I’m taking a break from the Chicago International Film Festival today after stuffing in six movies over the past two days … this on top of my three film in-and-out of the festival lineup on Sunday. Nine movies in three days is a lot. Nine movies in three days plus all the CTA rides in between, plus F45 classes, plus unfamiliar restaurants and cafes and some scheduling with other people is all too much for me.

Actually, the worst part of the film festival experience to me is waiting in the lines and sitting in theaters before the screenings, being forced to listen to the various loud-and-opining film bros share their points of view on the films. I swear these guys have developed a tonal quality meant to speak to no one in particular, but fill a room as if they were holding court on their cinematic genius. You would think that these would be my people in some sense, fellow movie lovers, but no, I hate them.

Why do I hate them? Because they can’t stop going on and on about how certain movies were too long and the specific aspects of the story that “didn’t need to be there.” First of all, the runtime of every movie is available in multiple places, including the ordering system and on their favorite tool, Letterboxd, so they know very well in advance that these movies are going to surpass the magic 120 minute length that sets off their “too long” detectors. So if the movie was too long for them, that’s on them for showing up in the first place. Second, most of the critiques I’ve heard are just flat out wrong. Parts they find unnecessary, I’ve found essential. Sometimes you just have to build a story, an atmosphere and a cast of characters. That could lead to an 800 page novel or a 160 minute film. You know this before you begin, so shut up about it.

Anyway, enough trashing my fellow human beings, onto the movies. The three movies I saw on Monday I rate in the good to very good category. Cannes Special Jury Prize winner “The Dreamed Adventure” I went into with very low expectations. This is a movie that was criticized widely at Cannes for its length and slow pace — but it worked for me. It didn’t waste time on boring pastoral shots, it just stuffed in lots of conversations that helped build this Bulgarian community seemingly overrun by organized crime. Completely original characters, a fascinating view of Bulgaria’s social changes, and just enough mystery kept me engaged throughout.

I also give thumbs up for “The Diary of a Chambermaid” by Romanian director, Radu Jude. Having just seen the Romanian themed “Fjord” and still reading the Mircea Cartarescu novel “Blinding” right now, I’m steeped in Romanian culture at the moment. This one also takes place in Bordeaux, so there’s another interesting European culture clash … and in this case, the movie is also really funny. It ends abruptly, which felt strange, but an effective film with some powerful moments.

A couple months ago I saw a movie called “The Blue Heron” which made me wonder if “Aftersun” is becoming a genre. That argument gained some steam with the third movie of the day, entitled “Everytime.” This one was shot by Gregory Oke, also the cinematographer of “Aftersun” and it was a striking meditation on grief that took a dramatic turn toward the surreal in its final act. The director Sandra Wollner was on hand for a discussion after the film, which added to my enjoyment of the experience. It’s a movie I’ll revisit when it is more widely released.

So, a three for three day is something to be appreciated and not taken for granted. I kept that in mind on Tuesday, where the results were more uneven. The first film of the day, “Far from the Trees” was beautifully shot and had tremendous sound design. When it did little more than travel the Peruvian countryside, I soaked it in like I would a nature documentary. But there was a story attached to it, something having to do with an aging family in Mexico the protagonist could not get home to in time before someone (I think her grandmother) passed away … it was both slow moving and confusing to me. Beautiful, dull movies are fairly common at film festivals and I’m glad I saw this one. But it wasn’t a memorable experience.

The middle film of the day — “The Spiral” — was memorable to me just because I hated it so much. The director was also on hand for this screening and I had to exit quickly at its completion because I couldn’t stomach hearing an audience kiss up to him. This was another in a new genre of European films that centers on rich people experiencing a series of gruesome setbacks and tragedies for comedic effect. We get subjected to a lot of fat shaming along the way, an attempted suicide attempt, and plenty of random unpleasantness. If I wasn’t stuck in a middle seat in the auditorium, I likely would have walked out halfway. Just not my type of film, I can’t enjoy watching human suffering.

Fortunately, the day ended on a high note: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s sublime crime procedural/Russian social commentary “Minotaur.” This movie won the Gran Prix, second place prize at Cannes this year, and I found it just as riveting as Zvyagintsev’s brilliant “Leviathan” from 2014. The movie works as an update on “Crime and Punishment,” with the rich and powerful of the Putin era getting away with everything, and the rest of the culture forced to suffer with the consequences. An exile from Russia for the past decade, Zvyagintsev nearly died during the COVID era from an unknown illness, so it’s great to see him working again. This movie will stick with me for a very long time and I look forward to examining it in closer detail.

So, I have nothing to complain about regarding the recent movies I’ve seen. Four of the best movies of 2026 have come in this stretch: Possible Love, You Can See Everything, Fjord and Minotaur. Still to come in the festival, I’m hoping to get a ticket to All of a Sudden, which I hope is in the best of the fest lineup on Sunday. Otherwise I’ll have to wait until late November to see the movie I’ve been most looking forward to — even though it’s more than three hours in length. For a true Ryusuke Hamaguchi fan like me, that’s nothing — his film “Happy Hour” is more than five hours and was a wonderful companion a few years back on a flight from Australia to Vancouver.

I have also bought a ticket for “Fatherland,” Pawel Pawlikowski’s film about Thomas Mann, next Wednesday at the Music Box (after the festival.) Pawlikowski will be in attendance for a post screening Q&A, so I look forward to that. He is a master, by the way, of the shortish film … and this one also clocks in at about 1 hour, 20 minutes.

After all of these lengthy epics, I will enjoy it, and I doubt anyone at the screening will complain of the length.

So, there’s a lot of catching up for me about what I’ve seen at the Chicago International Film Festival (and outside the festival) over the last several days. My manic watching (7 movies in the last 5 days so far, with two more tonight, and about 10 more in the festival to come) was interrupted by an outrageously expensive trip to East Lansing for Parents Weekend at Michigan State.

I arrived on Friday evening, where my son informed me that he couldn’t meet up that night because he was frantically writing a philosophy paper. He asked for my help and of course I did, because how could I resist offering my thoughts on Socrates? I walked him through some suggestions and got to sleep around 11. Well, at least I tried for a few hours to sleep, it was mostly a restless night of semi-sleep.

This made me tired for the Saturday festivities, which mostly consisted of going to the Michigan State-Northwestern football game. The entire college football ritual leaves me cold, but for a half it was fine, which is all either of us intended to watch. When I asked what he wanted to do afterwards, he responded that he wanted to see the new Nathan Fielder documentary “You Can See Everything,” which was the perfect answer in my book. Off we went.

It’s a long film and the first hour is a fairly conventional documentary (albeit with some wacko moments) but I was starting to get into it, when my son handed me his phone, where he declared that something had happened with his friend group so he wanted to leave and meeting with his friends at a tailgate. He somewhat gave me the option to staying, with him catching an Uber, but I got the sense that he’d prefer if I left with him, so I did something I nearly never do — I walked out of the movie (in this case two hours before it’s conclusion.)

This tailgate wasn’t much of a party to my eyes, his friend group (which consisted of four young women) plus two older men who I assume were fathers. Like his mother often used to do, my son assumed that just because I’m roughly around the same age as other men, I would enjoy their company — but the truth is that I’m completely disinterested in talking to 90 percent of men, and there’s no way I was going to fake my way through an hour or more of conversation about college football. So I asked Mac what his plans were — he intended to hang with his friends — so I declared that I was really tired (which I was) and wanted to go back to my hotel and take a nap. He asked me to call him when I was done, maybe he’d want to meet up.

I took maybe a 20-minute nap and decided, screw this, I’m going to watch the rest of the movie. So I bought another ticket (at a different theater, closer to my hotel) to see the movie in full. I told my son once I arrived at the theater, he seemed adequately busy not to care. Mind you, I’ve spend about $400 a night on a hotel in some place called Okemos, 10 miles outside of East Lansing, for this looting opportunity on desperate parents. And I’ve seen my son for maybe 3 hours of this “weekend.” But at this point, it’s all sunk cost to me, I’m going to do what I want and finish the film.

Fortunately, the movie is an incredible experience, a landmark documentary. Nathan Fielder has built his career concocting elaborate schemes to help him (and presumably his audience) better understand situations and concept. Except this time, his energy was focused on understanding a person — the enigmatic former CEO of Theranos (and famous fraudster) Elizabeth Holmes. And what a person to try to figure out — Holmes is something of an idiot savant in manipulation and at every turn of the film, it’s nearly impossible to figure out if she’s genuinely a misunderstood deeply neuroatypical person or one of the great personality chameleons in history. The movie is also about her partner, a more obvious and highly narcissistic swindler named Billy Evans and includes a surprise co-stars who has wisely been kept off the film’s promotions.

Ok, so that’s my East Lansing film experience … I drove back yesterday morning and hit Chicago around 10 a.m., giving me time for some movie watching … actually a full day of it. I started it out with Cannes Palme d’Or winner “Fjord” at the Music Box theater. For those unfamiliar with “Fjord,” it’s been met with some controversy — but that’s basically the point of the film, to get audience to confront their opinions about the role of government, religious freedom, cultural differences.

“Fjord” might be the most Montaignean film I’ve ever seen. So many of Montaigne’s favorite themes — the dominant role of culture, the limitations of laws, conflicting mores of people from different place — all come to the fore in the film. The movie even examines one of the Montaigne’s central, but often overlooked, views — that citizens have a duty to follow the laws of the place where they live.

I don’t want to get into the various political hot potatoes tossed around in “Fjord,” it’s easy enough to find those discussions elsewhere. What interested me about the film is that I largely agree with the positions taken by officials in Norway, in support of a secular society that protects children and relies on the rule of law, but found myself one hundred percent in support of the family being oppressed by these ideals. The way Cristian Mungiu, director of the remarkable pro abortion rights drama “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” pulls this off feels like a magic trick to me, and I’m thrilled that he pulled it off.

A have a couple quibbles with “Fjord” that keep me from giving it a 10/10 … first, I think the movie unnecessarily makes the government officials excessively strident in their prosecution of the Gheorghiu family on child abuse charges. The movie would have been more effective if the government officials didn’t express personal opinions so much and simply followed the law to spin this web of oppression.

Second, I think the movie also contains a major plot flaw. I’d normally not concern myself so much with this because plot isn’t that important to me. But one reason why “Fjord” works so well is the way it indicts liberal democratic institutions as not being capable of being even handed towards all people and therefore applying the letter of the law in a capricious manner. This is demonstrates in a two-part legal minefield the family has to traverse, first in an administrative hearing to determine if they can get their children back, second in a criminal trial on the specific abuse charges.

Fair enough, but the criminal trial really shouldn’t worry the family at all, because the confessed abuses all took place while the family was in Romania and therefore would not fall under the criminal jurisdiction of the Norwegian courts. (I also find it impossible to believe that Norway would rush a criminal trial before the defendants had adequate counsel for the proceedings, but I’ll chalk that up to cinematic shorthand.)

Even with the flaws, “Fjord” is clearly an extremely skillful, tense, effective film that makes people think about their deeply held beliefs and wonder if the cultural differences in our world can be bridged purely with efficiency and law. It was a deserving honoree at Cannes and I hope it finds a wide audience.

I saw two other movies yesterday — “Primetime” and “Rose,” the second as part of the Chicago Film Festival. And today I saw a Bulgarian film “The Dreamed Adventure” that I thought was much better than I expected, even though it seemed to bore most of the audience.

I’ll try to circle back on these films and others to come in a future essay. I think I’ve written myself out for one day. Good thing that I haven’t exhausted my movie going energy yet.

Today I saw my first two films at the 2026 Chicago International Film Festival. I don’t know if festival programmers designed it this way, but both films had significant homages to my favorite director, Krzysztof Kieslowski.

“Possible Love” by master Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong even had Kieslowski’s long-time collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz listed as an Executive Producer. Apparently the movie is in Piesiewicz’s series of unofficial cinematic remakes of The Dekalog (he almost accidentally acquired full rights to the series recently.)

And yet, the movie bears no resemblance to The Dekalog, especially not Dekalog 10, which it was supposed to align with. Instead, the movie is packed with nods to “Three Colours: Blue,” including an opening scene that is nearly a direct copy, a poster of the film showing up at a strategic moment and a documentarian played by Cho Yeo-jeong (best known for “Parasite”) sporting a very Binoche early 90s haircut throughout.

Dig a little deeper and the film seems almost Kieslowski centric. KK started his career as a documentary film maker, but eventually had moral objections to the documentary process, believing that he brought difficulties to the subjects of his films. That’s basically the story of “Possible Love,” and it’s climax is almost a direct correlation to the incident that pushed Kieslowski away from documentaries for good.

There is also a fascinating critique of Ye-ji by her friend (or is it just documentary subject?) Mi-ok, who tells her that her glamorous clothing feels out of place with the working class subjects of her work. This is nearly a direct copy of Kieslowski friend Hanna Krall’s concern about “Three Colours: Blue” that the film is about glamorous characters she doesn’t know or understand.

But “Possible Love” is a lot more than a series of Kieslowski hat tips and you don’t need to be obsessive about KK like I am to appreciate it. Lee Chang-dong is a genius of pacing, starting the film out as a slow burn character study, slowly building tension while keeping the same pace. Just like in his last film — the modern classic “Burning” — the movie starts making you feel like it’s a thriller without using any of the classic tropes of the genre. By the last 30 minutes, I had no idea where this movie might go, and it’s resolutions are both subtle and surprising.

This may be an excellent subject for a future scene-by-scene examination. “Possible Love” will hit theaters next week and will premiere on Netflix on November 6.

The other film I saw tonight — “Three Colors Pan African” — resembles Kieslowski in a more obvious way, in title and structure. Like Kieslowski’s career capping trilogy, Three Colors is three stories in one, defined by color palletes. It’s an entertaining enough film that is stylish and well acted throughout. It’s not the movie’s fault to show up on my viewing schedule right after a movie as skillful as “Possible Love.”

Many more movies to come for me over the next 10 days.

Having completed 75 of the 108 essays in the series, in a few cases writing more than an essay a day, which is ahead of my traditional pace, I think now is a good time to take a pause in this march.

My initial goal for this project was to get back to writing about Montaigne in a personalized manner, having spent the last couple of Montaigne trips getting the core of his storytelling down. It took me a little time to get warmed up to it, but I think I succeeded in pulling out my feelings about topics this time around.

That isn’t to say I’m entirely comfortable with the effort, however, and I think these essays are getting highly repetitive. So, better to stop now and decide later whether 33 additional essays are worthwhile in this round. I have nothing left to prove with endurance tests.

In the coming days, I’m going to begin a new movie project on David Lynch’s 2001 film “Mulholland Dr.” I’m thinking through where I want to post this series, either with a new URL, here on my main website or perhaps on my Substack page (which has been languishing quietly for several months now.) Cross-positing to multiple site is also an option.