Here are my reviews of Ana the Cleaner and Sanguine from the 2026 Chicago International Film Festival.   Ana the Cleaner is an indie comedy thriller set in the suburbs of Chicago. The film follows Ana (Yana Roykhman), a Ukrainian immigrant who loves murder-mystery podcasts and spends her days as a cleaning lady for upper-class suburbanites. When her newest client’s wife mysteriously goes missing, Ana starts doing her own investigation based on everything she has learned from listening to…

  Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur is the second remake of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 La Femme infidèle, along with Adrien Lyne’s 2002 Unfaithful. All three follow the same main plot: an upper-class married couple is unhappy, yet neither wants to end the marriage. The husband finds out the wife is having an affair, and drama ensues. The beats of Minotaur are roughly the same as the other two films, but it’s everything around the plot that makes…

  Writer/director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden is a stunning film. It is an intimate and powerful film about empathy and human connection in a world torn apart by capitalism. It is dense and challenging, but as beautiful as movies get in 2026. Virginie Efira stars as Marie-Lou, a director of a Paris-based elder care facility. Having had a bad experience with elder care facilities in the past with her mother, Marie-Lou is trying…

  Burgundy is the newest film from directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, the directing duo behind one of my favorite documentaries of the decade, 2020’s The Truffle Hunters. Burgundy is another film that embeds us in a specific, obscure part of society and lets us live there for a short time. But this time Dweck and Kershaw try something a little different, and unfortunately, it hurt the film overall. Burgundy brings us to the…

Continuing my coverage of the 2026 Chicago International Film Festival, here are my reviews of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland and Grzegorz Debowski’s crime drama What Belongs to Others.   Fatherland is Pawel Pawlikowski’s first feature film since his 2018 Oscar-nominated film, Cold War. Like Cold War and Pawlikowski’s debut feature, Ida, Fatherland takes place in post-war Europe, this time moving away from Poland, like his first two films, to Germany to look at a complicated country…

My 2026 Chicago International Film Festival kicked off with the Brazilian wine drama Isabel and the documentary No Hands: The Wild Ride of the Schwinn Bicycle Company. Gabe Klinger’s Isabel is a charming film set in São Paulo’s wine community. Marina Person stars as the titular Isabel, a world-class sommelier working at a Micheline Star restaurant. She is unhappy at the restaurant, as the owner, Tommaso (Marat Descartes), does not appreciate her talents as a sommelier and…

  Early on in Joshua Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder’s documentary You Can See Everything, Elizabeth Holmes, the now-defamed founder of the company Theranos who was found guilty of conspiracy and fraud, and her partner Billy Evans are reading a profile the New York Times did on Holmes. In the profile, there is a quote from Holmes pertaining to Amanda Seyfried playing her in the Hulu show The Dropout. The quote reads, “They’re not playing me….

  I would argue The Social Reckoning is a companion piece to 2010’s The Social Network, not a direct sequel. Aside from screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who also directed the film, and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, none of the original cast and crew returned for Reckoning. It tells a completely different story and has a completely different tone, style, and motivation. The biggest connective tissue between the two films is the man at the center of both…

  The advertising for Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s Digger made it seem like a satirical political comedy in the vein of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, and that is part of the movie. But around the half-hour mark, the film becomes something completely different than what the advertising and the first act showed. To avoid spoilers, I will not go into what this shift is, but it’s bizarre and frankly unnecessary,…