiences an unusually close encounter with one of drama’s greatest roles.

Frida: Viva la Vida (February 7)
This vivid documentary portrait of Frida Kahlo draws directly from the artist’s own letters, diaries, and writings to illuminate her life beyond the rich mythology she left behind. Moving seamlessly between themes of art, illness, love, and political commitment, the film illuminates Kahlo as both fiercely self-aware and profoundly vulnerable, tracing how pain and creativity became inseparable forces in her work.

Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round (February 21)
An urgent and inspiring civil rights documentary, Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round examines and unpacks the first organized interracial protest in U.S. history. When Black students and white allies joined together in 1960 to desegregate a Maryland amusement park, their sustained picket line became a training ground for future Freedom Riders and a crucible for grassroots activism. Told through immersive storytelling, archival footage, and firsthand accounts, the film expounds upon a pivotal but largely forgotten chapter of American protest history.

Water Lilies of Monet: The Magic of Water and Light (March 7)
This visually sumptuous film immerses viewers in Claude Monet’s lifelong obsession with water, reflection, and light. Moving between art history and sensory experience, it explores how the Water Lilies series redefined modern painting, and how Monet’s garden at Giverny became both subject and sanctuary. Seen on the big screen, the paintings’ scale, texture, and color take on renewed power.

Culture Vulture is an ongoing celebration of art in all possible forms. Whether you’re drawn to history, performance, or visual beauty, these curated screenings offer a rare chance to encounter such landmark works on the big screen, as they were meant to be experienced. Buy your tickets today and prepare to be wowed!

Father Mother Sister Brother: Jim Jarmusch’s Quiet Meditation on Family Ties

January 6, 2026 by Lamb Laemmle Leave a Comment

Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, winner of the coveted Golden Lion at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, offers a signature turn from one of independent cinema’s most distinctive voices, culminating in a gentle, contemplative triptych that quietly observes the tangled, often unspoken dynamics between children and their parents. Opening January 9th at the Laemmle Monica, Claremont, NoHo, and Glendale theaters, the film invites audiences into three subtly interconnected stories about siblings, aging, and legacy, all rendered with the iconoclastic filmmaker’s characteristic blend of wit, understatement, and emotional precision. Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Jarmusch discuss his latest work with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its debut.

Structured in three chapters set in New Jersey, Dublin, and Paris, Father Mother Sister Brother foregrounds ordinary domestic encounters over flashy, overt drama. In the first story, adult siblings Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) make a quiet, tentative journey to visit their widowed father (Tom Waits) at his remote home, negotiating the awkwardness and muted affection that define long years of estrangement. Jarmusch’s direction attends closely to how the three characters move and speak around one another, revealing a lifetime of shared history through pauses, glances, and half-finished thoughts.

The second segment moves to Dublin, where an accomplished novelist (Charlotte Rampling) receives her rarely-seen daughters Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps) for an annual tea. Here, the emotional choreography is just as rife: politeness, competition, and unspoken disappointment circulate beneath measured exchanges, offering a quietly sharp exploration of how adult relationships with parents can continue to bear the marks of youth.

In the final story, set in Paris, twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) sift through their deceased parents’ belongings, reminiscing and confronting the traces of the lives that shaped them. Minimalist but resonant, this segment emphasizes memory, loss, and the ways shared history lingers in objects and quiet conversations.

While some viewers may find Jarmusch’s pared-back rhythms and emphasis on silence challenging, the film’s rewards lie in its textured, patient observation of ordinary life and its capacity to reflect shared human experience without forcing tidy resolutions. The cast—a blend of longtime Jarmusch collaborators and fresh faces—brings this world to life with subtle (yet thematically crucial) commonalities, underscoring the film’s unstated hypothesis that, whatever differences may exist between us, family dynamics follow a universal language.

In a cinematic landscape that often equates drama with spectacle, Jarmusch’s latest anthology stands apart as a humane, reflective study of the ties that bind us—sometimes awkwardly, sometimes silently, but always with a strange, persistent tenderness.

“What makes the triptych of thematically connected snapshots memorable is its deftly unfussy observation of the unknowability that can endure among people who share the same bloodlines.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“[The film’s] laid-back, liquid rhythms are a perfect mood-setter for a film that also understands that loving someone doesn’t mean you know them all that well.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

Greg Laemmle’s Top Ten Movies of 2025

December 31, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle 1 Comment

I’m still trying to make sense of 2025. The year in general, and the year in film. After the pandemic shut down and the Hollywood strikes, the mantra for many in the exhibition business was to, “survive to ’25,” with the feeling that this was the year we would get past the hangover of those twin impacts. But sadly, the year ended up being marked by a number of Hollywood films that provided more hype than actual entertainment. On top of that, a number of indie and art films – in my opinion – suffered from filmmaker overreach. I’m hoping that in 2026, producers (and editors) will feel empowered to rein in some of this, so that audiences can get more films that are both enjoyable and illuminating.

As for overall trends, the North American box office is going to come in just shy of $9 billion. It would have been nice to cross that number, but we did get close, and we did have a slight increase over 2024. Numbers are still down about 20% (plus or minus) on pre-pandemic levels, but showing some strength. People still want to see movies in movie theatres. There just needs to be a more consistent supply of diverse genres to engage different audiences. Maybe we can get there in 2026. Or maybe we will see a further decline in production as we see one of our legacy studios get folded into another company.

: Frankenstein

I still love seeing movies in a movie theatre. I believe there are others like me out there. As I type this, people are buying tickets to see Guillermo del Toro’s FRANKENSTEIN and the latest Knives Out installment, WAKE UP DEAD MAN even though these pictures have been out on platforms for weeks. Why? Because the best way to see a movie is in a movie theatre. You’re not escaping into another world when you sit on your couch. That’s more like hiding from reality. Getting out of the house. Sharing space with strangers. Fully turning yourself over the storyteller. That’s what happens when you see a movie the way it is meant to be seen. So thank you to those who are back regularly. And to those who haven’t fully returned, this is a good time to resolve to try something different in the new year.

For me (and in alphabetical order), here were the Top 10 movies of 2025.

ALL THAT’S LEFT OF YOU – Filmmaker Cherien Dabis has every reason to be angry about how her family was displaced during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. And to be sure, there is pain and anguish in her multi-generational tale that spans 70 years in a family story. But there is also more understanding and empathy than I can recall in any other film on the same subject. And with three members of the Bakri family in key roles, including the amazing Mohammad Bakri who recently passed away, the film provides a master class in acting. Shortlisted for the Best International Feature Oscar, this one is, in my opinion, the finest foreign language film of the year.

BLACK BAG – There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing a master filmmaker craft a well-oiled genre picture. And in BLACK BAG, Steven Soderbergh is at the top of his game. This tightly paced spy thriller may not have a lot to say about world affairs and such. But at just a hair over 90 minutes, the film is tightly constructed, well acted, and a fun watch.

: Blue Sun Palace

BLUE SUN PALACE – A beautiful film about the loneliness and displacement of the immigrant experience. The film features a trio of amazing performances, led by veteran actor Lee Kang-sheng, and marks first time director Constance Tsang as someone to watch.

DEAD MAN’S WIRE – Where many veteran directors delivered interesting but bloated films this year, director Gus van Sant, working from a terrific script by Austin Kolodney, reminds us with DEAD MAN’S WIRE what a terrific filmmaker he is. Based on a true story of an armed kidnapping, the film is packed with great acting, led by Bill Skarsgard in the lead role. So far, this one hasn’t gotten a lot of Oscar buzz. But it deserves it, so I encourage you to search it out as it goes wider in January.

DON’T LET’S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT – Veteran actress Embeth Davidtz worked both behind and in front of the camera with this story of white farmers in post-colonial Rhodesia. Based on a popular memoir by Alexandra Fuller, the film features perhaps the year’s best performances by a child actor.

: Ghost Trail

GHOST TRAIL – One of the year’s moviegoing highlights for me was catching this film in March at a Rendezvous With French Cinema screening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Director Jonathan Millet, a documentarian making his first feature, delivers a Hitchcockian thriller with this story of a Syrian refugee in France trying to track down their former torturers from the Assad regime. Ignored by major critics, this one truly deserves another look.

THE PLAGUE – Charlie Polinger’s debut feature really floored me. Working with a cast of unknown young actors, Polinger tells a story of pre-adolescent bullying that is deeply resonant of his experiences as a kid, but also with much to say about our current political and cultural moment. With great cinematography, some of the year’s best sound design, and other technical achievements, this may be the one of the best debut features of the year.

PREDATORS – My favorite documentary of the year. Since it didn’t make the Academy’s short list, I guess I didn’t see enough docs this year. Or maybe this film was just hit some viewers in an uncomfortable way. While the film does not spare from scrutiny the folks who created the To Catch a Predator TV-series, it also confronts us as audience members with our role in turning the pursuit of justice into entertainment.

: A Private Life

A PRIVATE LIFE – A curious blend of romance, mystery and comedy, Rebecca Zlotowski’s French-language picture may not be the tightest film of the year story-wise. But I still found enough to enjoy that I saw it twice, and am ready to go back for a third helping. Stars Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil have perhaps the best on-screen chemistry of any screen couple this year, delivering a totally believable portrayal of a divorced couple rekindling the spark.

SORRY, BABY – Distributor A24 is ending the year on a high note with the box office success of MARTY SUPREME. But for me, this is the best film they had on their schedule in 2025, and I just wish they had been able to get more people to see when it came out in the summer. Eva Victor writes, directs and stars in this comedy, which deftly combines humor with a dark and difficult storyline.

: Song Sung Blue

Honorable Mentions – RENTAL FAMILY and SONG SUNG BLUE . Telling a sentimental story on screen may seem like something easy. But it isn’t. The Hallmark Channel may have a monopoly on telling formulaic stories, but these two films delight in appealing to our emotions without being manipulative or insulting. I encourage you to see them both. And it’s OK if you get a little misty eyed. We all need a good cry every now and then.

–Greg Laemmle.

Chlorinated Cruelty in Charlie Polinger’s The Plague

December 23, 2025 by Lamb Laemmle 1 Comment

In The Plague, writer-director Charlie Polinger delivers a bracing, tactile descent into adolescent cruelty and contagion, crafting a horror film that feels less interested in jump scares than in the slow seep of dread. Set within the pressure-cooker ecosystem of a boys’ water polo camp, the film uses genre as a prism, refracting familiar rites of passage into something diseased, hallucinatory, and quietly devastating. With its brutal group dynamics, The Plague often feels like a modern, chlorine-soaked Lord of the Flies, where social order erodes not on some remote desert island but in plain sight.

Tune into Inside the Arthouse to catch writer-director Charlie Polinger discussing his debut film with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its release on December 24th at the Laemmle Royal.

From its opening moments, The Plague announces its intentions through sound and image. Polinger’s approach is intensely sensory, and nowhere is that clearer than in his score, which pulses with a discordant, off-kilter rhythm. Rather than underlining emotions, the music destabilizes them, oscillating between menace and melancholy while subtly complementing the film’s meticulous sound design: splashes echo too loudly, breathing feels amplified, and the ordinary acoustics of locker rooms and pool decks take on an oppressive weight.

Visually, The Plague is just as unsettling. The cinematography leans into sickly color palettes and claustrophobic framing, transforming sunlit pools and suburban spaces into arenas of quiet menace. Polinger and his cinematographer repeatedly trap characters at the frame’s edge or obscure them behind bodies, water, or architecture, reinforcing the film’s fixation on hierarchy and exclusion.

The cast grounds the film’s escalating unease with remarkable precision. Joel Edgerton brings a coiled intensity to his role as an authority figure whose presence looms larger than his screen time, embodying the institutional blindness that has allowed such abuse to metastasize. The younger ensemble, led by Everett Blunck and Kayo Martin, delivers performances of unnerving authenticity, capturing the volatility of adolescents caught between bravado, fear, and complicity. Their interactions reveal how quickly cruelty can become currency in closed systems, and how survival often depends on knowing when to look away.

That cruelty manifests most explicitly through the film’s body horror, which Polinger deploys with remarkable restraint. The physical affliction at the center of The Plague is never treated as spectacle for its own sake; instead, it becomes a grotesque metaphor for how shame and violence spread when left unchecked, infecting bodies and communities alike.

By the time The Plague reaches its unsettling conclusion, it has established Polinger as a filmmaker with a precise command of mood and an unflinching eye for social rot. Anchored by its inventive score and unnerving cinematography, the film lingers long after its final frame, less like a scream than an infection you can’t quite shake.

“An eerie sense of unreality runs through The Plague… Polinger uses horror conventions to tease out the psychic terror and intimidation of pre-teen social codes.” – Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter

“A film that harnesses its many offbeat and potent powers in service of a unique strain of reassurance.” – Sophie Monks Kaufman, IndieWire